House of Commons from 1999-08-26

House of Commons from 1999-08-26

Glamdring	Greetings and thank you for attending tonight's Open House.
Glamdring	Tonight's chat is focusing on the Acccessability Patch.
Glamdring	I will be our moderator for this evening. In order to submit questions please /msg or /query Fripp, Xander or Niobe.
Glamdring	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, or myself--these questions will be ignored.
Glamdring	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 feel that it is not appropriate or that it has been better answered through some other question.
Glamdring	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	Thanks for coming, everyone. We will now begin accepting questions.
Glamdring	*Ibn_Shaun* Increasing the price of thread and cloth has greatly diminished the only advantage of healing over magery -- it's low cost. Since the intent was to close an economic loophole with tailoring and not to injure healers, could you consider increasing the number of bandages created per unit of cloth or perhaps reopening the Delucia cotton farm on Siege Perilous where a large supply of free cloth is not a threat?
toad	At this point there have been countless requests about bandages, making them lighter, making them easier to cut, giving you more of them, and I do understand the reasoning of the question given the problems for healers that will be created by this fix to a loophole,
toad	but at the moment we don't have any definite plans for what will change about bandages
Glamdring	*Shadow* Please explain the reasoning behind recalling from a key directly onto your boat, especially with the addition of snooping not revealing a player now. Do you not think this will lend itself to countless boat keys being stolen and those boats boarded immediately by thieves?
toad	To be honest with you, at the moment, a bigger problem than boat keys being stolen and boats being boarded is the problem with people not being able to find their boats, which can be caused by falling off of a moving boat, or just not remembering where it was left. This has generated a large amount of GM calls of people looking for their boats.
Glamdring	*Elowyn* Will there be switches added to the options to turn off the small stat bar tags that appear or possibly a switch to the "classic" UO interface. Many people I spoke to would like to have more control over the client and the information that it provides.
Runesabre	I have noticed a lot of interest in wanting to toggle the mini-health bars.
Runesabre	We can look into making a toggle for them but first I wish to focus on more client stability work.
Glamdring	*Ravage* im wondering why reds are no longer allowed to instalog in there own homes.. aren't there enough things hurting reds as it is?
toad	The problem is that very often reds hang around their houses, wait for someone to walk by, then kill them, run to their houses and instalog from their steps
toad	So to keep this kind of thing from happening, and to keep reds from abusing the system, we put in a limitation for it.
toad	The same thing happens in towns with Inns and thieves who use the same idea with different geography
Glamdring	*Arcadian* I've now heard from a few players who accidentally deleted a character due to the new login interface. Is there any way to add a 2nd confirmation window when deleting a character?
Runesabre	There should actually be a confirmation screen.
Glamdring	*[Anarchy]* Ive experienced problems with freezing up and not being able to move since the patch. I could still cast, and do anythign else, but I kept "rubberbanding" to the same spot.
Runesabre	I need to do some more investigation into that issue. Not many details on what might be the problem yet.
Glamdring	*ImaSupa* As the boards demonstrated today, reds not being able to instalog is very unpopular. what about tying instalogging in houses to the aggressor flag, rather than the character's color?
toad	It's a good suggestion.
Glamdring	*DarkDragon* why are animals so darn fast now? I literally have to box in my sheep to shear it. I thought you wanted pets kept LOOSE in houses? Will we see monsters like this too? because lag will make them inescapable!!
Runesabre	Another issue I will need to investigate. :)
Glamdring	*Pirate-Guy* Can we have an ETA on skill/stat management? You (osi) said it would be in RIGHT after accessabilty update. Also, could you describe the system that it will utilize?
SunSword	I'm not going to give out dates or ETAs.
SunSword	Skill management is high priority for the next update
SunSword	And we plan on going back to a more frequent update cycle
SunSword	As for details, there are a couple of designs in consideration, more to come on that later.
Glamdring	*soy* What do you plan on doing about this bug involving veteran players making newbies and then turning them young?
Runesabre	I am, fixing that in a miniupdate tonight.
Glamdring	*Kergan* On the the update page you said something of a client arrow to point players in correct direction. Is the refering to Newbie quests only?
Runesabre	Yes the arrow refers only to newbie quests right now.
Glamdring	*DarkDragon* any plans on giving a more thorough walk thru on the new macros? Some of them are tough for vets to figure out (especially if you never used UOA or UOE)
Calandryll	There is a FAQ on the website that walks you through many of the macros
Calandryll	It's in the latest game updates: http://update.uo.com/latest.html
Calandryll	If there are other specific macros you'd like to see a walkthrough for
Calandryll	then please e-mail me them.
Glamdring	*Jarvis* Rune, SP is up almost a month now. How do you feel about its status? Are you considering changes to the RoT system to attract more players, by making it easier/faster to have a viable character?
Runesabre	My priority right now is centered the future of UO in general so right now I am not evaluating Siege Perilous for any changes.
Glamdring	*deVoca* Any chance of upping the range on tracking? Incoming names effectively gives everything the equivalent of a pretty good tracking score.
SunSword	There are some interesting things we could do with tracking, including incorporating the new arrow used for quests. That's certainly a valid comment.
Glamdring	*Ground_Zero* With the new patch adding many useful features (if it doesn't crash) do you expect to see a decline in usage of 3rd party programs?
SunSword	Well, we certainly expect to see a decline in 3rd party programs if they continue not to work as they do now
SunSword	And yes, obviously as the client is improved, I imagine fewer people will rely on 3rd party programs.
Glamdring	*Jynx* Any chance you will add notification for skills DROPPING? (ie stat cap and gaining skills)
SunSword	it already does...
Glamdring	*Honorable_Brit* Is OSI concentrating on the newer people that have joined or the older people that have been here for a long time? This patch is nicknamed the "newbie-patch" and it seems that things to come are going to be for the newbies and not the older players. Are there going to be any rewards for being an older player?
SunSword	This patch has something for everyone
SunSword	Yes, we did add some things to the game to make it easier for new players to adjust, but at the same time we added many new items for everyone
SunSword	mostly in the form of client enhancements and bug fixes
SunSword	as you all know, many of the things coming are for the advanced player, like alchemy and skill control...
Glamdring	*chaos23* ok...I think people needs to know this, what is the excact effect of eating food, does it increase skill gain?...enhance combat?...or what?
toad	It allows you to regain stamina faster
toad	as well as hitpoints
SunSword	(that's it)
Glamdring	I would like to thank everyone for attending the chat tonight
Glamdring	The log of the most recent UOHoC Open House chat between the players and Development Team of UO has been posted at the UO House of Commons.