UO Developers

A UO Artist Speaks!

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The following is from an artist who works on Ultima Online, and I thought it might be of interest to people, given the issues that are coming up these days, and the amount of silence over the account management migration that UO has went through this month, along with its fellow games Dark Age of Camelot, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. Ultima Online has experienced some particularly severe issues from this migration, compounded by people worried over housing.

Over the last 10 days or so, many of those issues have started to be cleared up, and with the game time codes being re-enabled, many more issues are starting to be cleared up as we head towards the Publish 72 announcement, which will hopefully be tomorrow.

This was posted on Stratics today, however the thread has been locked and so it will probably be missed by many people. Unfortunately the thread was full of attacks on the UO developer team, so it came as a surprise to many of us that one of those on the UO team decided to speak out. While I strongly disagree with the personal attacks on the developers and UO’s producer – this migration was not of their doing, and I know that many of them have been working extremely late to try and fix things, as have developers from the other two MMORPGs, I understand the frustration with the lack of communication between all three of the teams and their players. Some have the attitude that the developers don’t care or are not working, when that’s not the case – if they weren’t working to try and fix what issues they can, and players started quitting, they would soon be out of jobs.

It’s juvenile to assume and publicly declare that it’s all their fault or that they haven’t been trying to fix the issues that are within their responsibilities, and even outside of their responsibilities. The people who make those kinds of attacks will be in for a rude awakening once they have graduated high school or college and have joined the real world.

The lack of communication is a serious issue, but what Electronic Arts allows them to publicly say and their commitment to Ultima Online are two completely different things. In my dealings with the developers, artists, and UO’s producer, I have no doubt that all are committed to UO. It would have been easy for many to have moved on to other games, including Star Wars: The Old Republic during some of its major hiring phases, however they chose UO.

Anyways, here is the message in its entirety, and as I mentioned, it was originally posted on UO.Stratics.com.

hat I’m not any sort of EA spokesperson and I know nothing about the inner workings of this account migration, and any issues it might have and because of that I can’t comment on anything pertaining to it. So for the purposes of this post, let’s set that issue aside. Not a dodge, I’m just not speaking on things I know nothing about. Da**** Jim, I’m a doctor, not an engineer. Ok, and I’m not a doctor, either.


Also, after writing this I’d also like to say sorry for sounding preachy, it’s just something that I care a lot about, and that’s dev/player communication.

So I think it’s obvious that I second this comment. Woodsman and puni666 and others have made very insightful comments. I can’t speak for my fellow team mates, but I feel pretty sure that most of us know little about the inner working s of the account migration issues and thus really have little to say on the topic that would be of any relevance to the questions you folks have.

But I saw this post from Syrus and really felt a pull to make a comment on it, especially in light of some of the other posts I’ve seen on this and other threads about dev posting. This is actually a topic that is important to me, so despite all the warning klaxons going off in my head to just close the browser and get back to work, I continue to type. I want to share with those who are interested my perceptions of Dev/Player interaction and posting on Stratics.

You should know outright that for me I believe that Dev/ Player interaction is a privilege, not a right. Player interaction is the probably the most rewarding aspect of this job for me, I kid you not. I have met some amazing people, and have been fortunate to call many friends – even those I’ve only met once, or have never met in person at all. I wish I could put into words what the player meet ups does for me, but in short, it’s a powerful energizer.

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The Sounds of Virtual Silence (Updates)

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Update #2: Account Center Maintenance has been announced.

Update: Maybe this post should be called “My God, it’s full of Accounts!”

I’ve received a couple of emails pointing out to me that we are not alone, and that many EA customers have had their accounts migrated to the Origin.com system, including those customers with accounts or pre-orders on SWTOR.com, which is the main website for Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Much of what I stated below, I still stand by, however now that it’s apparent that this problem is bigger than I imagined, I’ll add a bit to the end.

First of all, if you are still having problems, see this tutorial about account management at the Dark Age of Camelot wikia page or see previous post about contacting EA.

