Five on Friday - March 30, 2007

"Will Kingdom Reborn still have the occasional Energy Llama?"
Oh, ye of little faith...

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Kingdom Reborn Pic of the Week:
Our testers have taken some awesome shots of the Ant Lion. Someone on the art team sure likes bugs...

The Ant Lion - side view
The Ant Lion - front view

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3D Client Update:
The April 2nd date has been pushed back - we are now projecting that the patch that will turn off the 3D client will go live on April 11th. (This does NOT mean that KR as a whole has been pushed back a week - we've just rejiggered the schedule a bit. This actually means that, theoretically, 3D players have a week less to wait before they get a proper replacement for their client.) Again, after this patch, the only clients that you will be able to log in with are the 2D client and, if you're a beta tester, the KR client.

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More Item Properties Cap Details:
Last week we posted the simple ones - the caps that don't change in different cases. Of course, y'all want the hard ones too...

Fast Casting: This property is capped differently depending on the skill you're using. The list below:

Magery: 2
Necromancy: 2
Chivalry: 4 (unless your Magery skill is 70.0 or higher - then it's 2)
Ninjitsu: 4
Bushido: 4
Spellweaving: 4

Fast Cast Recovery: FCR is capped at 6 for all skill types.

Spell Damage Increase: A couple of you asked if SDI varied between PvP and PvM - it does. SDI is capped at 15% in PvP only - it has NO cap in PvM.

Resistences: As several of you pointed out, Elves actually have an Energy Resist cap of 75, not 70.

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"Why is the drop rate for the Scrolls of Alacrity so low? Will they be spawning somewhere permanently after this event ends?"
The drop late is low for several reasons.

The item is pretty powerful for certain skills that are more difficult to gain in.
The item can be used anywhere. So with this version of the scroll, there can be lower risk (unlike the blackrock area).
All invasion mobs can possibly drop them. And there are 6 locations of invasion mobs (i.e., 3 in Trammel, 3 in Felucca).
We didn’t want to flood the world with these scrolls. We wanted to err on the side of not spawning a lot of these.

With all this stated, we will certainly continue to monitor the spawn rates of these scrolls. We're also gauging the popularity of these scrolls to see if we wish to reintroduce them in the future - nothing has been decided one way or another.

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UOGameCodes Change Clarification:
The update about www.uogamecodes.com brought up a couple of concerns:

This change ONLY applies to www.uogamecodes.com - NOT to phone orders or to PayByCash.

This change shouldn't affect your favorite gametime-for-gold broker, as brokers (and players) are welcome to call in orders for transferable game codes. And just as a reminder, we DO NOT offer bulk discounts for game time. If you encounter a website that claims to have gotten such a discount, they are not telling the truth, and their motives are.. shall we say, highly suspect?

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I asked you for feedback and boy, did I get feedback. If you haven't sent in your opinion on something UO-related yet, get to it! Remember, we're doing a drawing from all the valid feedback forms submitted this month to pick one person to get a KR beta slot!

Forms submitted must be received before midnight, March 31 (CDT) in order to be eligible. Spam will be deleted, and while "I want a beta slot" is feedback, of a sort, it's not what we're looking for. I won't disqualify previous entries on that basis, but if you haven't sent something in yet, pick a topic and tell me how you feel about it - balance, crafting, PvP, whatever. Make a suggestion, a complaint, a rant - whatever is on your mind.

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Beta Status Update:
Time to give you all some news about where we are and where we're going with the KR beta. Some things have changed since the last time I posted - check it out:

First Stage: Internal testing. This stage is done. (Insofar as internal testing is ever done, of course. Our QA team is still hard at work.)

Second Stage: Small-scale beta. This is where we are now. Over the next weeks we're going to be going from 25 or so external testers to several hundred. (If you've won a beta slot at a Town Hall, you'll be getting your invite during this phase.) We're getting the last of the major systems in, and things are going really well.

Third Stage: Live Shard Test (was Origin Test.) It turns out that an "Origin-only test" is not really possible for a bunch of technical reasons, so we'll be doing a medium-scale test on all the servers at once in this stage. This is where we make sure that KR and 2D play nice together. This is also where legacy 3D will go away. The NDA will be lifted somewhere around here.

Fourth Stage: Large Scale Beta. I have five-digit numbers on my "beta testers" plan for this, so if you haven't gotten in by this stage, here's where you'll most likely get your shot.

Fifth Stage: Launch! KR will be free to download for everyone.

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Wow, what a week. Tons of stuff going on, here - the Candle of Love, lots of new KR stuff, approximately eleventy billion bits of feedback to read... I need a nap. Have a good weekend!

- Jeremy