Five on Friday - February 2, 2007

"Where do I go to find out more about Kingdom Reborn, especially the stuff that was given out at the Town Hall?"
There is a ton of information, rumor, and pretty, pretty artwork floating around after last week's adventures. We have updated the Kingdom Reborn FAQ with answers to some of the most common questions and links to several of the player reports.

"I just noticed www.uoherald.com is live! What's up with that?"
(Note: the site JUST went up this morning - this means that the DNS information may take some time to propagate, and, for some people, that link may not work for as long as a day or two. This is normal.)

The UO Herald will be (as I have been hinting for a long time) your primary source of UO news, in an easy-to-read blog-style format. It's not a change of the whole site - you may notice that, while shinier, the left navigation hasn't changed in content, and still leads to the old-style site. For the moment, the primary change is to provide a site with a focus on what you, the UO player, want to see, updated as often I can manage without getting boring :)

(Regarding the feedback forms: please wait until we post info about how we're using them before you fill one out. This should happen next week. Thanks!)

"A GM sent me the wrong answer to my question!", revisited.
Regarding last week's CS post, from Sanya:

"I had Jeremy take it down. The fact that it was live at all was the result of the worst comedy of errors I've had since I started working as a community weenie, back in June of 2001.

What you saw was a draft that wasn't meant to be posted. The gist of the post was correct, in that our methods and procedures have changed. What was not correct had to do with the way things used to be. I rely on other people for that information, since I don't have the personal memories of old times. And I thought I was holding on having this go up on the web until I heard back from a particular developer. I badly miscommunicated with my poor minion, Jeremy, and she put up the post in innocence.

I picked the wrong day to not check the forums or I'd have realized what happened much, much sooner.

I apologize, everyone. The issues of response time and customer service methodology are very important for us, and I want to explain our thinking as clearly and completely as I can. But explaining it accurately is much more important, so for the time being, the original post has been removed."

"Why did I get a email from EA with my password? I didn't fill out the "lost password" form - what's going on?"
This is a hot topic on the Stratics forums at the moment, and to be perfectly honest, I got one of these this week myself. Seemed like a good time to address it :)

The first explanation is the harmless one: somebody has the account name "avitar", and your account name is "avatar", and they typed it wrong in the "forgot my password" form. They would then have sat around for an hour or two, waiting for their password to arrive, no doubt becoming very confused when it never did. :)

It is possible there's something else going on besides typos, of course. Someone could be using the form to figure out whether or not an account name is real. We are always working on keeping our security strong, and we have started taking steps to foil anyone who tries to verify account names in this way.

However.

If a shady character gets your account name, it's not a disaster - assuming you have a good password. (Our password request form cannot give a villain your password, because the password is going safely to you.) If you don't have a good password, I would STRONGLY suggest you go and change yours. Some tips:

Your password should NOT be the same as your account name. This defeats the purpose of having a password at all.
Your password should NOT be the same as your main character, any alt characters, or your character's pet llama.
As a matter of fact, your password should not be (or even resemble) any public information associated with you.
Longer passwords are better than shorter ones. Passwords with numbers AND letters are better than passwords with letters alone.
Passwords that are not dictionary words are stronger than passwords that are.
Your UO password should not be the same as your password for your Stratics login, your guild forum login, or, ideally, any other login you use anywhere.
NEVER GIVE YOUR PASSWORD TO ANYONE. I would amend that to read "never give your password to anyone you can't hunt down and smack if they do something dumb or evil with it", but, sadly, the threat of smacking will not actually stop your little brother from emailing your login info to all of your friends if you eat the last popsicle.
Change your password OFTEN. UO has been around for nine years - ideally, no active player is still using the same password he was using in '97. Or '02, or '05, for that matter.

If you think your account has been accessed by someone who shouldn't have access to it, contact Support - they can help you get control of your account again. And if your password is "password", dude, GO CHANGE IT. OK?

--

This week has been a blast - I love getting to see everyone react to all the new KR info. I think I'm mostly recovered from my travels, just in time for a nice quiet weekend on the couch. See ya!

- Jeremy