Category Archives: News

Uthgard 2.0: News Blooms in Spring

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From: https://www.uthgard.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=46687

We’ve been hard at work here on Uthgard on a number of initiatives to bring forward some new features. Many of these changes are on our back end for staff to improve our operations, however, there are a number of exciting changes that we wanted to share with you some changes we’ve made in recent weeks.

Factions
We have been hard at work on implementing our faction system. Factions represent how much an NPC or monster likes or dislikes you. We have reset all standings with all factions and they are now in full effect. Examine NPCs and monsters carefully, as you may now see a different behavior towards you based on your previous actions! Now you can befriend creatures of a certain type. Skillfully explore and make your relationships work to your advantage, such as being able to pass through the dragon zones with minimal resistance as you befriend the warring creatures.

The faction system is now live within our world as of today, 5/29/2018!

Crafting Keep Additions

We believe players should be rewarded for choosing to craft in more dangerous areas. We already implemented a +25% craft speed bonus, however, now you will find all crafting masters as well as a Vaultkeeper in these keeps as well, so that you may now skill up from start to maximum skill level in these keeps, should you wish to undertake the dangerous journey. In addition, crafting tools (sewing kit, planning tool, smiths hammer) are now available on their respective merchants in these keeps as well.

The craft speed bonus and crafting masters are located inside of: Dun Crauchon, Caer Benowyc & Bledmeer Faste.

Social Chat Changes
In addition to within the capital cities, we have introduced region-wide /broad and /trade chat inside housing. Players will now have access to chat with realm mates across their entire housing area, making for a much more social and interactive experience. Because of this new wider access, we have implemented the /trade channel in capital cities (Tir na Nog, Camelot & Jordheim), which has a cooldown timer, similar to LFG.

We ask that all trade be conducted via /trade, rather than /broad. This includes asking for crafters, buying, or selling items. We’ll be reminding players over the next several weeks about the proper usage then we will begin moderating the /broad chat with a timeout based system, similar to LFG. Similarly, /trade is not for social chat, joking, LFG or RVR information. We will have a timeout based on those guidelines as well.

Violations will work on the following time scales:
1-2 Violations: 24 hour restriction
3 Violations: 2 day restriction
4 Violations: 7 day restriction
5 or more Violations: 30 day restriction

This will be counted and applied account wide from now on, instead of per-character.

Bug Fixes
We want to remind you that recent bug fixes can be seen on the Uthgard homepage when you are launching the game. You can click each item to get more details including reviewing information about when the fix is live. Some fixes can be effective immediately, while others must wait until after we restart the server. You can view the uptime of the server using the /serverinfo command.

As always, we wish to thank you for playing on Uthgard and we look forward to seeing you out on the battlefield.

Warm regards,
Your Uthgard Staff

Uthgard 2.0: RP for keep takes, exp group bonus and summer XP event!

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https://www.uthgard.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=44594

Summer XP Event

First things first – Looking to stay cool during the hot August nights? Come enjoy another bonus XP weekend!

10. August 2017 at 20:00 CEST – 14. August 2017 9:00 CEST

We will offer a +30% XP bonus during the time of the event that stacks with all other bonuses in all areas! At the same time there will be an increase of +30% money from bag of coins and chests. Your chance to get your rusty and stuck character leveled up. Don’t miss it!

Keep Realm Point Pool and Siege Incentives

This update focuses on highlighting two options for advancing your character by rewarding you for participating in Realm vs Realm.

New Keep Siege Realm Point Pool

We implemented a new feature to reward defenders and attackers of a keep raid for successfully defending or attacking a keep. To encourage players to participate in keep siege and defenses, we introduce a bonus feature inspired from later versions of Dark Age of Camelot. As players are killed near a keep, bonus Realm Points are added up into a pool that is awarded on a successful capture or defense of a keep. After a keep siege has ended, stick around for 60 seconds to be rewarded what was collected up in the pool! A message will tell you when that happens.

RP For Keep Takes

To recap, on Uthgard, we award players for participating in capturing a keep. Players receive a reward that is based on the difficulty in taking that keep. This is above and beyond the bonus realm points for any defenders you may have killed during a keep siege. This has been active for some time on Uthgard and we wanted to inform you exactly how it works.

