House of Commons from 2002-07-11

House of Commons from 2002-07-11

Glamdring	Good evening everyone, thank you for coming to tonight's Ultima Online open house. This Stratics House of Commons chat is a direct connection between you the players and the designers and programmers of Ultima Online.
Glamdring	This chat will be in a moderated format. To ask a question of the developers, please /msg or /query the question takers that will be listed in the topic of the channel and have [QT] in front of their names. These question takers will then present the questions to the Ultima Online development team here with us this evening.
Glamdring	I will be our moderator tonight...I will post your question into the House of Commons chat channel and the Developers will answer those that they can. Please /msg or /query different question-takers at different times, in order to balance the load and speed the process up.
Glamdring	Please remember that your question may have been asked previously or may not be able to be answered in a public forum. Please do not message or query myself or anyone from OSI, these questions will be ignored. We encourage you to read the logs of the previous Open Houses, which are available at http://uohoc.stratics.com.
Glamdring	Enjoy tonight's chat...the topic is Publish 16's Housing Changes, new Guaranteed Gain System, and Combat
Glamdring	*Chocolate-Ice* can we submit questions? If so: Pertaining to GGS, Is there code that is disabling log in gain log off? Many people would benefit from this as they casually play UO and would only gain a couple points a week.
Prophet	There isn't code that specifically disables gains after logins but your chances of gains from GGS are lower for a time after you log in.
Glamdring	*Azlen* If GGS has predefined guaranteed gain intervals, how can gains be going too fast or too slow?
Prophet	Remember that gains can come from non GGS. So GGS only means you will gain after a a certain period if your are successfully using your skill at the appropriate difficulty. It doesn't mean its going to fast or to slow. I hope that answers your question.
Glamdring	*Eisernes* What do you plan on doing to fix the out of control stat gain problem?
Prophet	We are in the process of developing a stat locking mechanism much like the currently enjoyed skill locks.
Glamdring	*Kakarott* Hi, my question is, are there any plans to re-implement insta-swing? What I mean by this, is a constant timer in between swings, instead of the timer being reset after a re-arm.
AdrickOSI	no plans to re enable insta hit we will be evaluating the viability of pure classes and hybrids
AdrickOSI	after publish 16 but at this time there are no plans to re enable insta swings
Glamdring	*Ertai* On SP and SP ruleset shards, why can blues throw purple pots and cast field spells which hurt red hued characters but not blue hued characters? Don't you think that this will lead to an imbalance of pvp and a huge advantage for blue hued characters?
AdrickOSI	No because part of the new rules mean that if your red and in the same guild with another red the guilded red will take no damage either
AdrickOSI	we feel that to disallow blue players from using field spells is the imbalance - and moreover this is exploited by those who want nothing more than to grief faction fights by running into an area and giving counts
Glamdring	*Albretch_Minorac* Will GGS make skills like Resisting or Poisoning easier or harder to gain?
Prophet	We feel that it will make gaining hard to gain skills easier, as the rate of gains will be more constant. This is one of the advantages of this system in that all skills are treated equal so if you use a skill you should have an equal chance to learn it through GGS as any other skill at the same difficulty level.
Glamdring	*Thomas* An email notice was sent not long ago giving warning of Publish 16's implementation. Many on the boards have mentioned they never received this email, even though their email is supposedly on file. What steps can be taken to insure someone gets future notices, where in the past they've missed out on them?
Sannio	There are definitely a significant number of updates and new features as part of that publish, and we knew it was important enough to do all that we could to make sure as many players as possible were alerted to these changes, and thus a few hundred thousand e-mails went out. We tried to e-mail that Publish 16 alert to all our players, but unfortunately a lot players truly don't keep an up-to-date e-mail address in our system.
Sannio	The best suggestion I can give is to try to make sure your game account's e-mail address is up to date. (You can do that at the account management page at http://www.ultima-registration.com/).
Sannio	Other than that, just keep an eye on our Update Center section of UO.com, where we post the latest FYIs and development cycle news.
Glamdring	*Grond* I'm confused about the nomenclature surrounding GGS -- we've been told about things that affect our "chances" of a guaranteed gain. Is the gain guaranteed, or is there just a *chance* of a gain?
Prophet	I agree the nomenclature is a bit confusing. The very first design of the system was such that gains were in fact 100% guaranteed. Since then we modified the design a bit here and a bit there and one of the things that happened was that gain's no longer became 100% guaranteed, but still very close to 100% (and certainly within a few minutes of your timer for a ggs gain going off it becomes 100%). So we continue to call it the Guaranteed Gain Sy
Glamdring	*madh4x0r* will there still be stat loss for factions?
AdrickOSI	yep no changes to the faction skill loss penalty
Glamdring	*beans* Is it true that GGS removes see saw stat working? If so, why was that removed, and how can players get their stats to the level they want it to be at?
Prophet	Yes its true that Pub16 removes the "see-saw" method of stat gain. If I went into the full reasons for its removal we would be here all night explaining. It was a complex decision but primarily (and this isn't the only reason) we didn't feel it matched the ability to gain skills through GGS. Of course the flip side is people can't tailor their stats the way they want to. To address that we will be adding stat locks.
Glamdring	*Keith[FaT]* When is the new GGS time table going to be updated, and at high level skills, for example if I had 98.9 resist, would I be able to login FS myself and then gain .1 if my guarenteed gain was due? i.e. logging in once a day to do this?
Prophet	Sannio is in fact feverously trying to post it now. I don't have the numbers in front of me so you will have to wait till he posts the values.
Sannio	He's not kidding. I'm working out some kinks with the HTML even now.
Glamdring	*Barrackas* If I only own one house on my account, will it automatically become the "Primary" house once the housing changes are implemented, or will I need to manually set it?
