I read about the Item Reduction (Clean Up Britannia) plan yesterday and was pretty excited about throwing away relatively invaluable stuff to get items newbified, statues and such. At that time, OSI hadn't posted anything about it. Ironically, Dr. Twisters Bug Alert was the only source of information on this system even though it was already on the Test Center. Since seeing is better than reading, I logged into the Test Center to take a look. Tossing something in a trash barrel shows you what's available and for how much:

Now, here's where we run into a problem. I was reading the In Testing page and the details about this system that OSI finally posted. It made reference to this being Phase I and to visit In Development to read about Phase II and III. Phase III scares the shit out of me. That phase says, "Once in effect, house item decay will affect all items that are not locked down, placed in a secure container, or were placed by a GM.

House item decay will begin on October 19, 1999.

Ummm... holy shit. So my potions sitting out in non-locked-down bags and my regs sitting on tables are going to decay??? Get the fuck outta here. So, I took a couple of seconds to write this friendly email :

To : uoconcern@owo.com, sunsword@owo.com, runesabre@owo.com, calandryll@uo.com
Subject : Oct 19th House Item Decay

OSI Support and Development Members,

I'm obviously one of your paying customers. I wanted to let you know that I am 100% opposed to your Phase III of the Clean Up Britannia plan. I believe that Phase I & II should be more than adequate to reduce the item count. Phase III is soley an invasion of my gameplay. I cannot lock down both furniture and containers in my house - so you're forcing people to choose between furnishings and containers.

Do you think that anyone is going to say "I'd rather have that table than that bag of Greater Heals"? Please. This part of the plan is just insulting. It will result in decay of items that only enhance the game asthietics and drive people to using houses as stoage places instead of social environments as well as a place to hold items. Since your details on how Phase II "will change the way items are stored in houses", I'm hoping that you don't implement Phase III without first addressing the fact that most of us don't want a house full of chests.

Items are a problem? Fine, we pay you $10 a month for it to be your problem. We just want to play a game without the rules constantly changing. I don't know how big of a voice I have in this community, but I'm certain you won't listen to the single player. Perhaps getting the thousands of players that visit my site daily and generally share my views to email you will show how unwanted this is.

Have a nice day.

Richard Rowe
Nighthawk (Baja)
JoV Webmaster

Joy of Villainy
http://www.wtfman.com/

I think Phase I is a great idea. Phase II and III have me concerned. If you're worried, email them and tell them since they're not asking us directly. Apparently, the same voting system that was used to decide whether to revert Siege Perilous couldn't be used to ask our opinions on this. :/

I've been hearing a lot of people talk about strength gaining and how herding doesn't work anymore. Well, I macroed my treasure hunter and a friend of mine's newbie from 50ish STR up to 100 in 1 night of macroing. Some newbie in Bucs Den asked me, "Do you have 100 STR?" Herding is the reason I responded, "Does anyone not have 100 STR?"

Another tidbit of information - I'm blue again. I've ping-ponged 6 times, yet I somehow returned to blue when I should be "perma". I actually like being red - I sure as hell find more fights. I just thought turning blue after I was supposedly "doomed" was interesting.

As a side note, I went through and removed/updated all the dead links in the links section. Most importantly is that you don't have to download UOAutoPilot from me anymore. Someone is now updating this great program and has posted tons of good macros for it. Obviously, that's in the 3rd Party section, but all link sections were updated...

I log into UO and I'm surprised to see a gift from OSI in my character's backpack. Awww... they remembered my birthday! How sweet! As I'm talking to people and it turns out that they were also given gifts. I'm glad that OSI decided to make up some storyline about an anniversary to have an excuse to give out presents to everyone in recognition of the most beloved UO webmaster. =)

Important Quote on the Dev Board from Sunsword:

1) The point of giving players who don't want to be involved in PvP [some choice] is to be able to REMOVE the shackles that are currently placed on the PvP'ers. Reduce (or remove) statloss, update the guild-system to make more sense with PvP, add useful ladders to track PvP prowress, etc...

You guys don't have all the details yet, but I think you're really going to like what we are able to do with this...

2) So the answer is that because of public demand, we had to tighten the screws on PvP so much that it became too painful to do on a regular basis. We shackled the pvp'ers in an atempt to stop PK'ing because the code couldn't tell the difference.

What we're looking to do know is give the players a choice, based on geography, as to whether they want to be involved in PvP or not. Once we've established that, we can enhance PvP without worrying about those who aren't interested.

My plans go much deeper than this, but you get the idea.

I wanted to share that quote from the Dev Board sice it might expire before people have a chance to check there. No one knows specifically how big of an area he's talking about for this pvp zone, but it's good that he acknowledges that we want mass wars, unrestricted pvp and no stat loss.

