Community News

Thoughts on the Producer’s Letter, the Top Secret Edition

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So we have the January 2012 Producer’s Letter. Producer’s letters are the kinds of things that can give us insight into how a corporation or a studio views a game, and for quite a while, UO’s outlook was pretty bleak, because the producer’s letters were quite generic and full of buzzwords and a certain type of vagueness. Very odd when compared to the producer’s letters of other games, where the producers would get into very detailed specifics and were willing to talk about future plans.

With so much secrecy around UO’s future plans, you’d think they were adding goddamned panda bears to UO. World of Warcraft is adding pandas, and not only are they not ashamed of it, they seem quite proud of it and want to tell you about it every chance they get. I guess when you bring in so much money, crazy shit like adding pandas as a playable race starts to sound good.

But UO? Far more simple things than a new continent or giving the furries what they have apparently been wanting for years is shrouded in secrecy. There have been too many times where things were kept secret, and when they were finally revealed, we were like “You kept this a secret from us? And here we were worried you were going to add fucking panda bears.”

I went on a rant a few days ago about things that need to be addressed, such as UO and its community as well as UO and its future and what I wanted to see in the producer’s letter.

Sadly, not much has changed over producer’s letters from previous years. Things we already know about from the November 2011 producer’s letter or other posts on UO Herald, or past UO producer’s letters have now been repeated in the latest version of the producer’s letter.

Things that didn’t need to be said again, but were repeated anyways:

#1 2012 is UO’s 15th Anniversary and there are events planned.
#2 Pub 73 and 74 have been released and pub 75 is in development.
#3 The dungeons are being revamped, one at a time.
#4 UO devlopers, artists, players, etc. are great and deserve pats on the back.
#5 The Origin store needs work.
#6 They want to deal with hackers (do you mean cheaters/exploiters?)

Things that we already know about, and that are useless to tell us about anyways without specific examples:

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Got My Copy of the Ultima Ultimate Collector’s Guide 2012 – Did You?

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I was planning on getting this anyways, but last week Amazon put it on sale for $39.20 and I couldn’t resist getting it immediately.

So just what is the Ultima Ultimate Collector’s Guide 2012 edition?

It’s a huge book written by Stephen Emond that covers:
* 520 main releases
* 286 books and collectibles
* Nearly 150 miscellaneous items
* A total of nearly one thousand items from 24 countries across 6 continents.
* Differences between releases of the same games, maps, etc.
* History and lore of the world of Ultima.

Oh, and it’s over 800 pages.

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UO 2012 and Community

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Over the past year, I talked about things I thought needed to happen as UO moved towards its 15th birthday. Sadly, while some things are being done to move UO in a good direction, such as dungeon revamps, other things which are more important in the long term are not being done, even though they are incredibly obvious to all who are concerned about UO. Back in October, I made a post, Three Things to start Fixing Ultima Online, which were:
1) Act like BioWare owns it.
2) Raise the level of communications.
3) Talk to us about the short and long-term plans for UO.

Today, I want to talk about #2, although it certainly ties into the other two.

One of those things was improved community relations as well as promotion of UO’s community. Back in November 2nd Producer’s Letter from Jeff Skalski, he even highlighted that as the #1 thing in the list of plans for UO.

Sadly, it’s not really happening.

The community team is still woefully understaffed and UO shares a few people with at least three other BioWare Mythic teams, and it shows. While Dark Age of Camelot was finally moved away from the CamelotHerald.com website over to the DarkAgeOfCamelot.com website and received a much needed makeover, the Warhammer Online website makeover that was promised roughly 8-9 months ago, and then saw delay after delay last fall has never happened. DAOC players didn’t receive much of a bump in improved community relations as a result of the website makeover. Jeff Skalski, the Ultima producer, said he would look into UOHerald.com moving back to UO.com, and everybody that plays UO knows that UO’s website needs a facelift.

