•Sunday Publish

This just in from UO.com FYI:

Publish Update, October 1st Sep 29 2000 4:03PM CST (GMT -06:00)
We will be publishing the changes listed in Testing for Next Update to all Ultima Online shards on Sunday, October 1st. The publish will be active on all shards following their Monday, October 2nd maintenance period, barring any unforeseen downtimes. Once this publish is active, players will see a message in their own profile stating, “Cannot determine this account’s age.” This message is a side-effect of code that is not currently active, and can be disregarded.

This publish will include the opening of Dungeon Khaldun on all shards.

The changes will be added to Latest Game Updates once the publish is active on all shards.

And here are those changes, so you know:

Various Fixed and Updates Sep 27 2000 5:39PM CST
Various changes and fixes
The repeating creature sounds occurring at the Moonglow bank will be fixed
Dungeon lighting levels will be restored to their previous levels (the level they were before the dungeon respawn changes)
Certain areas of the map which have an improperly large spawn ratio of creatures will be addressed. This is not the final step in our surface respawn changes.

Various Fixes and Updates Sep 26 2000 1:59PM CST
Dragons will be able to dispel Energy Vortex's and Blade Spirits

Dungeon Khaldun Sep 8 2000 5:19PM CST
The Dungeon Khaldun will be located in the Lost Lands (T2A) on the Felucca facet. The dungeon has two entrances which are both located to the far east of Delucia. The sextant coordinates for the entrances are:
58o 16’S, 5o 7’E
62o 8’S, 3o 47’W
Khaldun is designed to be a dungeon for veteran players and as such, it is meant to be very difficult. Rather than publishing a full document that gives away all of the dungeon's secrets (thus spoiling its many surprises), this document will give you some basic information on what to look for. A full document will be posted when the dungeon is published to the live shards.

When testing this new dungeon, keep the following things in mind:
There are new monsters in this dungeon. Many of them will act differently than existing monsters.
The dungeon has some secret passages and rooms. Finding them will not be easy.
Some spells and aspects of skills will not work in this dungeon. These include:
The Mark spell.
The Resurrection spell.
The Healing skill when attempting to resurrect (healing and curing will work however).
Killing another player will sometimes bring unexpected repercussions upon the murderer.

Enjoy!!

Later

•News Time

Bringing to you once again all the nifty info that has come into the works as of today. Figuring that right now I am bored out of my mind, while my little Avatar goes at it with a mad sheep on SP. Gotta love that ROT.

Melantus over at the UO.COM message forums, wants to know what you think of the new dungeon changes. As of yet I am still undecided, mainly since my amazing cable connection gets me 900+ pings at night on most shards. So go check out the thread and see what your fellow players are saying/whining about now.

Looks like the test running for Vet Rewards is having some issues. And of course you know what that means, the boo-birds are out.

Once again one of our very own here at UOPG has come out with yet another outstanding article on Factions. Go check out what Bob has to say, its under "I will not fight like a man. I will fight like an Evil Overlord."
All I can say is Bob rocks.

In other Factions news, I stole this from the UO.com Factions forum, wonderfully made specifically for factions. Designer_Evocare had some info to pass along. For all the lazy folks out there:

Test Factions

This is a quick note to let everyone here know that the faction system will disappear from the Test Factions shard for a few days. When it returns it will have both the functioning silver coins (the actual coins themselves rather then the intangible silver variable which was being used for now), and a slew of fixes for some current problems and bugs. Sorry for the inconvenience, but I hope to see you all again on the shard in a few days. Thanks!

- Evocare

So all you factions testers out there get ready to test out some new features in the near future. Well thats it for me, back to my little Avatar. I know its SP and all, but damn I have burnt up 3 pairs of scissors already today!

Later

•How I saw Red die

I logged on to find little ol' Redrum on my ICQ. We chatted a bit, hooked up in game, and after mucking around trying to find a chest that didn't want to be found, I asked him if he's interested in meeting The Executioner in Wrong. He said, "SURE!"

He had his warrior, I had mine. We met up at the Tower and went on into the bowels of Wrong. I have NEVER seen anyone laugh at his own death the way Red did. I swear, I resed him twice and he got healer resed at least once. Once Kwan, Xarot, Quincy the Executioner and their assorted minions got together, they cleaned the whole freaking place out. I saw 2-3 ghosts at any time. After a bit of getting folks resed and me doing the "I will be the guinea pig and lead them off" and almost dieing 3-4 times, people got to their bodies and cleaned up the spawn. Oh, what did I do? I ran like a bitch everytime I saw the Executioner with his Executioner's Axe of IKILLYOUNEWBIEBIYOTCH. He swings that axe so well, Gator would hang up his axe in shame after he saw him.

Wrong is freaking insane. Level 1 as you walk in could have 2-3 lizards mulling about, or 10k red wizards, brigands, and lizards. Just to the right of the teleporters is the Brigand area. Not bad for a single well experienced warrior. Just be ware that the spawn CAN get insane. Did I mention that? Ok...

Beyond that, where the Trolls used to spawn are the Brigand spawns ("camps") and blue NPC's yelling "release me from my chains, I suck and I can't just walk out". I usually ignore them and beat up on the Brigands. Used to be lots of traps here, but they got moved it seems. At least I never got hit with one there. To the East side of Wrong are cells of Brigands that you can't get to (bear in mind this is on Great Lakes shard). The doors say "a barred gate/door". Red and I tried magic unlock but that wouldn't work. We just gave the brigands the finger and walked off.

Downstairs is where the fun REALLY begins. Kwan Li, Xarot the Black Archmage, a ton of little Red Wizard of Thay Biyotches, misc. Brigands, and the MAN (or woman in some cases) him(her)self, The Executioner. In this scenario we had ol' Quincy kicking ass. Can you say: "I hit you, you die, and you can't do shit to me?".

He has to have 200 (or 2000; take your pick, it really doesn't matter) in each of the following: Lumberjacking (seems that he benefits from the Lumberjacking bonuses; thank you very much OSI), Swords, Tactics, Anatomy, and Dexterity; he also has permanent (yes, I said permanent) Magic Reflect, permanent Reactive Armor (even when using a bow; now that's fucking stupid), hits like a boar that hasn't been fed in days and you are bleeding all over it's pigpen, and hits everyone within his line of sight with Harm or Life Drain (has to be, he keeps taking my life the bastard) over and over. Only way to kill him efficiently is Blade Spirits OR Energy Vortex. Ganging him without healing support will have you seeing grey VERY fast.. OH, and don't bring majickal and/or good armor. My Invul suit lost 10 AR (FUCK SHIT AND DAMN) and Red had some shields break.

There was one mage that was casting blades, then invisible, and dropping more blades just to get kill rights. I got to show Red my 3l33t looting skills by beating up on the poor Executioner as he got raped by 3-4 Blade Spirits. Granted, I got the gold, but it sucks when you are stuck between a staircase, a wall, a spawned chest, and the Blade Spirit you cast earlier as it keeps you from casting dispel, teleport, greater heal, or recal. Luckily, it dispelled on it's own. :/

To the east and west of the "Executioner's Love Room" (Where the Ogre Lords used to spawn) is misc. spawns of brigands and red mages. Be VERY wary of traps on the ground. I think they all got moved down here from the old Troll room. They will hurt you, poison you, cause you to be disrupted while casting and all kinds of shit. Gas, spikes, saws, etc etc. That Executioner is one sick bastard.

Um...can someone tell me how a Brigand can use a shield with a xbow? Please? Tell me how that is possible. These little bitches got killed by me first EVERYTIME. They knew how to hurt you with their bows/xbows.

My final take on Mr. Man? The loot on the Rapist Bastard (my pet name for the Executioner cause he RAPES every character within sight) is decent. 500+ and some chances at a magic item. I wouldn't melee him alone cause you WILL die. Bring friends and be prepared to take a dirtnap eventually. If he don't get you, one of his mage buddies will. He retargets the nearest person and I SWEAR he keys in on archers (I saw him go after EVERY archer that shot him at least once; damn my ass still hurts from running from that axe). His "powers" are ungodly. And know what? I like it. THIS is the challenge I have been looking for. Hard enough to make it challenging, but with a couple of friends or "luck", a decent way to have fun. One thing I worry about is the Mage campers. I wish he could dispel the Spirits and Vortexs (no other spells thank you; he doesn't need them). Otherwise, they could just sit there hiding and waiting for one to appear, drop 2-3 blades, one Vortex (I saw a single Vortex drop the Rapist Bastard quick), and then disappear and just wait for him to die. Lame.

Armani, my smith, is going to be PISSED when I show him my beat up armor :(. He hates it when I screw up pretty armor.

Hasta.

•Poison Mage 201

This is part 2 in a series on how to become a poison mage. If you read part one and followed my directions, you have a decent amount of cash and have 100 Int, 100 Str, and 25 Dex. You should also have about 30k stowed in the bank, and if you’re smart you’ve been picking up reagents on the ground for the last 2 days or so that it took you to get here.

First things first, go buy a boat, the smallest one you can find. At the very least you will need a Greater Heal, a Recall, an FS scroll and a summon water elemental scroll, but a full spellbook is best. Buy some mark scrolls, or get someone to mark for you, and mark runes to 10 mage shops, especially Occlo and the 5 on Moonglow island itself, then Magincia, and the 2 in Britain. Add one more of your choice, then let’s get to work.

Using your set of runes, recall around and get about 500 of each FS reg. Now, go place that shiny new boat and sail out onto the ocean blue, and using the 8x8 method, as lovingly described in the Stratics Magery forum GM yourself magery and work on eval. Once you get magery to 70, switch to summon water to get gains. Do this until you are a 3x GM, med, eval, and magery.

At this point you’ll need to make some more money, more than likely. Gating NPC’s is fairly profitable for a GM mage and you can make reg stops while you do it. You need to buy up scrolls and make friends with a competent alchemist. Using the wonderful guides here on UOPG, work inscription, then poisoning during burst hour. As you work inscription, you’ll find that there is a decent market for recall, mark, and gate scrolls. So sell some and make some cash. Place a vendor if you can, so you can spend more time earning skills, and less time making money. Poisoning is an even bigger cash cow than inscription can be, and once you GM it, your days of worrying about money are all but over.

You’ll note that, as much as possible, I prefer to work on one skill at a time. I think it’s most efficient that way, and it ignores those pesky skill timers. Now, go buy healing and anatomy to 30, and get a boatload of bandages. Go somewhere and cast firefield and walk around inside it until you get to 50 resist. Use the bandages to heal yourself. Even failing 50% of the time, it’s still cheaper than casting GH on yourself. Now, go GM wrestling on some critters somewhere, or on a kind friend or guildmate if possible. Getting wrestling to GM ought to only take 2 days or so

Now get back out on that boat, and following the resist guide here on UOPG, finish resist. This one is going to take a while, and you will probably want to start practicing PvP during this time, but you must devote every burst hour to raising resist. At this point you’ll be dropping healing and anatomy in favor of resist. Go ahead and keep healing yourself until you get to 70 resist, then you’ll have to rely on GH, which is more expensive, but you’re rich now anyway.

That’s part 2, next time we get into some specific tactics for you to use in battle.

•State of UO

Brought to you by the UO Message Forums:

State of UO

Well it has been 3 years for UO. Quite an achievement for a game expected to last six months or so.

We (OSI) have learned a lot since those early days. UO was a first in many ways, and there was and still is room to grow. Certain things are essential for an online game to prosper for an extended period of time and be successful. Things such as: listening to the players and getting good feedback from them as decisions and changes are made, providing good feedback to the players as the game evolves, staying on top of bugs and problems, helping to keep the game fun and interesting, providing new content. Note that when I said successful, I am not talking about pure numbers. There should be more to an online game then statistics or charts. What we have been trying to do with UO is take it in a new direction, and listen to the players and make changes according to their feedback. Basically you are a part of this Dev Team through your feedback and suggestions, or even complaints. So what do we expect of UO in the future?

We will continue on the same path of adding new things to UO. So far that has meant a new dungeon, new changes to the spawn, new items. We will also continue to listen to the players and include them on how UO will progress. In fact we plan to ramp up the feedback obtained from our forums in a really good way. I think our response to taking care of problems in the game such as scamming and exploiting so forth has been good. Our main concern there is to correct the problem or "flaw" in the game.

I'm sure many wonder what sort of things we will add to UO in the future. Well, I wouldn't want to spoil the suprise. However try to remember how far we have come since housing was opened in Trammel. That shadow wyrm you want to fight, the repond weapon you found, the times you will spend in Khaldun or the newly revamped Despise/Wrong/Hythloth etc, the enormous amount of bugs that have been fixed (mostly behind the scenes) that allow for better play...all this since Trammel housing. There is still a lot in front of us even now to be done. However the QA team, Designer team, and programmer teams have all increased in size in the past few months. In fact I think some of our teams have doubled in size. We are serious about staying with UO and improving it. There is plenty to be done, and with your feedback we can do it right. This is just the first level of a new direction in UO. Certainly not perfect, and we know that. Changes and fixes take time, and our plates are certainly full. But the best way to tackle this is to press on and get things done.

Melantus
Online Community Coordinator
Ultima Online
Melantus@uo.com

Keep up the good work guys, your doing one hell of a job. ::applauds::

Later

•Mindblast: The Results Are In!!

Well after talking with numerous players on the subject of Mindblast, I went to test to see for myself. The problem is that, half the people think the damage is based on what your current stats are. The other half believe it is based upon your base stats, whether under outside influence or not. On test, I did this by myself, I just went out of town and casted away. I performed 16 casts per stat set. Reason being that you only get so many damn regs there, plus after a little bit the results were final. You will see what I mean. I also have Anat and Healing, this way I saved my regs for casting MB. Here were my skills and results:

STR: 100
INT:100
DEX: 25
Magery: GM
Eval Int: GM
Meditation: GM
Resist: GM
Anatomy: GM
Healing: GM

MAX DAM: 36 MIN DAM: 12 TOTAL AVERAGE: 23.1


STR: 111
INT: 111
DEX: 14
Magery: GM
Eval Int: GM
Meditation: GM
Resist: GM
Anatomy: GM
Healing: GM

MAX DAM: 40 MIN DAM: 20 TOTAL AVERAGE: 32.5

So there you have it. If you drink potions/use spells before PvPing a Mage, beware you have been warned. Now I will go back and change the LJ essay to read the way it used to read. Out of the 16 shots with enhanced stats, 10 of them were for 40 points worth of whoop ass. I will be deleting the LJ:103 Revision article, since it no longer applies. I am sorry for the problems this may have caused. For all the individuals out there that emailed me, thank you very much. You were a great help, as you always are.

Later

•I guess I'm wrong.

I just read this post from Cal about the reward program. If you can get 4 three year rewards, then it's obvious that you can get 4 of the others. So it's possible to get 4 bless deeds. Oh well. I'll stick with dying from harpies and decorating my house like a little school girl until it passes over.

In 2 week old that I just now noticed news, Black & White, the "god" game that was supposed to come out in November, has been delayed until Spring of next year. I just love the reason: EA doesn't think it will sell a lot of copies if it's shipped around Christmas shopping time. Peter, the creator, says it would be done by November-December, but EA won't ship it. I'm not joking, either.

•Honey, I am HOME!

Gawd it's great when something works right. After fighting with the cable company for almost 2 weeks, cable is working as it was intended. On top of that, I got TWO computers on the one line. Isn't that just spiffy?!

Look for some Redrum and Nieves adventuring updates as well as some really neat and dandy things from us at the UOPG Crew!

My thank yous go out to the updaters for the great job they have been doing. You guys are da bomb. Even EA knows it! ::wink wink::

Be ready...cause I am back and better than ever!!!

Muhuhahaha!

::goes back to smoking his UO pipe::

Hasta.

•Bless Deeds and My picks for the Rewards Program.

Right now everyone and their mother is debating the bless deed issue. On all the major sites, including UO formus people are complaining that PvP will be ruined if bless deeds are made available to everyone. Doubtful to say the least.

First, how many people do you know that have accounts and still play UO are 24 + months old. Yes yes blah blah Redrum blah blah but he is Redrum. He doens't count. Most of the people I knew in game that actually PvPed are long gone. Guilds like S!S, SSJ, ARR are nothing now. The newer warrior guilds are comprised of newer players. I know about 2 people on Atlantic that PvP and have had an account for 2 yrs or more.

Second, weapons decay. And when you are using a weapon non stop, like all the "newbies" will when they get their bless deeds, the weapons will decay fast. And you can only repair a weapon so many times.

Third, although they arnt's silver vanq's faction items are blessed for something like 3 weeks. So no worrying about constantly buying weapons at your local vendor.

Now onto my picks. I am a rare hunter so presumably I would want the rarest of items. Those items would be the clothing for the reward I am getting (My account is not yet 2 yrs old). But getting two pieces of clothing is worthless. I think I ll get a furn dye tub bc their market value is very high now.

The greatest item is the horse. My god a horse! You never have to buy one again and its gonna look cool as shit. I wish I had a 3+ year account. Thats status right there.

In other news, if any of you who read this site server jump in PvP...ie at Bucs Den run back and forth across the bridge to move from internal server to internal server to avoid getting targeted...you are fucking newbies that don't belong to visit this site. So remove your bookmark and never come back because Powergamers aren't pussies. They die when they know they are beaten.

•Find out how old your account is.

Since finding out how old your account is still doesn't work (no, not even on test rewards), go here. Click on edit account to log in and look at the last table on account summary (you know, the one that says member since) and it will say how old your account is. I'm exactly 2 months short of being there for 3 years. Oh well. All that I want is a black dye tub for the 50th time and I'm happy.

Thanks to Silencer for the tip.

•LJ103: LumberWarrior Tactics

Ver*sa*tile adj. 1. Capable of doing many things competently. 2. Having varied uses or serving many functions. 3. Inconstant or variable; changeable. -ver'sa*tile*ly adv. -ver'sa*til'i*ty, ver'sa*tile*ness n.

That was the answer I just gave you. "Well Gator what was the question?" The question you were going to ask me was why I like playing the LumberWarrior in PvP. And it all boils down to that one word. Versatility. In my honest opinion there is no other template out there that offers as much as the LumberWarrior does. "But Gator, what about fighting a shield fighter?" What about it? There is a way, several actually, and I am going to break it all down....shotgun style. Yes folks, LJ103: LumberWarrior Tactics and You has finally arrived.

This is how this is going to work. I am going to break it down into sections as follows:

Part I: Equipment
Part II: Weapons & Armor
Part III: Specific Opponent Tactics
Part IV: Review

If you are using UOAssist, which I hope you are, make sure you have all your macros set up for what you will need to do. Speed is what you are looking for. The quicker you are, the longer you may live. Develop macros to disarm/rearm your weps/shields, drink potions (GC, GH, TR, GA, GS), and of course heal. Before I begin let me add that these are my own opinions and techniques. Some of you may find them useful, others will not. I have no problems with that, and I encourage it. As always I accept constructive criticism.

I. Equipment

Band aids:
(10) Band aids
(25) Cloth
I personally have a macro set up in UOAssist that will heal me, then cut another band-aid. Reason being that running around with 50 cut band-aids doesn't allow for a whole lot of loot collecting. Why 10 pre-cut even though you cut your own as you hit the key? Never know when your buddy might need a heal or cure.

Potions:
(5) Greater Heal, Greater Cure, Total Refresh.
(3) Greater Agility and Greater Strength.
Do not want to make it too many, but want to have enough in case your moment in battle last longer than you like it to. Heals and Cures are self-explanatory. Use the GA/GS then throw on a band-aid before you enter combat. Do this quickly, no time to waste. Also follow up with a TR to get that Stamina to max. A Macer will eat up your stamina, so the more you have the better. Use them TR's if you get low stamina or if you need to get out of a tight spot in a hurry. Good idea to have potions pre-stored in a pouch somewhere. That way in case you run out, you have a handy reserve, which you don't have to worry about organizing. Good idea to have band-aids/cloth in there as well.

Misc:
(1) Runebook
(5) Trapped Pouches
Rune Books are officially newbified. Of course this means automatic transportation. Make sure it’s stocked to the max with recall scrolls before you go hunting. And try to have it filled with strategic rune locations and safe spots as well. Trapped Pouches are obvious. When that mage casts Paralyze, you got to get at him in a hurry. Use a pouch and commence to beatin. The sitting duck tactic never works, unless you are using Archery.

II. Weapons & Armor

Armor: I wear a full suit of GM Studded Leather myself. I sacrifice AR for speed. Unfortunately, this is not an AR essay, so I will not get into all the specifics. But if you really want to learn about how AR truly works then go here and read what Paladin and KH have to say. Also Paladin updated some good info on AR recently. And you can find some more Armor Combinations here. When it comes down to it, wear what you feel is good for you and your abilities.

Shields:
(3) Kite Shields
The best shield you can use for PvP is a store bought kite shield. That's right store bought. And here's info to back that up. Macers love breaking shields and with this many you will have a couple of backups to bring Mr. Macer down.

Weapons:
(2)Double Axe's
(2)Halberd's
(2)Poisoned Katana's
Here is where people start screaming. But just listen up and you will see what I mean later on when I break down into tactics more. I use two because you just might run into Mr. Battlefield Thief whom likes adding to his weapon/reg collection.

III. Specific Opponent Tactics

LJ vs. Mage: You are a Mages worst nightmare. If one sticks around long enough to see you, then it maybe to late. You want to be all over him quickly. Before entering the battle, do this stat enhancing option, drink GA, GS, Band-Aid, TR, in that order. Now you are 120/25/120, so lay the smack down on Mr. Mindblast. And don't worry, MB only effects your base stats after a recent patch change. So do not fear raising them, it will only help you. Have a GH ready to go, as soon as you see your health drop, drink away, and hit a band-aid. Re-Arm that axe, and do what you do best. CHOP! If you’re lucky, you can take him down in 2-3 hits. Depending on what he does. Do not let him out of your sight. If you get that swing in and nail the concussion blow, well needless to say there goes half his mana. This is what you want. Put him on the defensive as soon as possible, and his chances of recovering are next to nil. Don't forget about your GC's and GH's if needed. And whatever you do, do not stay poisoned. If he stays on the poison, well then give him some right back. Arm a poisoned katana. I recommend lesser-poisoned blades. DP is too expensive, and the thought here is not to kill him with poison, but instead to keep him "occupied" with poison. On average a lesser-poisoned blade will net you about 18 applications before you have to refresh it. Whereas DP will only get you 12 uses before having to reapply. Not to mention that once your blade tastes blood with DP it’s going to corrode a lot faster than it will with lesser.

LJ vs. Macer: When you begin, go through the potion/band aid routine(GA, GS, Band-Aid, TR, in that order.) Make it quick, in fact, the sooner the better. If he is using a shield read down a bit to LJ vs. Shieldfighter section. Macers got one thing, a big damn hammer. Unfortunately this hammer loves to eat shields and armor like a ¼ pounder w/cheese. But that’s ok; you got a little supply stocked up in your pack. You want to give it to him fast. You can go no shield, and go axe vs. hammer so to speak. Just keep them heals flying, and if you get to about 50 HP, disarm, run, drink heal. Got no stamina, use that TR. When it all boils down to it, you should have the upper hand. If he doesn’t go down quietly, throw him a move and equip that Poisoned Katana. Unless he’s got Swords/Fencing, he doesn’t have poison, you do. Use it or loose it. And as always use it quickly, no time to waste. Wait for him to make his instead.

LJ vs. Fencer: Against the fencer its all basically the same as against the macer. But remember one thing, he is most likely faster than you are. Your options include, ye olde trusty Katana with a smear of poison w/shield. Or you can opt for your trusty double. Trust me that phat ass Halberd that’s burning in your pack will be needed really soon. As with the macer, if this fencers is using a shield, scroll down to LJ vs. ShieldFighters. Watchout for the paralyze special hit with a spear. If this happens, don't bother with a trapped pouch. Gonna have to ride it out and keep healing.

LJ vs. Archer: Once again speed is the key here. Notice a *speed* trend here? Amazingly enough fight them almost like a Mage. But you want to USE the potion deal before combat (GA, GS, Band-Aid, TR, in that order). Then hop on him and don’t let him go. If you got a horse you will be better off. But if he does as well, it will not be a short day. Here a shield with that poisoned kat would be a good idea. When he notices that he will not be able to get that cure/heal done. He will disarm bow to drink potion. Now is your chance but you have to be fast. Either keep poking him with the Kat, or the moment he disarms, do the same, and grab that axe. Who knows your one shot maybe the last one he receives on the day. And you will have a few arrows to give all your friends.

