We are currently working on getting the full (even the lost 11 mins) of the developer feed from UStream and make it available for you guys to see. Should be soon! The following is part of the transcript I'm making from the questions and answers from the feed. More to follow tomorrow.
This transcript is from the beginning of the Dev Live Feed, the first 11 minutes.
Cal wanted everyone to understand that before the High Seas booster launched we came up with what we wanted to do with pub 69. We made a lot of effort to make sure we are consistent this year with, making sure that usually during a year with a new expansion you lose a lot of players as you lose a lot of focus on live game.
One thing we wanted to do this year is to make sure to pay a lot of attention to bug fixes. Pub 69 is actually us trying to our best at keeping promises. It’s chock full (of bug fixes). One of the things that we have been meaning to do since SA launched was revisit the Abyss. We have actually put in some gargoyle separatist’s in the abyss. Effectively they have a bad attitude about joining Britannia and Ter Mur. So you will be hunting them down and they will have a lot of goodies on them. We haven’t decided whether or not we are going to put any other gargs in cages or not. So for right now it’s bad gargs who don’t like our kind.
Question from UHall with regard to the EC…Can you tell us is there work to be done on it so it can be taken out of beta?
We use the term beta on the EC pretty loosely, kind of like gmail, that was in beta forever. And until we are really, really comfortable with the state that it’s in we are not going to take that beta tag off of it. We are always making bug fixes in the ec. We have a list of stuff that we are hitting one by one as we get time. There is a bunch of love for the EC in pub 69, but I don’t know off the top of my head any specific.
Players often beat us over the head as to why are we so secret about all of things. What can happen is often we try to fix exploits and we are not going to tell you what the exploits are. If there are updates to the client it is because someone has found that can be an advantage, so we are not going to tell you how to ship stuff over US Mail with the EC. There are definitely some EC specific bug fixes in pub 69. With housing you can go over 250 people on your friends list (housing).
Question from Uhall with regard to the High Sea Fixes…Is there any hope/plan that legacy ships will be fixed so that when an account is not upgraded it is not “scupper-able”? Assuming that they mean that legacy ships can be destroyed without high seas entitlement? Yes, that is what they mean. Can they repair it without the high seas entitlement? Yes
I don’t think that we really could do that, simply, with trial account or non-upgraded account, could use legacy ships to box in a pirate would be easy to kill it. From the abuse-ability we can’t do that. Just bring some boards!
QUESTION: When we reach GM fishing can we please stop fishing up shoes?
Well we are actually looking at doing something about the shoe issue. They are all left shoes, where are all the right shoes. We are still kind of creating a solution to that one of the ideas is just to have more of a variety of things to get as the booby prize. Another of course is to reduce the chance doing it perhaps to zero. If you don’t give shoes do you give more plain fish, is it more valuable to get more plain fish. How about just get nothing? No shoes, nothing. We will talk about that. It is not out of the question, we have discussed it, it did not make it into this particular publish. We are aware that you get a lot of shoes and we realize we should probably do something about it.
Question: Will Pub 69 give multi co-owners per house?
YES! Ten co-owners per house! There are also some fixes to the friends list, the ban list and the access list to the house. They are now capped at 250. You will now be able to remove items from that list, I think it was from the 11th page or further. After 100 entries it would break. That is fixed as well. You will have a larger ban list and much easier to manage now.
QUESTION: still cannot transfer homes with high seas entitlement; and will this be rectified?
This is in our bug tracking system did not make it to this publish.
Question from UHall with regard to the EM Event…can we get an update on the rebuilding of Magincia
Yes, so 3-4 weeks ago went back over the arc, do understand there is not enough time in the year to do the rebuilding of magincia however the arc is going to go for 4-6 more weeks but the update you will see in pub 69 is going to be intense. I think the fiction is out there for virtue bane at this point. When he says 4-6 weeks it not starting now but after the pub goes out. What you guys are going to see and what you need to pay attention to is and one very very small off shooting quest there were searches for the book of truth. In the next couple of stages in the arc you will see references to 2 other elements of the virtues. I’m not going to tell you but it will be an extremely apparent after pub 69 goes live you will see an impact to Dawn’s life. You will see actually how bad virtue bane is and how evil he is. You will also get some very specific choices about which faction you care to be part of after 69. He doesn’t mean faction. He means side. He means whether you’re on Virtue Banes side or the side of Britannia. Just didn’t want to make that confusing. Just know that it will be moving a lot faster than it has been. And simply it was not moving fast is because we were working on the ships and new stuff. WE ended up pulling everyone on that and it just happens. But we are getting back on that with a vengeance. Actually I’m looking forward to seeing how this plays out and it will be very interesting.
