Ultima Online Patch Notes for 01/20/1998

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Ultima Online Patch Notes for 01/20/1998

These are the official patch notes from the original release of Ultima Online. These patch notes were found at [1].

• All tame animals will now have "(tame)" above their names (whether they have been renamed or not).
• The friends list has been temporarily disabled because of a stability problem.
• The notoriety highlighting should now be accurate again.
• You will not be able to move with the resurrection window up.
• A bug with advancement in tactics and parrying has been fixed.
• We have isolated one possible cause of lag and have put in a fix.
• Dragons and drakes are now a lot more aggressive towards all humans.
• The delay before the first swing or shot will be much shorter; also, the time it takes to recover from movement in archery will also be much shorter (though the firing rate overall remains the same). You will not need to get new weapons for this change.
• Torches will now have a sound effect when they light.
• Lightsources are not on secret doors anymore.
• Teleporting with the bank window open will cause it to close.
• Magic:
  • It now takes full mana to use scrolls.
  • Area effect spell damages have been tweaked.
  • The magical aura around teleporters now disrupts field spells in such a way that prevents them from being cast. Curiously, this also affects dungeon entrances. ;)
  • There will be continuous animations during the spell casting delay.
  • The mage will be frozen in place whilst casting.
  • There will be a chance of the casting aborting if the mage is struck during his casting process. The chance is based on how much damage you took, and your ability at magery.
  • There will be an automatic 30 second time out on spell targeting.
  • NPCs and creatures now attempt to avoid damaging fields.
  • Spell damage has been revised. Spells of higher circle now offer clear advantages in greater damage, with the tradeoff of longer casting time. Along with this, mana costs for all circles have been revised.
  • It is now easier to resist spells, and some bugs have been fixed in the skill.
  • The light sources on fire fields, energy fields, and paralyze fields should be correct now.
  • Energy fields should animate correctly.
  • The fire field spell now affects notoriety only with the first victim.
  • The magic lock spell's ability has been tweaked.
• Skills
  • Inscription is now difficulty based. It becomes harder to inscribe spells which you yourself cannot cast reliably, so the skill is now partially dependent on your ability in magery.
  • The healing and vet skills have received an overhaul:
    • They now check line of sight and distance.
    • They are significantly more powerful.
• The algorithm for selecting which skills to atrophy will change from a random skill, to your least-used skills. Skills you acquire via learning by watching do not count as "used"! Expect them to melt away very quickly.
• A few problems with items saying they were no longer usable will be fixed (notably in traps).
• The problem with tinkering being unable to use items in containers will be fixed.
• Enticing shopkeepers will now make the message pop up over the right person.
• Advancement rates for magic resistance, wrestling, and bowyering/fletching have been altered.
• The advancement curve for all skills has been tweaked to emphasize the exponential curve:
  • Advancement in the lower points ranges (below 30%) is noticeably faster.
  • Advancement in the newbie-chosen skill range is faster, but you get diminishing returns pretty quickly. Around 50% advancement is the same as it is now.
  • Above 50% the exponential curve is steeper, and it is now much harder to reach the highest skill levels.
• The various "hello" words used to attract NPC attention have been disabled in favor of having to use either the NPC's name, or "guard" (in the case of guards), or one of the following in the case of shopkeepers, in every speech you wish them to hear. This was done at numerous players' request in order to reduce the amount of NPC interruption of conversations.
  • shopkeeper
  • shopkeep
  • merchant
  • vendor