If this shard was desperate for players would you bend......

A place to discuss shard marketing ideas to find players seeking a T2A experience.
jimm1432
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Joined: Wed Jun 27, 2012 8:08 pm

Re: If this shard was desperate for players would you bend..

Post by jimm1432 »

Boomland Jenkins wrote:Whereas that archive link is great, there aren't dates associated with those bugs/easter eggs/features nor did that list get updated promptly upon patches from OSI. I remember that list as a player back in the day and trying multiple things on it only to find out it was a) inaccurate or b) fixed.
yes that's very true but many all did work during or pre t2a. i only going by memory and that list confirms some existed.

if i had real patch notes and dates i would list them within the NEA forum but i don't i'm just listing a few things as general convo.

Kaivan
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Re: If this shard was desperate for players would you bend..

Post by Kaivan »

It should also be noted that corroborating sources go a long way to giving us a better idea whether a bug did or didn't stay around during the era.

For example, when attempting to corroborate the ability to teleport to objects, even those on water, I was unable to find any other source that claimed that it was possible, and the demo specifically has code in place to ensure that the location that you're teleporting to is a valid location. This suggests that if it were possible to do, it was done prior to the demo, and was then fixed by the time of the demo - and never "broken" again later on in a new patch.

On the other hand, there are secondary sources that confirm that corpsers and reapers could be made to move (both pre-dating and post-dating the demo), despite the fact that on the demo, it doesn't work (removing a single line of code does make it possible though). This suggests that it did work at one time, was fixed, and was later broken again, all of it not documented anywhere in the patch notes themselves. (sources: here, and here)

Finally, as always, the patch notes are valuable tools for seeing if certain bugs were or weren't fixed, and with corroborating evidence elsewhere, we can be reasonably certain that something that was actually documented on the patch notes was actually fixed. In the case of teleporting into castle courtyards, a patch from late 1997 documents that it was no longer possible to teleport near boats or houses. This is corroborated by code in the demo, which gives us a distance check (no closer than 3 tiles IIRC) for nearby multiobjects, and this is further corroborated by a test on live servers done a couple of years back that confirmed that the same code checks were in place.
UOSA Historian and former staff member: August 11, 2008 - June 19, 2016

Useful links for researching T2A Mechanics

Stratics - UO Latest Updates - Newsgroup 1 - Noctalis - UO98.org

jimm1432
Posts: 277
Joined: Wed Jun 27, 2012 8:08 pm

Re: If this shard was desperate for players would you bend..

Post by jimm1432 »

there a issue with following patch note though, some people mite remember me from askchopper as the finder of the ''unlimited gold'' bug when BODs first came out, where as you would fill you pack to 124 item count drop the completed BOD onto the npc and receive the gold but because there wasn't room for the item the bod gave you, so it would return the BOD and leave the gold. I wrote a macro to drop the bod on npc then transfer gold to a packhorse. once I released the bug to the public it was patched, in the patch notes it simple said ''Fixed a bug involving packhorses and bulk order deeds'' when it had nothing to do with the packhorse lol.

Point being osi didn't like to admit there fuck ups

Kaivan
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Re: If this shard was desperate for players would you bend..

Post by Kaivan »

I don't think that I've stated that we can only work with just the patch notes, but I do assert that the patch notes are a very good source of information regarding changes to the game. Additionally, an important point to consider is the idea that we can't take every claim as true, particularly when it conflicts with other sources. Sure, there may be a person that claims that something worked one way (e.g. teleporting onto the water by targeting an item that's on the water), but a single source, and one that conflicts with the official patch notes as well as reliable sources such as the demo, cannot stand as a refutation of those resources by itself. However, if there is a lot of information about a subject which notes that something has changed and it isn't in the demo nor the patch notes, then it does gain at least some significance by merit of coming from multiple sources.

A good example of this is the use of the magic trap spell, or simply trapped items in general, which work very differently on the demo than they do on UOSA, and for which there is no corresponding patch note that documents any change. However, newsgroup posts from during the era and during late pre-T2A show developer comments copied from the CoB boards and elsewhere about changes that actually occurred to the game to those mechanics. There's also multiple use cases for these mechanics from the era and later that document the mechanic working the same way it works here on UOSA (and also use cases from the time of the demo that document the mechanic working as it did before any changes). These paint the best kind of picture we can get for something that isn't documented directly via the patch notes. The important part is that it isn't a single source, but a confluence of multiple sources all separately documenting changes to the game, whereas in the case of teleporting, there's just a single line item on Stratics. That one source is simply not compelling enough on it's own.
UOSA Historian and former staff member: August 11, 2008 - June 19, 2016

Useful links for researching T2A Mechanics

Stratics - UO Latest Updates - Newsgroup 1 - Noctalis - UO98.org

jimm1432
Posts: 277
Joined: Wed Jun 27, 2012 8:08 pm

Re: If this shard was desperate for players would you bend..

Post by jimm1432 »

but we all know stratics never got things wrong :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:

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