LJ vs. ShieldFighter: Finally we have arrived to the LumberWarrior's worst foe. Why? Simply put if you use an axe against them you better like the color gray. You will see it a lot. This is where your Katana OR Halberd will come into play. When you fight a ShieldFighter you will see them use Maces, Fencing, or Swords. Basically follow what I have already told you above against them templates with these changes. Like I said you have two choices. The first one being to equip that kite shield and poisoned katana. Then commence to wearing them out, keep your heals going. And if you need to use a potion drop your shield real quick and drink away. I recommend only disarming your shield due to the fact that you do not want to stop hitting them. Now, why a Halberd? Well to put it simply, a Double Axe at GM Anat, Lumber, Swords, and Tac can do the same amount of max damage as a Halberd. The big difference is that the Double is faster, therefore more damage over time. But, the Double Axe is worthless against Shields. On the other hand, the Halberd will eat through a Shield fast. If you do not have Parry I recommend using the Halberd. If you have Parry, use the poisoned katana. Stay on him, stay aggressive and most importantly, stay alive.

IV. Review
Well that is everything in condensed form. I am sure that there are something’s I missed or even left out. Feel free to comment in the forums, or email them to me. If its important, I will make sure I get it included in this essay. It takes time and a certain talent to become good at PvP. And the only way you can achieve that is through practice. I highly recommend the test center for these exact purposes. Grab a friend and go there, make your templates up and have at it. This is the only way you can learn what to do in certain situations. Once you get comfortable with everything, move on over to factions. Here you will find plenty of opponents. Some folks here are good at what they do, and then there are others that totally blow. Either way, you can get a great multitude of different templates and situations. But most importantly have fun. That is what UO is all about. Hell I kick ass then there are times I get my ass kicked. Either way, I always have a smile on my face, because I am having a great time. Thanks for your time.

Later

•Bah, Bless Deeds.

I have all three opinions on this "bless deed" issue:

1. Agree : Yes, I like the idea, for myself. If it were rare and few people had them, I would want one. That has to be damn cool to have a silver vanq weapon stay with you when you die.

2. Disagree: Since most people would have one (2yr+ players), it would ruin game balance. Let's face it - Town PvP isn't the same when every other jerk is running around with their katana or kryss of vanq. And what fun is the PvP if you don't get loot when you beat them? I like to kill people (town PvP, no pking) and at least have the satisfaction of keeping their loot. Of course, if I set up or agree on an "honorable" fight, the loot stays with the corpse, I don't touch it. Another way to look at the blessed weapon is that what if you don't have one? What if you're a newer player out for some fun PvP? What fun is that if you can't beat everyone because they're using amazing blessed weapons on you? I don't like it at all, even though I personally will be eligible for the bless deed.

Here's a thought : What if OSI made it so that bless weapons could work on anything (within the limits - no stackable items)EXCEPT weapons? Would that make this a more valid reward prize without possibly ruining PvP? We'll see what they decide.

3. I don't care - I can also relate with this last opinion. Like Paladin and Gator said on the boards - "Big deal." Weapons will eventually die off, fall apart, whatever (lose durability). But a nice furnature dye tub or dragon statue will always be with you, with an ever-lasting increasing value (unless everyone has one.)

In conclusion, there are these three point of views on the bless deed issue. What do you think about it? Forgive me for pulling a "Lum," but go here to post your thoughts on our ever-famous forum.

Cya Later.

•Magery, the advanced course.

What's wrong with magery? Well, there are several things wrong with magery, but the first is that mana costs are skewed. I mean, how undercosted is greater heal? 50 points for 11 mana at GM. How good is that? The first thing I would do with magery is change mana costs to a modified logarithmic scale, similar to the way the old single player ultimas were.

First Circle = 1 mana
Second Circle = 2 mana
Third Circle = 4 mana
Fourth Circle = 8 mana
Fifth Circle = 16 mana
Sixth Circle = 24 mana
Seventh Circle = 32 mana
Eight Circle = 64 mana

You'll see that I would lower the cost of the first 4 levels, and increase the cost of all spells above 4th circle.
You'll quite possibly be seeing red now because I just said that GH was overpowered at 8 mana, so I want to LOWER it? Well, not exactly.


My second step would be to move a few spells around in the spellbooks, eliminate a few spells, and add some different spells.

First circle: would remain as it is, without any changes, except heal would become "Minor Healing"

Second circle: would also stay the same.

Third circle: would lose "Wall of Stone" and get a new spell, "Heal" that would be a second stage heal

Fourth circle: loses recall and arch protection, and gains wall of stone, and Stoneskin (like old protection spell an AR boost) Greater Heal is replaced here by poison field.

Fifth circle: Poison Field was dropped to 4th, mind blast gets dropped in favor of a simpler direct damage spell. We'll steal explosion from the sixth circle. Greater heal moves here and is more appropriately costed.

Sixth circle: Goodbye explosion, hello Recall (Mark and Recall should be the same circle). Goodbye Mass Curse(does this spell suck or what?) hello Ice Blast. A second spell for offense that allows you to do extra damage to fire critters.

Seventh circle: Goodbye polymorph, hello Major Healing, a spell that can heal up to 75 life. Goodbye Chain Lighting(It's duplicated anyway), hello antidote, a spell that protects you from poisoning for a maximum of 100 seconds, based on your (poisoning+magery/2).

Eight circle: Combine the summon elemental spells into one spell with a menu option, like what polymorph currently has. This leaves us with 3 empty slots in this circle. I'd take the first up with
Mass Healing, since we have this cool party system, let's use it., Mass healing would apply the fourth circle greater heal spell to the members of your party. Second, Eighth circle really needs a powerful direct damage spell, let's call it, Incinerate, just because I like that name. It would be a single target direct damage spell.
Lastly, let's give the Grandmaster Mage a defensive tool, let's call it damping field, and it will reduce all physical damage to zero for 30 seconds. This is the basic, get me the hell out of dodge spell. You'd still be interruptable in this time, but could not be damaged physically. This spell would be part of the RA/Prot/Reflect family and could not be stacked with them.

One note, any of the defensive spells could be superceeded at any time by higher circle one, but not by a lower circle one, so long as it has not yet been activated.

Part three would require a reassessment of the damage that can be dealt by a spell. Simply put, the maximum damage that a spell can deal is equal to it's circle multiplied by 6, up to the 4th circle, and 8 for the 5th-8th circle. The minimum damage dealt by a spell is equal to half of the mana cost of the spell. So incinerate would do 32 minimum, and Energy Bolt would do a minimum of 12 damage. Now the maximum damage that a given mage can deal with a spell is simple It's represented by the following equation:

{[(Magery/100)*0.75]*Max Damage}+{[(Eval/100)*0.25]*Max Damage}=Actual Maximum Damage

so a GM magery GM eval that casts incinerate can do 64 damage max, but someone with 80 and 80 can only do 51 damage.


Resist stays the same, for the most part. If you resist a spell, you take half the calculated damage. Damage is calculated before resist is factored in.

Chance to resist is factored like this:
(Target's resist-[(Casters Magery+casters eval)/4]

Minimum chance to resist is 1% no matter what, and maximum is 50%

Spell Circle will no longer be a factor, it will be based on the skill of the caster, which makes more sense anyway.

Lastly, a Mage should get a damage bonus based on his inscription skill level. If he has 100 inscription, he should get a +10 minimum damage bonus, and a +5 maximum damage bonus; +9, and +4 at 90, etc. This way, dedicated mages don't have to do 12 damage e-bolts. This also makes the lower level spells more useful, as a lightning bolt that you can depend on to do 18-24 damage is better than one that does 8-24. Clarification: This damage bonus can't make a spell do more than it's absolute maximum damage.

As always, feel free to respond via E-mail, or in our lovely forums. I'm way too lazy to do a link to them, but you can find one on the left there.

•What I get from the reward program.

Already questions about the reward program are arising, so I'm going to try and explain it as best as I can.

The first option is a given - you get two rewards from the first batch. On the second option, you get two rewards from the first batch and either one reward from the second batch or a third reward from the first batch. On the third option, you get two rewards from the first batch, one reward from the second batch and either one reward from the fourth batch, a third reward from the first batch or a second reward from the second batch. Now, remember that in the second batch you can choose an item from the first batch. This means that it's possible to have 4 items in the first batch for the third option.

Now, about the program. Bless deeds shouldn't be in there. Blessed items (particularly in PvP) are lame. The option to choose two for the third option is even more lame. Look at all the choices in there, if you will. There's very low armor clothing, statues, a non-fighting horse, dye tubs... and a bless deed? NO NO NO sir. It doesn't fit in with everything else there: harmless, yet cool stuff. They should be replaced with the special hair that was given out during the ticket system. It's harmless and cool. We have a perfect match, Jonny.

And don't try testing the reward program because it doesn't work. It says, "can't determine how old this account is" or something like that for everyone.

Lastly, I got this:

Just letting everyone on Chesapeake that there is a new Factions page for the Shadowlords, you can find it at: shadowlords.chessienet.com It's still a work in progress, but we'll be updating it with information from test center as well!

Thanks
-Triven

•Player Rewards Update

Find this at good ole UO Dot Com...

Ultima Online Rewards Program Sep 13 2000 4:00PM CST
The Ultima Online Rewards program is designed to reward you, our long-term players, for your loyalty to the UO community. It is our way of thanking you and showing our appreciation for your long-term support of UO, and for your contribution to making UO the most popular virtual world in existence today.

Determining Account Age
The age of an account will be determined in the following manner:
Any account created before November 30, 1999 will automatically be credited for all of the time from the date it was created until November 30, 1999. In other words, if you created your account on October 30, 1998, your account would be credited for 13 months of time, regardless of whether your account was inactive during part of that time.
Following November 30, 1999, only the months in which you had an active account will contribute to the total count of months qualifying you for rewards.
You can check your account age by logging a character into the game. To check your account age:
Double click your profile scroll.
Scroll to the bottom of the scroll window.
A horizontal bar will be at the bottom of the profile text. Your account age in years and days will be displayed under that line. The account age will display the same value for all characters on the same account.
Updates to your account (such as reactivations) are updated every Sunday, but may not be displayed for several days.
Rewards
There are three categories of player reward levels currently identified as part of the program: players who have been in the game for 12 to 23 months, players who have been in the game for 24 to 35 months, and those who have played for 36 months or more. Each of the three designated categories of long-term players will be offered a different selection of in-game rewards. All reward options are ‘no loot’ and ‘no steal’, and clothing items will never wear out.

12 - 23 Month Players may choose two of the following rewards:
Black dye tub
Bronze cloak
Bronze +2 AR robe
Copper cloak
Copper +2 AR robe
Furniture dye tub
Choice of one of 14 mini-monster statues:
Dragon
Skeleton
Troll
Orc
Deamon
Ettin
Earth Elemental
Gargoyle
Gorilla
Crocodile
Lich
Lizard Man
Ogre
Ratman
24 - 35 Month Players may choose three reward options (two for being a one year player plus one more for being a two year player) from the list of one-year rewards above and the additional two-year rewards listed below:
Agapite cloak
Agapite +2 AR robe
Golden cloak
Golden +2 AR robe
Bless Deed
Any of the 12 - 23 month reward listed above
36+ Month Players may choose four reward options (two for being a one year player another one for their two year reward, plus one more for the third year) from among the one and two-year reward choices as well as those additional rewards listed below:
Ethereal horse
Transparent hue.
Appears as a statue in your backpack.
Double clicking the statue will cause the statue to disappear and create the horse and your will automatically mount it.
Once mounted on the horse, double clicking yourself will dismount you and automatically transform the horse back into the statue which will reappear in your backpack immediately.
Never loses loyalty and can't be transferred.
The horse can never appear without being mounted, therefore it cannot attack or be attacked,
Verite cloak
Verite +2 AR robe
Valorite cloak
Valorite +2AR robe
Choice of one of three mini-monster statues
Zombie
Cow
Llama
Any of the 12 - 23 or 23 - 35 month rewards listed above.
It is important to note that characters on an account with less than the appropriate amount of time will not be able to use some of these items. For instance, if another player gave you a golden cloak, but your account is 20 months old, you would not be able to wear it until your account reached 24 months. This only applies to clothing items and the ethereal horse. Other items such as dye-tubs and monster statues will be usable by any character.

Players who fit into one or more of these categories will have the option to receive their rewards when they log into the game after attaining a reward level. Rewards are given on a "per account" basis, but may be divided among characters on an account. It is very important to make sure you have the correct character logged on before choosing a reward. Game Masters and other OSI personnel will not be able to transfer rewards from one character to another. For example, a player who has a 24 month old account may choose to accept two rewards with a character on one shard, and may choose the remaining reward with a different character. The option to collect rewards will appear each time you log in to the game until you have chosen the total awards for which you are eligible.

If you make a rewards program selection during a final backup or before a server crash, the system may not have adequate time to save your choice. When the shard returns to service, it may take a few minutes for the server to recognize that you have not gotten your reward. The system will account for this however, and after a few minutes you will be able to select a reward.

Later

•AR Revisited

Here is how the AR for your character is calculated. I will be using hypothetical numbers to illustrate the principles. If you're that interested in experimentation, you should be able to figure out the exact numbers for each actual type of armor.

We're going to assume, for the sake of this discussion, that full plate armor (defined as plate chest, arms, legs, gorget, gloves, and helm) has a total AR of 50 and that leather armor (defined as leather tunic, sleeves, gorget, cap, gloves, and legs) has a total AR of 20. Those numbers may not be even close to their actual values, but they make the math easy, so sue me.

Now, you may not understand that the AR displayed by UO is actually a fairly meaningless number, so far as actual damage taken is concerned. Two different sets of armor that give the same AR, could actually be far apart in actual protection conferred.

You must first understand that the character is divided into 6 individual areas that can be hit with a given physical attack. Let's say that 40% of the time, you will be hit in the chest, 20% the legs, 20% the arms, 10% the hands, 5% the neck, and 5% the head. The UO game engine then uses these numbers to calculate the AR it displays.

Now, if you mix armor types, the AR at each given location changes, so the overall AR is different. For example, if we have a plate chest will all other pieces being leather we get ([50*.4]+[20*.6])=32. Now, I can do the same thing with a leather chest, gloves, and gorget, combined with plate legs and arms. I can do the same thing with a plate gorget, helm, arms (or legs) and gloves, combined with leather chest and legs (or arms). This illustrates how the total AR number can easily mislead you.

The essential fact of the new armor system is this: You trade dexterity for damage absorption. The higher the dexterity penalty associated with a given piece of armor, the more protection it provides that particular body part. The rule you can apply to this is, the harder your expected opposition hits, the better off you are with heavier armor, because they will generally swing slower, thus offsetting your relatively slower swings.

•Hmmm...took them this long....

Never a day that goes by where I do not stand amazed at the people that live in our little world of UO. Take the wonderfull skill of lumberjacking for example. How long has it been now? Four months that this skill has been around in full action. And now the boo birds are out. And all of a sudden now, it seems like there is a problem.

Parry should be adjusted down a bit, and lumberjacks should go back to 25%. I don't need to see guys in studded leather armor or lighter getting dropped in two hits. Tonight my friend stepped into a doorway and got popped by a lumberjack. No problem I figure. I start casting heal. Before I can drop the heal spell on my mage friend he is dead from the second axe blow. Granted it's not the typical situation, in which the mage is expected to run for his life like he's jacked up on a crack binge.

Lets evaluate shall we. For starters, if you adjust parry down, and then knock GM Lumber down to 25%...hmm...whats the difference. I mean as of now it is extremely rare for a Lumberwarrior to kill a Parrywarrior. WITH an axe. The only time the lumberwarrior has an advantage in combat is against a mage or someone without Parry. And even then I would hardly call it an advantage. If your silly enough to stand around in a doorway while I mince you with a double. Well thats your problem. Here's a news flash for mages. Avoid doorways. Obviously a mage doesn't want to melee. Better have that RA active, slinging poison, and moving as best you can, cause needless to say my Lumber wants your regs.

And here's Gators' second news flash of the day. Axes Hurt. Has anyone been hit with an axe lately. I mean last time I checked you just might, extremely rare, but you might loose a limb in the process. I have been wrong before. As always if you think I am wrong you can bring it here and let me know.

And also this, you tried casting heal, and didnt get it done? We are not talking about a kryss here. A double axe isnt that fast. Might want to invest in something quicker than a 56k if thats the case. That or work that reaction time some. Or...wait a minute..heres a thought..practice PvP a little more. Dont try it for just one day then scream "Nerf Lumberwarriors!!!" I mean come on folks. Thats my problem with Trammel these days, nobody tries anymore. One chance if they don't like it they go screaming to Daddy OSI "NERF, NERF, NERF!!" Sheesh...I love this game.

Later

•My Absence

My apologies to the readers and updators, for my inactivity in updating. Real life has been busy, which has kept me from my UO updates on this site. Please forgive me. :) I can assure you that soon I will be back, and ready to go with some good updating.
Thanks,

Eric-GL

•This and That

1.) Outside of Wind is cool now, you can get deamons to chase you into the city and teleport onto the walls and get behind them. This is fun. Tamers can also use the wall as the maximum amount of space they are allowed to have between them and an unhappy critter.....

2.) Ordering pizza online is insanely cool. All hail Papa John's!

3.) Note to Keyshawn Johnson: Would you SHUT THE FUCK UP now?

•Anatomy Gains Working...

Go here to our forums and check out this pic by Davion. I am not sure if he used this method after I posted about it. Or did it on his own. Some people know about this technique already. But its a picture proof example of it working at its best. GMing Anatomy in a quick amount of time is possible. Thanks for posting that Davion regardless if you read my update or not. It gives everyone a greater understanding. And thats what Powergamer's is all about.

Later

•They just had to put the lever there and leave that little hole open.

Well, it seems that the original trap spot in Shame 3 no longer exists. In fact, they got rid of the whole room where it was located. However, they seem to have made a booboo, because there's another one (at least on GL... I don't know if the lever is on all shards). Here it is:

Good way to gain resist and archery - especially from the PE that spawns there. Do one at a time so you don't die though. You should probably mark a rune to that location, because it's hard to get there with the 50 monsters blocking it.

Update: The second square that's up a little ways is also a one tile trap spot that works.

•Input.

Covetous

On the bottom floor (not the dragon one, but the other one with the jail cells) there are some mummies and a rotting corpse! The rotting corpse is that nasty, Lethal Poison inflicting, super-fast zombie that was in the Trinsic invasion with a ton of hit points. I suggest taking along a white wyrm to kill it, AND have a bard handy to provoke the mummies to fight it.

Despise

Top floor sucks (with the lizardmen), but the lower levels are fantastic. Ettins and earth elementals galore! Go deeper, and you encounter ogres and trolls. Near the old NPC mage spawn there is now an Acid Elemental.. sort of like a double strength Water Elemental that gives 650+ gold. Not recommended to solo unless your resist is good; it's melee attacks aren't that bad, fortunately.

Did I mention the ogre lords on the lower level of Despise now? :)

Thanks J.C.

Okay - my tragic story begins in Moonglow. I was bored out of my mind, so I decided to use my Lich room rune, which takes me to the room east of the Fire Ele room and west of the path to the LL room (where people run from the PE in the lich room). There used to be a rare lich or two in here, and I was fully ready to kill it. I pop in, and there is a PE and 3 liches. I try to run, but 2 of the 4 paths are locked, and I have to get within melee range of the PE to get to the stairs. I sprint towards the fire ele room and teleport across the chasm, immediately killed by a lich. 3 people see this, and immediately head in my direction. 'Thank God,' I think, 'a res.' I was wrong. They all stopped at my corpse, laughed, and waited for my corpse to turn to bones. I ran to the lich room to get a res, got one, and proceeded to died 3 times attempting to get back to my original corpse, which was completely emptied by the time I got back. This is a word of warning to everyone - Not only to look out for the critters, but for grief players looting corpses in Trammel.

Thanks Krunk.

Get off the fucking computer.

Thanks family.

•Factions Test Info? Of Course We Got More

Some faction info that some people may not know about. This all came from GreyPawn over at the Council of Mages website. Its a sharp looking site for factions. In fact I believe its the only site I have found for a faction....so far. But dont worry I am sure others will follow suit. So all you young web designers out there that want to strike gold. You better gets ta steppin in a hurry. One faction down, three to go. ::Rushes to grab his copy of Dreamweaver::

Hints & Tips GreyPawn || September 8, 2000
Playing the Factions Test Center for quite a bit lately I have uncovered a few
interesting tidbits of need to know information.

-To transfer kill points say "I honor your leadership"
-Beware the moongates. People are teleporting ONTO them in hopes of blocking you
escaping should you encounter an ambush, which will be often.
-Watch out for traps. These are killers.
-Do NOT PLACE any traps other than poison traps in your stronghold. This is a
high level poison, and chances are extreme that the person triggering it WILL
die, while the others they will just take damage.
-Faction Commanders should ALWAYS assign ALL the silver presently at the faction
stone to the cities and ALWAYS appoint the Sheriff and Finance Minister for a
city captured.
-Faction Commanders should NEVER EVER EVER increase the tithe rate to 100%, as
cities themselves are denied silver in the Commander's absence.
-Sheriff's should always place as many guards as their city and silver will
allow.
-When going for a sigil, use stealing, hiding, and stealth. Take the long way to
the moongate.
-If you have a kill point or more, do NOT let yourself get rez killed. It
continues to take them away.
-Sigils are freaky. Always be on the wary that your town just captured could be
recaptured.

Just a few things I thought I'd share with you.

And yet some more info, thoughtfully cut, and pasted from the Council of Mages. Check it:

Sigil Guarding [] ·· 09.21.2000 at 5:03 PM ·· ^top

Now any of you on Test Factions have seen numerous times, sigils being guarded by debris. Vast debris...most usually hides and crates and other big clunky hard to carry type things. This is for the purpose of preventing the enemy from stealing the sigil from a town you currently control. Its a defense mechanism, only natural of the players to do so.
Well...here is an evil method of protecting your sigil that will take the enemy at least over a half an hour to get through. Go out and make crates, with a carpenter. Make the biggest kind available, the big square ones, not the little skinny ones. Now, stick around 125 of them into a big crate. Doesn't matter how. Now, place the huge crate in the spot where you want the blockage to be, whether it be on or around the town pedastal, it doesn't matter. Now use an axe to break the crate containing the 125 crates. Viola. You have a series of 125 large items stacked neatly on top of each other.
This fiendish recipe, brought to you by Larz.

We Are United

- GreyPawn

Once again, a big thanks to the people over at the Council of Mages site for sending this info our way. And check out that site, its a good one.

**UPDATE**Looks like there may be a True Britannian site comming soon. As always we will keep an eye on it, and let you know when they get it up and running. But the site name is taken, and its there. We shall see. Like I said, it will only be a matter of time.

Later

•The last 3.

Wrong sucks. There's about 5 lizardmen in the beginning, and the rest is all evil NPC mages. There's roughly 500 of them in level 1 and 2. I got an e-mail that says that some of the NPC's are just like ogre lords. The only way to tell the difference is in their paperdoll it says, "executioner" and they carry an axe. Thanks Steve.

Despise sucks more. In the beginning, it's not so bad. There's scattered lizardmen around. But when you go a bit deeper, this horse shit happens. I have a feeling that the NPC is going to be trapped for a very long time.

Hythloth is the only tame dungeon.

Level 1: hell hounds and imps scattered; 2 gargoyles in most rooms; 2 scorching gargoyles on the left room on the bottom right.

Level 2: gazers, gargoyles, hell hounds and imps scattered; cocoa daemon and named daemon in bottom right room; gargoyles and daemons (usually 2 of each) in most of the rooms; 6 gargoyles and 2 named daemons in top left room (don't go there); gargoyles scattered near end.

Level 3: imps and gargoyles in beginning; balron and gargoyles in the middle; teleporter room is empty and safe (mark your runes for here); 5 gazers below the teleporter room; 2 named daemons and a gazer in the bottom left room; scattered gargoyles near the end; a stone gargoyle, 2 named daemons and a gazer blocking the exit.

Level 4: couple scattered imps and hell hounds and pairs of gargoyles; 2 named daemons and gargoyles at the bridge; stone gargoyle and gazer in top right room; gargoyle and sweltering gargoyle on bottom left room.

Outside Hythloth needs to be fixed badly. This is what it looks like everywhere. You can't move without dying. Thank god for the help/stuck/teleport to town command (thanks K'thak).


