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

• New Player Program
  • Created a custom system to help new players, to UOR or UO in general, get acquainted with the game
  • This protected status will allow you to learn without being subject to certain dangers in the rest of the world
  • This program is completely optional and when you start as a new player you are given the option to participate in the program.
  • Players may join the new player program up to 7 days after creating their account.
  • Players who do not meet this requirement may request inclusion manually by contacting a staff member if your account was created before this patch.
  • If you are not interested in the new player program, simply check the box at the bottom and you will not be notified again.
    
• New Player Program - Young Status
  • Players who join the new player program will be marked as (Young) players.
  • This protected status will allow you to learn the world and its dangers
  • This program is limited to Occlo island and Occlo Sewers. Leaving the island by any means will remove you from the program.
  • Should you leave the program on accident you may rejoin using the young command.
  • You may join the young program on multiple characters within the 7 day limit. However you are limited to 200 total hours of young gametime per account.
  • Young players may interact, trade, etc with non young players while on Occlo.
  • Young players may leave the program at any time via the Young Menu
• New Player Program - Occlo Island
  • Added several new buildings to Occlo island to help new players experience a full town.
    
  • Created a new player dungeon with a variety of entrances on Occlo.
    
• New Player Program - Helpers
  • Created a new type of NPC to provide our new players with information.
  • These NPC's will be stationed around Occlo and will offer to provide information to new players.
  • Any player however can double click on them to obtain information and links about the location/shop or dungeon.
  • This will help new players get immediate access to context sensitive information.
    
• New Player Program - Rules
  • Young players cannot use player moongates.
  • Young players using the public moongate to leave Occlo will be removed from the program.
  • Players who fail an AFK check will automatically be removed from the program.
• Ancient MIB System
  • Doubled the size of the pirate bay instance adding 2 more island with additional spawn
  • Updated the control region for the event to reflect the changes.
• Anti AFK Gathering System
  • Developed additional logic to better differentiate between computer and human driven activity when mining and lumberjacking.
  • Computer driven gathering of resources will now be monitored at an accelerated rate while players piloting their characters will be flagged less often.
  • Improved the method of randomization and the system that tracks player responses to AFK checks.
  • Applied the system to collecting bulk order deeds. Like any other resource players will need to collect these items while at the computer.
• Commodity Deeds
  • Added the deeds as a purchasable item from bankers.
    Note: These items will cost 500 gold each.
  • Removed the ability to assign a custom name to commodity deeds when placed on a player run vendor, removing confusion related to pricing.
  • Adjusted the weight of a filled commodity deed to 20 stones.
  • Adjusted the list of items that can be turned into commodity deeds.
• Escortables
  • Resolved a variety of problems with the escortable npc's design that was causing random client crashes for certain players.
  • Players can now find NPC's to escort in towns across Britannia
• Exploision Potions
  • Improved the timing functions of explosion potions to make them resist to macro use and targeting.
  • Incorporated a better "tick" system, which can vary slightly on each potion use.
  • Players using them manually should not notice a difference in timing or use, however using a macro to use and target the potions will be less accurate.
• Factions
  • Additional Faction Base Adjustments
  • Fixed a problem with targeting on the COM base bridge by layering in some floor tiles on the bridge. This resolved the LOS failures when trying to cast wall spells. (Thanks Liberation)
• Housing
  • Adjusted a check, that was failing in certain situations, causing a "housing could not be created here" message to be sent to the player.
  • This was related to a bug in RunUO where a check for your location was combined with a T2A check resulting in these phantom and unexplained messages.
• Items
  • Fixed some incorrect sounds on the Rabbit Statue
  • Created a Horse Statuette.
  • Created an exploding firework.
  • Created 15+ new items into the baserare class to be used in the future.
  • Stump, StumpAxe, Rope w/ Noose, Rope w/ Pullies, Rope w/Pulley, Rope w/ Hook, Large Fishing Net x 2, Flute
• Lumberjacking
  • Improved the functionality of the Anti AFK Gathering system to tell the difference between a player running a macro to gather resources vs someone playing a character manually.
  • Macro's will be checked to make sure the pilot is attended at a higher rate than someone chopping without an automated process.
  • Converted two public overhead messages to private messages that were being shown when trying to use an axe on non choppable objects. (Thanks Liberation)
• Mining
  • Removed a variety of grass tiles from the valid mining targets as they should not be providing ore when mined.
  • These tiles were confirmed to provide no mine-able metal in the UO Demo.
    Note: They may return in the future as an ore providing location but they will be scaled to the spot/tile type.
  • Improved the functionality of the Anti AFK Gathering system to tell the difference between a player running a macro to gather resources vs someone playing a character manually.
  • Macro's will be checked to make sure the pilot is attended at a higher rate than someone mining without an automated process.
• Monsters - General
  • Adjusted the code which provides items when the boss monsters are killed.
  • Adjusted the code that provides platinum when the champions/harrower is killed.
  • Adjusted the code that provides items when the pirate class monsters are killed.
• Monsters - Champion System
  • Further Refinement of the loot found on the champion bosses
  • Added special loot to the Harrower, Neira, Mephitis, Barracoon, Lord Oaks, Semidar and Rikktor
• Murder Reports
  • Removed an errant line of code that was causing players to get a long term murder count when someone reported them for a bounty.
• News
  • Players when logging in will be presented with a new menu showing recent patch notes and Renaissance News.
  • This gump will show up each time there is a patch, however players can toggle it to not be shown on login.
    Note: This only needs to be done once per account.
• NPC's
  • Removed the detect hidden skill from the NPC guards.
    Note: This was causing the guards to detect hidden players in their vicinity.
• Player Management Gump
  • Created a new combined menu system for players to manage their online profile.
  • This consists of a variety of sections.
  • News Section - Showing patch notes and information helpful to new players.
  • Links - Showing important links to various UOR resources
  • Profile - Shows information about your account, gametime, monthly rewards, and your website options. Links to you various player pages are shown
  • Registration tab - Allows you to register your account, update your linked email and change your account password.
  • Young Tab - Allows new players to join the new player program, leave the program and get information about the program.
    
