Month: February 2012

UO.com Relaunch Delayed (Probably), Also Broken or Old Links Can be Fixed, it is True!

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In the Ultima/UO producer’s letter from a few weeks ago, the following was mentioned: Speaking of the herald, we are planning to relaunch UO.com later this year with an all new look. More details to follow on that in future posts.

First off, many Lizardmen had to die for this information. And by Lizardmen, I mean electrons that light up my computer monitor.

Top Sekrut Information I Have Learned about UO.com: Since the UO Producer’s letter mentioning a desperately needed relaunch of UO.com, I have learned that UO.com’s redesign/relaunch is still behind WAR’s website redesign, which means that UO.com will not be redesigned/relaunched before the 15th Anniversary.

Why do I say UO.com will not be launched before the 15 anniversary of UO? Because I read this WAR thread in the Official BioWare Mythic Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Forums. In it, Kai Schober, BioWare Mythic Community Relations Person, who covers WAR, DAOC, and UO, although you would only think he covers WAR since those are the only people he interacts with, explained that WAR’s official website relaunch was still ahead of UO.com.

For those not familiar with the epic saga that is the official WAR website redesign and relaunch, it’s been talked about, hinted at, even had official mockups posted to the official WAR forums on BioWare.com. FOR OVER 6 MONTHS! And now, according to Kai Schober, the official WAR website redesign and relaunch has not only been delayed yet again, to add insult to injury, Kai has confirmed within the thread that WAR’s website relaunch is still ahead of UO’s website relaunch. And Dark Age of Camelot’s redesign and relaunch took equally as long, and was even delayed because the person doing it had problems with a Drupal upgrade or something.

Keep in mind that Kai Schober is in charge of the BioWare Mythic websites. He was in charge of the DAOC redesign and relaunch. He is in charge of Warhammer Online’s redesign, and given that he said UO.com is behind WAR’s relaunch, I have no reason to doubt him, and I believe that he’s also in charge of the UO.com relaunch.

Look at a calendar.

It’s February, 2012.

UO’s 15th Anniversary is in September of 2012. SEVEN MONTHS FROM NOW.

Given that after six months of work, WarhammerOnline.com’s relaunch has been postponed again, and given that it took at least six months of work to get to the point where WarhammerOnline.com could be postponed, well you do the math.

It’s not hard to see that UO.com will not be relaunched before the 15th Anniversary. How embarrassing will it be when UO celebrates its 15th Anniversary, and a lot of ex-players come back to look around and see UOHerald.com.

There is a little hope on the broken links front. Remember all of those broken links I dug up for UO people and Kai to look at? Well after many months of being ridiculed on the official Warhammer forums, the reason being that the latest news links were over a year old, Kai went in to WarhammerOnline.com’s front page, removed the dates so people wouldn’t see how outdated they were, and then added some new links to make it appear that somebody gives a shit about Warhammer’s official website. If he can spend 5 minutes doing that on the official WarhammerOnline.com website, I have every confidence that he can do the same for all of the broken links on UOHerald.com sometime in the next seven months. He will find the 15 minutes he needs to fix those links on UOHerald.com!

Obligatory He-Man video to cheer you up!

By the Power of Grayskull, Real BioWare Mythic MMORPG Producer Letters!

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Note: The original title to this article was going to be “BioWare Mythic MMORPG Shits Out One and a Half Producer’s Letter” but some people are offended by the word “shit” so I refrained from using that title. Below is an explanation of the new title.

So UO had a producer’s letter a few weeks ago. Of course, the only thing that was new in that letter was the resurrection token which brings together the gender, race, and name tokens, and mention of a few things announced last year that could all be rolled out together in a single publish.

But let’s shift gears for a few moments and talk about Warhammer: Age of Reckoning or WAR as it’s commonly referred to, as well as Dark Age of Camelot, or DAOC, and Star Wars: The Old Republic. You can read the BioWare Mythic producers letters that were published two days ago:

Letter from the Producer – DAOC

Letter from the Producer – WAR

All I’m going to say is that UO deserves producer’s letters that at least provide actual mentions of things really happening, that are being developed or in the design stages, that tell us the actual status of things that are extremely important to UO’s future, and that give us a reason to think that things for UO might start looking up.

I’ve provided a list of things that would be nice to see in a producer’s letter, but I’ll give a few hints:
1) High Resolution Artwork Update. Talk to us about, show some concept art. UO used to not be shy about showing concept art to the paying customers.
2) Talk about the other Ultima game(s) under your control (give me credit for trying)
3) Talk about where you want UO to be a year from now.
4) Talk about what you are going to do in order to see UO arrive at where you want UO to be a year from now.

A producer’s letter should lay out the plans for a game, talk about things in development, and not be a retelling of past producer’s letters. It definitely should not be so vague as to leave people with the impression that there isn’t much of a plan beyond the 15th Anniversary.

This SWTOR pseudo-producer’s letter is the kind of thing we need to see for UO.

City Loyalty Ratings – Explained!

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Kai Schober has posted an in-depth explanation of city loyalty ratings. It’s been a hot topic among a lot of UO players since it went live recently.

Basically a character is rated by every participating city, based on whether the city likes, hates, or doesn’t care about them. The values/numbers for these ratings are not displayed to characters/players. The explanation posted on the Herald takes you through the different tiers of being hated or being liked/respected. You can become loved or hated by actions you take based on the live events going on – dealing with rioters, etc.

