From UO.com:
Until further notice, players are advised not to place deedable items (curtains, rugs, etc) on the front steps to their houses. Doing so will cause the item to drop to the ground and may compromise the security of the item.
From UO.com:
We have received many complaints of accounts being hacked after the account owner created a login at a particular website, which purports to offer UO gold in exchange for filling out surveys. While we cannot say for certain the problems are connected to this website, we can say with certainty that there is no such thing as a free lunch.
We strongly suggest that you do not reuse your UO account name and/or password anywhere - particularly not at a UO-related site. If you have recently typed in that information during a visit to a website offering free Ultima Online gold or items, we beg you to change your password immediately.
If you need to change your game password, log in to “Account Management” from the main UO site. Be very, very wary if someone offers you something for nothing.
A new Five on Friday has been posted:
“The Boiling Cauldron from the Heritage Collection was a container when it was displayed on Origin - now it’s not. What happened?”
The Origin display house had unfinished versions of the display items, and the cauldron was not intended to be a container. However, many people have requested that it be made into one, and it’s relatively simple to do. But if we make it a container, it will require you to empty it out and re-deed it before you can customize your house (like the aquarium, elven containers, etc), so making it a container has some drawbacks. We’re happy to go either way with this one, so we’re asking your opinion - visit the poll on Stratics’s forums here and vote!
“AAAAH! I still don’t have my Veteran Rewards! My account age is STILL stuck!”
We’ve found the problem and we believe that we’ve corrected it - but the fix is not instant, and so you may see some account age weirdness over the next two weeks as all your characters get updated. Be patient just a little while longer, and you should be at the correct account age by 11/27/06 if not before.
As with all dates/times/weather reports, this is subject to change depending on our testing. This is our best guess given the information that we have at this time. Frankly, Sanya got a little too excited and jumped the gun when she gave the Stratics posters a date. But the programmer who gave her the information was just So Dreamy, she got distracted and didn’t wait for the test run to finish out.
“Does the 9th Anniversary Collection include a sixth character slot?”
This was not explicitly stated on the 9th Anniversary page - sorry for any confusion. Upgrading to 9th Anniversary will entitle your account to a sixth character slot.
“When Age of Shadows was launched, we were told that the ban on placing Keeps and Castles was temporary. That was a long time ago - when can we place those house types in Malas?”
Quite frankly, I searched uo.com six ways to Sunday and couldn’t find this ban listed specifically anywhere, so we had to look at the problem from the beginning. The purpose of the ban originally was, we assumed, to allow more players to place houses in Malas, rather than allow fewer players to place bigger houses. This still seems like a good idea, particularly because we are expecting new players to join the fun this spring with Kingdom Reborn. Also, people who were around for the launch of AoS searched their minds and hard drives, and found only evidence that Malas was intended to be mostly free of the large edifices. In fact, the only large houses in the area are promotional in nature.
So, for the foreseeable future, we’re going to keep the housing rules on Malas as they have been: “Castles and keeps, which occupy large plots of land, cannot be built on Malas in order to make room for more housing slots, ensuring that all citizens of Sosaria have a fair chance at home ownership.” This does not, of course, preclude us from changing our minds if at some point it makes sense to.
“This Halloween stuff is fun, but when are we going to get back to the storyline? I want to see Ricardo get what’s coming to him!”
Patience, patience. The wheel of justice grinds slow but exceedingly fine.
There’s your Five on Friday! Also, to follow up on the question about German ordering information that we posted last week, check out Sanya’s post about it here. Have a good weekend - I’m off to go hunt for the pumpkin with my name on it!
- Jeremy
You still have a few more days to participate in the Shard of the Dead:
Halloween is over, but the dead won’t go back to their quiet graves so easily. The Grim Reaper will continue to lead his hordes against the living of Sosaria until the 14th of November - keep your swords and wits sharp, and defend your land from the onslaught of those who have rebelled against Death and Time.
Be careful with those Shadow Banners:
If you place your Shadow Banner (Banner A) on a tile that already has a Shadow Banner (Banner B), wait ten minutes, and re-deed Banner A, you will lose your banner.
While this is likely to be a rare problem, we figured it would be better to warn you now so as to avoid any potential loss. The problem will be fixed next week.
Source: Update.uo.com
If your vendor is missing, you might want to pay attention to this news item from the UO.com Update Center:
If you cannot find your vendor after today’s bannings, it is because we set it in quarantine until we could speak with the owner. We apologize for any inconvenience, and ask that you page a GM as soon as you can to retrieve your belongings. Your items will be returned to you at our discretion. Thanks!
