Publish 30 has arrived on most shards today, and its main focus is the "Treasures of Tokuno" event, where even sea monsters killed in the Tokuno Islands facet can give players one of twenty new minor artifacts.
I confirmed this myself on Atlantic today with a few hours of hunting the wild krakens that spawn there. I was getting concerned after awhile, but Wilki, after reportedly checking with Leurocian, confirmed that every creature in Tokuno except for cranes has a chance at one of the new items. After killing over 30 or so, I was awarded the "Gloves of the Sun" minor artifact, which appeared right in my backpack upon the death of the kraken. The odds of getting one of these new items is based on the fame level of the monster, making krakens quite useful for this.
What is unknown at this point is whether or not fished-up sea monsters have a chance at them. I suspect that they can, since there seems to be a check on the odds at the time of the monster's death. Fishers who pull up sea serpents or toss nets in the Tokuno Islands may soon confirm this. Either way, it's a good thing to see that sea monsters, and those who hunt them, are being included in this event. Publish 30 is the first phase of the "Treasures of Tokuno" event, where players can obtain these minor artifacts. In the upcoming Publish 31, they will be able to trade in any 10 of the minor artifacts for something even better, according to reports. After Publish 31 (presumably when Publish 32 arrives), the event will be over, so enjoy the hunting while it lasts.
Also included in Publish 30 is a change to the big fish trophy, where it will not disappear even if the owner forgets to lock it down. Apparently several players who created them after Publish 28 found out the hard way that, unlike the other deedable decorations, the big fish trophy needed to be locked down. While Publish 30 lacks the amount of attention to seafaring seen in some of the previous publishes, it nonetheless gives mariners something new to do by hunting for the "Treasures of Tokuno" out at sea. While other players fight over the land and dungeon monster spawns, those in-the-know seafarers will go about their business of killing krakens and enjoying their bounty.
Basically, the city of Zento was raided by members of one of the clans that inhabit Tokuno. Against the advice of the ship's captain, the person in charge of the raid ordered the ship to set sail through a nasty storm, in order to escape Zento with the treasures intact. That ship was bound for Homare-jima, but the story says they were never heard from again. Now, the leader of the clan searches along the coast, looking in vain for his returning ship.
Sure enough, as of Publish 30, there is a new shipwreck site at Defiance Point, which lies on the southern tip of Homare-jima and due west from Zento. At that site is plenty of evidence of a sunken ship, and treasures are washed ashore. The tops of two masts and a dragon prow stick up out of the water. Oddly enough, attempting to pull these items up by dragging them reveals their full size. The masts are full masts with the sails rolled up, and the dragon prow reveals the front of the ship with the hold wide open - a graphic that never made it into the game for some reason.
Along the shore is a pile of gold and silver that cannot be picked up, as well as a treasure chest that is tagged "A Chest Emptied Of Its Treasure By Mustela Putorius Furo". One ingenious player who thought to google that name found out that it's the scientific (Latin) term for "ferret", meaning that our old friend Fertbert has snuck yet another ferret reference into UO. The chest can be opened, but is empty, and items cannot be put into the chest.
Most likely, this area is just a decoration to support the "Treasures of Tokuno" event fiction, and there is nothing interactive that can be done at the site. I've searched the surrounding area for more evidence of shipwrecks, and found nothing, other than the ones that have always been at Storm Point. They have at long history of using ships and sailing in the fiction of UO without making any gameplay elements to support it, such as the whirlpool that took the first explorers to Gravewater Lake in Malas. At least we get a new, in-character point of interest out of this one.
It was five years ago today that I scrabbled together a rough-looking website called the Turbulent Waters. My intention was at the time was to get the word out to Ultima Online players about boats, because there was so little information out there, and what was there was mostly inaccurate. I figured that all I had to do was get the basic information up - ship operation, navigation, security, and so on - and that would be it. There has always been so little news about ships in UO because there has always been so little development in regards to them, I mused. I was wrong.
