*waves*
So...
Are true thieves (not crates) still as nerfed as bad as they were when I last played years ago?
Is Siege still the red-headed step child of shards?
Are the developers continually adding more features and content to the game while old broken (and constantly reported) mechanics continue to tick off players?
Just curious...la
You missed the meet-and-greet with EM Drosselmeyer where he promised to have his event characters carry stuff in their backpacks' for thieves to steal and the one event he was able to carry out before the development team eliminated that ability.
You've also missed out on Evil Lord Smurfy's introduction to Siege and Siege's introduction to Evil Lord Smurfy.
And you've missed out on the recruitment and introduction of oh, probably 80 to 100 new
players (if not more) to Siege during the last half year. I'm one of them that's absolutely enchanted by the shard and the people that play there.
O-S and Gilfane, MYTH, and several other guilds have each gained new members. Also, among those new recruits to Siege have been many thieves-in-training. There are lots of new PvPers and PKs on the shard as well.
St. Dismas is carrying out The Father's wishes and cleansing the shard's unwashed nonbelievers. (Can't believe his abbey is so darn close to my house. *Shudders.* I think QZ has plans to point a huge flock of parrots at that abbey and see if they can drive St. Dismas mad. Or something.)
New Magincia has become well populated and is a bustling town of shops and bazaar stalls. Of course, it's all in guard zone, but I would imagine clever thieves know how to get around that obstacle. Zento is well surrounded by homes and shops. The area near Skara Brae has become the new home for Gilfane. And there have been some mysterious whispers of new activity in Barter Town. O-S is cobbling together a new public teleporter web. Can't remember where they plan to put the hub. The Umbra hub has picked up a few more teleporter tiles leading to additional destinations.
Of course, some people have said their goodbyes to the shard and sold off their stuff or just quietly disappeared. It's been interesting to see the same castle (was Elmer Fudd's, I believe) and large amounts of gold change hands a number of times in the space of just a few weeks. Kinda makes a Siege newcomer like me stand aghast at the amount of gold that seems to exist on Siege.
Diablo comes and goes, although he hasn't seemed to cause a whole lot of commotion lately.
So that's this newcomer's take on what's been going on with Siege. It may still be perceived by many as the red-headed stepchild of UO, but I for one don't see it that way. If you want more news about Siege, you should probably saunter over to the Siege forums and ask there! I'm sure some of the Siege old timers can give you a much better update.
The dev team rolled out two new mini-boosters that you can read about elsewhere. Nothing earth-shattering in either one and they cost more than they should for what you get. There's a PvP balancing publish on Test Center with nothing explicitly aimed at thieves, unless perhaps you use poisoning skill as part of your repertoire. About the only thing that the dev team "broke" lately that you might care about was stealing from pack animals' packs and stealing from monsters. That happened when they put in some coding to eliminate the ability to steal from EMs and their characters. However, they quickly set things back to normal for stealing from critters and the uproar that caused among thieves of all kinds was quickly quelled.
