f13.net forums - Production shard stuff, city invasions, and so forth.

So with whatever they were going to announce having been put off by whatever new thing they plan to eventually announce, the UO team has decided to keep the players occupied with some old-fashioned city invasions. Ophidians in Vesper and Papua, lots of them, with some fiction put out there to support it.

Thing is, they're using the "advanced spawner" code. I don't quite know all the specifics of how it's working this time, but the sense I get is that as you kill more spawn, some of the spawn points within the city shut down, while the remainder spawn tougher mobs. (They come in ranks, from Recruit to General, with Berzerkers and Brood Queens at the end.) Eventually it's possible to kill them all, and run through the city unmolested. Once it gets late and things die down, the spawn points fire back up over time as the rate of killing declines.

So, it's nothing amazing. But it is kinda fun. The tougher invaders drop some shiny, including weapons with the old "power" and "vanquishing" tags and so forth. Those are nothing great, but they're unique and seem to work unusually well against the invasion spawn itself. And it was kinda fun last night to stand atop a pile of bodies in Vesper after a couple hours of fighting and have everyone realize that the invasion had been completely stamped out. "Hey, we won! Let's go to Papua and kill them too!" You can't exterminate them utterly and get them to stop spawning ever, but at least they don't keep respawning endlessly in the same spot. Stomp on them hard enough and they do quit coming back for a while.