Five on Friday - January 4, 2008
The Five on Friday should return to its usual Q&A format next week; in the meantime, here are a few announcements, tidbits, etc to tide you over.
The Town Halls Return!
The first Town Hall of the new year will be March 1 in Jacksonville, FL at Dave and Busters. The RSVP site isn't updated yet, and stay tuned for announcements about the exact times, but mark your calendars if you're in the area!
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Winterland and Snowball Wars!
If you haven't checked out the Winterland shard recently, now's a great time - Snowball Wars is up and running! Here's the list of stuff to see and do in Winterland:
West Britain Bank
- Decorated for the season! Snow, party favors, and more!
- Paint Stations: Dye yourself, pets, and items with any hue from 0 - 2000
- Pet Bonding and Spellweaving gates
Tunnel of Love
- Experience the magic, and get a special bonus! A random stat is set to 150 (25 over the cap!) when you show off your love for another.
Dance Floor
- Come groove with Beth and the Beautiful Bards, our very first band playing songs non-stop for your partying pleasure. "Selim's Bar" is their most requested breakaway hit!
Holiday Tree
- Giant Holiday Tree: A huge, fully decked out Yew tree marks the heart of our winter wonderland celebrations!
- Wishlist: Leave three wishes behind as a memory of the shard. (Some, especially the selfless ones, may be answered!)
Gates to U.Hall Party and the Fairgrounds
- A fully decorated Winery at Empath Abbey meets the eager partygoers
- Includes a new spa, restrooms, and a pillory outside where you can shoot developers with apple juice cannons!
Snowball Wars at the Fairgrounds
- Join in on fast-paced team combat with... deadly snowballs!
Activities Guide
Snowball Wars
- Games start every five minutes. Simply enter the "ACTIVE" gate when you see the message that a new game is starting
- You will be divided into two teams once you enter the gate
- When the game begins, you're giving a pile of "deadly snow" in your backpack
- Double-click the snow and target another team's player to hit them
- You can use KR's targeting shortcuts to streamline the process by assigning 'Current Target' on the hotbar to the snow
- Snowballs do ~60% HP damage per shot.
- It's possible to heal during the battle through normal methods
- Hiding will slowly eat away your health until you die
- Death means you're out of the game. You'll be automatically teleported to safety along with your corpse
- The game ends when the timer runs down, or one team eliminates the opposition
- Distance will diminish the chance of hitting your target (1 tile away is 99%, 4 tiles is 90%, 6 tiles is 70%, 8 tiles is 30%, and so on)
- The arena changes its layout for every game, but always has a river and a bridge cutting the play field in half
- Each team starts on opposite sides of the river
Currently stress testing this. Join the fun! More will be unveiled soon
Paint Stations
- Double click, target item, type in the hue you want
- 0: Bleach - returns to natural color
- 1: Pure black
- 1150, 1153: White, Bright White
- 1152: Glacial
- 1154 - 1179: Fun neons
- 1180's: Crazy...
Wishlist
- Double click, and type in a wish! It may or may not come true.
- Three wishes
Dance Floor with Live Band
- Turn on Music in the Options
- Walk onto the dance floor, wait for the band to rotate into the next song (may be a minute or two before you get caught in the rhythm.
- Popular favorite: Selim's Bar
Mistletoe
- Stand under the mistletoe, with someone else within one tile
- Say "*kiss*" or "*kisses*" or anything that starts with "kiss"
- You'll glow a bit and see a message at the bottom part of your screen, and get a 150 base stat change to either Strength, Dexterity, or Intelligence
- You can only be the kisser once in a while (cooldown period)
Restrooms
- Walk inside the stall, sit down, wait for a little bit
- Drops food satiety in half
- Requires several hours before another attempt
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What's Next?
The developers are finishing up their moves and should be back in the office next week - we've got a LOT of stuff to do, so we're going to get to it as fast as possible. The first publish you see this year should have some nice bug fixes (not the BOD changes yet, most likely) as we run through our publish process to make sure everything made it through the move :) We're also going to be doing quite a bit of planning and scheduling over the next few weeks, so I should have more details for you in the relatively near future.
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Reminder - Fansite News
If you've got a website and you've got UO related stuff going on, send me an announcement and I'll post it here! (Please don't assume I already know about it - even if I totally do. I don't want to post something you'd rather I didn't, so I don't post about something unless I get a specific request to.) We've got a lot of talented people doing really neat things out there, and I want to brag about ya!
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Hope everyone had a good holiday, and isn't suffering too badly back at the usual grind. It's going to be an exciting year - I know I can't wait to get to it!
- Jeremy