I've been playing around some, and money really isn't that hard to get. They made lots of places a lot harder, but there's still some places to get money. As always, it's Shame. Level 1, obviously, is one. Earth Elementals give about 300 gold each, and it's the same as before. In level 4, there's some spots where fire elementals spawn alone. They also give about 300 gold. Get some runes marked for the right areas and it's still easy to make money fast. The only problem might be other people that do the same thing.

•Last one... for now.

Covetous.

Level 1: 3 harpies in main area; 1 stone harpy when you go down; scattered harpies, headless ones and gazers when you go up; corpsers near the end, like always.

Level 2: scattered headless ones in the beginning; 6 harpies by the hay to the north; 2 seperate dread spiders by the two places where the webs are (one on the left and one on the right); elder gazer in the middle by the pond; scattered gazers, corpsers and harpies near the end.

Level 3: 6 liches in beginning; 5 liches and a couple low-end undead in the main room; low-end undead on the left side; bone/skeletal knights and some low-end undead on the right side; 5 liches on the way top right room; a group of ghosts having a convention.

Level 4 (where the drake used to be): 1 dragon and 2 drakes.

There's also a couple skeletons and an ettin/troll in the path outside that you take to get to other levels.

Not too bad. The end of level 2 and level 3 are the only places that are really difficult. The rest is still newbie friendly. I'll probably do the rest later and see about getting a dungeon section up for them.

•Destard: temple of OooOoOOoOo's.

Another dungeon = another fast death = another walk to Britain.

In level 1, there's 2 wyverns that kill you right away. In the main area, there's 12 dragons, 3 wyverns and 5 drakes. By the pond in the bottom right there's 3 water elementals. Up the hill at the top right, there's 5 wyverns and about 6 drakes. At the exit, there's 3 drakes and 2 wyverns that kill you if the others didn't already.

In level 2, there's about 10 wyverns, 6 drakes, 3 named daemons, 2 shadow wyrms and a lot of player corpses.

In level 3, there's 4 fire elementals by the fire, 3 wyverns and 1 ancient wyrms.

Looks like they really want to encourage group play, because there's no way someone could live through all that shit (unless you use UOE, haha). I like it. No more easy money from monsters. Now for some more great notes!

If you're a pk, don't go to destard.

If you're not a pk, don't go to destard.

If you're in Felucca, don't go to destard.

If you're in Trammel, don't go to destard.

If you have a large group, go to destard.

Simple enough.

•A little more detail on the spawn changes.

First, the spawn changes are really cool. I like to get my ass kicked by anything and everything possible. And I'm not the only one, which is even better. There's corpses everywhere.


Deceit probably got hit the worst. In level 1, there's about 80 (I'm not joking) skeletons, wraths, zombies, spectres and whatever else is on the low-end of Deceit. Needless to say, there's no way that you can get through, and so I can't say what's on the other levels. I'll probably go in as a ghost later to see what's all in there though.

Shame 1 is the same as before: earth elementals and scorpions.

Shame 2 has 8 air elementals, kraken's, sea serpents and a LOT of dull copper elementals (a group blocking the path to level 3 as well).

Shame 3 has about 20 evil NPC mages, a poison elemental, a few elder gazers, dull copper elementals, earth elementals, a couple air elementals and fire elementals where the air/fire/poison elementals always were (west of the gate). If you go to the way top and into the path that takes you south, there's 6 air elementals and another poison elemental. At the bottom of the level, there's water elementals, dull copper elementals, earth elementals, kraken's and sea serpents.

Shame 4 is where the party is. There's 6 air elementals and 1 blood elemental where they always were. When you go up the bridge, there's another blood elemental by where all of the locked chests are. If you take a west and go across the bridge to the left, there's another blood elemental. If you go down a bit and take left into the hay area, there's a spawn of earth elementals. If you go back out and down, there's a spawn of dull copper elementals. If you go down some more, there's an acid elemental. And at the way bottom, there's a group of fire elementals. If you take a right across the bridge, there's elder gazers. There's also kraken's and sea serpents scattered around.


A couple notes:

There isn't useless shit scattered anymore, except scorpions, but at least they give some gold. I didn't see any slimes, snakes or rats at all. The majority is the good shit, and lots of it.

If you have any brain cells, unlike me, don't go to Felucca without a group or you'll get killed fast.

Don't attempt to melee kraken's, because it won't work out too good. Also, kraken's usually spawn with a water elemental and a sea serpent.

Dull copper elementals are a waste of time. They have more HP than earth elementals and give about 100 gold.

Acid elementals give about 600 gold. I have no idea what kind of properties they have because I was dead at the time. Common sense says that they probably poison though. I'll probably go back later to die again.

Don't even set foot in a dungeon if you're a pk.

Walking from Shame to Britain is as boring as it was 4 months ago.

Walking from Shame to Britain is the only thing that I remember.

Glacial staves look like the weapons from star wars.

Star wars sucks.

I edited this 80 times. Refresh is your friend. Use it.

My roomate likes country music. Beat his ass for me.


I'll get more info. up when I can find a person that has some god damn RUNES on his vendor.

•Anatomy: All You Need Is A LIttle Patience

A week or so ago, I had posted a little update on Anatomy on how some folks were getting unbelievable "magic" gains in extremely weird situations. I mean seriously, who would have thought that Roxanne the Warrior, of Lake Superior, was going to GM her Anatomy from a skill of 94.1. In a matter of 10 Minutes against a damn Giant Spider!! I mean sure this isn't unheard of for some skills....but Anatomy?? Oh, did I mention that she did that while being outside of her power hour. After a return trip from the local forest after harvesting some wood. I should know, I was there, Roxanne is one of my characters.

So first question is of course "Gator, why GM Anatomy?". Well for the folks out there in Internet land that just may not know what Anatomy is, I will answer that. Believe it or not, we have players in this game who have no clue what Anatomy is good for. Anatomy, is good for two reasons.
1)+20% More Damage done to your enemies. This is culmalative, in a sense that, the higher your skill, more damage you will do. For example, if your mighty Lumber Warrior has an Anatomy skill of 50, well then you would be doing 10% more damage with that double axe than someone with 0 Anatomy.
2)Healing, Healing, Healing. I mean it really makes since. Doctors get a lot of classes on Anatomy in college. So in our case its the same. You want to heal good? Damn skippy. Then you better GM that Anatomy. With GM Healing and Anatomy, you can heal up to 80 points of damage with one measly strip of cloth. Whereas, GM Healing and 0 Anatomy, will net you a maximum heal of just 50 points. Understand now?

And now for the goodies. I would like to call this segment, technique time. Now this may or may not work for you. But I am going to give you my own examples of what I have discovered. Then I am going to tell you the best way that I think it can be done. But, let it be known now. To GM the Anatomy skill, your going to need a lot of patience. And that is the only thing I can tell today that is set in stone, patience.

Take for example, yesterday morning, I logged in to LS to refresh one of my houses on Fire Isle(Fel). While there, two Ogres decided they wanted to help in the refresh process, needless to say, Kryss was armed, and the first one through the door got it. Wack, .1 Anatomy, Wack, .1 Anatomy, Wack, .1 Anatomy. But just my luck I had lost my scissors in a serious accident within Hyloth, therefore, no healing for me. So I had to take the ogres out, thus ending my amazing gain. But every hit I was gaining. I was standing inside the first floor room, two steps away from the door. This particular house was a small tower.

Last night I was logged onto another shard working my lumberjacking skill and such while collecting hides for a good friend of mine, who happens to live near a swamp. Well on the way back to his tower, I collected a few lizardman who in turn wanted to drop by the house for a cold one. I went straight into the back first floor room, and positioned myself so I would only have to fight two of them. There just so happened to be ten of these little fella's, so I armed my double axe, and went on a serious chopping spree. Well when two were left, I started gaining Tac and Anat like mad. Heres a little tidbit for you, my Tactics was at 98.7 skill. Anatomy was at 89.0. This whole event happened outside of power hour. Every time I swung, and hit, I gained .1 Tac and Anat. It was clockwork. I immediately manned a newbie hatchet, after all I didn't want to kill the Lizard that was helping me out so much. But, once I GM'd Tactics, that's right GM'd Tac outside power hour, inside house, on a lizardman. Once I GM'd Tac, all Anat gains stopped. So then I got to thinking, what if.... I grabbed my lute, did some skill arrow adjusting and started strumming away. Knocked my Tactics back down to 97 skill. And then adjusted them arrows again. Swung hatchet, hit no gain. What does all of that mean? Well, I was hoping that my "magic lizard" would have kept giving me gains in Anat and Tac, if I dropped my Tac down again. But, unfortunately it did not have the effect I wanted. But overall in that little spree my Anat had jumped up to 90.3. I was still pleased. Some people out there are thinking, "Gator, you had Tactics GM'd and you dropped it??". Hell yeah I did, Tactics I can GM in an hour. Whereas Anatomy is a little bit harder.

So heres my advice. Go to the swamps, "herd up" about 10 lizardman, and proceed to a house in or around the swamps. Once there position yourself in a doorway, where you will only be hit by one. I recommend doing this OUTSIDE power hour. Doing this during your power hour would be a waste, and I would not recommend it. Once positioned start swinging. Have a weak weapon on you. I.E.. Fencers/Daggers, Lumbers/Hatchets, Swords/Skinning Knives, Maces/Wands. I would not recommend using archery during this procedure, waste of resources. Once you start gaining like mad, patience is a virtue, man that smaller weapon and have at it. GM that Anatomy, then light up a cigar in celebration for your newest GM'd skill.

Also while I was out in about hunting lizardman, I ran into a small tower where the owner had banned like 12 lizardman. Of course they were packed all nice and neat under the sign. To make a long story short, I met two great players, who gave me a few heals as I fought the Lizards. Well then Mr. Serpent came, and poisoned me, lag hit, BAM, dead Gator. Just so happens that all the wandering healers in the area were on strike. So after running around for a good 10 minutes, I finally found a SCAB and made my way back to my now surely looted bones. Well I was in luck the two people I had met had surely taken all my stuff. But instead of running off with it like true Twinks they placed everything in a bag for me, and waited for my return. Once I arrived they returned everything to me. So before I sign off for this post, I would like to personally thank Magnus and Kalanie. Two great UO players, and a welcome sign in these times of twinkness we all live in.

Later

•Great Lakes Dungeons Changes

Deceit Fire Elley Room

-3 Liches + 3 Fire Elementals: Continuous Spawn

-5 Liches + Lich Lord + Silver Serpents in Lich Lord room...oh, and lots of bodies.

Shame Blood Level

-Bloods and Earth Elementals Everywhere

-Scorpions (bleh!)

-Dull Copper Elementals (wtf?)

-Air and Fire Elementals on North and East Sides

-Loren of da wood's body along with her Lady title :/

All are continuous spawn.

Hasta.

•Counselor Anonymous Speaks

Well, just so we can add some more spice to the whole Counselor Debate, Counselor Anonymous speaks to us:

What's in a word.....

I am a counselor, been one for close to 2 years now. I am also an ASRC. What you are about to read is MY opinion, and MINE alone. It does not, and nor do I claim that it should, reflect the opinions and views of current and past volunteers.


When I first started UO back in early 98, I was a newbie, and I intend that in every sense of the word. I had played all of the Ultimas (1 - 7) and so I knew all about the Ultima lore and how Ultima worked.....or so I thought until I actually created a character. To this day I am STILL waiting for the gypsy to show up to ask me my 7 ethical questions. A gate to my tower can be arranged. :)


When I first logged on, it was brutal. I didn't know anything. I ran from a Mongbat! I fell for the trapped chest in town. I got guard whacked for any and everything. Hell, I was a newbie.


As time went on, I became better, and after a month of "learning" the game, I created the character that is still my main character today. As that character gained in skills, I always wondered why things were as they were, and how I should go about doing other things. Sites like UOPG, Lum, Markee, Prostitute, HoE, etc, did not exist, and I didn't know about UOSS. Well, what was a guy to do. Yup.....I paged a counselor.


THAT is where I learned that there is merit in helping others, and I wanted in. After knowing the game as much as I could, I applied and soon a new counselor hit the shards. My compensation at the time: $ 0.00. I knew it and I EXPECTED it would stay the same. After a while, OSI decided to "give" us a free account. My compensation then for over 10 hours a week of counseling: $ 9.99. I appreciated it, but I would have kept doing it for free.


Now, friends, the shit has REALLY hit the fan. When the AOL lawsuit hit, OSI removed the "free" account. I was disappointed, sure, but I understood the reason behind it, and I knew that the people who were in it for the $ 9.99 account every month would leave. WHY anyone would choose to counsel hours upon hours for a measly $ 9.99 is beyond me. I mean, hell, just subscribe to one of those "pay to surf" sites....I mean really.......


And now, out of the blue (no pun intended), some jackasses with too much time on their hands and too little brains in their heads decide it's time to follow suit. I had been expecting this. But that does NOT mean I like it or I approve it. Terendil, please, I ask you, WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU TO DEMAND BACK WAGES ON MY BEHALF WHEN I WANT NO PART IN YOUR "GET RICH QUICK SCHEME". WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU TO INCLUDE ME IN YOUR TIRADES AGAINST OSI ABOUT HOW WE ARE EXPLOITED. WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU TO TAKE IT UPON YOURSELF TO SCREW UP THE MOST WORTHWHILE PROGRAM IN THE ONLINE GAMING INDUSTRY?????


I see eyebrows going up here. Yes, it is a worthwhile program. While I can't help all of you out there, I do my best to help most of you, and to do it in a timely and efficient manner. I do my job courteously and I ALWAYS try to relate to the caller by letting them know my experience and how I overcame it. Now, due to 3 greedy fucks, this will be dismantled. OSI was providing this service as a bonus to players. OSI does NOT have a legal obligation to give in game support in the form of counselors and seers and elders oh my! When was the last time you bought a FRPG and found a "page a counselor" button? And all of you thinking that with no support everyone would have left, get a clue. For YEARS people have been bitching about PvP, loot, housing, spells, precasting (beeyotch) and such, and only a handful have quit. People can get by anyways, but having someone show them the way is more efficient.


This lawsuit is about 2 things.........greed and revenge. If there are 2 things that are fundamentally wrong with the world today, greed and revenge top my list. All this will do in the near future is simple: it will shut down the counselor program on UO (and soon to follow EQ and AC), cost OSI/EA some money, and some hardworking people their "job". I like counseling. Lets me give back to the game that gives me enjoyment everyday. I know about the "laws" and their interpretation, and all of this will be up to a court system to decide. Come to think of it, I figure my local government owes me as well since I volunteered for over 10 years.......yay! I'm gonna be rich!


Terendil and company, get a fucking clue brick, look at the damage you will cause to the whole industry before you look at your pathetic little greed/revenge oriented person and crawl back under the rock you came from. I wonder if you'd still be doing this had OSI bowed to your oversized ego a few months back.......as for "Plaintiff B and C", since you are still counseling while on this lawsuit, doesn't that mean that you are in a conflict of interest? I think so, but hell, I'm just a moron being exploited by OSI, right?


Enough said.

Wow...

Hasta.

•Take 2.

The fishing page has been updated again. Thanks to Valides for the new information.

Also, the person that Grynn is referring to, where such person said, "So? Those games suck." is yours truly. Aiyee.

•I ain't no Hypocrite.

Got this via email:


Interesting.

Look at the menu to the right. I see a link to "bugs". Can you say
hypocrite? It doesn't matter that those bugs are old and pretty much
useless; it entirely matters that they are on the site you just went
off on exploiters on.

Steve


And that is the EXACT reason that our "bugs" section has been removed from our site. It did not have, we thought, anything that could be considered a major "exploit". That is why we felt we were justified in having the information posted.

UOPowergamers is NOT about posting exploits. It's about finding the best way to play the game within it's current ruleset. Even if that includes going out and bending them just a tad ("tad"= using 8x8 which, I have been told by many, is not bannable). But, to avoid any hassles with the bigwigs over at OSI, I decided to kill our bug page. Hopefully this will avoid any possible chance of our updaters losing their accounts for having had this page up. As of this moment, my account is not banned and I don't feel it, or anyone from this site for that matter, should.

As Gator quoted, we have a Zero Tolerance policy about posting exploits or big bugs (ie-House stealing) in our forum. I have in the past deleted postings on this type of information and even made posts stating "DO NOT POST THIS". In fact, I deleted just a post this morning.

I hope this thing clears up and Anonymous Smurf gets us a clear stand on this issue from OSI.

Hasta.

•Serious News

Ok real quick, check it out over at Lum's for yourself. Here's a quote from Lum here:

"Origin has apparently gone on the offensive in their war against exploiters, taking the battle into enemy territory.
Last night at least 80 people, possibly more, were banned from UO for "posting exploits". The only thing connecting them apparently was that they were all regular posters on the "UO Prostitute" message board. (UO Prostitute is one of the few surviving bug/exploit sites.) Somehow Origin apparently managed to match play accounts to the persons who posted on this board. Needless to say, this did not sit well with those who were banned."

Now I know that we have never really had a problem with posting bugs on our forums. But just to let you know. Dont do it. I am not a board moderator, but if I was, I would delete any bug posting in a second. And I am sure that the other moderators would back me up on that. Why? Because we just might save that account you have been working on. So dont post about them, and dont ask for bugs either. Not to mention Powergamers is a well known UO site. We do NOT need to be known as a bug site. If you want bugs, you wont find them here. You will find techniques and strategies, but no bugs. That site that Lum mentions has been around since spring I believe. It was just a matter of time. Bugs ruin the gaming experieince for everyone. Especially ones that deal with duping, house break-ins, and others I could care less to mention. Heres a small tidbit from Nieves:

"We have a zero tolerance policy. We have deleted posts in the past of that
nature. Read the Bugs section and you will see what we mean."


So folks save your bugs for someone else, we dont need them here. At least not on my watch.

Later

•I voted, then I ranted...

I voted on Lum's Poll (right side) on what I thought the lawsuit was about. What was my vote? "The suit is obviousely Frivolous". It's about greed and, "you pissed me off so take this".

Myschyf had the most kick ass article on Lum so far about this issue. I suggest reading it if you can.

Sadly, this issue is going to hurt alot of the "wrong" people. People that don't give a shit about Powergaming, Lum's rants, or whether or not Adam Ant killed that Liche defiling intruder. The people that walked into Wall-Mart, found this cool looking white box, went home, loaded it, and started playing what they thought was the best game ever created. They don't give a shit about what is the latest PvP template, whether or not casting Poison from 1 tile away will really inflict Deadly Poison, or how to GM cooking in 2 power hours (being sarcastic here for those that don't get it). They log in and PLAY. They walk around looking at stuff and say "wow, that's cool". Heck, I was in the BK room one evening and this guy shouts: "YES! EXPERT WARRIOR!" I almost heckled him and then I thought: "I remember what that was like".

These people don't have a clue of the political bullshit we, the "veteran players", have created with our websites and "this is the best way to play" opinions. In a way, I think we are all guilty. Everything has to be about "the cause". Always, the "cause". And that "cause", sadly, was going to eventually hurt everyone, especially the little guy. So, here we are. At the point where now, "the cause" is going to finally destroy our wonderful Ultima Online.

No, I am not saying shut down your websites or shut the fuck up and just play the game. I am saying that maybe we need to step back and think: "Why am I doing this"?

These 3 little Smurfs have no clue what they just did. And I hope, if they win the lawsuit, that when they go and buy their brand new car, or put the down payment on the new house, or while they are sitting on whatever beach they are visiting with the money they got from OSI that they really feel good with themselves for destroying an entire genre.

In the words of IMANEWBIE: "You suck!".

Hasta.

THE OPINION YOU HAVE JUST WITNESSED IS JUST THAT, AN OPINION. AND IT DOESN'T NECESSARILY REFLECT THE OPINIONS OF THE OTHER UPDATERS OF THIS WEBSITE.

•Wind: "There be monsters in the park man!!"

Got an email from an avid reader. Of course I will not post the names of my source. Why becuase some people dont like there email addy and name posted all over the internet. Sheesh.

hiya, just got back from wind on Test center, and the garden/park is nasty now :P

Gargoyals(sp?)
Imps
Krackens
Air eles
Acid eles
Stone Gargoyals

... No animals now :(

there was 6+ air eles in there and 2 Krackens and 1 Acid ele and 1 stone Gargoyal, and like 10 normal Gargoyals and a few imps... I died ^^

I was using a bard and was overwhelmed by the Air eles, they move too fast hehe.

Just thought id tell what was in there now :p

Thanks Steve. Well doesnt that place just sound nasty. I mean Airs are realatively easy, if you arent swarmed by them. But I do see yet another nice hunting ground in the making. Three reasons right off hand:

1)Resist: With Imps, Krackens, and Airs running around, well needless to say, not a bad place to pick up some resist. But beware, krackens will not like you. And they are deadly. I have yet to wrestle with an Acid elemental, but I would be willing to bet my lunch money for next week, that they probably wont like you either. Just a hint.

2)Pickaxes: Another place for miners to get some of those nifty pickaxes so they can mine more ore. Also more people can go on Ore Elemental hunts.

3)LeWt: Thats right, go there and live, you just might come out of there with a little bit o' cash. Just think couple trips here and your avatar will be the local Wind Pimp. And with a bank located there now, it will be perfect for you to stash all that new LeWt.

Gator's Reccomendation: Have at it, but bring a friend or four just in case. I did mention that Krakens arent friendly, and also Acid Elementals arent necessarily puppy doggish either.

Questions, Ideas, or Comments? Check out the forums, you won't ever be the same.

Later

•FYI

Posted to FYI yesterday on the official UO website:

Publish Update, September 20th Sep 20 2000 6:57PM CST (GMT -06:00)
We will be publishing the dungeon changes listed in Testing for Next Update to the Pacific shard. The publish will be active on the shard following its Thursday, September 21st maintenance period, barring any unforeseen downtimes.

We will continue to monitor the Pacific shard for any issues that may arise, and will continue to publish to all remaining shards as soon as possible.

The changes will be added to Latest Game Updates once the publish is active on all shards.

Later

•Easy way to make money as a mage.

This is more or less just common sense, but lots of people don't possess that and it isn't anywhere on the site. Anyway, since Shame 3 used to be my hang out for making money, I decided to go back there to see how things changed over there. Not much. The easy money went from air elementals to earth elementals. All that you have to do is get 4 or 5 earth elementals to the same place that you trap poison elementals, because you can't be touched here. This shouldn't be a problem at all. Thanks to the new (it's new to me) pathfinding, all that you have to do is go into attack mode and double click on them, teleport to the location, and they'll find their way there. Once you get them to where you want, cast meteor swarm. I killed 4 of them in 4 meteor swarms, which took about 2 minutes (this was with GM magery, GM evaluate intelligence and 97.5 meditation, so results may vary). I made 1200 gold in 2 minutes. Good deal. This is much faster and easier than casting 80 flamestrikes or energy bolts. And thanks to the new spawn rate (they actually spawn now, for those of you who were fortunate enough to not be around when they used to NEVER spawn for hours at a time), they just keep coming and coming.

Since Felucca is less crowded, I recommend you go there. I have the place all to myself, thus more money. God damn greedy bastard.

Non-related updates:

The inscription page has been updated with how to gain during the burst hour. Basically, it's the same as magery: flamestrikes at 30 and water elementals at 70.

Thanks to Don and Mitch for the information.

Also, the bug awareness part of the bugs section has been updated with the following:


Stealing locked down items

This bug allows players to steal items that are locked down in another players home. What I suggest is to keep your doors locked. I don't suggest that you keep your door unlocked and to just put all of your stuff in secure containers, because there's a rumor that people can steal from secure containers also. While not for sure, it's better to be on the safe side.

Out of curiosity, does anyone know if the bugs listed on there even work anymore? Those were put there quite awhile ago, so I have no idea if they do or not. Also, is the stealing blessed items bug still around? Let me know.

Thanks.

•Using my l33t powers, I travel back through time.

There was a post made by ProQuo some time during the move yesterday, and didn't ever make it to the site. Here it is:


Its Official! People are morons.
Wednesday, September 20, 2000 - 1:03 AM CDT - ProQuo

Check out Lum’s site and remember this day. Today is the day that MMORPG genre died. 3 Ex-Volunteers filed a Class Action Lawsuit in Colorado claiming they are owed back wages and overtime. Not just any wages but close to 16$ an hour. OSI has yet to issue an official response and it isn’t likely that they will.

Lets play “What If!” for a moment. If these lawsuit-happy, disgruntled smurfs succeed in getting the money they are asking, companies will be left with 3 choices. None of these choices are very pretty.