Ok, this was really updated in the What's New section of owo.com. Apparenly, they have some long term goals and have decided to share them with us.

• Land Expansion
• Options for PvP
• Party System
• Improved Monster AI
• Increased Veteran Player Volunteer Programs

I was reading through the Dev Board and apparently last night Sunsword was in rare form answering an assload of questions. It's not often you get to see the lead developer speak, so I'd suggest going and reading the posts (if you want to be informed) before they expire.

Basically, they're talking about adding new lands without requiring a new cd to be purchased. In these new lands will be no-pvp and low penalty (possibly stat loss free) pvp zones. The other things are ok, but that's really the only point of interest to myself since I'm pretty pvp oriented. Sunsword hinted that the Skill Management system is nearly complete and that we should expect to see updates next week about it's release.

I have no idea what happened to Alchemy, Evil/Good, Necromancy, but maybe this won't be a pipe dream like those were.

I never thought that JoV would be as successful under me as it was under Warik. A big thanks to all the viewers and contributors. =)

I was looking through my old screenshots and found a pic of Ron's Last Run that I didn't post. I normally don't give smurfs hell, but I was in a mood and felt like tearing into someone. When he refused to call a gm to ban Ron, I shared my appreciation.

I don't know why, but I find that amusing. =)

This was published to In Testing today :

• The begging skills should be fully functional again. In fact, you will be able to use it on other players.
• Gold will no longer be lost when collecting it from vendors who have large amounts. Instead vendors will give use the gold to buy boats and women, and retire to the palace in Nujel'M.
• Dyes and dye tubs will always make everything turn black. They will be usable on clothing, armor, hair, skin, horses, grass, trees, rocks and other players.
• Mining without room in your backpack will destroy your backpack.
• Items that fall out of decayed player corpses will now be contained in a locked, trapped chest.
• Bankers will no longer deal with players. This will put a damper on one particular thief tactic in banks. In fact, it should largely curtail all of the activity at banks.
• The radius you can detect hidden in will now increase based on your skill, up to almost the full Shard for a grandmaster.
• Hiding will cause you to become poisoned.
• Spellcasting creatures and NPCs will now cast Reactive Armor on Energy Vortexes and then Provoke them to attack you.
• It will no longer be possible to gate.
• Looting while hidden will result in becoming poisoned.
• A problem with the formula used in the healing skill will be fixed. The result is that the healing skill will cause you to become poisoned.
• Killing cows will no longer lower karma. However, pigs cast flamestrike. Both animals are now poisonous.
• The "combat auto-move" bug will be fixed. You will now be unable to move while in combat.
• The problem whereby people of karma tier -4 could not deal with shopkeepers will be fixed. However, shopkeepers will be poisonous.
• Ordering a pet or hireling to become friends with inanimate objects will not be possible. In fact, there will be no more friends in the game at all. It's a dog-eat-dog world.
• Oh, and Dogs are now poisonous.
• Ressurrection while the resurrection menu is up will be completely impossible. This should finally fix all those ghost house-break-in exploit.
• The "You are already casting" bug will be fixed by purchasing UO Assist.
• Taste Id and Animal Lore are still useless skills. Can you believe they are even on the skill list? What the hell were we thinking?
• Provocation will no longer flag anyone criminal, because everyone will already be flagged criminal all the time anyway.
• Any use of the herding skill will result in immediate death.
• The problem with beggars talking to you from miles away will be fixed. Beggars will now teleport to your location to keep up
• Resurrectors will now die.
• Murder counts will atrophy at the rate of 1 per minute.

Obviously, none of that is true. This was posted on the Dev Board by Sie Ming (Originally from Dundee's Site) and since I liked it, I figured I'd repost it. And since it's patch day - we need some humor.

There is a new site out there worth mentioning. It's Ultima Online - A Parody Site. Nicely done take-off of the owo.com site - take a look.

Got an anonymous email today about harassment calls. Take a look.

About 5 days ago I was playing on my friends UO account. I've never played UO before and my friend was showing me how. I was in the middle of a order/chaos war with a player named "CoonDog". I chased Coondog outside of town. He jumped off his horse right when I was clicking to target him. I attacked the horse on accident. Coondog started to run because he was not able to get back on his horse . As I was chasing him he called me a "Nigger".

Well, I'm black and I don't consider that a very mature word. My friend got more upset than I did and paged a GM. The GM was like sorry for the inconvenience and we will take the necessary actions. My friend was like, "He is going to be banned for that shit".

But he wasnt banned he wasnt even temp banned for 24 hours. Nothing happened to him. Its weird how a game can ban someone for saying jap but not banning them for calling someone a nigger.

