Dev Team HOC Chat from Stratics

[Borg]

TheFellowship- if i placed my house yesterday to save the spot but i can enlarge it greatly, do i have to wait my 7 days to demolish the house and replace?

MrTact-No.

When you remove your last house, it removes the 7-day timer limitation

Lord-Xanthor Aedilwulf-What is the current status with addressing critical guildstone bugs for guilds over 150 members? (Inability to Kick/Title members)? Can we expect to see these addressed in an upcoming publish? And what is the timing?

Evocare- We're making a legitimate attempt at scheduling it for pub24, although there are no guarantees until QA has signed off on it

Lord-Xanthor Thomas-Can we have an update on the status of the remaining Virtues? How far along in development are they and which one(s) are we likely to see first?

Evocare- Some have gotten pretty far into development only to get postponed due to their heavy testing and long-term implications

that being said, we're evaluating what the "right" scope for the remaining virtues are, and how they'll best fit into defining UO, especially in light of UXO, which is very heavily virtue oriented

Lord-Xanthorbuster- There have been hints of a possible cap to a player's 'faster casting' - as it is, fc4 is ridiculously overpowered, and generally unobtainable for most, especially in PvP. Do you intend to change this system, and if so when?

Evocare-yes, after having listened to many different views on the subject, i've pretty much decided to go with caps on some of the key pvp-related magic properties

Evocare- i believe we can ensure that magic items/artifacts are still desireable, but don't have the dominant effect on outcome that they have today

Lord-Xanthor Adamantyr- Are there plans to introduce bulk order deeds for other craft skills, such as cooking? On that note, are there any plans to make food a more vital component of the game, such as the necessity of eating to survive, creating exceptional food items, adding glass mugs and other paraphernalia to the tinkering lists, etc.?

Evocare-as we've stated in the past, there definitely is a desire on the dev team to add bods for other craft skills although cooking is probably less likely to get them as soon as carpentry/bowcraft/tinker for example

we are interested in having cooking become more useful in UO

however,

we're not likely to force players to eat to keep their characters from dying

no wait,

we're not just "not likely" to do that, we're just flat out not gonna do that

we'd much prefer to see eating be something you'd like to do, then something you have to do

we get the "have to" part already from reality ;]

Lord-Xanthor drewniu-In one of the previous chats it was stated that not being able to steal containers is a confirmed bug. In the next one it was said that it's a designed feature. What caused the change and can we expect any change in that matter? Thank you.

MrTact- It is *not* a bug

It is, in fact, a solution to the problem of blessed or insured items in containers.

We have contemplated other solutions to the problem but we don't plan to pursue them right at this moment.

Final answer.

Lord-Xanthor Garaba-Any Fixes to the Golem bugs on the short term radar?

Evocare- not that I know of offhand, sorry =[

there may be some that will be scheduled soon, but i honestly don't know for sure off the top of my head

Lord-Xanthor fect|afk- Alot of us that have been playing for a long time, would like to see a shard that is based off of Pre-Ren. Do you see OSI ever pubslishing a shard with that sort of a rule-set?

MrTact- Right now there are no plans to do a pre-uor shard.

What we are doing is looking at gameplay from back in the day (especially pvp) and seeing what about it makes players yearn for that ruleset.

Then we want to take what we learn and use it to improve the game as it stands today.

Lord-Xanthor Ktorr- Are there any plans to adjust certain perceived imbalances with Skills. ie. Poisoning is one of the most difficult and expensive skills to gain, but can be countered with 0 skill by using a single potion, and 20.1 in tracking seems a bit low to allow someone to find a player with GM stealth ?

Evocare- There are a lot of plans to balance all sorts of things with different skills. Those plans are very far-reaching and include scrutinizing every skill in the game (poisoning included obviously)

However, I wouldn't expect to see any changes to that in the next publish or two, it's longer term then that

Lord-Xanthor Derek_-There has been some discussion recently about sightings of counselors and rumors with a possible connection to the E.M. Program, is there any truth to this and/or is any thought being given to bring back the volunteer program?

Sannio-I don't know yet why a Counselor was supposedly sighted, but I do know that there are no plans to recreate the volunteer program, and Counselors will not be a part of any future Event Moderator team

Lord-Xanthor UOnuts- Question: Is there anything, such as Auto Loot Distribution, planned to stop script looting, especially at Doom Gauntlet?

MrTact-I believe we are to the point where we have decided that we *are* going to do auto loot distribution, but we haven't even started design on it atm.

As such, I couldn't say when to expect that.

Lord-Xanthor UOnuts-Please ask this question: any chance to make any change to archery in near future?

Evocare-i'll be looking at basic damage over time values for archery in pub24, although I can't say for sure yet if and how much it would change

Lord-Xanthor Thomas- At present, what's the planned focus for each of the next three publishes?

MrTact- Well, since I've already been skewered for this on the boards . . .

Pub 23 is going to be almost entirely character transfer

Pub 24 is in the planning stages atm . . . we have already mentioned a couple of things we are looking at for that pub

Pub 25 isn't even a gleam in anyone's eye yet.

