17) 10th November – Ultima Online

Ultima Online Patch Notes for 11/10/1998

Crop growth in the Lost Lands should be slowed.
- When a thief dies in town, items he stole within the last two minutes will be automatically placed in their owner’s backpack. If the owner is not around to receive them, they will fall to the ground.
- Pets and hirelings will move to attack when so ordered, and will move to attack when guarding something that is disturbed. They will no longer stand still all the time, but will loiter around the last place where they were given a command (unless they are following, of course).
- Carving corpses will now always leave the results of carving on the corpse, where players can then grab it. This was done in order to limit the amount of stuff left laying on the ground after carving.
- Several house break-in methods will be fixed.

This is the first pass at balancing weapons. It is not intended to be a final balance for weapons, but rather a good starting point. We expect there to be individual weapons and possibly weapons proficiencies that will require further tweaks.
A retroactive weapons fixer will adjust weapons to fit the new weapons statistics going in. This code will attempt to transfer over your old weapons and adjust them to the correct weapons scale. It will fix one-hit weapons, “prepatch” weapons with outdated damage ratings, weapons with multiply applied magical bonuses, and similar problems. However, it may not function perfectly with all particular combinations of weapon abilities. In particular, exceptional quality weapons may lose some of their capability in the adjustment.
The first pass at weapons statistics will be in place. Key features here are that all three weapons proficiencies should be comparable in effectiveness in combat, but they will all require different tactics to use well. They will also prove to have different strengths against different types of opponents (eg, some weapon types will do better against heavy armor than others, and some will be more effective against mages, etc).

Again, these changes are expected to require additional tweaking. In particular, we’ll need to keep an eye out for the advancement rate on stats, to determine whether they advance too fast or too slowly.
Skill atrophy was adjusted so that it picks the least-used skills more often.
Skill atrophy also was slowed so that it occurs less often. This was done to compensate for “seesawing” effects that were manifesting on the Test Center.
Stat atrophy will now only happen when you reach the stat cap.
The skill advancement curve has been tweaked so that it will taper off start around a skill level of 45 for the typical skill (it will vary depending on the skill).
Stat advancement will now occur regardless of your skill level. So even if you are already a grandmaster in a skill, your stats will continue to advance from use of the skill.
Stats also have a minimum chance to advance.
With the above changes, stat advancement has been slowed down.
It will be possible to reach 100 in any skill. Previously, some skills couldn’t reach 100.
Holding a spellbook in your hands will prevent the learning of tactics or wrestling. Mages should make careful note of this, as the new skill advancement changes will result in problems for them otherwise!

The healing skill now advances properly, including increased difficulty for curing poison and resurrecting, so that healers with a skill higher than 93 should now be able to advance by resurrecting people.
Tailors will now be able to craft surcoats, tunics, jester’s suits, and leather caps. All but the leather caps will be dyeable.
Blacksmiths who are GMs or near GMs will be able to craft exceptional breastplates.
When a grandmaster blacksmith crafts an exceptional item, the item will have a “maker’s mark”–its name will have “crafted by (name)” appended to it.
It will be possible to craft exceptional and below average quality bows, crossbows, and heavy crossbows. These will have differing damages just like exceptional quality smithed weapons do. In addition, they will have maker’s marks if they are exceptional and are crafted by grandmaster bowyers.
Alchemy will no longer give “So and so continues grinding” messages to bystanders.
Provocation will now be considered a single act, as far as the reputation system is concerned, instead of “controlling” the creature for the long term. This means that actions taken by the creature after your provocation is complete will not affect your standing in the reputation system. (This also means that you will not gain karma and fame for creatures your provoked creatures kill. We will see about adding this back in eventually.)

Client Patch – Options menu
- The switch for turning pop-up help on and off will work correctly and save.
- A new option, “Translation” (on/off) is added to the menu.
- The current option, “Automatic translation”, will refer to whether translation is performed automatically, or when you click on the text.
- All options should be available in German and Japanese as well.