Question from Twitter:
When you don’t refresh a new ship and it goes away what happens to the quest that you had?
Your fish monger, you kind of, you can quit the quest. There is no way to get the box back. That is kind of outside the parameter to that quest for your boat to go away while your crate is on it. You’re not just out of luck, but you would have to quit that quest and restart. The decay timer on ships is actually pretty long. You have to be gone for awhile for your ship to decay. Like 2 weeks. So we are not talking about something that is going to happen cuz you fell asleep at your keyboard.
QUESTION: is anything else going to be added to Pirate bounty hunter quests? After you get an orc ship there's not much else to them.
Yes.
Question: Is there a fix in for double points for trap fish vs. 1/2 points?
Mark said on Stratics trap fish were worth double points but our testing shows they are only 1/2. deep sea fish weighted 1.5, shallow water fish 1.0, and crabs-lobsters presently weighted 1/2 point in getting bait rewards. Was mentioned in Stratics post by Mark crabs/lobs should count as 2.0?
Nothing counts as 1.5. I don’t know if that is really clear as to what that meant. What it mean was there are brackets, in which diff rewards are given out and the way that works is, when you for example if the order was 100 fish or more or 100 fish or less, then there is diff prizes in the quest. And the way that it works is that certain fish count twice and certain other fish count 3x. It’s just because they are harder to get, I didn’t want people to go I hate it when I get these cuz it’s such a pain to get but it’s actually counting double or triple. The ones that count double are the deep sea fish and the lob and crabs. I don’t see how someone is finding a 1.5 thing. I don’t even know how they are measuring it as they don’t know what the brackets are. The fact is the bottom line all I really wanted people to know and be comforted in is that the orders for the more diff to get and more troublesome fish are actually rewarding you better. And getting you closer to that coveted PS. Pub 69 we have increased the change to get the PS too. All power scrolls not just the 105. All fishing power scrolls.
Question: What’s in store for the Stygian Abyss? any updates?
There is 2 stages pub 69 as I mentioned we went ahead and put the separatists down in the abyss. Right now I can’t say specifically what that is. Yes, there will be more SA stuff. And it’s going to be totally fleshed out with MOBs to fight and items to find. The other thing that folks are actually asking about is in terms of, for example, if we put something in the abyss it needs to be there for a reason. For example the gargoyles are putting their separatists, we know why they are there. We do not want to put stuff in the game just to put stuff in the game. We want to have it as being grounded. For all updates for SA, we put them in for a purpose that players know about and care about. We also have some myst changes on TC1 that will be going out with 69. This is just the first of many. Probably some other misc bug fixes related to SA.
Question: With the current live story arc, it was decided that the Council of Mages Faction base would be moved to Moonglow. Do we have an estimated date that this will happen?
Yes, pub 69. Actually we went out on TC and showed a few folks where it was going to be. And the faction base changes, this is actual faction, Council of Mages base has already been moved, made it thru QA and is good to go. Will be on TC 1 very shortly.
Question: Can you tell us about the 13th year veteran rewards?
There are 4 new rewards in year 4 different years. Every one of them is functional. It does something. None of them are just deco. There is no clothing. There all functional items. The 13th year reward is a new mount. What it is will be announced later. Cooler than the polar bear.
QUESTION: ok what about the plans to fix the current power scroll problem aka not being able to get a 110 till you are over 105?
Yes, that was answered earlier. We have fixed it. It will be in pub 69.
QUESTION: When the fields were turned off for the boats in high seas they were turned off in houses, will we ever be able to cast fields in houses again? (wall of stone energy field ect)
It was probably an unintended consequence with the fix for the boats. They will never be able to be cast on stairs. That was fixed a long time ago. Noted. It’s in the tracker.
