UO Devs

Transfers and the Test Center and Exploits

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There is some funny stuff going on – if you happen to see some oddly-colored mounts, steer clear of them, they maybe soon going poof, if they haven’t already. Some of these may have a shadow shade to them, others red or green.

From the UO Producer, this was posted on UOHerald.com:

Greetings,

We would like to bust a recent myth about transfers from Test Center.

There are two shard types that players may not transfer “from” or “to”: Siege and Test Centers.

Character transfer is not enabled for these shard types, nor will it be implemented.

So why are you seeing strange hues on some pets? During the recent updates and patches to the game, some content we made available for testing, made its way onto production shards. We identified the problem immediately and put in a fix during maintenance to prohibit more “illegal” hues to make their way into the game. In addition, all changes were reverted … but not before some content made its way onto live shards.

Right now we have monitoring in place to identify what items and hues were available before the update, and which were made available to those who took the opportunity to exploit the changes.

Know that for those who have taken the opportunity to exploit, those hues will also be reverted to their original state

Read:
* UO Herald
* UO.Stratics.com thread about the pets

Publish 70 Test Delayed One Day, Blue Crystal Owners Happy

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So the plan was to roll out the Publish 70/New Magincia to the Test Center tomorrow, using a backup of Great Lakes. That’s been pushed out a day to Thursday, March 17, 2011, however blue crystal owners rejoice, they will be used in the growth and rebuilding of New Magincia. The reason given for the one-day delay is due to some internal testing. The clients will need to be patched, and this will involve a restart and update of all shards on Thursday at 3pm Eastern, 2pm Central. They should be back online within a few hours. Full details:

While the preparation for the launch of Pub 70 to the test center is in full swing, our internal testing on the changes to Magincia require one more day of review. Pub 70 will be available on Test Center this Thursday, March 17.

The client patch for Pub70 requires a server restart. Therefore on Thursday, beginning at 3:00 pm EDT we will bring down all shards. We expect all shards to be back online no later than 5:00 pm EDT.

As an additional note, we have added a purpose for the blue crystals so many players have asked about. They will have a use in the growth of Magincia.

There may have been an additional comment about starting new characters and where their starting location would be, which was tied to the client/shard updates, but it has been removed.

Read: UO Herald

Publish 70, New Magincia Lottery, on Test Center this Wednesday.

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Update: The test has been pushed back to Thursday, however a use for blue crystals is being implemented. Calvin Crowner, the producer of UO, has posted this late bit of breaking news. Ultima Online Publish 70, which should go a long ways towards wrapping up the Magincia storyline, is going to be loaded onto the Test Center this coming Wednesday, March 16, 2011, with a backup of Great Lakes. We will be able to see how the lottery system for New Magincia is going to fully work (more on New Magincia). The period of testing will be extended due to the recent tragedies that have happened and are still happening in Japan, so that hopefully when it is finally published to the production shards, more Japanese players will be able to participate. Given how large of the UO player population is Japanese, I wondered how EA would be handling this. I’ve seen other companies such as Sony suspending billing for people in affected areas.

We will be bringing build 70 to the test center on Wednesday March 16th. As always, we ask that you participate in this test phase and give us your feedback.

However, in light of the events in Japan we will be extending the Test Center phase of this publication. Publish 70 is the end of the live event and the new beginning of Magincia and we want all players to have a chance to participate; and we recognize that there may be many members of our Japanese community who may be unable to participate at this time.

So here is our current release plan for build 70: Test Center Deployment: 03/16. Our expectation is that we will publish to Origin in around 2 weeks. Of course, as events change, we will keep all of the community updated.

We will be putting a back up of Great Lakes on Test Center 1. We hope this encourages you to log in and discover for yourself how the lotto system on Magincia works. In addition to the house plot lotto please enjoy the new system of planting seeds and watching your plants group in the open land of Magincia.

Thank you for your understanding. We are looking forward to getting your feedback and please join us when we say that the hearts and thoughts of our team go out to our Japanese friends.

Read: UO Herald

Ultima Online Publish 69.7 and Client 7.0.12.1 and 4.0.12.2

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Rowland Cox made this announcement earlier today on UOHerald.com about Publish 69.7 as well as the client updates. This publish and the client updates revolve around the rebuilding of Magincia and possibly the upcoming mini booster pack.

It is our pleasure to announce the release of Publish 69.7 to all shards along with the Classic Client Update 7.0.12.1 and Enhanced Client Update 4.0.12.1.

The notes for this update are below, thank you and have fun!

Publish 69.7
* Updates for final live event

Client – Classic and Enhanced
* Cliloc updates

UOJ Note: It’s Enhanced Client 4.0.12.2.

For a little more about the Classic Client updates as well as what Publish 69.7 is moving towards, read Next Booster Pack = Magincia, Plus the Magincia Bazaar. Some of it is also covered in the Breakdown of Last Nights UO Video House of Commons.

Some of the EC files that were updated that I noticed:
* LocalizedStrings.uop
* UOSA.exe

Patches in total were listed as 8481KB by the Patcher.

A Little Bit of UO Nostalgia

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Massively has an article up asking readers how long they’ve been playing MMOs/MMORPGs. Plenty of their readers did get their start with Ultima Online.

There is a very interesting article at Gamasutra (short version and long version) with Rich Vogel who was an associate producer at Origin in the 1990s and who is now working at BioWare Austin on EA’s next MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic.

What was your role on Ultima Online?

RV: I was an associate producer and my job was to get the game together in a shippable state and make sure that it had everything it needed to be an online game. At the time Origin didn’t really have the experience of ever making an online game before. So there were lots of things that were not there when I got there and needed to be there, such as all the customer support tools and making sure the game mechanics looked good and forward advancement.

We were kind of pressured on time. I wish we’d had a little bit more time. We could have actually put some of the things we wanted to put in that game. But unfortunately when you have a game like that you have core mechanics that are very difficult to change once launched.

The full interview is a good look at the other side of UO – how Origin and the developers saw things, how they worked against them, how they knew there were problems with certain things such as PKing or economics.