The homepage for UO Autopilot has been taken down. I'm not too surprised because the author stopped updating it April last year. Anyhow, the link in the 3rd Party Programs section has been changed to a local copy of UOAP. Download it there.

Well, I guess it couldn't last forever. They took the Abyss shard down today.

Abyss Test Shard
Jan 29 1999 10:19AM

We would like to thank everyone for participating on the Abyss test shard. We will need to bring down the Abyss shard today in order to help us gather important data. We hope everyone had fun on the Abyss shard, and we look forward to providing you with more interesting surprises in the future.

Oh well... would have been a fun event, but I guess it'll have to wait until another opportunity arises for everyone to be on even ground. To answer some of the questions, I had 3 characters - two mages and one fencer mage. The highest kill points I got to was 83.

From a non-UO site (but still funny as shit) called The Misanthropic Bitch, the JoV quote of the day is :

"You're so close to being retarded, I really can't hate you."

I think I might be able to find a use for that phrase in UO...

If the Abyss shard lasts until Saturday, I think we should have a huge JoV gathering. I'll get everyone spellbooks and regs, all you have to do is start a character with JoV at the end (IE "Nighthawk JoV"). That way people can't just get on the Nude team without us knowing who the traitors are (pretty tough to change your name to join a group).

If your interested and Abyss is up on Saturday - then just make a character with JoV in the name, give him 7 GMs from the Britain gates and run to the desert to find me. I'll be the guy with all the dead bodies around me. :P

If any of you are planning on starting on Abyss, you can find me in the desert near or in the guard tower. I have about 20 full spellbooks just for anyone who starts there because they are hard as hell to get to because they're not in Britain while everything else is. Remember, they did a wipe last night, so if you haven't played since then, you're starting over too. Here are the locations of the good stuff in Britain (partial list because it's from memory) :

• Magery & Meditiation : In front of main mage shop north of the Brit Healers
• Resist & Eval Int : South East of (west) Tailor shop just north of the docks
• Wrestling & Tactics : In front of the Warrior Guild just over the west bridge from the main Brit bank
• STR & INT & DEX : NW of the Main Brit Bank along the river just before Castle British

There is a money gate in front of Empath Abbey in Yew, but that's not really convienent. :) Anyhow, if you want to join up with me, find me naked around the east part of the desert (hopefully still on horseback) with other Nudes. BTW, say hi quickly or be naked because I tend to think people running up to me are planning on a fight... :)

I got an email from MoMaW - the GM of the JoV on the Chesapeake shard.

We are here to promote evil on the Chesapeake shard, much like you do on baja. We are evil, but not dickheads. I am looking for good pvpers who dont mind being chaos and will not quit because of this. I need people who play often not weekend warriors and people willing to die for JoV. The minimum skill requirement is 95 tactics 95 in some form of combat and 75 magery. We will be chaos when i have 10 members who meet all these standards.

MoMaW

If you're interested in joining up with some evil folx on Chessie, email MoMaW.

Let me give you one suggestion. If you haven't logged onto the Abyss Test shard yet, do yourself a favor and do so. I didn't play one minute on Baja this entire weekend because I was having the best time I've had in UO since the Dread Lord days.

There are tons of team wars in the desert - the 100 man (and growing) team were the blues. Nuker and I started the Nudes - yes, we really started the team that is now dominant (I have no reason to make things up, yanno). Nuker and I must have killed four or five hundred people over the weekend. No exageration. Mana regenerated SO fast with GM Meditiation (they had GM gates for everything in Britain) that we just ripped into people with para/explosion/ebolt and para/ev/para combos unendlessly. Vapor and I have been continuing the tradition of anally dominating people tonight - I couldn't count the kills within the past 3 hours, but it's a LOT.

The only downside now is that they got rid of the spellbook/regs gate. You can get unlimited regs in the desert by doubel clicking on the reg stone, but getting a spellbook is far more difficult. But, if you like, you can start a GM fencer/alchemist/poisoner and not even worry about magery too much.

Either way, this shard HAS to show OSI that SO many people want anti-dread types wars, no stat loss, and large scale pvp without penalty. If they don't see the overwhelming response, then they're morons to the core and there's no help for them. Get on Abyss while it lasts.

Depending on which shard you are on, the past two days were patch days. They changed a lot of shit - a complete list is on the Latest Game Updates. However, there are a couple of things that changed that may fuck up how you play.

The big one to us evil mofos : no more stealing in combat. Christ almighty, I can't believe they did this. If anything is attacking you (even monsters), you can't tab out to steal anything. Being in combat is determined by line of sight to someone you're in combat with now, not whether you're in war mode or not (this also affects hiding - see below). So, basically, you get one chance to steal from someone unless they decide not to attack you. This is great news for thief/PKs because people are going to think that attacking someone will stop the theft, when it will actually lead to a legal ass beating. Since stealing in combat is gone, I hope you get their pearl/root/weapon before the fight starts.

Two more important things that the patch fixed/fucked up :

There has definitely been an outcry for the UOAP script. So, the script(s) to automatically fight Blade Spirits has been posted. You can go here or check the Newbie section.

