Patch 40: July 3rd 2013 New Player Program, 4th of July

I just now respawned them, I wasn't able to get them tested before I left town, should be all good now.

Since leaving the island will remove a young player from the program, they are not allowed to use player created moongates. We did however add a public moongate that they can use to leave the island at any time just south east of the bank.

This will change in a future patch, I just didn't have time to develop a custom gump to handle young players using moongates since players could cause confusion since leaving the island would remove them from the program.

They will be enabled in the next patch, however the amount of ore found in any one 8x8 area will depend on the amount of ore bearing tiles in that 8x8 area.

The bumps were found to have an incorrect amount of ore, even for the UOR era, and players were taking advantage of this oversight extensively.

During the second age the bumps were unable to be mined at all as there were as the resource banks were set to zero for any area not in/near a cave/mountain.

During UOR the non mountainous areas were able to be mined but at a rate relative to the amount of mineable tiles in the 8x8 bank.

At some point later OSI said screw it and just randomized everything. They also randomized the banks as well where the ore found in an area would change at regular intervals.

The spots were disabled due to a massive uptick in the amount of mining that was being undertaken on these spots. Based on the logs, a large percentage of all AFK checks for mining were sent spots that were not near a mountain or a cave. This clearly indicated a problem. In a few spot checks I was unable to find anyone actually mining these spots without using some sort of a macro. (Recall, Mine, Recall, Bank, Organize, Restock, Repeat).

However a side affect of patch 40 removed tiles that were used in a variety of places, and this will be rectified soon.

In patch 41 these spots will return, but they will provide ore relative to the amount of ore bearing tiles nearby. The correct amount of ore that can be found in any single spot should be 1-16. However will most likely use a scale of 4-16. Each 8x8 resource bank contains 64 tiles.

UO Demo Code - August 1998, these spots provided no metal.

There is no variance in timing with potion ticks related to your character performing other actions/targeting. The purple potions now conform more closely to server ticks, resulting in a small variance on each numerical tick based on when the potion was used. (Between 1-100 milliseconds, 1/10th of a second)

In all testing done on the minor change to the potions not one player could determine when the patch was applied and when it was not. (blind testing, using a potion by hand)

The only way in which players were able to tell a difference is when they tried to use AssistUO, EUO, or Razor to try and auto use/target purple potions. Since the timing is now processed on server ticks, you cannot make a macro that says "Use Potion,wait 3.x seconds, target" and achieve a high level of accuracy.

If you want to be accurate with purple potions, against a moving target. Target based on the visual clues.

Ezekiel demonstrated this to me as I had never seen it before.

The problems you were having were due to the overall variance in the potion use which could be anywhere from 4ms to 650ms. Since that combo depends on clear timing it would be much more difficult to pull off since you are basing the targeting on the time to cast certain spells.

I reduced the front end randomization but left the per tick randomization to make this have less effect on that.

Hitting a target on the run however will take very precise timing still, although I did make a tiny adjustment there to make it a bit easier.

This should be applied in patch 41 in a day or two.

This all said, I can't rule out future changes if we find players abusing explosion potions using automated methods to guarantee hits on moving targets.

It is a common practice on Renaissance to disable a feature or system that is not working correctly and can damage the experience or the world economy while the staff reviews it. This has been done in the past multiple times with things such as bonding, masonry, ancient MIB's, commodity deeds and other systems.

Our monitoring software notified us of a problem, the problem was traced to computer controlled, but watched, activities. A patch was made to restrict this behavior until the problem could be solved.

Our goal since day one is to provide a vibrant economy for our new players to enjoy. Not support the automated gathering of resources using a computer controlled character. If you were affected by the change while mining normally without using computer automation we apologize for the inconvenience, and have resolved it in patch 41.

Patch 41 has been applied to address these concerns and resolve the problems that were found.

Patch 41 Details