House of Commons from 1999-04-22

House of Commons from 1999-04-22

Jerrith	Greetings and thank you for attending tonight's Open House.
Jerrith	Tonight's chat will consider Items currently in development and as such we will accept questions related to this topic.
Jerrith	Jerrith will be our moderator for this evening. In order to submit questions, please /msg or /query Rainman, Fripp, Agrajag, or Niobe.
Jerrith	Please /msg different question-takers at different times, in order to balance the load and speed this process up.
Jerrith	Do not msg anyone from Origin or myself -- these questions will be ignored.
Jerrith	Remeber they may not have the opportunity to answer all of your questions. In addition, some questions may not be answered if they feel that it is not appropriate, or that it has been better answered through some other question.
Jerrith	In addition, please do not submit any questions that have already been answered during past conferences.
Jerrith	We encourage you to read the logs of the previous Open Houses, which are available at: http://uohoc.stratics.com/
Jerrith	Thanks for coming, everyone. We will now begin accepting questions.
Jerrith	*deVoca_Ni* Will the bard LOS checks include preventing people not in a bard's LOS from hearing their racket?
Faceless	No. The sound effects code does not check LOS
Jerrith	*Garreth* You intend to add line of sight to Mining (to prevent House Macro-mining, I suppose)... Isn't Smithing (and therefore mining) hard enough to raise/maintain? It takes an INSANE number of ingots to be a decent smith and run a vendor. Plan to drive us all out of buisness?
Runesabre	Its not realistic to mine thru a wall of a house plus it artifically prevents other players access to the same mountain.
Runesabre	If it becomes harder to smith, then, eventually there will be less smiths and smithing should get easier if it truly is an ingot supply problem.
Jerrith	*MordenUH* Question: I am pleased with many of the items In Development... I was wondering when we can expect the next major change (by this I mean the revamp of Alchemy or the introduction of Necromancy, or the Good/Evil system)?
Faceless	I cannot give out dates. Good/Evil was the farthest along, and is on Abyss for play testing. It's hard to balance so it might take a while
Faceless	Necromancy and Alchemy still have a lot of code to be written based on the new designs. I'm pleased with the new designs, but I am not sure when the code will be ready at this point
Pandemonium	The more people that test good/evil and give us feedback on it, the sooner it may come out. I'm sure noone wants us to publish it unbalanced :)
Jerrith	*Anthrax_KS* Can you give us any updates on the status of interior lockable doors and house guard zones?
Faceless	Lockable doors is being worked on by Sun Sword. Guard zones are on hold indefinately as we look at the exploitable effects of having small patches of them.
Jerrith	*Leeland* Could you briefly explain how the house auction sytem will work?
Faceless	When the design is worked out, we'll publicize it. Currently it's not fleshed out enough.
Jerrith	*Vixy* You mentioned new designs for Necromancy and Alchemy? Can you give us some more details and possibly examples? I also heard rumours about charms for Necromancy, will you be using the Necromancy reagents?
Faceless	The 2nd question is easier. Yes we will use those reagents. As for the 1st...
Faceless	Hmm...let me give an example. THe old alchemy system used random combinations of reagents, sort of trial and error. That wasn't too good....
Faceless	The current new design calls for each reagent to have different properties. Formulae will actually make sense when creating new potions.
Faceless	A much cooler system in my opinion which also calls for many more potions. A reagent for adhesiveness to weapons, a reagent for explosiveness...etc That's what we are headed for
Jerrith	*Rumplestiltskin* Will arms lore include an estmation of current HP compared to Maximum HP, as compared to the original HP the item had?
Runesabre	We have recently discussed adding a "brittleness" message to arms lore. No timeframe on when to expect it in game though.
Jerrith	*Pryrates-DEN* With the Good/Evil system....how long will the evil and good steeds last, do they last until they are killed or for 5 mins or what?
Runesabre	Depends how evil or good a player is... the more points they rack up the longer their steeds last.
Runesabre	I think the shortest time period is roughly a minute.
Jerrith	*Leafbeach* Will the LOS check for mining affect mining from boats in any way?
Pandemonium	It shouldn't since you have line of sight to the mountainside
Jerrith	*DrTwisTer* When will the 800x600 client be fully added?
Faceless	When the bug curve levels out. Currently it is not ready for patch.
Jerrith	*deVoca_Ni* a follow-up on Vixy's question: will the new alchemy system *replace* alchemy as we know it, or will it be in addition to what we already have?
Faceless	It is our intent not to replace it. Certainy things may in fact change, but we'd like to keep any changes if necessary to a minimum.
Jerrith	*OrinWarrick* Do you have any intention of balancing the healing skill with the magery skill for combat for those of us trying to be 'pure' warriors with 0 magery?
Runesabre	Our current plans to healing are to reduce the time required to 1/4 of current times in the case that the healer and the healee are different.
Pandemonium	I would like to see healing much more competetive with magery in regards to healing, especially ressurection. The delay is going to be cut almost in half initially
Pandemonium	if it proves to be too length of a delay still we'll lower it some more
Jerrith	*Duskwalker* Brief question for Runesabre- The final Abyss... when can we expect to see it up?
