Post at UOHerald by: Jeremy Dalberg

Greetings All,

I’m Robert Mull, the new Community Relations Director for EA Mythic.  I oversee the work our team of Community Coordinators do for Warhammer Online (James Nichols), Dark Age of Camelot (Missy Hatch and Joanne Laroche) and Ultima Online (Jeremy Dalberg).  They are a great team and I am lucky to have inherited them.

As a gamer who got his start in MMOs with the Ultima Online beta, being allowed to support the same community that made that game so enjoyable to me is a real pleasure and I feel like I have come full circle.  Since then a decade has passed and I have played countless MMOs.  A few of these became part of my daily routine for years as I worked to found guilds, build cities, run player-events, engage in pvp conflicts, roleplay, and be an active member of the gaming community.  While the games have changed over the years, the real draw for me has always been the people.  A strong well-supported community makes good games great.

Prior to coming to EA Mythic, I worked at Wizards of the Coast supporting brands such as Avalon Hill, Axis & Allies, Dreamblade, Duel Masters and other products.  I learned many lessons there that I have brought with me to EA Mythic, but first and foremost is that you have to be honest and open with your community.

In the coming months you will be hearing much more from me.  I want to continue and extend the reputation EA Mythic has built for integrity, honesty and quality in community and customer support. Our job here is to be the voice of the community inside EA Mythic and the voice of the people working hard at EA Mythic to the community.  The Community Relations team is a feedback loop and our goal is making the community better, day by day.  I, for one, take that job very seriously and enjoy it immensely.

I look forward to talking to you all on the boards and at Road Trips, conventions and other public events.

Bob

So recently EA changed the drop rates in Doom so now even the most casual of players can get involved and even score an arty or two. However the whiners appear to be out in full force bitching about how archer templates dominate in Doom and should 16 or more of them show up its unfair and dose not allow anyone else to get a chance to get an artefact. Which as you can see from this thread, that not everyone agrees and even a debate started on whether archers are the best template for dealing damage.
 
I never ceases to amaze me how players of this game find something so moronic to whinge about, especially when if they really wanted they could create an archer template and go to Doom and join the crowd. But no, they would prefer to whinge and hope to effect change by getting EA to nurf archers. Which would only lead to another thread about another template needing nurfing. In this day and age of Soul Stones are people still too lazy to train up characters? Worse case you could use and advanced character token and start your archery skill at 85. If you took him to the invasion it wouldn’t take very long at all to get him to whatever skill level you wanted.

If you have been living under a rock or in Buc Dens then you may not be aware that Magincia has been levelled and is currently under full invasion from some hell bent on destruction demons. Various members of the Sosaria militia have been trying to defend the town and those hapless souls that live on the lonely island. However the invasion seems to have kicked into another gear with the corrupted moongate now being guarded by some super demons that summon some of the most vile creates from the depths of hell itself to defend them.

Post at Stratics UHall: Draconi_EA

Invasion Finale

The invasion has reached it's final stage. An octet of Rift Guardians have appeared in front of the much smaller, energetic moongate. They defend themselves with barrages of magic and can summon Daemon Berserkers when threatened.

They are surrounded in part by barrier flames that can only be removed by creative use of spellwords.

Meanwhile, my humblest apologies for the delay. This should have occurred automatically already, and I'm now enabling them manually, shard by shard. This should take approximately another 15 minutes. Do not worry, I have not been hit by a truck (that happened last year), and the show will go on!

Due to the delay, the event finale will be extended until Friday. If the Rift Guardians are not defeated by then, that shard/facet's Magincia is lost.

Oh, and hey! It turns out I'm staying with UO after all 

I took my second jaunt over to Doom last night and within 20 minutes I had my second Doom artefact. I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw an Ornament of the Magician sitting in my pack. I would have to say I have spent a collective 2 hours in Doom for a collective 2 artefacts.

I would like to introduce Farscape from the Oceania UO community who has agreed to help me keep the site updated and fresh. Farscape is a long time verteran of UO.

So no more relying on me to keep the site updated, Im sure between the Fink, Farscape and myself we can keep the content flowing.

I have another interview lined up for later this week, so stayed tuned.

Cheers
Shane

Better late than never. Another stella production from UOPOCASTING.COM if I do say so myself. This show is a long one as it is the interview with Fink I have mentioned a couple times.

So sit back, plug in and listen to what Master Fink has to say :-P

Corp Por Show #22

Cheers
Shane

Apparantly the invasion which has the demons completely leveling the town of Magincia on nearly all shards and both facets as not yet being over. Suppoedly the Demons still have one trick left in the bag and therefore the worse has yet to happen. I'm not sure what could be worse for the poor town folk of Magincia when the citizens are Sosoria have been seen leading the ticking time bombs into town to blow it up.

So be very very afraid the worse is yet to come.