QUESTION: Is there anything else to fishing quests *besides* power scrolls
There are recipes associated with them. There is a lot of bait for rare fish. That is very important. Bait actually works. It makes your chance go up a lot. Your chance is so remote without it that you are not going to automatically get. Even with the bait it is probably still rare to get the bigger fish. The trophies, gives you access to fish pies that give buffs to players. The system is kind of designed to reward people with things, if they like to fish. Anyone who is doing that quest likes to fish and there are rewards if you like to fish. Maybe we will add more in the future, sure why not, but there are baits for every kind of fish in the books that you get from the monger. We had talked about adding more items but we just want to make sure they are good items.
Question: What exactly are the holiday plans, Queen Mum wants to be able to make chocolate holiday cookies from the cocoa that is available, so are we going to make Queen Mum happy?
No fortunately not, maybe if she had sent cookies that would have inspired them.
Holiday Secret: Christmas lights….. Thanks Queen Mum
Question: When is the "whale" going live and how do we get it?
The ship right now is in process. It’s very close. So right now we are updating the high seas booster with some additional content. One is the Britannian ship, it will be offered purchase-able in limited quantity, but in addition, players will also be able to do it thru community collections. The thing we wanted to be sure of is, we get a lot of feedback, if you are going to put something in the game or make it purchase-able, we need to be able to get it as players. And that is something we wanted to make sure that we did. Purchase-able meaning real money. Also we wanted to be able to limit the number, limit how many players could purchase it. And we wanted to be able to make it still accessible inside the game. Its huge, it’s gigantic. The other part of it is there are 4 pads on each side for cannons, 2 extra little pads, with those you can mount certain house add-ons, such as soul forge, anvil, spinning wheel or some that are purely decorative; 9 total weapon pads. So for the massive size that it is and the additional add-ons it is going to take you quite a bit of time to actually build up to it, but with the economy as it is we are pretty sure players should be able to get it. It looks beautiful. It looks kind of like a British galleon, or actually Spanish Galleon. British would be Man-o-War. It’s a very, very large beautiful ship. So when you see it, it’s an amazing piece of work. It took us 2 months to do the artwork. And we did want to get it with the high seas launch, but with everything we were doing and everything we were doing with the Brit ship, it took a lot longer to get it done. It’s 2 tiles wide and has a ladder accessible hold, decks that are kind of angled like a ramp…its pimptastic. The hold is bigger than any other ship also. Well worth the investment for sure. Either the investment in time or through purchase. And it will cost you time.
Question: Instead of always adding new stronger mobs to the game, what about returning to old mobs and making them stronger?
Yes we have. About their strength, their attributes and their loot. We thought about it. We haven’t done it. It is something that needs to be done. What we do is we keep a backlog, which is basically a running list of things that we want to address in the future. And that happens to be one of the items.
Question: When will publish 69 be out?
Mid-December.
Question: Are there any plans to integrate the new Stygian Abyss Item Mods to the Imbuing System?
No. Actually I think it’s advantageous to have properties that can only be obtained through the game. Otherwise it’s really hard for us to make items that you want to get when you can just imbue it yourself. So I think that is kind of the idea with like the siphoning and things like that where it’s nice to have some things that are unique to specific items just to make them still valuable. Also for those that either don’t have SA or don’t want to put their time into imbuing and actually just want to go and do champ spawns and get the cool items too. lt makes it a bit more viable for that part of the experience of the game. You can imbue almost anything better than what we give them. Yeah, but we still like options.
Question: Are we thinking of adding some more stuff for the library and museum donation?
Yes! Well we added the lobsters and the crabs. You can all turn in piles and pilse of lobster and crabs into community Collections.
Question: What other fixes can we expect for the High Seas Expansion?
Other bug fixes…we fixed some problems with rune books, sacred journey was taking too much mana, we did have a pretty large bug fix list… Ship access, you can remove the fuse from a cannon thru the cannon control gump now, whereas before you could only do it thru the context menu, fixed the problem with the fishing quest where you would sometimes arbitrarily lose your standing with the fish mongers. Figured out what was wrong and fixed that. Essentially there are too many fixes that happened that we just don’t have enough time to list. There are fixes from every one in this room.
Question: Will heavy flame and frost cannonballs be obtainable again?
