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Temporary Forums Coming Soon
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Site News - May 11, 2008 12:19 PM EDT | Posted by Aster
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Data recovery efforts continue. While waiting for restoration of our historical data, Stratics will bring online temporary forums built on vbb code for the EAL/TSO community's use. These forums will require new handle registration. The posts made to them will most likely not be moved to the restored forums once they are brought online because of compatability issues.
When the EAL/TSO temporary forums are available, a news announcement will be posted to the main page of EA/TSO Stratics with a link to the new temporary forum set.
This has been a frustrating time for everyone involved with Stratics. For the EAL/TSO community, the Stratics server failure could not have come as a worse time. Please make note of everything you were hoping to say over these past 10 days to the rest of the community - from goodbyes, thank yous, giveaway announcements, suggestions to the sundown team, favorite memories, pleas for petition signing and rants and railings about EA. On the temporary forum set, there will be room for all of those discussions and more.
Thank you for your patience.
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News Index
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Site News - May 8, 2008 5:45 PM EDT | Posted by Aster
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A repost from Stratics Central:
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, as well as our EVE, WAR, and L2
sites.
We are working diligently around the clock to restore the databases
to working order. Restoration includes data recovery, 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.
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PayPal Refund Information
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TSO EAL General News - May 6, 2008 11:39 AM EDT | Posted by Aster
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From the blog:
With
the closing of EA-Land, one of the main questions that keep surfacing
is recent transactions of the ATM for in game money. EA will refund
all (not only recent) ATM transactions automatically. Be on the
lookout for your refund. Please note that if you have already reversed
the payment for any ATM transactions you will not be receiving an
additional refund.
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Stratics Forums Outage Continues
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Site News - May 6, 2008 11:37 AM EDT | Posted by Aster
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The outage continues for the Stratics forums, but progress on the backend has been made. There is no ETA yet for when the forums will be back up, but the Stratics Tech Team tells me that there is light at the end of the tunnel and that the canary is still singing. And that extended metaphor is good news, indeed.
(Please note: the forums outage is Stratics-wide and not limited to the EAL TSO subsite. The Stratics forums outage is not related to the game closing announcement made last week by Electronic Arts.)
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Site News - May 3, 2008 11:43 AM EDT | Posted by Aster
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The Stratics forums server is down. This outage is site wide and not isolated to the EAL TSO set of forums. The Stratics Tech team and contracted system administrators are working to resolve the problem. There is no schedule at this time for availability, as the extent of the problem is still being assessed.
- Aster
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Object Prices Down, Skilling Speed Up, Property Cost Next
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TSO EAL Community News - May 1, 2008 10:53 AM EDT | Posted by Aster
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From the blog:
Today,
we turned off dynamic object pricing on catalogue items. We’ve also
raised skilling speed to 148%. These are permanent changes.
Purportedly, a giant landfill has been found between the robot
factories and the restaurants. In the next few days, it will cause
property values to plummet! If you are thinking of buying property, we
highly recommend that you wait for a bit.
p.s. I have turned off comments for a bit as I directly help
customers and moderating comments here was taking up a lot of time
better spent with direct help.
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Wednesday, April 30, 2008
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EA's CoFounder and Chief Creative Officer Steps Down
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TSO EAL General News - Apr 30, 2008 9:18 AM EDT | Posted by Aster
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Bing Gordon, Electronic Art's co-founder and industry vet of over 25 years has stepped down from his role as EA's Chief Creative Office to become a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. He is expected to provide expertise in consumer technologies once he officially joins the firm in June of 2008.
KPCP
partner John Doerr said in a statement, "[Gordon's] success with
dynamic and engaging digital entertainment and consumer media is
invaluable for innovators in mobility, social networks, gaming and
entertainment – indeed, in any area that interacts directly with
consumers.”
Bing will continue to hold the title "CCO Emeritus"at EA and will return periodically to the company to conduct workshops with industry leaders.
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EA Announces Details of EA-Land Sunset
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TSO EAL General News - Apr 29, 2008 3:50 PM EDT | Posted by Aster
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EA has issued a Q&A about the details of EA-Land's wind-up/sunset.
Highlights include Custom Content approval procedure, Tech Support information, and critical bug fix support.
More information and specific details can be found here, on the EA Customer Support website.
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TSO EAL General News - Apr 29, 2008 5:38 AM EDT | Posted by Aster
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From the blog. To discuss this announcement, please see this thread in the Stratics City Hall forum.
It
is with mixed emotions that today we are announcing the EA-Land
experiment will soon draw to a close. Since 2002, EA-Land / TSO has
attracted a very special group of players (of which you are one) and we
certainly appreciate your participation in the EA-Land community. The
lifetime of the game has drawn to an end, and now we will be focusing
on new ideas and other innovative concepts in the games arena. We’d
like to thank everyone who has taken part in this online community as a
unique experience in the virtual world.
