Ultima Online Five on Friday Q&A

This week’s “Five on Friday” Q&A feature on the official Ultima Online website covers questions about higher circle Mysticism spells, gargoyle meditation issues, and more.

The guild system does not appear to be working properly. The guild page on the official site seems way out-of-date. Veteran guilds trying to change leaders report problems with the vote count system. What’s the real story?

We recently discovered a curious little error in the Guild system. Way back when Guild Stones were converted to the modern system, a voting filter was included that only tallies votes from active guild members. That filter was disabled during the conversion, because the member activity data was new, and the lack of activity data on newly converted guilds would wreak havoc. The filter was supposed to be enabled in the subsequent publish, but somehow that got lost in the shuffle.

As a result, in order to elect a guild member, 2/3rd of the entire guild roster who have enough rank to vote must vote for a new Guildmaster. So, for any guild where 1/3 of the membership is inactive, it becomes impossible to successfully vote. If the guild has no active members who can kick inactive members, then obviously there is a whole boatload of fail happening.

We are currently checking to make sure that enabling that filter will have the intended effect of only requiring 2/3 of active guild members to elect a new Guildmaster, and won’t have any unintended side-effects. Assuming no additional issues arise, we will be able to enable that filter in a near future publish. At that time, voting in a new Guildmaster will require only a plurality of votes from active guildmembers who have sufficient rank to vote.
-Phoenix