The first choice, companies will have to get rid of their entire volunteer program. They really won’t have a choice. When a program cost more then its worth, companies discard them for the sake of profit. While some of our more dense readers might think this is a good thing, it isn’t. The volunteer program is what makes a game like UO possible. Without Councilors to bitch at, UO would be a much different game.

There would be no way to get help in game from an OSI rep. The help button would be discarded and you would have to just deal. It would be impossible for 2 or 3 GMs to handle the amount of help calls coming in. Queue’s would be even longer then now. GM’s would be even less attentive and more ban happy. The end result would be a less pleasant game as players bothered each other with NoOb questions and sent massive emails to Dev team members asking how much longer till there Red leaves statloss.

The second choice would be EA/OSI raising monthly fee. Noone wants this but its quite possible that they will have too. If they are forced to pay each volunteer $5.50 an hour for as many as 20hours a week, UO would stop being profitable. Expect subscription rates to double or even triple. Thousands of players would quit, refusing to pay that much for a game. The resulting exodus would leave the game barren, boring, and expensive. A downward spiral would consume the game as more and more quit. Eventually, UO will be home to 3 servers serving the wealthy hard-core UO addict group of professional baseball players.

The third choice is EA deciding that UO isn’t worth the trouble. Despite what you might think, UO isn’t exactly a cash cow. They may make one and a half million a month in subscription fees, but they do have expenses. To make this game run they end up paying for bandwidth, servers, support, design teams and other business expenses cuts into that. If forced to pay six thousand past volunteers just $2000 each in back wages, it will consume a full year worth of subscription fees. That chunk alone would make UO unprofitable and worthless to EA. In the world of commerce, unprofitable things get flushed. EA would be justified in dropping UO and all MMORPG projects, considering them expensive, bothersome, cash-toilets. The genre would be dead, thousands of gamers would be upset, and 3 kids mad that they lost their free account will have lawsuit money in their pocket. WoOt!

Am I over-reacting? Possibly. While I will always believe people are wasting my air, the effects of this lawsuit remain to be seen. Maybe the case will be thrown out, maybe settled, maybe taken to Supreme Court. Only time can tell. One thing is certain, something is going to happen and it wont be anything I like.

•And yet.........More Dungeon info from yours truly...

Well Designer_Hanse had even more info today on the official UO Message Boards on Dungeon Spawning and issues that were resolved. Check it:

Re: Lots of comments on the dungeons

Great comments! I'll review your concerns and post responses to your issues. The dungeons you don't have issues with, I'll skip. :)

Deceit:
More creatures, actually... there was a problem with ghosts, skeletons, and zombies spawning too infrequently in some areas. This was resolved.

Liches should have originally spawned 1-3 at a time in Deceit, but were not functioning properly. They are spawning at the intended amounts, on Test Center. If liches prove to be too easy (and they seem that way), then we'll evaluate them at a later date.

I just cant wait for more liches, but I also heard that its going to get a little tougher to get to them treaseure chests throughout the dungeons. Gonna have guards posted so to speak. As in evil baddies.

Covetous:
Basically the same for the undead area of Covetous. There are a lot of liches there, but it's a little more confined. The ghost, skeleton, and zombie spawns seem a little higher because of the smaller area.

Hythloth:
It was our intention to tone down the amount of hell hounds and make sure that nothing spawned in the walls. I guess you didn't see the different monster there... someone else will, eventually.. :)

Different monster, anyone have an idea? Supposedly, nobody has discovered it yet.

Destard:
I'm sure many people will find ways to not die. *grin*

Can you say Drakes?

Fire:
It was our intention to theme it more. There are great points of interest in it (it has a spot that I'm sure will be camped often). A person can run through almost all the dungeons and live consistently on Trammel (without a bad internet connection).

Run all the way through now with a good connection? About time it didnt look like downtown New York city at lunch time.

Wind:
Wind is an "elite" mage city (skill requirement). Having a park with many chickens, cows, sheep, etc was originally intended for the balanced ecology/economy. Since the ecology/economy is not being used, the park was a prime target for a few tough creatures.

Has anyone actually gone to Wind yet and looked at it yet. I havent gotten the chance to run on the test dungeons area yet, and take a peek. But is it better? And can mages have a *good time* ?

Surface spawn:
I just checked the ophidians outside Terathian keep. There were many there when I checked (they spawn on the north side on/around the path).

There was one lich in the city of the dead.

The ettins were originally intended to spawn with orcs, but they were not. This was fixed with the spawn changes.

The huge wall of creatures south of the moongate near Trinsic is part of the spawning bug. Dungeons were fixed first and the other areas are targeted next.

The orc spawns on ice island are missing. It may have been they were not intended or that they somehow were removed while changing the dungeons. I'll do more research on this one.

Again, thank you for your comments!

-Hanse

And then he commented on hot spots in the outter world and not in dungeons:

Re: Good Work Hanse! Now about those hot spots...

After a few bug fixes, I hope. We don't have a definite time table yet, though.

Two areas that were simple fixes were Yew forest (the line) and the south end of Ice Island. These two were included with the dungeons since the dungeon changes affected them.

-Hanse

Ohh, lots of stuff changing. Serious point of interest in that last one, spawn on south end of ice island. Thats right, tamers getting the big phat nerf coming. That is the spot for working Taming. And it will no longer be it looks like. Better get out there quick and work that taming skill up fast!!

Later

•Partly right

The poison thing from the aforementaioned counselor is absolutely correct. I tested it myself on TC, and it worked.
The MB data is wrong according to published reports. Go here. to see the publish date of the fix on mindblast.

•The Truth about Poisoning

From our resident Smurf, Counselor Anonymous, come "answers" on Poisoning and Mindblast.

I can answer the poison one.

It is range dependant.

Next to target = Deadly Poison
Up to 5 tiles away = Greater Poison
6 tiles and greater = Lesser Poison

Mindblast works on the differences between stats.

According to my info, and it could be wrong, (GM's are not known for knowing everything), it is based on the current stats, not the base stats. So the best way to defend against it is to
have balanced stats. I know that in this age of the dexmonkie warrior with 100/25/100 it makes it easier for a Poison/Mindblast mage to use cheap tactics. But balance has ALWAYS been
an issue with UO.

Mindblast should, in my opinion, go through a balancing process, making it work like it should have initially, and that is it compares intelligence. I don't see how my DEX or STR should
affect the power of a mind blast. But that is a completely different rant.....:)

If people get info on test server and try to port it to a production shard, they should be aware that test servers are just that, TEST, and that their results may vary on a production shard.

He is working on getting us some more information on Mindblast. No, I am not paying him. He's VOLUNTEERED to help us. And no, he's not going to sue UOPG for wages. Hell, we didn't even offer him a free updating account on the site. He's just a nice guy :)

Oh, I didn't tell you we had a Smurfy Smurf helping us answer questions? So sorry... ::evil grin::

::starts skipping and running through the forest::

Fa la la la la la, la la la la la.

Hasta.

•Council of Mages Web Page

Doing that daily surf thang that I do oh so well. I ran upon the Council of Mages website. Here you will find current Factions Test information. And of course it all deals specifically with the Council of Mages and their hunt for Factions superiority. The also have a message forum, so if your playing on the test, and you want to contact other COM members, have at it. I am not sure as to what this site plans to do when factions goes live. But for now, it is interesting. There is a nifty strategy guide also that can be used to view each cities strengths and weaknesses. And you can get a good idea as to how stealing that blasted sigil from each city can be planned. Also they have a great reference section that goes into about Order/Chaos and the virtues. All together a fine and interesting site for factions Test info. Enjoy.

Stay tuned, Part III of the LumberWarrior essay, Tactics, will be coming out real soon. I hope to have it in your greedy little hands by Saturday.

Later

•As if shit wasn't bad enough.

As always, Lum breaks the news.

Ex-volunteers are suing OSI for backwages plus overtime for all the work they did for them. Granted I agree that they did get fucked by OSI, but the issue, I think, goes beyond law. They knew it was NOT for wages. They knew it was to dedicate their VOLUNTEERED time to help people in the game. They knew the only "compensation", if any, they would receive was a free account. Some could argue that these volunteers profited from this free account (Ebay Equation). (But that is probably a weak arguement.)

This is for revenge, through and through. If you treat people right, they will treat you right. AOL and OSI's management decided to allow their volunteers get pushed around by pisspoor policies and supervisors. Yes, they allowed it to happen. They knew or had an inkling of something not being right in their Volunteer corp and managers over these areas. The "offended" are now taking this crap to OSI and AOL and hit them right where it hurts. The only real way (it seems) to get back at a company that totally screwed you these days. What does that mean for us who play UO? No more UO maybe in the future, shittier Volunteer services, and, most probably, higher subsription fees. Thank you very fucking much.

And the bringers of this class action suit kind of pissed me off (if you hadn't noticed). Here is a snippet of the interview Lum had (how the fuck does he get these interviews?) with the original Plaintiffs:


Lum: Most people who play UO do so for fun. An average player, looking at this, may view this lawsuit, with the impact that this could potentially have would have a serious impact on Origin's ability to run UO, as resulting in higher subscription fees or worse service. What do you have to say to that player?

Terendil: The answer is pretty clear, a industry that cannot survive by the rules of law should not exist. Should we all suffer so that a player can have "fun"?

So, what does that mean to me? "Fuck you, we want our money that we feel we deserved and we don't give a fuck if you get to play UO or not". Not like it's the only Hobby I REALLY enjoy right now. Nope not at all.

Talk about it in OUR 3l337 forum.

Only in America.

Hasta.

•A few skill updates.

The anatomy, fishing, parrying and smithing pages have been updated. There was also a little tip added to the main skills page, which states that you should use/make whatever is 10 skill points more than you're normally supposed to during the burst hour only. This doesn't apply to skills that have their own "burst hour only" section (such as magery), however. Make sense to you? Of course not... I never make any sense. That's what examples are for. If you're trying to gain inscription, you should attempt to make paralyze scrolls at 55 skill instead of 65. Again, this is for the burst hour only. You will waste lots of time and resources if you attempt to try this trick during outside of the burst hour.

Thanks to the updaters for the majority of the information and Grynn for answering all of my dumb fishing questions.

•OSI Staff members are a bunch of Imps...

I was logged on my thief today, at the Britain Felucca Bank on GL, when I came across an Imp-figure, by the name of Senez the Imp.

Considering his name was in the purple letters, I'm assuming this creature was a Seer or GM. Has anyone else spotted this figure? If so, where? Does anyone know if this is part of a quest? Please post in our forums if you have further info. on this. ;)

And it really makes you wonder...Is this what the GMs actually do? Pfft, they are complaining about not enough staff since many counselors quit. Well, if they weren't such imps , maybe they could get something done. :)

•The peacemaking mage.

Everyone blabs on and on about the poisoning mage, the stealth mage, the scribe mage, the tamer mage, the archer mage etc etc etc.

Well boys and girls. I am here to defend the case of the peacemaking mage.

Almost all the times I have gone onto Faction Test I have used the peacemaking mage.

Skills :GM Mage, Med, Resist, Wrestling, EI, Music, and Peacemaking. Stats : 90 Strength, 50 dex, 85 int.

Now before you call me a newbie just wait friends. Just wait.

I am sure many of you do not know how peacemaking works. Basically when someone uses peacemaking in the general area all people are tabbed out of combat and have to re - tab / re - attack to continue combat. There is a 1 second time delay between successful attempts...ie I can continually peacemake and you will have to continually target me. At GM Music / Peacemake I have a 100 percent chance to succeed in the skill so don't bank on me failing.

Here's what happens. Lets say 3 dexers come up to attack me. I peacemake continually and they never hit me. Especially with GM wrestling. If I do get hit, I peacemake and cast G Heal at the same time. I have gotten the heal off 100 percent of the time on Faction Test. Basically you never die to dexers, unless your a newbie who shouldn't be reading this site anyway.

But you ask...what about mages? Ahh balanced stats my friend. If you do plan on making this character your dex will go wild and I have figured this into the equation. Those stats are pretty much natural stats while making this character. All the Post UO:R mages cast 2 spells. Poison and Mind Blast. No one heals anymore bc it is useless. You need potions to survive or you are going to die even with GM resist. So the mages can Mindblast me non stop and take off...10 - 15 damage. And cast agility on yourself and it is even less.

As the peacemaking mage you basically own duels vs both classes and can escape pesky dexers with the ease of your peacemaking macro. You should all try it out and watch how successful it is. Email me your results.

On a different note, I am up on GL as well now boys. And not because Red is there (I was there first, you can ask Nieves) but because I want to make an old fashioned pk. My last attempt failed miserably when I logged out hidden and found myself dead the next day with 7 short terms on my record. So I am making a new one. Probably an Adam Ant type with no stealth. Just Explosion Poison DP Katana ... OOOOooOOOOO type.

Keke ^^

•"I wanna be like NIEVES!"

You wanted it, you got it. My guide to doing a level 3 chest is now up. Go check it out and worship my 3l337 Treasure Hunting sK][[[Z b()&33!! (I have been taking classes!!! Thanks to Max the mage of BDA for teaching me!!)

Hasta.

•More Faction News.....

Angry Bob has another outstanding write-up about the factions monsters on his site. Go check it out. Our very own Pro Quo even provided him some information on Deamons and stuff. Very interesting article, and as always lives up to the outstanding essays that Bob puts out. This guy is good. Make his site a favorite on your web explorer, you wont regret it.

Later

•How to GM Lockpicking (and ANY target-based skill)

What I got from the Treasure Hunter's of Brittania Page.


OSI made the anti-macro coding for target based skills that prevents the old attempts at macroing.

There is a way to GM all of these skills post UO:R, because I have done it. Lockpicking, Arms Lore, Stealing, Poisoning, Taste ID etc... Most anything that requires you target multiple targets - I have gained very well in the post UO:R world.

How can you do it? OVERKILL on the amount of targets! I have helped train *MANY* t-hunters, thieves and dungeon-pickers, and all the ones that have learned fast and GM'd have done it have followed my rule of Overkill. When some thieves were using 20-30 tubs on their pack horse for stealing, I had 115. I used 3 secures full of magic weapons and armor to GM Armslore. The most successfully gaining lockpickers have used MANY boxes.. One person filled 2 secures with over 180 GM Carp/Tink boxes/chests when they hit 85 skill, and was able to GM from that as well as the occasional trip to the chest 'hotspots' around the world. The key to gaining is again - Overkill on the number of targets. You have to show the game that you are active and targeting many different individual boxes. You can carry 100 boxes and 5 keyrings in 5 different bags. That's 110 items, add a runebook and you've got a travelling power hour that can't be stopped! Get some more chest locations in towns if you need them, but no matter what you do get LOTS and LOTS of boxes.

BTW: Most Carpenter/Tinkers will do them very cheaply if you bring them the wood, because then they don't have to pay the outrageous 20gp/board prevailing price (on GL)... So get 1000 wood (20 min work for a good lumberjack) some ingots and some gold and go find a good Tinker in the 90-95 Range.. Yes, I didn't say GM because I have found that most gains are best in the 'sweet spot' range when the tinker is 10-15 points above your skill. In fact, when I started Reklos I was a tinker, and tinkered up ahead of my lockpicking and Remove Trap skills by 5-10 points. It was the fastest way to gain, and I never had to find anyone else to do the work. I quit at 86 Tinker, because I had GM'd Remove at that point, dropping tinkering to work Magery. I then found a GM Carp/Tink for the rest of my lockpicking boxes. I also wore plate gloves and carried 2-handed weapons like Hallys and Warhammers.

Best of luck, and remember always to go WILD with the amount of targets you use on Lockpicking or any target based skill.. that extra effort will save you WEEKS of lost effort.

Reklos of Treasure Seekers Alliance [TSA]
Pure Skill Hunter of Great Lakes

Now go buy 5000 chests and work that lockpicking!

Hasta.

•::Crawls away from Podium::

::Nods frantically:: Yes boss, I wasn't hurt at all. ::Rubs Ass:: I know you wouldnt hurt me...your right Nieves.....::Rubs Head:: We are good buddies.....::tiptoes out of the room before the next loss of good connection nervous breakdown begins::

•::Steps up to the Podium::

"Hi, my name is Nieves. And I play Ultima Online...and know what? I don't give a fuck what you all think!" ::someone from the crowd speaks up:: It's ok man, let it out.

What the...? AN EX POR, MINDBLAST, POISON, MINDBLAST, POISON, CORP POR! DEATH MOAN! "I []Wn JUUS NUUB!"

-----------------

People have been asking me what I think of cable and how it's going for me. I read about the success some folks have had with it ::scrolls down and reads Gator's post again::.

You want to know how it's going for me?

::grabs Gator and hits him over the head with the 17" Monitor:: ::Yells at Gator while he's groaning on the floor:: "You got a kick ass Cable connection right?" ::starts tieing him up with the cable and hangs him upside down from the ceiling:: "You got fast access right?" ::rips out the modem from the computer and starts to walk around to Gator's ass:: "How is this for fast access service"? [Edited for Content]

That clear enough for everyone?

That is what happens when an addict can't get his fix on. ::blinks as folks just stare at him:: What??? At least I fucking admit it!

-----------------

My apologies go out to Caleb whom I was trying to talk to via ICQ before I lost con TWENTY FREAKING TIMES!

NOTE: Gator was not hurt as it was all just make believe. Gator is my buddy and I love him very much ::hits him in the head with the modem:: Ain't that right Gator? ISN'T IT?! ANSWER ME!????

Hasta.

•Dungeons, Factions, and Napster....These are a few of my favorite things...

Doing my daily site search I came up with some dirt on Factions and the new dungeon changes. And if your too lazy to point and click, this is what Designer Hanse had to say:

Re: Only 1 character per account in factions?

The faction system is designed to promote group interactions. To allow more than one character in the faction allows for mules - joining a faction should be a dedicated choice. Allowing more than one character into factions will hurt the dynamics of teamwork.

A tinker is going to be highly demanded, as are all of the merchants - by allowing everyone to play both sides of the fence it devalues the contributions both warriors and merchants can make to the faction.

There are other reasons - such as load balancing, voting and the muling of silver and kill points but the main reason is the importance of teamwork I mentioned above.

Adrick
Designer - UO Live

And then Dungeon Info:

Finalized Dungeons

The dungeons are in their final stages. They should have their finishing touches on today on Test Center. We'll be evaluating them today to make sure no issues are present.

Because of the changes, spawns in the world may increase or decrease. These areas have not been reviewed and may be changed. We have a long list of "hot spots" that we would like to review and change.

So, in short, Test Center should have the final changes for dungeon spawns today.

-Hanse

Only one character per account. I think this makes total sense. If you are going to fight for a cause then by God fight for it. This will prevent people from putting 4 of their characters all in each faction. Thus preventing espoinage which is a good thing. Also you wont be able to put one char in for PvP then have 4 of your mules running around making you stuff. Basically it all boils down to two choices you will have. Either A.)You PvP or B.)You are a merchant. Either way you will be golden. Plus it will alow those people out there with crappy connections or below average PvP skills a chance to participate in OSI's next big game release. Then again you could just be like me. I got 2 accounts, but both of my characters will be PvP.

Dungeons, dungeons, dungeons. As far as I know the changes are the still the same that have been reported over the past week. With just some fine tuning here and there. All these changes are super exciting and changes that needed to be done. Here, here for OSI, next time I see these guys in a bar. They get a round on me.

Ahhh sweet, Napster. All I will say is that if you havent gotten it yet. Get it while the getting is still good. I downloaded 250 Megs worth yesterday. Now I can Jam to Ozzy and kOrN while on TC putting a hole in someones ass.

Later

•How much lunch can a person eat?

Just looking through my daily websites, I noticed that Stratics has a few real life player gatherings listed. Maybe just one too many.
We all remember the world faire that OSI tried every possible way to get people to sign up for.

Well here are a few more that I dug up:
Heather is holding her usual event in Texas. Okay, great. But what's this?
Dor of Sonoma is having one too.
Well isn't that great? Sure it is...More lunch for us. But just when you thought 2 player events + OSI's World Faire was alot, think again. Yep, you guessed it. Another one.
At this point, you have poured out at least a couple hundred bucks, and have had lunch with various different UO addicts. Great.

Is there any chance that you could possibly want more? Yup, well you the chance to meet more people and eat more lunch.

Although this information was probably useless to you, I thought I would just show you all how crazy UO really is. If you are going to or have ever been to any of these real life playing gatherings, tell us about it in the forums. I'm actually interested in hearing about what they are like, considering there are so many.

•This is too funny, and way OT, but still...

How many of you out there are AD&D veterans? I know I have some unforgetable playing experiences siting at a friends house getting drunk on Mountain Dew. Well I stole this amazing video clip from Lum's, and it is too friggin funny. So check it out, you wont regret it, and afterwards, head over to Lum's, and give him mad props for finding that one. Now I am going to go watch it again.

Later

•It is finished....

Well I am finally all set up. New computer is running like a champ, and my cable modem issues were settled this afternoon. So what does this all mean to you as the reader. Well with new equipment changes, it will mean better gameplay for Gator. Thus, you will get better info on PvP and other UO issues that really matter. You want Factions? Well so do I, and I am going to make it my personal commitment to get as much info as I can on this subject to you. Through testing and keeping an eye out on what good ole Adrick has to say, you will stay informed, or by God shoot me. Well don't shoot me, it hurt's, just flame me on the boards or something. And if you want some information you just can't seem to find. Use the boards, thats why they are there. And here at UOPG, player/reader satisfaction is job #1.

Later

•And you thought I was doing nothing. Peesh Pash.

Well, I got the moving part done. All links should work and the file paths for the scripts should be correct. If something doesn't work, please let me know so I can get it fixed.

Also, you should change all of your bookmarks to here. The sites are not mirrors, so the news that's on the old site will not show up here and vice versa. And, as you can probably guess, site updates will only be made to here.

Note to updaters: if you didn't receive my e-mail about the moving, e-mail me and I'll send it to you.

And a huge thanks to Nieves for registering the domain and Evilseed for setting it up so fast.

I also did some fall cleaning. The Death Squad, Diablo II and Temporary Updaters' pages no longer exist. The DS page wasn't updated in 2 and a half months, the Diablo II page wasn't updated in 3 weeks and the temp. thing is over. They were all just wasting space.

I've been digging through the archives, and I see that I should've updated once in awhile. There's lots of valuable information in there. I'm putting it together, and will hopefully add it to the site very soon. I'm also going to update the Newspro guide shortly. I don't even know what the hell I'm saying on the current one. Don't ask me how others do.

And lastly, I'd like to thank Nieves for agreeing to be partners. It will be fun working with him. We don't disagree with eachother often, we talk to eachother all of the god damn time (36 e-mails sent/received today, to be exact) and we are both geniuses. Honest. I'm sure that everything will be just fine and that we'll get a lot of stuff done faster.


My First Real Update, Along With Other Info.
Monday, September 18, 2000 - 5:22 PM CDT - Eric

In case you are wondering what kind of updater I will be (PvM, PvP, etc.), there is no true answer to that question. I’m here to bring you interesting news and powergaming info as I come across it, but I don’t plan to specialize in any specific type of updating.

Lately on Great Lakes, I have been playing mainly with my thief character. One place I have found to be slightly informative for thieving info, is this site.
I wouldn’t say that it’s the best for information, but it gives general information needed on how to raise your skill, and also comes equipped with a nice message board where they tend to be helpful as far as questions about thieving go.

During my search for more info on thieving, I came across this site which has some very interesting pictures from alpha or beta UO (not sure which). We all know that Markee Dragon has always brought us excellent and very old Ultima Online screen shots, but this site had a few that were very interesting that I had never seen before. Check it out.

That’s all for now.. Feel free to flame me in our wonderful forum if you don’t like the way I bring you the news. : )

Cya.

•Oh, yes, another updator. Be afraid, be very afraid.

That right, I'm your new temp. updator. If all goes well, and you guys don't flame me to hell, maybe I'll become permanent...Let's see how I do.

For now, I'll just give a little introduction about myself. My name is Eric, and I currently reside on the Great Lakes shard. (Yes, for all of you that actually read the UOPG forums, I'm Eric-GL) I have every type of character (except a carpenter I think) so consider me a useful resource for all of your UO powergaming needs. Rather than go on and on about my characters and myself, I'll stop here. Expect something a little more informative from me later tonight or tomorrow.

Cya -

Eric

•50/50 Cause Red and I are cool like that.

Looks like Redrum and I have worked out an amicable agreement to ownership of UOPG. We are partners now and we will be working together to making UOPG da bomb (like we aren't allready).