Cheers
Shane

So knowing that EA was going to fix the Doom artefact distribution system I decided it was time to revisit Doom and try my hand at the new system. However the first hurdle was the acquisition of a golden skull that allows you to summon the ferry man, who spends most of his time hanging out in Moonglow Trammel. Now when Doom first launched you could purchase a golden skull off a local merchant who had more time on his hands than was healthy, but as the novelty of Doom wore off the skull market dried up.

So I found myself in a position of having to actually god forbid play the game as it was intended. So knowing where the best spot was to get bones in Doom so you can summon the Bone Demon which will hand out the your ticket for passage with the ferry man I loaded up my archer and headed off. Well I discovered a gold faucet that EA must have forgotten was turned on full throttle and blasting out loot faster than one could reasonable loot without the aid of some unnamed software. I literally was killing guardians faster than I could loot them and within 10 minutes had the 1000 bones I required to summon that ridiculously boring to kill bone demon.

I would like to introduce Fink from the Oceania UO community who has agreed to help me keep the site updated and fresh. Fink is a long time verteran of UO and a moderator of the Stratics forums.

So no more relying on me to keep the site updated, Im sure between the two of us we can keep the content flowing.

Sorry for the pause in transmission over the last 2 days, I went to the IBM Chirstmas party on Thursday night and got home Friday morning at 5am. I had the Cisco Christmas party last night and got home at 2am. Needless to say the heads not feeling to good and also the reason for the pause in transmission.

However tonight I will be recording the interview I have lined up with Fink and UOPODCASTING.COM is back in full swing.

Cheers
Shane

As the title suggests I have managed to publish another podcast and all in the same week. WOW thats alot of content :-P

This weeks show:

1. Site Update and House Keeping.
1. The Fink Interview has been delayed
2. Videos and my plans for the site
3. Contributors are being sort
2. Cathat farewells UO
3. Publishes, bugs and EA's general incompetence
1. The sudden rush to deploy a publish
2. The posting of critical and easy to find bugs and yet still  a publish
3. Doom artefacts and making them easier to get is a good thing
4. Begging Changes
5. Blood Oath fix
4. Told You So
1. This ones for all the people that said I was wrong about when UO would close down
5. Shopping System
1. The problems with shopping in UO today
2. Explanation of how to improve the system
3. Explain how taking what's good from other games is smart
4. Other side benefits to this proposal
6. Item Decay and how items must die.
1. Reflect on some of Mr Tacts original ideas for item decay
2. Propose a solution to item decay
3. Give purpose crafters and building community for crafters
4. How the obtaining of resources can benefit those that find them
5. Maybe EA gets item decay with the recent cursed arties
6. Is EA assaulting scripting slowly through the BOS charge increase

Cheers
Shane

Posted at UOHerald:
Jeremy Dalberg
27 Nov 2007 16:52:10

DO NOT store ingots in your salvage bag while smelting items - there is a possiblity you will lose the stack of ingots.  This will be fixed shortly.

(Storing cloth in the salvage bag will simply get it cut into bandages, so... don't do that if you don't want bandages.)

Posted at UOHerald:
Jeremy Dalberg
27 Nov 2007 15:31:48 EST

UPDATED 11/27 12:30:  One more note:

- On Siege Perilous rulesets, all items of clothing that have higher than normal resists - including artifacts, museum pieces, and randomly-generated items with bonus resists or magic properties - will not be able to be blessed with a Clothing Bless Deed.  All currently blessed items will become unblessed, and the CBD will be placed in the players' backpack

There were a number of changes that didn't get listed on last night's server publish - all the notes below the cut are in addition to the previously posted notes:

Posted at UOHerald:

All Servers to be Published
Jeremy Dalberg
26 Nov 2007 17:29:57 EST
All servers will be published with the following during their next available maintenance:

 Added the Salvage Bag: 

•  The Salvage Bag is the core of the enhanced recycling system. Players store items in the bag like any other container, but when a recycle command occurs, they target the bag to handle all the items at once.

• Layout:
  
  
  
  • a blue leather bag labeled "A Salvage Bag"
    
  • Available on Provisioners for a nominal (~1000gp) fee
      
  Read more ...

Posted at Stratics UHall: Leurocian

In response to:  So, I havent tested the changes myself yet, but several of my friends from Japan who play on Japanese shards have recieved 3-4 artifacts an hour each in doom.

Now I know that Japanese pvm playstyle is much different from American pvm playstyle, as it is much more efficient and effective, but was the drop intended to be this high?

Leurocian:  Hello there,

The general intent is if a group of 5 players adventure through the entire Doom gauntlet at various luck values, each one of them would hopefully receive an artifact by their 4-5th run. It could be a little sooner than that. It could be later.

Now if this feels like players are receiving artifacts too frequently, we can easily adjust this frequency. We will continue to monitor your feedback for the next day or so and see what you all think.

Thanks everyone!