They are obtainable now. You get them from the pirate quests. If you aren’t we need to know. You only get it when you capture the pirate. (Feedback from the chat room indicated you only get light flame cannon balls from capturing the pirate.) The team will look into this problem. This might be a RNG problem. The RNG doesn’t even want to be fixed. We actually have a new RNG in testing.
Question: Can we expect other ships in addition to the "Whale" (like, elves and stuff)
No, not for awhile. It’s not on the schedule. It takes a lot to put something that size into the game. And we are trying to actually really focus on doing the right things. It’s like what I said at the Townhall, playing with the toys that we have. There are so many things that need to be fixed in the game. Continuing to do something that massive inside the game takes more time away from us getting to do the right things that people care about. Yes, but not right now. We need a break. Besides we still have some issues to fix like with people blocking docks. Figure out a way to get you away from the docks.
Question: Will they consider offering the Whale Ship as a bonus for booster preorders or early sales?
Not right now. It’s going to be with some other stuff. Let’s put it this way, we are putting it with some other stuff, but for presales, no. You will be hearing about that what we are going to do with the Brit ship in about a week or so.
Question: Is anything on the agenda for fixing regular fish not stacking?
Regular fish do stack. This is the whole facing problem thing. Regular fish don’t stack? The facings tend not to stack. The ones that are named for the quest, we made sure they all face one direction, so ones with the same name do stack. The ones that are very rare will not stack as they have info on them that say the day it was caught and things of this nature and they couodnt stack unless they have the same date on them. The question was for regular fish. They do stack if they are exactly the same. Also these are just related things... we made the traps so they no longer appear randomly because it will make it easier to hot bar for the EC. The ones that are empty face one direction and the ones that have stuff in it face the other direction so you can quickly tell them apart in your pack.
*Note: (it was explained in the chat to the dev team that this is referring to “a fish” that do not currently stack). It was explained exactly what this question meant and JamesEAMythic indicated he would follow up with Cal on this problem.
Question: What happened to the arenas that were mentioned earlier this year?
We are working on them. It’s in testing. The arenas are supposed to be about 4-5 months ago. At the time, we were supposed to launch in August. And then, High Seas happened and it took a lot of our bandwidth to get high seas out the door. Arenas are something we are very excited about and the reason for that is we would like to bring players along so that they can engage and player vs player combat without really intense consequences. There is a history with UO before the facets split that the whole world was PVP. Then after the facet split it seems that folks got, you were either on one side or the other. What we would like to do is be able to give folks an opportunity to essentially get their feet wet. That is what the arenas are about. The system is pretty robust. We are trying to fix silly issues like, hey you shouldn’t be able to put a house in the middle of an arena. And you would think that would work right out of the box. But we are actually closer, I do not want to give a percentage of how close we are. We are actually on round two, Because the first round of arenas were only included last man standing type battles and round two we have team battles. That is in testing now. We also gotten started, almost completed a feature to facilitate the testing on TC for arenas. Which is the character copy system, which means you will be allowed, when we turn it on, you will be allowed to copy your characters from any shard you are on to test center. This will make any kind of testing on TC easier to do. This will draw more people. For arena testing, it will be much more useful for pvping there with your actual characters and not spend time setting them up. Let me make it clear, you are not transferring there, your being copied. And it’s only for test center. That’s where arena is. The other thing you need to know, is that arenas will not go directly live. It will sit on TC until it’s working and it’s in a good position to go live. Also it is not on it’s way to replacing anything or doing anything other than being a system for players to engage and it’s just another bit for UO that we have wanted to do for a very, very long time.
Messanna: How many want to know exactly the items you get for Christmas and Vet Rewards? SPOILER ALERT…If you do not want to know what they are I suggest you leave… Ok Christmas….. You will get a Christmas Rocking Horse…..*sound muted* Much laughter on the part of the dev team.
Thanks to everyone that came for the chat tonight. Happy Holidays from the UO development team and James Nichols sitting in the chat room. Thanks to the guys at Stratics for supporting us like always. You were in the beginning and are there every day for us, thank you very much. Thanks for the 140 players that showed. We got a lot of really great stuff planned for you guys for the holidays. I know that we owe you some more answers and we will do that in a separate video call. I know that we never ever answer everything that you guys ask, and we won’t get to the 120 things that are important to you but we will keep trying. Happy Holidays everyone!
