Question & Answer
1. What are the plans for Blackthorn’s Dungeon moving forward?
We are currently brainstorming solutions for two areas of concern as it relates to Blackthorn’s Dungeon. The first of those concerns is that the rewards are out of balance in terms of power as it relates to the difficulty of the non-captain related content. The second of those concerns is to provide game play and reward delivery mechanics that do not favor unattended game play. We look forward to discussions with the community as we iterate through these ideas.
2. What are the plans for the content that has been part of the year-long High Seas update?
Changes such as those we’ve made to ship-cannon mechanics and treasure chests will be permanent additions. When it comes to other elements of the update such as Plunderbeacons and the Black Market there are a few factors in play. We are evaluating the long term viability of the market with regard to updating the rewards and balancing it against our broader goals for the future of development on Ultima Online. Whatever our ultimate action ends up being, Plunderbeacons, the Fellowship Donation Rewards, The Pirate Black Market, and the Jolly Roger rewards will be available for the immediate future. We plan on discussing the cleanup of these events during Publish 108 and will make announcements to the community long before the events would potentially come to a conclusion.
3. Is it possible to add a pet-respec token?
All creatures, including pets, spawn with a random set of starting stats. This is how variation within pet species is simulated in the game world and how pet training accounts for some pets being on the cusp of one slot level vs another. The starting stats of a pet are not tracked and training progress is not saved. Due to this we unfortunately cannot offer pet-respec ability.
4. What’s going on with vendor search? Why are there so many “too-vague” results?
We will be performing maintenance on the database with the release of Jolly Roger to improve the performance of Vendor Search.
5. Can we please do away with blocked locations while recalling/gating?
This functionality is core to movement validations when it comes to mobile objects moving from one sub-server to another and we cannot remove it.