A few weeks after I opened the site, OSI opened the Trammel facet, including a haphazard invisible barrier around Haven island that ate boats by the dozens. Not only did I have to chart it and try to get a warning out to players about it, I tried to get the developers to fix it by making public posts and frequent reminders. And the die was cast. That issue alone set the standard of how I would use this site to inform players of new dangers in boat use and publically pressure the developers for a fix, a standard that has been followed ever since.
Summer of 2000 brought forth a wave of boat-related exploits involving alterations to the Z-axis. Players were using these exploits to create either "flying dutchman" boats or "submarines", both of which allowed them to break in to other boats or do other dastardly things. But the summer wasn't all that bad - in August the special fishing net was snuck into the game, complete with a new sea monster, much to the players' delight.
Clearly, I was going to have more to report on in regards to ships and sailing in Ultima Online than an occasional bug fix. And so it has been for five years, with many ups and downs. One of the bright points came from Designer Hanse, who has recently left the UO team for unknown places. Hanse spent much of his personal time communicating with fishers, checking the numbers, discussing the design of the skill as both a resource-gathering and a treasure-acquiring skill, and developing things like the big fish. His hard work and genuine dedication made seafaring in UO much more fun, and he will be missed.
The torch has been passed, though, to a recent addition to the UO team in the form of Leurocian, who last year brought forth the ancient SOS, the fabled fishing net, the leviathan, and several nautical-themed minor artifacts, one of which is "the Admiral's Hearty Rum". Even though he has already moved off the live team to work on "something else", his drive to get the seas developed, and his courage in making the new content for seafarers hard to get (in spite of the usual clamor from the general populace to make things easier) have made Leurocian a legend among the maritime community of Ultima Online in just a short time.
There have been quiet a few down points too: four expansions without new content for seafarers (Renaissance, Third Dawn, Lord Blackthorn's Revenge, and Age of Shadows), the cancelled seahorse from the Third Dawn expansion, the cancelled "High Seas Adventure" expansion from late 2003, the three sea monsters yanked from last year's Samurai Empire expansion, the failed promises Vex made in May of 2001 to get some attention to boats, and so on.
Communication between this site and the folks at EA has had its ups and downs as well. It has gone back and forth and back again since I began this site, with extremes ranging from downright public demonstrations of contempt for my efforts (Mr Tact and the breaking of the Serpent Pillars) to personal face-to-face contact with the positive exchange of ideas (meeting the devs and community people in person at various events). There are times when they are just gushing with openness and seem positively exhuberant about the future of UO, and there are times like right now when they retreat into an "ivory tower" mentality and I can't even get a response to a simple question like the issue of players recalling to boats in the Feluccan Lost Lands. It's usually not their fault on a personal level - they seem to be kept in a state of "keeping things close to the vest", which is no doubt the result of people like me reminding them of past promises that they failed to fulfill.
Right now we are once again in a holding pattern while we wait to hear the next revelation about the future of UO. We've been here before, and it's not a pleasant place to be, especially when one hears that a dedicated designer like Hanse has left the team without publically giving a reason. As far as I know there is still a huge amount of people working on some "secret project", and there may even be some working on "another standard expansion". It's all speculation at this point, but what is known is that the live team - the ones who work on UO now as it actually exists - is still at the painfully small size that it was before the release of the Samurai Empire expansion. This means that it is unlikely that seafarers will see any significant content additions nor any meaningful fixes for boats in the near future.
But as history has shown us, the pendulum will swing back at some point. Just when you think you've got something covered in UO, the game has a way of letting all hell break loose, and suddenly I'll find myself scrambling to keep up with developments in the game and designer communication about them. With an ever-growing community of dedicated and vocal players continually calling for the realization of the potential of ships and sailing in Ultima Online, the slow news days that I envisioned when I created the Turbulent Waters have increasingly become a thing of the past. And that is a good thing for all of us.
