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

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 Ladder

We 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).

From Update.UO.com:

On Tuesday, November 7, 2006 at approximately 7:00PM PST (November 8 - 3:00AM GMT), we will deploy client patch 5.0.6c.

Details for the patch are as follows:

* Ladders now work correctly in the 3D client
* Added Castle ladders to get off the roof of castles and keeps
* Players who have existing ladders will need to re-deed them
* Castle ladders that face south and east are invisible
* Added new ladder art for south and east leaning ladders
* Adjusted the height of the Heritage tables to allow items to sit on them properly
* Crystal walls with windows are now the same height as ones without windows
* Raised the height of one of the sides of Shadow foundations to be the same as the others
* Added artwork in the Heritage menu for the tree trunks

PLEASE NOTE:

* The current version of the Heritage ladders are meant for use with castles and keeps only

If patched correctly, your current version will display 5.0.6c 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.

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

From the update center: Update.UO.com

On Tuesday, November 7, 2006 at approximately 7:00PM PST (November 8 - 3:00AM 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

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

Jeremy Dalberg’s first Five on Friday as the new UO Community Coordinator.

November 3, 2006

1. “What’s the Shard of the Dead stuff? Why should I bother to log on?”

Oh, man, the Shard of the Dead has some crazy cool stuff - Vampire Wars, mazes, monsters, zombies… too much, in fact, to go into detail on here, so I got all the devs to give up the goods on their projects. Check it out here. There sure are some twisted minds on this team.

2. “The 9th Anniversary page says “Ordering information for Germany is coming soon!” What does “soon” mean? I want my Anniversary tokens!”

We’ve been pursuing this one all week, internally - the short answer is still “soon” but since that’s not only useless but annoying, here’s the long answer: Germany has some regulatory processes that video games must go through before being put on the shelves. Until the 9th Anniversary package makes it through that process, we won’t have retail information to put up. We’ll keep on this one, and post updates regularly on Stratics.

3. “These Halloween monsters are too hard!” or, conversely, “These Halloween monsters are too easy!”

So, to clear up the confusion: The Halloween graveyard spawns are NOT normal undead. They will vary in difficulty - here’s the full explanation from Draconi:
“The spawn will increase its difficulty if it’s beaten too quickly by players. If the next round is beyond the players’ abilities, it will continually tone down until it finds a good spot.
The balance to this is that there’s more than one graveyard to be fighting in; so if you can’t handle one, try looking for another that’s been ignored for a while and has a more decayed difficulty.” .

4. “MrTact said that he’d put Hit Chance Increase back on shields, but he hasn’t! What’s up with that?”
In the interest of strict honesty, I’d like to quote the whole House of Commons section about HCI:

Sprite - *Dolgorath[ATL]* Has there been any discussion among the devs about the HCI on Shields issue? Are there any plans to bring it back or remove it from existing, non-artifact shields? This causes a significant pvp inbalance between people who have the extra HCI and people who don’t.

MrTact - I wouldn’t say we’ve discussed it, though we are aware of it.
MrTact - Right now I think the way HCI and Hit Lower XXX are implemented is a little overpowering. That’s something I was ruminating about this morning, in fact.
MrTact - So A) That imbalance should be mitigated in the rebalance
MrTact - and B) Unless someone gives me a good reason why that property was removed from shields, I see no reason not to put it back.
MrTact - So, there you go . . . I have foolishly committed myself.

Right now the “good reason” is that we have not yet mitigated the imbalance, so for the moment, HCI will not be added back on to shields. That could, of course, change in the future - but the overall game balance remains the most important concern.

5. “Are there any plans to revamp the Doom artifact drop system?”

With the different looting rights systems on Treasures of Tokuno and the Grim Reaper, this question has come up. Leurocian has some ideas: “There are plans to revamp the Doom Artifact system to make it similar to Treasure of Tokuno. The tentative idea is that each player character participating against a gauntlet boss or the Dark Father will accumulate artifact reward points. The more artifact reward points a player character accumulates the more likely an artifact will spawn in his/her backpack. Player characters who score higher on the Top Attacker list will earn more points. However, everyone in the Top Attackers list that stays the entire duration of the combat (even if slain) will still earn points. This way, everyone who participates will eventually be awarded an artifact. As far as when this system will be implemented, this is still to be determined. No promises.”

That’s it for my first Five on Friday, folks - it’s been quite a week! Oh, and by the way - hurry up and grab those coins, because Sherry the Mouse has almost finished driving off the rats…

— Jeremy

From Update.UO.com

An intermittent issue with the entitlement process has been discovered that sometimes causes the application of the code to fail. Until the issue can be fixed permanently, the code can be applied successfully using the following steps:

1. Log into the Account Management website
2. Click the Upgrade Account link
3. Enter the code
4. Select the code you typed in and copy it (Yes, you will need this. Please be sure the code is entered correctly!)
5. Click “Okay”
6. Click “Accept” (click it multiple times if required)
7. When it brings up the billing info page click “CANCEL”
8. Click “CANCEL” again
9. Repeat steps 1 & 2
10. Enter your code again or if you copied it “ctrl + v”
11. Click “OKAY”
12. That’s it!

From: Update.UO.com

Due to the issue that occurred yesterday with players being able to access private houses, we had to remove some of the UO9 ladder functionality. We’re hard at work on a fix, and will have it in place soon. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Yes, there are people who already have access to the UO: 9th Anniversary Collection. Check your mailbox/doorstep/etc. tomorrow and friday if you have pre-ordered in the US (and possibly Canada).

Another client patch has been released, version 5.0.6b, with details at UO.com (or below).

On Tuesday, October 31, 2006 at approximately 6:00PM PDT (November 1 - 2:00AM GMT), we will deploy client patch 5.0.6b.

Details for the patch are as follows:

* Modified Heritage Ladders to allow players to reach the roof of their castles and keeps
* Updated localization text
* Bump client version to “5.0.6b”

PLEASE NOTE:

* Ladders will require a follow-up patch to work correctly in the 3D client
* A follow-up patch will be required to update the art for two ladder directions

If patched correctly, your current version will display 5.0.6b 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.