As you know he gave the site to me but he came back recently and said he wouldn't take it back. I have since bought the domain name and did some other "undercover" things to make the site better. But I would feel like a low bitch if I didn't give it back to Redrum. So, we talked a bit and agreed on sharing the duties as owners and overall moderators of UOPG.

I think this will be to everyone's advantage as you now have two crazy fucks with no lives to help maintain the best Ultima Online information site bar none. [No offense to the moderators as they work just as hard if not harder than Red and I in some cases.]

We will all be collaberating on moving the site, redesigning it, and implementing new sections and completing old ones.

Maybe Red can get me to curse less now, too. Um...yeah right.

Anyway...

Welcome to a new age of Ultima Online Powergamers: 2000.

Hasta.

•Lions and Tigers and Deamons, OH MY!

I updated the PvM pages a bit. You will notice the menu items aren't quite right on the left side for the new and updated pages. That's because I didn't realize Redrum was using a "static" menu on each page. Not bitching, just more work to do. If you find you can't find a monster in the sublistings, just go back to the PvM Main page and look for it there.

I will either fix it later or just wait untill we change the site's layout.

In Napster news, read this. You might find it interesting as the government seems at odds over what to think of Napster.

Cause I am cool like that, I moved two of my updates from today to the Nieves Page. They were more like rantings so they should go there anyway. Not like I am trying to make you go there or anything. I would never do that.

Hasta.

•You know I have to write a review for whatever game I play. It's a tradition around here.

I got a chance to play UO today, and I can say that the dev team did something right (I don't think I ever said that).

The people that I played with seemed to be nice, and this is on a weekend. There was only one episode where a bunch of people looted my kill at the same time and tried the lame old "trap with wall of stone that DOESN'T WORK ON ANYBODY and NEVER will" trick, but for the most part, people ressurected, gated, healed eachother and didn't loot kills very often. Most of them had the chance to loot, but they let the main person do the looting. It wasn't a bad thing to play with other people for a change. They're usually fuckheads that need some nut kicking.

The lag was very pleasable. I only lagged once, and it wasn't too major that I died or lost connection. Everything was nice and fast. I can actually play the damn thing without having 90% pl to every shard now.

The client is also good. No memory leaks, not ONE crash (unbelievable, considering how many times I crashed pre-quitting) and whatever else that I missed.

The monster AI is good, but still bad. They do have better pathfinding and cast higher spells, but they're basically the same. If you have high resist, the spells don't hurt at all. I was getting drained on by an assload of them, but I only had to heal a few times. They're still slow and easily out-runnable, so that's kind of lame. I could still kill them with a few spells as well. The spawn is nice though. It's fun fighting 8 monsters at the same time... Especially when you're insane, like myself.

Trammel/Felluca isn't bad. I hear that pk's and Felucca is dead. False. I was attacked almost every single time I went to a dungeon in Felucca. Now only if people would learn how to fight, it would be great. Just wait until I get Red a house and start pk'ing. I will make everyone cry. Ok, that's a lie. I'll be the one whining like a little bitch from dying constantly and having to walk home every 5 minutes.

In relation to the above two, the challenge aspect is better than it was before. I'm kind of dissapointed that I only died once, but it's still harder than before. The fact that I was attacked constantly by others made my day. I love that. I have yet to find some thieves though. I'm still waiting for them. Monsters actually moving towards you is pretty good also. One thing that I don't like is how easy it is to get money. Either monsters need to have more life/resist and hit harder/cast spells that DO DAMAGE or they should lower the loot drastically. It's ridiculous that you can make so much money so easily.

The party system is pretty cool. I like three things about it: you can see all stats of other party members, you can talk to them while meditating and you can talk to them from the opposite side of the map. And that other stuff that I don't care or know about.

People are actually playing now. When I played last, there was not one person anywhere. You can imagine how boring it is to recall from location to location to location to location to location to location and not find one soul wandering. That's how it was before. There was people everywhere this time around. I seen a lot of good guild wars and groups help eachother kill stuff.

I didn't get to PvP yet, but that's because I'm currently a clueless pussy that's learning everything again. I can't comment on whether or not it's good.

Nieves makes the game. Damn, that guy is nice. Anything you could imagine that someone would do for something else, he did it. Even though all we did was get our asses kicked by orcs and other weak monsters, it was fun playing with him. Paladin is pretty nice himself and actually knows what he's talking about. Now if he'd only stop his whining and come join Nieves and myself on GL. Watts is also pretty nice and helpful. He should zip it like Paladin and join too.

Anything else that I missed, too bad.

All in all, it's pretty fun. Hell, I played it all day long. I never thought in a million years that I'd ever play again. Considering it sucked more horse shit than anything else before, it was with good reason. I'm glad I tried it again though. I'll probably play it for awhile. Whatever Origin did, good job.

In funny shit news, this is some funny shit.

•Me and Lum have a lot of common.

We both quit UO, gave up on our sites and came back 2.75 days later (I counted - both times) and came back to UO again. Not in that particular order, nor at the same time. Ok, so we don't have a lot in common. Anyway, while doing the normal "stare up while the lights are off and see how many of them moving dots I can find" fun thing that only cool people do, I decided to reactivate my UO account. One reason is because Diablo II SUCKS. I have no idea what they did wrong, but they did it. I mean, the game runs smooth, battle.net is fast now, the people on bnet are actually nice and helpful and there doesn't seem to be any bugs/exploits. The above was supposed to be everyone's dream game. It is fun, but for some reason it gets boring fast. I only lasted 2 months. What the fuck is that? Erhmm.. the other reason is because of boredom and lack of money. If you can't buy something new and are so bored that you have to choose from Everquest and UO, you pick UO. I'm kind of curious to see what it's like nowadays too. It better not suck like it did when I was playing last or I'll be mad. Please tell me it's good and that I can have 3-some's in front of the bank without getting banned.

I didn't actually play yet, because my mom isn't a loser like me and doesn't wake up until around that time that normal people usually do, thus I have no credit card. My account is still active though. This means that Origin lied. I cancelled 4 months ago... it's supposed to be gone after 3 months. I'm not one to complain though. As long as I have my l33t hair from one of them valentine gift things or whatever, it's all good.

I'll probably hook up with Watts on Pacific just to see how much he sucks so I can laugh at him. And to use all of his stuff. And to loot his house and kidnap his horse. Etc. Etc. Etc. If that fails, I'll go to SP and do the same with Paladin. I'm such a swell guy.

Nieves will still be the owner. It's only right. You don't give something to someone and take it away. Ok, so you do, but this is different. Maybe if running/updating one site and updating two others gets a little hasty, I'll be happy to be his partner (told you I'm a swell guy). Whatever. It doesn't make it a difference to me. I can live with just being a bitchling that mildly updates. It is less work afterall, and you all know how lazy I am. Hopefully, he'll be nice enough to give me a section so I can whine at will. That would be great. And if I don't quit right away, I'll try to make myself useful like I used to and bring some information. This might be awhile, since I have no idea what happened in the last few months and will thus be a newbie.

Keep the faith (everyone else says it).

•Freedom of Speech

Many of you are aware that we have recently had a situation with a fellow claiming that his "freedom of speech" rights were being violated. Well, as the resident political science major, I'm going to explain something to everyone that might not understand. If you look at the Constitution it does indeed say that, "Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech...." Now, that's pretty straightforward, but I'd like you to look carefully at that "congress shall make no law" part. If you don't understand it, I will explain.

The Constitution limits the government. In no way does it protect you from the actions of other citizens. It was written to limit the federal government's involvement and control over the lives of ordinary citizens. This site and the associated forums are public places, but as in all public places, rules of decorum apply. Those rules are looser, and a more free exchange of ideas is able to be accomplished thereby, however, even these looser restrictions can be crossed.

If you do cross them, and you are banned, none of your rights are being violated. We, as a group, are exercising our right not to associate with you, and at any rate, as private citizens, we can't violate your right to free speech, since we are not a government agency.

As a final note, specifically to our dear, departed friend, DMX. If you behaved the same way on the UO boards and in game, I certainly expect them to ban you, and would be disappointed in them if they did not. They also can choose to disassociate themselves from you, and I hope they have a party when they do. That I'd fly to Austin for.

•I GM'd Cut & Paste

Nissa, one of our beloved forum residents just posted this to our wonderful message boards.

This just in from Cal on the Development board:
I spoke with Sage about this and we're going to keep runebooks blessed and will also work to make sure the older ones become blessed as well. I'll update all of you on that once we have a system in place.

I also want to say a few things here. First, thank you. Thank you for taking the time to communicate with me in a constructive manner even though we were debating. I know this was a very big issue to many of you and that many of you felt very passionate about it. I was glad to see everyone write compelling arguements and examples of why you felt they should remain blessed. It is exactly that kind of communication and feedback that I am looking for when I read these boards.

Anyway, runebooks will remain "blessed" items. I think the kind of debate we had last night is very healthy and I hope to continue to have that level of discourse with you as we press forward.

Thanks again everyone!

Read all about it HERE!!

Thanks all!!

------------------
Nissa - Chesapeake

Oustanding. Love them rune books. Just think now you have no excuse for being stuck anywhere. Just keep them books stocked with recalls and you will be golden. Any thoughts or comments, go here and post on our wonderful message boards. Ok, ok, I am done advertising. Whoops, did it again. Hehe.

Later

•Why go to other sites when you have our forums?

From Nissa:
I don't if many of you realize it, but OSI has stated that runebooks will no longer be newbiefied. Cal stated that it
was a bug and that it would be fixed.

Needless to say, many people are posting on the UO Development Board that they don't want it to change. Cal has given some feedback why OSI feels this way and many have countered his reasons. It does make for some interesting reading.

If you feel strongly about this issue, please go to the link below and post your support. Maybe we can talk OSI out of changing it.

Here is what Cal said:
That's not the right way to do this though. Yes, it's been that way for a while, but just because a bug is longstanding, does not mean we simply ignore it and call it a feature. Look at it the other way, imagine if we had the attitude that "skill gain is just fine, it's been that way for two years now, we don't need skill locks". We can't think that way.

Again, just because something is a certain way for a long time, does not mean it should be left that way, if it is in fact not working as designed. The fact is, runebooks were never meant to be newbie items, however, tracking down why they are has proved to be a bit tricky which is why I can't give an ETA as to when they will be fixed.

Bobbycocks! It doesn't hurt anyone. Everyone benefits from it. ::sighs:: Whatever...

Click on the link below to see the thread:
Show your support for newbie runebooks!!

Thanks to Nissa for bringing this to our attention.

Gawd I love cut and paste.

Hasta.

•When all else fails, steal from other sites.

Bob’s was updated today with an in-depth look at which Faction has the dungeon advantage. It’s covers all the current dungeons and feeds my ego. Check it out here!

Battlevortex returned to service today. Their host, Atomic Rhino lived up to its name and went atomic. They managed to put out the flames and restore BattleVortex just in time for them to post more about games that aren’t out yet. WoOt! I did find this in their forum though. That interesting taunt to Adrick inspired me to try it out, and it was surprisingly fun!

That’s basically all I do on Faction Test now. I kill anyone that goes grey and I make lots of “friends” doing it. I found that most ppl don’t like the idea of a fair fight so often I get called names like “nubi fag” as they run around screaming for help. I also found that people hold grudges and that an ass like myself shouldn’t go grey. I was on the receiving end of a multi-faction gank not two seconds after flagging grey. It was fun watching Minax and Shadowlords put aside there hatred long enough to pummel me in a slew of Arrows and Mindblasts. Make sure that if you stop by Corwin’s guild message board and tell him how l33t he is.

In actual game news, OSI needs more slaves to work as councilors. If more of the boys in blue aren’t hired soon, the boys in red will start quitting. I paged a councilor twice yesterday and to my surprise, I got a GM both times. The embarrassment these guys must have felt at being lowered to answering questions about housing issues. But like good smurfs, the Game Masters weren’t helpful at all. Go apply here and help the GM’s get back to more important things like decorating towers.


And finally I ask that you check out our forum and post your ideas on the perfect faction template. Remember though, The Fist of Fascism is waiting inside to crush all those that quote Eminem or otherwise annoy me. Place nice in the forum, The Fist likes nice.

•Dungeons, Spawns, Dungeons, Spawns...It goes on and on and on...

Found a great writeup on whats going down in all the dungeons. This players site has a great level by level breakdown of what has been spawning for each dungeon on the test center. Great work if you ask me. Also hes got some info on everyone's new favorite dungeon Khaldun. Awesome screenshots, probably some of the best I have seen so far. So give it a look over, hell, I bet even Nieves would give it an overall good rating. And check out the rest of the site while your there as well. Great information for tamers.

Later

•The day that was....

Well on a positive note, I got my cable modem installed today. Although on a negative note, my computers AFU and the cable wont work at all. So I am still on ISDN. Then there is the next positive note, I should get my new computer tomorrow. And what does all this mean? Cable Modem+New Computer=No Lagged Gator. If by tommorow afternoon sometime your outside, and you hear angels singing. Thats riiight. Gator just logged on UO. I even had to go out of my way to design a special exhaust system for my computer and high speed access. Mainly because, Im gonne be smokin. And I am not talking about NightShade either. :P Onto latest and greatest UO news. Stole this from the Official UO Website:

This is from FYI:

Housing Update Sep 14 2000 6:48PM CST (GMT -06:00)
We will be updating all shards with two changes to housing. These changes will be active once the shards return from their next maintenance or down time.
Houses which at one point had double (or more) doors cannot currently be re-keyed or transferred properly. This will be resolved.
Some houses were registering as having vendors or guildstones that no longer exist. This has been fixed and the houses will be able to be set “public”.

Counselors Wanted – All Ultima Online Shards Sep 14 2000 2:35PM CST (GMT -06:00)
Are you enthusiastic, motivated, and excited about helping your fellow players enjoy their time in Britannia? We’re looking for UO players to join our Counselor corps on all shards. If you enjoy working with people and have a few free hours each week, please fill out the Counselor application and make the first move toward a rewarding role in Ultima Online.

The UO Counselor program requires that you be at least 21 years old and have no outstanding billing issues to qualify. For a full list of requirements, and to fill out an application, join here.

There is an interesting article on the whole UO Counselor Program over at Lum's. Check it out. And I hope these housing fixes will remedy some of our avid readers' problems out there. If not, go here and raise some hell about it.

And then I nabbed this from Testing for Next Update:

Various Fixes and Changes Sep 14 2000 3:25PM CST
The following changes will be added to Ultima Online:
Secure containers will be dyeable by using a furniture dye tub
A problem with player vendors and guildstones not removing themselves properly from houses will be corrected.

So let's here it for OSI, getting out there and fixing some of these pesky bugs. I am keeping a close eye on factions, looking for some good gouge to get to you guys. I have been receiving emails about anatomy gains, keep sending them. If I can get enough info about it, I will do an update on it so all the world can see. And I am working on Part 3 of the LumberWarrior series. Keep an eye out, its gonna be nifty.

Later

•The day that was....

Well on a positive note, I got my cable modem installed today. Although on a negative note, my computers AFU and the cable wont work at all. So I am still on ISDN. Then there is the next positive note, I should get my new computer tomorrow. And what does all this mean? Cable Modem+New Computer=No Lagged Gator. If by tommorow afternoon sometime your outside, and you hear angels singing. Thats riiight. Gator just logged on UO. I even had to go out of my way to design a special exhaust system for my computer and high speed access. Mainly because, Im gonne be smokin. And I am not talking about NightShade either. :P Onto latest and greatest UO news. Stole this from the Official UO Website:

This is from FYI:

Housing Update Sep 14 2000 6:48PM CST (GMT -06:00)
We will be updating all shards with two changes to housing. These changes will be active once the shards return from their next maintenance or down time.
Houses which at one point had double (or more) doors cannot currently be re-keyed or transferred properly. This will be resolved.
Some houses were registering as having vendors or guildstones that no longer exist. This has been fixed and the houses will be able to be set “public”.

Counselors Wanted – All Ultima Online Shards Sep 14 2000 2:35PM CST (GMT -06:00)
Are you enthusiastic, motivated, and excited about helping your fellow players enjoy their time in Britannia? We’re looking for UO players to join our Counselor corps on all shards. If you enjoy working with people and have a few free hours each week, please fill out the Counselor application and make the first move toward a rewarding role in Ultima Online.

The UO Counselor program requires that you be at least 21 years old and have no outstanding billing issues to qualify. For a full list of requirements, and to fill out an application, join here.

There is an interesting article on the whole UO Counselor Program over at Lum's. Check it out. And I hope these housing fixes will remedy some of our avid readers' problems out there. If not, go here and raise some hell about it.

And then I nabbed this from Testing for Next Update:

Various Fixes and Changes Sep 14 2000 3:25PM CST
The following changes will be added to Ultima Online:
Secure containers will be dyeable by using a furniture dye tub
A problem with player vendors and guildstones not removing themselves properly from houses will be corrected.

So let's here it for OSI, getting out there and fixing some of these pesky bugs. I am keeping a close eye on factions, looking for some good gouge to get to you guys. I have been receiving emails about anatomy gains, keep sending them. If I can get enough info about it, I will do an update on it so all the world can see. And I am working on Part 3 of the LumberWarrior series. Keep an eye out, its gonna be nifty.

Later

•Some Links to look at and the Dungeon, Shame .

I found this today in our own Blackthorn Forums: PvP Tactics. It seems a moderator has no idea why Inscription is so good for mages now. Anyone want to explain it to him?

I also found this link off Adam Ant's site. Seems like Adam has some new competition in the Liche Guardian Role. I like the site. He needs to work on his writing a little bit, but who am I to judge that? Anyone that has talked to me via email knows I totally suck at writing sometimes ::winks at Paladin::. 4 PvMers from me. I still want to know why everyone uses black as a background color all the time? :/

Anyway....

This site made me laugh my ass off. Yes, Evil can be roleplayed, and Photek is funny as hell.

Here is Duncan's next Dungeon installment: The Dungeon, Shame. Enjoy.

Shame
I first went into Shame right after Renaissance. My warrior had reached GM swords and tactics, and I had around 65 healing. I went there because I heard Earth Ele’s were good for loot.

Level 1
The first floor has only Earth Ele’s and scorpions. On trammel, the spawn is manageable, but beware on Felucca as if no one has been there in a while, you can get easily swarmed. This place is GREAT for loot hunting as scorpions barely poison you and earth elementals don’t hit too hard for their 300 gold loot. To get to level 2, head north east.

Level 2
Not too much here… some random air and fire elementals which are a bit beefed up magic-wise. The air’s are FAST… so don’t get into trouble with them unless you are on a horse and not lagged. This level is too narrow for my liking and has a very slow spawn.

Level 3
This level should be called “beware of poison elemental”. Sometimes if it was chasing someone, it may be right next to you as you enter level 3. It spawns near the western island of the level. Not much else of interest here… mostly fire ele’s with a few of the rest.

Level 4
This level is small and dumb… a few fire elementals, but I don’t bother with them.

Level 5
Home of the blood elemental. Archers and mages: there is a trap spot south of the room it spawns in. It is a one square space for you… just teleport in. I have heard that warriors have meleed this. I don’t see why they would… it would cost a LOT less to kill 3 or 4 earth elementals to get the same loot with a much smaller chance of dying. BUT, if you want to, you better be a parryer. Bring a buckler as they kick ass… and use the hardest, slowest 1 handed weapon you can… just hit and run. Tamers: bloods give good money, but you will need some vet skill to keep your dragons healthy. However, with some even half decent magery and one dragon… you should go to the south west corner of the level. There is a GREAT Earth ele spawn there with a few scattered giant serpents. The serpents will give you 4 meat each to feed your dragon, and there is never a lack of earth ele’s for loot. This was my favorite spot to hunt with my dragon.

Loot Rating: A
Dungeon Difficulty: B+
Dungeon Design and “Look”: A- I just wish we could put boats in dungeons again…

Duncan MacLeod

Hasta.

•News from the Developer Front

There have been a couple of interesting posts from Designer Hanse on the UO.com Development Forum. The first concerns the 'ability to push through players or monsters' issue:

"Pushing Through" Players / Monsters

The ability to push through monsters/players is not changing, currently. It was a temporary side-effect of the changes we had on Test Center. It should be fixed to the way it was, prior to our changes.
If this does change in the future, it will be announced on our web site.

-Hanse

A post on the Dev board from someone:

**breaths a sigh of relief that it isn't being changed**

:/ Well...I guess we can all go back to being happy that we don't have to worry about being blocked by monsters. ::holds out the hanky:: Ok, I am being mean. Sorry. Personally, I wouldn't have minded it changing so that it's more of a challenge. Maybe, just maybe, the spawns will be hard enough that people won't be able to just walk through dungeons and it's nothing but a cake walk for them.


And the second concerns some changes that have taken place to Wind on the Test Shard:

Wind

Wind is located near the dungeons, so it was included in the spawn fixes. The city has received changes to the monster locations and types.

Wind had a bank added to it. The sign has not been added to the front of it yet, though. It's on the east side of town. Wind should have more mage vendors, now. :)

Check it out and comment! Thanks!

-Hanse

OOOH! A bank in WIND!!!! Can you say hello momma!?? I love it. The mages now have a definate hang out all their own. I can't wait to hear the fighters with less than 72 magery complain about this. Someone will find something to complain about.

UPDATE: I got this via email:

>From: "Those"
>To:
>Subject: A Bank in Wind? Aeck, did they even look at Wind?
>Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2000 21:06:55 +0200
>
>Hiya, good old Nieves.
>
>I just wanted to tell you Wind has a bank.
>
>Has *always* had one. To the east.
>At least on Drachenfels. In the room with a lot of beds in it
>and some golden chests...
>
>Maybe only on Drachenfels? I'd find it extremely disturbing
>to see two banks in such a small towne just because
>the designer(s) did not find it. Admittedly,
>almost nobody knew about the bank because I there
>was no sign there, but that's part of the fun - finding out
>things on your own, don't you think so.
>
>Maybe you could ask your fellow site readers if there is
>or there ain't a bank in Wind already on other shards.
>
>You know, as a real power gamer you know the bank in Wind ;-)
>
>Thanks, almighty uopg owner,
>Tralalalalala
>
>Sshysta

Thanks for making me feel stupid.

Hasta.

•Yes, Yes I am not dead.

I am still playing UO.

But like 2 or 3 hours a week :(

My findings over the last few weeks.

Thief Mages own. Yes own!

My theif now is 70 magery, 70 stealing, 80 snooping 65 hiding, 85 meditation, GM wrestling. Let me say he doesn't die. Never.

I have owned everyone in Deciet the last week. I own mages bc I steal their regs (cure regs :) ) and have balanced stats so Mind Blast does like 4 damage to me. I own dexers bc they suck against a good mage that uses potions.

And the money. My god the money. Silver weapons galore. I think I have stolen around 25 weapons in the last 2 hours of game play and killed a multitude of people that try to attack me and get their loot to boot.

Point of post : Make a theif mage.

•Angry Bob: The Unknown Genius of PowerGaming

There is a reason that almost every UO page worth a damn links to his site. That man knows his shit. Angry should change his moniker to Silent Bob, because like the character in every Kevin Smith film, he doesn’t say much but when he does, its golden.

For example, his latest guide to making a Bob (or any dex monkey) is the a power gaming piece of art. Using it, I was able to make a throwaway fencer pk with no effort or thought. I also collected enough gold to afford me gear to go play with.

Since his guide didn’t get enough time on the front page, here is the link. Check it out or be forever lame.

•"Mailmen: Gunning down MacDonald's since 1982"

Got some interesting info in the email today on everyones favorite skill Anatomy. Check it out:

Dear Gator:

I play on the Napa shard and recently decided to go back and work on my warrior's anatomy (it was around mid 80s - and i dropped from playing him so much to work on my merchant chars *ducks the flame*) and I decided to come back to it. Well, I decided to go to trammel (yes i am a wus for not staying in felucca) and wandered towards the swamp ( I think its the one on the way to Yew). where there are many, MANY lizardmen there. It was also out of power hour for me and I gained over a point of anatomy swinging at these monsters. I had a GM katana with me and GM armor giving me an AR of 38. I have GM swd/tac but my dex is real low (it was only 28 with the armor on)

Bottom line: These lizardmen seem to be a good source of raising anat at said high level (last night it went from 90 to 91).

