IronWill - Before we start I would like to say a little something about a couple events that will be going on next week.
IronWill - As you might know we have been working on the implementation of a new volunteer player group.
IronWill - This coming Wednesday we will have an open house all night long at the Britain Counselor Guild. This is a chance to let you meet...
IronWill - some of the people that really do a bangup job in helping us support the game.
IronWill - You will be able to meet counselors, seers, senior counselors, GMs, and our new group the Elders.
IronWill - Again this will be an open house at the Brit Counselor Guild this Wednesday, February 3 all night long.
IronWill - So make plans to be there and of course have a good time. :)
IronWill - This event will be on all shards btw. :)
DenDragon - Thanks IronWill!
DenDragon - Greetings and thank you for attending tonight's Open House.
DenDragon - Tonight's topic is: 'Changes Currently In Testing'. We will be discussing the upcoming changes that are listed at http://update.owo.com/testing. Please phrase your questions accordingly.
DenDragon - Rainman will be our moderator for this evening. In order to submit questions please /msg or /query Troll, Kazola, Kainen, Hellbunny.
DenDragon - Please /msg different question-takers at different times, in order to balance the load and speed this process up. Do not msg anyone from Origin, myself or Rainman--these questions will be ignored.
DenDragon - Remember that the DevTeam may not have the opportunity to answer all of your questions. In addition, some questions may not be answered if the DevTeam feels that it is not appropriate or that it has been better answered through some other question.
DenDragon - In addition, please do not submit any questions that have already been answered during past conferences. We encourage you to read the logs of the previous Open Houses, which are available at http://uohoc.stratics.com.
DenDragon - Before the meeting begins, Designer Dragon would like to make a few comments.

DesignerD - Evening everyone!
DesignerD - I don't know how many of you are thieves, butI know that a lot of folks have been anxiously awaiting our release of our plans for this controversial profession.
DesignerD - We promised to have it ready for release this week--we're still gonna try to do that, but we've all been so busy we haven't really had time to sit down and write it up to post to the website yet.
DesignerD - Rich Vogel, our producer, also known as Dupre in UO, was going to be here tonight so we could premiere the changes tonight, in an excluive infodump for the House of Commons :)
DesignerD - Unfortunately, he's not here.
DesignerD - Which means that instead, I
DesignerD - will just have to take the blame for the changes :)
DesignerD - So without further ado, here's a quick summary of what we intend to do to thieves!
DesignerD - First: ROGUES
DesignerD - We will be adding skills to detect and disarm traps.
DesignerD - these will be very useful for the chests in dungeons that will bespawning traps, locks, and of. course treasure :)
DesignerD - They will also be useful for the hidden, invisioble traps that will be spawning at ra.ndom. locations in the dungeons.
DesignerD - These traps will be invisible except to those with detect hidden, and we anticipate that every dungeon party will want a rogue along to make their dungeon trip more easily survivable
DesignerD - All doors in dungeons are also quite likely to start acquiring traps and locks.
DesignerD - The ability to detect traps will definitely be at a premium. :) We're also investigating a stealth skill to allow thieves to move (slowly & with difficulty) whilst in complete concealment.
DesignerD - So that's what rogues will be--a rather fun and exciting change, I think.
DesignerD - That brings us to what we're doing to the PvP thief...
DesignerD - And now Dupre (who showed up) has some words to say about them :)
RVogel - I don't like PvP thieves..They are disruptive and hurt the online experience for many players. I am recommending these changes
RVogel - to channel the thieves away from player into a profession that is more about advanturing
RVogel - and not about promoting anti-social behavior
DesignerD - OK, so now that he took the blame, here's what we're doing:
DesignerD - Lord British hath finally granted, after much petitioning, the request of the heretofore underground and forbidden Thieves Guild!
DesignerD - They shall be granted an official charter by Lord British himself, to come into the open and be recognized as a true trading guild.
DesignerD - However, LB had some strings attached...
DesignerD - 1) Nobody will be allowed to PvP steal unless they are a member of the NPC Thieves Guild. They have an exclusive charter on this sort of activity.
DesignerD - 2) There will be strict skill requirements for joining the Thieves Guild. Throwaway and macroed thieves need not apply.
DesignerD - 3) The Thief Guildmaster hath decreed that since their charter is tenuous indeed, that murder is STRICTLY FORBIDDEN for members of the Guild. Violaters will not be allowed to members, and will be summarily expelled, possibly with very harsh penalties.
DesignerD - 4) As thieves operate on the shady side of the law, members of the Thieves Guild will not be allowed to report anyone for murder. Ever.
DesignerD - In other words, they can be killed at will.
DesignerD - They will not, however, be flagged visibly as members all the time, so they can operate in the shadows until detected.
DesignerD - 5) Users of the Forensic Eval skill will be able to determine whether a person is a member of the Thieves Guild by using their mastery of detective powers.
DesignerD - In addition, there are some across the board changes coming.
DesignerD - 1) Stealing will be difficulty based, based on weight of the item stolen.
DesignerD - 2) There will be armor restrictions in place for many of the thief profession skills, including hiding, stealing, and stealth.
DesignerD - 3) we will be examining success rates & chance of getting noticed, of course, given these changes
DesignerD - 4) NPCs will have stuff worth stealing.
DesignerD - 5) Trying to steal stacks will now take an amount from the stack, not the whole stack.
DesignerD - 6) Since you are assumed to know your home well, detecting hidden in your house will reveal EVERYONE with a very high (perhaps guaranteed) success rate
DesignerD - Oh--forgot this item about thief guild--you can't rejoin for 1 week if you resign.
DesignerD - Now, to summarize: we stated that we would be drastically reducing the incidence of PvP thievery in the game. We believe these changes will accomplish that. But we also believe that the well roleplayed rogue has an important part to play in UO, and we will be working to ensure that theyt take their rightful place
DesignerD - We want thieves to be a profession that is respected, not scorned and reviled. The PvP thief who actually lives with the penalties and downside and requirements of the Thieves Guild will be a dedicated player who represents the best possible side of PvP theft--and will also be damn rare.
DesignerD - And the bulk of thieves will be adventuring rogues.
DesignerD - I imagine you have a ton of questions on this plan, so please feel free to ask them as part of the chat. :)
DesignerD - Now, let the questions begin :)

