Commentary

WHY CAN’T BIOWARE OR EA PUT TOGETHER A TUTORIAL?

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I’ve made my point. It’s over 24 hours after the account migration started. Look at some of the big threads on Stratics at the issues people are having, and go through and make a proper tutorial. Do not rely on fansites for tutorials – you need a tutorial covering account linking, what it means, what the various terms mean such as Master Mythic Account, EA Account, etc., and that tutorial needs to be front and center on UOHerald.com. It’s important because such a tutorial carries far more weight with people who don’t follow fansites. Links to fansites don’t cut it when it’s something that affects every single UO player. Many players are going to look to UOHerald.com FIRST!

I understand that this was not the doing of the UO, Dark Age of Camelot, or Warhammer: Age of Reckoning teams since all three games were upgraded at the same time, but somebody above those teams needs to take some responsibility and put out a tutorial and revise the wording of the website because there are a lot of UO, Dark Age of Camelot, and Warhammer players very unhappy and very confused.

And please do something about the game codes store, seriously, it seems like half of the in-game problems are related to it.

Shards Back Online, Some Reverts, Vet Rewards Disabled, Other Issues

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This was posted a few hours ago on UOHerald.com:

Migration Update:
Shards are now online.

Production servers have been reverted to last best version August 13th, 2011 6:25 a.m. EDT, with the exception of Origin which was reverted to August 12th, 2011 7:02 a.m EDT.

Veteran rewards are currently disabled.

We are investigating 6th character slot and other entitlement issues associated with our recent change to a new account center.

We are monitoring the forums and CS is forwarding all issue to the team. We will do our best to keep you updated as we hope to have many fixes implemented during the weekend.

Nothing too surprising, given how complex the accounting migration is. I’ve put together a brief tutorial and linked to a Stratics tutorial in there as well.

One thing that kind of surprised me from reading through forum posts on Stratics and UO Forums, there appear to be a lot of people who didn’t experience the more serious problems that UO experienced in it’s first five years or so. I see people who are upset about losing a lot of time or were doing something important after the servers came back up this morning and lost that when the shards reverted. In the early days of UO, it was almost the first unofficial rule of UO – don’t do anything you would be upset about losing immediately after a major patch, publish, or other system change. I was even hesitant to take a peak at the account management system, but decided to in the interest of the website.

Since there are a lot of people who are upset over losing some time this morning or who assumed that everything would be 100% perfect after the upgrade, that leads me to believe that a lot of players these days weren’t around for UO’s early years, and that is actually a good thing. That means that UO has a lot more players who started in the last 6-7 years or so. I had been running on the assumption that many of the remaining UO players were from UO’s early years. Given the stiff competition over the last seven years, it’s interesting how many chose UO. I think the majority of players I encounter are probably from around UO’s early years, but there is definitely a group who came along after that.

Changes to UOJournal.com

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Since I’m flying solo for the most part these days, I’m going to be changing a few things about UOJournal.com, and the focus is just going to be on the news and commentaries. You’ll see some links in the menus disappear or redirect you to UOGuide.com or other websites. This is something I should have done several months ago.

It’s not going to slow down or change my posting on UOJournal.com, it just means that a few things I had planned on doing on this website, I will probably be contributing them to UOGuide.com as it seems a more logical place to write them.

Of course, if you’d like to contribute – articles on UO, commentaries, upcoming events, etc., by all means Contact Me and I’ll see that they are posted.

Basically, UOJournal.com is going to strictly revolve around news, events, and commentary. Yes, I know, that’s what it’s basically been for some time now, but this is basically a formal declaration. I’m also going to be more active within the community, but a lot more about that later.

Deckard

Servers Still Down, But I Received Classic Client Patch 7.0.16.3

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It’s just after midnight and the login/account servers are still down for Ultima Online, but they are also still down for Dark Age of Camelot and Warhammer Online. I did not realize that everybody that players of all three BioWare MMOs gets to go through this tonight.

Anyways, I got a small client patch that took me up to 7.0.16.3 (Patch 54) on the Classic Client. Not sure what that’s about since I thought the only work being done was on the accounting end of things, which would be out of EA corporate, and not BioWare.

I’m headed to bed, but obviously something is taking longer than normal.

BioWare, Mythic, MMOs, and Ultima Online

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BioWare released a press release yesterday discussing the web-based Dragon Age Legends and their releasing of it on the Google+ social project/network.

Recently I mentioned that BioWare became its own label and how important that was. I’ve also discussed the fact that the Mythic branding seems to be either on its way out or subdued.

With yesterday’s press release, I think we are seeing a little more of that happening. In the about section of the press release, this was the listing for BioWare’s studios and games:

About BioWare
The BioWare Label is a division of EA which crafts high quality multiplatform role-playing, MMO and strategy games, focused on emotionally engaging, rich stories with unforgettable characters and vast worlds to discover. Since 1995, BioWare has created some of the world’s most critically acclaimed titles and franchises, including Baldur’s Gate™, Neverwinter Nights™, Star Wars®: Knights of the Old Republic™, Jade Empire™, Mass Effect™ and Dragon Age™. BioWare currently operates in seven locations across the world, including Edmonton (Alberta, Canada), Montreal (Quebec, Canada), Austin (Texas), Fairfax (Virginia), San Francisco (California), Los Angeles (California) and Galway (Ireland).

Currently announced projects at BioWare include the development of Mass Effect 3, the sequel to 2010’s Game of the Year Mass Effect 2, ongoing downloadable content for Dragon Age II such as Dragon Age II Legacy, the social Play4Free RPG for Facebook, Dragon Age Legends, and the story-driven, massively multiplayer online roleplaying game, Star Wars®: The Old Republic™. BioWare also operates the award-winning MMOs Warhammer® Online: Age of Reckoning®, Dark Age of Camelot™ and Ultima Online™.

You can read the full press release at BusinessWire.com. I found it interesting. I think we’ll see this more and more.

Just as CamelotHerald.com was changed to DarkAgeofCamelot.com and the Mythic branding was removed in favor of BioWare branding, I think we’ll see UOHerald.com changed back to UO.com and the removal of the Mythic branding as well.