House of Commons from 2003-07-03

House of Commons from 2003-07-03

Lord‑Xanthor	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.
Lord‑Xanthor	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.
Lord‑Xanthor	I will be the 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.
Lord‑Xanthor	Please do not send the same question to multiple question takers, those that do will be ignored. Thank you =)
Lord‑Xanthor	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
Lord‑Xanthor	Enjoy tonight's chat...
Lord‑Xanthor	Tonights Topic is 'Bod Books & Vendor Changes'
Lord‑Xanthor	Please /msg /query [QT]Elfiwolfe, [QT]Ling_Ma, [QT]DrGhost .
Cynthe_OSI	Actually, since we're short on a few key devs for those features tonight, let's open up the topic to include everything about Publish 19. :)
Lord‑Xanthor	*Thalestin-ElF* Hello, will uo be adding a powder of temperment for tailored things such as hats and the leather armour
Lord‑Xanthor	Thalestin-ElF* it would be nice to see a skull cap being usable:)
Hanse	No...
Hanse	Temperment is for metallic objects. :)
Lord‑Xanthor	*GuitarRocker14235* When can we expect Publish 19 and the Bod Books and Vendor Changes
MrTact	If all goes well, pub 19 will go out next week.
Cynthe_OSI	*brosses fingers*
Cynthe_OSI	*crosses, even*
MrTact	We do still have a few bugs to squash though (at least one of which was found on TC by players ;-)
MrTact	So that's what we're shooting for
MrTact	BOD books will be out with pub 19 (& are active on test center right now)
MrTact	Vendors have been pushed back. They will probably go out with pub 20
MrTact	(This includes bulletin boards, for those who have been asking.)
Lord‑Xanthor	*Bender* It was announced that the new craftables (tribal masks, deer mask etc) on TC5 would not be craftable when Pub19 goes live on the real shards. Is there any chance you could leave them craftable? In the opinion of a lot of players having them craftable with the new exceptional bonus was a great addition. I myself was looking forward to having a deer mask to wear with decent resists.
Hanse	You crazy folks with your pink deer mask outfits!
Hanse	Actually, I posted on stratics that I misread the bug report.
Hanse	Those items should be only repairable...as some magic items cannot be repaired
Hanse	So, to make them repairable, I put them in the crafting system.
Hanse	Which folks proceeded to take full advantage of on TC5... :)
Hanse	I believe there's some fun there to be had...but QA expressed concerns on our timeline to get publish 19 out the door...
Hanse	So, the items were pulled from crafting and are only repairable. I'll lobby for their addition to the crafting system in a future publish.
MrTact	Me too!
Lord‑Xanthor	*Enyo* With all the recent changes for other fighting skills, what abilities/improvments can we expect to see for archers? When changes are in store for bows etc?
MrTact	We have archery love on our long term plans list.
MrTact	It will be a few publishes before we get to it, though.
Lord‑Xanthor	*Kiara* is it possible to make bod books dyable? (for even easier organization!)
Cynthe_OSI	In the current design BOD books won't be dyeable, but it was one of the first questions asked when we had a team meeting to check out the new design. :) It would definitely be a cool feature to add, and it's possible we'll get it into another publish, but -- MrTact or Hanse correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think it's been specifically scheduled for an upcoming publish just yet.
Hanse	Yes, it is...but not for publish 19
Hanse	*on the dyable stuff*
MrTact	There's all kind of stuff we want to make dyable
Lord‑Xanthor	*XenaDragon* Can you explain why I cannot drop a bulk order deed in a bod-book when the book is inside a secure chest?
Hanse	:)
Hanse	Yes, I wanted to limit exploits as much as possible with BOD books.
Hanse	I've limited bod books to your personal backpack to avoid exploits with paging, gump resets, bod amounts, throwing trash bod's into books, etc...
Hanse	It's quite a complex system and I tried to make it as foolproof as possible... Please get on TC5 and break them... :)
Lord‑Xanthor	*Blackheath_THB* Now that BOD books are becoming a reality, is there any chance of similar books for other things? An atlas to store treasure maps in would be great!
MrTact	Hmm, I think I've seen this question before
MrTact	The answer is, depending on whether the bod books are as successful as we think they are, yes, we will probably do more "mass storage" specialized containers
MrTact	They are nicer for you guys & they save on server memory, so it's win-win for everybody.