This transcript is from the beginning of the Dev Live Feed, the first 11 minutes.
Cal wanted everyone to understand that before the High Seas booster launched we came up with what we wanted to do with pub 69. We made a lot of effort to make sure we are consistent this year with, making sure that usually during a year with a new expansion you lose a lot of players as you lose a lot of focus on live game.
One thing we wanted to do this year is to make sure to pay a lot of attention to bug fixes. Pub 69 is actually us trying to our best at keeping promises. It’s chock full (of bug fixes). One of the things that we have been meaning to do since SA launched was revisit the Abyss. We have actually put in some gargoyle separatist’s in the abyss. Effectively they have a bad attitude about joining Britannia and Ter Mur. So you will be hunting them down and they will have a lot of goodies on them. We haven’t decided whether or not we are going to put any other gargs in cages or not. So for right now it’s bad gargs who don’t like our kind.
Question from UHall with regard to the EC…Can you tell us is there work to be done on it so it can be taken out of beta?
We use the term beta on the EC pretty loosely, kind of like gmail, that was in beta forever. And until we are really, really comfortable with the state that it’s in we are not going to take that beta tag off of it. We are always making bug fixes in the ec. We have a list of stuff that we are hitting one by one as we get time. There is a bunch of love for the EC in pub 69, but I don’t know off the top of my head any specific.
Players often beat us over the head as to why are we so secret about all of things. What can happen is often we try to fix exploits and we are not going to tell you what the exploits are. If there are updates to the client it is because someone has found that can be an advantage, so we are not going to tell you how to ship stuff over US Mail with the EC. There are definitely some EC specific bug fixes in pub 69. With housing you can go over 250 people on your friends list (housing).
Question from Uhall with regard to the High Sea Fixes…Is there any hope/plan that legacy ships will be fixed so that when an account is not upgraded it is not “scupper-able”? Assuming that they mean that legacy ships can be destroyed without high seas entitlement? Yes, that is what they mean. Can they repair it without the high seas entitlement? Yes
I don’t think that we really could do that, simply, with trial account or non-upgraded account, could use legacy ships to box in a pirate would be easy to kill it. From the abuse-ability we can’t do that. Just bring some boards!
QUESTION: When we reach GM fishing can we please stop fishing up shoes?
Well we are actually looking at doing something about the shoe issue. They are all left shoes, where are all the right shoes. We are still kind of creating a solution to that one of the ideas is just to have more of a variety of things to get as the booby prize. Another of course is to reduce the chance doing it perhaps to zero. If you don’t give shoes do you give more plain fish, is it more valuable to get more plain fish. How about just get nothing? No shoes, nothing. We will talk about that. It is not out of the question, we have discussed it, it did not make it into this particular publish. We are aware that you get a lot of shoes and we realize we should probably do something about it.
Question: Will Pub 69 give multi co-owners per house?
YES! Ten co-owners per house! There are also some fixes to the friends list, the ban list and the access list to the house. They are now capped at 250. You will now be able to remove items from that list, I think it was from the 11th page or further. After 100 entries it would break. That is fixed as well. You will have a larger ban list and much easier to manage now.
QUESTION: still cannot transfer homes with high seas entitlement; and will this be rectified?
This is in our bug tracking system did not make it to this publish.
Question from UHall with regard to the EM Event…can we get an update on the rebuilding of Magincia
Yes, so 3-4 weeks ago went back over the arc, do understand there is not enough time in the year to do the rebuilding of magincia however the arc is going to go for 4-6 more weeks but the update you will see in pub 69 is going to be intense. I think the fiction is out there for virtue bane at this point. When he says 4-6 weeks it not starting now but after the pub goes out. What you guys are going to see and what you need to pay attention to is and one very very small off shooting quest there were searches for the book of truth. In the next couple of stages in the arc you will see references to 2 other elements of the virtues. I’m not going to tell you but it will be an extremely apparent after pub 69 goes live you will see an impact to Dawn’s life. You will see actually how bad virtue bane is and how evil he is. You will also get some very specific choices about which faction you care to be part of after 69. He doesn’t mean faction. He means side. He means whether you’re on Virtue Banes side or the side of Britannia. Just didn’t want to make that confusing. Just know that it will be moving a lot faster than it has been. And simply it was not moving fast is because we were working on the ships and new stuff. WE ended up pulling everyone on that and it just happens. But we are getting back on that with a vengeance. Actually I’m looking forward to seeing how this plays out and it will be very interesting.
