A Correction on my Critique of the Producer’s Letter
In my Thoughts on the Producer’s Letter: The Top Secret Edition, I said there were only three new things or ideas that we learned about UO from Jeff Skalski in his January 2012 producer’s letter:
#1 Increasing champ spawn difficulty
#2 Adding value back to plate armor
#3 Addition of reincarnation tokens.
I’m not wrong in saying that all three of those could be accomplished in one or two publishes and don’t tell us anything about UO’s future. But I was wrong in stating that two of those are new, and somebody I know in-game and somewhat out of game pointed out my mistake. It’s really bad since I had written articles that covered both of those things.
#1 Increasing champ spawn difficulty: this was mentioned back in the May 2011 Developers Video, that mobs/spawns would be updated.
#2 Adding value back to plate armor: This was an idea also discussed back in the May 2011 Developer’s Video. No firm plans at the times, but they wanted to do something in the future. There were also references to ideas revolving around changing the mobs/spawn difficulties and wearables in other developer discussions both prior to and after May of 2011.
So that leaves us with really only one new idea out of Jeff’s entire producer’s letter – the reincarnation tokens.
Apology to Mesanna
Also in my thoughts about the producer’s letter, I made a comment about how everything UO producers do seems to have to go through Mesanna and that she has the power to silence her bosses. There was a bit of humor intended in that, which is why I left it out of the summary of things we learned from the producer’s letter. Producers and Associate Producers do have to work pretty close and let’s face it, you don’t want an associate producer who agrees 100% with you, aka a “yes man” or “yes woman” as it were, otherwise you could find something yourself in a bad situation that would have been avoidable if you weren’t surrounded by people who agree with you. Steve Jobs was famous for surrounding himself with people who would argue with him, and it seemed to have worked out okay for him.
However, I did phrase it rather tartly. I have no problem with Mesanna, she is critical to the team, because she’s one of a very small group of people who have a decade or nearly a decade of working with UO, and I believe that is very important. If you lose those people, you end up with a lot of people who have no attachment to UO lore and history. I like Mesanna a lot in fact.
Anyways, Mesanna, I apologize for giving people the impression that you pull the strings.
Non-Apology to Furries
I really pissed off more than a few people over my comments about how Blizzard should be ashamed of adding pandas to World of Warcraft. I never knew that there were so many WOW fans who read UO Journal, and I never knew how many of you have unhealthy attitudes about relationships with animals. Hey, if your friends on Facebook encourage you to think about such relationships with animals, or in this case moving images on a computer display since we aren’t even talking about real pandas, you should just delete your Facebook account, get rid of your computer, and move to Australia. At least in Australia, most of the animals can not only fight off your advances, but probably do you the kind of harm that would seriously discourage your views on human/animal relationships in the future. I’m just going to leave it at that.
On to the fan/hate mail. The three that I’m answering, I just picked a few highlights because either they were as long-winded as I am, very explicit, or were just better off being paraphrased.
Email #1: “Jeff is new and still finding his way around UO”
He’s been around long enough to push out the same fluffy producer’s letters that are chock-full of vagueness that have been a staple of Mythic producers for many years now. Now in Jeff’s defense, he hasn’t played UO continuously since the early days and so maybe he doesn’t realize how many broken dreams and promises and vague comments that have been thrown at us to make us shut up and stop demanding more, but he’s been a part of other Mythic MMOs for several years prior to his stint at UO. On some level he has to know how the players feel.
In no particular order, the following is a list of questions I’d like to see the UO/Ultima Franchise Producer answer. To me, the following questions would provide an excellent producer’s letter, not the watered down producer’s letters 
So we have the 
I guess when you bring in so much money, crazy shit like adding pandas as a playable race starts to sound good.
I was planning on getting this anyways, but last week 
Publish 74 is out and about on the production shards, yay! If you want to read the full list of changes, check the