Personally, I think that "nigger" is a LOT more offensive than "jap". I mean, jap can at least be a shortcut for the word Japanese - there is little excuse for saying nigger. Then again, AAR (Korean guild on Baja before AriRang opened) used to say that all the time to Americans because they knew it was so offensive (even though most of Americans are not black), but I doubt any of them were banned for it.

Personally, I don't call gms for harassment just because it's a game, I'm an adult and I can handle whatever people say to me. However, if I were black, I'm sure that word would set me off.... leave it to gms to fuck up such an obvious case of abuse.

Well, the week of duels has ended. I didn't get to duel all of LoD like I wanted to, but I did get 67 fights in. Well, kinda - I counted the people that attacked me when I was grey/red that I killed, but since I was always alone and if I killed one (even if he was part of a group), that counts as a beatdown in my book since they willingly entered the fight. Anyhow, I ended at 61-6. I lost to Raven, Valid, TTG, Legolos, Sieve (*cough* lag *cough*) and someone else who I don't remember off the top of my head.

I'm red again from someone running into my blade spirit when I was trying to kill an ogre lord that spawned on a treasure hunt. So, I have a feeling that I'll be finding more fights soon since I don't just sit in my house and macro off the time. I'm thinking about doing a Running of the Nighthawk along the lines of what Greybeard did last year. I can't find his news posting about it in his archieves, but basically he had a standing payout of 20 or 25k for each time he was killed on a certain day. There were some rules, but when I remember/talk to him and figure out a date, I'll post something about it. Maybe I'll make it a "Kill NH on his BD" event. Anyhow, when I figure out my plans, I'll post them.

I posted the result from the Sysic story I posted to the news page a couple of days ago. Not a lot new except for the results of the duel today, but all combined it was enough to make into a story. So, being the slacker that I am, I took the easy route and just posted a new story to the stories section.

If you give a shit, go look there for the conclusion.

In case you haven't heard, Glacius was banned for asking for a simple goatee coloring. The gm basically banned him instead of just saying "no, we can't do that". You can read the whole story on The Icehouse.

Then I want to fight you. I want duels and lots of them. I want to fight so many duels that it makes me go broke from having to re-reg/potion up for the duels. I want 100 duels before the weekend is over (that's about 15 duels a day average).

If you want a duel on Baja (looting or no looting, I don't care), email me or you can just simply find me in game in SH bank or Deceit.

According to the UO Server Status Page Baja and Napa Valley have been down for 5 hours. Unfortunately, they've been down longer than that. They came up for about 30 seconds and went right back down - about 5 hours ago. All the west coast servers have been fubar since around 7am EST this morning. Runesabre said on the Dev Board that it was a problem with Global Center.

Gee, I would never have thought that Global Center was a problem. Then again, I was amazed that a developer posted on the Dev Board... *sigh*

DeatH of Pacific sent me this in icq today:

Today's Hint (from www.uo.com)
Non-player characters (NPC's) have 225 different ways of saying, "I don't understand."

Today's Hint (from me)
Gamemasters (GM's) have millions of ways of saying, "I can't help you"

How true....

It's way too early, my shard is down and didn't have it's normal server downtime wars and I'm at work. So, being bored as fuck, I start surfing the UO sites. After being bored to tears with most of the other sites, I hit Ron's to see if he's updated. Amazingly, he has. After that I'm less bored, but still bored enough to click on his Disclaimer link.

Now I'm amused. Thank god for Ron....

Ok, I'm non-stat loss red on my main. I'm running around the main dungeons and such looking for duels to pass the time. I go to Deceit and on third lvl I see Sysic grey. So, being the agressive type of guy that I am, I attack him.

He runs down to the 4th lvl, but eventually stops to fight. Good man... 1on1 as god intended. Well, after about 30 seconds someone else runs in and starts attacking me. Well, it was a dex monkey with low resist, so I drop him real quick. Sysic, of course, didn't stop because of the additional help. I wouldnt' have if I were attacked either, so I'm not blaming him.... yet.

Now, he runs to 3rd, back to 4th, back to 3rd, etc etc etc. Finally, he stays on 3rd long enough for a friend of his to run up and heal him. After I said "no 1on1?", the friend stopped healing. That spelled the end for Sysic, because a lich spawned a decided to interupt the 1 heal that could have saved Sysic. Anyhow, since he didn't stop in a 2on1 against me, I didn't stop with one against him. I loot as he gets ressed. By this time, there are three people with him.