Question from Twitter:
When you don’t refresh a new ship and it goes away what happens to the quest that you had?
Your fish monger, you kind of, you can quit the quest. There is no way to get the box back. That is kind of outside the parameter to that quest for your boat to go away while your crate is on it. You’re not just out of luck, but you would have to quit that quest and restart. The decay timer on ships is actually pretty long. You have to be gone for awhile for your ship to decay. Like 2 weeks. So we are not talking about something that is going to happen cuz you fell asleep at your keyboard.
QUESTION: is anything else going to be added to Pirate bounty hunter quests? After you get an orc ship there's not much else to them.
Yes.
Question: Is there a fix in for double points for trap fish vs. 1/2 points?
Mark said on Stratics trap fish were worth double points but our testing shows they are only 1/2. deep sea fish weighted 1.5, shallow water fish 1.0, and crabs-lobsters presently weighted 1/2 point in getting bait rewards. Was mentioned in Stratics post by Mark crabs/lobs should count as 2.0?
Nothing counts as 1.5. I don’t know if that is really clear as to what that meant. What it mean was there are brackets, in which diff rewards are given out and the way that works is, when you for example if the order was 100 fish or more or 100 fish or less, then there is diff prizes in the quest. And the way that it works is that certain fish count twice and certain other fish count 3x. It’s just because they are harder to get, I didn’t want people to go I hate it when I get these cuz it’s such a pain to get but it’s actually counting double or triple. The ones that count double are the deep sea fish and the lob and crabs. I don’t see how someone is finding a 1.5 thing. I don’t even know how they are measuring it as they don’t know what the brackets are. The fact is the bottom line all I really wanted people to know and be comforted in is that the orders for the more diff to get and more troublesome fish are actually rewarding you better. And getting you closer to that coveted PS. Pub 69 we have increased the change to get the PS too. All power scrolls not just the 105. All fishing power scrolls.
Question: What’s in store for the Stygian Abyss? any updates?
There is 2 stages pub 69 as I mentioned we went ahead and put the separatists down in the abyss. Right now I can’t say specifically what that is. Yes, there will be more SA stuff. And it’s going to be totally fleshed out with MOBs to fight and items to find. The other thing that folks are actually asking about is in terms of, for example, if we put something in the abyss it needs to be there for a reason. For example the gargoyles are putting their separatists, we know why they are there. We do not want to put stuff in the game just to put stuff in the game. We want to have it as being grounded. For all updates for SA, we put them in for a purpose that players know about and care about. We also have some myst changes on TC1 that will be going out with 69. This is just the first of many. Probably some other misc bug fixes related to SA.
Question: With the current live story arc, it was decided that the Council of Mages Faction base would be moved to Moonglow. Do we have an estimated date that this will happen?
Yes, pub 69. Actually we went out on TC and showed a few folks where it was going to be. And the faction base changes, this is actual faction, Council of Mages base has already been moved, made it thru QA and is good to go. Will be on TC 1 very shortly.
Question: Can you tell us about the 13th year veteran rewards?
There are 4 new rewards in year 4 different years. Every one of them is functional. It does something. None of them are just deco. There is no clothing. There all functional items. The 13th year reward is a new mount. What it is will be announced later. Cooler than the polar bear.
QUESTION: ok what about the plans to fix the current power scroll problem aka not being able to get a 110 till you are over 105?
Yes, that was answered earlier. We have fixed it. It will be in pub 69.
QUESTION: When the fields were turned off for the boats in high seas they were turned off in houses, will we ever be able to cast fields in houses again? (wall of stone energy field ect)
It was probably an unintended consequence with the fix for the boats. They will never be able to be cast on stairs. That was fixed a long time ago. Noted. It’s in the tracker.