When you conquer a keep, realm points are distributed to all players in range for defeating the keep Lord itself, regardless of the number of defenders. The total realm points awarded is based on the level of each door and the level of the keep itself. You will see increased rewards based on the level of each door as well as the level of the keep.

We increased the total amount of realm points available for taking a keep. You will see an approximate maximum of 5,200 realm points for a level 10 keep with 2 level 10 doors. We changed it so that now up to 16 players get the full reward. With more players you will see a bit scaling down as the effort for more players to take keeps gets less. We also lessened this scaling beyond 16 players so you should see more RP in general for keep takes.

XP Changes – Group XP Caps

Following our lengthy discussion and also inspiration from our community Uthgard will be introducing some changes to our EXP system. The primary point of this discussion was to support players who wish to build groups and thus for them to see an additional benefit or bonus to grouping up and playing together as a community.

Uthgard will be adding a bonus to the experience cap in groups. Every player in a group enables a +5% cap increase to experience for all members of the group. That means your experience cap will be pushed up by +40% in a full group. Since all other bonuses beside the group bonus are on top of the capped experience they heavily depend on the cap. Since the group bonus (think BAF, social mobs) is used before the cap you should be targetting mobs that bring in significant group bonuses (+20% for each mob you face) so that you can use the cap bonus to its fullest.

Bonus to experience cap will be as follows:

2 players +10% bonus
3 players +15% bonus
4 players +20% bonus
5 players +25% bonus
6 players +30% bonus
7 players +35% bonus
8 players +40% bonus

There’s an important limitation you should know: Only players inside the experience clamp of a group can benefit from the bonus. You notice that clamp if you get the same XP as the highest level player (provided you didn’t cap already). As an example a level 41 player grouped with level 50 will benefit from the cap bonus. A level 40 player grouped with level 50 does not get the bonus. As rule of thumb the player should be not lower than -20% of the highest level player in the group. The clamp is calculated by a complicated formula and its wider in lower levels so it isn’t really a fixed percentage but you get the idea.

When you get experience beyond the cap you will see it in the experience gain message. Here is an example of a FG:

You receive 8,996,782 experience for adventuring in this area!
You receive 98,964,602 experience! (20,761,804 camp bonus) (23,991,418 over cap)

Darkness Falls access

We decided that Darkness Falls will now remain open for 15 minutes after your realm loses control of the majority of keeps.

World Changes

Please be aware of the following recent world changes:

  1. Beliathan once again spawns.
  2. Battleground mobs will now drop randomly generated objects. Each BG has a ‘boss’ type mob that can drop additional randomly generated objects of higher stat value.
  3. Mobs in RvR Dungeons (Dodens Gruva, Marfach Caverns, Hall of the Corrupt, Summoners Hall) now drop more appropriate randomly generated items. Additional non-random items have been added as well!
  4. Players can now access a level 50 dummy mob outside the capital cities. These will help test your abilities.
  5. Battleground “Medal of Honor” quests have been updated for the new level ranges.

User Interface Improvements

Players will be able to see their endurance and group mates endurance in the group and minigroup windows.

We are continuing to work on enhancements and look forward to bringing them to you! Until then see you on the battlefield!

Your Uthgard Staff

Uthgard 2.0: battleground changes

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From: https://www.uthgard.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=44246

Dear players,

Based on player feedback we want to announce changes intended to increase play options and enjoyment of all on Uthgard. Our vision remains to provide an authentic Dark Age of Camelot experience to players new and old and we are making tweaks that will allow us to deliver our vision while providing an engaging play experience to our players. We remain committed to our vision and will continue to make changes on an as-needed basis. This is part one of two patches we have planned for now.

Changes to Battlegrounds

It was evident amongst players that the battlegrounds are seen as an important feature and experience whilst playing Uthgard in the past. Many players have the perception that leveling up was faster on Uthgard 1 than what they experience now. One reason for that often was that players used BG’s to break up time spent leveling, or use the bonus from owning the BG keep. The XP formulas we use are alot more forgiving than on Uthgard 1 and even allow powerleveling by now and still the perception is there.

As you might know player kills give 500% XP compared to PvE kills. That helped to level up and reach the XP cap of a BG. Players who used BG’s had an alternative route to level up instead of doing pure PvE. We want to help you with that again.

