Moats - So when do the rest of us get them?.....

Step 1. Clever Marketing Campaign . . . . Check
Step 2. Everybody Wants One . . . Check
Step 3. ???
Step 4. Watch everyone drain their Platinum savings for these . . . Pending.

All according to plan.

Seriously though that is our test site to make sure that placing water/lava/swamp tiles in someones courtyard could not be abused. Given Darkwing's extensive time at sea he agreed (translation: was forced) to test them for me to make sure that nothing bad could be accomplished with these additions.

These will function in a very specific way. One feature has already been added, the ability to disable your courtyard.

The next step will be releasing a client patch on the website that updates multi.mul to include 3 new castles, 3 new fortresses, 3 new large/classic keeps.

Once players have disabled their courtyards they will have the option of changing their courtyard to one of the newly patched designs (Water, Lava, Swamp).

This will cost nothing and anyone who owns one of these houses will be able to make this change, however only if your courtyard is disabled.

The final piece of the process is players will purchase one of a variety of bridges for their, now locked down, house. These will come complete with a lever (usable by Co-Owners/Owners) for raising and lowering the bridge. Marking and Recalling will be allowed while the bridge is down, disabled while the bridge is up. There will be a 1 hour delay between raising the lowering the bridge.

As for when this will be complete

Items not decaying in player courtyards also brings back one of the very classic aspects of UO. However it has a bad side affect of people stacking items 2-4 deep in their courtyards. While installing the test site for Darkwing, I removed almost 400 items from his fortress courtyard. Under the new moat system 400 items in the average fortress would turn into 25-40.

Note: The delay in finalizing these additions will be the client patch, as we only want to release a single patch to address 50 various client side issues. So while the moats are almost finished, the client patch may take a bit.

No existing runes will work as the bridges are elevated.

The bridges do not require that you change the courtyard to a "moat look" Only that you disable the courtyard.

Unrelated issue to moats, but yes I am working to fix it. As it is a large global system that can affect all 4000+ spawners in the world some stress testing needs to take place to make sure adding checks for courtyards does not add any undo stress on the server.