Dear playaz,
the server will be offline this tuesday 24.1.2012 at late night hours due to a server upgrade.

We are moving to a better machine than we currently have, which means there will be a little downtime while we move the stuff over. This shouldn't take longer than 1 hour, however, because server will be on a different machine, we don't know how long will it take for DNS servers to acknowledge that address realm.gamingconsortium.org points to a different location. This can take from few minutes to few hours.

A little workaround is setting your realmlist to a new IP address instead of the DNS entry ( = realm.gamingconsortium.org). We will upgrade this post with an IP address the new server will have when it's online.

Current server specs:
Intel® Core™ i7-920 Quadcore
8 GB DDR3 RAM
2 x 750 GB SATA-II HDD (Software-RAID 1)
100 MBit link

New server specs:
Intel® Core™ i7-2600 Quad-Core
16 GB DDR3 RAM
2 x 3 TB SATA 6 Gb/s HDD (Software-RAID 1)
100 MBit link


While server is offline, please take a few minutes and fill in this questionnaire
viewtopic.php?f=57&t=8048

Hello everyone,
we have some exciting news for you. So without further talk, let's get this started:

Arena Season 7 is starting today!
That's right. We're slowly approaching the season this patch is supposed to be played at! ^^ We hope the games will be more balanced. Rating requirement for items is lower than last season too. Your first relentless item is available at 1200, and from there on you can buy new item every 50 rating. The prices are set as follows

http://www.wowhead.com/forums&topic=119 ... nformation

with 2 changes: Relentless Helm requires 1850 rating instead of 1900, and Relentless Shoulders require 1850 rating too (in 3v3 or 5v5) instead of 2000


Onyxia
WoW veterans surely remember this old lady from Dustwallow Marsh. She's back stronger than before in both, 10 and 25-man modes. Get MORE DOTS and have fun with her (the instance will be open later today before raid time)
At the same time, the requirement to clear all bosses in Naxxramas in order to enter Frost Lair has been lifted. Now you can face Saphiron right away.


Dungeon Emblems
Increasing the Emblems quality is a must to keep the lower dungeons still appealing. After discussions we decided to deviate from Blizzard a bit and adjust the emblems as follows:
- all bosses who previous dropped Emblems of Heroism will drop Emblems of Valor now (heroics, naxx10, os10, eoe10, daily dungeon quest)
- Ulduar 10, daily heroic quest and weekly raid quests will reward Emblems of Conquest (together with Ulduar 25, onyxia 10 and later on ToC10)
- Onyxia 25 (and later ToC25) will drop Emblems of Triumph


Increased rates
By a popular demand, we are offering an option for players to increase XP rates, while not forcing them to players who want to experience the leveling to the fullest. The rates can be increased to 2x for level range 1-60 using ingame command .rates or using Settings page in UCP
The reason why we preferred to use this way and not a "Refer a friend" system is, that RaF is not suitable for free-to-play servers and creates a lot of awkward situations. The rates option provides same bonus and does not tempt to abuse the system.


GC tokens
The awesome goblins Mumu, Zuzu, Fufu and Bubu have arrived to Dalaran. While the first 3 offer a preview of items, Bubu is a real deal and lets you buy mounts, pets and fun items for GC tokens. You can visit them at the Horde bank near the statue. The same items will be available for donation as well.
Related to this new, The Crypt run now requires 2 players to start (down from 3).


Race change
Thanks to the hard work of tibbi and Feanor, Gaming Consortium now allows you to change your race (and faction). This option will be available for GC tokens or Donation in next few days.


Transfer adjustments
The transfer option has been a great success. Our community received several very nice players. We're still tinkering with the restrictions to satisfy more players who want to join GC, but at the same time not to harm current players. The changes are:
- we allow to transfer Death Knights
- you can transfer up to 3 characters
- transfer from retail servers is allowed (without char deletion)
- Guild rewards requirements have been lowered
- 1 free race change to each transferred character (even to those already transferred in past)


Arena Tournament
Another AT is behind us. This time we were fighting in Relentless gear. Tournament had several surprises, top teams received beloved GC tokens and some gold. We tend to organize a tournament every month. Keep an eye on Arena Tournament page and register for next one. You don't need to have a lvl 80 char on main realm to participate, you don't even need to have a char on GC. So call your friends to fight with you (or against you) The event is held on our test realm which switches to tournament database every weekend.


GC LFP (Looking for people)
Even though we're trying day by day, our time is limited. We try to provide you the best we can, but still we need a little help. We are currently looking for people who would help us in following departments:
- Graphic designer (icons for website, pictures for announcements and subpages, armory and tools, ...)
- Community manager (to help with announcements, FAQ, guides, forum moderation, Rules, helping ppl with common issues, etc.)
- Movie/Trailer maker (posting a video of news to YouTube every month or two will definitely draw an attention of more players... even if not "hired" into staff, feel free to post a video and we'll feature it on GC channel )
- scripters/developers (for core and scripts... I see some sparks in the "howto" thread on forum)


Future plans
- ToC (before X-mas)
- complete floating menu on right side of page with ALL the tools and useful links with icons (LF someone to make icons)
- "About us" page
- Isle of Conquest
- daily quest for Crypt run

Good news everyone,
as you may have noticed, there has been a lot of work going on last few weeks. Let's sum them up a little:

Voting rewards

That's right, now also Gaming Consortium gives u a chance to get free epics. Tier 10 is included, some new custom items and for the top voters even [Shadowmourne]!

lol jk, srsly...

