UO Team is Looking for Houses up Longer than 10 Years

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Once again, something that should be on the UO Herald, is of course not on the UO Herald.

We already had the unannounced 14-day renewal bonus that ended today.

Now we’ve got a thread up on Stratics, where Petra Fyde explains that the UO team is looking for people whose houses are 10 years or older:

Calling all house owners!

Do you have a house that is 10 years old or more? We, in collaboration with the UO Team, want to locate them all.

Mesanna is asking for Vet Houses to step right up! Submit your house information if you have a house placed for 10+yrs to receive in game recognition of your accomplishments!

Fill in our simple form and tell us about it. Where is it? Shard, facet, co-ordinates. Find these with a sextant if you need to. Tell your friends too, we want to find every home 10 years and older on all shards. Help us find them all, Mesanna is counting on us!

Find the ‘information’ page on the house sign, enter the date in the same format as it is shown on the sign

There are a lot of people who do not follow UO-related forums for one reason or another. Come to think of it, they probably don’t follow the Herald, for that matter, but that’s beside the point.

This isn’t a dig on Stratics either, this is a dig on the at times non-existent UO community relations team. In the old days, these kinds of things would be mentioned on UO.com, because that’s the official website for communications. It should also be in the client login screen.

If the Herald was actually updated with this kind of stuff, more people might start following it.

Openings for Japanese-Speaking Event Moderators

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Do you speak Japanese with at least a little bit of English, have 20 hours a month to devote to UO in a role that has nothing to do with your current accounts, and are you outgoing and creative?

If so, they are looking to add 6 players to the Japanese Event Moderator team. Details below.

Greetings everyone,

We are looking for 6 players that are creative, outgoing, and love to make events come to life on Japanese shards. These positions require you to be 18 years of age, and able to put in 20 hours a month. A small amount of English is a must to be able to communicate with the team. If you are interested in being a part of the Event Moderator team; please fill out the following application and return it to barmstrong AT ea.com.

Name:
Age:
Shard/shards you play on:
What language (s) do you speak?
Account names (no passwords please):
How long have you played UO:
Have you ever been a volunteer or worked with EA before?
What type of character do you like to play?
If you could change anything about UO what would it be?
Where do you buy bananas? (sorry couldn’t resist)
Has any of your accounts ever been suspended, if so what was the reason?
Write a short event that you would like to run on a shard, include the type of decoration and reward you would like to give.

Please remember you are not allowed to EM on the shard you play on.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Source: UO Herald

So There Was an Unannounced 14-day Renewal Bonus

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Didn’t see it mentioned anywhere else, including on the UO Herald, but apparently there is a 14 day bonus that applies if you renew by today, as it expires tomorrow.

The opportunity to get a 14 days bonus when you renew your Ultima Online account will expire tomorrow.

If you want to renew your account, use this last day to do so and visit our Account Center now.

Source: UO Herald

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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