Posted on uo.com

1. "What's the Shard of the Dead stuff? Why should I bother to log on?"

Oh, man, the Shard of the Dead has some crazy cool stuff - Vampire Wars, mazes, monsters, zombies... too much, in fact, to go into detail on here, so I
got all the devs to give up the goods on their projects. Check it out here. There sure are some twisted minds on this team.

2. "The 9th Anniversary page says "Ordering information for Germany is coming soon!" What does "soon" mean? I want my Anniversary tokens!"

We've been pursuing this one all week, internally - the short answer is still "soon" but since that's not only useless but annoying, here's the long answer: Germany has some regulatory processes that video games must go through before being put on the shelves. Until the 9th Anniversary package makes it through that process, we won't have retail information to put up. We'll keep on this one, and post updates regularly on Stratics.

3. "These Halloween monsters are too hard!" or, conversely, "These Halloween monsters are too easy!"

So, to clear up the confusion: The Halloween graveyard spawns are NOT normal undead. They will vary in difficulty - here's the full explanation from Draconi:
"The spawn will increase its difficulty if it's beaten too quickly by players. If the next round is beyond the players' abilities, it will continually tone down until it finds a good spot.
The balance to this is that there's more than one graveyard to be fighting in; so if you can't handle one, try looking for another that's been ignored for a while and has a more decayed difficulty." .

4. "MrTact said that he'd put Hit Chance Increase back on shields, but he hasn't! What's up with that?"

In the interest of strict honesty, I'd like to quote the whole House of Commons section about HCI:

Sprite - *Dolgorath[ATL]* Has there been any discussion among the devs about the HCI on Shields issue? Are there any plans to bring it back or remove it from existing, non-artifact shields? This causes a significant pvp inbalance between people who have the extra HCI and people who don't.

MrTact - I wouldn't say we've discussed it, though we are aware of it.
MrTact - Right now I think the way HCI and Hit Lower XXX are implemented is a little overpowering. That's something I was ruminating about this morning, in fact.
MrTact - So A) That imbalance should be mitigated in the rebalance
MrTact - and B) Unless someone gives me a good reason why that property was removed from shields, I see no reason not to put it back.
MrTact - So, there you go . . . I have foolishly committed myself.

Right now the "good reason" is that we have not yet mitigated the imbalance, so for the moment, HCI will not be added back on to shields. That could, of course, change in the future - but the overall game balance remains the most important concern.

5. "Are there any plans to revamp the Doom artifact drop system?"

With the different looting rights systems on Treasures of Tokuno and the Grim Reaper, this question has come up. Leurocian has some ideas: "There are plans to revamp the Doom Artifact system to make it similar to Treasure of Tokuno. The tentative idea is that each player character participating against a gauntlet boss or the Dark Father will accumulate artifact reward points. The more artifact reward points a player character accumulates the more likely an artifact will spawn in his/her backpack. Player characters who score higher on the Top Attacker list will earn more points. However, everyone in the Top Attackers list that stays the entire duration of the combat (even if slain) will still earn points. This way, everyone who participates will eventually be awarded an artifact. As far as when this system will be implemented, this is still to be determined. No promises."

That's it for my first Five on Friday, folks - it's been quite a week! Oh, and by the way - hurry up and grab those coins, because Sherry the Mouse has almost finished driving off the rats...

-- Jeremy