Pirates of the Burning Sea Stratics Network News

We want to take a minute to introduce the new Stratics In-Game Community Toolset that we're making available to the Stratics community completely free. Below you will find out how to download the new tools and information on how we're trying to improve your gaming experience.

We've been busy working with PLAYXPERT to deliver a totally unique experience for you while you play the games you love. This new technology allows you to use gamer-inspired tools without the need to alt-tab. Now for those of you with dual monitors, this is already an option. But for the majority of users out there this will be a new luxury, allowing you to surf the web, chat with friends, listen to music and even kill process's all while still in-game.

We have built these Stratics Community tools just for you.

DOWNLOAD HERE

The hand-picked widgets that will come standard for our users:

• Universal chat across all major chat IM tools (Yahoo, Xfire, Windows Live, ICQ, AIM, Gtalk)
• Pandora for your music listening pleasure while you're raiding or grinding in-game (Pandora has a US only restriction)
• Web browser widget so you can access the stratics news, reviews and even your guild pages while in-game and
• Switchblade so you can test playing your favorite games with a Xbox 360 controller.
• GoogleGadgets – Allows the user access to the wealth of Google Gadgets in-game
• Notepad – Gives the user the ability to use the Notepad application in-game to take notes for quests, locations, etc.

*The technology works on XP and Vista but the in-game overlay system will not be available to Vista users until January. Take note – the updater will auto-upgrade your vista version when the in-game support is added.*

More about the Technology:

Ever wanted to work in the game industry? Well now is your chance: Stratics is currently hiring Web Developers! Stratics is your gateway to opportunities within the Massively Multiplayer field. Many of our staff move on to well-paid positions within respected development houses. Now is your opportunity!

Applicants should have the following skills:

• Drupal CMS
• vBulletin (create and/or add plugins via the plugin system)
• php 5 with OOP
• Basic HTML
• Basic Ajax
• Ability to make, modify, and add java scripts

This is a paid position. Interested applicants should email: directors@stratics.com and include a copy of, or link to, your resume and any applicable references.

Stratics (www.stratics.com): Founded in Sacramento, California during the Autumn of 1997, Stratics became the world's first content-driven Massively Multiplayer network. Begun as a personal homepage dedicated to Electronic Art's "Ultima Online", Stratics has grown over time into a sprawling treasure trove of information and community services dedicated specifically to interactive persistent world environments. Stratics currently serves millions of unique monthly visitors and provides official site and forum hosting to multiple Massively Multiplayer development houses.

Begin your endeavor today!

We will be bringing our forums down Friday, July 11th 2008 to import restored user data initially lost in May. The following was posted in our Forum Announcements:

"On Friday, July 11th our message forums will be taken offline for approximately 48 hours while we restore the data we were able to pull from the old database and merge it with the existing data. The restoration will begin at about noon EST on Friday.

Users whose accounts were recovered from the old database will have those accounts merged with the current existing account, if the username and the email address match. For those of you who created alternate usernames we will be able to merge your restored account with your new account after the restoration has been completed.

If you have any questions or need any assistance with your account please email forumhelp@stratics.com or use the "Contact Us" link at the bottom of the forums."

Stratics IRC - 

Please feel  free to join us on Stratics IRC during the downtime! You can connect to one of our Stratics IRC servers using your favorite IRC client. A list of popular IRC clients is available on our downloads page, and for those who wish to chat via their browser you can connect via our java IRC client. (Java required - download here)
Connect to irc.stratics.com (port 6668) or choose a server close to you from following list:
     stratics.frws.com USA - Colorado (ports 6667 6668 7000)
     irc.glowfish.de EU - Germany (ports 6667 6668)
     stratics.afraidyet.net USA - Texas (ports 6667 6668)
     irc.gamers-irc.org USA - Colorado (ports 6667 6668 7000)
 

While we apologize for the inconvenience, we are at the same time very happy this scheduled downtime is occurring as it means we are returning to normality!

As I am sure you all noticed we had a little trouble over the past week or so. Hopefully that is behind us now for the most part. You will undoubtedly notice that occasionally a page might have broken images or a bad link. We are working hard to get all of them fixed, so please bear with us while we dig through all the content on the site.

Additionally, you may have noticed that the Stratics Forums were affected as well. We have a Temporary Forum setup for the Sratics Community to use, and they can be found by following this link: http://vboards.stratics.com/index.php

You will need to register a new account to post.

Here is a quick FAQ of the events and about the Temporary Forums:

What's the deal with these forums?

