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Crafting and the economy are top priorities for us to address with our move to Britannia. Our aim is to recenter the economy around players and the goods they can produce. We want to move closer to our roots in UO and then build on top of that with our own additions. To do this we will be implementing several overhauls to crafting, items, and combat.
The first of these overhauls will be to Inscription. Below is a preview of what to expect from this. None of these items or perks are finalized and are subject to changes.
Return of UO style basic Runebook and Spellbook.
As we return to UO scaled loot tables in Britannia, we intend to revert the recipes for runebooks and spellbooks back to their respective UO requirements. Full spellbooks and runebooks are needed by a large portion of the population at very early stages of game play. This change will allow new players to be able to get these items at a much lower cost than they are now. With this overhaul basic runebooks and basic spellbooks will no longer be a scribes main source of income. Runebooks and full spellbooks also become consumables for their more powerful counterparts, so they will always be in high demand.
Runebook Crafting Charges
Introduces inscription skill based variable max charges for runebooks.
Mystic Spellbook
This spellbook performs the same role as the basic spellbook with a few small perks that veteran players will appreciate.
Requires a full spellbook and a new consumable(s) to craft.
This item is blessed and provides 1 to 2 small bonuses and perks from a pool of perks.
Potential Perks Include but not limited to:
Chance on spellcast to not consume reagents
Small +% bonus to spell success chance
Small +% bonus to mediation
Sacred Runebook
This runebook performs the same role as the basic runebook with a few small perks that veteran players will appreciate. Like the basic runebook, this runebook will have variable max charges. Unlike the basic runebook, the legendary runebook will require you recharge it by purchasing more charges with gold.
Requires a runebook and a new consumable(s) to craft.
Perks Include but not limited to:
Chance +% to success recall
Consume X charges to gate travel
Volatile Spellbook
This spellbook performs the same role as the basic spellbook does but is intended for more advanced players. This spellbook is not blessed and provides small bonus to base spell damage at the expense of increased spell fizzle chance. The cost to produce this spellbook will be less than that of its legendary spellbook peers but not trivial either.
Requires a full spellbook and a new consumable(s) to craft.
Effects Include but not limited to:
Small +% bonus to base spell damage.
Increased spell fizzle chance
New Inscription Books
In an effort to expand the scribe's potential customers, we're adding some new books for players to use. To start with we will be adding the tamer's veterinary manual and the bard's songbook.
Veterinary Manual
Perks Include but not limited to:
Small +% bonus to veterinary
Small +% bonus to animal lore
Songbook
Perks Include but not limited to: (1-2)
Small +% bonus to provocation
Small +% bonus to discordance
Small +% bonus to peacemaking
Small +% bonus to musicianship
Loot updates
Each of these high level inscription items will require new consumables for their recipes. Some or all of these will be available at vendors and for adventurers out in the world.
The Road Ahead
We're excited about these changes and our plans to transform the player economy. Expect to see more details and testing ahead. Again, this is just a preview of our inscription overhaul. Everything in this post is subject to change.
Keep your eyes on the news as we will be sharing more details on inscription and other changes. We will also be talking about our vision for armor, additional Britannia content, and an extensive combat overhaul.
Hi Folks,
TLDR? See the last few lines at the end of the article.
Firstly, thank you as always for your patronage and doing what you do to support us and our development efforts. We are a little unique in terms of our game and platform, in that we are in development (early access) while you all put in the time and effort to play. Because of that, we always do what we can to limit the impact to players with the changes we make to get us moving closer to our vision for the game.
This news article is to announce that we are disabling enchanting as we know it. We appreciate that this will strongly affect those that have invested large amounts of time and effort into it. We have thought long and hard about this particular change, and wanted to share some of the reasons on why it needs to be done.
- The two developers that wrote the system are no longer with us. The complexities of this system mean that it is quite difficult to simply pick up and support/balance ongoing. We've tried multiple times to make this happen, but the fact is it's just too much work. That's why for example you saw Five Star General disabled, but never brought back or otherwise addressed.