Publish 32, which is slated to go into testing on Thursday, April 14th, should contain the next set of changes to the mini-map, according to UO Live Team Lead Fertbert, who has been kind enough to answer some questions I sent him. In addition to detailed answers about his work on the mini-map and some new screenshots, Fertbert also discussed the issue of boat recall into the Felucca Lost Lands as well as the unfinished Samurai Empire sea monsters.
Fertbert first mentioned the mini-map changes last fall, saying that it was a side-project that he had been doing in his own time. Stop and think about that level of dedication for a moment. The live team is in good hands. Okay, let's move on. At the time, Fertbert showcased a few screenshots but of course cautioned players that there was no schedule for the implementation of it.
Now, what he is calling the next set of changes is ready, and from the screenshots he sent me, the lands are looking good. While the water is still the basic blue hue, features on the land - mountains, trees, building roofing - all look quite amazing. Fertbert describes the changes as:
- shading based upon the slope of terrain tiles
- shading based upon height of objects (to make things like the hedge maze stand out better)
- better Z sorting (to make roofs of buildings look better)
- tree canopies (not displayed in Felucca unless the tree canopies option is on)
- better hue processing (there were some problems with this before)
In addition, Fertbert stated that animated water, lava, and tree canopies, as well as the display of nearby creatures are features that are "awaiting additional optimization and refinement for a future publish". And even beyond that, Fertbert hopes to add (but of course makes no promises on) wakes for boats, markers for corpse locations, and something I've wanted to see for years - increasing the update range on boats (as well as houses and creatures) so that they appear on the mini-map sooner.
He was also kind enough to issue a firm statement about the use of boat key recall to circumvent the recall restriction into the Felucca Lost Lands. "Not intended." As far as a fix for it, while he doesn't have it scheduled he says that there are a handfull of recall spell issues that need looked at, so the likelihood of a fix is higher (presumably by association).
Last year, when Binky broke the news to me that the three new Tokuno Islands sea monsters were being nixed, both he and Leurocian were quick to tell me that they, along with Fertbert, really wanted to do what they could to get them in shortly after the release of the Samurai Empire expansion. When I talked to Fertbert at the UO Community Day last September, though, he said that getting it done was dependent on getting a full-time artist on the live team, perhaps after the release of Samurai Empire.
Unfortunately, that has not come to pass. However, according to Fertbert, the live team will be getting what he calls a "small budget for art from our marketing group" (is he Fertbert or Dilbert?), which will allow for some new art this year. He cautions that even though that is the case, the missing Tokuno sea monsters are currently not on the live team's schedule.
As stated previously, Publish 32 is scheduled to go into testing on Thursday, April 14. Among the few things listed are "many major and minor bug fixes", with a more detailed list promised when the test shard is opened. Hopefully a few of the more minor boat bugs will be among those that are fixed.
Phoenix Mountains, Tokuno Islands
The Hedgemaze, Trammel
Bridge Over the Pormir Priin, Ilshenar
The mini-map changes which Fertbert says should be in Publish 32 are not among the things listed in the announcement. It's possible, of course, that they fall under the "many major and minor bug fixes" category, and the details Fertbert was kind enough to share with me will be listed there as well. Look for a report and perhaps more screenshots of the improved mini-map on this site if the testing schedule holds up.
In the meantime, my greatest thanks and appreciation to Fertbert for taking time out of his busy schedule to not only answer my questions about these issues, but for sending me these screenshots highlighting various features of the improvements. While considered by many a minor issue in the greater scheme of Ultima Online, those of us who spend a lot of time looking at the mini-map will certainly appreciate his efforts.
The long silence has been broken, as the next expansion for Ultima Online - called Mondain's Legacy - has been revealed to players attending a Town Hall meetup in Washington, DC. And as expected, ships and sailing are again being passed up for an expansion that features - get this - that snotty yet classic RPG cliche' known as elves, and more of the same old crap seen in every other expansion to Ultima Online, namely new monsters and new dungeons.
