The real one question to ask is, at least to my opinion, whether these Mysterious Rocks are PERMANENT or TEMPORARY content....
And, if they are temporary content, for HOW LONG will they spawn in Treasure Chests ?
Not all players have that much time at hand to play UO so, I think that these are informations which should be told to players so that they could better organize their time in UO...
Popps, if you think about how things have gone in UO over the years with regard to temporary content, we often get stuff to do over the summer that leads up to even more stuff to do around the time of UO's anniversary. The stuff to do over the summer often arrives in a publish that is released near the end of June and then the next publish hits around the end of August or early in September. In October we finish up the content from September and dive into Halloween content. Sometimes the Halloween stuff carries over into November a little bit. In December, we do the artisan festival and open presents. The devs take a nice long break around that time and then around February we start hearing rumblings of new stuff coming out later in the year. We were very lucky this year to get the plunder beacons to do all these months early in the year. Usually there isn't much going on in the spring if you don't do EM events. And there sometimes isn't much new to do over the summer months. Usually there is, but not always.
Since the mysterious fragments weren't something we saw on Test Center, it's probably safe to assume they are temporary content and meant to be a surprise. Whatever they are, they will hopefully serve to get people motivated to actually try digging up treasure chests when the new publish hits, as some people may be teetering on the edge of deciding whether to stick around and train remove trap or call it quits for treasure hunting. Not everyone has an old soulstone with remove trap skill stored on it that they'll be able to use to instantly pour the skill onto their treasure hunter. If the mysterious fragments turn into something people want, hopefully that'll be enough of a carrot to get people to keep digging up treasure chests, in spite of the changes to that system.
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