(UO expansion) You'll all scoff, but I'm still going to jizz.

[WindupAtheist]

Another note:  Now that Mythic is in charge of UO, they're apparently mulling over banning eBay sales.  Tweety says they won't have an answer on the issue for a while yet though.

[LC]

sinij the problem is the numbers don't agree with you.

You can claim that UO pre-Trammel was a better game, but you can't claim it was a more popular one.

That's because a large number of vets bought extra accounts so they could place big houses on the new land.  It wasn't like a bunch of 14 year old kids went "OMG MOM!  5 YEAR OLD UO IS SAFE NOW!!! PLZ BUY FOR ME!!111!!"

Ya I remember people buying 3-5 new accounts for houses when trammel opened.

[shiznitz]

I found eBaying accounts in UO actually let me re-sub and de-sub more easily.  Starting UO from absolute scratch would really suck. It is nice to be able to buy a combat capable character and a small house. Of course, this was back when there were no empty lots in Trammel - unless you spent weeks IDOCing - but that was never high on my list of reasons to re-sub.

[WindupAtheist]

Thing is, you could pretty much RMT through EA even without eBay.  All of the for-pay services like shard transfers and name changes come in the form of tokens.  What that means is you pay EA your fee, and your character gets "a name change token" or whatever in their pack.  That can then be used, or sold to other players for gold.

So one could buy a token, then sell it for gold, and buy an advanced character token or a house or whatever.  And from a buyer's perspective, it's nice being able to purchase those services with your UO play money instead of actual cash.

[climbjtree]

I'd really like to play UO on a pre-trammel server that has a good population and rules against macroing. Do private shards that fit my requirements exist?

[Cheddar]

I'd really like to play UO on a pre-trammel server that has a good population and rules against macroing. Do private shards that fit my requirements exist?

http://www.metropolisshard.com/

May want to post a hello message on the UO boards, never know who is in the wayback machine.

[eldaec]

Sanya M. Thomas
Director of Community Relations
(That isn't as dirty as it sounds.)
EA Mythic
http://www.camelotherald.com
http://www.warhammerherald.com
UO link coming soon(TM)

Should be fixed to read...

Sanya M. Thomas
Director of Community Relations
(That isn't as dirty as it sounds.)
EA Mythic
(But that really is as dirty as it sounds)
http://www.camelotherald.com
http://www.warhammerherald.com
UO link coming soon(TM)

Cheap shot I know.

[WindupAtheist]

Latest in Mythic's UO plans, selling Ultima Online key chains and beer mugs.  While this is sort of a WTF move, I'm pleased with all the attention they're giving my beat-up old game.

[Damn Dirty Ape]

Weak.  Lame.  If UO was really hardcore, those mugs would be leather:

http://www.jesterleather.com/gallery/gallery.html

[Yegolev]

When is this fucking new turdpolish expansion coming out?

[WindupAtheist]

Spring of the coming year is all that's been said thus far.  And to pad this post, a little baseless speculation upon the fact that the integration of Punkbuster into UO has been canned.

A)  It probably didn't work that well in testing.

B)  Someone from Mythic came along and said "This sucks anyway, let's just build something into the new client like WoW and whoever else did."

C)  Cheat protection isn't worth much if it's optional.  I expect that the new client (though probably not the associated expansion content) will be available for free as soon as EA feels it's sold as many boxes as it's going to, at which point support for the old clients will be phased out.

[Slayerik]

I'd really like to play UO on a pre-trammel server that has a good population and rules against macroing. Do private shards that fit my requirements exist?

http://www.metropolisshard.com/

May want to post a hello message on the UO boards, never know who is in the wayback machine.

That shard is not against Macroing, but I had fun there. Good PVP.


My weigh in...

I still don't understand why they never made a new server with legacy settings. People had only been asking begging for it for years. I know I personally would have resubbed in a heartbeat, along with a crew of guys I know.

I totally agree with what someone mentioned earlier about it being damn tough to get people to try an old game, due to the "these guys are gonna have all the gear, experience, tricks and what do I get besides owned?" thought process. Hell, I'll admit not wanting to try a year old game for the same reasons. For me it's start at launch or probably not at all. Like EVE, since I heard it was a great PVP game I had considered trying it but after reading up it would take 6 months of training to even get a decent ship. Fuck that. I had tried to get some friends to try UO out but most the time they were just too far behind. A game as aged as UO should let you start as a 3x GM in certain skills, and leave more advanced ones for you to work on. Give the new guy a bone, and old players re-rolling probably deserve it anyways.

Another example of a great game (to this day) is Subspace (2d space shooter MMO). But I pity any noob that tries to roll in and play in Chaos zone or Powerball. The learning curve is just too steep and you are playing against people that have been refining their skills for 10 years. Same sort of thing applies in most any game that is skill based PVP and is not a FPS -  like SS or UO.

