>> Master Five on Friday List

Leurocian is Back! (Oct 13, 2006)

I see that Leurocian is back! What is he working on?

Patrick “Leurocian” Malott, Designer: I’ve been working on additions and bug fixes for the heritage items such as adding fruit on the apple and peach fruit trees and allowing the curtains to open and close. I’m also working on design documents for UO: Kingdom Reborn as well as collaborating with our other designers on resolving ‘hot topic’ issues such as Evasion balancing.

How was Ophidian Invasion developed? (August 11, 2006)

Can you give use some insight on how you’ve developed the Ophidian Invasion? What were your overall goals, and do you think you achieved this?

Draconi: The Ophidian invasion is a bit of a labor of love between a lot of people on the team. We’ve all had our hands in different parts of it, so I’ll try to just give a quick rundown on how it was developed.

The overarching goal for the invasion has been both to entertain and to set the stage for things yet to come. Inu still lies captured, cut off for weeks upon weeks from the world. The visions she sees and the portents foretold are coming to a head, and soon everything must be revealed. It’s only appropriate that in this time of turmoil that the world itself should begin to be plunged into chaos. We felt that the players have been given a chance to stand united against a common foe; some learning how to work with one another for the first time, and others being able to bring their experience to the fore.

So the invasion began in what seems to be a normal course of events. The Ophidians are wronged, and therefore struck back. Yet then the villagers of Papua are decimated, and thus retaliate aided by volunteers from across the facets. We’ve seen the invasion progress from a simple set of random Ophidian scouts, to avengers setting upon thieves, to attacks on cities, and now what seems to be… something more. We’ve worked with the GMs to deliver many portions, created new systems entirely, and even leveraged the abilities of the advanced spawner from the Despise invasion - it’s definitely been a fantastic process.

It’s certainly our hope that we’ve succeeded in our foremost goal: having people enjoy the invasion and feel like they got something from it (mmm, army rations…). Beyond that, yes, be prepared, I don’t think we’re quite done yet.

UO Cancellation? :rolleyes: (July 28, 2006)

Is UO going to be cancelled?

Darkscribe: No! We are working extremely hard right now building a new future for UO. I wish I could let you in on what we’re up to, but please be patient. It will be worth the wait.

Dev Team focus these days (July 28, 2006)

Where is your focus these days - new content, bug fixes, PvP balance or something else?

Darkscribe: Oh boy, we have a lot of focuses right now. New content? Yes. Bug fixes, yes, especially PvP balance and exploits. More than anything, my focus has been on working through new ideas and making detailed plans. We are trying to simultaneously plan out the next five publishes and the next three years.

Where do Five on Friday questions come from? (July 7, 2006)

Do all your 5 on Friday questions come from the boards, or do you sometimes make them up to cover a general topic?

Wilki: Most of them come from the boards, either copied exactly how they were written or cleaned up a bit for clarity. Sometimes we do write a Q & A to answer something specific that we want to talk about, though that isn’t always the case. In general, we try to pick questions that will be of interest to the greatest number of players.

Inu Story - The Author (May 12, 2006)

I really enjoyed the “Inu” story that was printed on BNN. Who wrote it, and do you plan on writing more fiction like that?

Inu the Crone: I commissioned this relatively unknown writer who goes by the name Draconi to write the first chapter of my story. So many of you have come to me asking me about bits and pieces of the story. By bits and pieces, I literally mean one word at a time. And you wonder I prefer the company of scorpions and sand to you people? Bah.

In any case, I do think I will have this Draconi fellow write more of my story in the future.

Q&A and Legacy Bugs (March 24, 2006)

How is QA involved in determining which legacy bugs will get fixed each publish?

Ando: Before each publish, the Dev team meets to discuss what they would like to fixed. Each department, such as QA, Community, GMs, Engineering, etc each bring a list of things they would like to see addressed. Everyone has their own view of what is important, but we are generally able to come to a consensus on what we want to do in a reasonable amount of time. A representative from QA will normally attend one of these meetings with a list of its top issues. We prioritize this list based on a number of factors such as how severe a bug impacts a player, the likelihood a player will encounter a bug, and whether or not it’s a hot issue we’re seeing a lot of discussion about.

Submitting a bug (April 7, 2006)

What happens when I submit a bug using the bug form on uo.com?

Ando: When a player submits a bug to the Quality Assurance (QA) team using through the bug submission form (http://www.uo.com/mailBug.html), an email gets sent to our UO Bugs inbox. Then each day one of our testers, such as Serado or Mesanna, goes through the list and pull reports that appear to be new issues. We cross-reference these with bugs we already have entered in our tracking database to check for duplicates, and test anything that appears to be new. We pay particularly close attention to player reports while a new publish is being tested on Test Center, or just after the release of a new publish to production shards, and treat these issues has high priority. Once we do find a new bug that we are able to reproduce, we enter it into our bug tracking database, and if it’s critical enough, we bring it to the rest of the Dev team’s attention.

Sometimes players tell us they are concerned that we did not receive their report because we do not respond to them, so they send it again. This is not necessary though, generally because we’re so busy testing new features in addition to bug reports from players, we don’t have time to respond to each report we receive. We typically only have time to respond to players who tell us about an important bug we don’t know about, but don’t provide us with enough details to reproduce it.