Therefore we will be introducing the following changes to Uthgards battleground setting:

20-26 R1L5 Abermenai
27-34 R2L0 Thidranki
35-41 R2L6 Murdaigean
42-47 R3L3 Caledonia

The XP reward for a player kill will be increased to 1000%.

You can reach level 48 without being forced to PvE all the time and can have some action in one of our BG’s. You can play as long in BG’s until you reach the RR cap of R3L3 or exceed level 47.

Note: We are working on re-vamping the PvE mobs for charming and hunting in the BGs. They should be available for the weekend but they will not immediately be available.

Money for RvR kills

In addition to the Battleground setup change we will introduce a gold reward for RvR kills. The amount of gold will depend on your targets level and will be split evenly the same way as XP is split to all who attacked the target. This income applies to all player kills, so Battlegrounds, Frontiers, RvR Dungeons and Darkness Falls are all included!

Guard respawn

Quite some of you made us aware that the guard respawn in keeps was getting out of hand. We adjusted the algorithm responsible for it. The outcome will be monitored and further adjustments will be made if necessary.

Crafting keeps speed bonus

We believe players should be rewarded for choosing to craft in more dangerous areas. We already implemented a bonus which was only announced in the changelog. We are increasing that from 10% to a +25% craft speed bonus. If you try to craft your MP part or just level up your crafting this can be a big time-saver for you.

The bonus is active for crafting inside of: Dun Crauchon, Caer Benowyc & Bledmeer Faste.

House rent warnings

Another change you might have noticed are the new (intentionally annoying) warning messages when rent is due in the next 24h and the lockbox does not have enough money to pay it. Your Consignment Merchant will still pay the rent – that was not changed. We have added this message to help safeguard against situations where players or guilds have lost their houses due to not having enough money to pay rent.

Following situation led to a problem:
1. The consignment merchant has enough money to pay the rent, which is due in the next several hours
2. No warning is given as the CM has enough to pay rent
3. A player withdraws money from the CM
4. Rent is due
5. Not enough money in CM to pay rent => house gets repossessed

In a later patch we will remove that warning and implement a different system. There will be a small grace period after repossession.

Unique Object Changes and other World Improvements

Our GMs are consistently improving our world. In the coming days and weeks you may notice some camps look a little different. One example of this is Dodens Gruva, where large clumps of monsters have been “thinned”. Do not be alarmed — although there are fewer monsters, they should respawn faster thus providing MORE mobs than before and a better hunting experience if you want to go XP there, rather than waiting for respawns.

Additionally, we recently fixed a bug that limited the maximum possible stats for items for monsters over level 50. What this means is that you can now see items with higher maximum stats. This applies to all newly created objects labeled “Unique Object”.

Finally, our GMs are working on itemizing camps in the frontier zones (and BGs!) with more appropriate ROG options — that is to say, human type mobs may drop weapons, specifically. This will give you a better sense of where you can hunt for a specific type of object in some cases. The last change to mention is that along with these changes the drop rate for unique objects should see an improvement of at least 5% for regular mobs and for named mobs, depending on their difficulty, much more.

Wish you the best,
Your Uthgard staff

Uthgard 2.0: RvR changes and /lfg channel

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New changes to Uthgard freeshard!

  1. Brand new LFG channel
  2. Realm Points for Keeps
  3. RvR Kill messages
  4. High level crafting materials in the capital cities
  5. Realm Keep Porters

See all details below or in the forum thread: https://www.uthgard.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=43625

 

Brand new LFG channel

Some of you may have noticed that we have introduced a new LFG channel to the server and we have seen some very positive feedback on the feature with players seemingly able to find groups easier. There were complaints in the past that finding groups is a problem so our hopes are that this is the right tool to help you to get into groups or build up groups more easily.

Players can use (example): /lfg Level 50 BM for RvR / 24 Mentalist Exp – this message will be relayed to the LFG channel.

That message is by default visible to all players in +-10 levels range. However, players may adjust this by using the following commands:

/lfg see50 – Allows players to see LFG messages from level 50 characters.
/lfg seeall – Allows players to see LFG messages from players of all level ranges.

The command has a seven-minute cooldown to lower continuous spam.