• Player Vendors
  • Added the ability for the staff to move a vendor between houses for players.
  • Resolved the problems with the vendor dismiss and vendor replace commands.
  • These commands will now return a contract for the vendor, including any paid wages and the name of the vendor.
  • This deed can be re-used in a new spot, restoring the name and wages paid to the vendor in the new location.
    Note: Both commands have the same function, and the vendor must still be cleaned off prior to issuing the command.
    
• Smelting
  • Disallowed smelting stacks of ore greater than 30000
    Note: This was causing a loss of ingots when anyone tried to smelt a stack of ore over 30000.
  • RunUO by default would trash any overrun that in rare cases could produce a stack of ingots over 60k.
• Server Core
  • Found and fixed a bug with the bounce back code that in very rare situations would cause an item that was dragged from the bank, to bounce to your feet rather than back into the bank.
• Wands
  • Adjusted the Heal/Greater heal wands to cast spells based on a static 60 magery value, vs incorrectly assuming that the wand was a scroll for the purpose of casting the spell. (Thanks Mes)
    Note: A greater heal wand should now heal 25-35 hit points
• Website
  • Added Gametime and Account Age to the Items covered by marking your character private on the website.
  • Fixed a problem with Karma and Fame listings being swapped on certain player lists.
  • Created a completely new system to show additional details for items in the web database.
  • Players can now see a breakdown of items on the server by hue, with a color marker shown.
    
    
• World
  • Adjusted the reg spawns from 2-4 hours to 30-60 minutes since regs decay by normal means. This should cycle them properly now.
  • Adjusted the guarded region around yew to make sure houses cannot be placed to close to the bank on the north side.
  • Adjusted the no housing region north of the yew bank to be more accurate for the UOR era.
  • Adjusted the no housing region outside the despise dungeon to be more accurate for the UOR era.

I must say ... I Remember being able to mine this Spots on OSI, and getting just as much Ore as if you where mining the mountains or caves
so i am not so sure how accurate this one is!

We verified in the UO Demo that these tiles could not be mined. However If I find additional information I am willing to adjust this setting. The plan at the moment is to allow them to be mined, but with a degree less resources. At some point they were changed to allow players to mine the locations but only minimal ore would be found compared to mining a mountain or cave.

We are still working on the exact era accurate fix for this, which should be seen in a week or so.

A quick maintenance patch was applied to address the following issues this morning related to patch 40.

• Young players will no longer be removed from the program when crossing region lines on Occlo.
• Young players can no longer be attacked.
• Young players can no longer attack other players.
• Monsters on Occlo island will not longer attack young players unless they are attacked first.
• Resolved some minor issues with the region size for the town and dungeon.
• Young players can no longer have items stolen from them.
• Resolved a problem with the Anti AFK gathering system that was resulting in players getting checked every time they obtained a BOD.
• Fixed a problem with the Ironman Awards for Ancient MIB instances. Thanks Shadowjack

I wasn't able to fit this in, but it will be done in a week or two for patch 41.