- Some of the enchants are wildly imbalancing, and result in trivializing encounters that we don't want trivialized. This means we need to redesign these encounters to suit the enchants, which simply isn't sustainable. (We should be designing enchants to match encounters, not the other way around.)
- Moving toward Britannia we are no longer using LoA monsters and PvE balancing will be scaled toward UO. Enchanting in its current form makes this very difficult to accomplish for us.
- Enchanting in its current state isn't lore friendly and doesn't meet the current team's ongoing vision for the game itself, especially with the impending move to the Britannia map later this year, and the rebasing of everything involved in that process.
- Enchanting in its current form has a fairly significant performance impact on the game. This was one of the primary reasons for disabling Five Star General, which was an extreme case of performance impact.
- Our other, more extreme, alternative to this was an item/gold wipe, which we really wanted to avoid. While the economy is definitely not in a great state due to multiple challenges over the last year or so (yes we are well aware!), we want to avoid any sort of wipe wherever possible.
- We are working very hard on creating new systems which will empower our crafters and player economy, enchanting conflicts with our long term vision for this in its current form.
However, your characters will continue to track what enchants they previously had from 'Enchanting v1.0', and as we move forward and potentially introduce an 'Enchanting v2.0', we will look to make sure that characters that previously put in the time, money and effort are rewarded appropriately. Plans aren't set in stone for this part yet, but we'll share more detail as soon as we can.
Hang on to your enchanting mats too - we will once again look at a way in which we can make these worth something to you.
TLDR?
- Enchanting v1.0 is disabled for the short term.
- Enchanting materials will no longer drop off mobs.
- Enchanting may return with a v2.0 in the long term. It will be a ground-up redesign/rewrite
- Keep your mats, we will look to reward you for that investment and will advise on how we will do that later down the track.
- Your character will continue to track what enchants you had from v1.0, and we will also look to reward you for that investment as well.
- We have exciting overhauls to the player economy and crafting coming very soon!
Attention Tamers!
ZooKeeper will remain active temporarily while we move through this transition.
Thank you once again for your continued participation in our project, and we sincerely hope you'll enjoy everything we have in store in 2020.
During the next scheduled restart in about 20 minutes, we'll be upgrading the server to the latest version. Be sure to grab the latest client as this solves a desync issue and possibly other things. Client upgrade is not required however, so you may still log in with the old client until you've downloaded the new one.
The previously reported Known Issue involving animations, effects, sounds not working in the latest client is now resolved in this newer version.
It's time! Britannia (well, Britain and its surrounds) is up on test server! A few things to be aware of:
This is still an early build, there will be things to fix. Feel free to report those in #britannia-chat
This is currently just Britain town itself, and only West Britain, along with the surrounding areas (Graveyard, farms, northwest forest)
The spawning/merchants are placeholders for the most part. There's a bunch of refinement still to be done
Did we mention there will be issues? There WILL be issues! Constructive feedback is appreciated.
Known issues:
This is what we are tracking so far. No need to report these:
Current Known Issues (01/16/20):
- Some textures missing, or temporary.
- Some Structures are missing or temporary (Ongoing effort, buildings, stairs, other)
- Some Structure Walls aren't 'pixel perfect' and may show tiny gaps.
- Cave Lighting needs tweaking
- Ocean Water is too dark (Fixed in next build)
- Some Britain Building Roofs have rogue pieces that won't disappear (Fixed in next build)
- Few buildings not finished (Placeholder) (Fixed in next build)
- Some Doors are darker than normal (Fixing)
- Slight performance hit at night (Lighting!) (Looking into optimizing this)
- World Spawns are not finalized, the current spawns are temporary and are being replaced with a permanent system
Wanna show off your PvP skills, earn bragging rights, and collect a unique prize? We are hosting a 1v1 PvP tournament! This tournament is slightly different than traditional tournament rules so please be sure to read the rules carefully, then sign up at the link below! Please forward any questions to Scout or Smokey Rust.
Good luck, and GIT GUD
Sign-up ends January 10th, 2020 at 8PM EST.
