In this thread started recently players made comments regarding a 'lack of responses from the Developers.

Below are just a few comments and there responses


No punkbuster. Nothing being done about scripters. Nothing being done about speedhackers. Nothing being done about PvP. Nothing being done about..well, much of anything which affects how the game is PLAYED rather than how the game LOOKS.

What, exactly, are ya'll going to be doing over the next year or so about how the game is PLAYED in addition to how the game LOOKS?

Are we just going to get prettier scripters? Flashier speedhackers? Or, is there going to be SOMETHING done about these issues which have been studiously ignored for years?

Give us long suffering player who play by the rules some bone that you're actually going to do something about the cheaters in this game. It is well and long out of hand.


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It's a GRAPHICS ENGINE update for the CLIENT, what more were you expecting?

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WOW has very little cheating, Most of the big FPS games have little as well. Y? because they have anti cheating programs that scan your system... and if you are caught, you get banned! In FPS that costs you $40 to buy a new game...


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Funny, I just saw a French documentary on Telly about MMOG where they also showed the side of how making rl cash creates rl sweatshops in China where rooms are filled with computers and acctual companies have developed around scripters hording gold and LvL'ing characters to sell for rl cash or to hunt better monsters for more gold. Other games where some buy up land and sell for alot more etc. rl people and companies living off of this.

Nowhere in this documentary was UO ever mentioned. However WOW was. Infact mostly WOW except for 2nd Life and another OnlineGame which isn't really a game like WoW or UO but another world beside Your own where it is "legal" to live and profit.

In WOW they showed acctual brokers that were known to stand under certain shop signs that you could approach to buy gold etc. They even interviewed the companies, employes and acctual persons behind this. The broker simply deleting her characters if they felt that Blizzard was on to them for transferring to large amounts of gold and starting new.

Saw one chinese guy (in one of the sweatshops rooms) running like 2-5 computers with WoW Running hording gold with scripts running the fights and he only pushed a button once in a while. That was while others were having their nap. The room was filled with computers. They even live and sleep in rooms in the back of the office. This runs 24/7.

Another Chinese business man with a company/office in US (I think it was) that used to sell gameboxes, but since the profit demands it have switched to this market. He said WoW had a while back closed like hundrerds or thousands of accts so he showed piles of gameboxes that he had now delivered the codes to China from. So that they could open new accts and keep going.

Even Blizzard representatives saying how big a problem this is for them since the massive scale of their playerbase.

Since WoW is the largest community it attracts the most of profit seekers.

So saying that UO has bigger problems than WOW or that WOW have less cheaters than UO is definetly not based on any hard core facts. This does not excuse cheating in UO, it should still be 0 tolerance. However the facts should be straight.

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The Noob Comic

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Awesome on line comic by the way

Dave "CatHat" Brown -
UO Character and Environment Artist -
EA Mythic

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Hi Drax (and everyone posting in this thread),

Sorry I haven't responded sooner. KR has kept us very busy. However, I want to take a moment and respond in this thread now since this is the first Saturday I haven't had to work for a while.

I do want to mention something to all of you that you all may not realize. As game designers and engineers, we don't necessarily have to power to implement things immediately in the game. We are not the ones that prioritize decisions. Sure, there are some cases where if it's a bug fix, we can slam it out and put it in the queue for QA. But most of the time, all game features and changes go through a process of several layers: executives, production, other designers/engineers/artists, community, marketing, QA, and so on.

As developers, we can go to our superiors and peers and talk about what we'd like to work on - or what our players would like to see us work on. Community brings this information to us also. However, we don't always get to work on what we'd really like to work on at a given point in time.

The other factor is developement resources. As Jeremy stated in the latest Five on Friday, all hands are currently on deck for Kingdom Reborn, and after this Stygian Abyss. Because of this, some of the stuff we'd like to address in Live has been temporarily foregone until Kingdom Reborn is done. Some of the hot topics I know we talk about when it comes to live are PvP, Factions, Loot / Creature rebalance, Skill tuning, Crafting, additional live content and so on.

Recently, I sent a very spirited email to the team asking when we can get back on track to work on systems that need our attention. Darkscribe explained to me that we will be doing that once Kingdom Reborn ships. I imagine there were be a Live effort that happens at the same time we ramp up on Stygian Abyss. We know we need to do this so we can balance any new systems and features we add with Stygian Abyss. It's just a matter of who do we allocate internally do to these tasks. That's information I don't have right now, nor is that our call per se as developers to make.

I can tell you that when we are able, we will tackle these important game systems that need dire attention. I understand if you just think I'm typing words with no commitment. That would be fair given our lack of attention to these systems for so long. However, I'm afraid that's all I can give at the moment.

Patrick "Leurocian" Malott
Game Designer, Ultima Online
EA Mythic

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Thank you for taking the time to reply. I'm afraid that I'm one of those, however, who, until I'm shown differently, will think that you're just " typing words with no commitment..." Of course, that is the case, mostly due to the preceeding paragraphs in you post which indicates that you (the developers) have little, if any, control over what is done in this game.

Right now, one entire guild on Napa has essentially quit over the Speedhacking issue, the largest PvP guild on the shard. Several of my guildmates have recently quit for the same reason. One would hope that your superiors would decide to invest some resources (ya'll) in fixing these game breaking issues in the near future.

I'll stick around, maybe just running my vendors, working skills, or whatever. The basic game is pretty dang good, but is dying on the vine due to lack of attention. I hope that UO:KR infuses enough new blood that the lack of attention doesn't choke the life out of the game.

We'll see.


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