Lord‑Xanthor	*Buster* Greetings. Is the format we are seeing for guild titles on test5 what we`ll finally see in pub 19?
Hanse	No. We know that the titles are not what players want.
Hanse	We'll be looking at changing it to get a better format next week.
MrTact	That's what you get for having a non-guild player (me) do the fix!
MrTact	Sorry!
Lord‑Xanthor	*Enyo* Why is a fix for the bug in recall/gate to default Runebook location not in yet? Also, can we expect to see a change so Chivalry users can take advantage of rune libraries?
MrTact	Because that was Fertbert's bailiwick & I haven't assimilated all his tasks yet since he went to the client.
Lord‑Xanthor	*Thomas* With resistance bonuses going up for exceptional armor, some people believe this will make runic made items less enticing, even with their special properties. Are there plans to address this concern? Perhaps making certain hammers give specific properties, giving more control on what is made?
Hanse	If you were restricting hammer powers to only resistances, yes...
Hanse	But that's not the case...hammer powers include all possible properties on the class of item you're crafting
Hanse	We understand that you would like to see an increase of powers to the hammers to match exceptional bonuses.
Hanse	But crafting itself seemed "nerfed" by magical loot drops and we needed to make crafting a viable profession with AoS magic system changes.
Lord‑Xanthor	*Coop* When partied in the gauntlet, people designated as healers NEVER have a chance at getting an artifact because even tho they are partied and can loot, they didnt "earn" looting rights. The healers are instrumental in killing Dark Fathers, yet have no shot at the artifact.. Why? Wouldnt it be better to make the game recongnize them as being in party and thus "earn" their right to loot = chance at the artifact?
MrTact	While I was working on tweaking the looting rights to solve the power scroll problem, I noticed that.
MrTact	Frankly, I agree that it's not really fair, & I will be pushing to make some kind of change to that in a future publish.
MrTact	Obviously it has some grief potential, so we'll have to give some thought to how we go about it . . .
Lord‑Xanthor	*Noxin* Some of the new walkthrough tiles are very buggy, it seems like some of them converted okay and are able to be walked over, but others remained as blocking, such as brambles, with the new rubberbanding effect this is very irritating. Will these be fixed before it goes live?
Hanse	The patch affects publish 19 servers.
Hanse	The blocking items that cause rubberbanding on public servers is because those servers do not have publish 19 yet.
Hanse	Also, some items do not render properly in the client (ie: your character looks goofy when standing on them) that we did not unblock...
Hanse	So you may see some inconsistency with blocking and non-blocking items and publish 19.
Hanse	This is just the first pass on these items and they will be tweaked in another publish.
Lord‑Xanthor	*JCtheBuilder* In the latest bug fix list it says, "Players can no longer mount horses while the horse is being attacked" Why is horses the only mount affected by this change?
Hanse	Mountable mongbats? *runs*
MrTact	Actually, I think it applies to all mounts, though I'm looking at the bug entry right now and it specifically says "horses"
MrTact	I will check & post a followup on the boards.
Cynthe_OSI	I checked on that one just today before posting, but there were two bugs involving mounting pets in combat, and there may have been some confusion.
Cynthe_OSI	I'll post a correction once MrTact tells me what he found. :)
Lord‑Xanthor	*Thomas* Since the last time you guys put up your proposed vendor changes, what additional changes are now on the plate given the extra dev time you now have til Publish 20?
Vex	I'm not able to go too much into specifics right now, until we're more sure what we'll actually have time to accomplish.
Vex	Right now the biggest part of the new changes, and our most favorite, is the public bazaar idea.
Lord‑Xanthor	*firefrog* any thing about tinkers or bowyers getting some sort of runic? because alot of people like archery and there are some weps u can tinker
Hanse	Possibly
Hanse	It depends on how we would introduce the item... The historical system is the BOD system...
Hanse	It would be best if we left this suggestion open for discussion in the future, when we're ready to look at this feature.
Lord‑Xanthor	*Tolkin* is there a cap on how many deeds a bod book can hold?
Hanse	500
Cynthe_OSI	try to keep your answers shorter, please, Hanse... we don't have all day. ;)
Hanse	okay....sorry
Cynthe_OSI	lol
Hanse	.5k?
