Mar 26

Recent Site Downtime

Our apologies for the recent, sudden site downtime.

Our web host was experiencing technical difficulties with their shared hosting that had quite the drastic impact on our infrastructure. These issues should be resolved by now.

Once again, sorry for any inconvenience.

Jan 03

Mysterious tunnel..

The mysterious tunnel just outside Galven’s Western gate, reported by the Galven Guard, is none other than the new town of “Sanctum”.

This town is a PvP-free zone that was founded under the pretense of offering players a wide variety of activities that don’t consist of slaughtering one another. Below is a few of the possibilities you’ll encounter in this new town of Sanctum.

 

Cock Fighting
Players are able to place wagers on fighting roosters for a bit of fun and laughs. There are three pens with varying stakes, so choose wisely!

Hall of Donors
A collection of statues in honor of the generous players who invest in Sanctum’s future. Thank you to everyone who has already donated, and to those donating in the future!

Casino Royale
Likely to be the biggest favorite, players can participate in poker, blackjack, and slots. We will be introducing “card memberships” in the future that will allow players to earn even better rewards from higher stakes games. These memberships will be won by way of events and/or purchasing a membership in-game. For your convenience, there is a bank located directly beside the Casino.

Staff Offices
We don’t often get to spend time chatting with our players, so we’re opening up our own officers in this new town. Players will be able to stop by and leave notes, chat with us, or just relax in the comfort of our lavish suites.

Mix of NPCs
Your normal NPCs such as bankers, healers, innkeepers and so forth are available as well. Some of them have special features or perks to their services.

Coming Soon!
In the next week or so, you’ll find donation displays as well as a player vendor mall that will allow players to rent vendor space. Keep in mind, those slots will not be cheap.

Jan 01

Happy New Year & Patch Notes

First and foremost, Happy New Year!

We hope you all had a blast with any festivities and are looking forward to ushering in yet another new year.

I want to personally thank all of you for being ever so patient with our server migration Monday evening, and the extended downtime we had throughout much of Tuesday. Believe me, it was well worth it!

Onto our patch notes!

 

patchnotes1

  • Skillballs will no longer allow you to proceed to empty pages (additional ‘previous’ buttons have been added as well).
  • Removed several redundant chat commands from our in-game system.
  • Improved the nature of some of our mage-based AI creatures.
  • Added a variety of new creatures that you will see spawned in coming days.
  • Added Mana Potions
    • Three types of Mana potions: Lesser, Basic, Greater
    • All three types require GM Alchemy to craft (you’ll find them under the Mana category in the Alchemy menu)
    • Lesser mana potions will restore 10-20 (random) mana when consumed. You must wait 60 seconds before consuming another.
    • Mana Potions will restore 25-35 (random) mana when consumed. You must wait 120 seconds before consuming another.
    • Greater Mana Potions will restore 50-75 mana when consumed. You must wait 4 minutes before consuming another.
    • We want to ensure that these do not have an enormous impact on PvP. We may increase timers / recipe difficulty as necessary.
  • Added Taming BOD system
    • The system is quite primitive and based loosely around our Resource Order Deeds.
    • Players may receive a Taming BOD once every two (2) hours. The BOD will be a random creature type and a random number of that type (you will not receive a BOD requiring more than one creature type).
    • You may collect a Taming BOD by visiting any one of the Shepherds located throughout Atria (specifically, near Animal Trainers). Simply click ‘Talk’ within the Shepherd’s context menu.
    • The TBOD will display the number of creatures required. For instance, 0 / 8 Dogs. As you add tamed creatures to the deed, you will notice the first number increase. Amount Tamed / Amount Needed.
    • Once the TBOD has been filled, you may return it to any Shepherd for your reward.
    • Each creature type is graded (internally) on a taming and combat-related difficulty scale, which factors into how the gold reward is calculated. The general rule of thumb is, the harder the creature, the more valuable the reward.
    • We are evaluating options for introducing new rewards for our Taming BOD system, but for the time being, this is just a practice run.
  • Added PvM System
    • As we’ve discussed in previous posts, we’ve been itching to implement an entertaining system for PvM-minded players. This system will allow players to accrue “points” for killing any number of creatures throughout Atria, and these points help determine your overall ranking on the PvM Leaderboard.
    • Currently, at Galven bank, you will find the PvM Information stone which displays the current prizes and next leaderboard reset, as well as the PvM Leaderboard itself and three statues that will display the winners from each period.
    • The PvM Leaderboard display the player name, player’s guild name (if applicable), number of PvM kills, number of deaths, and the player’s current rank.
    • Points are calculated by creature difficulty. Mongbats, for instance, will not give nearly as many points as a drake. All players start with a free 100 points this period only.
    • The PvM Leaderboard resets every 2 weeks, at which point the top three PvM players automatically be announced globally and subsequently cloned by the statues located in Galven, and each will be awarded 50k gold, 25k gold, and 10k gold for the winning, second best, and third best tiers respectively.
    • We’re working on introducing credits to the PvM system that will have a similar purpose to points, however credits will be able to be spent through an external gump for valuable PvM rewards.
  • Added new hirelings
    • Players may now “hire” fighter, ranger, or ranger archer mercenaries located throughout some of Atria’s cities.
    • The charge per day (in gold) for these hirelings will vary based on their overall skills (which are always random).
    • Currently, hirelings are really just battle companions and will not have any tremendous impact on game-play or PvP. Expect the stats, skills, and overall value of these hirelings to be adjusted and scaled accordingly in the coming weeks.
  • We’ve also added a variety of other pieces of content, such as mines and “flashbangs” that we will be introducing to our PvP players in the very near future.
  • +Alya is currently working on another central “hub” for Sanctum, located outside of Atria itself. Here, players will be able to rent PvP-free vendor locations for a substantial fee, as well as visit our upcoming casino and interact with Staff directly at their “offices”. We will be posting additional info about this extra content as we release it.

