MrTact (Server Developer, Ultima Online

[Borg]

First off, I should mention that we are planning to set Test Center 5 ("TC5") external with a recent Pacific shard backup for this weekend. I will also set the housing mode on the test housing server to "global" (this is equivalent to being in phase 3, where actions on one shard affect your houses on all other shards). Let me stress that this does not affect the production shards at all! There is no danger of your houses being condemned in production because of what you do on test centers. In other words, feel free to condemn your Test Center houses without worrying about your real houses on Pacific, Europa, Yamato, Siege Perilous, etc.

Second, I plan to update the housing docs very soon with more details about coowners and claiming houses. There have been a lot of questions on this topic recently, so I feel some clarification is in order. I would do it today, but Prophet is out until Monday and there are some detailed issues I am not 100% comfortable addressing. I want to make sure anything I post on this topic is definitive, since it is the source of great anxiety for many players.

Finally, some speculation as to what the housing rollout will look like. This is Prophet's baby, and he will ultimately be responsible for making the decisions about what happens when. However, based on what I know about how the housing system works, I think I can paint a picture of the rollout process that is pretty accurate.

First, Publish 16 will go live. We will want to wait until it's live everywhere before we start registering shards. This is the process by which we iterate through all the houses on the shard and add them to the housing database (popularly known as "Phase 1"). Registering a shard takes a good deal of time, and we have to keep the shard internal while it happens, so I don't anticipate we will be registering more than one shard a day (although this may change as we gather more information on the system's needs). That means that phase 1 should take 20-odd days to complete.

Based on the way the inactive account handling works, we will have to wait about ten days once the last shard is registered to turn on the ability to claim "ownerless houses" (phase 2). Then we will want to leave the claiming phase active for at least a week before we turn on phase 3 (where housing events on one shard may affect one's houses on other shards).

Once again, that is not the hard and fast PLAN, but how I BELIEVE the rollout will work. We should be able to announce an official rollout plan sometime next week .

MrTact