So here we are, just 12 or so hours shy of a full week since the new account management system went live. It’s been roughly five days since I asked why BioWare or EA can’t put out a tutorial. Now technically, a tutorial of sorts was put out, possibly by a BioWare employee. The Dark Age of Camelot tutorial above was put together by somebody referring to themselves as “BioWare Linda” and Linda has been busy, making over a thousand edits since the DAoC Wikia page went live. My hat’s off to you BioWare Linda. I also want to give credit to the countless folks who have been trying to help their fellow DAoC, UO, and Warhammer online players.

The problem is that you have to have received a link to that tutorial in an email I like I did, or saw it posted somewhere on a fansite. That tutorial is nowhere to be seen on Accounts.EAMythic.com. It’s also nowhere to be seen on the DAoC website, the UO website, or the Warhammer Online website. It’s also not on the Facebook pages.

A typical UO, DAoC, or Warhammer player is also not going to know that the Master Mythic Account is also their game account, or that an extension such as “_uo” needs to be added.

So where are we at? Some bad decisions were made, but I don’t really care who made them or why they made them. I see a lot of speculation and I have some ideas of my own, but the time for arguing about those decisions is in the future.

What I care about is that we’re a week into this, and things seem worse because more and more confusion is popping up.

I see a hard limit of 9 linked accounts, which is quite ridiculous when you stop and consider that we are talking about three MMOs, at least one of which has a history of players having many accounts. I hear tales of players being told by customer service they will be banned if they do this or that with additional accounts and yet because they have a certain amount of accounts, they are having to do that which is rumored to get them banned. I see DAoC players and UO players having connection problems that seem to parallel each other. I see UO players who wonder if they are going to lose their houses. I see Warhammer players who think they wasted their money on pre-paid gametime codes. I see people who are concerned that they may no longer be able to transfer their accounts to fellow player or family members. I see people who are wasting hours upon hours with customer service, going in circles. I see players who receive conflicting information from EA’s customer service.

I disagree with some of the conspiracy theories floating around as well as other things I’ve seen or heard. I will say this: I can understand why members of all three teams are shying away from posting on forums, official or third-party. I don’t know if they are being prevented from doing so, but I think that they know they have to be extremely cautious about what they say at this point, because players are latching on to every little thing that’s been said and passing it around. Of course, because so little is being said, that makes every word said take on greater importance.

Somebody emailed me with some links discussing BioWare Mythic employees being busy in Cologne, Germany at the Game Developers Conference and Gamescom. This is something they’ve been planning for months, so they aren’t going to cancel at the last minute, and it’s not the entirety of BioWare Mythic that flew to Germany. Besides, they have the internet, they have email, they are in fact posting from Germany, they just aren’t discussing the problems that DAoC, UO, and Warhammer players are experiencing. Update: I’m now aware that this problem is bigger than BioWare.

As a matter of fact, I think it’s great they are trying to generate some new interest in Warhammer Online with the free multiplayer arena-style Warhammer game. But guess what? You have existing Warhammer players who want to give you money, but they can’t do so, or are confused about how to do so! Little ironic, don’t you think?

I want to make three points very clear.

Point #1
People who may have been contemplating leaving any of the three BioWare Mythic MMORPgs, which happens naturally in the life cycles of MMOs, well they’ve just been given something that could nudge them into leaving, especially if that something is a loss of items or housing.

Point #2
This account system migration took place at a higher level at any individual team. Whether the teams and their producers had much say in how or when this migration occurred, I don’t know. I don’t expect the EA employees involved to talk to us because that’s not their job. They aren’t responsible for the three MMOs, they are responsible for making sure that Origin.com runs smoothly and that EA can collect money, which isn’t running so smoothly. They aren’t going to take ownership of this mess. Somebody needs to take ownership of this mess though. That means that somebody within BioWare management needs to say something.

If you an executive or say the community manager for BioWare Mythic say a few glowing words to the media in Germany about a new, free, unreleased Warhammer game, or talk about meeting up at a brewery, surely somebody can say a few words to the existing customers who are actually giving you money (or trying to), some of whom go back 10, maybe even 14 years, who are having serious problems with your existing games.