The notes at the bottom of the document help clear up a few questions I and others had:

* It is possible to shift a city’s favor slowly over time, but this is much more difficult for those with checkered pasts
* Negative deeds are worth more hate than positive deeds are worth love
* Negative deeds are remembered longer than positive ones
* While the world is in chaos, all cities distrust each other. This is why trying to be devoted to multiple cities will just earn neutral ratings from all. However, this will not always be the case…

The implication is that there is a potential for cities to unify in some way, or at least allow characters to be loyal/devoted to more than one city. It also confirms something I thought – that it’s a lot harder to move up the positive side of the loyalty ratings than it is to drop. This makes sense, and actually ties into the virtue system in a way. Evil always takes the easy way, that kind of thing.

Read the full document: Entire article at UO Herald

Billing Support for UO – Another Contact Option

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EA has added another way to contact billing support for Ultima Online.

This was posted a few days ago on the UO Herald:

We have improved the way to contact our Billing Support for Ultima Online. If you have a problem that you need help with you can either email support@ultimaonline.com, or visit help.ea.com. This website offers you a form to make sure that all necessary information get to our billing advisers.
If you are based in the US, this website allows you to leave your phone number for us to call you back. We are actively pursuing expanding phone support outside the US.

To use help.ea.com, login with your EA Account and click on ‘Talk to a Game Adviser’ on the right side of the page.

What follows is a screenshot and information about talking to a Game Adviser.

My question is, and I’ve asked this recently: Why don’t they add a simple tutorial to Accounts.EAMythic.com, explaining the linking of accounts, when to add _uo to your account if you haven’t created a certain type of EA/Mythic/Origin account, etc.

That would save a lot of frustration for returning players. There are going to be returning players next September for UO’s 15th Anniversary.

Read the fully story: UO Herald

I Would Like to Help With UO

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I’ve been a little negative lately, because I am not seeing simple things getting done, things that should take an afternoon at most rather than something like 6 months or more, and that in fact were supposed to happen last year. Some of these problems are over a year old, some of them were introduced with the Account migration. With that in mind, rather than being negative, I want to help by pointing out some simple things that could be done quickly, but that would help quite a bit. We’ve heard multiple times that the UO team values potential new players and returning players alike, since both help grow UO’s population.

The first thing that many potential and returning players are going to do is visit UO.com. The second thing that will happen is that they will be redirected to UOHerald.com. Hopefully that will change later this year, but for now, you work with what you have available. Once they get to UO Herald, there are far too many things that could start them off with a negative impression.

There are broken links, confusing information, missing information, etc. on UOHerald, and those links and bad information could be easily removed or corrected in an hour or two. If you have to get approval from some EA executive to remove a broken link or point to the proper EA website, may the spirit of Lord British keep you from bashing your head on your desk so hard that you require a trip to the hospital.

All of these should require no more than a few minutes at the most for each individual item.

Broken or Missing Links on UOHerald.com Community Section
Fansites – Remove These, They are Broken
– The Thieves Den
– Spellweave (guide was placed on Stratics, domain is empty)
– UO Ledger
– UO Modders Exchange
– Full Moon

Fansites – Move these to the proper language section
– Play UO

Fansites – Add These
– UOGuilds.com – Seriously, help returning players find guilds quickly
– Ultima-Auction.com
– Ultima Aiera
– UO Journal (who am I kidding, I’ve probably pissed off too many people)

UO Herald Support Guide
– Fix the Knowledge Base link
– Fix the Avoid Scams link
– Fix the Maintenance Time link
– Fix the UO Approved Apps link

UO Herald Update Center
– Remove the “Ask the Devs” link since it takes you nowhere

UO Herald MyUO Area
– Remove the “temporary” crap, it’s been down for a long time and there is no indication it will ever be added back.

UO Herald Stores area
– Change the wording to properly reflect that UO Game Codes store does not exist any longer and explain that it will take you to the Origin store.

Somewhere in a Sidebar
– Link to EM websites
– Mention UOGuide.com prominently
– Mention the Ultima: The Ultimate Collector’s Guide: 2012 Edition
– Mention UltimaForever.com
– Mention that old Ultima games can be purchased through GOG.com

Other changes
– Mention Pinco’s UI prominently on the Enhanced Client section of the Playguide– players who are new to UO, but not new to MMOs, are used to customizable UIs, and I do not recommend that they play the stock EC. Pinco’s UI will make it much more enjoyable for them.

Bigger things that could still be done in a day
– Set aside an area of UO Herald and have all of the individual EM websites linked from there. Better yet, since the EM websites are running WordPress and spitting out RSS feeds, get a Drupal module installed on UOHerald.com that reprints RSS feeds from those EM websites so that new and returning players can easily find events happening where they will meet a bunch of people and hang out together. You spend money on EMs, but unlike UltimaOnline.jp, you don’t bother to advertise the fact that you have EM Events. REALLY?

This last one, it was promised by Cal, and then Jeff said on Twitter he would look into it, but it didn’t happen. It’s probably because it’s a separate part of EA, but given that it would save EA support costs, somebody should make it happen. At the very least, it could frustrate players who are trying to give you money.

Accounts.EAMythic.com
You have an Account Tutorial on UO Herald.com – http://www.uoherald.com/node/452 – LINK TO IT from the Accounts.EAMythic.com website and mention the _uo bit where necessary so that returning players don’t get frustrated talking to EA support, and so that you save them their time (it is valuable, you know), and so that they don’t start their return off by a crappy customer support experience.