Five on Friday - July 13, 2007

"If you're using a weapon that has an AoE proc, each hit can reduce durability of the weapon. One proc against a bunch of slimes (that do extra durability damage) can pretty much destroy it - is this intended?"
We're not considering this a bug, exactly; however, Leurocian thinks it's silly, and we'll definitely be looking at this mechanism in the future.

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"In the Five on Friday, 9 March, it is stated that wrestling has the fastest swing at 2.5 seconds. But I have noticed that several UOSE and UOML weapons have swing speeds of 2 seconds. Can you post a correction on this please??"
The player asking this is absolutely correct - Wrestling is not as fast as, say, a Dagger (which has a swing speed of 2 seconds.) Either our internal documentation is wrong, or this is a gameplay bug (we haven't decided which yet,) but for the moment, wrestling has a base swing speed of 2.5 seconds, which is NOT the fastest.

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"Is mining still dificulty based? If so, does it follow that mining higher level ore will yield better gain rates than, say, just iron? (Like smelting?)"
Mining is NOT difficulty-based - you'll have the same chance to gain skill mining iron as mining Valorite. (Smelting, however, IS difficulty-based, and smelting ores that you have about a 50% chance of succeeding on will give you the best skill gain chance.) You can see smelting difficulty chances, as well as ore rarity, here.

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"I have an older Athlon and since the patch on May 31st, KR just won't start - after it finished patching the patcher window closes and nothing happens. What do I do?"
We're getting a bunch of reports with this specific problem and we're having a heck of a time reproducing it. If you're experiencing this EXACT set of symptoms (AMD Athlon processor, no windows or UO error message, the game window never loads, and preferably that you know it worked before 5/31) AND you live in the SF Bay area, shoot me an email - jdalberg AT ea DOT com. We'd like to chat with you about possibly getting a very special visit from a very perplexed programmer :)

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"I thought you said we were going to get a KR patch this week - where is it?"
It had a few bugs that we had to get worked out before we could get it out to you - it looks like we'll be ready to go with it Monday morning, though. It's going to be a fairly complicated publish with more downtime than usual - check out the plan (and the notes!) here.

A few highlights:

  • Added several graphics options to improve performance on systems with lower-end video cards.
  • The game can now be maximized in windowed mode and/or set to your desired size via click-and-dragging
  • Ethereal mounts should actually be ethereal
  • Items should stay where you put them in Grid Mode

Plus lots of polish, bug fixes, and other stuff!

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Thanks to our Applicants!
We've gotten lots of great resumes for the designer position we're looking to fill, and we'll be going through them - thanks to everyone who applied!

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Lot of neat stuff going on - we've got the PvP focus group rolling, a lot of solid KR improvements in the pipeline, and plenty of interesting plans for events coming up. Have a good weekend, everyone, and enjoy your Friday the 13th!


- Jeremy

See Also