As longtime readers of this site and the few remaining members of UO's seafaring community who haven't left in disgust might expect, the old Admiral's got a few things to say about the failure of whoever has made that decision (for the sake of this article, that nameless EA executive and/or executives shall be referred to as Bob Evil) to have any real vision about the potential of Ultima Online. Now stay with me faithful readers, this is a long one and it may get a little wiggy.
The Shadow of the Dark Side
Bob Evil probably wasn't there last fall when EA flew me out to their Community Day. While the main focus of the event was the about-to-be-released Samurai Empire expansion, everyone who talked to me was interested in seafaring. It was the height of the "Age of Leurocian", where the live team was adding things to fishing and fixing some boat issues in every publish. I engaged in discussions with the man himself, Leurocian, as well as Fertbert, about a variety of boat issues. Most importantly, though, I caught up with SunSword, who at a similar event just a year earlier had told me the next UO expansion would indeed be a seafaring one.
Again SunSword said that he loved the idea of a seafaring expansion, and that the idea may be revisited again down the road. Also at that event there was buzz about the "secret project", which we all suspected was the much-needed modernized 3D graphical client for UO. There was a huge team of people there working on UO, and an atmosphere of optimism about it's future. Another great achievement at that event was accomplished by Binky, who by bringing what he called the "community leaders" together (the folks responsible for the main UO fansites and interests) had begun forging stronger bonds between them. Binky promised an era of greater communication and that those bonds would be preserved by creating a special "community leader" message board. He subsequently failed miserably to do that and I never heard from them again, but I digress.
Samurai Empire came and went, followed by the holiday season, so it was certainly expected that any news of UO's future would wait until the new year. Sometime after the first of the year, things went wrong. Since they never talk about these things, and indeed the players and community of UO will never know the truth, I've calculated the most likely scenario based on past experiences with Electronic Arts and Ultima Online.
Bob Evil stepped into the offices of UO on a chilly (chilly for the Bay Area) January morning, with a piece of paper in his hand. On that piece of paper there were some numbers - UO's subscription numbers, probably, and the grotesquely successful sales figures for World of Warcraft. Bob Evil probably started his yelling with SunSword, UO's producer, who defended UO's uniqueness, it's dogged survival against the releases of other MMORPGs in the past, and it's potential for future growth. Bob Evil shrugged that all off - after all none of those things were quantifiable and his shadowy superiors needed him to make decisions about the budget of UO based on real numbers.
When he asked to see the progress of the"secret project" he found that it was still at least a year away. By then, reasoned Bob Evil, World of Warcraft and other upcoming MMORPGs will have whittled UO's loyal playerbase down to negligble numbers, certainly not worth sustaining development on such a project, even though it was UO's ONLY hope for ever bringing in substantial numbers of new players. SunSword shrugged, took a promotion to head of all EA online projects, and fired a bunch of people who had just been hired in the last year to develop graphics for the secret project.
Of course, before Bob Evil went back to his office to schedule his next golfing vacation, he swore them all to secrecy. The remaining and completely demoralized UO staff was directed to do whatever they can within their budget to maintain the current subscription numbers, and not to take any chances with new directions or new ideas. So when the meeting came where the decision was made in regards to the subject of the next expansion, a developer or two might have brought up the idea of a seafaring or a pirate expansion, but had those ideas shot down in favor of adding fucking elves and more dungeons that are totally unnecessary (been to Ilshenar lately?).
Yes, the same people who shook my hand and looked me in the eye and said just how much they would love to do a seafaring expansion either backed down, walked away, or caved in to visionless corporate pressure and terrible decisions and kept their job. Some of them quit, no doubt betrayed by EA in some fashion - Hanse, Oaks, and Vex most notably. You can't blame the designers, though, and having met them I bet there was some anguish after Bob Evil's visit. No, the only evil is the unnamed one that I'm calling Bob Evil for the sake of this article.