An important thing to note: Only messages to build or find groups are allowed in the LFG channel! If /lfg is misused we will remove the ability from your account. Do not use the channel to spread RvR information. Players may use the feature however in the context of ‘Group looking for Healer for RVR’ for example.

If your LFG privilege has already been revoked due to misuse, it will be restored. Players must remember that we will continue to heavily moderate any misuse of the LFG channel.

 

Realm Points for Keeps

You will be able to obtain realm points for taking keeps! In order for players to get realm points the lord of the keep must successfully be killed. The amount of realm points gained comes from a variety of different factors, for example:

Each destroyed door while raiding the keep will add RP’s depending on door level to a pool. That pool will be given out in addition to the lord kill. Players will not only be rewarded for killing the lord but also the effort that was required for the siege. The RP’s will depend on keep difficulty and level in general.

Be on the lookout for this in the near future.

 

RvR Kill messages

We reconsidered how kill messages are spread in RvR zones on Uthgard. You will be able to globally see RvR kill messages with locations. Globally means OF zones and partly zones that are neighbors of OF zones if the kill location was near the non OF zone.

Frontiers bonus EXP

We have introduced further EXP bonuses to the frontier zones and have tied them in to our current EXP bonus system around keeps:

    • Players will automatically receive:
    • 1) Static +10% XP zone bonus in the frontiers
    • 2) +20% XP bonus for exping around a keep owned by your realm (a total of +32%)
    • 3) +40% XP bonus for exping around a keep owned by your guild (a total of +54%).
    • There is a twist to the +40% guild bonus. Players who are in a group where the leader is from the guild who owns the keep will also benefit from the extra +40% bonus.
    • Same rules apply to Battlegrounds.

High level crafting materials in the capital cities

Players will once again have access to high level crafting merchants in the capital cities.

 

Realm Keep Porters

The portal ceremony timer will be reduced depending on how many of your realm mates are out in Frontier zones. This should especially help our NA community to keep RvR activity up in lower populated times.

We hope you like our changes. Some are already available others will be available shortly. We have more to come where details have to be worked out first. We look forward to hearing your feedback.

Your Uthgard Staff.

Uthgard 2.0: Easter EXP event and permanent exp bonus in BGs

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Full detail can be found in the original post: https://www.uthgard.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=42971

 

Battleground EXP bonuses

We have decided to introduce exp bonuses to the battlegrounds to match those that are seen in the RVR zone. Players will now gain 10% exp bonus if their realm holds the central keep and 20% if your guild holds the central keep of the respective battleground. Some of the mob camps have been improved in the battlegrounds to provide players with a further incentive to head to the battlegrounds whilst levelling! We look forward seeing more of you competing in the battlegrounds for these exp bonuses.

Easter EXP event

For the Easter break Uthgard Staff will be offering you an EXP event. There will be a global +20% XP bonus across all zones for the duration of the event.

In Summoners Hall there will be an exception as you will see a special +50% XP bonus there offered for those who are more daring with their levelling locations!

The event is held from 14. April 20:00 CEST until 18. April 06:00 CEST

Wishing you all a happy Easter.

Your Uthgard Staff.

Uthgard 2.0: Dragons, realm balance, update to streamers, and more

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News from the Uthgard developers: https://www.uthgard.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=41113

 

Dear players,

Uthgard has seen its first month of action since the relaunch and this installment of the news will be bringing you an update on our dragons and a few important messages from the staff regarding the server.

Dragons:
We are happy to announce that dragons will begin to spawn at 20:00 CET in all 3 realms! These creatures are ready to guard their loot and will do anything in their power to ensure you will not be able to loot their precious treasures, so be careful when you venture into their lairs! (Please note that the dragons might still receive adjustments to their AI, but we wanted to give you guys a chance to raid them over the weekend already)

Realm Balance:
We are aware that there appears to be a lot of forum activity regarding realm balance at the moment, and we are always closely monitoring the server incase we need to take action to ensure better realm balance. That being said there is some misconceptions that needs to be addressed.

– We want to make it clear that we are not biased towards any realm!
– The population number between hib/mid/alb is not as imbalanced as you might think.
– We are aware that the availability of respecs can have impact on game play and thus with the dragon implementation this should now no longer be an issue.
– While one realm is holding DF more actively, this is not the only place for money / template items. It is important that realms come together to not only take the valuable keeps needed for DF but to also defend them to allow ample time for your realm to have access to Darkness Falls.