These are temporary forums that we've put up so that communities across Stratics can continue without impediment while we work towards recovering the old forums. Again: if all goes well, these forums will be brought down in approximately five to seven days.

Why are these forums different?

We decided a while ago that VBulletin offered most of the features we custom built in to UBB out of the box - that would make it much easier for us to do things like forum upgrades, etc. We've been doing small alpha tests of VBB over the past month or so. In terms of this downtime specifically, VBB let us get these temporary forums set up and configured far faster than doing the same with UBB. Moreover, this will be a great opportunity for users to give us feedback on VBB and suggest features/customizations (keep in mind there are *many* "rough edges" here - our goal was to get these boards up ASAP).

What happened to the forums?

It's important to note that we take lots of precautions to prevent the loss of data. Stratics is hosted on five production servers. The forums sit on a brand new machine with eight SAS drives operating in a RAID configuration. In the unlikely event that machine loses enough drives for there to be data loss, we contract for both local daily backups as well as local backups to remote datacenters in New York and the mid-west. That's an eight drive RAID configuration with brand new SAS drives and three daily backups. In this case, our primary data center accidentally wiped the data off the forums server while trying to install a new operating system on a similar looking machine. At the same time, we discovered that the system administration firm we contracted with at the time had not performed any recent backups in spite of correspondence with us to the contrary.

Thus we were forced to send the machine out for data recovery by a leading firm. Unfortunately, the process is very slow. Thus these temporary forums.

Why are some forums missing?

Some forums were omitted for the sake of expediency in getting temporary boards up. No worries though - those forums that are missing will return.

I have a suggestions/comment/complaint - who can I contact?

Please feel free to contact directors@stratics.com. Some one will reply within a few hours.

On Friday, May 2, at approximately 7 a.m. EST due to events beyond our immediate control involving a third party data center, we suffered a catastrophic systems failure. This systems failure has affected the databases that supported our forums, EVE, WAR and as well affecting site data for L2.

We are working diligently around the clock to restore the data and databases to working order. Restoration includes data recovery and setup, a process that is very tedious and time consuming. At this time we unfortunately do not have a firm ETA on when this process will be complete.

We apologize to our dedicated community for this inconvenience and thank you all for your patience and your understanding during this down time. If you have any questions, comments or concerns, please contact the Directors of Stratics at directors (at) stratics (dot) com.

The Stratics forums server (which also hosts Lineage2 Stratics, EVE Stratics and Warhammer Stratics) is down, and currently remains unavailable. While there is no current ETA on its return to service, our team is working overtime to get it back online for your use as soon as is possible. There has been progress made, and it's looking good for getting back on track soon.  We apologize for the disruption, and thank you for your understanding!

In the interim, we would like to invite you to join us in Stratics IRC, where you can hook up with the game community of your choice (each has its own channel), to share information and get updates, or simply chat with your fellow players while the forums are unavailable.

The following links should help you to join us: How to Connect to Stratics IRC (with links to client downloads and the java client) and the Getting Started Guide.

If you are a Pirates of the Burning Sea player, we hope to welcome you aboard when you /join #burningsea !

Pirates of the Burning Sea Stratics has always been about the community.  We cannot think of a better way to expand the community than to provide detailed news pertinent to each server.

Do you enjoy writing? Do you enjoy reporting the events that are happening on your shard, including player run events and PVP victories of each nation?  If so, we are looking for you.

Send an email to Kayhynn or submit an application via the image link on the front page of PotBS:Stratics.

 We look forward to hearing from you!

Greetings folks,

Please, don't come after me with torches, oil and pitchforks. I'm just the messenger.

We are scheduled for a short downtime starting at 2 a.m. PST Feb. 1 for mandatory maintenance that is being done by the data center, which is beyond our control. This includes our sites and forums.

The downtime is estimated to be less than three hours and is occurring during the off-peak times. So if you happen to be a night owl or an early riser or our European/Asian friends, we are only down temporarily for maintenance, check back with the site later.

Thanks and have fun gaming!
~Kayhynn
Stratics PR Coordinator

The last few weeks, our reporters did a series of question and answers with the community manager, developers and producers of their specific games about the holiday season and how holidays are celebrated in their respective game.  Each person was asked the same five question, and surprisingly enough, the answers were all quite varied.

We spoke with individuals from games such as Pirates of the Burning Sea, Star Wars Galaxies, ToonTown, and Ultima Online just to name a few.

So check out the article here.