As soon as he's ressed, they all explosion and bring up a flamestrike or ebolt - that was my cue to leave. So I recall to bucs, grab my keys, drop off the loot and reg back up. I recall to Bucs to drop off my keys to find Sysic there with his three friends and at least two demons. Gee... all that for lil ole me.

To make a long story short, in a 4on1 with demons on the other side, I still didn't recall. I ran across the server line to try and separate one of them from the group so I could get a kill, but naturally when one realized he was alone, he ran or suddenly the rest showed up (I assume because of an icq to them of where he was getting raped).

Anyhow, the bottom line is that if you have to have you and three friends (plus demons) to kill one guy, then YOU are a TOOL. And yes, Sysic, if you have 4 people - I'm allowed to go over server lines. Nice try with the 50 para's tho... next time you might want to

I hope you weren't hoping that yesterday's patch was to fix the client stability problems. Calandryll posted this to the Dev Board late last night :

Yeah, I've seen the CL reports. This mini-update was actually implemented to resolve the server crash issue. But, obviously, we are still looking to fix the crash problems as well.

Here's what they did in a nutshell and why I think they did it. Basically, they tried to stop duping. The two major changes were not being able to walk into a gate one right after another and not being able to super overload yourself using an npc. The dupe must have had something to do with both of those things combined. Back when my tower decayed, we grabbed all the stuff from my tower and put it on one of my characters with the npc trick. When we gated that character across a server line, the lag was so bad for all of us I thought Baja was going to crash.

So, if that was the way to dupe, then the server side lag we've been seeing recently could have been caused by several people on each shard trying the dupe. Anyhow, the long and short of it is I'm glad they fixed the dupe, but I wish yesterday hadn't been such a cluster fuck. Fortunately for me, I was out all day yesrtday helping a friend move out of his 3rd floor apartment so I missed the CF this patch was. Ok, that was a pain in the ass, but I guess in some weird way I was fortunate...

From my post yesterday, some of you thought that I meant that GMs can't see hidden players. First, I didn't say that and second, I'm not that stupid.

What I was referring to was that if you macro in the middle of no where, the chance that a GM is running around looking for macroing players is slim. The most likely situation is a player calling a gm and reporting you - which won't happen if your hidden.

Anyhow, news in my online life is that I think I'm now perma red on my main character. I didn't attack anyone that wasn't grey to me, had noto query on, but suddenly I'm red. *shrug* Well, I guess when I said I wanted more pvp action, it looks like I'm going to get it. Unfortunately, the only pvp I've gotten so far is gangbanging in bucs... how brave...

I don't know if they meant to... hell, they may be tired of people filling the gm queue with worthless "I found a guy macroing, come ban him" bitching. You can now do Eval Int, Anatomy and some other skills while hidden without being revealed. Most of my characters don't have hiding on them, but one's being developed or recovering from stat loss will find this very helpful in not getting nailed for macroing.

Ok, just when I think I'm gone for good, my friends drag me back to having fun again. Damnit. Oh well, if you saw the update earlier, disregard it. Thanks to Charley, Raven and Jesus - I'm still in UO. God help me, I almost escaped.

Hi, I fixed the message board.

Richard I would appreciate it if you would refrain from allowing flamboyant homosexuals who salivate over naked men to tamper with my arousing Perl code. If you wish to send hatemail to the flamboyant homosexual who salivates over naked men, please direct your comments here.

Bye.

A nice pvp guide was submitted by Nocturnal of KoY (Pacific). It gives the basic ins and outs of mage pvp, so if you're a little low in pvp skill and could use a push in the right direction, go check out that guide in the Newbie section.

Good job OSI. At least they realized a problem and coded to fix it. You can see the full update in the Latest Updates section of update.owo.com. Basically, the thing that matters to me most are these two items:

• Murderers (reds) who are not flagged as criminals or aggressors will be able to instantly log out of the game while in their house or in an inn.
• Transferring a pet will no longer result in the pet going wild.

I know that the second one was probably mainly because they basically put tamers out of business, but the side effect that reds aren't dicked out of riding horses (without "friending" them). Now, maybe if they up the spawn in dungeons back to what it was two weeks ago, people would be in dungeons for we pks to hunt...

The Forum isn't working right now. As a matter of fact, anything on the site needing CGI is not working, so the Polls are probably fucked too. Who's fault is this? Well, it's our service provider, but that's no fun. So, since Ron takes care of our site stuff, it's his fault! Send him hatemail!

Anyhow, I'll be working on getting people smarter than me (I know nothing about CGI or why it's fucked up) to fix this asap. Until then, go to the other WTFMan Message Board and post away happily.

BTW, you can "friend" a horse or whatever to someone else without it going wild. So, reds do have a way of getting horses. Thanks for all the emails - now stop telling me. =P