This week saw a very troublesome bug which caused random lockups in the server. Most of the development team's effort was spent finding and correcting this bug.

Contributors
Serado
SirGrizzlyBear
Zerodowned
dmurphy
Norman

New Features
The Item Insurance menu from OSI Publish 64 has been added. This menu allows a player to see all insurable items in their pack, toggle insurance, and view other details. This change also drastically lowers the price of insurance for most items. Insurance prices are now based on the item's magical intensities, vendor prices, and other properties.

Changes
Mage Guildmasters will no longer convert Artifacts to Mage Armor
Mage Armor now spawns correctly in the wild
Jacob's Pickax is now blessed
Gargoyles should no longer take falling damage while flying
Chivalry spells are no longer interuptable
Gargoyles can now properly wear aprons, hatchets, pickaxes, and shepherd's crooks
Imbuing now works much more like OSI, especially in regards to receiving Relic Fragments
The Despise champion spawn has been reduced in radius a bit, please keep the feedback coming!

Known Defects
As of 3/7/2016 the server would print periods to the console every time an item generated with the Mage Armor property. This was since been resolved.

Starting tomorrow, around 2PM GMT both the site and official shard will not be available. This is to accommodate operating system updates on the server.

Expected downtime is expected to be about 2 hours for the website and 1 hour for the shard.

This week has seen an intense focus on feedback from the official ServUO shard. Come join us and help stamp out the bugs! A huge thanks to our players that have reported on these issues and helped us understand what was most important to them.

Contributors
Dexter_Lexia
PyrO
Ravenwolfe
dmurphy
Norman Lancaster

New Features
Animal Lore now works as intended. It is impossible to use the skill on anything but a tamed animal below 100 skill, and doing so will have no chance to gain skill. Below 110 skill it can be used on tamable animals. Above 110 skill it can be used on anything.
NPC vendors will now always be willing to withdraw gold from a player's bank account.
Random Item Generation is fixed! Yay! BIG thanks to Dexter for fixing this, and a big "I'm Sorry" for me breaking it repeatedly trying to integrate it into all of the other spawning systems we have. This is still disabled by default until we have vetted it out on the ServUO server. To turn it on, see Config/Loot.cfg .

Defects Fixed
The monsters of Britannia are no longer fooled by youthful looking grandmasters. Once a citizen reaches the Adept level they will loose their Young player status. Certain skills that are difficult to observe, such as battle focus or meditation, are not affected.
The Carpenter's Union has relaxed lumber oversight regulations, lumberjacks may now cut raw logs into ready boards without a Carpenter's oversight, even for rare wood types.
Many of the vendors of the Royal City have begun selling specialty wears for their own people, although some still only deal in human equipment.
The monsters of Britannia have gotten over their fascination with Mystic and Necromatic magic, and are once again carrying all scrolls in relative proportion.

Technical Stuff
Stealing from a monster carrying no gold will no longer crash the server
The Meditation buff icon will now properly disappear in all cases
The Alchemy menu has been updated for...

This week saw the final known defects in existing content closed and the launching of the official ServUO shards. That launch brought with it the discovery of so many new defects that the next few weeks will be full of more major updates Thank you all for your support!

Contributors this Week
PyrO
Kilra
Ravenwolfe
dmurphy
Norman

New Features
New Loot System is now the default <<< WARNING, this is now known to be bugged and has been turned off
Spellweavers have discovered the power of Wildfire and Arcane Empowerment!
Archers may now restock their quivers
Scribes may now create their own scroll stock
The Council of Mages faction has moved into their new faction base on south Moonglow Island
All players now start with a 720 skill cap
A new Artifact, the Mystic's Guard, has been reported in the Underworld
The Abyssal Infernal champion spawn is now accessible through the Underworld

Defects Resolved
Boglings and Gaman have left Haven for good
The back entrance to Khaldun has reopened
The stairs to Hythloth level 3 have lost their magical properties of allowing players to journey beneath the Earth itself
Boglings and Bogthings will no longer spawn near Yew town centre
The Carpenter vendor is back at the Haven sawmill
The Tailors have returned to Moonglow on the Trammel facet, joined by their cousins at the eastern Mage Shop
The Lich Lord has vacated Wind, and without his influences the liches have roamed out into the corridors
The park in Wind has become overrun with monsters!
Acid Elementals have become more liquid of late and have lost their Air Elemental-like bodies
A Veterinarian has joined the staff of the Royal Stables in Castle British
The Terithans have invaded the Spider Cave of Ilshenar!
The rightful residents of the Specter Dungeon have returned
The Evil Mages have been driven out of Reg Volom by the Ethereal Warriors. So were the wandering healers!
The Butcher selling questionable meat on the Homare-Jima docks has been detained by...

So it's time!

Sunday at 6PM GMT we will be opening the doors to our Official Shard! This shard will follow closely the development of ServUO so will always have the latest updates.

The shard will be ran professionally and can be considered stable. There will be no wipes, extended down time or any other nasties.

You can find more info about the shard at http://ServUO.net including a countdown to the opening of the shard. If you guys have any questions please post in here and I will answer them. Looking forward to seeing you in game.

