Reminder: Learner’s League in channel Tourney, 18:30 Tuesday

This week’s tournament winners

Monday  1v1 dota: 1st – Sepultura, 2nd – ma_se_mielie

Wednesday 3v3 dota: 1st – michiko, corrupted & ferbi

Thursday 2v2 dota: 1st – Sepultura & Covenant

Tournaments take place 18:30 Monday – Thursday

daNNy Cup

The daNNy cup is a clan tournament that takes place every Sunday. Feel free to sign up on forums under the daNNy cup subforum. Episode 3.5 starts this Sunday!

This week’s tournament winners

Monday  1v1 dota: 1st – Revoker, 2nd – sneeuleeu

Tuesday Uthers: 1st – frozenwolf, 2nd – suggestions

Wednesday 3v3 dota: 1st – Metagross Typhlosion  & Venusaur

Thursday 2v2 dota: 1st – infernape & IRwasted, 2nd – augustana & dariyal

Tournaments take place 18:30 Monday – Thursday

daNNy Cup

The daNNy cup is a clan tournament that takes place every Sunday. Feel free to sign up on forums under the daNNy cup subforum. Episode 3.4 starts this Sunday!

Administration

To receive announcements about tournaments, type /group dota join – on battle.net

/group diablo2 join for announcements on the LLD, HLD tournaments as well as other Diablo 2 news.

For any queries or suggestions email: Xenophyl@tga.za.net

Have a good weekend!

- The CA team

So, in the turmoil of the recent network problems we have been experiencing, saidin decided to update the underlying software for the ticket system website, which of course broke everything. You may have noticed that the website has been changing, for better or worse, quite a lot over the last 3 days or so. Once things were broken, we decided not to take the shortest path to fixing it, but rather to improve upon things instead. Lemonade from lemons and whatnot. I just thought I would keep you updated on what’s changed.

The first thing you may notice is that upon logging in, the recent activity is in fact, recent activity! Many thanks to Supy for sorting that out. He has also been working on a lost password form, so that you no longer have to email us to get a password reset. We will let you know as soon as it is finished and tested. The only other real change that you will probably notice is attachments now open in a new window, and images actually show in that window! No longer do you have to download images and open them on your pc!

There were many things that broke and had to be fixed along the way, and they seem to have been sorted out, maybe, but those are the only changes you are likely to notice. For the rest, you just need to know that our underlying software is up to date and working happily, and the network issues seem to have sorted themselves out as well.

In other news, DotA v6.72c is out and the WAGE bot has been updated accordingly, hooray!

After implementing the 1.26a update, somewhat smoothly, we’re happy to announce that the changes are relatively positive. We try to keep updating down to a minimum because some players struggle to double-click in quick enough to actually open a folder and this means that when it comes to updating: there are so many problems, we actually want to cry.

And while tears are refreshing, we’d rather not waste them.

The changes between version 1.24e and 1.26a include the following two main enhancements:

• The new Warcraft 3 TFT 1.25b patch update brings numerous balancing changes to the races and items. It adds support for widescreen resolutions and fixes vulnerabilities to various exploits and hacks. By releasing this patch Blizzard proved that they still care for Warcraft 3 even after 7 years.
• The banner works again

Note: these updates are both included in the recent patch. Don’t stress. You have everything to need to have to benefit. Because we’re on 1.26a we have all this and more.

Basically the above means the following: instead of having to juke your Warcraft 3 resolution in the registry, or through a third-party program, the game now offers support for widescreen resolutions. Some of you might have noticed, especially those on laptops, that the game is a little clearer and more crisp.

Then, the banner. We’ve been without a banner for a while. We decided to update and add a custom banner for all of you to click on.

Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like, in case you cannot see it for some strange reason.

Yesterday we miraculously were updated to 1.26A. Actually what happened is I had slipped the updates in but hadn’t turned them on. Then the server went for a nosedive and got restarted with the updates activated. So, it jumped the gun by a few hours, but things seem to be peachy! This is what you’ll need to do:

1. If you’re having problems with autoupdates in the past (usually because your game wasn’t installed properly), you’ll need to run WC3Setup. This basically adds an InstallPath to your registry so that the updater knows where your game is installed.
2. Connect to Twilight has per usual. You’ll get the 1.24E to 1.25B update, followed by the 1.25B to 1.26A update. Your Warcraft 3 will automatically restart after each update but you must quit and relaunch it using the loader before you’ll be able to connect to Twilight again (this is because the updater launches war3.exe instead of w3l.exe after updating).
3. From 1.25B onwards, there is a new loader.

There is also a forum post for this which may help more.

This last week we managed to rock out 3 outages in a row. Over the last year we’ve had very few outages. Here is a brief rundown:

• Our first problem was with DNS. Our twilightgaming record expired but didn’t warn us. This caused downtime while we had to pay the slackers money.
• Our second problem was last night. We ran out of disk space because of bnetd’s log file. Unfortunately we couldn’t remove the file because of the way bnetd works and had to reboot the server.
• And today, the old war3 record expired. The warning email went to a defunct account.

The real sad story is that, as a result of the reboot, some Diablo II characters were lost. This is because they couldn’t be saved to disk (no space) and thus existed only as long as the server was up.

The future:

• We’ll have to keep an eye on the twilightgaming record and pre-empt this next year. Unless our DNS provider solves this for us.
• I’ve cleared enough space to serve our needs for the next 4 years (that’s how long it took us to run out the first time).
• The email address has been updated.

For what it’s worth, we do daily backups of our databases and Diablo characters. Unfortunately, this process writes to a log file. Thus, the last healthy backup we have is from May 02, which is too long ago for us to do anything meaningful with.

The server went down for 15 minutes today for planned maintenance, using the following plan-o-action:

• Announcements on Bnetd and IRC of the maintenance
• Backups of databases and Diablo characters
• Bnetd was taken down
• Software was updated (core system libraries and database – this took 5 minutes)
• Server was restarted (this took 10 minutes)
• Bnetd, Diablo servers and mumble were restored
• All databases were optimized

In addition to new software, we now have automated monitoring in place to resurrect things automatically if they fail (we’ve had the Mumble server fall over once in a while and this got annoying).

The following Operator changes have been made:

Operators  have been removed:

• Haeten has been removed from his position as Operator, effective immediately. This was due to misconduct, abuse and dishonesty in his communications with staff and users.

OptiMum has retired from his position as Operator. The Twilight Administration Team thanks him on behalf of the community for all the effort and long nights he put in. He will be missed!

Shinobi187 has also decided to resign due to personal reasons.

We would like to congratulate RiNCEw1ND on his appointment as an Operator, he has completed his trial with flying colours and has been promoted accordingly.

The following Community Activist changes have been made:

CA’s have been added:

• Brautles1
• Lostears

The inquisitors are not taking applications for the positions above, please do not send applications until you are notified of openings.

As a result of the server upgrade, we came across a bug in the new version of PHP which broke registrations on the forum. We have found a workaround while the bug is addressed. Registrations should now be working.

Thank you for your patience and for those who contacted us via the support email address.

Today I performed an OS upgrade on the server. The server was down for around 2 hours while the upgrade took place. Everything appears to be running smoothly. Other than the network outage on Friday night, this was the first time the server has been offline in over a year – and hopefully these new upgrades keep things running smoothly for many more.

Happy gaming!