House of Commons from 1998-12-31

House of Commons from 1998-12-31

DenDragon	Greetings and thank you for attending tonight's Open House.
DenDragon	Tonight's topic is: 'Looking back at 1998'. We will be discussing what has happened in and to UO in the past year, which includes (but is not limited to) enhancements to the game (the good), what went wrong (the bad) and the fight against exploiters (the ugly). Please phrase your questions accordingly.
DenDragon	Glamdring will be our moderator for this evening. In order to submit questions please /msg or /query Aphrodite, Kazola, Uziel.
DenDragon	Please /msg different question-takers at different times, in order to balance the load and speed this process up. Do not msg anyone from OSI, myself or Glamdring--these questions will be ignored.
DenDragon	Remember that OSI may not have the opportunity to answer all of your questions. In addition, some questions may not be answered if the Dev Team feels that it is not appropriate or that it has been better answered through some other question.
DenDragon	In addition, please do not submit any questions that have already been answered during past conferences. We encourage you to read the logs of the previous Open Houses, which are available at http://uohoc.stratics.com.
Glamdring	On a side note...DD's daughter has been in the hospital but should be coming home real soon. I'm sure that DD and his family would appreciate your thoughts and prayers for her during the holidays.
DenDragon	Thanks for coming, everyone. We will now begin accepting questions.
Glamdring	*^Xander* When T2A was publicized, extra space for player housing and towns was one of the features. When do you plan on opening T2A for this? Particularly for player towns that have been planning around this moment? (perhaps a limit of only public buildings?)
DD	Sometime early in the year. Basically, housing in T2A will be zoned. There's specific areas that were designed for guild houses, for towns, and for villages.
DD	It won't be limited to only public buildings, however, since many "semi-public" buildings make use of the "private" setting.
DD	If you look at a map of the Lost Lands, you should be able to tell which areas are the ones designed for it. Note that "spawn areas" are generally not the places that look like space for housing.
DD	A good example is the plateaus in the desert canyon region, the ones without any cacti & stuff on them, that are a little more open, those are design for houses so that they won't interfere with the spawn down in the canyons proper
Glamdring	*Phoobnahr* before it was released, UO promised incredibly smart AI, this turned out to be only partly true as many people turn to PvP because of unintelegent monsters. EverQuest boasts of a VERY intelegent AI for NPCs and monsters, any plans to upgrade monster AI to help compete with everquest?
DD	If you've ever played the game "Creatures" you've seen a very very advanced AL system in action (way beyond what UO was trying in terms of detail, btw)
DD	UO was an attempt to apply AL rule systems to a very large scale game. One that had players in it. As it happens, it wasn't a resilient enough ecology to handle the players.
DD	Creatures were hunted to extinction, the forests were deforested, and the mines were mined out very quickly.
DD	Basically, you ended up with the correct "sim result" for what was happening: a bunch of rvaenous, very unGreen, non-eco-conscious players exploiting the wilderness. :)
DD	So we turned it off, because the higher order behaviors that we had seen in testing in a closed environment never had the chance to develop in the actual game.
DD	Meaning, deer didn't have the chance to herd and migrate, dragons didn't live long enough to raid towns, etc.
DD	Whew--now, that brings us to what we plan to do
DD	Yes, we plan to work more on the AI. :) Basically, we want to get the artificial life system back in.
DD	It'll take a lot of work,. however
DD	In the meantime, it's likely that we will keep adding more of the type of AI you say you see in EQ, the basic kind of state machine AI. There's some in there already--nonhuman monsters looting is an example of that sort of AI
DD	In the future, you may well see stuff like more intelligent targeting, better pathfinding, perhaps stronger "memories" for individual monsters, and also possibly certain monsters who learn skills and gain stats & strategies the longer they live
DD	For example, monsters that learn when you use skills on them, and try to use them themselves against others in the future
DD	Lots of stuff we can do there. But I have to admit, my first love isn't that sort of (fairly simple, really) AI, but the AL system, which has the potential for much cooler sorts of interactions
DD	But there's no reason we can't have both :)
DD	Hope that answer wasn't too detailed :)
Glamdring	*LarsUlricht* DD, is the player base much different than MUDs you have worked on in the past? If so, how is UO's player base better and worse than bases you have experienced in the past?
