Five on Friday has been posted on UO.com

For all previous Five on Fridays, organized by topic, please see the master list here at UOCodex.com

1. It’s great that the Treasures of Tokuno event is back. Do you have plans to do other events like this, but with new rewards?

Aaron “Darkscribe” Cohen, Producer:
Yes. There are a few variations that we are talking over and will experiment with. We’d like to make a system that isn’t just about combat, but also involves other disciplines like crafting, fishing, mining or others. That would bring players together with different interests and abilities and give them a reason to work together. We’re working on something along those lines and will roll it out when ready. I can’t give a timeline at the moment, but we like the idea a lot.

2. I love the 9th Anniversary stuff! Will we get to see any of this on the Test Shard?
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According to the Shard Issues at UO.com, Character Transfer Service is now active:

The Character Transfer Service has been restored to service. We appreciate your continued patience, and apologize for the inconvenience this interruption may have caused.

From the UO.com Update Center:

On Wednesday, September 13, 2006, at approximately 6:00pm PDT (September 14 - 1:00AM GMT), we will be deploying a publish to the Origin shard.

The update will contain the following changes:

* Character Statues will no longer lose their Sculpted By name (existing statues will need to be resculpted)
* Fixed an entitlement issue with the weapon engraving tool
* Using the Weapon Engraver’s context menu no longer displays a system message twice
* Red Soulstone no longer does an entitlement check for UO:SE
* Fixed an entitlement issue with the cannon
* Fixed an issue that allowed players to fire the cannon without standing next to it
* Added live event content

We expect the Origin shard to remain offline for approximately one hour.

On Wednesday, September 13, 2006 at approximately 6:00PM PDT (September 14 - 1:00AM GMT), we will deploy client patch 5.0.4d.

Details for the patch are as follows:

* Vet Reward Player Statues no longer have health bars
* Players can no longer access the Virtue Gump from a Player Statue’s paperdoll
* Added 9th Anniversary splash screen and entitlement check
* Adjusted the location of the progress loading bar for the 3D client splash screen
* Updated text strings and localization for Live Event

If patched correctly, your current version will display 5.0.4d for both clients. If you have any difficulty receiving this patch, please check the following:

Check the “Patch” directory within your Ultima Online directory (the default location is C:\Program Files\EA Games\Ultima Online\Patch). This directory should be empty. Any files in this directory should be deleted.

Run a virus scan on your computer. Undetected viruses may cause conflicts with patching Ultima Online. For information on up-to-date virus detection software, please visit http://www.mcafee.com/myapps/vso/default.asp.

If after trying the above, you are still experiencing difficulty patching the Ultima Online client, please visit this web page.

Previous Client: Version 5.0.4c (August 29, 2006)
Associated With: No Particular Publish.
>> Full Client Timeline List

Update from Shard Issues (UO.com) concering issues that cropped up today:

Log-In Server Issues and Entitlement Issues have been resolved.

We appreciate your continued patience, and apologize for the inconvenience this interruption may have caused

Just a heads-up, we mentioned early that there are log-in issues. The shard issues page at UO.com has been updated with the following information:

We are aware that some players are experiencing entitlement issues such as ML access and 6th character’s missing. We would like to let you know this is a temporary issue and your entitlements are still in place. We appreciate your patience, and apologize for the inconvenience this interruption may have caused.

From Shard Issues (UO.com):

We are aware that some players are experiencing issues logging in. We are working diligently to solve this issue, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.Thank you for your patience.

I’m hearing that people are reporting weird issues after logging in, concerning their accounts (the servers don’t think they have the right expansion, etc.), and this appears to be all tied together.

If you are running Ultima Online Under Linux, you might want to check the UO-On-Wine-HowTo. It appears that it was updated by Xanathar/Marco today.

I’m not sure what has changed in this update, although I know a major release of Wine came out recently.

According to the TugSoft UOAssist website, if you are running Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 2003 Server, you might want to be aware of the following:

* If you are running Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 2003 server and are getting the error “Corrupted Data or Unsupported OS” you probably have UOAssist.exe set to run in a ‘Compatibility’ mode which is causing the error. To turn that off do the following.

* If you have an UOAssist icon on your desktop right click on it and select Properties. Then click the Compatibility tab. At the top make sure the ‘Run this program in compatibility mode for:’ option is OFF.

* Or Using Windows Explorer navigate to your UOAssist directory (default is: C:\Program Files\UOAssist). Right click on the UOAssist.exe file (it will have the red UOA icon). Select Properties and then click the Compatibility tab. At the top make sure the ‘Run this program in compatibility mode for:’ option is OFF.

* NOTE: UOAssist has been updated to work even when it is running in a compatibility mode and a future update will contain that change.