Dec 23

Merry Christmas & a few updates

Staff Schedule
Regarding Staff’s holiday schedule: we will be unavailable for the next three days, but you can expect us all to return full-time by Friday the 27th. I will still be available via email, so in the event of any crashes, network disruptions, or the like.. you can contact me directly and I will get everything back online promptly. For any regular pages or non-game breaking requests, please try to give us some time to get to them if you contact us on the forums or via PM.

Christmas Stockings
Starting at midnight tonight (EST), players will be able to obtain one of two stockings upon logging in. The gift opportunity ends on the 27th. There are two stockings available in Green and Red. We will post what the contents of those stockings are post-Christmas to avoid spoiling the surprise for anyone.

Christmas Events
As for Christmas events, we will not be available to run any this year.. mainly due to scheduling. Next year, we hope to have an enormous Christmas bash! Holidays going forward will be fun here on Sanctum.

Misc. News
We’re aware of the few bugs that have been posted and we appreciate your patience. We are working diligently to get them resolved and should have a new patch out by this weekend. We also hope to introduce some of the new content we mentioned in our State of Sanctum post.

As always, spread the word about us and don’t forget to vote! Please travel safe, mind the weather, and have a wonderful holiday!

Dec 21

Player Population

No one wants to play on an empty shard. That’s not anyone’s idea of fun. Fortunately for Sanctum, that feeling of player isolation is mainly attributed to players spreading out over a humongous map. Other factors include such things like macro’ing policies that send players into the isolated corners of the world.

First and foremost, we want to avoid artificial server “bloat” attributed by allowing excessive clients logged in at once. Too many servers allow upwards of four clients per player! We want to offer more of a ‘what you see is what you get’ approach. There is a certain stigma that a high population count online instantly means a healthy server. That is simply not true. When you allow each user to macro four or more clients at the same time, all it leads to is artificial server bloat. We originally wanted only allow one account per IP, thus one client online, but due to community feedback we moved to a three characters per account, two account policy. Now this will certainly alter our “face value” server population, but in turn you will see less empty drones macro’ing at banks and get a true idea of what you’re going to bump into that day.

Let’s rehash some previously discussed bullet points. Our map is specifically designed for a small to moderately sized population. More specifically, the type of population that exists for Ultima Online shards in 2013. Beyond that the map can also easily support a higher, wealthier and older population as the shard ages due to our already implemented expandable land masses for housing. Each town in Atria is only a few minutes run from each other. The benefit here is that no matter where you are running or what you might be doing in the wilderness, you will be encountering others. It may be a weird thing to aspire for, but we’ve always been nostalgic for the moment of some apprentice fencer killing cougars in the wilderness, and getting to say “Hail” to another player gathering wood for his carpentry. It is the little things like this that actually brings the humanity back into the game. An auxiliary bonus of this is also removing the travel time completely nullifies any necessity for horses.

Furthermore, our dungeon system is very unique and we think we’ve “cracked the code” so-to-speak. We have a number of beautifully crafted dungeons that will be rotated weekly/monthly. As any server population is never a stable beast, one week we might have 3 dungeons open, another 5. This mechanic makes dungeons a little bit more dangerous, but definitely a more “social” occasion. We want people bumping into each other, fighting over spawns, and fighting each other. Long gone are the days of your own personal spawn for 6 hours straight. You’ll have company – be it amicable or hostile.

While it is not a unique idea, there are immediate perks to being a citizen of any city. Our towns were designed from the ground up to be nostalgic to that of the original towns. It’s fairly difficult to explain, but everything is very familiar once you’ve toured a new city. We are tremendously proud of how the map turned out and if you haven’t checked out the map yet, I guarantee you will be pleasantly surprised.

By bringing it all together, we have something very special here; another chance for Ultima Online to feel alive again. Artificially bloated server population isn’t our goal; an emotionally invested community is. Our goal will never be chasing the carrot on the end of the stick to pad our numbers – it will always be addressing the current players’ needs and concerns, no matter the number of players.