DD	Absolutely it is different
DD	UO's playerbase is a) larger b) far less computer savvy c) averages a younger age d) tends to have less education (because of C, of course, don't take that the wrong way!) e) tends to be less aware of social patterns that are common to virtual spaces
DD	Traditionally, muds have attracted an audience ranging from 18 to around 30. A sizable portion of the traditional mud arena is taken up by women, and a sizable amount of it is college upperclassmen, graduate students, or postgrad students in the technical fields.
DD	UO's audience has a smaller proportion of women, and a lower proportion of programmers and the like...
DD	Most of the differences can be chalked up to the fact that UO is easier to get into than just about any mud there is (muds are text and use a command line, and require the knowledge of telnet, etc) and the fact that UO by itself probably has as many active players as, oh, maybe 1/3 of the total mud audience out there. So the audience HAD to broaden from its mud origins
DD	Basically, muds self-select by their difficulty & their interface to a smaller audience that has more technical savvy.
DD	& also to players who have playd other muds before, whereas UO has a huge amount of people who have never played a virtual world of any type before.
DD	Sorry I can't go into actual stats on this answer, but it's actually info valuable to folks like Sony & Turbine :) So that's all I can say
DD	A note--I am talking of the whole mud audience, btw. Not just the gaming muds. Gaming muds skew younger, social muds skew older. Gaming muds also skew male more.
DD	Lastly, ALL online gaming audiences have been growing younger over the last few years as the Net exploded. Basically, your average online gamer's age has fallen (this is off the top of my head, don't think of it as scientific) at least five years in the last five years.
DD	UO, like most gaming muds, reflects this. Social muds haven't been as hard hit by the younger demographic, possibly because you don't kill things. :)
Glamdring	*Josh* First off, what will happen to existing craftables on boats? Will they be deleted? And secondly, can we get a secure method for selling/buying houses whereby the gold is automatically transfered between banks and the ownerships is also automatically transfered (like a trade window)
DD	Warning, after this next q, I have to cuddle my screaming son. :)
DD	No, they won't be deleted. A "bank draft" method for house sales has been discussed but there's no firm design yet. Sunsword was investigating it last I heard.
DD	OK, break for a min while I cuddle a screaming baby
Glamdring	Okay...Until DD get's back we're going to unmoderate the channel so you can discuss what has been said so far
Glamdring	Just behave or we'll put the +m back on :)
DD	OK, I am back.
DD	Thanks for the well-wishers who hoped that my daughter is better. She should be out of the hospital tomorrow night, she was diagnosed with Type I diabetes
DD	It was very scary for a while, she was in intensive care
DD	Whol, to answer your comment: I do NOT think that UO players are stupid. Far from it! UO happens to have the most involved and articulate community of any online game I have ever seen
DD	It is not an insult to say that the audience skews younger, IMHO. It's just different
DD	I saw questions about stat loss. We're still discussing what to do about that & blue PKs. We'd rather encourage current blue PKs to be red, and if that means lightening up on red penalties, then that may be what we have to do. Ultimately, we'd prefer that red PKs were extremely rare, and limited mostly to those who actuallky roleplayed evil in a way that was fun for everyone.
DD	SO basically, we'd prefer to push the current blue PKs into guild warfare or some other form of consensual warfare. There are many means of doing tis that we haven't tried, and there's some nice ideas out there, including Bob Hanson's latest proposal.
DD	As far as the allegations of editorial control on OSI's part for this chat, or picking only Q's that put OSI in agood light... well, that's silly.
DD	I just answered at length a question that very clearly seemed to say "hey, your competitor does this better than you, whatcha gonna do about it?" :)
DD	i have never seen the moderators here slant the q's towards favoring us, and I find it somewhat inappropriate to accuse them of that when they are voilunteering their time to run these chats for you :(
DD	now, back to the q's :)
Glamdring	*Matthew* Are there any plans to lessen the terrain restrictions on placing houses, or to provide additional areas to place houses? My guild spent months saving for a tower only to realize there is not a single place on the map to put it.
