Just a quick note to everyone involved with CCS in all its many sims. Have a great holiday this year.

And remember, no matter what day it is, your friends and family are always important. Make sure you take the time you can have with them this holiday, and enjoy it for all its worth.

For those of you without family, remember to do the same with the families you have chosen for yourselves.

In the end, no matter what holiday you celebrate this season, its the people you love that matter over any other thing. Make sure you give them your best this year, even if the best you are capable of is to tell them that you love them.

See you all on the other side of 2014. My my how the time flies.

Okay folks there was a big sigh this weekend as a I implemented a REALLY QUICK hotfix that was designed to stop tank and DPS classes from having the same level of intelligence based bonus to healing as healers and casters. There was a bit of a problem there.

Unfortunately a lot of people aren't too happy with that except the people that realized it was actually an error.

So I took the last couple days to try to work out a server side fix to address this situation more functionally than my quick hotfix did. At this time due to real life concerns I am not getting a lot of input from Melanie or Maldoror and cannot at this time push a LSL based fix for this issue until Melanie completes the encryption pass for the 1.0.5 meter. Which we hopefully will have a new beta for soon.

So for the technical details, heres how things stand now.

All skills are affected by intelligence. Some skills will only have their base value payload affected by intelligence whereas the DOT/HOT/SECONDARY effect will not affected by it, so a DOT will do an initial large int modified hit, then the "tick" on the DOT will only do the base per tick. Secondary effects added to skills via string encoding are not affected by intFactor, unfortunately at this time there is no way to pass that to the meter please keep this in mind.

This means that now all skills are affected by intelligence and all races/classes have various STR/INT based advantages which are all mostly the same from race to race other than the Cyborg race which gets a minor efficiency improvement based on their racial creation premise of being slightly more efficient at everything.
INT AND STR MOD BY ARCHETYPE:

---

DPS
STR 1.75
INT 0.75
TANK
STR 1.25
INT 0.50
CASTER
STR 0.50
INT 1.75
HEALER
STR 0.75
INT 1.50

CYBORG
HEALER(S)
STR 0.75
INT 1.75
TANK
STR 1.50
INT 0.75
DPS
STR 2.00
INT 1.00

---

And for the super geeky:
mysql> update skillsDamage set intFactor = 1;
Query OK, 130 rows affected (0.01 sec)
Rows matched: 171 Changed: 130 Warnings: 0

mysql> update skillsHealing set intFactor = 1;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
Rows matched: 57 Changed: 0 Warnings: 0

mysql> update skillsSupport set intFactor = 1;
Query OK, 90 rows affected (0.01 sec)
Rows matched: 90 Changed: 90 Warnings: 0

The above means the intFactor for all skills in all categories was set to 1. Basically all skills are affected by intelligence.

update players set respec=1 where respec=0;

That last bit there means that all players that had no respec available, now have 1. So if you didn't have a respec, you have one to work with, if you had one or two respec's banked you still have those respec's banked.

Hopefully this helps with the balance issues and doesn't make intelligence a wasted stat for DPS and TANK archetypes.

Happy Tax Day, I guess.

Discussion Thread

UPDATE: Linden Labs has agreed to leave the sims open until March 9th to allow renters in that sim to retrieve any potential items or objects they wish to recover from the sims before the items are lost for good. If you have irreplaceable objects or simply want to take some pictures of places you liked, in either Lost Vegas South or Vampires Asylum, please get them in the next 24 hours. And thanks to Linden Labs for stretching the closure date to try to be courteous to the community. - Info from Jolene Merlin.

Hey all, as you may have noticed the Vampires Asylum and Lost Vegas South Sims have gone off the grid. This is something we have been putting low key warnings out about for a few months now.

Effectively though, several months ago we received a message from an individual who had come online and stated that Karoline Merlin had died in real life. We were unable to confirm this as a fact so we did not, at the time, push forward with a large effort to memorialize her or to spread the news around because for all we knew it could have simply been someone playing a twisted and rather evil game.

Regardless of that there have been multiple attempts from myself, and Melanie and many other members of the CCS Community to get in touch with Karoline since then, to my knowledge there have been no replies from Karoline to any of them, so as of around December we started giving quiet warnings that there might be a problem with the sims.

Regardless of that, apparently today the sims have gone offline for good according to Linden Labs, further information, of course, is not theirs to give us, but I think its safe to assume that at this time, its entirely possible that the person we knew as Karoline Merlin has passed on.

This is unfortunate as Karoline was fairly young, only in her early 40s to my knowledge, and she worked very hard with CCS for several years, working closely with both the Damnation and CoLA chains, as well as supporting the CCS network in her time with us.

I'm sorry to have to think of her as dying an untimely death, but it seems that this is all we can assume at this time, unless we are otherwise corrected beyond this point.

So, my apologies for not taking a moment to "remember" Karoline before right now, but I simply had no way to know for sure, and did not want to reinforce what could have only been a rumor.

So, if what we believe has happened has truly come to pass.....Rest In Peace, Karoline. And thank you for everything, you were a great help to us and you will be missed.