Prophet	You will have to manually set it. We thought about doing this automatically but decided against it for a couple of technical reasons.
Glamdring	*XzzyLS* how long till stat locks?
Prophet	Honest answer, don't know. We have been working on it for a couple of days now and are making good progress. We will keep you updated as things progress. It's our number 1 priority right now.
Glamdring	*DrGhost* Many people have complained about +5 and +10 skill scrolls being to common - will the odds of getting these scrolls be reduced any?
AdrickOSI	we are monitoring the number of scrolls being given out and like what we have seen so far - we wanted people to get a taste of them and are hoping it will give them the determination to go after the harder to get ones +15 and 20 :) so answer right now no plans to tweak them down
Glamdring	AG* how different will the skill gain be compared to the old days? In other words are the gains going to be just like outside ph now.
Prophet	They will be similar to gains outside of power hour but more predictable at higher levels (and for some skills much more common at high levels) We will continue to monitor the gains carefully.
Glamdring	*Daemon-* What is the reasoning behind not allowing players to see house decay status? Is Osi trying to bring the land surveying tool back into action??
Prophet	There are a couple of reasons. One of them is techniqual but also because we didn't feel that the general populace needed to see the state of a house that didn't belong to them or they weren't friended to.
Glamdring	*RJO* what type of schedule are we looking at for the various stages of housing control implementation?[02:44]
Prophet	Phase I has already started on Pacific obviously. As each shard is published with Pub16 they will start with Phase 1. Once the last shard has been published with 16 we will move to Phase II. This is where houses are tracked globaly (but don't decay yet) and co-owners get to claim houses. There is no set time for how long we stay in phase II but I figure its about a month. After that we go to Phase III which is where houses start to decay again.
Glamdring	*Grond* Stats on Pacific seem to be using Siege RoT rules, i.e. maximum gain of one point per hour, maximum gain of six points per day. This wasn't announced, and hasn't been acknowledged (as bug or feature) on the boards. Was it an intentional part of GGS?
Prophet	That is correct stats on Publish 16 basically use the RoT rules. It wasn't mentioned in previous documents and this is entirely my fault. There was a lot that went into Publish 16 and in documenting everything we missed this one piece of information. Sannio has just posted an updated GGS design page at (http://update.uo.com/design_425.html) which includes this design change along with the new GGS timetable.
Sannio	That new document also includes an expanded skill gain example charrt, by the way.
Sannio	It may help answer some of the other GGS questions some players have been having.
Prophet	Didn't I say that? :)
Glamdring	*DrGhost* If I wanted to get a 120 skillcap, could I put together a +5 and a +15 skill scroll? If not, what if i accedntly put on a +5 skill scroll instead of a +20--how would I ever get 120 in the skill?
Sannio	The bonuses you get from Scrolls of Power are independent of one another.
Sannio	If you have a +5 scroll and a +15 scroll, they can't give you a combined effect of +20.
Sannio	If you use the +5 to boost your maximum possible value in a skill to 105, and then later use a +15 scroll, your new maximum value becomes 115 (100+15).
Sannio	In order to get a skill cap of 120 for a given skill, you'd need a "+20 Scroll of Power.
Glamdring	*UncleOzzi* Any plans to deal with Altar Hiders? People are getting frustrated at working the spawn a couple of hours while these people wait until the Champ, jump in, and get scrolls
AdrickOSI	we are aware of the issues with hiders hanging around - we have a tenative plan in place to deal with this although its not ironed out enough to post details we are looking at a sollution
AdrickOSI	that will address this issue though :)
Glamdring	*Rez* I want to know if it is already written in concrete that us multishard home owners must use "grandfather" rather than being able to "primary" each single house per shard
MrTact	The way of the future is that if you want to have autorefresh, you must only own one house, and if you want to continue to own multiple houses they will have to be refreshed.
MrTact	some of the other issues people have with multiple houses might get addressed in the future, though . . .
Glamdring	*XzzyLS* What are the details of phase one housing?
Prophet	Phase I is were we start tracking all your houses with the new housing system but we only track houses by shard (very similar to the way it works now) so you can continue to place houses without global penalties on separate shards.
Prophet	ie during phase I you can place a house on ATl then right away place a house on Pac.
MrTact	Note that if you place a house on a shard that is in Phase 1, it still condemns all the other houses you own ON THAT SHARD
Prophet	Yea what he said
Glamdring	*Spyke* The new chart posted, you gain more often in your total skill level is lower? so it would make sense to do the hardest skills first?
Sannio	Well, that's certainly one of several valid tactics. It's likely that players will come up with a number of skill gain techniques as they grow more comfortable with the changes in Publish 16.
Glamdring	and, in closing....there's always one of these =)
Glamdring	*JunkHead* hi.. i was wondering... will it ever be possible to ride an ancient wyrm and fly next to another person on an ancient wyrm... and switch mounts in mid-flight?
Prophet	uuh you know when I said Stat locks were my #1 priority.. they are number 2 now.. this is number 1 now.
MrTact	ROFL
AdrickOSI	UO: dragonriders expansion ?
MrTact	Ann McAffrey would sue us
AdrickOSI	:)
Prophet	shhhhh
Glamdring	I would like to thank everyone for coming tonight!
Prophet	Thanks all! Good questions!
Sannio	Me, too! Thanks, everyone!
Glamdring	and thanks to all of the OSI folks for spending their personal time talking to us
Prophet	what? I don't get paid for this?
Sannio	I have personal time?
Glamdring	Please join #ultima-online for continued, unmoderated chat
Glamdring	the log will be posted shortly
Glamdring	THANKS
Sannio	Remember, the new GGS documentation is now available at http://update.uo.com/design_425.html
Sannio	Bye!