DD	There are NO plans to reduce the restrictions. Many people seem not to realize that the objective of the housing updates was to end up with less houses. The route we chose relies to a large degree on the inability to place houses in locations that were previously permissible.
DD	It is quite likely that we will ALSO have to add house maintenance to help with house turnover.
DD	The current measures in place will ensure fewer houses, but it's fairly slow-acting. House maitnenance would make the houses that are not much used go away
DD	As far as additional areas--the Lost lands WILL open up for colonization in the new year. but placement there will be under "zoning" laws.
DD	Reminder: questions need to be sent to a moderator, not to me...
Glamdring	*Zolthar* One thing not taken care of in 98 was a fix for guildstones. Can we expect a patch to revamp it just like housing? It usually takes hours to sift through a list just to declare against a guild. Also the many coloring/name bugs that exist with the guildstones when changing guild types or names, moving guildstones, etc.
DD	That is indeed planned. :) We did fix a bunch of coloring problems with the last update we did, right before the holidays started (the specifically chaos/order warfare related ones). We set any ones we could not resolve (because of bad data on your guild or your character) to highlight blue.
DD	If you have that problem now, I suggest changing guild type back and forth, or undeclaring and then redeclaring war. And also visiting your guildstone to make sur eyour character is updated with current data
Glamdring	*IronWolf* I realize they're low priority, but what are plans for weather and night and day? Existing day and night is pretty weak, universally players would like gradual twilights and dawns, darker nights in general, maybe even an increase in undead spawns during nighttime. And of course more graphicly interesting weather, that may affect combat or travel.
DD	Well, we don't want to do something that is merely cosmetic. I was actually looking at the night/day code the day before vacation. We can easily put in gradual night/day, but many players reported that it felt like lag to have a gradual sunset, probably because of full screen redraws. We can almost certainly find a way to toggle seeing them or something
DD	So you should expect that sort of thing to appear. What priority it'll have, I'm not sure.
DD	Darker nights are also a possibility, but light levels based on moon phases is more likely. If we add lycanthropy, it'll be tied to the moons after all
DD	If we do impose this schedule, then stuff like shopkeepers being closed at night is also something that might get discussed. We're concerned about how the newbies will feel about that--I expect most advanced players owuldn't mind it at all, but during the beta many new players objected to not having shops availableat all times
DD	As far as gtraphically interesting weather, we've discussed getting the snow & rain back into moving weather fronts, of course. Snow accumulation on the ground. Adding fog as an effect...
DD	We'd definitely want in-game effects though, like exposure, spawns being affected, etc
Glamdring	*Slide{MiM}* DD, how much is the archery patch going to actually change archery?
DD	Well, we're not positive yet. Faceless and Runesabre have been poking at various combat things, as you know. I don't actually know off the top of my head what all the things they are looking at testing are. But you should expect a couple of different measures ot be tried on TC before anything goes to the public servers
DD	Hey, I only have 8 votes :)
Glamdring	*rath* Well there ever be more advanced options for friends in the house. For example allowing friends to be able to lock down or un-lockdown an item?
DD	I am surprised I am not running higher in the poll for meanest UO person. :)
DD	Possibly, Rath, but we don't know yet. We'd like to avoid making that an insanely complex system, and it's already kinda complex.
Glamdring	*SirRobin* Now that housing is in full force, have you decided what is the next big project? I know there are a lot of ideas on the board, but is there one that stands out?
DD	Well, we will actually be settling on that in the course of the next week or so. But some of the ones that stand out include combat revisions, quests, and a party system.
DenDragon	That's it for tonight, everyone
DenDragon	thanks for attending, and have a good new year!
DenDragon	the log will be posted at uohoc.stratics.com shortly
DD	Well, I'd like to apologize to everyone for the few q's this chat--my long discursive answers to a few of them are probably to blame. I am sorry I cannot stay longer, but circumstances prevent it...
DD	Happy New Year everyone...
Glamdring	Best wishes to you and your family DD.