UO Devs

12 Topics That Would Make a Proper Producer’s Letter

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In no particular order, the following is a list of questions I’d like to see the UO/Ultima Franchise Producer answer. To me, the following questions would provide an excellent producer’s letter, not the watered down producer’s letters that we get in reality. You know, the ones that pass through layers of bureacracy and only reveal a handful of new things that could be handled in one, and at most, two publishes.

Answers to them would provide us more of an insight to the future of UO than what we currently get.

You maybe surprised, but I’m not going to get into in-game mechanics or other aspects related directly to the game, although some of the topics below certainly tie into it. I’m trying to look at the bigger picture, and not what’s in the next publish or two.

I’m not even going to mention the high resolution artwork update. Well, I just did, but I believe it’s happening and I believe Jeff Skalski when he says it’s important to UO’s future, so I don’t have much to say, other than it sounds like they need more artists/developers to help.

#1 Community Relations
If you can request a half a dozen Event Moderators from the UO community to put in 20 hours a month, why can’t you request half a dozen UO players to put in 20 hours a month putting together stories for the UO Herald/UO.com?

If you can ask for people to run in-game events, you can ask for people to contribute to the Herald/UO.com. I would shut down this website or give it to somebody else, and gladly work on the Herald/UO.com, highlighting player resources, community news, fixing broken links, etc., and I know I’m not the only one.

Boosting community relations is one of the cheapest and most effective things a company can do for a game. Twitter, Facebook, these are tools to supplement, not replace, community relations. Third party websites are things that supplement, not replace, official community relations as well. Like it or not, it’s also a sign of how well a game is supported. Right now, UO’s community relations and website would not instill much confidence in new or returning players.

#2 BioWare’s Public Dedication to UO (or lack thereof)
If BioWare is as dedicated to UO as they claim, why haven’t we seen a new hire or two or why don’t we see more public support from BioWare for UO? It’s quite clear from where I sit that UO could use more resources. You would barely know UO exists from looking at BioWare.com. An Electronic Arts Vice President, the man who is over BioWAre and other EA labels, claimed that UO was “widely profitable”. The man who runs BioWare Mythic claims that he’s proud to be head of the studio that runs UO.

These people are in a position to do something to help UO out. If UO is “widely profitable” and if the head of BioWare Mythic is so proud of UO, then why don’t things reflect that? Why aren’t the profits being plugged back into UO to make it a better game and bring in more players? Why is UO barely even mentioned on BioWare.com?

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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.

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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Publish 74 is Out and About

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Publish 74 is out and about on the production shards, yay! If you want to read the full list of changes, check the UO Herald.

I’m just going to give a brief rundown.

Valentine’s Day is nearly upon us. We’re getting cupid statues and cupid arrows. You can tag your true love or the object of your stalking, I mean desire, with these arrows.

A major live arc/storyline is starting up. We’ve been getting hints for a while now – the town loyalty, the rioters. It starts in February is set to run through at least September, and involves both the main UO team and the EM team, and is meant to lead to the 15th Anniversary.

Bulk Order Deeds (BODs) are getting a makeover. NPCs will now cache up to 3 BODs a day for players. All BODs are limited to obtaining a new one every six hours, regardless of crafting skill. You can now bribe NPCs that give out BODs to get even better BODs. I’m not sure what to think of it, since I see both sides to argument – that it was a pain in the butt to obtain certain types of BODs, but on the other hand, I can see the bribery prices going sky high, putting certain BODs still out of the reach of a lot of players. It’s a gold sink, and it will definitely lighten some peoples’ bank boxes.

I’m not going to talk about the Runic Re-Forging – you really need to read the UO Herald publish post about it. It’s interesting, but not something I have time to check out and comment about.

Continuing in the series of dungeon revamps that started last year, Wrong has been revamped! Very happy about this. The New Loot Generator applies to Wrong. The mobs are tougher, there are escort missions to gain Compassion rapidly. The Prison of Nightmares has been added – you’ll have to try this one for yourself. New stealables have been introduced for the thieves out there.

Clean Up Britannia has gained 4 new dyes. I’m glad to see Clean Up Britannia continuing, and hope it’s permanent.

Looting rights distribution has been changed, and healers are included equally, assuming they act as they should.

Some Bard changes were made – I don’t have an active bard character so can’t really comment on those.

Finally, there are a lot of bug fixes. Again, read the UO Herald post for more information – too many to list here.

The Classic Client was updated to version 7.0.23 and the Enhanced Client to 4.0.23.

Overall thoughts
A lot of work has went into Publish 74, and at the same time it seems to have come together fairly rapidly. It’s a good sign, and there is clearly a lot of work being done to rework current systems, in addition to the dungeons. The numerous bug fixes are also a good sign.

Would like to have seen information about the high resolution artwork update to the Enhanced Client.

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)