I noticed, just yesterday, that Mythic had pushed another small patch to Ultima Forever:

Patch notes for these mini-updates (they usually comprise not more than about 5 MB, if you examine the MYP files that store patch data using iFunBox or similar) aren’t typically posted online, so it’s sometimes difficult to see what has changed in-game as a result.

But, in a post to the official Ultima Forever forums entitled “Late-Breaking News!”, Ultima Forever community manager Gene Makely made clear what some of the changes this latest patch had effected were:

A bit of news and happy tidings for you tonight, concerning a few things we’ve just pushed to the live game a short time ago:

• As a Thank You for participating in our Soft Launch, we’ve (for a LIMITED time!) fairly significantly increased the number of gold keys that are obtained when purchasing the Keg of Gold Keys. Normally, you’d get 160 gold keys for $19.99. For a brief time, however, you’ll get 400 gold keys for that price! Be sure to get yours soon, while supplies last!
• (NOTE: This particular item may take several hours to go into effect; so you might want to wait until tomorrow before spending a bunch of keys on chests!) A set of four vanity items have been introduced: Safari Hats! Each of the 4 hats is fashioned from the likeness of a different animal (I won’t spoil anything here; I’ll let you guys discover for yourselves which ones are available), and can be (randomly) obtained using gold keys on town chests (not a guaranteed “drop”). Keep in mind that these items don’t provide any stat bonuses; they just look cool! You’ll be the envy of all your friends throughout Britannia!
• Finally, another positive tweak has been made to key drop rates. You should notice an up-tick in the rate you acquire bronze keys upon defeating your enemies!

Enjoy!!

And, indeed, a quick glance at the “Purchase Keys” dialog within the game confirms that one can in fact get 400 gold keys for $19.99. This is a significant bonus, as you can see; $49.99 is the purchase price for 430 keys:

The third bullet point is also worth drawing attention to. The penultimate mini-patch released for the game drastically reduced the key drop rate of enemies in dungeons, as Browncoat Jayson and others took note of:

I did a run that used to net me ~200 keys; I got 28. So drop is about 10% of what it previously was, which is horrible. I might expect it to drop to 75%.

The patch notes said “We’ve also increased the number of health potions that drop from chests”, however all I’ve noticed changing is that the little health packs drop an insane amount now.

However, after this latest mini-patch, the issue had been resolved to his apparent satisfaction:

The patch tonight has resolved a lot of these issues once again. I did another pure-key run, roughly the same as before, and netted 127 keys. Not quite the 200+ from first launch, but up dramatically from ~30 in the last attempt.

Overall, this is pretty much I wanted to see. I will start doing some standard dungeon runs again to make sure I can keep up with repairs.

Mythic, then, continue to interact with the people playing the Ultima Forever soft launch, in advance of the game’s impending global release. More importantly, they continue to make changes and tweaks to the game based on player feedback, striving to positively address what player concerns they can.

And the players, for their part, remain quite willing to point out every issue they encounter. (Jayson, in particular, has been a quite dominant voice on the Ultima Forever forums, winning praise from the developers and the respect of other contributors.)