"You were the Chosen One!"
Now, some of you landlubbers may be looking at your screens and saying "Gee, why is the Admiral so pissed off about this? The expansion sounds cool and I can't wait to play a LEET NEON ELF!" You see, there's something fundamentally wrong with the MMORPG scene, a dread cancerous affliction that has haunted them all since the one called Everquest fell like a shadow on the land. UO is a massive multiplayer virtual world of depth, Everquest (and apparently every MMORPG that has followed it) is a massive multiplayer fake cardboard construct of a world wrapped around a levelling treadmill game.
Let me elaborate on that. In Ultima Online you can create a character and customize it in such a manner, through both game mechanics and personal imagination, that the adventures you and your friends can have are truly limitless. In the Everquest family of financially successful yet horrifically shallow clones, you can go where the game sends you based on your level, play with other players based on your level, and create a character archetype that is identical to hundreds of other players.
I know a person who plays these types of games - a co-worker in real life - who migrates from one of these types of games to another. He reached level 200 in Anarchy Online, then it was off to Star Wars Galaxies where he did similar things, then he played Planetside for awhile, then back to Star Wars Galaxies then Anarchy Online again before finally settling on World of Warcraft the day it was released last fall. He talked incessantly about his approach to that golden level of 60, and of how he used his skills to engage in disparate level PvP against other players. Lately, though, he's grown bored with WoW and is back to Planetside.
When I tell this person about UO and why I still play it after all these years and in spite of its graphical inferiority to everything else on the market, he doesn't comprehend. This is what the MMORPG scene has become - legions of short attention span MMORPG gypsies migrating from one product to another, NOT roleplaying, NOT building communities that last, and NOT comprehending what a true virtual world is, or can be. In spite of UO's flaws from the day I purchased the game, I saw something great in it that has ever since fired my imagination, something that has yet to be recreated in any other online product, and that is POTENTIAL.
We have these characters in Sosaria, which to many of us who've been playing a long time have developed their own little histories. These characters have property and posessions and skills that come and go over the years. We have done and will continue to do many things with these characters. This is where the potential comes in. Ultima Online could potentially give us new types of adventures to have - and seafaring adventures are merely one such possibility - but instead continues to rehash and regurgitate the land and dungeon based monster fighting theme which has been included in every single expansion ever released. It's like putting the world's greatest chef in a fully equipped kitchen and having him prepare meatloaf every night.
Who Wants a Seafaring MMORPG Anyway?
Remember when SunSword was telling me that there was indeed a seafaring expansion in the works (after which he FAILIED to tell me that it was nixed, and then refused to answer my emails about it, and then finally talked about it a year later when he sat next to me at lunch)? According to him, what caused them to change their minds was a single focus group - seafaring fared poorly as an expansion theme to a group of people they gathered who instead had wanted vampires in UO. I'm sure that if I ever bother to confront them about seafaring getting passed up AGAIN in favor of ELVES, they would say the same thing. After all, there certainly can't be any market appeal for massive multiplayer piracy, can there?
It seems several thousand people (ones with a hint of vision and market saavy) disagree.
World of Pirates ( www.worldofpirates.com ) was finally released earlier this year, and is a game I covered way back in the past during it's development. It has simple graphics yet challenging gameplay, and a small but robust community of players. I truly regret not following it's development and not having a more in-depth report on it's gameplay. However, it's limited scope and support means that it will be overshadowed by other games coming up.
Pirates of the Burning Sea ( http://www.burningsea.com/index.php ) is on the other end of the spectrum. It has gorgeous 3D graphics, player avatars that can get off the ship and walk around ports, and many other features including PvP that may lure me away from UO when it is released. It's the closest thing to what I wanted out of UO that is in development. Can you imagine The Turbulent Waters as a Pirates of the Burning Sea fansite rather than a UO fansite? Stay tuned.
