BUGS AND CONTENT [Author: myschyf]

STILL BUGGY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

Whoa is me, the poor hapless, casual UO player trying to work a new old character up and not knowing the latest bugs to gain stats. For without the knowing the gaining lives on in that wild imaginative tale known as ‘gaining stats and skills through normal gameplay without having to abuse bugs.’ But perhaps I should speak in plain English, eh?

How’s this for straight shooting? Almost four years into UO and not once have we been able to gain stats without abusing a bug. The current way to gain stats reminds me of some of the old house break-in bugs. You must go to any vendor. Buy up skill until you are skill capped. Then go use a skill that primarily works the stat that you want to raise until your real skill equals 10. Then set that to go down and go do another skill that raises that stat primarily until it equals 10. Then set that to go down and, if the first skill is at 0, work that skill again. If it is not yet at 0 then pick a third skill and do the same with that. See-saw between the skills until the stat you are working is where you want it.

So for instance lets say you wanted to gain strength. Go to any vendor and buy up skill until you are skill capped. Then go mine until your real skill equals 10. Then set mining to go down and go blacksmith until your real skill equals 10. Then set blacksmithing to go down and go wrestle until your real skill equals 10. Then set wrestling to go down. Wash, rinse, repeat until you are ready to shoot OSI for making stats so hard and weird to gain.

Now at this point you might say to me, “Mys where the hell have you been? Stat gain has been like this since UO:R.” You’d be right. It has been. But you know, silly me, I thought that sometime in the last, oh 10 months or so, OSI might have FIXED it! But no! Not only have they not fixed it. THEY SANCTION IT! This is the OSI-approved method of gaining stats. When questioned, the developers just kind of shrug. This was a great post where Evocare, the lead designer of UO, says, well pretty much nothing. That post has scrolled off the UO boards as of this writing but thanks to the Adrick and Evocare cheering section formerly known as Fear over at Battle Vortex we can reproduce it here for you.

Re: Gaining stat rant

The concerns you’re expressing are not lost among deaf ears. I can’t say we have a solution for you right now, but we definitely acknowledge the problem.

What the hell do you say to something like that? Woo woo? I suddenly feel a great deal of sympathy for Carly Staehlin. I was under the impression that the development teams of UO, in their many guises, had ALWAYS acknowledged the problem. Guess not. By the way its really too bad that thread scrolled off because I think it would have been amusing for some of you to see a bug being posted and sanctioned by OSI. I know it was for me, in some perverse, weird sort of way.

UO:THIRD DAWN — THE CLIENT WORKS! WOO WOO!

Well it works for me now. I’m too lazy to go back and see when they actually released the client for this but I haven’t been able to play it until recently. I had about given up but I was informed that it had been recently patched and was much much better. It is. I can actually play it, set my macros without crashing, and lo, and behold, I was able to fight an orc mage and I even saw the damage as it appeared and not 10 minutes later as a ghost. This is going to be a bit unkind but saying the client works now is sort of like having a head cold instead of the flu. You can function but you still don’t feel good.

For those of you for whom the client has never worked I urge you to give it a try. The graphics and textures are very pretty, the spell effects are very cool, and there’s some useful things that have been added to the interface. The options screen, for instance, is MUCH better than the old one. However I’d play it for a while before I did any extended life-threatening stuff. For starters, its still pretty slow. Recalling and gating, in particular, can take a few minutes (yes minutes, I timed it) depending on where you are going. It took me approximately 2.5 minutes to recall to the large Brit bank roof. It took me about 40 seconds to recall to Skara Brae. It only took about 20 seconds to go to Jhelom but no one ever goes to Jhelom. I recalled into Cove (where there is a humongous orc population — more on that later) and was at half hits by the time I could move. Be careful. I’m on DSL and was playing on a P3450 so those times shouldn’t have been that long. Those times, by the way, are from hitting the macro for the spell until the time I could move in my new location.

On top of that, the new client takes a TON of getting used to. Nothing is as it used to be. You have to reset all your macros. None of the monsters look like they used to and right now are sort of hard to distinguish from the PCs and NPCs, which also don’t look like they used to. Things like reagents and potions and scrolls all look the same. Houses still look the same. Horses are butt ugly and if you have an old nightmare (before nightmares were different than black horses) there’s a bug that makes it appear as if it was a horse. It still reacts as a mare, but it looks like a regular old horse.

However, you really do want to run the 3D client because of the visuals. Everything is a lot crisper, the colors are WAY cool, armor looks great, and then there’s….

THE NEW CONTENT

I didn’t think he could pull it off without the volunteers but Calandryll has done a good job with the new content. The orc attacks are fun. The new orcs are fun. The new items are fun. Every couple of weeks there’s something new so it isn’t like before where the monsters attacked the towns and then that sort of got old and fizzled out. I’ll skim over the new stuff for those of you that don’t know about it.

There are a bunch of new types of orcs. There are frightened orcs that run away from you, orc scouts which shoot arrows at you and teleport and hide when they get to about 50% hits, orc chompers which are like mega orc lords, orc bombers which throw explosives at you and savages. Savages are not orcs and I’m told they will fight orcs. I’ve never seen one stay alive long enough to do it so I’ll have to take my friend’s word on that. Savages kill nightmares and for those of you that hate tamers there’s nothing that will bring a smile to your face faster than seeing a nightmare go down to the savage that you were fighting until some lame tamer came and stole it from you. The fact that the mare going down is usually follwed by “WTF??? It killed my mare??” by the hapless tamer that doesn’t realize that the savage has now targeted him is even better. The cries of “HELP!” by that same tamer when he realizes he’s about to die just put the icing on the cake.

Orc scouts have these cool orc bows which seem to be, in my extremely unscientific experimentation, roughly equal to a bow of power except they only work on orcs. I think. Orc mages have these green masks of orcish kin that make orcs think you are one of them. They blow up if you attack an orc with them on. Orc Bombers have bola balls and with five bola balls you can make a bola and knock people off horses and its a few minutes before they can get back on. Again, very cool. But the coolest stuff so far is the savage paint. With the savage paint, you can make yourself look like this:

Pic courtesy of IanStorm

You can read more about the orcs, the orc-stuff, and the savages over at IanStorm and I urge you to do so if you are still playing UO or want to get back into it. There’s undoubtedly more to the savage paint than we know so far. As I said, the new content is very cool. All of the non-SP people I know who have been playing for years are in the towns killing orcs. One note: there’s not much difference between Trammel and Felucca as far as the orcs go. The orcs are either in the towns or supposedly in the orc forts. I went to the orc fort out by Yew and didn’t see any of the new orcs. Minoc, Skara and Cove seem to be inundated with them with the largest congestion in Cove. However, since you can’t PK people in towns, there are as many kill stealers in Felucca (don’t listen when PKs try to tell you that people in Felucca are more polite — they aren’t. There’s just less people in Felucca so it seems that way.) as there are in Trammel. Felucca has the extra detriment of having bank thieves. But if you are looking for that ‘danger element’ *cough*pkfodder*cough* by all means head on into Felucca. The couple of times I’ve ventured there lately there were PKs waiting by the entrances to Minoc and Skara.

So to sum up: Stat gain still impossible without exploiting bugs 4 years into the game, 3D client playable but slow, new content is kewl. Note to OSI: fix the damn bugs and the 3d client already and clone Cal.