Here's the list of winners (a full 5, this time around!):
Goodfuzzy
Soligna
Ribbert
Kel A
van

Congratulations to the contest winners! Much of what was submitted has already been added (links, updated information, etc), and what isn't yet will be soon.

The winners of the contest have been chosen and will be getting an email soon. I'll announce the names to all when I've gotten responses from the winners...

/old man voice: I feel happy! I feel happy!

In other news, the Grab Bag last week revealed that the Minotaur will not be able to wield a two-handed weapon in one hand. Before commenting, please consider the difference between a "Minotaur" and a "Mauler".

If you submitted an entry to the contest, you should either have already received an email from me confirming that I got your submission, or will be receiving one soon.

However, the site was down for quite a while recently, which may have affected email as well. If you entered the contest and don't receive a confirmation, please resubmit your entry; I'll wait until tomorrow night to completely close the contest and announce the winners.

Just as a reminder, the Labyrinth of the Minotaur contest ends tomorrow night. Don't let the short time left dissuade you - a day is plenty of time...

While you can still submit more or less anything you wish, with the time remaining I would suggest spell notes. As seen on the Reaver spell page, I'd like to have notes for spells that aren't fully explained by the information in the spell table itself. If you play two or three classes, that's dozens of spells that might need notes, each of which will take little time.

I've been looking around for something to replace the Cats builder, after we ended up not finishing our spreadsheets, and came across this gem.

It's from a German team but is available in english. It is a download but it checks for updates automatically and as far as I can tell, is up to date on everything.
Here's what they have to say about it:

What's that?
A character planner for Dark Age of Camelot. If you know Catacombs Character Builder you'll have no trouble with this one.

Do I need it?
Lets ask differently: What is the difference to Catacombs CB?

• everything has a suitable explanation
• the Charplan can be stored (locally)
• inclusive RA's
• career mode - > for planning the development of Chars from level 5-50
• more information to Spells: A) when planning, b) in a second table and a C) with complete description
• extra tables of the Spells and Style, depending on skill
• (hopefully improved) support for Autotrain
• Masterlevel
• Championlevell
• localized german version

I know a lot of people are curious about the status of the expansion, so I thought I'd let everyone know that arriving in my email today was an invitation to the LotM beta. This is (presumably) phase 2 - contest winners and so forth will be part of phase 3. The fact that there's a beta and I'm in it is just about all I can say at this point, so don't bother asking questions about it. :P

However, if YOU want to be in the beta... there's one week left in the contest.

Walt, AKA Copper, posted a Producer's Letter on the Herald, which has two pieces of information we haven't seen before:

Character Creation Restrictions Removed: When we implemented clustered servers, cross-realm spying was a problem we could combat with cross realm restrictions. We restricted players from creating new characters in ‘opposite’ realms and also implemented login timers. Now that the clusters have matured, we feel that the benefits of opening up each cluster for players to create characters are greater than the limited effect on cross-realm spying. Thus, in this patch, we will open each cluster to cross-realm characters. However, our cross-realm customer service policies remain unchanged.

Free Respec For All: One of the recent changes that we introduced was the Mythic respec – a mechanism for us to grant the players a respec without overwriting any respecs that they may have earned. In this patch, we are granting a free Mythic respec to every player, in recognition of the many changes to the game that we have made this year. Of course, we still have many improvements to the game to come.

Gareth is getting clustered with the other classic servers as of tomorrow. I'm smiling at the ingenuity displayed by Sanya: coming up with a somewhat different excuse for the short notice every single time they do such a move, is no easy feat.

I'd like to apologize for the recent downtime. My only explanation, frankly, is that our host sucks. We're in the process of fixing that particular situation...