US Democracy Server: Patch Day
Version 44.0
President
- Leadership: Will now scale properly to national crises. Intelligence was not being properly applied.
- A bug has been fixed that allowed the President to ignore the effects of debuffs applied by the Legislative classes.
- Drain Treasury: There appears to be a bug that allowed loot to be transferred from the treasury to anyone on the President’s friends list, or in the President’s party. We are investigating.
- Messages to and from the President will now be correctly saved to the chat log.
- Messages originating from the President were being misclassified as originating from The American People.
- A rendering error that frequently caused the President to appear wrapped in the American Flag texture has been addressed.
Vice President
- The Vice President has been correctly reclassified as a pet.
- No longer immune to damage from the Legislative and Judicial classes.
- The Vice President will no longer aggro on friendly targets. This bug was identified with Ranged Attacks and the Head Shot ability.
- Reveal Identity: this debuff will no longer be able to target Covert Operatives.
- Messages to and from the Vice President will now be correctly saved to the chat log.
- A rendering bug was affecting the Vice President’s visibility, making him virtually invisible to the rest of the server. This has been addressed.
Cabinet
- There was a bug in the last release that prevented the Cabinet from disagreeing with the President, which was the cause of a number of serious balance issues. This bug has been addressed, and we will continue to monitor the situation.
Judiciary
- Many concerns have been raised regarding balance issues in the Supreme Court. This system is maintained on a different patch schedule, and will require longer to address.
- A large number of NPCs in the Judiciary were incorrectly flagged "ideological." We are trying to identify these cases and rectify this situation.
Homeland Security
- Homeland Security Advisory System: We have identified a bug in this system that prevents the threat level from dropping below Elevated (Yellow). The code for Guarded (Blue) and Low (Green) has been commented out. We are testing the fix and hope to have it in by the next patch.
- Torture: This debuff is being removed after a record number of complaints.
- Item: Large Bottle of Water is incorrectly generating threat with TSA Agents when held in inventory. We are looking into the issue.
- Asking questions about Homeland Security was incorrectly triggering the Chain-Jingoism debuff.
Economy
- Serious on-going issues with server economy are still being addressed. We expect further roll-backs, and appreciate your help identifying and fixing bugs. We can’t make these fixes without your help.
PVP
- Reputation with various factions are being rebalanced. The gradated reputation scale was erroneously being overwritten by the binary For Us/ Against Us flag.
Quests
- The” Desert Storm” quest chain was displaying an erroneous "Mission Accomplished" message near the beginning of the chain.
- The quest chain that begins with “There’s no Cake like Yellow Cake” and terminates with “W-M-Denied” has been identified as uncompletable, and has been removed.
Reagents
- Many recipes that currently call for Crude Oil can now be made with Wind, Solar, Geothermal and Ethanol reagents. We hope to roll out even more sweeping changes in the next patch.
Events
- The “Axis of Evil” event is drawing to a close. Look forward to the “Rebuilding Bridges” event starting in January.
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Dang, that is some FUNNY STUFF. Well done, sir!
That’s awesome!
love it! will be forwarding to all my suitably-geeky friends
This makes my head hurt with the width and breadth of the awesomeness respresented.
I can’t wait to see the patch implemented.
that’s a really funny idea … fair play to you sir
This is amazing. Probably one of the funniest things I’ve read over the course of the election, etc. Bravo:-)
Now, can we completely delete the offending bits that were causing the system crashes before the patch cycle?
This is beyond awesome. I laughed until I cried. Well done!
That is some uber-geek fantasticness. This is one patch I can’t WAIT to see implemented. (Here via Wil Wheaton’s Twitter.)
you do know that none of that is going to be fixed by Obama, right? Obama isn’t any better than Bush was, neither of them deserve the title of President. geez. this was clever, but sooooo very flawed. I hope you guys aren’t expecting any real changes from this guy because you’ll have a looooong 4 years.
Made of Win. My wife and I are both WoW geeks, and we LOL’ed. Repeatedly.