From UO.com, good news (especially in light of the fact we are probably picking up new users, what with the release of the 9th Anniversary Collection and everything):
More Than 400 Dupers Banned, Tens of Thousands of Items Deleted
After a month-long investigation and a thorough review of all involved, we:
• banned more than 400 accounts,
• deleted more than 100,000 illegally duplicated items, and
• deleted more than one trillion in gold.More importantly, the bugs that allowed this particular kind of illegal duplication have been fixed. Also, duping and exploit prevention/detection systems have been in place for some time now - systems that help us to identify and eliminate cheaters.
We take all forms of cheating extremely seriously, especially cheats that affect the in game economy and devalue the hard work of honest players. We will never stop investigating and solving these issues, and appreciate very much those of you who contribute to the fight against cheating. We’ve had to keep these developments quiet until we completed our investigations, but we are very proud to be able to make this announcement today.
PunkBuster On Hold
After a lot of research and development, we’ve come to the conclusion that for now, it would be better for us to focus on internal fixes and security improvements instead of trying to install PunkBuster. The integration of PunkBuster into the Ultima Online client is being indefinitely postponed, until we can do justice to the marriage of the two products.
We enjoyed working with the team from Even Balance, and hope to do so in the future. We do have the same goals, after all: Ensuring fair play is one of our highest priorities.
Please know that we are working to make systems within the Kingdom Reborn client extremely tough on cheaters. We’ve made cheat prevention, and other in-game measures, a top (and ongoing) priority for our coding team.
It’s nice that they are working hard on the Kingdom Reborn client, as far as security, from the very beginning. It helps that UO is one of the oldest MMORPGs around and so they’ve probably seen a little bit of everything.
What Origin has received, the rest of us have received/are receiving, according to the Update Center at UO.com:
On Thursday, November 9, 2006 at approximately 1:00PM PST (9:00PM GMT), we will be deploying a publish to all shards.
The publish will contain the following changes:
* Anniversary gift for all characters 30 days or older consisting of:
o 9th anniversary coin
o Gift box containing a random piece of crystal or shadow furniture
* Updated ladders to allow players to get down from keep rooftops
* Fixed an exploit with the Iron Maiden and Guillotine
* Heritage Tree trunks will no longer lose their “blessed” tag after being re-deeded
* Slightly reduced the difficulty of the Halloween graveyard spawns
* Added new Halloween pumpkins
* The Grim Reaper will now return to his graveyard if he teleports into a justice region
* The Grim Reapers will now teleport back to his graveyard once he gets down to 33% of his health
* Other monsters will now ignore the Grim Reaper
* Pets will no longer become uncontrollable if their target leaves the area
* The Heritage Ladder will let you choose between two types of ladders:
o Castle/Keep Ladder - can only be placed by house owner
o Regular LadderWe expect each shard to remain offline for approximately one to two hours.
From the Update Center at UO.com:
On Wednesday, November 8, 2006 at approximately 6:30PM PST (November 9 - 2:30AM GMT), we will be deploying a publish to the Origin shard.
The update will contain the following changes:
* Anniversary gift for all characters 30 days or older consisting of:
o 9th anniversary coin
o Gift box containing a random piece of crystal or shadow furniture
* Updated ladders to allow players to get down from keep rooftops
* Fixed an exploit with the Iron Maiden and Guillotine
* Heritage Tree trunks will no longer lose their “blessed” tag after being re-deeded
* Slightly reduced the difficulty of the Halloween graveyard spawns
* Added new Halloween pumpkins
* The Grim Reaper will now return to his graveyard if he teleports into a justice region
* The Grim Reapers will now teleport back to his graveyard once he gets down to 33% of his health
* Other monsters will now ignore the Grim Reaper
* Pets will no longer become uncontrollable if their target leaves the area
* The Heritage Ladder will let you choose between two types of ladders:
o Castle/Keep Ladder - can only be placed by house owner
o Regular Ladder
We expect Origin to remain offline for approximately one hour.
Very interesting about the ladder.
According to the UO: 9th Anniversary Collection Early Buyer site, you can “Purchase the 9th Anniversary Collection and use the promotion code before January 12th, 2006, and choose nine special in-game gifts from this selection of rare items from the history of Ultima Online.” (we assume they meant 2007 and not 2006).
