Hello everyone,
There is a lot going on in UO, so let me tell you all about it. First, there is Publish 78 which is on its way to all shards soon. We have revised Despise, placed the artifacts on Siege only on Cora and level 3 in Covetous, relocated some of the monsters everyone is missing in other areas, and for the younger players we have earth elementals and more! The Anniversary rewards will be given out starting the month of September. As some of you know the Harpsichord is among one of the items; additional music can be found on monsters in Ter Mur. We have removed the Bless deed and added a Steward to the list, since this is an ongoing clean-up system we will be changing out items on it from time to time. Remember nothing is gone forever *grins*.
We have already started working on Publish 79! I am sure everyone will be happy to know we are working on a method to distribute the Scroll of Valiant Commendation. We have come up with new seasonal content for Halloween and added a few new items to the pumpkin patches, so have fun and remember to visit your graveyards *evil laugh*. For this publish we are getting Christmas gifts and Veteran rewards put in so I hope everyone enjoys what we have come up with. Yes, sneak peeks will come later!
As everyone is aware we are quickly come up on our 15th year Anniversary. To start celebrating this we are bringing back Return to Britannia for the whole month of September. I hope to see old friends and new ones! Let me go ahead and assure everyone that they cannot place houses (see we have learned from past mistakes =P).
I have received a lot of emails regarding the Party here in Fairfax on the September 29th, everyone that has written in so far has a reserved slot already. We have a block of rooms reserved for you at a discount rate if you will be spending the night. Here is the link to the motel. I will be posting an agenda for everyone soon on the Herald.
If you want to enter our writing contest announced on the Herald (we love to read how creative our players are), please send them to your EM’s so they can compile all the entries and send them to me. I will be sending them to the judges without names on them to avoid concerns about favoritism. The judges will be one person from the Japan team, one from the community team, EM team as a whole (EM’s will not vote on the shard they work on), Petra from Stratics, a mystery judge, and myself. Please remember it has to be between 250 and 500 words, the ones I have gotten directly have fallen a little sly of the requirements. I look forward to reading all your memories!
Last but not least I wanted to tell you what we will be working on after Christmas. Publish 80 is going to be a bug fix as I promised. All we are going to be working on for this publish is bugs, both our team and the Japan team are all looking forward to being able to take a breath and fix as many bugs as we possibly can for this publish. Misk has been going thru the Stratics boards and looking for open issues that are not written up. If you do write a bug please give details so we can reproduce the issue. The whole team is really looking forward to this as much as I am sure most of you are. Will be nice to get the most pressing bugs off our plates!!
Now for the exciting part of the letter. Remember what you are going to read after this is not written in stone….*takes a deep breath* This is a list of things we have been talking and brainstorming about:
- Vendor search
- High Res Art
- New Art pieces such as new furniture ( if we don’t break the new artist to much maybe even new armor and new monsters/tameables)
- New Paperdoll (time to change the diapers)
- New tasteful hues on tameables other than cu sidhes
- Enhanced UI Improvements for EC client
- Currency Conversion (gold would be on character/account, no checks)
- Revising UO Armor to make all types useful again
- Revising pet slots
- Pet Revamp
- Chaos/Order and doing away with factions
- Reworking champ spawns (improving mobs, loot etc)
- Add new items to fishing and fishing quest rewards
- New sea creatures and encounters
- New wearable’s for both male and female
- Working closer with Stratics to streamline the search to help filter out duplicate questions so the team can address some of the player questions weekly
- Meer/Juka Loyality quests
- Battleground shard
So my friends this is what the team has worked on, is working on and wants to work on in the future. I will be putting up some sneak peeks to finish out what Jeff started in his letter to you guys so see if you can guess what the puzzle is. I know everyone will have a lot of questions, especially about the last list. When we make our decision as to what we are going to work on each publish I will give you guys a heads up. Thank you for reading this and if your coming to Virginia. Please have a safe trip! I will be putting up an agenda of what we are going to do and what you can expect of the day soon, so please keep an eye open for that.
This is the second piece of the puzzle… good luck!
Thank you everyone!
Bonnie “Mesanna” Armstrong
Producer UO