Balancing & Improvements

This patch has been deployed to the live server, see most recent changes at the bottom of this post

Young Player Status changes:

• increased account-time-played-as-young threshold from 40hr to 72hr
• increased per-character skill total threshold from 350 to 600
• removed ending Young status when accomplishing 80 skill-points in any skill
• unchanged: killing monsters of a high rating still has a chance to cause Young to end, with warnings occurring prior

Rotating Dungeons:

• introducing a Weekly Protected Dungeon that will be randomly selected each week on Sundays at 9am UTC
• criminal actions are prevented in the weekly dungeon (thieves can still Steal objects from the dungeon's structures though)
• weekly dungeons have a 50% reduction in loot
• boss/sequential spawns temporarily suspended in the weekly dungeon
• the Daily Dungeon feature will remain active, and Daily Dungeon should never conflict with the Weekly Protected Dungeon, allowing players to choose between: more danger for more rewards (Daily Dungeon), normal danger for normal rewards (All Other Dungeons), or less danger for less rewards (Weekly Dungeon)

Lord's Boon (Hearthstone)

• introducing Lord's Boon, a hearthstone that is blessed & soulbound to their owner
• usable by innocent players, not in a faction, with positive karma (above 0)
• can be obtained by completing a quest which will involve killing monsters at the Graveyard and possibly other tasks; see Lord Seymour in Castle Britannia (West Britain)
• can be used to teleport to a town they have bound to, uninterrupted (except death), with a 1 hour cooldown
• use this inside of a town's inn to bind your spirit to that location for use with this hearthstone

PVP Balancing & Improvements:

• added temporary PVP Protection to innocent players as they Resurrect, allowing 5 minutes of invulnerability from other players (not monsters), and will be interrupted if engaging in combat, or looting a corpse that is not their own or their pet's; this protection will only apply to innocent players with NO murder counts
• added an upper-limit for post-death murderer restrictions, now capped at 72hr, previously unlimited
• increased aggro or threat generation against murderer or criminal characters by NPCs/monsters
• added a warning to PKs if they go to attack a player that has (a) died recently, (b) been murdered in the past 24 hours, (c) if the murderer has killed any player in the last 24 hours
• prevented murderers from using item insurance & prevented from equipping insured items, items will automatically be unequipped on login if they are insured
• prevented being able to give murder counts to members of the same faction, similar to being in a guild or group
• prevented AOE spells from damaging innocent players inside houses without line of sight (Earthquake, Chain Lightning, Meteor Swarm)
• added craftable Camouflage potion for innocent players to use to prevent being tracked by players for a duration; this will be interrupted if becoming criminal; can be crafted by Alchemists
• added "call for help" speech command for players to be able to warn other players in the vicinity of a nearby murderer
• prevented the "Loot All" option on player corpses, except for the owner
• changed Hireling NPCs to be able to be used in PVP only against PKs by Innocent players, but they cannot be hired by PKs
• balanced skills/stats for Hireling NPCs to be tougher in PVE, in return their damage has been reduced in PVP in order to keep them balanced; they also now have a periodic self-bandage ability (subject to change)
• reduced Tracking range for player & pet targets by 20%
• fixed Tracking hunting mode to avoid party/friends

Reputation Improvements (preparation for upcoming additions to reputation):

• we've aligned the ways in which one can gain & lose reputation from the Ultima codex
• you can now gain Fame by: killing murderer characters you are not associated with, completing a Season challenge, completing a Quest objective, completing an Escort Quest
• you can now gain Karma by: healing, curing or resurrecting players
• prevented Fame/Karma losses from actions against players or pets you associate with (own, group, guild, faction)
• you can now lose Fame when logging in if your character has been logged out for an extended period of time (7 days or more); this will only cause a small amount of Fame loss and is NOT scaled by the amount of time you were logged out

Updates for Feb 22nd, re-deployment of this patch:

New changes:

• Added "Dungeons Status" context menu to self to be able to check the Daily & Weekly dungeons at any time
• Players will now be able loot player and pet corpses that are half-decayed to better align with expected UO mechanics; note: player corpses turn to bones at the half-way point
• Increased player & pet corpse decay time by 10m, now it will take 40 minutes to decay in total, or 20 minutes to half-decay
• Improved Hireling Mercenary commanding
• Completing the Lord Boon quest will now put the Hearthstone in your backpack rather than your bank
• Removed chance for characters with Hiding to not reveal when looting corpses that are not their own/their pet to align better with expected UO mechanics and for balancing

Fixes:

• Fixed murderers not being able to equip any items
• Fixed PVP prevention happening when trying to perform beneficial acts
• Fixed issue with not being able to complete the Lord Boon quest in some cases
• Fixed issue with adding to a stack of items not registering the new amount with the Quest tracker
• Fixed issue with Undead Crystals not stacking, not retroactive
• Fixed issue with Hearthstone not being bound on creation, retroactive fix for pre-existing items included
• Fixed issue with Weekly Dungeon spawns not being refreshed properly
• Fixed issue with un-hired hireling mercenaries attacking pets
• Fixed an issue with Karma becoming locked again after unlocking it, when gaining Karma but the total Karma remains below 0
• Fixed being able to drop backpack-bound items outside of the backpack
• Fixed issue with monsters being able to see over walls in dungeons in some cases