Runesabre	I need to add a better way to configure skills and make a few more tweaks to the Faction System currently running.
Runesabre	Also want to get web-based scoring working... so its not certain when Abyss will be permanent.
Jerrith	*Eagawk* When deadly poison first came out, it was about what level 5 poison is now. Then it was nerfed. Will players ever be able to make level 5 poison?
Pandemonium	Letting players with high poisoning skill have a slight chance of delivering a more poisonous blow than what is on the blade is something i've been thinking about
Pandemonium	To give warriors more incentive to learn the skill themselves than to have someone else poison it for them
Jerrith	*Rumplestiltskin* Please ask anyway, I have yet to get any answer from OSI, What is the official reasoning behind implementing am age restriction of 25 years or older on counselor apps?
IronWill	There have been several concerns (some very legitimate) about the age limit.
IronWill	We will be issuing a full statement about this hopefully tomorrow or possibly Monday detailing all of this.
Jerrith	*Schattenwolf* Speaking of magery, will there be any changes to it ? I mean since Elemantals, Daemons and EVs can be easily dispelled by enemy Mages or Monsters you rendered the 8th circle useless (well, almost).
Pandemonium	I would like to see summons alittle more resistant to dispel as well.
Pandemonium	Also including a slight chance of summoning a more powerful elemental occasionally (poison/blood/snow) will make the spells more useful to players than only daemons
Jerrith	*Blaeke* I've noticed problems with the latest ingame options menu. I can't get my chat font to change and my text color seems to be frozen. Is it buggy, perhaps?
Runesabre	If you have found problems with the client, send a description to [email protected] and we can take a look at them.
Jerrith	*BigJohn* Is there anyway we could get a full stable/animal wipe in the near future? It would be nice to get some of the spawns back, such as the Nightmares/Forest Ostards.
Pandemonium	If excessive stabling is affecting the spawn then maybe the stablemasters are charging too little. We'll have to look more into that.
Jerrith	*Nick1* regarding Evil/good sytem , if a person declared hismelf as evil and become red, can he/she still be able to join order or chaos guild? thanks!
Runesabre	I think currently you can still join Order/Chaos despite being evil. I would not expect that to remain true in the future.
Runesabre	Certainly not for Order and since Chaos is not necessarily evil, probably not Chaos either.
Jerrith	*Lockheart* Could tinkering of Rings have a choice between newbie wedding ring and a normal ring for players not getting married. Also if you double click on a wedding ring could you attach a name to it thus engraving your own ring.
Pandemonium	Sounds doable, i'll make a note of that one. I'd also in the future like to let tinkerers do engraving on certain craftable objects
Jerrith	*deVoca_Ni* At OSI, on y'all's office/cubicle nameplates, do y'all use real names or your GM (even if not really a GM) names?
Runesabre	I forgot what my real name was. *chuckles* Just kidding... we have real names posted on our offices. :)
Pandemonium	i dont have mine yet - ill have both :)
IronWill	Actually believe it or not in GM Land, we call each other by our GM Names here. (Now what was Peldor's real name again...) :)
Jerrith	*Grinch* will tamers ever be able to tame something that isn't tameable as of the moment such as a wyvern or ancient wyrm?
Pandemonium	I'd like to see alittle more variety in tamable monsters myself, perhaps evil/red players can tame/charm some undead types
Runesabre	I would also think it would be neat to have tamable water pets for those who like to travel the high-seas.
Pandemonium	More spell throwing monsters that you can tame would be useful as well. Hellhounds and Imps are popular for this reason
Jerrith	*Fodder* I would like to know why all of MDK was banned even though most of the members were not present for the banning incident.
IronWill	We really cant comment about the bannings regarding individuals as that is something between OSI and those individuals - what we can say is that the terms of service were broken by members of the guild and subsequent action was taken because of it.
Jerrith	And now a few words about Harassment Logging from Runesabre:
Runesabre	I would like to mention an important development I am implementing right now.
Runesabre	In the very near future, a player will be able to have a journal of all speech, emotes heard or spoken saved on the server.
Runesabre	This can be saved regardless of GM hours and evaluated at a later date if need be.
Runesabre	This should prove a critical tool to help the GMs help our players. :)
Jerrith	*BuRnToAsT* Does this mean OSI will be able to go trough every word people say including those thought to be private?
Pandemonium	This journal will only be looked at to investigate reported player actions that may violate the terms of service agreement
Runesabre	The player is the one that causes the journal to be saved. So, only thing able to be viewed is when the player decides it needs to be viewed.
Jerrith	*Thanatos* will this mean that people that get harassed in the future can have actual proof about what happened in stead of taking someone's word for it?
Runesabre	This is exactly what the intent is. And people will have proof for things that happened well after GM hours as well. :)
Jerrith	That concludes tonight's chat. I'd like to thank everyone for coming tonight, in particular, IronWill, Runesabre, Pandemonium, Grond, Zippy, and Faceless.
Jerrith	Have a good night everyone.
Runesabre	Good night Britannia!