Hanse	101 items in backpack at maximum deeds!
Lord‑Xanthor	*Thomas* With magic items possibly spawning in dungeon chests now, can we get a word on the max intensity chances the chests could spawn? What's the highest possible?
Hanse	Well, I had to make sure the chests wouldn't spawn with outrageous loot.
Hanse	This is because I wasn't sure where all those chests spawn and if they'd be too easy to loot.
Hanse	A little more time to research and I could have found that information out... but it takes a while to cross-reference with monsters that spawn in the area...toughness...difficulty the reach the area...etc
Hanse	So, I put it below 50% intensity...
Lord‑Xanthor	*[DJ]psycho* Will we see any changes to PvP in the next publishes? after AoS our guildwars went down from 140 to 30... coincidence?
Vex	It's very likely. In addition to the ongoing combat balance tweaks that Evocare is doing with each publish, there are very likely to be some more broad PvP related changes coming up.
Lord‑Xanthor	*GuitarRocker14235* How will bod books be acquired?
Hanse	You can craft them through inscription. It takes 10 scrolls to craft. :)
Lord‑Xanthor	Just a reminder to please only message teh people with [QT] in their names. Questions sent to Anyone else will be ignored.
Lord‑Xanthor	*Flutter* How about damage numbers over our pets and their targets just as they are over ours and our targets?
Vex	That would be very nice to have. I'll put it on our wish list. No promises it'll make it into the game as a feature, but it could happen.
Lord‑Xanthor	*Coop* I've been reading alot of posts about Peacemaking being overpowered because of AoS.. are there any Devs that think this as well? Are you guys looking to balance it.. again.. any time soon?
MrTact	An interesting thing about that . . . just GARGANTUAN thread . . . was that there was a substantial percentage of people who were actually IN FAVOR of the "nerf"
MrTact	(You know who you are!)
MrTact	While I don't think this particular change was appropriate (and we're very much opposed to unannounced nerfs in the first place, btw) . . .
MrTact	I DO feel there is some merit to the argument that creatures should not just stand there stupidly while you whale on them.
Hanse	whale=wail
Hanse	but in Tact's case...whale
MrTact	I, for one, would be interested in hearing what the community has to say about possibly making some adjustments to peacing in the future.
MrTact	Nothing as drastic as "it just stops working" . . . I believe there was one player-proposed suggestion (by a tamer, no less) that looked pretty good on paper.
Lord‑Xanthor	*LivingDeath* whats bod book?
Cynthe_OSI	http://update.uo.com/design_444.html
Cynthe_OSI	:)
Lord‑Xanthor	*Argyle* I know it isnt exactly on topic, but when can Siege expect some work on the skill gain system (resist above 90 now, and other skills that require faction stat loss)? It has been broken since Publish 16, nearly a year.
MrTact	We have resisted fixing that specific problem because we want to overhaul skill & stat gain in general.
MrTact	I will be pushing very hard to get that into publish 22.
Lord‑Xanthor	*Broughton* vendor changes- What kind of considerations, if any are going to be given to rune libraries?
MrTact	I will refer you to my earlier comments about bulk containers for stuff other than BODs
MrTact	I think that's probably the most interesting answer.
MrTact	However, I should point out that the rune libraries I have visited recently I don't believe will be impacted as badly as people are anticipating.
Lord‑Xanthor	*Thomas* Short but big question. What -is- Ultima X: Odyssey?
Vex	I can neither confirm nor deny that there may or may not be the hypothetical possibility of some person, place, or thing named "Odyssey" at Origin. :P
MrTact	No comment
Cynthe_OSI	Noooo comment.
Hanse	My mongbat says to comment...
Hanse	Oh wait...it says...no comment
Vex	Er, what they said.
Cynthe_OSI	Your mongbat has no comment.
Hanse	Uhm...I think it says I should eat yew bark on a full lit moon.
Hanse	I really have no idea what my mongbat is saying.
Lord‑Xanthor	I would like to thank everyone for coming tonight!
Lord‑Xanthor	And thanks to all of the OSI folks for spending their personal time talking to us
Lord‑Xanthor	Please join #ultima-online for continued, unmoderated chat
Lord‑Xanthor	the log will be posted shortly at http://uohoc.stratics.com
Lord‑Xanthor	THANKS