Point #3
This last point flows directly out of point #2, and that is that the longer the silence goes on, the more harm is being done to all three communities. The three communities are not in the best of shape as it is – communication has not been very good for a long time, and while some joke that it’s the Mythic way to not communicate with players, given that all three games have much lower numbers than at their peaks, communications and community are more vital than ever. Distrust of the DAoC, UO, and Warhammer teams is rising, distrust of BioWare is rising. There is confusion, there is anger among the communities, some more than others, and nobody is talking to them except for EA customer service, who seems to be giving them misleading or conflicting information.

All three games have efforts underway to attract new players, but maybe they should spend a few minutes talking to their existing players.

Update: In light of the fact that this migration is affecting Star Wars: The Old Republic customers, and possibly other games at a later date, including games within BioWare such as Crysis and Dragon Age II, I think some of the above is even more important. In addition to the individual team producers possibly commenting, I think it’s probably important for the top brass within BioWare to comment as well, because some are claiming that the teams themselves are being silenced by somebody within EA. Given the deafening silence from the three teams, unless I hear otherwise, I’m inclined to agree that the teams are being silenced.

This migration has probably caught up many people who don’t yet realize it because they don’t check emails all that often, they don’t read fansites, and they don’t post or read in forums. It was kicked off with an incredibly short and all-too-brief notice that was posted on the game websites and on Facebook.

People are posting on Stratics or on UO Forums, but many do not read either of those forums or other websites, and a false sense of many players being informed has arisen. This needs to be addressed now, because the longer we go with this without any official communication from the people managing the games and BioWare, the worse it’s going to get.

Put aside the confusion and issues that came up with the migration and linking process itself. If something happens and people start losing castles or keeps or houses full of keepsakes and mementos from friends over the years, all of the sudden you’ve got a group of people who are just going to walk.

Right now, the only official communication that UO, DAoC, and Warhammer players are receiving is from tech support, and the messages are all over the place and contradictory at times.

Richard Garriott Talks a Lot About Ultima Online and Crafting

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Richard Garriott gave a keynote this week at the GDC Europe conference, where he touched on the Ultima and Ultima Online series as well as what he’s learned.

While I don’t have a transcript of the keynote, He gave a really in-depth interview that was published on the Soulrift blog.

Here are some excerpts. In regards to in-game economies and trying to control how much players have at what levels:

Well, when you generate a massively multiplayer game, the ability to tightly control and constrain things goes out the window. Even if you start with a basis of saying at level 1 you get 1s of gold and level 2 you get 10s and level 3 you get 100s, etc., the problem then becomes that anyone of high level can basically hand that value to a person of low level.

In regards to non-combat roles and real estate and housing in UO:

We had the circumstance where, I think one of the most interesting emergent value assets that came up in Ultima Online was how quickly and how valuable virtual real-estate became. I think that the reason why they became so valuable and the impact on the economy kinda goes like this: Ultima Online, to this day I think, is the only MMO that did such a good job of giving players non-combat roles that were so thoroughly simulated that people had entire lives that they would live out in the virtual world that had little or nothing to do with adventuring. The classical case is the blacksmith. There were people who would literally spend their entire virtual life online buying ore that would be brought by adventurers in dungeons, smelting it down into ingots, taking those ingots and forging weapons, and selling those weapons back to the adventurers who would go back into the dungeon and get more ore. Well, if your joy in this game was to be a blacksmith and make weapons, well your blacksmith shop sorta needed to be somewhere on the beaten path between the dungeon and the city centre where the players usually had their caravans of player groups going for safety. And that real-estate, of course, was almost immediately bought up by players early in the game, so late in the game the only place to build a new blacksmith shop was way out in the woods somewhere, which was, frankly, no amount of advertising would bring people to you. So the real-estate suddenly became the thing of value.

