From the Herald today...

I WAS planning on leading off the grab bag with this, but I decided not to wait.

People who sell artifacts are getting very nice prices from the NPCs. This is causing a certain amount of drama among those who had artifacts on their CMs, and would have wanted to sell those artifacts themselves. I understand the drama, and would probably be adding my own slightly out of tune alto to the chorus if I didn't, you know, work here. But I do work here, and would like to explain. I'll use the FAQ format I've come to rely on like I rely on sweet, sweet slushies.

So it turns out that if you were on early enough, and realized what was happening, you could have become the in-game version of a Powerball winner. If you had Artifacts on your CM, there's a decent chance you've lost a lot of potential money.

Mythic's reasoning for this situation is pretty solid, but you have to feel sorry for the people who lowered the price on their unactivated Artifacts.

Daily goodies last week: On Wednesday, 1.81E was posted. There's a small change to DF access rules, but the big change is hearthstones:

- A new Loyalty Reward program is being introduced with this patch that will reward players for continuous, consecutive account activation with recall stones that will allow players to individually teleport to various locations. Currently the rewards are as follows:

3 months: personal bind recall
6 months: personal house recall
12 months: guild house recall

- These stones will be usable once per hour, and do not share a reuse timer. They will not be usable in Realm vs Realm zones. The stones have a 10 second casting time. To obtain these new loyalty rewards, visit the Royal Treasury Clerk (a new NPC) in your King's throne room. As a reminder, you must be using the Darkness Rising client to access the King's throne room. These rewards will only be awarded once (at each plateau) to each character on your account. The stones are not tradable, not sellable, and not destroyable. They are usable in shade form.

On Thursday Sanya posted the memories sent to her by players. Be prepared to laugh, to cry, maybe to cry some more when you think about how much time you've invested in a game.

Then the 4th anniversary of the Grab Bag on Friday... no particularly headline-grabbing questions in this one.

Usually you expect to see the major changes of a patch come right at the beginning, but 1.81D has some big new changes, including:

Enhanced cures have been added to the primary healing line of the Cleric, Druid and Healer classes. These cures are in addition to Cure Poison and Cure Disease. These cures will be available to currently created characters with the appropriate specialization.

As Dark Age of Camelot progresses, many of our players have fought their way to the tops of the realm rank charts. To allow these players the opportunity to achieve new goals in the New Frontiers, we have extended the realm rank system to Realm Rank 13.

Mezmerization and Stun spells are now calculated when determining Realm point distribution. The spells are looked at as if they were damage spells cast upon a player. All Mezmerization spells will count as 5% and all stun spells will count as 10%. However, this does not mean a player will get 10% of the realm point worth of an enemy that is killed. It means the player will be considered as doing 10% damage from the damage pool, which dictates realm point values.

Realm points will now be awarded for successfully repairing a door or outpost piece. You will receive roughly 10% of the amount you repaired in realm points.

Realm points will now be awarded for healing players who are involved in RvR combat. You will receive roughly 5% of the amount of hp you restored in realm points.

Altered Player RP Value formula to: (Player level - 20)^2 + (Player's realm level * 5) + (Player's champ level * 20) + ((Player's master level^2) * 5). Remember when you're feverishly minmaxing that we raised the RR cap to 13 this patch.

Dead players will now continue to retain and receive their realm point credit on targets until they release. This will work for solo players as well as grouped players in terms of continuing to contribute their share to the kill if a target is being attacked by another non grouped player as well.

/autoloot toggle added.

And in case you're curious about how much you or a foe will be worth after the RP formula changes, but don't feel like doing math, I've got a calculator up that will do it for you. You can find that at http://www.classesofcamelot.com/RPCalc.asp.