Ask & Answer No. 9

In this week’s Ask and Answer we have a interesting mix of questions that the developers answered. Here they are for your reading pleasure:

UO.stratics

Has there been any thought as to letting us use any of the boats in the huge lake in Malas near Umbra, or sail in any of the waters in Ilshenar? (Bazer – Apr 2011)
Could rowboats only be allowed in Dungeons, Ilshenar, Ter Mur and Malas? (Basara – October 2012)
Will you allow us to use rowboats in dungeons please? There is so much wasted water in like ice dungeon and I need to catch Winter Dragonfish and Blue lobsters so….thats all (Lord Gareth – June 2011)
Maybe it would be nice to allow rowboat placement in dungeons? There some dungeons where a rowboat can be handy to fish. Otherwise rowboats don’t realy have a good use cause they are slow and have no hold.(Frarc -Mar 2011)I wouldn´t mind rowboats in Ilshenar, Gravewater Lake etc either …. (Ertai Vodalion – Mar 2011)

Kyronix: Using Rowboats in dungeons and Malas/Ilshenar is something that isn’t as simple as flipping the “rowboats on” switch.  As far as dungeons go, all the areas where you’d presumably place a rowboat would need to be checked given the new level of accessibility, basically the dungeons weren’t built to be sailed, the same, albeit to a lesser degree, goes for Ilshenar.  Malas however, that’s a pretty straightforward body of water and we’ll discuss the matter further.  As far as fishing goes we’ve made some passes at various aspects of fishing that will be visible in the Pub 80 bug squashing extravaganza.

Essentially back when they increased the chances for lower end creatures to give relic frag generating loot they broke the loot generators ability to drop single mod items like 20DCI/HCI, 4MR, Stats, 150 luck, 35 EP, etc. Can they somehow undo what they did or give the loot generator better chances of dropping single mod items with max intensity? (DEVs can you please take a look into the loot generator?) (silent)

Phoenix:  Such items are currently produced by low-end runic tools. We do not have plans for the near future to revisit monster loot generation.

(I rewrote the question into a more concise form – MMoore)
Will you take a look at the contents of the holds of pirate ships, the loot of pirates, and the rewards for capturing pirates? The time investment, cost, and risk are not commensurate with the reward.

Phoenix: Yes, we will have a good look at these in a near future publish.

In the SA Dungeon, to the right of where the Slasher of Veils spawns at the Destroyed Monument/Statue in center of other buildings. When fighting the Slasher Of Veils in this area and a hell hound is on the statue area, provoking the hell hound on the Slasher can cause the Slasher to teleport on top of monument base then teleport players up also, killing them, leaving them with no way down and unable to retrieve items from their corpses. Will this be looked into in the near future? (From Trokip – submitted via PM) Also (asamdan, Ask the Devs Jul 2010)

Kyronix: I will submit an unconfirmed bug into the system, and if it checks out (which it sounds like it will) will look to altering the world building in that area so this no longer occurs.

Will we ever be able to use soulstones that we find from other people for something besides deco? Like maybe using them in the creation of fragments or being able to wipe the stone empty to use them again, maybe with limited charges? (PowerFullPete, Jan, 2010)
We all have a few odd unowned Soulstone’s gotten from housefalls or found in luna. These unowned stones are good for deco but Id like to see perhaps a trade in. Red ,Blue an green ones litter uo, tons of dye tubs,statues stc.. so to clean them up Id like to see something like the Holloween mask lady set up perhaps in luna to except the rewards trade in. Old for new choice. Would go along way to clean up unwanted rewards and get something we can use. (Lady Storm, Jun, 2010)
Will we ever be able to re-link full soulstones or soulstone fragments to different accounts similarly to what is possible with teleport tiles? (Forte~, Sep, 2010)
Can there be a way to use old soulstones? Especially when the players who originally owned them (and paid for them, real money here) have quit the game? They are already paid for? Why can’t we re-use them? I understand they are account bound. But why can’t the skills be re-moved and the stone be re-newed? It seems pointless to have hundreds of soulstones in game, that we ALREADY PAID FOR, be completely and utterly unusable. It’s real money floating around in a game, and being worthless. EA (as a last resort) could even sell us a tool that would un-bind them and wipe the skills from them for a couple of bucks. So that at least it could be used again. It costed someone money to purchase in the first place. Why can’t they be re-used if the player who bought it has quit the game entirely? (Templar Asarhi, Jun, 2011 )

Phoenix: We are currently evaluating ideas for what to do with these, including implementing an exchange program that will allow multiple soulstones to be turned in and exchanged for new soulstones.

Siege Shard General Chat

Is it possible to get a better explanation of ‘drift speed’ and ‘turn delay’ on large ships? In other words, which ship type is fastest, and which is slowest? Also could we get these figures, plus ‘durability’ and ‘cannon damage’ figures for the Britannia Boat?

Phoenix: All ships move at the same speed, except rowboats.

The Tokuno and Orc ships have 100,000 hit points. The Gargish ship has 140,000 hit points. The Britannian ship has 200,000 hit points.

 

UO Auctions

Question: Has the Dev team ever considered adding further higher levels of ingot and stone that could be extremely rare but give material bonuses similar to that of heartwood? this may open up slightly more deversity on how you can kit up a human/gargoyle melee fighter, as the material bonuses of wooden armor often outshine metal/stone?
(Treasure Seeker)

Phoenix: We do not have plans to add new types of special materials at this time.

Question: Have the Dev team thought about ways to bring back dragon scales as a recourse now that the armor is obsolete? i think perhaps an item crafted by tinkers that adds +1 resist or +5luck to a crafted armor piece would be a good way of bringing back the scales and also making balancing crafted sets a bit easier .
(Treasure Seeker)

Bleak: We are currently working to bring back value to all types of armor including Dragon Armor

UO Mania

could you let us use the Retouching tool on an ethereal mount statuette in the trade window, so that other players don’t need to give us their ethereal mounts to make them transparent? (clorenz)

Phoenix: We will take this idea into consideration.
 

If you have something you want to know about Ultima Online and the team, post your questions on your fansite. All interesting questions will be collected and send to our team, so we can continue to answer them.