Right after this part, he went on to discuss how officially Origin/EA had no stance on Real Money Transactions (RMTs) and then once they saw what started to happen – scams, third world labor, etc., they began to shift their official stance against RMT

In regards to crafting in other games and UO, Garriott mentioned that it should be as powerful in other MMOs as it was in UO, and that he had no idea early on just how powerful it would be in UO:

but I had no idea of the power of these levels of activity that were not combat within Ultima Online until I was a game master within the game itself and I would do things like… I remember a day that I was running around in the Help Queue and just responding to complaints, people getting stuck somewhere or whatever their problem might be, and I would teleport in as Lord British and help them out and feel very proud of myself.

I remember one time I was invisible and just walking around the coast line and there was this man standing along the shore and he had decorated and adorned his character very carefully, he was wearing cut-off short and a holey shirt and a big straw hat and he was standing on the beach with a fishing pole catching fish and laying the fish out beside him on the dirt. At that time, this was very early in Ultima Online, the simulation for fishing was precisely this: use fishpole on water, 50/50 chance to generate a fish. End of simulation. So there really was no simulation. I did not think of fishing as a profession, I did not think of fishing as something we were simulating, I just thought everything you can see that is a decoration in Ultima Online, it should work. So if you saw a typewriter – not that we ever had one – but if we did, it should work. If there’s a telephone, it should work.

He described how important it, when discussing the fisherman mentioned above, and how it changed his perception and reinforced certain beliefs:

That was a very important lesson for me, when I saw that. It really taught me that people were already playing Ultima Online for reasons that I had never in my wildest imagination have thought that people would desire, much less pull off an entire existing around fishing. But because we were devoted to “everything works” and you really could fish and you really could sell that fish in the market and you really could go into the pub and not only, of course, buy drinks but there was also a board game, you could sit down and play

The whole thing is very much worth a read with a huge emphasis on in-game economies and crafting, and Garriott goes on to talk about Tabula Rasa, some of the other games he’s worked on, and the next Lord British game.

So what are you waiting for, head over to Soulrift to read the full interview.

Gordon Walton Talks About Community Management

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Remember Gordon Walton? He gave a keynote earlier today at the Game Developers Conference Europe’s Community Management Summit, where he talked about how gaming communities have evolved.

If you don’t remember Gordon Walton, he’s worked on Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, and until recently, on Star Wars: The Old Republic for BioWare, before he went to work for Playdom. During his UO days, he was Vice President of Online Operations during The Second Age, Renaissance, and Third Dawn.

His nickname was “Tyrant” and having interacted with him on the old UO.com forums, it was a well-deserved moniker.

It sounds like he learned a lot from working on UO and SWG:

“Communities are smarter than us. They will figure stuff out, they will figure out what is really going on,” said Walton, stressing that a community manager should never lie, because they are “not politicians.”

As the designated voice of the entire company, everything a community manager says will be dissected and taken apart by a community, so Walton stressed the importance of working closely with both PR and marketing to make sure messaging is concise and on message. A good community manager must resist the urge to “feed the trolls,” he says, acknowledging that it’s sometimes difficult to ignore situations that strike an emotional chord.

“What you should do is ignore things you don’t want and reward what you do; it’s a well-understood way of training mammals,” he said.

Full article: Gamasutra

Account Center Migration: Official Update

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This was just posted to the UO Herald

Greetings!

We are diligently working to resolve all account center transition problems:

At the present time please do not attempt to redeem gametime codes. This was mentioned last week, but we want to make certain all player data and account age issues are sorted before users assign more game time. In the interim, we have protocols in place to make certain houses and accounts do not lapse or go inactive during this time.

6th Character Slot issues should be resolved, if you continue to see these issues please contact in game support

If you have reactivated your account and continue to have login issues, please contact Customer Support at support@ultimaonline.com

The veteran reward system is currently disabled.

DO NOT share credit card, billing, or password information on the forums or with other players. Electronic Arts cannot ensure the security of players who openly share this information.

When calling in to customer support request an incident ticket at the time of your call. We’d like to track your customer support experience.

We will notify players immediately when gametime cards may be redeemed, and will continue to make progress toward resolving each players concerns as we move through the week.