Attention:

As of Sunday, February 21, 2004 the domain name uowebsites.com has ceased to function. This was the result of a failure to renew the domain name before the expiration date. The domain cannot be re-registered until on or about March 21, 2004.

Until that time all sites located at uowebsites.com can be reached via www.winterboard.com.*

This includes the Kingdom of Winterfell and the Integrity Shard subsites.

On or about March 21 we will re-register the uowebsites.com domain and both it and winterboard.com will continue to point to the UOWebsites.com network.

We apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused and thank you for your patience during this temporary relocation.

Sincerely,
- Tim Barkus, Webmaster
http://www.uowebsites.com and http://www.winterboard.com

* The domain name www.winterboard.com may not work properly at this time. It was setup Thursday, March 27, 2004 and will take up to 72 hours to fully propagate throughout the internet. If the domain results in a "Server Not Found" error, please try again at a later time.

A new variant of W32/Sobig, W32/Sobig.f@MM is a High Risk mass-mailing worm. It arrives as an email attachment with a .pif or .scr extension. When run, it infects the host computer, then emails itself (using its own SMTP engine) to harvested email addresses from the victim's machine.

In addition, when it propagates, the worm "spoofs" the "from: field", using one of the harvested email addresses. So exercise care when opening emails with attachments. An infected email can come from addresses you recognize.

Because it sends so many emails, a worm like Sobig also saps bandwidth and slows network performance. Worse, it can also open up a user's computer port, making it vulnerable to hackers, who can plant dangerous Trojans. These malicious programs often let unauthorized users remotely take over a system, steal personal information or use the infected PC to send spam.

The next UO House of Commons Open House chat between the players and developers of UO is scheduled for tomorrow night, August 7th, at 7 PM CST (5 PM PST, 8 PM EST).

The chat will be available at #uohoc on Stratics IRC, on the following networked servers:

• irc.stratics.com 6667
• stratics.frws.com 6667
• irc.glowfish.de 6667
• irc.epaxsys.net 6667
• stratics.afraidyet.net 6667

This month's topic is "Publish 19." Remember that this is a development chat, and as such only questions relating to the monthly topic will be answered.

If you are new to these chats, please visit the UO House of Commons webpage for information on how it all works.

It's my pleasure to invite you, an influential member of the online gaming community, to an exclusive preview of a groundbreaking new EA game. Ultima X: Odyssey is the next evolution of online gaming. We think it is the most innovative new MMORPG of the year -- and you can be among the first to see it!

This special event will be held in San Francisco on August 21-22, 2003. Domestic airfare and lodging will be provided! The details are confidential until you register.

To attend, please register at: eaxevant.com (check it out for a cool flash movie of what is assumed to be an UX:O in-game fly through)

User Name: [removed]
Password: [removed]

Lead off the beta community and be one of the first to experience this unparalleled online adventure. Don't miss your chance to be part of this landmark event.

If you have questions, please contact EA at [removed]

Here is a snippet:

Question: Quite a few people enjoyed the final fall of Blackthorn, however we were all told don't expect this to be the start of new content. Was this just to tidy things up with that story line, or is it a foretelling of new content? Or perhaps more ant and hag style quests?

Answer: Mostly we're just trying to control expectations. The Blackthorn event was something we wanted to do to liven things up for a bit, and was not a kick off event to a new series of ongoing fiction. We were concerned that players would expect a new barrage of ongoing content, and we didn't want them to be terribly disappointed when/if it didn't come. Everybody supporting UO is a fan of ongoing content as well as in-game events and what they add to the game; we're presently investigating how both can be provided in the future.

I have often heard the suggestion that UO should have player races.

Now, before I go any further, the purpose of this post is to foster some discussion about what you all think a player race IS, what about player races is the most meaningful, and which player races you'd like to see.

This isn't a promise that we're adding player races to the game. I know some of you won't be able to just leave it at that, but you guys know the drill, right? Players sometimes bring up that races would be good to have in UO, and we are wondering what exactly it is that YOU feel player races would bring into UO that you don't already have.

Anyway, there's been some debate in the office about which races would theoretically make sense if we were to add them one day, and what the implications of being one race or another should be. For example, in some games, choosing your race is almost akin to choosing a class. If you want to be a fighter, you might as well be (totally arbitrary) a half-ogre. Otherwise you don't get the strength bonus and special move!

