Events

Event: Siege Perilous – Naval Warfare – Saturday Nov 19

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There is a really unique ship-ship PvP event happening on Siege Perilous in just under two weeks, with some nice prices.

It’s going to use cannons and the High Seas booster pack will be required if you want to participate in that aspect of it.

Player Requirements: High Seas Booster Pack and a galleon outfitted with cannons if you want any chance of winning, but feel free to show up in a rowboat to cause mayhem if you’re not upgraded. Other than that no skills required, sign up for someone elses crew to help them out if you don’t have your own ship but want to attend.

What?: This will be a ship pvp event, happening in and around the waters of bucs den. It will consist of teams of no more than 5 players or pets (recommend at least 3) In a shipboard deathmatch. It is not recommended to wear your beast gear for this event, nor should it be necessary. (everyone will probably have more fun if in simple lrc suits or exceptional leather, I just don’t want the event ruined by a whiner who wore 10 artys and got looted, the fight is with cannons anyways so it wont help all that much.)

Date: Saturday, November 19, 1PM PST
Location: Siege Perilous, meeting off Buc’s Den Docks (Sail your ship into the harbor)

I think it’ll be fun and if you’re not busy during that time, you should pay a visit and participate if you can. There are not many large naval engagements.

Read the Stratics thread.

UO Shard of the Dead Wraps Up, Treasure Hunt Set

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There is a new treasure hunt – Catskills is going to have to defend their recent victory against Napa Valley.

As the winner of the last treasure hunt, Catskills had very little time to relax and to enjoy their trophy before a new challenge came from the Napa Valley.

Tomorrow is the time of decision and we are looking forward to watching the contest.

DATE: Tuesday, November 8th, 2011
TIME: 6:30pm Pacific, 9:30pm Eastern
PLACE: The Chessboard in Nujel’m, Test Center

Also, the Shard of the Dead, a (hopefully) annual Halloween event, is wrapping up today. The UO Herald has posted a list of the top players at the UO Herald (see the link below).

Sources:
* Treasure Hunt Approaches
* Shard of the Dead Ends Today

Shard of the Dead: Dungeon Deathmatch Edition

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It’s nearly Halloween, and thanks to a developer dropping hints on Stratics, everybody was alerted to a Shard of the Dead.

Now the details have been revealed.

We are proud to announce our annual Shard of the Dead. This year, we’ve started with a clean slate to bring you an all new toe-to-toe slugfest. We’ve swept the elementals out of Dungeon Shame and replaced them with some gruesome and hellish beasts along with some exciting loot. Here’s how it works:

You may create a character on the Shard of the Dead, or copy a character from your regular shard. No matter which option you choose, you will arrive without any items, money, or pets on a platform where you must choose to join a team. Enter either the Order Gate or the Chaos Gate, and you will be transported to a safe haven for your team. Here, you must obtain some gear and supplies, in order to prepare to enter the Infernal Battlegrounds.

Lucky for you, the dungeon floors are literally strewn with powerful magic items. All you have to do is survive long enough to grab some and put them on. You may sell items you don’t want to get precious gold to buy basic supplies. Picking up new skills is incredibly fast. There are items that grant stat boosts as well.

Once you accumulate enough to fight the monsters in the dungeon, you will find they drop still more powerful loot, along with gold and items that allow you to summon strong pets.

Be careful, though! All your equipment is cursed. If you die, you must start naked again in your team’s base.

If you can gather a group of friends, have a go at the Disciple of Lucifer. He’s extremely tough, but his loot is very worthwhile. One of his treasures is a deed to bless a single item, making it just a little bit easier to start over.

Every few minutes, a gate in each team’s base will open, taking all who dare to go to the Infernal Battlegrounds. Here, Order and Chaos engage in a struggle to capture each others’ bases, and to hunt down and slay The Butcher. Fighting in these battles offers opportunities for still greater rewards, including the Supreem Headless Bomb and the Flask of Invulnerability, along with your pick of the cursed items picked from the corpses of your slain enemies.

Scoreboards in each team’s base show battle records, and players’ mouseover tooltips show their PvP stats.

So come on down to Shard of the Dead and join us in the slaughterfest!

Source: UO Herald

Treasure Hunt – Napa Valley vs Catskills

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With Sonoma going down, Napa Valley is now challenging Catskills to a cross-shard treasure hunt.

Having defeated Sonoma in the last Cross Shard Treasure Hunting Challenge, the Blue Beetles of Catskills knew they would have to defend their title soon enough. What wasn’t known was just who they would be defending it against. We now have an answer as the shard of Napa Valley has delivered the following challenge to Catskills:

The ages pass and a new power rises from the Myst of the Mountains deep in the Napa Valley! A new voice cries out to be recognized and make their stand! We are Napa Valley and we throw down the gauntlet in a test of wits and stamina of the Cross Shard Treasure Hunt Challenge against Catskills. The Treasure Hunters of Napa Valley boldly stand to take possession of the trophy and bring it Home where it belongs!

In accordance with the rules of competition, the Champions respond:

Challengers of Napa Valley,

Bold words to suggest our trophy belongs with you! Perhaps the Myst of the Mountains has clouded your vision, or the wine of your vineyards impaired your minds; For if you saw clearly the monumental task that lay before you, you would not speak in such confidence! The Blue Beetles will bewilder you with their speed, bedevil you with their skill, and beguile you with their good looks.

