Ultima Online Five on Friday Q&A

EA’s Jeremy Dalberg has posted another one of his “Five on Friday” Q&A features on the official Ultima Online website.

“Why is this patch removing the ability to sell insured items?”

One of the biggest concerns we have is making sure players don’t lose items to bugs. If you’ve ever experienced this, you’ll understand why – the GMs can’t replace them, and potentially months of work can disappear in a puff of bits. We’ve gotten a fair number of reports of items dropping to players’ corpses even though they were insured, and we believe we’ve narrowed down one of the possible triggers to buying a previously-insured item off of a vendor.

It doesn’t fail every time; there’s no obvious reason in the code why it would fail at all. But we decided that the best strategy to prevent this bug from occurring was to eliminate that trigger as best we could, and that means requiring that items placed on a vendor not be insured. (Existing for-sale items are fine, however buyers may want to consider re-insuring the item themselves. As near as we can tell, trading insured items, whether via the trade window or just leaving stuff in your house for multiple characters to use, is also fine.)

Yes, this makes shopping in Felucca much more dangerous – a Bag of Sending might be a good thing to take with you when you’re bargain-hunting! And we will keep checking the bug reports for other instances of the elusive Insurance Bug.