In order to increase our player base a bit through votings, we re offering small rewards to those who support Gaming Consortium this way for their effort. Depending on number of votes, players can claim their GC tokens on the new voting page in UCP every week. The rewarding is as follows:

• 5-9 votes: 10 tokens
• 10-18 votes: 20 tokens
• 19+ votes: 30 tokens

*note: the votes are only counted from 2 sites, because the third one doesn't support this feature. However, you are more than welcome to vote on all 3 sites. It's all for you afterall
**note2: if you are using different forum account than your main game account, contact emsy on IRC or via a PM


Class spell fixes

Death Knight
Hungering Cold glitch
Blood Tap will properly activate Blood Rune
Anti-magic Shell immunity

Druid
Berserk removes Tiger's Fury

Hunter
Frost Trap for Lock and Load

Priest
Glyph of Shadow fixed (wont disappear outta shadow-form)
Remove Prayer of Mending aura if there is no other target within jump radius
Dont trigger Prayer of Mending from absorbed damage.

Warlock
Soulwell
Pet saving and deleting
use absorbed damage also in calculation Haunt heal

Warrior
Taste for Blood will not proc if absorbed

Other fixes
- Taunt Diminishing Returns
- UP bosses Svala and Gortok have had their scripts vastly improved
- Auction house should cherish a bit more with a help of a new AH bot. It was carefully tinkered not to bring any disbalance in the economy, but rather help
- silence, slow fall and water walk effects will not be all removed from a player if he had multiple buffs with this effect and one of theme expired
- and MANY MORE from our bugtracker, see the summary

SotA is enabled again

After fixing many of the issues related with the Strand of the Ancients battleground, it has been reopened better than ever before. The fixes include lot of achievements, bombs disarming, tanks respawn, bombs spawning and numerous exploit and glitch fixes. It still not perfect, but if you find better one, let us know

Achievements summary

Latest achievement fixes:

• Gurubashi Arena Grand Master
• Bombs Away
• Quick Cap
• Save The Day
• most of SotA achievements
• some kill PvP achievements now properly require killing blow instead of a HK
• timed pvp achievements

Category working/broken list of broken achievements
General 53/1 X
Quests 46/3 X X X
Exploration 70/0
PvP
- general 29/2 X X
- Arena 24/1 X
- Alterac Valley 12/2 X X
- Arathi Basin 15/0
- Eye of the Storm 13/0
- Warsong Gulch 15/0
- Strand of the Ancients 11/4 X X X X
Professions 75/0
Reputation 45/0

What's next?

Our development team has been busy and our near future plans include:
- faction and race change system (also for transfers)
- new pets, mounts and fun items at donation page and ingame token vendor.
- Isle of Conquest
- Northrend Dungeon Scripts improvement, with achievement criteria support
- end of season 6 on 20.10. All brackets will be rewarded - there will be another announcement with closer info about rewards (prolly same system as last time) and new season prices (prolly lower than last time )
- start of new season at 27.10. together with Onyxia's Lair
- Trial of Crusader later this year

We at GamingConsortium have a surprise for everybody! The release of Ulduars final boss (other than algalon) Yogg-Saron on Friday August 12th!

After painful months of working to tweak him, test him, and fix loot, we believe he's finally ready to let loose! To access him you will need to kill all 4 of the keepers and General Vezax. 0-4 keeper Yogg will work as well, as well as the corresponding loot for the level of difficulty.

For those racing for realm first achieves, remember the only realm first achievement yogg holds is 25 man 0 keepers (aka omgwtfbbq fakopmobs). Remember to report any bugs you guys encounter in the bugtracker as well! I think however we should all be proud that we are one of the few (if not only) servers with such a close to blizzlike replica of Ulduar.

Also I've included a poll to ask the players what should be worked on next in reference to content!

Hello everyone,
Gaming Consortium staff wants to announce another bunch of updates we prepared for you.

Random Dungeon Finder
RDF has been implemented, you can use it to find group and get additional bonus from finishing dungeons.
At this moment it is in testing phases and may still have contain some problems but these will be solved as soon as possible.

Matchmaking Rating
MMR and some additional arena related changes has been added, we want to increase activity of arenas and ease up gaining mid-high rating.

Ulduar progression
To make Ulduar even close to be fully open we are going to release General Vezax next week, we are also working on rest of problems with other bosses so they should be improved soon.

There are also a lot of different fixes which you can see in our changelogs
core: http://www.github.com/gc/mangos/commits
scripts: viewforum.php?f=36