Also on a side note: I have a few houses and 3 of them are public 1
private. The warrior owns the private house and was fighting monsters in one of the public houses. NOTE: He was gaining anat while fighitng IN the house - not just on the steps but IN THE HOUSE itself. Ive noticed this for another of the public houses (owned by another char of mine) that he was gaining anat while fighting in the house.

I dont know if this is becuase my houses are on the same account
(pre-patch of 1 per account) or they are houses un-owned by that char.

Let me know if any of this is of interest to you.

Bentho of Napa


Thanks Bentho. Lets bring out them important points and evaluate.

1) Gains from inside a public house that isnt yours: I have read numerous posts of people fighting outside a house, when Anatomy is gained they immediately run either inside a house, or hop on the steps, and start gaining anatomy like mad. One day I was coming back to my tower. Bam. Two spiders were looking at me considering lunch. I manned my Double Axe, and hit one right as I had opened the door for my house. Viola. Anat gain. Next swing Anat gain. etc. I dropped my axe, and just started punching, 94.1 to GM anat in 10 minutes. Everytime my right hook landed I gained a .1. But I still believe these remarkable gains are totally random. Since then I have tried this like mad and have received no results.

2) Fighting against multiple creatures: This is a good one, and I am going to throw out a wild theory on this one. Usually you will gain anatomy, through attacking a creature. But, what if, the anatomy skill gets and improved chance to gain, when you are attacking or being attacked by multiple creatures? Hmm, interesting. Cause I have seen this as well. And a good friend of mine used to go to heavy spawn areas in Felucia to gain anat through this method.

So, does anyone else have any thought or ideas on this subject? Email me, and lets figure this one out. If you have some wild experiences while gaining anatomy, or a good tactic at gaining anatomy. Drop me a line. I will put everything together in one neat pile, and find out what we can do to GM that nasty skill.

Later

•A farewell...

A good online friend of mine Duncan MacLeod (not real name for those wondering) has recently sold his UO account (BOO!). I will miss him in UO. You can read about the probable "last straw" for him on my Nieves page. He was kind of enough to send me guides on the Dungeons of Sosaria. Some of these will probably be made obsolete with the upcoming dungeon changes. They are still good reading and could be viewed as "remember how it was...?" when these dungeon changes occur.

Enjoy them, I know I did.

Here, for everyone, is: Dungeon Wrong

Wrong
I first found this dungeon when I was about a month or two into playing UO with my warrior... at the time, he was around 75 in swords and tactics. I had no healing, as I did not know how it works. I had gotten tired of being poisoned in Despise (I never had orange potions, did not use bandages, and forgot that I could use the spell)... so I dedided to go to Wrong. This was also before
newbified runebooks... so if you had a rune, you better not lose it as Wrong is a LONG way from anything. Nowadays, just keep your newbie runebook and you'll be all set.

Level 1
You will walk in and see a small tunnel heading north. At the end of this, you will see three blue sparkling mist things. Step on the middle one and you will be transported down to level 2. That wasn't so hard, was it? Well if you want to check out level 1, you have 2 options: walk left or right at the mists. To the right is nothing of great interest... To the left is the same thing BUT you can follow the path to the Troll Room. At any given time there are as many
as 6 trolls in there plus a few more outside the room. If you have a couple buddies who have low healing skill but decent weapons, you should be ok. Just watch out for Giant Serpents. Trolls used to be decent for money but with some other mosters having absurd loot (Earth ele's come to mind), they're not great.

Level 2
As you step thru the mist, you have about a half second before 6 Ettins tackle you. On Felucca, this level means death. On Trammel, you can shove thru them. Nieves mentioned to me he ran immediately left into the end room to make a choke point and take the monsters one at a time from there. Beware of the Ogre Lord as well... it looks like an Ogre. It walks like an Ogre. But it hits like a balron.

Level 3 and 4
Well, you can't get here anymore (anyone know if you ever could?) I have heard that GM's and seers use this room to plan quest items and events and stuff.

Loot Rating: B-
Dungeon Difficulty: C
Dungeon Design and Attractiveness: B, would get a definite A if level 3 and 4 were useable.

Duncan MacLeod


Note: If some of you are wondering why I haven't said a fare thee well to Red yet, here is why: 1) I am busy as hell with taking over the site and I want to give a write up to him justice; and, 2) I want to dedicate the rebirth of UOPowergamers (layout redesign) to him when it happens. When it's done, I can dedicate a good post thanking him for the opportunity he has given me and transfering ownership of a great site to me. Always remember, Red will forever be there at the heart of UOPowergamers.

Next...Shame.

Hasta.

•Three chances to guess what I am doing...

Check this out:

Congratulations! Your domain registration has been processed and completed. Your domain(s) www.uopowergamers.com has been registered for a term of 1 year(s).

And now...it begins.

Hasta.

•For the record, I don't get mad Veg...er..Ep...oh, whatever your name is now!

Welcome back the new and improved Vegeta to the site. It will be good to read about PvP from your point of view. And you can post whatever you want. PvM is for everybody :).

The updaters are doing a GREAT job posting their PvP essays (Lumberjacking and Poison Mage). And talk is circulating on updating the skills essays as well. Eventually, these PvP essays will be compiled and put together in a PvP section for all of you guys to enjoy. And the skills pages will be update as soon as we are able.

As Gator put it: Update Character Templates with high speed essays. Kinda like Stratics but ours will be better due to the fact that we can change them when the game changes and they never do.

We change our essays because we care about the game a whole lot more than they do. Or do we have more time? Oh well, I am sure to get an email from Xena sometime soon about it.

::shrugs::

Hasta.

•Not to step on Gator's feet but..

Just took a quick look at LJ102, and Id like to make a few points.

I started a new warrior, and Im at 98 tacts, 87 swords, 92 anatomy and 91 lumberjack and I haven't left the jhelom dueling pits. Sure I could do this faster with bone knights, but while Im there I sit at the computer studying for a test or whatever.

Also for healing gains:

The flames in Covetous one work ALOT better than falling off a building.

That is all.

•Return of the Omnipotent One.

Well, Im back.

You may know me as Vegeta, or God, or any other names I have. Many of which are not all that great.

Im going to be a PvP updater, and my goal is to bring you both informative pvp posts along with stories such as Red use to.

Any suggestions can be sent to my mail box.

I promise not to venture into the PvM world as Nieves seems to get quite upset when that happens ^^

•LJ 102:GMing Those Skills, Enquiring Minds Want to Know!

Ahh, yes. So now your keen sense of fighting is rising to levels you have even yet to dream of. Women in taverns speak of you, and every Bull, Great Hart, Llama, and Pig throughout the country side trembles when you stride by. Yes you are an Expert Warrior. A fearsome man, loathed by the newbies that beg for yards of leather at your feet. But wait....it gets even better.

So you ready for the big time? Are you ready to reached the magnificent title of GrandMasta Warrior? Then read on. To put it simple, GMing any melee type is probably the easiest thing to GM in this game. Nuff said on that. But ask an old timer sometime. Back in the day, there was no such thing as a week old GM DexMonkey. Of course, come to think of it, back in the day their weren't any DexMonkies. :) Thats another tale for another time my little kiddies.

Right now your Tactics and Swords should be in the 70-80s range. And your STR/DEX should be in the high 90's, if not 100/100. And if they aren't like this go back and read Lumberjacking 101:The revised addition or read this. Gaining stats with minimal skill usage is an excellent essay on how to max them stats. Get them maxed out first then read on.

Be aware that right now Dungeons are going to change. How? Well right now I am not totally sure. I mean, we know OSI right? But as for now, I will post what I know that works to GMing them melee skills. And if a change comes about, stay tuned to UOPG and we will get you on the right track.

Dungeon Deceit and The Wall: Back in the day the wall was the shit. And sometimes it still can be. Read about it to understand what it is. That way if you are their going toe-to-toe with a bone knight and someone screams out "Man The Wall!!!!". You will know what the hell is going on. A great majority of people cant stand the wall and have yet to grasp the concept that yes you can make better gold one floor down in the Lich room. ::sigh:: I just dont know, maybe its just the Powergamer in me. But to get on with the subject, Bone Knights rock for skill gain. Go their with 70's skill, and be ready to do some swinging. I would say 3-5 days to GM tops. Do this of course during your Power Hour. Around the corner from Bone/Skel Knight room, you can find some spell tossing skeletons called Bone Magi, these guys are great for gaining resist. How do you get to Deceit? Well if you have the cash and can buy a boat. Point that boat to sail North, and you cant miss it. Look for the isle covered in snow with enough polar bears and orcs to populate New York City. And dont forget the funny little people running around asking Walruses to be their friend. Well the dungeon is in a cave in the big mountain located smack in the middle of the island. But their is an easier way to get their, if you can recall, go to peoples houses looking for runes or runebooks. When you find some, if it says "Deceit", "The Wall", or "Bone Knights", your in there. Recall or Gate, Bam your there. Fight, fight, fight.

WARNING: If you die on Deceit there is a shrine, southeast of the dungeon to get your self ressed. But if you loose all your stuff in the process, you may be stuck hanging out for awhile. So be careful! If you are in the Bone Knight room and die, just hit war mode so folks can see you. Someone will res you, and if you lost your stuff, most likely you can get a gate as well. If not ask for a couple of recall regs or a scroll. Nine times out of ten, someone will hook you up, just be nice about it. But remember if your a twink, don't expect anything.

T2A Undead Fort: On that map its located in location RED #4. Delucia is location ORANGE #1. So as you can see it is a hop skip and a jump away as well. At this fort you will find Bone Knights, Skel Knights, Bone Magi, and Liches. Occasionally you will get the random orc coming from the Orc Fort located just North. Anyways, find yourself a Bone Knight and lure him far away from the fort, where he will be all yours to play with. I recommend bringing a friend with just in case, these guys can smack you HARD. Also if you are working Archery, you can hop up onto one of the hilltops surounding the fort, and shoot away to gain archery. Need some Parry? Grab two Bone Knights and let em smack on you. Great Parry gains from this.

T2A Teth Keep: On that map its located in location YELLOW #2. The City of Papua is GREEN #5. Once again pretty close. But the risk is a little bit higher. I recommend this place ONLY if you are trying to build Archery/Resist or gaining cash. Don't go here to try and gain swords or whatever. You will be dead in a blink of an eye. Bring plenty of arrows/bandaids. And if you can't teleport, then don't go. Teth Avengers and Matriarchs can teleport right on you. The only safe spot, and I say only with a slight bit of sarcasm, is on the hilltops located in the SW corner of the keep. This is outside, right near a pool, and you cant miss it. Hang out up there and shoot away at the Avenger and Matties. Or target them once and let them mana dump you for resist. Either way you are good to go. If they teleport up, haul ass.

Dungeon Shame: This one is easy. I have seen great gains with this place not too mention 10k an hour in gold. Its in the first level, Earth Elementals running around everywhere. You know the routine. Go there during non-peak hours. Cause when this place gets busy, its busy. And watch out for the scorpians, they juiced them during a patch so now their poison can produce a nasty sting. And if your curing(healing) ability isnt up to snuff, your toast. Enjoy the loot, with sweet gains!

That takes care of the places, now lets get a little into specifics with the other skills. The melees are easy, now comes the fun part.

Anatomy: Hit anything and everything as many times as you can. The weaker the weapon you use the better, this way your killee will last a little longer. Just dont stop swinging. Any orc fort is good for this. Also I have heard, yet to try it though, that Dungeon Wrong is a good place as well. Check out the Trolls in the back room, equip that hatchet and let em know Gator sent you.

Healing: Heal yourself, then when your done, jump off a cliff and heal yourself again. Think I'm joking? Just be thankful this skill isnt difficulty based like it was back in the day. Hell, go to places where people are practicing their melee skills and heal them. Just keep healing, its slow, but it will get there. When you can cure well, cure everyone. And when you can res...well you get the picture. Work it with a friend, at about 80 skill, have him kill himself, then try ressing him over and over again while moving. Just dont stay in one spot, your gains will cease.

Hiding: Set up a macro key ie. SPACEBAR to run the hiding skill. The just keep hitting it all the time while you play the game. Also when you talk it will continually use the skill, cause, duh, your hitting your spacebar. And, once again, keep moving.

Lumberjacking: Ahh, the light at the end of the tunnel. Well not exactly. At higher levels, ie. 90, LJ is a royal pain in the ass to raise. The good thing is, while you GM'd Anatomy, it should be right up there in the Master area. Which is good. So how do you GM it? Well this is how you do it. Grab your hatchet(s), go find a nice spawn. And then you guessed it, do what you do best Grandmasta Warrior, hit everything that moves as fast and as many times as you can. And after your done skinning Smokey the Bear, hit something else. Once your in the 90's do it in and out of power hour. I have gained .2 in power hour at this level, then turned around later that day in non-power hour and gained .3. Just hit shit, ALOT. Good trick I used was too trap a NPC warrior in my house, cause LJing isnt actuall a *true* melee skill, you can gain skill their as well. Just hack away, and make sure you have plenty of bandaids and hatchets. And take note of this too, grab one that doesnt have a weapon. It will be easier on you. BUT remember anatomy will not gain at high levels in your house. So only use this for LJing. Some people have said to attack the Brown Bears SE of Moonglow Cemetary. Folks it don't matter, just be hitting something. Fellow Guildmates with spare time are always nice.

Parry: Well you can use Bone Knights or Earth Elementals like you did while gaining Swords and Tac. You can also have a good mage friend cast Bladespirits for you and Parry will gain REAL quick. Just remember, they hit hard, and their posion is extremely deadly. So be ready for them. And equip alot of shields. I recommend that your mage friend cast all cures and GHs as well. Makes it easier on you.

Well thats it for skills. Any add-ons or new tricks that people may know about email them to me. I will look them over and get them posted. Next up, :::::DRUMROLL::::: Lumberwarrior Tactics in LJ103:Tactics. Yes thats right folks 999 things you can do in PvP as a Lumberwarrior and probably live to tell about it, so stay tuned.
Later

•Death by a thousand links

In case you don’t check any other UO websites (Why should you?), a lot of new things are in testing.

The complex faction system, vendor changes, a new dungeon, plus a facelift to the old ones equals a lot of things to cover. I was wondering if all these things were connected in some bizarre “Six degrees of Separation” way and they are. Read and be amazed!

Lets start off with factions, shall we. Factions is basically Order/Chaos’s bastard child.
Ill simplify it down for you in such a way that doesn’t do it justice.

There are four factions fighting for control of 8 cities: Minoc, Yew, Moonglow, Britian, Trinsic, Skara, Magencia and Delucia. You run around killing players for points and silver while trying to capture towns. Controlling a town let you set prices for that town, points prove that you OwNz and silver lets you buy cool faction toys like blessed armor in cool colors. Another cool feature is faction monsters.

Faction monsters are another source of points and silver but they come with a price however. The faction monster are super aggressive to opposing factions while blue and almost friendly to those of the same faction. That right there means and changes where your character can hunt. The faction monsters are:

Minax: Ogre Lords
Council of Mages: Wisps
True Britannian: Silver Serpents
Shadowlords: Daemons



Now lets take a look at the new dungeon spawn. MarkeeDragon was gracious enough to provide a complete list here. It seems OSI has given Monsta Killas a reason to join factions, a friendlier Lich Lord room.

In Deciet Lich Lord room, Silver Serpents have been added for flava. That ruins that gold fountian for many of you players as you rather not deal with the buggers. But there is a way to get around all that.

Silver Serpents aren’t a worry to those that join the True Brit faction as the snakes become friendly to those that do. On the other hand, to the warrior in Minax, that overgrown snake if an invitation to death. Most other dungeons have the same set up. For example, Shadowlords can go hunt Shadow Wryms in Destard 2 unbothered by the Deamons that hang out down there. Minax have no need to fear the Ogre Lords walking around Ice Dungeon. The Council of Mages can roam the woods with friendly wisps. In fact, all but 5 dungeons hold faction monsters. So choose your favorite gold fountian and join the faction that guards it.

The dungeons that are free of faction influence can be split into Newbie dungeons and Vet dungeons. Terrathon Keep, Fire and Khaldun are deadly enough with out having to worry about opposing Faction players attacking you, while NoOb’s can roam Wrong and Covetous with only the occasional Pk to fear.

But what about the tamer nerf?! To make the tamers forget about that they added new tamables and took away an old tamable. A grey drake and 2 shades of shadow wrym are what I saw yesterday. I also noticed that Frost Spiders were taken away. I know the Drake was tamable but Im getting conflicting reports on the Shadow Wrym. Of course with the new Stable changes, I can’t exactly stable and keep them. Lets see, one White wrym, one Shadow wrym, one dragon, one mare, and one grey drake and a frost spider. Doh! That is one to many if I had Vet skill. O well, at least I can play dress up with my vendor.

With Vendors I can name "AZN MaSteR" and then dress all fruity, Im as happy as a school girl. WoOt!

•The Very Last Farewell Message

I can remember first finding UO Powergamers last year, and permanently adding the bookmark to my Netscape navigation bar. A lot of other sites had a little information here, a little information there on how to build skills, kill monsters, make money, PVP, raise stats, etc. But UOPG was the first one I'd ever found that had everything in one place, and (unlike Stratics) had the most current information possible. To top it all off, here was this crazy guy updating (by himself at the time) sometimes 2-3 times a day, every day. Out of all the other rant/informational UO sites out there, UOPG was pretty much unique in it's focus on passing on the best or fastest game-legal ways of doing things with a minimum of ego-driven bullshit.

Anyone who doubts that Red has left us with a pretty good legacy really only needs to compare the UOPG Forum to so many other boards out there. I don't think I've seen anyone ask a question in the past 6 months that hasn't been answered within a couple of hours by someone who's got the right answer (or "a" right answer). 99% of the people on the Forum are truly interested in passing what information they know instead of flaming people for asking "newb" questions. That didn't just "happen".

As someone who has used UOPG to make the time I spend playing UO more enjoyable and less "work", I'd like to say thanks to Redrum to for creating, maintaining, and keeping UOPG alive and true to his original intentions, even as his active participation in the site diminished. He made a lot of good decisions and we've all benefited from the results. I'd also like to wish Red the best of luck, especially now as he leaves to pursues his lifelong dream of becoming a hand model for a brand name manufacturer of personal massage devices... watch those cuticles, Red!

•Poison Mages Poison Mages Lots of Fun With Mages and your Reagents.

I'm supposed to educate everyone on how to be a poison mage. Since I'm not above stealing an idea or two from someone else, I'm going to copy the three part format that Gator has chosen to use for the lumberjack. One note before I begin: Mages are hard to play at first. You're not going to kick any and take any for at least a little while, because you will suck. That's just life.

If this is your first character, don't be a mage. Be a parry warrior or a lumberjack, because they have the fewest consumables. Mages have the most, and poison mages especially will go through some supplies. I am going to assume that you have no money and you are starting this character from scratch, or at the very least with a very small nest egg. If you can spot the character 10,000gp it'll be a lot easier. This will be for making a character on a regular shard, not SP. If you're on SP it's totally different, and I'll address that in the SP section at a later date. There are bugs that some of you might know to gain some of the skills that I will be talking about. I'm not telling you about them, and you shouldn't use them, because you can be banned for using them

Start your character with 45 strength, 15 intelligence, and 10 dexterity. Your starting skills should be magery at 50, poisoning 49, tracking 1. Why one point in tracking you ask? For the really cool newbie boots, that's why. I can't stand sandals and shoes. Start in Magincia, wherever you wish. Moonglow is also OK, but on most shards it attracts the dregs of UO society because of it's mage shops. the first thing you should do is put your three first level scrolls in your spellbook. next go take everything out of your pack and stow it in the bank. Keep your spellbook on you though. Now, go attack a guard and get killed. Go to the healer in Magincia and get ressed and now you have a nice new robe. Toss off your other clothes, and wear the robe and the boots. It's fairly light and covers a multitude of sins, such as leather armor.

The template we are aiming for is this one:

GM Magery
GM Evaluate Int
GM Meditate
GM Inscription
GM Poisoning
GM Resist
GM Wrestling

Yes, wrestling is still important. You can't keep protection up at all times. Trust me on this one.

Now, if you don't have any cash except your newbie stash, go to the beach and get an escort to Jhelom, or Skara, or Moonglow. Now go to the northernmost tip of Magincia Island, and using the excellent info on Stratics, figure out when the gate goes to the appropriate town and go there. Then get an escort in that new town to Magincia, or any of the other towns on the above list. Do this until you get 10,000gp.

Ok, now that everyone has their money, go out and buy up skills, any skills except for arms lore and spirit speak, until you have 690 base skill points. Now, mark ALL skills as locked, then mark arms lore up and spirit speak down. Arms lore up to 10.0, then mark it down and spirit speak up. Spirit speak until 10.0 then mark it down and Arms lore up. Repeat until you have 100/100/25 as your stat set. This ought to take about 2 days of playing. You can do this while you walk around escorting NPC's so you can build up quite a stash in 2 days. You need to get about 30k before we can move on, so get to escorting darn it!

Next up, part 2, gaining those pesky skills.

•"Oh, and Gator, post your own shit. Lazy ass :p"-Nieves

I am the PvP updater, not the PvM updater, ohh gRaNdMaStA mOnStA kIlLa... :P.
Later

•Shame: Its not just for GC anymore!

While most of you were busy getting dressed and going to your places of work, I was running around Test Center in an effort to bring you the latest and greatest changes from OSI. The dungeons are getting a facelift and spawns are being changed around. I only checked out two dungeons today and here is what I found.

Shame got fucked. Shame used to be the place where your average moron could go and make 50k an hour killing Air Elementals, Blood Elementals was the place for Fame and free resist and none died unless Bill GateS pk'd them. After this patch hits, thats all going to change.

They added a few more Poison Elementals to Shame 3 because you can never have enough Deadly poison flowing thru your veins. Krakens dart amongst them adding a new challenge. Elder Gazers wait to trap you in a small area. I even hear that there is a new Elemental down there called the Acid Elemental. I didn't see it though. I DID see 1 million Dull Copper Elementals on every floor besides the first. I know what your thinking, Free Dull copper ingots!

I find it funny that they decide to do Dull Copper over Shadow, Verite or even Bronze. I can't give Dull Copper armor away, what makes them think anyone will want a new supply of the ingots.

I also noticed a large supply of traps everywhere. If I wasn't getting whacked by Dull Elementals, dumped on by Air Eles, spike traps were poking me. These things were everywhere and they did damage every time. Its obvious OSI wants to force us to form groups that contain many different types of characters. From what I saw in Shame, Destard, and Deceit, Monsterkilla's are going to have to make friends with a tamer and rouge. I can't imagine a warrior going to Shame alone and making enough money to make it worth his time.

For a partial list on the new dungeon spawn, check out Markee’s site. His crew put out a list for most of the dungeons. Also, as soon as I figure out how, Ill post pics of the new tamable creatures for you guys. Tamers may have gotten nerfed, but there pets come in 3 new flavors! WoOt!

•Lumberjacking 101:The Revised Addition

Ahh, the life of a lumberjack. Running out in the fresh Vesper morning sun to chop a load of lumber for the local merchies. Its sweet isnt it, when the blade of your hatchet cuts deep into the bark of a mighty Yew tree. The world is in the palm of your hand and nothing could be sweeter. But see there is. Yes, Gator is here to tell you the sweetest thing there is about being a GM Lumberjack. And no my friends its not about getting logs every time you hit that tree. Even though right now selling boards can be quiet profitable. Lets see here.....how about +35% damage torwards your enemies while using an axe. Now that is a true axe. And no, Halberds and War Axes dont count with the LJ skill. But as a GM Lumberjack you can do as much max damage with a Double Axe as compared to say, hmm, a Halberd..but the Double Axe is faster, more info on that in LJ 103. I am here to tell you how to be the perfect woodsman. And what tactics are going to help you in specific PvP situations. I will do this guide in three parts. 101:Intro and starting out. 102:GMing those skills. 103:PvP

There are several different templates that can be used as a LumberWarrior. Here they are in no particular order:

Lumber/Parry
GM Swords
GM Tac
GM Anat
GM Lumber
GM Heal
GM Parry
GM Resist or 70 Resist/30 Magery

Lumber/Archer
GM Swords
GM Tac
GM Anat
GM Lumber
GM Heal
GM Archery
GM Resist or 70 Resist/30 Magery

Lumber/Hider
GM Swords
GM Tac
GM Anat
GM Lumber
GM Heal
GM Hiding
GM Resist or 70 Resist/30 Magery

And plenty others.

NOTE: Do whatever makes you feel comfortable. If you want to have all the melee skills and GM Cooking, feel free. I wont make you do what I like, but you arent going to get many kills with fishsteaks. Take it from me, I have a GM Fisherman.

