I often reflect on memories of my time in Ultima Online. Experiences that are now long forgotten and completely undocumented. I thought it might be nice to have a thread where we share our memories of Ultima Online. You don't have to have been an alpha tester to post here. Tell me about things that happened during the past few years! I and many others here have missed these years.
So to get things started, here is the memories that sparked the thread.
Skill Gain
I remember when I first started playing about two months after public release, skill gain was handled very differently that it is today. Skills gained at a constant rate regardless of current level or difficulty of the skill check. What did matter was the total amount of skill points for that skill on the server. For, for example, herding was a relatively fast gaining skill because there were very few skill points per character average. Magery, on the other hand, was used by almost every character as it was the only way to travel large distances, cure poison (which was a death sentence back then, it didn't wear off), and the most effective way to heal. So magery gained very slowly. So slowly in fact that it took several weeks before the first characters had the 80.0 skill required to begin attempting to cast eighth-circle spells.
The Seven Circles of Magery
Another thing you might find strange is that there were no eighth-circle spells at release. You see, when an OSI production shard comes up, level 1-4 spells are available on vendors, but circles 5-8 are nowhere. The scrolls for these spells must be found as loot on monsters and added to spellbooks before they can be copied by scribes and made available as full spellbooks.
But at release, no monsters dropped eighth-circle spells. It is unclear if the development team had not implemented these spells yet, but whatever the case a publish released the eighth-circle of magic. As most of us know, these circle consists primarily of spells that summon high-level (for the time) enemies to fight by your side.
As mana regeneration was incredibly slow in that day, a common method for training magery skill was to cast these eighth-circle spells with little to no chance of success. It cost reagents but no mana to fizzle. The West Brit Bank (the popular hangout of that age) was full of folks casting summon spells. It was common to see water elementals walking around everywhere and daemons poking through the ceiling of the bank.
Sploit'n for Fun and for Profit
It wasn't long before a few folks figured out that if you kill your summoned elemental (even with the spell Dispel) the summon left a corpse, loot and all! At 90 magery summoning water elementals, you could turn about 100 gold worth of reagents into 150 gold of loot, plus reagents and minor magic items to boot. For about a week this was the only thing you saw anyone doing at WBB. After this week a new patch was put out to make summoned pets not leave a corpse upon death.
Finally, if anyone has a Wayback Machine link to Xena Dragon's old screenshot archive I would die for that. I am coming up empty.
So to get things started, here is the memories that sparked the thread.
Skill Gain
I remember when I first started playing about two months after public release, skill gain was handled very differently that it is today. Skills gained at a constant rate regardless of current level or difficulty of the skill check. What did matter was the total amount of skill points for that skill on the server. For, for example, herding was a relatively fast gaining skill because there were very few skill points per character average. Magery, on the other hand, was used by almost every character as it was the only way to travel large distances, cure poison (which was a death sentence back then, it didn't wear off), and the most effective way to heal. So magery gained very slowly. So slowly in fact that it took several weeks before the first characters had the 80.0 skill required to begin attempting to cast eighth-circle spells.
The Seven Circles of Magery
Another thing you might find strange is that there were no eighth-circle spells at release. You see, when an OSI production shard comes up, level 1-4 spells are available on vendors, but circles 5-8 are nowhere. The scrolls for these spells must be found as loot on monsters and added to spellbooks before they can be copied by scribes and made available as full spellbooks.
But at release, no monsters dropped eighth-circle spells. It is unclear if the development team had not implemented these spells yet, but whatever the case a publish released the eighth-circle of magic. As most of us know, these circle consists primarily of spells that summon high-level (for the time) enemies to fight by your side.
As mana regeneration was incredibly slow in that day, a common method for training magery skill was to cast these eighth-circle spells with little to no chance of success. It cost reagents but no mana to fizzle. The West Brit Bank (the popular hangout of that age) was full of folks casting summon spells. It was common to see water elementals walking around everywhere and daemons poking through the ceiling of the bank.
Sploit'n for Fun and for Profit
It wasn't long before a few folks figured out that if you kill your summoned elemental (even with the spell Dispel) the summon left a corpse, loot and all! At 90 magery summoning water elementals, you could turn about 100 gold worth of reagents into 150 gold of loot, plus reagents and minor magic items to boot. For about a week this was the only thing you saw anyone doing at WBB. After this week a new patch was put out to make summoned pets not leave a corpse upon death.
Finally, if anyone has a Wayback Machine link to Xena Dragon's old screenshot archive I would die for that. I am coming up empty.