Below are some facts about how the site and service will be closed. Please see also a special message from the team that maintained EA-Land, to the community that played it.
Key Facts:
- On August 1, 2008, the game EA-Land / TSO will no longer be in service and EA will focus these resources on future games
- Your subscription billing will end now, so that at least 60 days of your EA-Land experience will be at no cost to you
- You may cancel your account and subscription at any time by
contacting customer service or by managing your EA account online. To
do this, you must log on to EA-Land / TSO to cancel within the game
- Starting immediately PayPal cash-in will not be available anymore
- EA Customer Support at support.ea.com is available to help answer any questions you might have regarding your account
If you are a paying subscriber as of April 29th 2008, EA would like
to offer you one of the following two gifts as a token of our
appreciation:
- A three month subscription to POGO Game Time
Paying subscribers please insure your email contact information is
up to date as details of this offer will be sent out to you within 30
days.
Again, thanks you to all of you.
Electronic Arts
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A message from Luc and the EA-Land Team
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TSO EAL General News - Apr 29, 2008 5:31 AM EDT | Posted by Aster
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From the blog. To discuss this announcement, please see this thread in EAL Stratics City Hall.
We
share the sadness of the entire community in writing this blog to
announce that the EA-Land experiment is being brought to an end.
Decisions such as these are never easy and the rationale for closing
EA-Land is particularly complex. Regardless, it is hard to see the end
of the collective investment of emotion, time and friendship.
This development team over the past year, in partnership with your amazing community contributions,
worked to deliver a re-engineered TSO architecture ported to DirectX9,
with a stable economy, variable pricing, the beginnings of custom
content (bitmaps, chairs and sculptures, skinning), integrated
web-services (enabling Facebook apps and user created widgets), and
kept pace with new features pushed weekly (cash in, free play,
across-world mini games, etc). The team is a very dedicated crew that
spent many nights and week-ends making it all work.
We would like to thank the community for trusting us over the last
10 months and enabling this opportunity. A special thank you to the few
thousand who have been with the game since the original beta! (A big
thank you also to all the users who came back since December).
Thank you for uploading 30,000 pieces of custom content and proving
again that development teams should build worlds involving their user
communities. We are particularly proud that the top entrepreneurs in
this new world are custom content makers. Personally, I have been most
motivated by your participation in all stages (from design on the wiki
to testing in TC3 and feedback all over). I think that this smart and
well-connected community is one you should be proud of.
Thank you for helping us, pushing us and making us more flexible, wiser, and smarter!
The virtual worlds are still in their infancy, I sincerely hope we will have the opportunity to be creative together again.
We miss you already,
Luc,
(With the help of: Greg, Larry, Sarah, Uri, Cort, Randy, Parizad,
Mark, Lee, Margaret, Paul, Michael, Audrey, Laurent, Alex, Minkz,
Vishwa, Cindy and Bing)
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From the Archives: Chapter Two, Dedicated to Coke A Cola
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TSO EAL Community News - Apr 28, 2008 2:49 PM EDT | Posted by nikiking
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Willinglabrat, one of TSO's and TSO Stratics most intelligent and beloved players, wrote a series of posts to explain his personal history with Test Center during the test period of beta into the launch period of the game going live. His recollections are from 2002 and were written and posted to the public boards in 2004.
A History of Test Center by willinglabrat will be presented as a serial news story, with a news article for each chapter. EAL Stratics is very happy to have the chance to provide an encore posting of willinglabrat's story.
A History of Test Center, Chapter 2
Dedicated to Coke A Cola
by willinglabrat, Stratics, 2004
Yeah. Those were the days. During those wonderful three weeks of November, a great deal happened in Test Center. The Goth and Newbie museums developed under Betty Newbie and Bella Goth, with husbands included. Mortimer was much nicer in the online game.
Free food accepted no gratuities for its services. It's legacy, through Lost Friends once rated Test Center as the most welcoming city in all of TSO, in CherryBomb's surveys, and not the kind of sorry welcome meted out in certain places in the news.
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Custom Content Statue Awards
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TSO EAL Community News - Apr 26, 2008 2:33 AM EDT | Posted by Aster
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EA-Land player and Stratics poster Avyi Zenith has started a thread about her idea for a Custom Content Statue Award Competition and Ceremony to honor and celebrate the custom content being made by players, for players, in EA-Land.
EA's Parizad Parav has donated on behalf of EA grand prizes to be given
out during the ceremony. These prizes include 3 simmies (one of each
color) and 2 garden gnomes.
EA-Land player and Stratics poster
shredded.carrot has donated time and services to create a website
devoted to the submission and voting process of the competition. To see the EA-Land Custom Content Ceremony website (currently under development), click here.
To read more about the contest and ceremony and learn how you can help make this happen in game, please see this thread in the EAL Stratics Custom Content forum.
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