Most likely, by the time we get to pub 25, some very interesting things will have happened, so it would be hard to even guess right now.

Lord-Xanthor Ghostface- Why is a system as enormous as luck not a priority to put effort into when it's been admitted that its nowhere near up to par. People dont expect good items all the time but we do expect not to get junk all the time. Also can you fix it so people with Vamp Embrace on can mount steeds you have to get on then recast it :

Evocare- I believe MrTact has been planning on going over luck to resolve whether there are bugs that cause the percieved problems

or whether its the case of the design needing changes to make sure it works the way players feel it should

When exactly that might happen I don't know with any degree of certainty

MrTact-I posted extensively in this thread the other day: http://boards.stratics.com/php-bin/uo/show...v&selv=&vwhich=

That is everything I know about the current situation with loot and luck

Lord-Xanthor xcelsior- Can we have soulstones somewhere around pub 35?

Evocare- i hope so... I had originally hoped they would go in with AoS

so, I'm still a big fan of doing soulstones, it's just a question of fidning a time to do them

Lord-Xanthor M.C. -Items decay extremely fast now (both weapons and armor), and repairing a barely damaged weapon even at 120+ skill results in a max.durability penalty very often. Are there any plans to tone down the rate of item decay?

MrTact-Not right now.

I would say now we are at the "wait and see" stage.

Lord-Xanthor Red_Falcon- I was just wondering if the dev team will fix the lamp room in doom so people cannot logout in there and stop them from exploiting to get the lamps and gloves.

MrTact- Now that the team has grown somewhat, we are going to be dividing up into groups to focus on live and . . . other stuff

Lord-Xanthor unified -Is it at all possible for there to be a mechanism to allow players to see the autual numerical value of fame, karma, and virtue they have acheived. It's confusing getting "you have gained a little fame" or "you have lost a lot of fame" when there is no way to actually know where you are.

MrTact-Yeah we feel that the status gump is too small, so we're going to be making it a lot bigger so we can add that stuff.

JK

There are UI enhancements planned for the future, and it's possible that we may elect to make those stats less obscure.

Evocare- what? you want real information about your character?

Lord-Xanthor Adamantyr-At the moment, a locked down item can't be used or picked up. This is well, but if you lock down a container, such as a mug, you can't drink from it. This means you can't really operate a tavern unless you have cutletry you don't mind losing to thieves. Can a new level of lockdown be made so items can be usable but not takable?

MrTact- Actually, it is possible to make a class of locked down items usable.

We had a real problem with this after AoS where a lot of item types that had to be used when locked down couldn't be . . .

(Can you say "plants"? Sure you can."

The fix we did for that stuff can be done for other item types as well. When you come across stuff like this, please forward it to the bug box.

We want to get bugs like this on the schedule because they are relatively easy to fix.

Lord-Xanthor Dryzzid- Also, do mages gain the bonus FC1 effects from an equipped weapon? I see some people using programs to rearm between each spell? If so, is there any way to fix that?

Evocare- yep, planning on fixing that

cheaters!

hopefully with the next round of balance changes mages won't feel compelled to cheat

;]

Lord-Xanthor uocoriantum- I'm wondering if UO plans on introducing more rare items into the game? Maybe some "mid-level" rares would be nice--especially mage rares!

Evocare- sure, adding stuff for people to find is definitely something we plan on doing =]

Lord-Xanthor [Garaba] Whats with all of Mr. Tact's jokes these days. Is he like this at the office.

Evocare-as a matter of fact, he's *exactly* like that at the office...

i think his wife must be deaf hoho

Lord-Xanthor- Did the Dev Team attend any good IDOCs? What did you loot?

Evocare- I got all of Adrick's stuff that newblar...

Sannio-I picked up a few things here and there. As I mentioned on the UO Stratics boards, I mostly picked up plants, but some statues, ingots, boards, and miscellaneous wearables. It took a long while and a bit of luck, but I was also able to place a small marble tower.

MrTact- I was crunching. Plus I thought it was a little unethical for a dev team member

---Sannio pokes MrTact---

Lord-Xanthor wilki24- Are their any plans for a new client to be released in the near future? If so, can you shed some details about it?

MrTact- New client? Whatever gave you that idea?

Lord-Xanthor I would like to thank everyone for coming tonight!

And thanks to all of the OSI folks for spending their personal time talking to us

Please join #ultima-online for continued, unmoderated chat

the log will be posted shortly at http://uohoc.stratics.com

THANKS

---Waves to everyone---

[Lord-Xanthor]

Im amazed this exists. Brings back a LOT of good old memories, including but not limited to accidentally banning myself in IRC doing one. Makes me wonder how all the staff is now a days. I sadly had to go when my wife gave me great news of our first child on the way and had to concentrate on my family, especially with the huge workload I was handed. I miss the old staff and friends I played with on Pacific. To think this game spawned the games we now see today.

I have backups of every Ultima Online House Of Commons. If the website want them, just message me. I can also be found on Steam.

Edited April 12, 2020 by Lord-Xanthor
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