“Will now scale properly to national crises” Wow… hmmmm normal when one is tight on cash you would downsize not increase overhead… but whatever… and WoW is gay and only geeks play it… real nerds can acutally function in normal soceity so we don’t need a pathetic cartoon to feel good. But that aside. This looks like a MAC update in that it breaks everything even further and takes all your money in the process…
… call me whatever you like, but sorry I just like to keep what I work hard to get and I don’t want the government telling me I need to give it to the “helpless” aka lazy bastards that have no money. If you make less money(proportionally) than me you are an idiot and need to be youthenized due to your utter uselessness. Try living on 300$ beyond bills its fun and easy and quite comfortable… really.
It’s still 44.0, and I expect a quick patch soon.
Cry a little harder, Anti-Intellectual 19. We can’t hear you over the chants of YES WE CAN.
Whoa. Seriously, haven’t you been paying attention? Patch notes are always published long before the patch release!
This is FANTASTIC.
Definitely will be shared and reblogged, with links back to you. Great work, and Happy Inauguration Day! We have a bright future to look forward to. 
Man, good thing the US isn’t a Democracy. Can we reboot to Republic OS? KTHXBAI!
Man that was hilarious!!! Completely wrong, of course, but funny stuff sean!
I predict the Obama campaign module will crash the servers.
“WoW is gay and only geeks play it… real nerds can acutally function in normal soceity so we don’t need a pathetic cartoon to feel good.”
Don’t even try to deny that you have multiple level 80’s.
“If you make less money(proportionally) than me you are an idiot and need to be youthenized due to your utter uselessness.”
I whole heartedly agree with you there man…cause I mean “youthenized”…seriously?? like are you to lazy to open up this wonderful thing called a dictionary and look the word up man? IT’S SPELLED EUTHANIZED…GAWD.
oh and my third gripe with your poorly prepared flamebait post is that you failed to define a time variable on this quote:
“Try living on 300$ beyond bills its fun and easy and quite comfortable… really.”
is that like $300 a month, a year? cause then that’s something to talk about but like…if it’s $300 a day or an hour or maybe even a nanosecond…cause I just don’t KNOW!
so in conclusion, I will have to agree with Murder of Crows; QQ moar pl0x
kthxbai
I was hoping they’d roll back the patch that corrupted Equal Rights for users in California. It was in the spec, and the patch to remove it was submitted without review, so maybe it’s taking a little longer to unpick.
Found this through a retweet by Wil Wheaton. Very well done. Excellent, in fact. Thank you.
Spot on!
Now, if they could just fix that bug that allows church-based guilds to take over the entire server…
Wow… Having just read the latest WoW patch notes this made me lol.
I’m also here because of Wil Wheaton’s tweet.
Passing this on!
@ Sorcha
Now, if they could just fix that bug that allows church-based guilds to take over the entire server…
The devs apologize…this was an experiment with a new combat model, EvP.
President
Leadership: Will now scale properly to national crises. Intelligence was not being properly applied.
**Thank you
A bug has been fixed that allowed the President to ignore the effects of debuffs applied by the Legislative classes.
–bug not validated… legislative ‘power to check’ was never called to override executive. Please see constitutional man page for details
Drain Treasury: There appears to be a bug that allowed loot to be transferred from the treasury to anyone on the President’s friends list, or in the President’s party. We are investigating.
–legislative unit v.2006(D) responsible for allocating resources, is the source of this bug.
Messages to and from the President will now be correctly saved to the chat log.
–as always inaccessible to other processes, please see constitutional man page for details
Messages originating from the President were being misclassified as originating from The American People.
**Thank you
A rendering error that frequently caused the President to appear wrapped in the American Flag texture has been addressed.
**Thank you, although seen by fewer users then first estimated
Vice President
The Vice President has been correctly reclassified as a pet.
–Correctly qualifying the current untested Biden process less capable then the previously considered and executively tested Palin process
No longer immune to damage from the Legislative and Judicial classes.
–bug not validated… legislative ‘power to check’ was never used to override executive. Legislative ‘power to check’ was never used to override executive, although diminished by a 2 to 9 (22%) margin. Please see constitutional man page for details.