Rainman - *Duskwalker* Among the In Testing items, is notice of the return of poisonous creatures. For the record, could you state which creatures this includes and what Second Age creatures are poisonous?
DesignerD - I'll have to look it up, and I cannot give you a full list because it is too much to type. :) Hang on just a moment.
DesignerD - Argh, OK, the serach I was gonna do didn't yield any useful results. :P Tell ya what, I will post a list on the Update Center tomorrow. :) I am pretty sure wyverns poison, though, to address the T2A issue.

Rainman - Ibn_Shaun* The new meditation skill has a lot of healers concerned. Mages can resurrect a person every 25 seconds (healer over 1 minute), cure someone every 3 seconds (healer over 20 seconds), and heal up 460-500 hitpoints/minute (healer 120-240) .. all with instant effects. Will healers ever be the best at their own art?
Faceless - It has me concerned a bit too. Healers don't need mana or reagents to perform these tasks so it should be a bit different than a mage but...
Faceless - if it requires tweaking the times of healing we're not adverse to doing that

Rainman - *voodo21* It takes signifigantly longer to attain GM resist, while GM evaluating intelligence can easily be attained in a few days. It also rules out any possibility of resisting any 6th circle spells. Don't you feel that the evaluating intelligence skill revision being tested on abyss is a bit too powerful?
Faceless - There are too things two powerful in my mind...spells that did no damage before (like mana vamp) are now too powerful and...
Faceless - extra damage done by people with high EI against low resistors. However, you will find that having 100 resist on TC
Faceless - is much better than having 0 at all. There is still a possiblility of resisting 6th circle spells
Faceless - and a GM resistor resists evreything to an extent. it's all scaled based on your resist and the mage's EI.
DesignerD - Poisonous creatures: giant spiders, silver serpent, giant scorpion, slimes, energy vortex, giant serpent, small snakes, poison elemental, giant black widow spider, wyverns, dread spiders, Terathan avengers, and Ophidian Knights.
Faceless - so the chance to "resist" the spell doesn't depend on EI at all.
Rainman - Please DO NOT message or chat with me, DD, Dupre, or anyone else from OSI, they WILL be IGNORED

Rainman - *Qui-Gon* Will Evaluate Intelligence just be a scaled damage bonus based on your EI vs your resist? Will it have any negative impact on a mage without EI and what will the maximum damage bonus be?
Faceless - Casting against a GM resistor will of course be very difficult.
Faceless - you will likely do between 25%-50% of the normal damage
Faceless - Acquiring EI will allow you to do 50%-100% against that same foe

Rainman - *Fripp* even with no visible flag don't you think rogues will be easy to pick out and kill on sight? Aren't you effectively putting out a kill order on all rogues to eleminate a problem that could be solved with many other solutions as suggested on the Rogue Suggestion Board?
DesignerD - We examined the solutions offered on the rogue board. The majority of them dealt with things like jail terms and the like. None of them seemed to address the topic of throwaway and macroed thieves, who don't care about jail sentences. We feel that PvP thievery in UO needs to be the province of a VERY few people who are willing to put up with the great difficulties it should offer.
DesignerD - This is not to say that we didn't agree with many of the points they brought up. The extensive list of stuff we're adding to the thief profession (detect trap, disarm trap, stealth, traps and locks in dungeons, treasure in chests, armor restrictions, etc) was largely thanks to their input.
DesignerD - However, we feel the strong need to drastically curb the PvP thief. These changes limit it to only a select few, and ensure that they cannot make use of the common steal-goad-and-PK tactics that are in use now.
DesignerD - Basically, under this system, the only PvP thief will be an HONORABLE PvP thief who is willing to take the penalties that his behavior deserves. This is akin to the red murderer today.

