Greetings

[PCRefugee]

Glad you see you here Standup. I think this is a much better board than the last one..plenty strategy discussed here so I don't feel so out of place. If you pass through Dunbar..keep going(only joking, it's not such a bad place and had one hellluva castle up until about the 16th century - then it was demolised). Plenty history around the town and , of course, the John Muir country park. Give it a visit if you've got time.

[St Leo]

I have been looking for a decent board for a while (and hopefully I've found one at last).

What's wrong with http://www.europa-universalis.com/forum/? The community is almost as large, the average age is higher, and there's no censorship.

[PCRefugee]

St Leo: I've checked it out and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that board....but I was looking for one which covered a variety of strategy games. I'm sure there are loads of good boards out there but it's a case of finding one to suit your needs.

[Grumbold]

Apolyton's willingness to give space to all things non-Civ as well as dwelling on its obsession is what makes it a great place to hang around even when your own enthusiasm for the latest Civ game has waned. The EU1/2 forum is definitely an excellent place for EU talk and has the advantage of regular candid Paradox and beta tester posts (although Paradox posters are perhaps not as commonplace as they use to be - all those new games to develop perhaps?)

FP I have been cured of my DAoC addiction by fate. I chose to stop playing the US version in anticipation of switching to the European version a week later. I recently cancelled my order for the game because my usually reliable mail order company have been unable to get a copy. This has me sufficiently worried about the efficiency of the European operation to wait and see if they are going to get their act together or collapse. The US version was fun but all the big raids into enemy territory would take place while I slept (like all RPG's that don't have servers dedicated to different real world time zones).

[FrustratedPoet]

sorry to wander off-topic a bit here, but ... oh ... what the hell.

Grumbold: The European release of DAOC has been a bit of a shambles to say the least. The problem seems to stem from Mythic turning the maintenance and administration of the Euro servers over to GOA, who appear to have a problem telling which way up their keyboards go.
The latest patch that came out a few weeks ago was a farce. First of all GOA didn't seem to realise that tens of thousands of people would want to download it in one day, and therefore they only had their one update server hosting it (no FTP in sight ). As people on 'net forums commented at the time: GOA know how many people have bought the game and how often they play, they also know the capacity of their update server, so why the problem?
Anyway, that problem really only affected the hardcore gamers how couldn't stand to wait for 48 hours for the servers to calm down, but you can imagine the kind of anger it caused amongst the trolls. The problem that annoyed me the most, however, was that the initial patch realease was exceptionally bugged. In Europe we have to accept that our patches for this game will take a while to appear because everything has to be translated into French and German before it can go live. What we don't have to accept is huge bugs appearing in the otherwise-fine patch that Mythic have sent to GOA. It was just little things like monsters turning invisible and invading the safe-zones, player's spells doing 0 damage and everyone's items disappearing. Funny, GOA had claimed that they were play-testing the patch before it went live to check there were no major bugs ... it looks like they missed a couple.
They've fixed it now, of course, but still... I suppose we should be grateful that the monsters didn't all form Communist trade unions and starve themselves to death after the latest patch, now that would be stupid ...

Sorry for this off-topic rant.

We now return to your scheduled programming...

[Grumbold]

Thanks for the update FP. I had thought that the delay in getting patches from Mythic would help, since they themselves are fairly good at releasing patch 1.4 only to follow it with 1.4b and 1.4c within hours or days to fix problems that slipped though QA. I hadn't considered that GOA would be editing the code to provide French and German text.

Is there a good website or forum where I can keep up with the performance of the European version of the game? I could only find ones dedicated to the US version.

[FrustratedPoet]

if you bring along a pitchfork to beat back the trolls you could always try ign vault, which has a forum for each European server (english ones are called Excalibur and Prydwen, by the way).

the official website for the european version is this site. It has forums as well as a realm war update. Members of the GOA team post official announcements (for what they're worth) in the forum here.

that isn't a particularly good selection, but it's all i know about.