[caladein]

Like EVE, since I heard it was a great PVP game I had considered trying it but after reading up it would take 6 months of training to even get a decent ship. Fuck that.

Well, you'll be gank bait in a straight-up fight for a while, yeah. In a group or fleet engagement, you're actually surprising useful just a week in.

I still agree with you on the "leg-up' thing on grey shards (at least). Probably why 100-500x rate servers for Lineage 2 are so popular, although that's probably exacerbated by the fact that Lineage 2 is grind from hell.

[sinij]

I like SB approach - 1-2 hours of newbie island then off to a druid farm for finished character. Original UO had ultra-long advancement, it took years to GM some skills without macroing/bugs. Resist, parry were super hard skills, eval and anat were not possible without macroing. On a positive side you didn't had to be 7GM to compete, most had 2-3GM and were fine with it.

[WindupAtheist]

Eh.  I was the head newbie wrangler for my UO guild all last year, and we had a lot of people who were fresh to the game.  We'd have two dozen people online, and a dozen of them would have been playing for three months or less.  All of the ones I kept tabs on are richer than me now.  I started over fresh on Europa a year and a half ago, and while I'm hardly a powergamer, I daresay my current gear setup is worth some millions.

Anyway, that's not why I'm posting.  I'm posting because Wilki, the former community monkey and current developer, decided to poke his nose into a Stratics thread about "Wah, I was unfairly banned for duping!" and completely blow his stack.

No one was banned for buying duped artifacts, unless they did so in mass quantities. We're ultimately responsible for the bug that allowed the dupe to occur in the first place, so it'd be pretty unfair to ban players who unwittingly bought a few artis or other high end items for personal use, etc.

However, item sellers who bought a LOT of duped items (as in you go to their house/backpack and see a bag with a 3 dozen covetous statues, 20 hats of the magi, 15 ornies, and some "unique" event items thrown into the mix) were given no quarter. While the dupers may have exploited this bug, it was the item sellers who truly did the damage to the game. Any one of them that tries to tell you, "But I only bought items from a supplier, I didn't realize where they came from," needs to be smacked upside the head, and then tarred and feathered.

UO is a GAME, not a freakin' business, and while we don't ban players for selling things for cash, we're not going to look very kindly on those who harm the game in doing so. And honestly, are any of these "trustworthy" brokers and item sellers with "years of UO experience" really going to tell us with a straight face that they didn't know those bags of 125 character transfer tokens and the bags full of extremely rare event items (i.e. bags with more of them than should even exist in all of UO) were duped?

Equine Puckey!

If those people bother to email me, they might as well call just call 976-WHAH, because that's pretty much going to be my reaction when I read their "so sad" emails.

To this date, I've unbanned ONE player, who had ONE account banned (out of 3), where a genuine mistake was made. I've been going through the players who have emailed me so far, one by one, to see if we made a mistake somewhere else. Tonight, I got an email from a "lady" who claimed she had never exploited, and was just a nice mother of 2 who loved UO. Pfft. How about that bag of 30 each valorite hammers, barbed kits and heartwood dovetail saws we found in her house? Or the fact that the account she was trying to keep hidden from us had a bag with 124 hat of the magis in it, along with lots of other artifacts?

To those people: DON'T BOTHER EMAILING ME! I wasn't born yesterday, I don't fall for the lame emo emails, and we're simply not going to release your account with 100's of duped items on it because you spun a really unconvincing story about how you just bought your account from your little brother/roommate/ex-girlfriend and didn't know your house was already being used to store those 500 artifacts. And yes, we DO know about your other "hidden" accounts. And no, changing your IP, using an internet cafe or using different payment methods won't help you either. We WILL find you, so you might as well just stop wasting your time and go find another game to exploit. Or, I have a better idea - how about if you go find something productive to do with your lives? That's the best idea of them all.

And honorable players - please, STOP BUYING from the item sellers who were "out of stock" last week. These parasites wouldn't be perpetuating this fraud if no one bought their stuff in the first place.

If any of this sounds harsh, well, I suppose it is. I love this game, and I really don't like people who try to do it harm.

[Slayerik]

EDIT: misread what WUA posted

[Slayerik]

Like EVE, since I heard it was a great PVP game I had considered trying it but after reading up it would take 6 months of training to even get a decent ship. Fuck that.

Well, you'll be gank bait in a straight-up fight for a while, yeah. In a group or fleet engagement, you're actually surprising useful just a week in.

I still agree with you on the "leg-up' thing on grey shards (at least). Probably why 100-500x rate servers for Lineage 2 are so popular, although that's probably exacerbated by the fact that Lineage 2 is grind from hell.

Hmmm...I could give it a try as long as I can actually contribute.