Make no mistake – our bravado is well earned. We respect your desire to Challenge, however. Therefor in keeping with the rules of the competition, we accept – and look forward to proving once again that the true “home” for the title is with Catskills.

– Shard Catskills

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DATE: Tuesday, November 8th, 2011
TIME: 6:30pm Pacific, 9:30pm Eastern
PLACE: The Chessboard in Nujel’m, Test Center

UO Herald

UO’s 14th Anniversary: A Look at 2011 (So Far)

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Yeah, I’m behind on looking back at UO’s history with the expansions – I’m getting in the attic tomorrow to retrieve some missing things from my Renaissance and LBR boxes, since they weren’t were I thought they were.

But I wanted to take a brief moment and highlight some key areas covering the last 10 months or so UO. It’s been a while since I made one of these posts. My overall feeling: cautiously optimistic.

The Publishes
In general, the publishes this past year have been pretty solid in my view. A good mixture of bug fixes and adjustments with a mix of new content. A lot of thought has been put into revamping areas that needed it or had been neglected for far too long. Impressive if you stop to consider that a lot was going on that we haven’t seen yet – the high resolution artwork update, among other things.

The Rustic and Gothic Booster Packs
I have a feeling they were an experiment. If they wouldn’t have happened without being paid content, well I’m glad they happened. We haven’t had any mention of booster packs since then. I still think some things should have been broken out and sold on their own, but what’s done is done.

High Seas and Stygian Abyss
Publish 69 saw the Stage One of the “Abyss Flesh Out” where some of the unfinished Stygian Abyss areas started to be fleshed out. High Seas got a lot of work done to it this year since it came out with Publish 68, but Stygian Abyss really needed to be worked on, since it had been unfishined in many areas. Publish 71 saw a lot of work being done on High Seas.

New Magincia Reconstruction, Virtuebane
The New Magincia reconstruction was strongly reminiscent of something first talked about during the Second Age release – player-built towns. No, I’m not ignoring Luna either. While I saw some would-be Lunas in the making, I also saw some serious attempts at larger guilds making a go at having a player town. It was a unique experiment, one that probably won’t be repeated, but it was long overdue. The planting system for New Magincia was also an interesting experiment, as was the New Magincia Bazaar system. Whether you like them or hate them, they make UO unique. Player populations need to be bumped up on some shards to really make them live up to their potential. As for the events, I enjoyed the Virtuebane events, both the EM and non-EM events. The EMs of the events I participated in were top notch. My only complaint is that they weren’t publicized on UOHerald.com.

Honesty Virtue and Mini-Quests
The Honesty Virtue/quest (aka the “Lost and Found” quest) that arrived with Publish 72 are getting a lot of people out and about and walking around Britannia, in areas that they might not normally otherwise go. I have a feeling this was what Mesanna was talking about in February as far as getting away from the mob-killing quests that have no point to them. This was also a part of the Virtue system that everybody has talked about for years. I like it a lot and look forward to the other virtues having virtue-specific quests built around them.

Account Migration
This is the last UO-specific issue I’m going to mention. This was a major lowpoint of UO’s storied history. It’s painful, it’s caused problems for a lot of people, some of whom are still having issues. I’m even having a few issues. I don’t know what else to say, other than BioWare Mythic really dropped the ball on communicating with us before, during, and after it happeend. I don’t know who first said this, but the fact that they included UO in the migration is a good sign that somebody wanted UO around, but UO players were treated poorly with the lack of instructions and help early on, instead forcing players to rely on one another, even when EA’s customer service representatives didn’t know what to do themselves. And before any DAoC or WAR players jump on me, yes their games were affected by the migration as well. UO’s problems seemed worse though.

Dark Age of Camelot / Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning
If you haven’t visitied the Dark Age of Camelot website, do so. It’s been improved. If you read through the stories, you’ll see articles from the developers talking about work they are doing to improve the new player experience. Something is happening with DAoC. Warhammer, I’m not really following the Wrath of Heroes game, which could be seen as an attempt to bring players into WAR. It reminds me of Ultima X in some ways. Still, attention is being paid to the Warhammer franchise.

Ultima Franchise Producer
I’m ending with this one, since it’s the most important one. UltimaForever.com was launched, GOG.com released a bunch of Ultima and other Origin games for players to buy and download at cheap prices. If you’re not familiar with GOG, basically they are wrapping those old DOS games up in a software wrapper to easily allow you to download and play them on modern operating systems. This is generating interest in Ultima. Something is afoot with the Ultima franchise. Last week, Jeff Skalski confirmed he was the Ultima Franchise Producer and that UO was one of the projects under him. What this means for us exactly, I don’t know. I get a sense that things are in good hands.

Yesterday he gave us a brief peek into UO’s future, when asked about EA’s plans for UO:

Continue to grow the game by revitalizing old areas forgotten, add new things to keep players happy & crush as many bugs as we can.”

Now I hope when I revisit this topic at the end of the year, I’ll have even more to talk about, including the art update, but putting aside the migration problems, it’s been a solid year for UO. Last year had a lot of us worried about the future of UO.