We also want to remind players that any realm who holds all relics will result in their relic keeps holding zero delegate guards. The power of keeps and relics are an important asset to your realms and the bonuses can be great, but you need to not only attack but defend!

Now, with all that being said, we are closely monitoring the situation, and if it gets out of hand we will take actions and implement a system to encourage people to move to underpopulated realms (such as a shorter realm transfer timer). However at this time the balance between the realms has been surprisingly good and thus we see no reason to implement a timer just yet.

Streamer update:
We are aware that a lot of you are streaming DAoC and Uthgard, which is amazing to see, however we want to remind our streamers that it is against our rules to share information to other realms. This means that we would like all streamers to add a 10 minute delay to their stream if they plan to RvR. If they plan to participate in a relic raid, we recommend not to stream this event until enemies have spotted you in RvR (still with a 10 minute delay). We will soon update our rules to reflect this, but we wanted to give you a heads up for what is about to change.

Contacting Staff:
We are always very grateful for player assistance especially when it may come to any infringement of Uthgard rules. We do see all /appeal ‘s and whilst we may not be able to get back to all of you we do our upmost best to do so. That being said it is important to note that if players have reported to staff someone infringing our rules that you do not then make the mistake of informing the player you have done so, staff will take the time to investigate and take action if needs be (even if we don’t get back to you).

Thank you for your time,

The Uthgard Staff

Uthgard 2.0: Opening at January 6th 2017!

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We would like to take you back to January 25th 2014 where we stated: ‘We’ve come down a very long road together’. It is fair to say that given the amount of time Uthgard has been down since the January of that year that we can echo those words once again. The road has been long, hard and at times draining. However, we are pleased to announce that on Friday January the 6th at 20:00 UTC+1 Uthgard will officially return and Dark Age of Camelot will once again return to our lives in its glory.

20:00 UTC+1 converts to the following time zones for you all:

      CET: 20:00 (Berlin)
      HKT: 03:00 (Hong Kong)
      EST: 14:00 (New York)
      PST: 11:00 (Los Angeles)

Once the new timer on the webpage has hit 00:00:00 Uthgard will open its doors officially once again for you our loyal player base, our DAOC veterans and soon to be new friends.

The server is now in a good enough shape to relaunch; the last few months of the open BETA proved extremely useful to improving the quality of our server and we would like to thank you all once again for your efforts. Some crucial and alarming discoveries were made, the most significant being an issue with our housing zones, as we strived to fix this we fell further into what proved to be a housing rabbit hole. We took the decision to completely overhaul the housing zone and this has taken a lot of man hours to do effectively. Along with housing there were other significant bugs and issues, but now we are in a good enough place to relaunch for you all and allow you all an equal opportunity to start afresh fairly.

We would like to make a side note to our American and non European comrades. We consider Uthgard to be now more than ever a truly international server. We realise the time may not be considered to be ‘friendly’ towards our American player base, this was not so much out of choice but staff scheduling. We value your presence and look forward to the influx of American and international players once our European friends return to their beds for rest! We have recruited some fine Game Masters who will be on hand to help our American and further afield player base so support will be there for you at all times of day.

https://www.uthgard.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=38319

Uthgard 2.0: Housing issues delay estimated relaunch plan

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As you are aware we have moved over the estimate we gave you some months ago. We want to address this and give you an update on what we are working on. However before doing so we want to acknowledge that we did not meet our estimate and explain why. Unfortunately since we gave the estimate major housing issues were brought to our attention. The rewriting of the housing code has proven to be a bigger task than first anticipated which further extended the work we feel needs to be done before closing down the server and preparing for a release.

Housing, Dragons and epics, Salvage and the economy, Importing item drops and some Minor issues are what are still in the pipe line for the development team to work on, before the server can be brought down and prepared for official relaunch.

Full post: https://www.uthgard.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=38231

 

Uthgard 2.0 beta: now with instant level 30

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A tentative time line and plan for the further tests and instant level actions on Uthgard 2.0 have been revealed by the developers.

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.

Get playing! https://uthgard.org/howto