Rules and Sign-up:
https://forms.gle/dSiaueJnXRRAPEie7
After being murdered, players should now, again, be given the option to punish or forgive a murder.
We just wanted to take a moment to remind everyone of our Natural Disasters policy with LOU Housing. If you or someone you know that plays LOU is affected by a Natural Disaster or other hardship in which they will be unable to access LOU for an extended time, please reach out and we will be happy to hold your accounts plots until you are able to reach them again. With every month revealing a new natural disaster on our planet, we cannot express our sympathy enough for those affected.
Happy New Year everyone!
This is a quick note to say that we do read each and every bit of feedback we get, whether it's a bug, a suggestion, or a report of player misconduct. However, as we are a team of volunteers that do this for free in our spare time, who all have lives and families, it is simply not possible to respond to all of the reports that we get (and there are many!). Please do remember that this is not a commercial server, and no one is paid to do what we do.
In particular, please be assured that we investigate every report of player misconduct and take them very seriously. When required, we take the appropriate action against those players. While it may not always be visible to you, please be assured we do action each and every one of these.
Lastly, we'd like to remind everyone that if you have concerns with any actions of staff, then the correct escalation path is to email [email protected] - once again, we cannot guarantee a response to any emails sent to this address, however be assured they are read and actioned as required.
Thank you all once again for your support, and we look forward to sharing with you all the new features we have planned for 2020!
There appears to be an issue with some or all in-game feedback reports (bug reports) not being received. We're looking into the issue. In the meantime you can use the Discord Feedback Bot to submit bugs, as those are still being received.
We would like to remind all players that, as per the rules you agreed to when first logging into our server, exploiting bugs/glitches etc is not allowed. In some cases, after a thorough investigation, the effect of a particular exploit may be so game breaking that we have no choice but to react with severe consequences to those players involved.
We do not take these decisions lightly, and of course we would prefer to avoid these situations at all costs. If you do encounter a bug that results in being exploitable, please do report via /bug in game and we will do our best to address it ASAP. Thank you for your understanding.
Covetous and Destard have been fixed, and are available to play again.
We are aware some folks have lost some house contents following the deployment of the 12/8 patch. We sincerely apologize for any losses that this caused. We do not take lost progress lightly and you should know that we're sorry it happened. We do our best to heavily test each change and take measures to prevent losses as best as possible. Occasionally unforseen circumstances do occur, and we normally do our best to recover from them. In this case we were unable to intercept the issue in time to perform a rollback and address it. We thank you for your support and understanding.
The server is now using the latest version of the LOA client. Please make sure to download the latest client to play.
There are a few known issues from this update:
- Covetous and Destard dungeons are purple/pink in appearance and have been disabled until we have had a chance to resolve
- Some trees/rocks may report "Too far", if you find that there are more than 'a couple' of these please let us know, but for the most part should be correct
- Trees that were previously hidden on plots may re-appear, please use a Tree Removal Shovel from an Architect vendor to try and hide it
Thanks to everyone that has taken time to fill out the Player Survey. We appreciate your time and value your feedback!
Please take a few minutes to fill out our survey: https://forms.gle/H7gAujnCdVspLF996
The stablemasters have started to slowly restock their inventory.
Due to a union-related issue, Stable Masters are not able to sell any animals at this time. We hope the result of their strike is that they are remunerated fairly and equitably, and they can return to providing a service that we all appreciate very much in the near future.
Please be reminded that claiming to be a staff member of LoU or LOA when you are not is considered a violation of our rules under Communication and Player Conduct - Part 6 which is publicly visible at https://legendsofultima.gamepedia.com/Server_Rules -- if someone does not have the Staff role in Discord or does not appear in-game with a Yellow name and Counselor/Guild Master title then they are most likely not a staff member.
Also please be reminded that this is one of the reasons, for security, that we do not provide support via Discord. Please make sure to report suspected rule violations via an in-game page, or an email to [email protected] -- this is the only way to be sure you are speaking to a member of the LOU Team.
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All company, product and service names used in this website, or other outlets, are for identification purposes only. Use of these names, logos, and brands does not imply endorsement.