I would recommend starting this character with 45 str, 10 int, and 10 dex. I would put 50 in Magic Resist, 49 in Healing, and 1 in Lumberjacking. Once again, put 1 in Lumberjacking to get that nice newbie hatchet that wont break on ya. Unless you wack baddies with it. Used to be good to start your character in Skara Brae, run out of town and fight rangers, well not anymore. Rangers no longer like to play with new characters, and they WILL kill you. Start in Moonglow instead, plenty of creatures outside the gates of town to get your skills up to the 50's. Also you can get through to T2A from here. From Papua make your way down to Delucia, where skill gains can be made all the way to GM easily. Start off with pigs. They will get you into the 30's. Move on to Llamas for gains up to 45ish, and then follow up with Great Harts and Bulls up to 70's. If you already have the money and you are pretty well established, go grab a warrior or paladin, preferably unarmed with a shield. Trap em in your house, or take them out of town and spar away. BEWARE you will go Grey, and if you are in Felucia, you could be dead quicker than you think!! Inside your house NPC's will raise your melees up to about 70. After that fight em outside and they can get you to the 80s, I have had paladins get me into the 90s. It was slow though. Always fight with an axe!! Why? Well if you use an axe you will gain swords AND lumberjacking. But if you use a sword....No Lumber For You! So grab a few hatchets from a tinker in town. Usually I will run to a forge where players are smithing. Most smiths have tinkering as well, ask them nicely to make you a few hatchets, and flip them a few coins. You want to use hatchets. Why? Cause they swing fast and do little damage. And at 50's melee skill you arent out to take on the world. So leave that Double Axe of Vanquishing in the bank....for now.

Use your power hour wisely and knock out all your skill gains. After power hour is up, take some time and run around shearing sheep. Take them balls of cotton and make your way to the tailor, and make some bolts of cloth. Use the cotton on the spinning wheel to get spools of thread, then use thread on the loom, to make your bolts. One ball of cotton will produce 3 spools I believe, then 5 spools are needed to make one bolt. One bolt of cloth will yeild you 50 Bandaids which will be crucial. Constantly use your healing skill. It will gain nicely all the way up into the 70's. I have gone into the fields west of Delucia and easily made 26 bolts of cloth in one hour, thats 1300 bandaids, whcih will last you a long time. These bandaids will be crucial to you GMing your skills quickly and effiently.

Anatomy:Use it at every chance you get. I set up a Macro while sparring using my UOAssist. My macro uses Anatomy on the nearest creature everytime I hit the hot key. Using Anatomy at lower levels will make your skill fly. But take note, at the higher levels its best to let Anatomy gain naturally through fighting, than to use it all the time.

Armor is always a plus. Whenever you kill something, skin it, and cut them hides into strips of leather. Save up your leather then hang out buy the bank listening for that famous snipping sound. Ahh yes scissors, that means a tailor is nearby. Offer to trade him whatever hides he needs to make you a nice set of Leather Armor. If he can make up some GM Studded, thats even better. :) Offer him some extra leather as payment. And I am sure that he will be more than happy to make a a suit or two for you.

So you need gold? Well if the 1000 newbie gold isnt enough for you, head to Delucia, if you arent already there. And make your way NW of town. Soon you will come up on a place full of undead guys. This is the undead fort. And the baddies there will not like you. But you are in luck, alot of players go here for skill gains. Run around searching slain creature bodies. Notice I said run around, your weak and things there do not like YOU. Grab whatever you can. Usually it will be alot of junk. But all of them scrolls, regs, and old weps nobody wants, you NEED. Take everything you can back to town and sell it to vendors. I have made 5k in a couple of hours doing this. Or chop wood, thats right Mr. Lumberjack, chop up some trees. Turn all them logs into boards, and stash em in the bank. When you get about 1k of em saved up. Advertise your business of selling boards at the bank. 1k boards should get you 10k in gold on most shards. Some shards have people buying boards for up to 20 gold each. But just go with 10, 10k will be great for you starting out. And more than enough for what we will do in the next step.

You should have the cash right now if you followed my steps. Buy your skills up from all the NPC vendors so you can max out them points at 700. Then do this trick: Gaining stats with minimal skill usage.
I prefer using Arms Lore(Str) and Lockpicking(Dex). If your low on cash or just dont have any, do Arms Lore/Herding(Str) and Snooping(Dex). Delucia in T2A is great for this. Get your 100 Str, 100 Dex, and 25 Int and you will be ready to move on to Lumberjacking:102.

NOTE: This information may not be usefull to some readers of this site, due to their mAd PoWeRgAmInG sKiLlZ. If this applies to you, I will have information for you when I get into PvP Tactics more.

Later

•THE LATEST ON THE DUNGEONS ON TEST!

Here is what I got from Gator...


...(edited) stolen from the Ultima list:

Picked this up off of dev board. No more lich lord campers! (Silver serpents being probably the third hardest naturally spawning thing to combat in the open)

Lets see...

Shame has some nice additions, including dull copper ore elementals mixed in with the earthies, sea serpents and krakens in the water, blue robed mages in the towers, elder gazers on levels four and five and acid elementals (light green blood elementals) on the bottom as well. The spawn is huge now as well. Level two used to have that one air on it, now it has about 15 of them.

Wrong has been entirely taken over by brigands. No more large humanoids, just red NPCs...including mages. The bottom level has blue NPCs on it, I assume as prisoners...

Destard has a huge spawn now...drakes everywhere on the first level. The ancient wyrm is stil alone on the third level, but the second level is really cool now. There is a blue mage spawn, as well as two daemons. The coolest addtion though is the shadow wyrm! It's a shadowy dragon (looks the same style as the revenant does, transparent grey outline). There were two of them flying around...

Despise has all the humaniods that Wrong used to have. The top level is all lizardmen, and the second level has ettins mixed in with a scattering of earth elementals. The bottom level has ettins, trolls, ogres, and ogre lords...which is to say at least half a dozen ogre lords walking around.

Hythloth is a massive gargoyle spawn now. There were litterally 150 of them in the dungeon. Two rooms full on level one, level two has them in numbers as well as two spawns of two daemons. Level three has the balron and a half a dozen daemons, as well as the ubiquitous gargolyes. Level four has gargoyles and an additional balron in the meeting hall room.

Covetous has more headlesses than you can shake a stick at. They are all over levels one and two, in huge numbers I may add. Elder gazers have been addded to level two as well as multiple water elementals. The lich room now has two or three liches in it at a time.

Deceit is not changed very much on the whole. The water elemental was not there on level one anymore, but there were a few mummys wandering around. The lich spawns have been tripled, so now there are three per room. The lich lord rom will be very interesting though...it now has a lich lord, two liches, and two silver serpents! :)


Nieves comment: Oh fuck! Silver serpents!?? No more Lord camping for juus!!!


Ice has been changed as well, with a few new creatures added. There is not frost ooze (ice slime) and blue ratmen are wandering around. The orcs have been replaced by ratmen, and the orc fort has yellow ratmen inside, although I have no idea what their special property is. Ice snakes are gone and so are frost spiders. There was still only a single white wyrm but he was in an entirely differnet part of the dungeon. There was also an ice fiend outside of their lair.

Fire has also been revamped. There are now efreet everywhere inside. Liches are in the graveyard with bone magi, and there is a lich lord spawn inside as well on level 2. There is also a single daemon spawn. The rest of the place is still full of hell hounds, but lava snakes and lava serpents have been added.

The Terathan Keep had a lot of ophidians in the balron room, but that was the only change I saw there.

Wind was unchanged as of yet.

Overall, the spawns are huge now. Everything is there in huge numbers, although a lot of that is probably a symptom of it being a test shard. Some things (like the gargoyles, headlesses, and drakes) are in numbers so huge that they are obviously out of whack (I had over two dozen drakes on my screen at one pint near the entrance to level two Destard). Regardless though, the spawn will be larger for one significant reason: THERE IS NO MORE VERMIN. Rats and slimes and all the other useless creatures are all gone! With the exception of the frost ooze and the little fire snakes, there was nothing but real monsters.

Go and run a ghost around the dungeons of test center and see for
yourself...it's pretty neat. :)

No more vermin. New dungeons. New spawns. No more fucking vermin. Its as close to a miracle as I think I will ever see. Where the hell did I put my re-activation number?

- Jinx

I was in Shame this morning, and it was the standard spawn. I believe that this is all still in testing, and hasnt actuall hit live shards yet. I will try to find this original message I am searching UO boards right now. But as far as I know, its still in Test only.
Later
Gator
-----------------------

I also got this:

Re: Please look at Dungeon Headless!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Melantus, what is the reasoning players/monsters blocking movement on
the TRAMMEL side of Test Center? (ie: can't run through them)

Is this an accident or something that was purposely done?

Hehe this will be great man I am excited...
Gator
-----------------

And this link from the Dev Boards.

Hmmm..Silver Serpents in the Lich Lord room. Monsters causing you to lose stamina and effectively blocking you. Know what I say? Bring dat chit on! To the guy crying that monsters block: Wah! Get over it or quit. Damn baby.

All you Trammel Hatah's beware, Trammel Dungeons have bite!

Anyone else want a hit off this pipe? ::holds it out:: You know you want to come back! (reference Jinx comment:Where the hell did I put my re-activation number?)


Now if they would just update the graphics...

Oh, and Gator, post your own shit. Lazy ass :p.

Hasta.

•Dungeon Spawn changing...

I am reading reports in various forums of Dungeon Spawn changing totally. In one post someone said "not one Lich spawned in Covetous Lich Room on Atlantic for hours".

I did report earlier that they would be changing Dungeons, but it seems Dungeons might be changing early.

If someone would, please email me what you have found on your home shards about spawns dieing down or changing.

Thanks,

Hasta.

•More stuff I can't get on to test!!!

Someone please send me emails about these changes in General testing:


This was just added to General Testing:
Changes To Dungeons
The methods of spawning within dungeons have been improved to allow for better distribution of creatures within the dungeons and to give the dungeons a more thematic cohesion. The overall number of creatures will not change significantly, however their placement within a given dungeon area may be different from what is currently active. Players may also see some new types of monsters that will help to build upon a theme. These creatures will have similar overall strengths as other creatures in the area, but may have different or unique characteristics.

Two links of interest:
Adventurer's Guide. Alot of good Sosaria Hunting Information
Council of Mages Faction Site. Something for those that want to join the Council of Mages Faction. Lots of good Faction information as well.

Hasta.

•UO doesn't suck...

Welcome Gator aboard as the new PvP updater. He has now graduated to Updating Whore. I have read some of his past posts and really like his enthusiasm and informative posts (not too mention the professionalism he had with an email he got from someone). ::reaches for the check from Gator::

Now, I need to hear from White Crow and Bryant by next Monday, otherwise I start looking for a new updater and having a new round of Temporary Updaters. If I don't hear from them, I hope to have a new updater by the Monday after that.

UPDATED: I will also be looking for an additional Diablo II updater.

While that is being cleaned up, I will start finishing up the PvM pages and continue threatening the Updaters with a pimp slapping with requests for PvP templates and tactics. []_[] jeje (Latin style laughing boyee!)

Seriousely, I hope they will take the mantle, pick a template, and run with it. No sense one person doing all the work. Again, I will not write about this. It's not my area of expertise. I will just worry about editing and layouts.

I will leave you with a quote I sent to someone about someone killing my "avatar" in game: "If you beat me in a duel or PK me, it still won't change the fact that you are an asshoe".

Hasta.

•Well, doesn't this suck?

Sorry to see you go, Red. Like Nieves said, this is your baby, so we'll keep it warm for you. For those of you that care, I was persuaded to relent and continue to play UO. The only difference is that I now play on Siege Perilous. Fewer idiots there because it's too hard for them to make an instant-character. Thank God. I'll be updating on PvP on SP and on various other things that I might want to. Unfortunately, since it's incredibly off topic, I won't be able to pontificate among the heathens. That's Democrats to you PC people. =)

•Another from ProQuo

Pro posted a great post concerning the new Dungeon in T2A in the House of Elements and UOPG Forum. I think it's worth getting posted to the main page.

-------------------

Where to start?

As you walk in you come face to face with the green tinted brigands with the noise of the zombie. If you pull up there paperdoll, you discover that they are the "cursed"

The cursed are the weakest of the new monsters. They wear no armor and carry a weapon. They do have a moderate amount of resist, as my spells did fairly little to them. The loot is 100 gold, what they were wearing, and an occasional journal.
There bodies show up as inhuman corpses.

There are also stronger version of the cursed. If you read the books that are scattered across the dungeon, you will recognize the names of these stronger cursed. They are the adventurers.

Grimmoch Drummel is by far the most dangerous of these "cursed adventurers" He is equiped with green armor and a bow. He shoots arrows at an insane rate. The arrows do between 25-40 damage each hit (to a mage) and at a rate that easily interrupted level 4 spells (greater heal).

There is also Lyseander Something, his pic is on the main page. He is capable of level 7 spells and has a healthy amount of hit points compared to brigans. Easily more then a Ogre.

There are two more "cursed" adventurers and can be spotted by the fact that they have a first and last name. One uses a bronze kryss and a buckler the other uses a bardache. All cursed CAN be poisoned.

The next most dangerous group are the spectral armor. They show on screen as a floating chain coif and a cutlass and nothing else. They make the noise of a snake. They hit pretty hard and swing fairly fast doing moderate amounts of damage. They also have decent resist. No loot.

There is also the Shadow fiend. A pitch black water elemental with the health points of a cow. They do no noticable damage at all. HOWEVER, while hiding in a heavy spawn, I noticed that I was continously knocked out of hiding. I THINK that these reveal ppl from hiding making them a deadly addition to a spawn of monsters. No loot.

There were also Zealots of Khaldun. They come in two forms, sorcerer and knight. The knight,dressed in full grey bone armor, hits fast and hard. Its resist is amazing and it has a ton of hit points. The sorcerer wears a red cape, red sandles and a grey bone helm. It to has alot of health but its ability to cast repeated lvl 7 spells makes it deadly. Upon death these go up in smoke and are replaced by a bone knight or bone magi. On a funny note, I saw a sorcerer polymorphed into a chicken three times.

There are also 2 "boss monsters" so far. One is the tenticles of haddings, I think. It is a blood red corpser in a blood pool. It is a very unique monster in that it uses an obvious Necro spell: Mass Life drain! Everyone on screen has a portion of there life drained every 15 seconds. The moment you leave its screen, the spell stops hitting you. This monster also casts Magic Reflect on itself every 30 seconds. The way to kill it is to cast multiple Blade spirits or EVs on it. Deamons give it a life source and magery doesnt work. Melle sucks as it constantly drains 15 HP off. The loot is 1000 gold, 4 scrolls, magic jewelry and some regs.

There is also Kheldran the ancient liche. A gray liche that spawns (by trigger I think) in the area around the 5 named sarcophaguses and the raised golden one. If you read the signs of the named sarcophaguses, you will see that Kheldran is the Keeper of Lore. He should be named Keeper of Mana. As with the ancient wrym, this guy has INSANE amounts of Hit points, Mana, Fame, Karma and loot. With 4 mages, 5 dexers and 2 zealots knights beating on it, it took 3 minutes to bring it down. It was casting 5-8th level spells the entire time. Yes, I said 8th. This is another necro creature as this liche summoned a bone knight and then poly'd into a skeleton. The loot was a magic armor(chain or plate) and a magic weapon each time, 1k+ gold, 15-30 of each reg, 4 scrolls and a partridge in a pear tree.

The new creature I saw was the revenant. It spawns to kill a murderer. It looks like the a councilor/ghost/GM thats transparent like a shade or Shadowlord horse. It carrys a transparent Hally. It moves like a poisin elemenental. It swings that hally faster then anything Ive seen. Imagine a fencer with a 100 dex thats using a dagger, thats how fast the hally swings are. NO loot or body.

This is how everything was tonight but Im sure it will change many times before it gets published.
------------------

Great, just great. I can't get onto UO (my Modem is missing and I still don't have internet access for at least another 5 days) and I am missing out on some good shit. I am sure my ICQ is lit up with messages. And this message is to Cloud: PLEASE tell Xas I still want the Cabin, I can't get it right now nor message either of you on ICQ/Email :(. Gawd I miss the game.

As soon as I get my access back up, I will go into the dungeon and check it out myself. I am Da Master Monsta Killa aren't I? ::winks at Gator/Suev::

Well, Red is stepping aside (fuck shit and damn). I got the site now. What am I going to do with the site? Nothing radical (yet). I am going to finish up the PvM section. Get a PvP section up and going (I need HELP big time from the PvP updaters please). I am going to get feedback from the updaters (and ALL readers are welcome to email me your ideas) on how we can make UOPG da bomb. Diablo II is not going to get deleted (don't fret Redrum). Red is going to keep his updating account. No, I will never cut him off. That would be lame as hell. He's the shit and this is his baby anyway. All I can do is make it better. ::removes his nose from Red's ass::

No updaters are getting removed. Ditto on the lame thing. I will also get ProQuo added (FINALLY!) so he can update to the main page (as soon as I figure out how this damn thing works). Dungeon sections are going to be added as time permits (A-la my T2A post last Friday). Also, I am going to add a Factions page so that the updaters can post how the Faction wars are going on their prospective shards (a cool idea IMHO). For now, that's all the additions I am thinking about.

Oh, and to K'thak, all I can do is try. UOPG will live on.

Later on we will probably get a face lift and make UOPG look even cooler than House of Elements.

In news, Lum the Mad reactivated his account to play test Factions (see, noone can put the doobie down forever; I am waiting for Red to light up his account again). He was play testing the new Dungeon as well.

Baldur's Gate is pretty cool, but nothing compared to UO. I keep looking for the skill menu so I can "work up" my stats. 21 hitpoints SUCKS. And none of my chars are above 2nd level yet (BAH!!!!). Mages suck in D&D below 5th level (I got reminded REALLY quick when she died 3-4 times; dumb bitch! BRING BACK PRE....oops, wrong game). The dude with the squirrel is funny as hell! I keep clicking on him to hear the next funny thing he might say ("you point, I punch").

Does anyone know what it feels like to have to disqualify your kid for "cheating" in a tournament? :[ My kid kept looking at his "prize" cards (A BIG nono!!!) at the Pokemon Tournament that I judge. Both times he was on the last turn of each game where he would've won. He was putting his "hand" next to his prizes and reached for the wrong "pile" :/. He wound up 3-2 and was not allowed to play in the finals (even though he qualified on his record). He was on his way to a 5-0 finish before the finals (everyone he had already beat was in the finals). ::sighs:: I wanted to cry as much as he did. Call me an ass and flame me all you want. I still feel bad.

Enough of that...

Hasta.

•Farewell...

In honor of Red retiring from the page, I have once again updated my guide to making a multi-GM dex monkey on any shard without any initial resources and even less effort or involvement on your part. You can view it here.

I'd also like to say that I'm sure Red would agree that you all should dock your stupid fucking boats when you're not actually using them. I'm sure it makes Red cry every time I have to pay attention to what's happening to my fruity little guys because they run into *another* deserted boat blocking a prime macroing path and I have to actually steer around it. So make Red happy and dock your stupid boats. It's really easy. Honest.

•When you no longer have the urge, it's time to move on.

That's the case with this site. I've been running it for a year and 2 months, and now it's time to give it up. The main reason is because of the subject title. I hardly even check the site anymore. I have about 50 e-mails from Nieves with information (yeah, I have them), but I never felt the urge to update. I've been playing some D2, and figured that I could stay around and update about that, but that's pretty pointless considering I hardly even play it. And when I do, it's just for a short amount of time.

As I say everytime the site is "supposedly" dying, thanks to Lum for telling people we even exist. And the updaters for doing a really good job keeping the site updated. And of course, people for coming here and listening to me whine like a woman.

Like I promised (note: this is the only promise I ever kept), I'm not going to let the site just die. Since Nieves is really into the site and keeps it updated as much as he possibly can, I'm turning it over to him. However, if he deletes the Diablo II, Warcraft III and Black & White links, he's going to die.

As for me, I don't think I'm going to make another site. I'll just stick with annoying Watts on ICQ and downloading Metallica on Napster just to piss them off. I'm really good at those two things.

It's been a fun ride. Best of luck in getting laid or whatever your goals are.

•The Lost Lands

Something I sent into New Player's Forum. I think some new players might enjoy the essay...

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Lost Lands was where I played exclusively until UO:R was released. It's great fun.

You can adventure your whole character's career from creation to Lord there. Here is a run down of the Lost Lands.

Note: For the Record, why does Lord British have his guards there? It's not his lands. He didn't care about us when we wre "lost", why should he care now? (kidding).

Delucia
This town is great. It has everything for all characters. Mining/Smithing, Tailoring, Bowying Fletching (might have to head east out of town a bit to get some wood), Carpentry, Taming, melee skills.

There is a cow/bull spawn for those that want to get melee skills into the 80s (some say 90s). You can also tame the bulls to reach high levels of taming/lore proficiency. Be sure to release the bulls though so someone else can get the hides later. Or kill it yourself if you can. Another will spawn shortly once the previous set of cows/bull is killed off. Plenty of sheep for cloth to use for tailoring and bandages. Please kill these off too after shearing (SHEAR FIRST!!!! wool is of better quality and yields 3 balls of yarn instead of one off a dead sheep when spinning it at the tailors). More will spawn in soon after.

Just Northwest of town is another spawn spot for animals. Same as above. Beware of the Orc Spawn there though. Sometimes they will come in and wreck your day (especially if you are a low level character).

Just outside the east gate is what we like to call Orc Hill or Hind Hill. You get PLENTY of opportunities to fight Orcs here as well as Llamas and Hinds for taming and hides.

Just North of this Hill, past the pond, you will find Mongbat Hill. There are plenty of opportunities to fight LOTS of Mongbats and the occassional Orc Spawn.

As a side note, there are colored ore spots dotting this region. :)

To the east of Delucia, in between two rivers, you will find what alot of us called Ettin Valley. Here you will find Giant Spiders, Ettins (hence the name), Trolls, Harpies, Gazors, Reapers, Lizard and Rat Spawns (with their locked treasure chests), and Mongbats. This is a great place for the mid to high level warrior to do some hunting without all the camping going on in the dungeons (if all you want is gold). My friends and I hunted these lands almost exclusively and we could walk away with some treasure maps (level 1s from Gazors, Trolls, and Ettins) and a good amount of gold. It's great fun and once you know the area (Stone Circle, "Australia" and others) you will be fine. Near this area you will find the "Vesper Passage".

In these areas you are sure to find the Forest Ostard. A very beautifully colored cousin of the Desert Ostard. I believe you can find Frenzies here as well.

North of Delucia is the City of the Dead (CoD) and Orc Fort (Fort). A great place for those high level warriors to test their skill and mettle.

Be aware that Bone/Skeleton Knights are the best skill gain monsters in the game. With decent healing (or a good friend), you can lure one of these knights away from the fort in a private area (best place I found is the bridge east of the City of the Dead) and can GM all your melee skills off the knight (be aware it will take a few hours for this).

The CoD has Bone/Skeleton Knights and Mages (all 4 of them are deadly to lower level characters), Skeletons of various types and, everyone's favorite, Liches. ALOT of people come here, but it's better than the various Liche rooms in my opinion. With a good rotation, you can make a killing in gold here. Another note, you can make just as much gold off Bone/Skeleton Magis with less hassle of "loot/kill takers" in the same amount of time. Oh, and take the regs. They are always useful :). You won't get as many (if any) magic items and you definately won't get treasure maps off of them. But if all you want is gold, hunt down the magis and you will see I am right.

The "fort" has 6 of the 7 types of Orcs in the game (the 500+ gold giving Orc spawns in the Desert of Papua and in Hythloth Dungeon on Fire Island). It's a VERY busy place and sometimes the undead will "wander" over to this place. I have great fun here and is a great place for mid to high level characters to gain skills and some treasure.

Also near the Fort is a mini-desert. Horses usually spawn here. Way North of the Fort is a cave that leads to an island on the "old lands" side. Lizards will spawn near here and is alot of fun. Beware of crossing a bridge and coming to a swampy area. Silver Serpents sometimes spawn near there and will totally wreck even the best player's/character's day.