Uncharted Waters Online by famed Japanese publisher Koei ( http://www.koei.com/index.cfm ) was reportedly shown at the recent E3 show. It's already available in Japan with other Asian countries to follow, as well as a possible North American release. Yes, it's a seafaring MMORPG, but no, I don't know a damned thing about it other than it's appearance at E3. Koei is a successful company though, so if they decide to bring their game to the U.S. I am sure we all shall take notice.
Pirates of the Carribean Online was recently announced by Disney Online, who in their recent press statement announcing the game said that it is scheduled to be released next summer to coincide with the sequel to the movie of the same name. They certainly have the marketing power to do it, but unless the game has been in development already for two years, there is simply no amount of human capability on Earth to bring such an endeavor to market in a year. Still, it will be interesting to see them try.
Conclusion
"Well there you go, Admiral ! A veritable sea of pirate MMORPGs for you to choose from! What the hell are you complaining about UO for?", you might be asking. Again, good question.
None of them are or will be UO. They might be great games, but none of them will approach the depth and uniqueness nor the virtual world aspect of UO. They will instead be reminders of the sorts of things I want to do in UO. I want to own my lighthouse at Moonglow Bay, command a fleet of pirate ships against Lord British's Fleet, smuggle rum into Skara Brae, write books in the game about questionable wenches in various ports, and weather storms on the sea by sailing skill and nautical saavy alone.
Instead I'll get to turn my character into an elf, perform some scripted quest that has been done a thousand times and is fully detailed on Stratics, visit new dungeons that look like the old underutilized ones, and OOOOH...Build a FISHTANK in my house! There's the table scrap for the seafaring community that we get thrown every now and then for our incessant begging. Reports from the DC meetup claim that nets will pull up live fish that we can put in the tanks. Golly, what a boon to the community.
So we go round and round again, dancing the same dance we always have. The names change, but the truth of the matter - the fact that no one in charge at EA will ever have enough vision and/or courage to realize the true potential of UO, nor the cannonballs to come out from the shadows and take responsibility for it rather than force some poor community guy to take the heat on message boards, goes on and on. I rant and pout and whine but I never quit - the dream of seeing the seafaring aspect of UO - and indeed the realization of the lifelong MMORPG experience - is bigger than one player with one fansite. Someday, someone, somewhere, will create another true virtual world, and the boats in that world will not teleport and jitter across an empty sea of unanimated blue, boring tiles.
No rants. No finger-pointing. No bitterness. Not in this article. Patrick Malott, the UO designer known as Leurocian, has tended his resignation at Electronic Arts. His last day there is June 17. He and his wife are returning to Indiana and I'm sure every seafarer in Sosaria will join me in wishing them the best of luck in their future endeavors.
A year ago, I wasn't even playing UO and this site was shut down. It was in July when I checked in at Stratics to see that a new designer, Leurocian, was posting quite frequently about his new job as a UO developer and what he was hoping to accomplish. Along with live team lead Fertbert, he championed a brief era that saw unprecedented development attention - both bug fixes and content addition - for the seas of UO. Leurocian sought out my input on his design ideas and words cannot express the wondrous joy I felt at tossing ideas back and forth, discussing how the community would react to the designs, and then seeing the players embrace them with such enthusiasm when they were implemented.
It wasn't just the seafaring community that Leurocian invigorated. All of UO's various communities and playstyles were excited by his constant public presence. His posts reflected the simple facts that he loved UO, he had gotten his dream job, and he truly enjoyed participating in the often rough and tumble message board environment. There was no "ivory tower" mentality, no "us and them" for Leurocian - he was one of us at the same time he was one of them, and that is an accomplishment that no one had ever managed in seven years of out-of-game community. There should be a Nobel prize for that or something.
