2013-01-18: Letter from the Producer

Letter from the Producer

Posted Jan 18, 2013 19:36 -0500 GMT by Bonnie "Mesanna" Armstrong on the UO Herald.

Greetings Everyone,

It’s been a while since I sat down and wrote to everyone so bare with me. In this letter I will be telling you about some issues that we are going to be addressing and what is in the next Publish. But before I do that I want to address all the “extended maintenance” we have been going thru. As I am sure some of you might have already noticed we are moving off the old servers onto the Cloud. With a game as old as UO it has been challenging but we are working hard to iron out the kinks. Both the East Coast and West Coast servers have been moved in addition to Europa, Oceania, and Drachenfels.


Current Issues

  • Please be cautious of buying spellbooks from vendors that might look like this xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxDemon Slayer. It is not a valid Demon Slayer book and has just been engraved to appear this way. We are fixing this so all engraved text is hued in some fashion in the next publish.
  • Please do not try to resize your house immediately after placement. There is a known issue that you will not be able to please wait till the next maintenance cycle to attempt to resize. We have not worked out all the details that cause this so any additional information would be helpful.
  • Please know that fighting your pets to drop pools of blood to block house placement is being viewed as a griefing tactic. If a GM is called he will warn you, if you do not stop you will be removed from the area. This will be fixed in the next publish.

Now for the exciting news!

Next Publish

  • Revamping Weapon System – Reviewed and adjusted all weapon damage based on weapon speed, as well as updated various special moves.
  • Revamping Armor System – Made all armor types useful again.
  • Introducing a new Housing Theme Pack which will consist of: * New couches, chairs, tables, beds, lots and lots of lamps, pictures, and tapestries. (46 new pieces of art total)
  • Advanced Tinkering – This will allows players to create new gadgets, one example is being able to create a light switch for your house to turn off and on your lamps
  • Changing the Co Owner status from 10 co-owners to 10 accounts as co-owners on one house (70 players)
  • You will no longer be able to place duped items on vendors.
  • New Player Council and City Voting system – Players with city loyalty will be able to run for the Ambassador for the appropriate city. This will allow them to enhance role play and manage activities in and around their cities. And new Ambassador titles.
  • New Instruments – 3 new Bells, Cello, and Trumpet
  • New Aquarium art – New sponges and Coral types
  • We are looking into the possibility of allowing players to have a house on Siege and on Production.
  • Continuing to work on High Res art..currently working on all the wall pieces. These will not be released till all pieces of a house are finished due to the fact they look horrible together with old and new. We still have many wall sets to update including doors, signs, and the roof before any high res art will be released. Please understand its taking us 3 weeks from start to finish to get each wall set type in the game. So yes this is slow going but we are going to finish it *grins* Remember now there are 45 wall sets total and we have totally completed 7. Below is a sneak peak of what you can expect to see in the future.

[img=center]http://www.uorpc/net/images/uomktg/WallSample.jpg[/img]

  • Adding additional turn in items such as bones, jack o lanterns, harpsichord rolls for turn in points
  • Adding 2 new dyes to the turn in reward system

We will be working on a new Global Arc for the future (of course it will not run for 8 months) but we hope you will enjoy the evilness of it anyways *grins*

Bonnie "Mesanna" Armstrong Producer UO