Fighting Blade Spirits. If you attack a BS, it does significantly less damage to you than had it attacked you. In other words, attack the BS and you'll take little damage. Walk next to a BS without attacking it and you're going to get poisoned and beaten to shit.

*imagines all the Blade Spirits out there that killed people trying to do my macro without attacking the BS first* lol... sorry, I thought that was common knowledge. *shrug*

If anyone wants my UO Autopilot "Blade Spirit training" script, let me know and I'll post it.

New stories by Dick Gozinya and Ozmo have been posted in the Stories section.

This is also going to be my last post until Monday since I'm going to Florida for the holiday weekend. Cya.

I have been macroing on polar bears for months and I swore by them to anyone who wanted to get to GM in a melee/archery skill - but not tactics (because you can't kill the bears and they regen HP so slow). I knew about Blade Spirit macroing, but I figured it was a waste of regs. Well, I was wrong.

I macroed up a newbie who had no skills except for GM Tinkering, 59 Magery, 50 Tactics, and store bought up fencing and healing. After 200 of each BS reg, he's at 65.0 Magery, 98 Fencing, 90 Tactics and 36.0 healing. Outstanding.

On top of that, I didn't have to worry about a GM coming by and deleting my polar bears. Strangely enough, that's what happened taht got me to finally try the Blade Spirit macro. Well, folx. It works because ya can't beat macroing Tactics and 5th circle Magery along with soon-to-be-GM melee skill.

I started hearing about a dupe bug just before the servers started to go down. Dr. TwisTer's Bug Alert published a bug today and said, "HUGE bug tonight. I am posting these also to run a test. I want to see just HOW fast OSI fixes the bug and in return find out if they are reading my site."

Well, within two hours of the posting, Tailoring (the skill used to dupe) was disabled completely. Just now update.owo.com said, "All the servers will be going down shortly for a mini-patch that will fix an exploit with certain skills. The tailoring skill will once again be available after the reboot."

Pretty fast turnaround. Guess he shouldn't have given warning that the bug was coming... :)

Posted five more stories. Three by Cyle of EiG and one each by Scythe and Jack. Thanks for all the submissions guys. I still have one more story in the "inbox" that I won't get to today. I'll get it posted tomorrow.

Brules just sent me a copy of a post that Rootdown made on some other board. The title of his email informing me of this was "Is Rootdown retarted???" Good question. On Nov 17th I posted about Rootdown - the guy that got hacked because he was an idiot.

Well that tears it.....yesterday i had my last source of income taken away (the castle deed i was trying to sell) when an unkown hacker froze my computer......when i tried to reboot, hey whaddaya know im missing win.com (a file nessecary to load windows) so i run my ass to my friends so i can get it on disk, i run back to my house boot up windows check my account......YAY! my castle deed is gone......anyway in short im fed up.....i want to take my misery out on anyone i can find....so anyone whos up for a bit of pkin tonight lemme know icq: 13223909

P.S. If you have any spare cash, regs or anything you can donate lemme know...thx.
-RootDown

Five new stories have been posted. Thanks to Lenny, Fixxer, Crackhead BoB, Ozmo and Dick Gozinya. I have at least 4 or 5 more to post, but I'll probably get to those tomorrow. So, check back here for them.

One of the most infamous evil players is returning to UO. Greybeard is back. He ran one of the most successful evil UO sites a while back, UOEvil. He's going to be over at The Warcouncil helping out my boy Zander.

Also, Greybeard is returning to UO on the Baja shard. So, add him to the already evil shard with me, Ronald McDonald, Zander, and SO many others - it's gonna be a good (evil) time!

I'm coming your way two weekends from now. I'll be in Tampa on Saturday, Jan 16th and in Miami on Jan 17th. I don't know if many people play UO from those areas, but if so, we could setup a last minute UO lunch or something.

While I'm in Miami, I will be hooking up with Warik and Sauron, so if you're interested in a small gathering, post something in the Forum (don't email me about this!). If no one is interested in a quick lunch, it's cool because that's just about all the free time I'll have aside from friends and Q-Zar in those areas. But, just in case anyone was interested in a RL meeting, here's your chance.

Wow. Thanks for all of your visits and participation. I'm starting to get the feeling the evil is popular... :)

Finally gotten a good gang of people to go pking with again. Just thought I'd show a good pic from last night's fun.

Notice the mid-falling of the third guy (even has his corpse name up already). Fun fun...

Since this same question is asked SO much, I added a new section to the Newbie area. It's called "Raising Stealing Skill". If you want to know how, there is a short explanation in there that should cover the topic adequately.

I'll try to make this as simple as possible. Don't email me asking me for help with your character. I'm not a UO tutor and I have better shit to do with my day. I have a whole Newbie section setup just for such questions. If the answer isn't in there, then don't think that I've got anything more to share with you.

I'm here to be evil, not to hold anyone's hand.

*end tirade*

Great utility. This user friendly 3rd party map util is VERY nice with lots of features. I added a link to it in the New Links section or you can just go straight to the UO Auto-Map Homepage.

I updated a small part of the GM Character Builder (pt 2) instructional in the Newbie section. Basically I recently did Taming on a rabbit again and discovered that the STR gains are still there and the skill still caps around 25. If you want some STR without a lot of wasted skill points, tame/release a rabbit all night.