For your convenience here is the connection info:
IP: play.servuo.com
Port: 2593

This is the first of what we plan will be weekly release notes on the continuing development of ServUO. We hope this will help the community understand what has changed within the product without having to read through all of our GitHub commits.

Please understand that the ServUO product does not make regular releases. Instead we keep the master development branch in a constant state of production readiness. At any time you may retrieve the most up-to-date version of ServUO from the repository. We highly encourage the use of the Git version management system to keep up to date with the product as it changes.

This week was spent addressing defects and developing features for current content (anything pre-Styngian Abyss).

New Features
New Champion Spawn system with per-spawn configuration (see Config/Champions.cfg and Config/ChampionSpawns.xml)
Darkglow and Parasitic poisons now work properly and can be cured correctly
Can now donate to Community Collections from Commodity Deeds
Enabled OSI Publish 86-style (Shame-style) loot system for all generated loot by default (see Config/Loot.cfg)

Defects Resolved
Fixed an issue with Personal Attendants when the server was hosted on a non-Windows platform
Community Collections data is no longer lost when the NPC is deleted
Fixed an issue that prevented the crafting of any Tinkering item that required wood
Fixed an issue that caused the Tinkerable artifact magic jewelery to have a 0% chance of success at GM tinkering
Corrected Essence of Wind damage calculation
Stealing unmovable stealable items (I.E. spawning stealables) no longer counts as a criminal action
Navery no longer drops Breastplate of the Berserker, but does now properly drop Tangle
Using the Hiding skill while under the effects of the Invisibility Potion will now properly leave the player hidden after the Invisibility Potion wears off
The Invisibility Potion's buff icon now properly displays its duration
Fixed several bad teleporters related to...

It's a long time coming so here we go.

Starting soon we will be offering two public shards for users to enjoy. One test shard that will be updated automatically to the latest commit on the master branch of the repo and one production shard that will be run as a professional shard for players to enjoy.

So why now? The repo has been getting a lot of love lately and we want to strike while the iron is hot in order to continue supporting our users and the repo. Having our own test and production environments will go a long way with regards to finding and squashing bugs. It will also make developing new features better as we get feedback from players.

These shards will be run on premium machines with premium bandwidth. They are EU based but have been tested from multiple locations with great results. There is little to no lag from both east and west coast North America.

These shards will be professionally run and have the full backing of all the staff here at ServUO. Staff will be active both in game and in the community. I have the greatest trust in all the ServUO staff and am confident the shard will be ran very professionally.

Saying that, we are looking for a couple more members of staff that are knowledgeable of in game mechanics and features. New staff will start at the counselor level and after some time will be promoted depending on performance. Staff positions are unpaid as this is a community project. If you feel you would be a good fit then please post in this thread that you are interested. Please include any experience you may have.

So when can you play? That has not been decided as of yet, but real soon. We still have a few things to work out on the server. We are talking days to a week or two, not months so get excited!

Q&A

What era will the server be based on?
The server will be keeping up to date with the ServUO repo. That means after some time we are aiming for and OSI accurate era. At the time of writing that is Time Of...

I am pleased to announce the next major feature of ServUO. We have refactored the Champion Spawn system in response to feedback from the community. The new feature includes system-wide and per-spawn configuration. We have tried to make the default configuration as close to OSI behavior as possible, but we lack data on many of these spawns. If you have input on how to improve the default configuration please let us know!

Need to Know Information

• The new system automatically replaces existing champion spawns and will interrupt any spawns in progress. Existing champion skulls will still work.
• The system is enabled by default and will auto-generate the spawns on server start. To disable the system, see Config/Champions.cfg .
• Disabling the new system will remove any existing champion spawns in the world, even custom champion spawns. To implement custom spawns, see Config/ChampionSpawns.xml .
• The amount of gold distributed by champion death has been reduced by approximately 1/3 to be more inline with OSI. This can be adjusted in Config/Champions.cfg .
• A new gump has been added that provides information about the entire system. Access it with the [championinfo command.

The site will be unavailable tomorrow starting at 12 PM CET.

This is special maintenance with no set downtime window. We will be moving the site to a much more powerful server. In the past few months ServUO has been gaining popularity having over 300,000 requests per day sent to our server with over 700 unique visitors per day. Because of this we are starting to outgrow our current server's capabilities.

The move to the new server won't take longer than an hour. However, the time it takes for the site to become available to you depends on your own ISP or the DNS Servers you are personally using. It could be a few minutes after the move or it could be 2 days. There is not much we can do on our end to speed this up. I recommend using google DNS if your ISP dns is slow at updating.

Here is to the future!

Since opening the wiki a few months ago it has largely gone unused. I have no idea why as it was a much requested feature by members of this forum. Because of this I have taken steps to close down the wiki as it was a monthly cost that was not worth bearing due to the fact it was unused. (Yes the addon had a monthly fee)

With that, I have gone ahead and opened in my opinion a much easier to use system for tutorials and documentation in the future. It can be found by clicking the Tutorials link in the nav menu above. I have made a simple tutorial to show the system in action and I really like it: https://www.servuo.com/documents/getting-started-with-servuo.2/

I have archived our old tutorial forums. It will no longer be possible to make threads in them, however you will be able to post in already created tutorials. It is my hope that members will transfer their tutorials to the new system and post future tutorials there.

Please post all feedback in this thread. Thank you!