QUESTION: Is there anything else to fishing quests *besides* power scrolls
There are recipes associated with them. There is a lot of bait for rare fish. That is very important. Bait actually works. It makes your chance go up a lot. Your chance is so remote without it that you are not going to automatically get. Even with the bait it is probably still rare to get the bigger fish. The trophies, gives you access to fish pies that give buffs to players. The system is kind of designed to reward people with things, if they like to fish. Anyone who is doing that quest likes to fish and there are rewards if you like to fish. Maybe we will add more in the future, sure why not, but there are baits for every kind of fish in the books that you get from the monger. We had talked about adding more items but we just want to make sure they are good items.
Question: What exactly are the holiday plans, Queen Mum wants to be able to make chocolate holiday cookies from the cocoa that is available, so are we going to make Queen Mum happy?
No fortunately not, maybe if she had sent cookies that would have inspired them.
Holiday Secret: Christmas lights….. Thanks Queen Mum
Question: When is the "whale" going live and how do we get it?
The ship right now is in process. It’s very close. So right now we are updating the high seas booster with some additional content. One is the Britannian ship, it will be offered purchase-able in limited quantity, but in addition, players will also be able to do it thru community collections. The thing we wanted to be sure of is, we get a lot of feedback, if you are going to put something in the game or make it purchase-able, we need to be able to get it as players. And that is something we wanted to make sure that we did. Purchase-able meaning real money. Also we wanted to be able to limit the number, limit how many players could purchase it. And we wanted to be able to make it still accessible inside the game. Its huge, it’s gigantic. The other part of it is there are 4 pads on each side for cannons, 2 extra little pads, with those you can mount certain house add-ons, such as soul forge, anvil, spinning wheel or some that are purely decorative; 9 total weapon pads. So for the massive size that it is and the additional add-ons it is going to take you quite a bit of time to actually build up to it, but with the economy as it is we are pretty sure players should be able to get it. It looks beautiful. It looks kind of like a British galleon, or actually Spanish Galleon. British would be Man-o-War. It’s a very, very large beautiful ship. So when you see it, it’s an amazing piece of work. It took us 2 months to do the artwork. And we did want to get it with the high seas launch, but with everything we were doing and everything we were doing with the Brit ship, it took a lot longer to get it done. It’s 2 tiles wide and has a ladder accessible hold, decks that are kind of angled like a ramp…its pimptastic. The hold is bigger than any other ship also. Well worth the investment for sure. Either the investment in time or through purchase. And it will cost you time.
Question: Instead of always adding new stronger mobs to the game, what about returning to old mobs and making them stronger?
Yes we have. About their strength, their attributes and their loot. We thought about it. We haven’t done it. It is something that needs to be done. What we do is we keep a backlog, which is basically a running list of things that we want to address in the future. And that happens to be one of the items.
Question: When will publish 69 be out?
Mid-December.
Question: Are there any plans to integrate the new Stygian Abyss Item Mods to the Imbuing System?
No. Actually I think it’s advantageous to have properties that can only be obtained through the game. Otherwise it’s really hard for us to make items that you want to get when you can just imbue it yourself. So I think that is kind of the idea with like the siphoning and things like that where it’s nice to have some things that are unique to specific items just to make them still valuable. Also for those that either don’t have SA or don’t want to put their time into imbuing and actually just want to go and do champ spawns and get the cool items too. lt makes it a bit more viable for that part of the experience of the game. You can imbue almost anything better than what we give them. Yeah, but we still like options.
Question: Are we thinking of adding some more stuff for the library and museum donation?
Yes! Well we added the lobsters and the crabs. You can all turn in piles and pilse of lobster and crabs into community Collections.
Question: What other fixes can we expect for the High Seas Expansion?
Other bug fixes…we fixed some problems with rune books, sacred journey was taking too much mana, we did have a pretty large bug fix list… Ship access, you can remove the fuse from a cannon thru the cannon control gump now, whereas before you could only do it thru the context menu, fixed the problem with the fishing quest where you would sometimes arbitrarily lose your standing with the fish mongers. Figured out what was wrong and fixed that. Essentially there are too many fixes that happened that we just don’t have enough time to list. There are fixes from every one in this room.
Question: Will heavy flame and frost cannonballs be obtainable again?
