Ando: We actually did this shortly after the release of Mondain's Legacy and 8th Age if you recall. See the Pub37 changes.. Part of the focus of this publish was to try and clean up the lingering issues from the release of those two titles.

The down side to doing "Bug Sprints" like these is that players generally want to see new content added to UO each publish, which bug fixes generally doesn't provide much of. I also recall that some of the responses I read regarding that publish were more or less along the lines of "Why didn't you fix PVP?". It just goes to show you that what's important to some players isn't necessarily what's important to others. Of course that isn't to say though that we won't do one of these again someday.

Personally I'm more in favor of trying to fix the hottest issues players are experiencing, rather than trying to focus on the quantity of fixes we can squeeze in each publish.

Ando: This is a good example of a bug that is important to one type of player, but perhaps not as important to other types of players. Priorties are assigned to each bug, with things such as the account age not updating correctly problem usually getting a higher priority because they affect more players or appear to be hotter issues for some reason or another.

In response to your claims, we do in fact have this bug entered in our tracking database, and yes we do read all the bug reports we receive on a daily basis. I know it may not always seem like this is the case because QA doesn't have time to individually respond to most of the reports we receive (we usually only have time to response to reports where we require more information) or perhaps because you've reported this bug to us more than once and still it hasn't been fixed. Obviously there are still some ML bugs such as this one that did not get addressed during the bug sprint. After the PVP rebalance I believe the Dev team will probably be looking at other systems that may need a little attention such as crafting (though I can't make any promises on this since I don't speak for MrTact, Darkscribe, or any others who have a bigger say than I).

Ando: No, I'm not saying that, if I did I'd be out of a job. I'm saying we try to balance the addition of new content with the number of bug fixes we implement. We can't do just one and not the other. Keep in mind that sometimes what is called bug fixing actually results in new content (for example the way the Exorcism spell was added for Necros to combat ghost cams).

Ando: I touched on this idea back at the beginning of Mondain's Legacy open beta.

You can read my post about it here.

I don't think we'll be doing anything like this anytime soon, but it is something I have given some thought to.

Ando: I've gone ahead updated our database with this suggestion.

Ando: Actually there's actually a fair chance this will be addressed sometime in the near future (at least if you're referring to what I think you are). As usual though, no promises