Website update to PHP 5.5, UOLL hits 100, shard direction

[Jack]

Last night the website was updated to run on PHP 5.5, which broke some of the pathing for PHP includes. If you notice any pages that don't seem to be displaying all the information they are supposed to, please let me know here.

In other news, UO Lost Lands broke 100 online today for the first time. Thanks to everyone who made this possible! It's an exciting time and I'd like to welcome all our new players who have started recently, as well as our long term players who have stuck with UOLL for a long period of time. You're all the most helpful and friendly playerbase a shard owner could ask for. I look forward to working with you all to continue making UOLL a great place to play UO.

Upcoming changes to UOLL:

• Archery is currently on test center with the equip delay removed, and the speeds of bows have been slightly increased. You can not cycle archery. This will be closely watched for balance. Archery has always been a fairly terrible combat skill on UOLL so hopefully this will go a long way to rectifying that.
  
• Halloween is coming up so a lot of work will be going into preparing that, which will slow down other updates for a while.
  
• The town invasion system will be getting a revamp to the reward system. This system will also be used with the upcoming champion spawn system. Damage dealt by each player will be recorded from start to finish of an invasion, and platinum rewards given out based on participation. The current system has problems where players can do all the hard work from start to finish of the invasion, and not get any platinum from the boss, whereas someone else can turn up right at the end, ebolt the boss a few times and get a full reward. Tamers & bards also deal far more damage than pure mage or warrior types, so bard damage and tame damage will be scaled back in the reward system to make it more fair. It will no doubt require some live playtesting and balancing to find the best numbers for this.
  

Tame and Bard damage accounts for 10% in this picture but may be increased:

• Champion spawns will most likely have to be delayed until after Halloween, I want to make sure we get these right as they will be a permanent addition to the shard.
  
• There is a huge backlog of era accuracy and bugs that will be worked on immediately after getting these systems out. I estimate that will take a few weeks.
  
• AI will be next in the list of things to look at after this.