They are obtainable now. You get them from the pirate quests. If you aren’t we need to know. You only get it when you capture the pirate. (Feedback from the chat room indicated you only get light flame cannon balls from capturing the pirate.) The team will look into this problem. This might be a RNG problem. The RNG doesn’t even want to be fixed. We actually have a new RNG in testing.
Question: Can we expect other ships in addition to the "Whale" (like, elves and stuff)
No, not for awhile. It’s not on the schedule. It takes a lot to put something that size into the game. And we are trying to actually really focus on doing the right things. It’s like what I said at the Townhall, playing with the toys that we have. There are so many things that need to be fixed in the game. Continuing to do something that massive inside the game takes more time away from us getting to do the right things that people care about. Yes, but not right now. We need a break. Besides we still have some issues to fix like with people blocking docks. Figure out a way to get you away from the docks.
Question: Will they consider offering the Whale Ship as a bonus for booster preorders or early sales?
Not right now. It’s going to be with some other stuff. Let’s put it this way, we are putting it with some other stuff, but for presales, no. You will be hearing about that what we are going to do with the Brit ship in about a week or so.
Question: Is anything on the agenda for fixing regular fish not stacking?
Regular fish do stack. This is the whole facing problem thing. Regular fish don’t stack? The facings tend not to stack. The ones that are named for the quest, we made sure they all face one direction, so ones with the same name do stack. The ones that are very rare will not stack as they have info on them that say the day it was caught and things of this nature and they couodnt stack unless they have the same date on them. The question was for regular fish. They do stack if they are exactly the same. Also these are just related things... we made the traps so they no longer appear randomly because it will make it easier to hot bar for the EC. The ones that are empty face one direction and the ones that have stuff in it face the other direction so you can quickly tell them apart in your pack.
*Note: (it was explained in the chat to the dev team that this is referring to “a fish” that do not currently stack). It was explained exactly what this question meant and JamesEAMythic indicated he would follow up with Cal on this problem.
Question: What happened to the arenas that were mentioned earlier this year?
We are working on them. It’s in testing. The arenas are supposed to be about 4-5 months ago. At the time, we were supposed to launch in August. And then, High Seas happened and it took a lot of our bandwidth to get high seas out the door. Arenas are something we are very excited about and the reason for that is we would like to bring players along so that they can engage and player vs player combat without really intense consequences. There is a history with UO before the facets split that the whole world was PVP. Then after the facet split it seems that folks got, you were either on one side or the other. What we would like to do is be able to give folks an opportunity to essentially get their feet wet. That is what the arenas are about. The system is pretty robust. We are trying to fix silly issues like, hey you shouldn’t be able to put a house in the middle of an arena. And you would think that would work right out of the box. But we are actually closer, I do not want to give a percentage of how close we are. We are actually on round two, Because the first round of arenas were only included last man standing type battles and round two we have team battles. That is in testing now. We also gotten started, almost completed a feature to facilitate the testing on TC for arenas. Which is the character copy system, which means you will be allowed, when we turn it on, you will be allowed to copy your characters from any shard you are on to test center. This will make any kind of testing on TC easier to do. This will draw more people. For arena testing, it will be much more useful for pvping there with your actual characters and not spend time setting them up. Let me make it clear, you are not transferring there, your being copied. And it’s only for test center. That’s where arena is. The other thing you need to know, is that arenas will not go directly live. It will sit on TC until it’s working and it’s in a good position to go live. Also it is not on it’s way to replacing anything or doing anything other than being a system for players to engage and it’s just another bit for UO that we have wanted to do for a very, very long time.
Messanna: How many want to know exactly the items you get for Christmas and Vet Rewards? SPOILER ALERT…If you do not want to know what they are I suggest you leave… Ok Christmas….. You will get a Christmas Rocking Horse…..*sound muted* Much laughter on the part of the dev team.
Thanks to everyone that came for the chat tonight. Happy Holidays from the UO development team and James Nichols sitting in the chat room. Thanks to the guys at Stratics for supporting us like always. You were in the beginning and are there every day for us, thank you very much. Thanks for the 140 players that showed. We got a lot of really great stuff planned for you guys for the holidays. I know that we owe you some more answers and we will do that in a separate video call. I know that we never ever answer everything that you guys ask, and we won’t get to the 120 things that are important to you but we will keep trying. Happy Holidays everyone!