The legacy of Leurocian's work - a revitalized Ilshenar, a high-end reward for fishers, and so much else - will live on past his tenure at EA. Seafarers will benefit from the fact that, in spite of almost constant player petitioning for easier ancient SOS bottles and guaranteed leviathan minor artifacts, Leurocian wisely stuck to his guns and as a result we have a system in the game that will not burn itself out for many years. Seahorse statuettes and ghost ship anchors will continue to be prized rewards for hard work, perseverance, and a dash of true luck. And I suspect that in the years ahead, players will still be guessing at just how big the biggest fish in the Sosarian seas is. Maybe someday, someone will catch it.
There's really nothing left to say here but thank you to Patrick Malott. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, and this is a stretch, never has so much been accomplished so well in such a short time. Thank you, Leurocian, my friend, for giving us all a time when the seas seemed fresh and the hope for clearer sailing ahead seemed more real than ever.
For years, the development of the seafaring aspect of Ultima Online has gone through a series of highs and lows, like the tides themselves churning about. We've gone from a time when we were told that any major changes to ships and the seas of the game would just be impossible, to a time when an entire seafaring expansion was merely seven months away, and now back to being told that boats are just too gosh darn broken to ever fix.
A Stratics poster by the name of Thorstein attended a meetup in Portland, Oregon last week, and reported this:
"After it was over I asked Marketing Guy about the future of ships. Ships are too screwed up to even thinking about fixing was the impression I got. Might as well ask about house to house combat."
Keep in mind that when SunSword had discussed a planned seafaring expansion with me almost two years ago, he was totally confident that new 8-directional ship movement code, revised water tiles, new ship art, new sea monsters, houseboats, a ship combat system, and related content was do-able within the seven months he had planned, utilizing the capabilities of an expansion team.
Thus, we come full circle. The enthusiasm last fall for developing the seas of UO, which was encouraged by SunSword and spearheaded by Fertbert, Leurocian, and even Binky, has died, replaced by other priorites and development desires. The community of players who have long supported such changes to the sea, most notably my friends at the FCB, has diminished due to the boredom and loss of the enthusiasm that we all felt last fall when things were beginning to happen for us. And I, someone who simply saw a great potential within UO for new and compelling adventures at sea, have grown tired of posting, pestering, and pondering about it all.
I rarely log into UO anymore. I don't sail. I don't participate in the player economy, don't farm for items, and just don't care about armor pieces and the little numbers attached to them. I just can't bring myself to do it. It's not just the failure of UO to move into a better future, it's the feeling I've had since the Age of Shadows expansion that I'll never be able to "catch up" with the rest of the players who have managed to move on and assemble "70s suits", while I still can't even figure out what armor to put on when my guildmates invite me to go with them to fight blood elementals.
I also cannot get excited in the least about the very minor table scraps that seafarers are getting in the upcoming expansion. There was a time on this site when I hurried to post on each and every tidbit of news regarding anything we were getting. The upcoming Mondain's Legacy expansion has fish tanks, into which players can put fish that are caught using yet another type of net. The fishtank system is designed along similar lines to the plant system, requiring maintenance and allowing for breeding and selling of developed fish. It is unclear at this time what extent the actual fishing skill is involved in this whole process, but since the main part of this "mini-game" happen ashore, at players' homes, it's really difficult for me to care. Likewise for the revelations that fishers will fish up pearls, which are a resource used by one of the crafting skills. Big deal, we've seen that before.
At this point, I am not quitting Ultima Online, nor am I taking down this site. In fact, I'm only holding on for the mere hope of another free trip to San Francisco courtesy of EA. I am, however, moving on with other things in both real life and on the 'net. For longtime readers of this site who might be stopping by to find out about the new fishtanks and other Mondain's Legacy table scraps, I recommend checking out the FCB at the link above. They are sure to have detailed information about these things when they become available in the game.
And who knows - in a few months the tides may change yet again and we could be talking about an upcoming seafaring expansion. I wouldn't count on it, though.