The Vice President will no longer aggro on friendly targets. This bug was identified with Ranged Attacks and the Head Shot ability.
–Lawyers remain fair game!
Reveal Identity: this debuff will no longer be able to target Covert Operatives.
**Thank you
Messages to and from the Vice President will now be correctly saved to the chat log.
–as always, inaccessible to other processes, please see constitutional man page for details
A rendering bug was affecting the Vice President’s visibility, making him virtually invisible to the rest of the server. This has been addressed.
–process is now a pet, incapable of assuming any other role.
Cabinet
There was a bug in the last release that prevented the Cabinet from disagreeing with the President, which was the cause of a number of serious balance issues. This bug has been addressed, and we will continue to monitor the situation.
–This bug was caused by President allocating system resources to Cabinet while the legislative process held all pipes unblocked. This is no different then the current condition, please advise.
Judiciary
Many concerns have been raised regarding balance issues in the Supreme Court. This system is maintained on a different patch schedule, and will require longer to address.
A large number of NPCs in the Judiciary were incorrectly flagged “ideological.” We are trying to identify these cases and rectify this situation.
–Halting these processes forcefully will cause a systemic failure.
Homeland Security
Homeland Security Advisory System: We have identified a bug in this system that prevents the threat level from dropping below Elevated (Yellow). The code for Guarded (Blue) and Low (Green) has been commented out. We are testing the fix and hope to have it in by the next patch.
–Bug in system which prevents the treat level from dropping below yellow has been attributed as an artifact of previous process. We’ll just ‘hope’ that we’re right this time.
Torture: This debuff is being removed after a record number of complaints.
** Thank you
Item: Large Bottle of Water is incorrectly generating threat with TSA Agents when held in inventory. We are looking into the issue.
– Hardware implementation costs to properly distinguish ‘Large Bottle of Water’ liquid and ‘Large flammable Bottle of clear odorless grain ethanol’ liquid greater then current running processes. This feature will become available in the future.
Asking questions about Homeland Security was incorrectly triggering the Chain-Jingoism debuff.
**Thank you
Economy
Serious on-going issues with server economy are still being addressed. We expect further roll-backs, and appreciate your help identifying and fixing bugs. We can’t make these fixes without your help.
–Please stop your processes and all the processes which your process has spawned from accessing system resources
PVP
Reputation with various factions are being rebalanced. The gradated reputation scale was erroneously being overwritten by the binary For Us/ Against Us flag.
–Legacy scale has been restored. Please note that this use of fuzzy logic closely resembles the v.2000 and previous, which led to the v.2001.9.11 disaster, which, even if handled incorrectly,still has not been solved.
Quests
The†Desert Storm†quest chain was displaying an erroneous “Mission Accomplished” message near the beginning of the chain.
–”Mission Accomplished” flag was accurately thrown after unrealistic unilateral action. Garbage collection process was hindered by a malicious blocking pipe with the Rummy process.
The quest chain that begins with “There’s no Cake like Yellow Cake†and terminates with “W-M-Denied†has been identified as uncompletable, and has been removed.
–”Yellow Cake” successfully removed, verified by trusted snopes thread.
Reagents
Many recipes that currently call for Crude Oil can now be made with Wind, Solar, Geothermal and Ethanol reagents.
–Methods to STORE these, while using nearly the same system resources as Oil have not been found. This feature is under construction. Please be patient.
We hope to roll out even more sweeping changes in the next patch.
Events
The “Axis of Evil†event is drawing to a close. Look forward to the “Rebuilding Bridges†event starting in January.
** Thank you
@ Frank
Good response! While some of the OP’s points are valid, I find it funny that the problems always lay on one entity, and not all those preceding ones that started most of the current situation. Power to check never utilized… AMEN.
Bush didnt do well, dont say he did…. but to blame it all on one person is stupid. I’m sure this wont really matter to post, because it will get torn apart anyway. But still needs to be said that almost ALL of our elected officials are to blame, not just one of them. (Which group is in charge of the legislative branch, and have been for years now? Hmmmmm….)