Thats how it works most the time for me, I go from the 'guy who shows up and gets owned' to the guy people depend on to be there to lead shit. lol

[Cheddar]

Hmmm...I could give it a try as long as I can actually contribute.

Thats how it works most the time for me, I go from the 'guy who shows up and gets owned' to the guy people depend on to be there to lead shit. lol

Read up on Goonfleets achievements.  Its amazing what one can do as a noob in EVE.

[Sky]

Resist, parry were super hard skills, eval and anat were not possible without macroing.

Resist and parry were easy, but I was a dirty arrpeer and was always sparring with the militia. Eval and Anat didn't mean shit until I didn't give a shit anymore :) I stuck with my tank-mage long past it's prime. It was still a useful character for a long time, fun to play. When it wasn't, I moved to Siege and started a non-combat character, no magery, nada.

Oh, Sky (the UO character) also got his resists up in the era of firewalkers...so there's that.

[WindupAtheist]

Update.  New client being logged onto production shards for bug testing, to be shown to the public next month in Georgia at one of UO's traveling dev team "town hall" events.

"Come ON! Tell us some more about Kingdom Reborn!"
We'll be able to release more and more information over the next several weeks, but here's a few tidbits that you may find interesting:

    * This week we hit a pretty major milestone - it was the first time we successfully logged in to a production shard with the new client. If you see some noob staggering around in the next few months looking completely helpless, it may be a dev trying to remember how to cast spells in the new UI :)
    * You can now die (without crashing the client, that is). Darkscribe tested this himself by going out and promptly getting killed... by a mongbat. (He insists that I add that he later avenged himself and stood in triumph over the beast's lifeless corpse.)
    * The art looks fabulous - and very much like UO. (This isn't a technical note, this is just me gushing :) ) We'll have more of it to show you hopefully next week.

"That is not NEARLY enough. When can I find out more?"
Why, I'm so glad you asked ;) We'll be holding our first Town Hall meeting of the year next month, and we'll be debuting KR there. Details below:

WHERE:
Dave & Buster's
I-75 at Delk Rd.
2215 D and B Drive SE
Marietta, GA 30067-8756
(770) 951-5554

WHEN: Saturday, January 27, 2007 (3:00PM - 6:00PM)

If you plan to attend, please RSVP by visiting www.mythicentertainment.com/uo/.

[sinij]

Bump this when they release classic server.

P.S. Trammel sux PK rulez!

[Cheddar]

<words>

Thanks for keeping us updated.  I am curious how this will all pan out!

[Yegolev]

Too bad I'm in WDW on that day.  Very close to my previous house.

[Sky]

Looks like good stuff. If I had the slightest interest in playing UO again.

[shiznitz]

Quad-directional movement is so retro!

[WindupAtheist]

On a peripheral note, it done snowed in UO today.  Here's me at Skara Brae moongate.

[Slyfeind]

On a peripheral note, it done snowed in UO today.  Here's me at Skara Brae moongate.

Holy crap, NICE. I'm impressed because I thought that would be impossible given the nature of the graphics engine...not without downloading a new game map, anyway. I like their solution to that.

[WayAbvPar]

That is kind of cool, actually. Did the frigid cold kill mongbats instantly?

[sinij]

That is kind of cool, actually. Did the frigid cold kill mongbats instantly?

It didn't kill flowers, so probably not.

[Dren]

  Here's me at Skara Brae moongate.

Somehow I thought you'd be taller.

[Trippy]

On a peripheral note, it done snowed in UO today.  Here's me at Skara Brae moongate.

Holy crap, NICE. I'm impressed because I thought that would be impossible given the nature of the graphics engine...not without downloading a new game map, anyway. I like their solution to that.

They presumably do it the same way they handle dyes -- they change the color palette of the tiles/objects.

[Yegolev]

You look like Darth Vader with a mace.  Still waiting on that new client.

[LC]

I think 2007 graphics would have been better, but I can live with 2001 graphics. I will consider trying it out as long as it's not scrapped before release. Trusting EA is like trusting a serial killer offering to give me a ride in his van.

[Cheddar]

They presumably do it the same way they handle dyes -- they change the color palette of the tiles/objects.

From what I understand it is pretty easy.  Azaroth would know better than I; its one of the reasons that player run shards are easy to mold into what people like. 

In the early days of UO people were even able to pick up the rare tile here and there and carry them around. 

[Driakos]

On a peripheral note, it done snowed in UO today.  Here's me at Skara Brae moongate.

Holy crap, NICE. I'm impressed because I thought that would be impossible given the nature of the graphics engine...not without downloading a new game map, anyway. I like their solution to that.

They presumably do it the same way they handle dyes -- they change the color palette of the tiles/objects.

Forest tiles match up one for one with the snow tile palatte.  They just pointed the forest tile # to the matching snow tile.  Then the canopies on the Trammel trees are just dyed.