The problem is that the same person or persons responsible for the other websites is also responsible for UO’s website and nothing has changed since around this time last year, although the community team may have in fact went down a headcount. I’m not sure, but having followed them for the past year, there are one or two people that I no longer see being actively involved with any of the BioWare Mythic games.

Of course, last April, BioWare Mythic got a “web journalist”, but we’ve only seem him once or twice. He was probably moved over to an MMORPG that has something to do with George Lucas’ vast empire.

Recently, Ultima Auctions asked Jeff Skalski in a twitter message about the community relations team and if they were separate. Jeff responded: “Our community team here is a seperate group who works with all of our projects.”

Still, you would think that there would be a lot more community relations going on, and that over time the websites would improve.

In reality, over the past few years, the UO, DAOC, and WAR websites have went backwards. Sure, Dark Age of Camelot got a much-needed domain name change and a makeover, but as a whole, all three websites have lost functionality.

Normally, over time, gaming websites gain functionality.

That is, unless you are one of BioWare’s MMORPGs that doesn’t have “Star Wars” in the name. If you are one of those BioWare Mythics that don’t have “Star Wars” in its name, your websites will in fact lose functionality over time.

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UO to be Featured in Massively’s Rise and Shiny Recap

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Ultima Online is going to be featured in this week’s Rise and Shiny Recap at Massively, which will actually be posted next Sunday. Beau Hindman explains his Rise and Shiny Recap column below in a comment he made here, as well as the account problems I mentioned in yesterday’s post:

Thanks for the tweet. Actually, I did gain access to my old UO account, but by a player’s help. Mythic has still not returned my emails. I will save the details for my Rise and Shiny write up that comes out on Sunday. (I play a game for around 5 days or 10 hours and explain my first impressions. NOT a review. In some cases I just like to go back and check in on old classics.)

Anyway, we love UO on the site, and I even streamed it yesterday. I will show the clip on my youtube channel later.

Anyway, see you in game. Normally I am on the Great Lakes server. This week I am playing on a character named Beauhindman there, since I had to get a trial account to gain access. See ya in game!

Beau

This is good publicity for UO. It’s an interesting time for UO seeing as how UO is in the midst of a graphics update as well as a new producer taking the helm.

Links
* Rise and Shiny Recap
* Beau Hindman’s Twitter

UO – Big Mention on Massively.Joystiq.com of Producer’s Letter, Not so Favorable Mention of Account Management

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Massively.Joystiq.com is one of the largest MMMORPG gaming websites, and earlier today they gave a big mention of UO, specifically concerning Jeff Skalski’s recent letter of introduction:

In it, he explains that his goals for the grand-daddy of MMOs include heavily increasing the team’s interaction with the community, implementing weekly Q&A sessions, squashing bugs, and “breathing life back into areas that have long been forgotten,” i.e., revamping older content.

While Massively mentions a lot of the work being done on UO, and they cited Publish 73, they missed out on the fact that UO is getting a high resolution artwork update, something that several comments mentioned they would like to see for UO. Well they didn’t miss it, they forget about it – back at the end of September Massively talked about UO’s 14th Anniversary (more than the UO Herald did) and mentioned the upcoming high resolution update.

However, while that press is good, other mentions of UO are not so good. From two days ago, in a discussion of what games they are playing, Massively’s Beau Hindman was planning on doing a livestream of UO this week, but ran into the account problems that have plagued many, and there is still no tutorial on UO Herald.

@Beau_Hindman: I can honestly say at this point that I have no idea what I will be playing, except for War of Dragons for Rise and Shiny. Other than that, I planned on playing Ultima Online for the livestream next week, but EA or Origin or whatever it is calling itself now is so frustrating to deal with. I literally have spent hours on hold and with customer service reps, none of which knows anything about my old UO account. For the record, I resubbed and played it recently. I tried to log in with my old login and it takes me to a site that does not even recognize the game. I felt silly.

For the naysayers who believe that the MMORPG community neglects UO, they don’t.

Link
* Ultima Online producer’s letter promises revitalization of classic content (Massively)
* WRUP: Let’s do the crafting edition (Massively)