Papua

The rough and tumble town of the Lost Lands. Here you will find all the vendors. It's got the entrance to Moonglow so it's usually the starting point of many adventurers. It's got a decent magic shop (I think Delucia's is better) and you can buy houses here. You can also sell most carpentry made items in the carpenter's shop west of the mage shop. Oh, and near the docks is the Smith shop as well as the Cartographer's shop. You can buy boats here as well. Be aware you cannot work Cartography in the Lost Lands last I checked. It's a good place to buy plenty of maps but you won't be able to work the skill. Moonglow isn't far away so it's not a bad place to get your maps.

If you are having problems selling your merchant wares (especially your carpentry items), you can come here to sell them off for gold. Again, Moonglow isn't far if you still have trouble selling items.

West of the town is the Papua Swamp. EXTREMELY dangerous only because of the Silver Serpents that live here. I have seen at least 2 at any one time and have heard reports of as many as 3-4. When you get past the area you come to the Terathan Fort. EXTREMELY dangerous. Not just because of the Terathans, but because you have to get past the Ophidians that spawn there. Ophidians spawn on the Northeast and North-Northwest sides of the Fort. It's a great way to gain loot and skills but ALWAYS do an all names before engaging with what looks like an Ophidian Enforcer or Warrior. Some of them might turn out to be a Knight Errant or an Avenger. They hit for 20-50 points of damage and can inject deadly poison into your character's veins. The rule of thumb always has been: "Allnames first, or it will use you to sate it's thirst". Beware of staff carrying Ophidians and the big MoMMa (Matriarch). They got nasty magic and can hit pretty hard. Not too mention the Staff bearing ones (Shamans and Apprentice Mages) usually come with 2-3 warriors/enforcers and the MoMMa can usually be found with a Knight or Avenger nearby. Not fun. Did I mention the Matriarch can teleport on you? Or that the magic casting ones will cast cure poison on their brethren? Just checking.

Once you get past them you get to the actual fort. You see a Big Red spider thing, run. Fast. The Terathan Avenger is NASTY. It's magic and deadly poison will kill an Ophidian Matriarch quickly. The Terathan Warriors hit hard and fast. They are tough but not too hard if you are smart and have good healing. The Terathan Drone are about as easy as a Mongbat spawn. The Terathan Matriarch hits hard and is just as mean as her "sister" the Ophid Matty.

If you can get down into the bowels of the Fort you will find Balrons, Dragons, Drakes, more Ophidians and plenty of Terathans to fight. Balrons will hit for 50 points on average and can summon elementals (from what I hear). A Balron is everyone's nightmare. They can kill a party of adventurers and are VERY smart (VERY good pathfinding opening doors, etc., good magery and can reveal party members). Down in the fort you will also find the famous "star room". I will let you guys look for it. When you find a "torch thingie" on a stand in the middle of a "swamp" in the fort, dbl click the flame multiple times and you will get teleported to it. Last time I was there nothing spawned inside...but that could change.

Also inside the fort you will find the Nightmare. As tough as a Dragon and probably tougher. High damage fireballs and melee and alot of magic. These are the only place in the game you can find them now. Thing is getting to tame one is a test of endurance and teamwork as all the Dragons/Drakes, and Ohpidians are there waiting to eat you. My friends call it the consummate death trap.

What some folks don't know is that west of the fort is a little set of ruins. I call this the Skeleton Ruins. It's got Ghosts and Skeletons of different types. My friends and I would go here for quick gold and to replace their bone armor. I have made some decent gold here and warriors with decent healing and melee skills can make good gold there. Beware of the occassional Lizard spawn and snakes. Sometimes you will get some serious magic thrown your way from the ghosts so be prepared.

North of Papua is the VAST (at least I think so) Papua Desert. I will break each section down for you.

Titan Desert
Located North-NorthWest of Papua across a gorge (well the whole desert is across that very same gorge). Here you will find Cyclopean Warriors (big ugly guys with big mean Hammers), Titans (smaller cousins to the Warriors but ALOT tougher do to their decent melee damage and level 7 magic casting abilities), Scorpions, Imps (Red Mongbats with level 5+ magic; really a nuisance since their loot just sucks), Stone Gargoyles (non magic casting Gargoyles with alot of hitpoints and good melee damage; these carry the famous Gargoyle Pickaxes), Stone Harpies (mean ass wench that hits hard and fast...BUT she gives out good gold [500+] so is worth killing), Mummies (hard hitting Zombies but blue-grey colored) and Wyverns (like a drake without it's firebreath...but it deadly poisons so it's best NOT to melee them; their loot sucks for their danger level--although they have some of the coolest shades of red of any creature next to the Frenzied Ostard). Also, you can find Desert Ostards as well as the occassional Frenzy. Oh, did I mention all the Orcs spawn here along with an Ettin? Just checking. You can get the tile of Lady/Lord off killing Titans.

West of this area, across "Titan Bay" is Titan Beach. You will find most of all the above monsters but at an accelerated spawn rate. Alot of fun, but alot more dangeous as the "trap" spots are limited as is the running room.

North of Titan Beach are isolated pockets of misc spawn consisting of Lizards, Imps, Wyverns, Gazors, Trolls, and Ettins. Farther North are even MORE isolated spots (have to use a boat to get there) of Wyvern spawns.

Oasis

Located East and South of the Titan Desert is the place of Mad Spawn. Trolls, Ettins, Lizards, Rats, Reapers, Harpies, Gazors, and Scorpions, all in a tight little area. This place is NOT for the lighthearted or novice. Bring friends or come prepared. The spawn is NON-stop.

East and North of the Oasis are Titan/Cyclop spawn areas (along with Imps, Scorpions, Orcs, Gargoyles and Harpies).

Volcano And Fire Dungeon

This is Southeast of Titan Desert and Southwest of the Oasis. This area is full of Hellcats, Predator Hellcats (red Jaguars; just awesome creatures), Frogs (of all sizes), Giant Serpents, Lava Lizards, Swamp Tentacles (moving corpsers) and Efreets. Tamers love this place as you can GM your taming and animal lore here. Beware that this place is NOT easy. The Hellcats and Lizards throw fireballs at you and hit hard. And the Efreets are mean, magic casting Elementals. Always bring friends when coming here. It's a long walk to Papua's healer shop. Not too mention the walk back to your body. Fire Dungeon is home to all the Orcs, Ettins, Hell Hounds (how I hate these), Giant Spiders, Lava Lizards, and Mongbats. Deep inside you will find the Mad/Evil NPC Wizard Tower(s). I love this place. You can go through and find it on your own. Remember, Papua is a long walk...

Lighthouse
At the farthest, Northern Point is the Lighthouse. This place is cool and there is a cave underneath (I don't remember where it goes). Around the area are Wyvern Spawn spots as well as the occassional Imps and Stone Gargoyles. Southwest of the Lighthouse are Orc spawn and Stone Gargoyle spots. East and South of here I have seen Desert Ostards spawning.

Ophidian Desert (or "Ophid Fort")

Northeast of the Volcano and East of the Oasis is the home of the Snake Lords. They have a "stronghold" here which looks like a villa. I have been in it as a ghost (I have died here many times) and saw an NPC inside just standing there. I don't know what the signifigance of her presence is but it's interesting to say the least. I want to go back and clear out the "villa" and see what she's doing there (bear in mind this was before UO:R and I don't know if there is one on Trammel much less Felucca side anymore). As if the Ophidians aren't bad enough, Wyverns, Stone Gargoyles, Scorpions, and Stone Harpies spawn around here. South of the Ophidian Fort is a Wyvern and Stone Harpie/Stone Gargoyle spawn area.

Iceland

Veritable hot bed of Snow Elementals, Giant Ice Serpents, Polar Bears, Ice Trolls (hit harder than their cousins) and Walrus'. You can do well taming the Polar Bears, Walrus, and Serpents for taming/lore skill, but beware of the Snow Elementals. They have a "cold effect" around them that will cause you damage if too close. I am glad they don't have magic. They are just a tad slower than Poison elementals. Here you will find the entrance to the Ice Cave. In the Cave beware of Snow elementals, Ice Elementals, Giant Frost Spiders, Giant Serpents, the Venerable White Wyrm (coolest of all the Wyrm Species), Orcs and the entrance to their Fort (with a kick arse orc spawn) and the entrance to the Mad Wizard and his Ice Fiends (think Daemons on Ice). Iceland is where you find the new Glacial Staves on Frost Spiders and Ice Serpents.

There is also a Wyvern Island North and East of the town of Papua I have never been too. There was so much to do I never had time to actually visit.

The Lost Lands are tough with no healers hanging around. It's meant to be. I consider this the "graduation" of the GM Warrior/GM Mages from Brittania to the Wild Lands. If you can survive here, you can survive anywhere in Sosaria.

----------------------------------

I am going to see if Red will put this in the PvM Section. Heck, I might just do all the dungeons and fill in the missing pockets of information for the rest of T2A. Email Red and tell him to make a T2A page.

Hasta

•PvM Updates

Some of you have sent me emails asking to update this or that on The PvM Page. I thank you. Some of that information I already have and is ready to be updated on the PvM page. I have been sending emails in to Redrum on updating the section. I don't know if he got it or it got lost in the Internet shuffle.

It was a pretty big update and it will take time to get it done so please be patient. Normally I would go ahead and do it myself. Unfortunately, access has been restricted to sites where I work and I cannot submit the information myself. As you also know, my Internet access at home is cut off. Since I ripped my modem out and threw it somewhere after I got ADSL, I don't know where it is. That doesn't help this predicament I am in. Ok, enough bitching and/or asskissing.

We are working on getting the PvM pages updated. Your patience is appreciated.

Hasta

•Shit damn and bobbycocks!

I get the call...I run home. "Sorry sir, Cable Modem access is not available in your area". What? HUH? The lady on the phone told me it was!! ARGH! Fine, go do something else.

::calls up the other provider:: "Cool, you have cable modem access, can I use the router the other company uses to connect 2+ computers to the internet? No??!??? Why not? You don't know or aren't sure?"

Fine fuck it. ::places order:: "Have a tech call me and tell me yes you can do that or why you can't. OH, you can't install it till NEXT FRIDAY???" ::sighs:: There goes another week without UO. It's ok...::starts twitching::..I will be just fine. I have done without it for a week. I can go another weeEEEEEEAAARGH....::falls on the floor in convulsions::

In other news: Stop posting exploits and links to web sites that post exploits on our forum. UOPowergamers, contrary to popular belief, isn't about that. Be prepared to see them deleted after you post it. And we all know I love my little delete key.

Hasta.

•Ultimate Freedom or Ultimate Fiasco?

This is a warning. From what I understand people are getting in BIG trouble (ie-Banned) for even LINKING the web site that is re-releasing (this a word?) UOExtreme in it's newest encarnation. If you remember, UOE was ban bait for the GMs. If you are even considering using it, I would ask you to reconsider and not do so until (if ever) it's approved by OSI.

UOAssist does the job of providing "additional tools" that enchance and even help game play. I am told by dedicated PvPers that without UOAssist, you can't do well in duels.

Do anything and everything you can to avoid getting banned if you truly care about continuing to play with that particular account in UO. Otherwise deal with the consequences and move on.

Hasta

•No Short Term Murder Count?

I read on Lum's that Murder Counts have been reduced and/or eliminated. I don't know exactly how this affected "red" status nor how it may have affected Counts as a whole.

Anyone got any information on this? If you do, email me.

Tonight I go check on "Hammer" to see what his murder count is along with seeing if he's red anymore.

Hasta.

•ProQuo's First update

Well, Pro doesn't have access so I am going to help him out. Check this wonderful update he got from the UO Lake Superior Message board. He dedicates it to all of the PvPers out there.


Hail all! I am a Grandmaster Chef on the Lake Superior Shard. I cook some of
the finest fish steaks in town.

Now mind you, I am a pure chef, and have no time to dabble in other arts.

Well I decided I'd like to participate in factions when they come in, so I
tested out my character on the test factions shard.

Suffice it to say that no matter who I fought, and no matter how I used my
cooking skill I was unable to win a single battle. In fact, by the time I had
to log I was all out of even the 1000 fish steaks I had started with in the
bank.

I threw fish steaks at the Brits. I tried to stew the Mages. I did my best to
coax a Shadowlord in to an oven and fry his behind!

But it was always the same. Whack, whack, whack, -or- Explosion/Mindblast
.... or ugh poison.

I died so many times, it was just a miserable experience.

How come I can't cure poison with my cooking skills? How come my fish steaks
do no damage?

*sigh*

PvP combat will not be balanced until the Pure Chef is a viable template.

JOY!

Hasta.

•Old News About Tinker Traps

For the 15 or so people who are interested in this stuff, you probably already know that tinker traps have been reverted back to the simple lock-it-and-leave-it format (OK - it's been that way fo a while now). No more thief-proof yet accessible containers for you!

As it turns out, OSI reverted them when someone supposedly found a way to unlock the box but leave the trap intact, basically leaving you with a version of the old school tinker trap that went boom the moment you opened it. Evidently, people were leaving them around Trammel and blowing up new players, which of course cannot be tolerated. Awwwwww. Um... wonder where they got the idea in the first place?

Anyways, considering that both of the latest two trap configurations went off the moment you used a lockpick and targeted the chest, it seems more likely somone came across a bunch of the old-style traps and just decided to use them. The old insta-fire traps still work that way if you have some pre-patched armed ones lying around. Just be prepared for a murder count on your tinker if you use one on someone without a sense of humour. And seeing that monster dumping is considered "illegal" on Trammel, you can probably expect a visit from a smurf if you use one there.

Personally, I always thought that learning about opening up the orange chests lying on the ground the hard way was a valuable rite of passage in UO. It seems unfair to deprive Trammelites of this fine, noble tradition... but you may want to reconsider if you are trying to GM Tinkering just for the traps. It doesn't work that way right now.

In other news, I've been told the Reactive Armour trick used to work Eval Int and Meditation has been fixed. The cheapest alternate solution to working Eval seems to be casting Poison on your tillerman while tooling around in your boat. The alternative way of working Meditation is to hit the ocean in a suit of metal armour and a magic hat. You equip/unequip the hat and work in that 5 mana point range... and hopefully OSI really has fixed the crash bug associated with equipping these things. BTW, both methods are best worked under burst.

•Factions Monsters or things that make you go "Hmm...."

I was reading about what monsters are allied to what faction. Here is a rundown.

Minax: Ogre Lords
Council of Mages: Wisps
True Britannian: Silver Serpents
Shadowlords: Daemons

Now, let's list the cities these Factions are based out of:

Minax Faction - The stone fortress just south of the Papua armorer's shop and shipping shop (The Revenge Shop and Pier 39), outside of town.

Council of Mages Faction - The Magincia Parliament Building in the southeast corner of Magincia.

Shadowlord Faction - Located in the unused crypts in the Yew forest, a fair distance in a direct line northeast from the east Yew Healer's Shop named "Deep Forest Healing". This is not the Yew Graveyard, but instead the haunted crypts far to the northeast of the city within the woods.

True Britannians Faction - Located within Castle Britannia's throne room, in the town of Britain.

Minax is near Papua right? What kinds of snakes hang out near Papua? Yep, you guessed it. Big, silver ones. What kind of monster hangs out near Britain, Papua, and Yew? Yep, big sparkly Death Stars (my gf's pet names for Wisps).

Hmm...let's see now, I am in Papua. This Minax Faction dude pissed me off. I go find a Silver, let it target me, ride (you will not outrun a Silver in most cases) into Papua, and hide or cast invisible. What happens to the Faction member that was sitting there at the bank minding his own business? He might become lunch for ol' SnakeyPooh.

So, what does (or is it "MIGHT") this mean? It means that people can drag monsters in from the forest, hide and let the monsters target the Faction member(s) within their homebase. Get enough Silvers in town and you can get your buddies to keep silvers by the healers and let the newly resed die while you wait to loot. Heck, that could open up a whole new tactic of raiding a town and then owning it. Just bring in the Silvers, let them do the dirty work, then your friends recal in and clean up the "risidual" defenders and they loot and steal the sigil. All neat and tidy. Ok, this is "cheesy" PvP, but SOMEONE is going to try it (especially after I posted about it). Anyway...

Continuing on, why Silver Serpents for Brittania? Forget about the fact that I hate them with a passion and they are the most dangerous monster in the game when considering it's "value" versus karma and loot. And what good are they if they are nowhere near Brittania? They going to magically spawn near the town sigils as part of the "Faction Town Spawn" now? Think about it. You and your team of crack Shadow Lord mages, thieves and fighters break into Brit to steal their sigil and 3 Silver Serpents spawn in. Man, talk about wicked (and I do like it! As long as the town mayor doesn't have any control over the spawn). Oh, and forget the fact that none of these creatures spawn near Magincia.

Magincia is the "most" monster free town of the 4. If I was going to be in a Faction with my own guild, I would pick the mages just for battles. Why? All the fights are going to happen IN the town. There is no "real" running out of town and to heal. It's an island (for those uneducated). You can set your runes to "hot spots" in town and protect the "key" areas. It's also the one Faction I think people are going to "under estimate". Why? Everyone is talking Minax and Shadow Lords for the "evil" aspect of it and True Brit for the PvP opportunities (who doesn't want to beat up on a Lord British follower?).

And gawd forbid you are making a run at a town with Ogre Lords or Demons "hanging out" near those sigils. Makes for interesting business within those towns eh?

Which brings up another topic...nah, you have enough from me.

Me thinks having some of these monsters included in the town spawn make faction battles ALOT more interesting.

Go talk about it in the forums...

Hasta.

PS-This opinion is expressed from the mind of a PvMer. Any inaccuracies are purely accidental and these ideas do not reflect the ideas or opinions of the PvPers on staff. (Don't you hate legal bullshit?)

•Smurfy!

Hiya. Miss me? Sure you did. God is going to strike you down for lieing. Anyway...

The following text contains verbage of a nature that is extremely vulgar. We at UOPG strongly urge any readers of a young age to close their browser now or visit another website. Any pollution of the mind is not the responsibility of those here at UOPG.

We all know how the Smurfs got smurfed by the smurfs at OSI. They got smurfed so bad, that they created a pretty smurfy website. Smurf! One smurfy guy even wrote a pretty kick smurf article about it. I highly recommend reading this smurfilicious piece.

I can see both sides of this really smurfed up issue. Volunteers are getting smurfed right up the smurf but what can OSI do? If they don't do something about it they could be the ones getting smurfed in the smurf and we won't have an Ultima Online anymore. And yes, some smurfy smurf is going to do something smurfy just cause they can. It's the nature of smurfs to be smurfs.

Sometimes I hate this smurfing industry!

Well, I am still in the process of moving and do not have access to my ADSL line for a bit. It smurfing smurfs!!! I miss it. Playing with 56k just isn't the same.

UPDATE: You know what sucks? When the fucking phone company doesn't have ADSL in the area I am moving too. So...I have to go out and pay outrageous installation fees to get a Cable Modem installed. OK! I don't HAVE to do it, and it is just a game right?! Right! And that little telephone I have can be replaced with cans and some wires to all the people I call on a regular basis. And all those other people I need to call on occassion, I can just use smoke signals to get my messages to them. BAH! Technology!

Hasta.

•The "OSI Is Not A Government" Rant

I spent some of this past week trolling UO sites, and I've come to the conclusion that a lot of the current anti-OSI sentiment out there stems from one simple misconception; that OSI is operating as some form of government in UO. Sorry folks, but that just isn't the case.

Here's PoliSci 101 for you. In ideal circumstances, governments operate by collecting revenue from the population and rolling that money into services for the population, defense, administration, education, etc. If you don't like the way a government is headed, you can always (theoretically) replace it. Above all, there's a sense of obligation between the government and the citizens, or at least that's the way it's supposed to work in a Western style democracy.

OSI and parent company EA are just that; commercial companies. As long as you play by their TOS, they collect your $9.95 American every month, and in exchange they give you to access to the client, the databases, and telecom system that basically make up UO. Don't believe me? Read the TOS. This is where the direct responsibilities on their part ends. Anything over and above this that they do to maintain or enhance the game is done for one very practical reason, and that's to ensure *trumpets sound*the greatest amount of customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction means the greatest number of happy, long-term players, and consequently it also translates into profit from monthly dues. For most commercial companies, profit is where it's at. It's an unfortunate reality that maintaining the "greatest number of happy, long-term players" usually means when something changes, there's a group of unhappy players on the losing side of this numbers game.

I'm not trying to be critical of profits. Profits are good. Profits mean Adrick can continue to wander around as an invulnerable pink Bunny of the Abyss and indulge himself (and hopefully make contributions to UO code, influenced by a passion for the game). Profits mean you can continue to wander around and get killed by Adrick. But staying profitable in a environment where there has GOT to be a high turnover rate in customers (especially competing against graphically superior games like EQ and AC) means you sometimes have to change to attract new ones. When PKs ruled the earth and UO got a bad reputation, in came stat loss. When all the spots that could possibly support a house were taken, we got Trammel (even if it took around a year). Changes are made to continue attracting new players to UO, or to keep the largest number of old ones as happy as possible. It may not seem that way to everyone all the time, but there's OSI and UO, still going strong...

Now this doesn't make it suck any less when you are on the minority side in an in-game issue and OSI makes a change that effects you. But just keep in mind that by sending them your $9.95 every month, you agree to be part of this. The only way to "vote" on anything OSI does is by keeping or cancelling your account.

There's your dose of icky reality for the evening.

•Glacial Staves

Someone (ProQuo or KH; I can't find the freaking thing now) posted a very interesting article in our forum about the use of Glacial Staves in combat.

From what I understand they can inflict 50 points of damage with just one charge at the cost of all your mana. That's cool right? I mean, 2 mages could do it and drop someone dead with no problem right? Now, from what I read you can do it while hiddden. Now that adds a SERIOUS twist to the whole scenario. Can you say "StealthMage"? And in pairs with some staves in their tow, they can take out a group of people without too much of a problem.

Who says I don't post good info? Now if someone could verify this for me (if I could just find the freaking forum post again!!!), I would really be happy. I await your testing results via email.

Hasta.

•Hear ye, hear ye, the court is now in session.

Yes, I will move this to my page later. I can't sleep and I don't have the URL that updates my page on this computer so hush.

Here I am thinking about the pressing law suit volunteers have against AOL. I mean, it sounds kind of petty, until you start thinking about how these folks are treated for what they get.

OSI Volunteers had it pretty good in some ways. A free account for volunteering a few hours a week. Yes, they had to endure the in game bullshit. Yes they had to endure OSI bullshit, but a free account is not a bad kickback. Considering alot of people can then sell their account at a later date (after they start paying for it) for a nice chunk of money (if it's a decent account). Of course, I hate what people have turned this virtual industry into by selling their shit on EBAY and like websites. But that's another topic and I digress...

Anyway,

Before alot of you get your knits in a wad, I know there are counselors that do this because they love to help people. The free account was just a benefit of it. It was the least OSI could give them for, again, putting up with the abuses from both sides of the fence.

Then I had a revelation. What if OSI could sue some of these idiots? What if OSI could take these idiots that cause them downtime and shard reverts and hit them in the mouth with the "Civil Suit Smackdown"? After hearing about the latest in a string of fucked up exploits, and after reading the great post Watts at UO Terror made, I started thinking. What if OSI could turn around and suck the money back they lost from the sons of bitches that caused the DEV Team to have to inconvenience their customers and working some serious over time by stopping on making game enhancements and corrections because some dumb fuck decided to take advantage of an "error" in the code or use a 3rd party program (which is TOTALLY against the OSI ToS btw) to fuck up another player's game time and close this loop hole?? (yes this is a run on sentence; I allready told you I am tired) Not too mention the horror of reverting a shard a whole day cause some idiot caused such a mess with an exploit. I don't know about you, but that shit pisses me off.

What it boils down to is time. And time equals money. You are costing OSI alot of money by fucking with their game and their time. Not too mention my time and my money (I do pay for this game ya know?). I would love to see some of these idiots spanked with law suits and made to pay OSI and the customers inconvenienced by the fuckhead's shenanigans. Heck, isn't there some type of "hacker" law about "cracking" into these games or something?

Go ahead, flame me. But everytime someone does something stupid in this game, it just makes people want to quit and OSI loses more money.

I love Ultima Online. I love that I can do whatever I want when I want (within the games rules). I love that OSI is continuing to support it and not just say "fuck it" and turn off the servers. I love that they care enough to correct fuckhead errors (even if it's on their part). To all you asshoes that keep messing with shit: Go to hell. I hope while you are doing this, OSI gets your ISP, tracks you down, talks to their lawyers, and sends you (or your mommies and/or daddies) a nice little letter requesting your presence in a court room. This is America, and in America, you can sue anyone for anything at anytime.

Hasta, and good night.