Dear players,

We thought it was time to give you a small update on what is going on with Uthgard, so here is a few notes.

Reporting issues and work distribution:
Since we opened the beta about 2 month ago, a lot of bugs have been reported in the tracker. For the most part these have been very helpful and you have been good at downvoting / invalidating reports that should not get our attention. We very much appreciate that, and hope you will be doing that some more. It is key that topics without evidence are not taking up developer time as their time is already very limited compared to GM time. This is why you might see a lot of item / mob / quest fixing compared to class ability changes, or code changes. So don't worry, fixing a quest, or an item does not slow down our progress towards a relaunch. If you are interested in work distribution the work queue might be of interest to you.

What are we working on right now:
Right now there are a few things on our radar, however our main focus is on fixing the missing piece of XP splitting (high level player, with a player outside their level clamps in a group). This is not an easy problem, we are however getting very close and hope we might have found a solution we can implement. Needless to say, we do not want to make a custom solution to this, as it could ruin the gaming experience if this is not done correctly. And in turn this could create imbalances between new and old players if we some day manage to find the right solution. As some of you know, we are not willing to mess up tomorrow, by creating an easy fix today. We hope you understand and agree with this decision. With that being said though, we feel we are getting very close and will therefore implement the next step in our plans. (Read more further below)

Along side this, the main world build focus has been on epic quests and implementing the dragons (If you want to know the status of epic quests, please have a look at the issue tracker).

DISCLAIMER: The following time periods are estimates and may change at any time! Please do not get angry with us if we do not meet these estimates, we will do our best to do so, but real life might happen.

What are we planning for the future:
We have decided to implement an instant level 30 NPC which also hands out free respecs in the capital cities. We hope this will encourage more people to test class abilities, and to test the BGs and RvR. By doing so we can hopefully get started on collecting data for the bugs that needs to be fixed when XP splitting is fixed. (A small note needs to be made here, we are aware that relic guard spawns are not complete at this point, and until we fix this in the future, there is little reason to report bugs about this. We will make another news post or announcement when all guard systems are fully working). This NPC will be available from the 1st of July and will give free respecs, and possibly some way of getting geared up (we are still trying to figure out a way to do this without breaking the economy completely as we still would like to gather data about this). This stage of the beta will last for about 1 month. A note is worth to be made here, that July is the month where most of the staff is on vacation in various time periods. So expect bugs / player support to be slowed down, we feel like the instant 30 test is a good testing phase for us to do this in, as most of the testing should be evolved around xp splitting in groups, and it might take time for everyone to get a good sense of whether that is working or not.

What will happen after instant 30:
After we have run the instant 30 setup, we will move onto the last major bug reporting step of our beta testing. This means we will introduce instant 50, and we will be focusing on RvR bugs and missing / bugged class functionality. This is also the state where we will be focusing on relic guards, dragons, etc.
This stage should hopefully take 1-2 months only (hopefully just 1 month), and after that we will move onto the final step.

What will happen after instant 50:
After instant 50 has been done, we will move onto the final stage of the beta testing. In this stage we will close down the server and prepare to relaunch (Wiping the servers, making sure all of our GM internal tools are working, etc). This stage should hopefully only take 1-2 weeks.

New GMs:
Some of you might have noticed we have recruited some new GMs. These are new additions to our team, and we hope you will welcome them to the team as we have. While they are still new to Uthgard, most of their tasks will be focused around world build issues (items, mobs, quests), but we hope they can eventually branch out and take on bigger roles. So with that being said, please help us welcome Decidon, Genjiro, Cirdan, and Alcyon to the team.

Happy testing,

Your Uthgard Team

** Update**
The instant level & respec NPCs can be found in each realm's home city.
Next to that NPC is an aid that will pass out equipmenent.

Happy Testing - Gnome

hyped. lets make uthgard great again

Great announcement, Trish. Things will definitely pick up now that we have the freedom to test classes like this.

My only comment would be that instant 30 should get implemented as 'instant levelling up to 30'. There's a lot of spots around level 15/20 I want to check the loot tables for.

Sounds good, so the relaunch may be expected to be somewhen around October or November. Nice, if so.

silenced wrote:Sounds good, so the relaunch may be expected to be somewhen around October or November. Nice, if so.

Or sooner, or later. Please do not expect every phase to be as long / short as specified, these are estimates. But you will get at least 1-2 weeks warning for when we relaunch.

Simple, thank you!

Also, welcome new GM's!

Amazing to get an overview guys and welcome new GM!

Just for my Information.. The Server will running on P 1.65, so do we have the Instant /level command after we got our first level 50 Char? (Should be implemented at 1.62)

Greetz Prime

Prime wrote:Amazing to get an overview guys and welcome new GM!

Just for my Information.. The Server will running on P 1.65, so do we have the Instant /level command after we got our first level 50 Char? (Should be implemented at 1.62)

Greetz Prime

Please read our FAQ on that topic: https://uthgard.org/howto#5

Thanks for the news. Dont mind the nej sayers, just continue with the good work that you guys do on your spare time.
Thanks to the beta testers thats actually try to help in any way they can.
And welcome to the new GM's.

My daoc itch will never go away so i gladly wait and play beta until its done.

Now time for some vacation

Have a good one guys and stay positive!

Thank you for this update! Good luck working out the exp issue!

Juhu...

Thanks for this update!

It couldn't have worked out better for me, as I'm on Holiday away from my PC for all of July. I'll be back in early August to help with the i50 testing.

Sounding positive, very good to hear.

In regards to the instant level 30 and the accommodating gear and breaking the economy; Perhaps whatever gear you decide is best to give, then you could have it unsalable/untradable/unsalvageable. Hopefully that way it will not affect the economy and only be useful for the levelled character.

Thanks for the update, and good luck.

Breaking the economy during beta might be acceptable to achieve other ends.

.../lv 30 ...
A good decision.
Many of the players play only for one reason: just play.
And many ppl just make a new toon as soon as reached out level 20-25 because of missing equipment and (so they think) low exp in further levels. So many ppl only know (in Albion) Camelot Hills, Salisbury Plains, maybe Cornwall & Killtasks in Caer Wittrin.
And when they are tired of finding groups or grinding blue (missing equipment...^^) they just make a new toon.

So the /30 is a good possibility to bring the (near of the) endgame to the players. And discover other places an ... above all... the RvR.

Just my 2 cents