Given UO's focus on flexibile characters, this doesn't seem like the direction we'd want to go. On the other hand, if there is no difference between races other than the cosmetic, they might not feel "substantial enough."

So, how meanginful would additional player races be to you? Which races would you want if you could have them? What differences between the races should there be, if any? (stat cap differences, skills, racial abilities, cultural assets, etc...)

Anthony Castoro
"SunSword"
Producer, Ultima Online

After further review of the issue and much conversation with players, we have decided to allow players to place houses near moongates as a result of Publish 19. Although we have not removed any houses yet, some players voluntarily removed their homes after the original announcement was made. We would like to thank those players for their cooperation, and we will be contacting them in order to return their houses. If you placed a house and then removed it, we know who you are, so please do not page a Game Master--we will be contacting you. Those houses that were placed in these spots AFTER we made the announcement not to do so will be removed. We believe that this is the fairest resolution to the issue and apologize for the confusion.

I hope this post finds you all well. Publish 19 seems to be settling down now, although there are a few minor issues to address. But on to what you really want to know about...housing phase 3! We have made significant adjustments in our approach to make phase 3 happen. We are now planning for it to be released with Publish 20 which is currently in testing. We should have more info on Publish 20's contents and planned date next week.

Moongates and houses. I take personal responsibility for the initial decision and now the about face. After visiting many shards, talking to lots of players, GMs, QA folks, and dev team members, it became clear that our concerns about lag and server performance were not strongly founded. As a result, we decided to give the spots back or let the originals stand. You may blame me directly for the waffling. Our customer service folks cringed a lot this morning when I came in and told them I was reconsidering. Aside from the waffling, I hope this does demonstrate our willingness to listen and make adjustments, although by all rights it shouldn't have been an issue from the outset. As to the house fighting issue, clearly we need to solve this problem in all cases, not just the one raised by having a house near a moongate in Felucca.

Finally, we are still hiring a new lead programmer, server programmer, and lead artist! If you think you've got what it takes, please visit origin.ea.com/jobs. We've gotten hundreds of applications already, but we're still looking!

I hope you have a good weekend and I'll see you in the game!

…as noted in the FYI, if you placed there first, you should get your house returned. I would particularly like to thank you and others like you for picking up the house when we asked.

Anthony Castoro
"SunSword"
Producer, Ultima Online

The publish released to the Pacific shard earlier this week, known as “Publish 19,” has been approved for all shards. Publish 19 will be activated on some shards as of their Wednesday morning maintenance period and continue being activated on all shards worldwide throughout the remainder of this week. As a reminder, this publish contains the following aspects:

• Publish 19 Bugfixes
• Quick Self-looting
• Changes to Blocking Items on the Terrain
• Bulk Order Deed Storage Books

I definitely encourage you (and anyone else) to try the changes out for yourselves. I think the effect of the change may have been overstated above.

An ebolt that does 30 damage from a high-skill and well-equipped mage (120 eval, 100 inscribe, 120 int, and 10 points of spell damage increase) falls comfortably within requiring 4 ebolts to reach 100 damage against a 60 resist (energy in this case) target (3 ebolts from this player would have no chance to deal 100 damage).

In general, we've found the balance "comfort zone" for very high-skill, well-equipped mages lies somewhere within having a 6th circle damage spell taking between a quarter (at least) to a third (at most) of a typical target's life (around 100 hp).

The original design of the AoS combat changes expected a "well-equipped" defender to mean having about 50 in all resists, yet it turns out that resist sets at about 60 are the balance point (with 70's being very rare), which is resulting in a "baseline ebolt" versus a "baseline defender" only dealing about 20 damage (which has proven to be unacceptably low).

I think it's reasonable to believe that if it takes the above mage 5 ebolts to reach 100 damage, that they have very little chance in pvp, whereas if 4 ebolts gets them to 100 damage (barely for a pvp mage without all the bells-and-whistles, but quite comfortably for one with them), that things will be better balanced. As always, this is the kind of thing we'll continue to look at, and improve on further in pub 20 if more change is necessary.

- Evocare -
Lead Designer: Ultima Online