@ Frank
Haha…excellent!
@ Eric
Don’t read too much into the funny. I see the last 20 or so years as a concerted bipartisan effort to pool money and power, with little regard for constitutional duties and little regard for public welfare, and we the people have by and large sat back and ignored it, because…I mean…just look at that television! It must be 50″ across! And we bought it with nothing down, no interest, and the only cost was our future. I don’t think one person is going to fix this, but I will say that team Obama has stirred a few folks from their slumber, and gotten them interested in the nuts and bolts again, and I remain…cautiously optimistic.
This patch and all future patchs will require that Tanks be mail or leather wearers.. plate wearers will be downgraded to mail or leather wearers if they ask but don’t tell.
Nice to hear about the Crude Oil, but what am I supposed to do with the stacks and stacks of Uranium I have in my bank?
Hi can I post this on mine its way too funny not too. All obvious credit will be given to you
@ Justin
Users are reporting unintended side effects when stacking Uranium. The work-around is to store small stacks, and keep plenty of Graphite Rods in any bag containing Uranium. There is also the potential for unwanted duplication bugs when working with this reagent. Expecting these issues to be address for the “Race to Save the Planet” event, coming soon.
“Messages to and from the President will now be correctly saved to the chat log. ”
It doesn’t do any good to have a chat log when all high level characters can edit the log file annonimously, or even delete parts. The recent changes to the Illinois guild leadership due to the respec of a senator class player to a president class was a total mess. Half the people involved can’t even remember if they’ve talked to eachother or not, and the chat logs may or may not be complete. Customer service is trying to sort it out, but they appear to only have chat logs from one player, and they don’t even know if that player used an alt account for some of the conversations or not. To make it even worse, it seems that a bannable offense was committed, but the GM’s haven’t been able to suspend the account while they investigate. RMT is clearly against the EULA, but players have been doing it for so long and getting away with it that it’s become accepted.
They keep trying to fix this game, but it seems more broken every time they do a patch.
@ David Nesbit
I’m glad you like it, David! How about posting a couple of the highlights, and linking back here to the full post?
Thanks!
Well known User-management:Permissions issues are currently under review. Multiple bugs in the User-Roles module have been identified. Fixes are on-going.
Seriously, where can I send a gift for this? It’s too good. I feel compelled to send coffee and fruit bouquets.
I’m giving this game one more try. If this patch doesn’t work I’m deleting my account and running off to play “Canada: Really Polite Socialists”.
You, sir, are full of win.
Thanks for putting the new administration in terms we can all understand.
Luv,
Wyn
Here thanks to a friends link. This is hysterical. As a City of Heroes/Villains player I laughed from a good healthy place and have reposted it hither and yon for good measure.
Good job, and I’m going to laugh anytime a patch comes in for City now.
You sir need a job on the Daily Show. That was fucking brilliant! Bravo!
Hi there – great post. We tried to get hold of you before our show went live but the site would never come up for us. I am one of the co-hosts of No Prisoners, No Mercy at Virginworlds.com. We just had to share this with our listeners. Of course you are given full credit in the show and in the show notes.
Keep up the great work
Julie Whitefeather
Awwwwwesome.
This is nothing short of brilliant! Made my day!
)
There seems to be a bug in the new version: some members of the legislative and journalistic classes (those with the ‘Republican’ flag set) are now making repeated zero-point attacks on the President. While these don’t do any damage, the continual notifications can cause important messages relating to real events to scroll off-screen before players have time to react to them, and may make play unnecessarily difficult until a patch can be issued.
@ Chrisj
Haha…love it! Wish there was a way to filter those notifications.
hilarious!
There seems to be a bug with certain non-American character types such as ‘Canadian’, even though they are part of the NAFTA Guild. WBEN forms and IRS relations for guild and quest activities routinely result in critical errors which cause certain quest rewards to fail to transfer.
Workaround solutions include forming Delaware based companies with ‘Canadian’ subsidiaries, checking the ‘under the table’ option, or sharing the quest with someone in the ‘American’ character type, and having that person manually transfer the funds.