Rainman - *Omniversal* If a thief steals from someone and they attack the thief, but the thief is a much better figher and kills the person, is it considered murder for the thief to defend himself?
DesignerD - No, because stealing will still not be an aggressive action. Making it an agg action was something that many suggested, but which we ultimately decided not to do because of the overall harshness of the plan.
DesignerD - BTW--I neglected to cover changes to snooping. Suffice it to say that there will be some. Including, for sure, a skill delay, and probably an "awareness" flag on victims that increases with repeated atte
DesignerD - attempts.

Rainman - *Damsel* After testing the new Tailoring patch I liked it all except the hides needing to be in the backpack. They are very heavy and dangerously cumbersome. Any plans to rethink that decision and possibly but back the target so they can be left on the ground?
DesignerD - Yes, that is being considered. So is just making hides lighter.

Rainman - *Trevar* Please make the colored ore a random find per the miner's skill rather than having the ore appear only in designated places. Do you not realize the pk's will be waiting for every miner to get the colored ore and the specified areas will be blocked off by players much like the boats block off sections of mountain now and most miners access to the colored ore will be minimal at best?
DesignerD - We have thought long and hard about this. We retain the ability to move the veins if this becomes an issue, and even make them random. However, this concern came up before people actually got to try the system. Now that they have tried it, we're not getting very many people saying that it is actually a problem. We're in contact with the United Blacksmiths of Britannia to get their sense on the issue, and thus far it seems not to be a big deal.
DesignerD - We DO feel that having veins stay put for a while, long enough to be known, is an important part of having veins at all. Otherwise, we could have just made it be random completely. We WANT there to be a sense of "mines" developing, the need to guard people there, get some organization going, etc.
DesignerD - We ARE aware that miners are a favored target. A solution there is simply making ore easier to transport, because it's sure a pain in the butt right now :)

Rainman - *Zolthar* With Meditation many mages will be sheading their armor to gain its effects, leaving them open to massive damage from bows/weapons and relying heavily on their wrestling abilities to dodge these blows. But many mages have now noticed that the fix that went in for raising archery without arrows has also removed "passive wrestling" (wrestling without tactics). Will there be a fix to address this?
DesignerD - We basically expect mages not to be in the front lines. Ways of making wrestling not really matter much for th epure mage are however being discussed. There are no concrete plans for changes on this front at the moment however.

Rainman - *RyNet_Jim* Question: DD, in the chat you did with BattleVortex you talked about working on Werewolves and Necromancy (being almost done). Do you think we can expect either of these by Summer 99'?
DesignerD - Yes.

Rainman - *Guderbayne* With the addition of the ability to create colored armor with blacksmithing, is there any consideration to making a similar addition to tailoring? Maybe not necessarily colored armor, but maybe different breeds of hides - Shouldn't dragon hide protect a little better than goat hide?
DesignerD - Unfortunately, I don't have a nice concrete one word answer to that one. :) Yes, it should, and it'd be nice to add sometime, but we don't have plans for it just yet.

Rainman - *Sav* Hail, is there anyway to get a name change ever in this game? I spent 8 months hitting gm tailor but I have a bad name, and I'd like it changed. Will this ever be possible? In my opionion and many others name change deeds should be available for a high cost for people wanting a new identity and starting a new life with out haveing to rebuild skills. Please consider this
IronWill - Unfortunately since every player would want a name change, it would literally be a logistical nightmare for the GMs to do.
IronWill - Not to mention the guy out there who might be a real weasel taht is being hunted down...
IronWill - if we were to change his name then all the hunters out there would a bit dissappointed in us for giving him an alter ego, :)
IronWill - There are too many things taht are inherently bad with changing names so please choose carefully!! :)

Rainman - *Dan* With the new colored armor change, has any though been given to having Tinkers do the coloring? Like electroplating. As it is, Tinkers don't have a lot to do in the game other than trap boxes, which I don't use.
DesignerD - Colored armor will be going in basically much like it is on Test Center.... however, that doesn't mean we don't have things we would like to do for tinkers in the future.

Rainman - *Shalafi* The abyss is interesting and fun ... but I don't feel we got a good enough test run for Meditation. What about the regen at 50 skill? 25? 75? Can we test this on a shard copy with advancement gates for different meditation and intelligence levels before the patch comes out? As a mage I love it, but I would hate for it to be overpowered.
DesignerD - The place to do that is on Test Center. :) We unfortunately don't have any plans for shard mirroring onto TC at this time, but rest assured we will be watching the balance with Meditation VERY closely.

Rainman - *King* What will be the skill requirments to join the NPC thieves guild?
DesignerD - High skill requirement in stealing, probably in other rogue skills as well. No murders. Possibly a set time of character lifetime in the game (eg, cannot join unless character is X days or weeks old).

Rainman - *Nova* With extensive testing on Abyss, I still find parrying isn't doing what it's suppose to be doing. It rarely absorbs damage from physical blows if it dosen't completely block the attack. Please examine this skill further if you have the time. Could you also elaborate on the future of parrying as a defense against missle like magical attacks?
Faceless - We will examine it further. I don't think we are satisfied with the results...
Faceless - as far as magic goes, projectile magic will have a chance of having some of their damage absorbed by a shield
Faceless - this will not affect non-projectile magic at all

Rainman - *AlienA* why was a UoReport0.log put in our computers with the latest client patch. What does it do and why was it put in?
RVogel - First of all this is not caused by OSI but UOExtreme.
DesignerD - Er, wait, hang on, back up a step.
DesignerD - The uoreport.log is a log generated by the client of wat files it opens and closes. It is to track down sources of client crashes.
DesignerD - It does NOT scan your hard drive. And it lives in your UO directory.
DesignerD - If you see it someplace else, it means your current working directory is changing because of how you're running UO.
Faceless - Certain applications that launch UO forgot to set the current working directory back to the appropriate place
Faceless - Thus people will see files get created in the "wrong" directory because of these external programs
Faceless - I'm not sure what other complications may arise from this
Faceless - If you are experiencing such a problem, I strongly suggest running UO directly from the start menu

Rainman - *Hartford* Will the revisions to rogues and thievery make hiding a viable skill again? With a simple cast of invisibility, mages again one-up's the "pure" skill with their ability to hide even in the midst of combat. (see Ibn's question on healing)
DesignerD - Mages have interruption, though, and also an ongoing cost in the form of reagents. If this becomes a signficant issue, we'll revisit it, but at the moment we have no plans to do so

Rainman - *Trobriand* concerning boats, will they be getting ownership, right now there are several ways to steal boats or items on boats decks, owners want protection, and if there is an exact ownership will forges be allowed to be placed?
DesignerD - The decks of boats are not secure, and never ever will be, period. That is what the hold is for. Boats will not be getting the sort of complex ownership system that houses have. We actually want to move boats towards transportation and temporary storage only.

Rainman - *KurokoOfBon* Are there any plans for making mages more foritfied versus attack? The new changes (and addition of another battle damage modifier) make mages really vulnerable. Perhaps via tailoring?
DesignerD - We don't want more fortified pure mages. Mages should be easy to kill--it's only fair, since they are devastaingly powerful. However, we will be continuing to examine spells such as reactive armorto ensure that they are worthwhile
DesignerD - Just to make clear, for poor AlienA who is now getting accused of all sorts of things--no, we didn't mean that she uses UOE. :) EVERYONE has a uoreport.log file.

Rainman - *CyleEiG* Question for DD: Since housing used for vendors is creating just as much of a priblem as what was supposed to be fixed, dont you think it would be a better idea to open up certain areas for house-less vendor placement? i.e., Minoc Merchant Camps, Counselor Guildhals, etc.?
DesignerD - We still believe that house maintenance will be necessary, as we told players from the outset... however, vendor marketplaces were also part of our original plan. We've got other fish to fry at the moment, but I don't doubt that both of those things will resurface in the future.

Rainman - *Slade* DD: Do you have anything to say/add about the elder counselor program? (its kinda 'in testing' *grin*) Thanks.
IronWill - I can sort of answer taht as I am somewhat involved....
IronWill - the elders program is made up of our older, veteran counselors who have done a bangup job
IronWill - this does two things: allows a static presence in game every night because they stay at the brit counselor guild hall and...
IronWill - allows us to bring in more players from our last application.
IronWill - Its been very apparent that players want to get involved, and we are happy to see our volunteer base continue to grow.
IronWill - We hope that it serves the players are are really excited about it.

Rainman - Ok, Everyone that concludes tonights Conference
Rainman - Thanks to EVERYONE for coming, including those who decided to play name games (keeps the bouncers busy)
Rainman - Next conference will likely be in 2 weeks, and the log of this should be posted on uohoc.stratics.com in less than 20-30 minutes!!
Rainman - Thanks again!!!
DesignerD - Night all!
RVogel - Good Night Everyone
Faceless - Good night!
DenDragon - 'night!