Broadsword Online Games have released Publish 86 for Ultima Online on the TC1 shard, and with it have kicked off the “Vice vs. Virtue” (VvV) event in-game. As I understand it, this is a faction-vs.-faction PvP event. The basics of taking part in VvV seem to be thus:

• Visit the VvV signup stone located at the Yew gate in Felucca.
• In order to sign up for VvV you must be in a guild and your guild master must have already signed up for VvV.
• When joining VvV you will be automatically joined into an arbitrary faction. This is only for testing purposes, as some messages use existing faction tools.

And here’s how the competition plays out:

• You can score points by,
  • Being the only guild that is occupying the city
    • You must be alive, and not in a house or on a ship to be counted
  • Killing players of opposing guilds
    • There is a 5 minute kill timeout for receiving points for kills
  • Stealing and returning the sigil to the Priests of Vice and Virtue
• A sigil will spawn after a random amount of time following the start of the match in 1 of 5 predetermined locations.
• When the sigil icon (located at the bottom of the battle status Gump) lights up, the sigil has spawned.
• The sigil can be found by a passive detecting hidden check with a detecting hidden skill greater than 80.0%, you will receive a message indicating “Your keen senses detect something hidden in the area…”
• The sigil can then be revealed using an active detecting hidden check.
• Once revealed the sigil can be stolen by a thief with a minimum of 100.0% skill using the stealing skill.

As well, Publish 86 also activates the Traders Quest in-game event, which allows players to accept delivery tasks from Trade Ministers; successful completion of deliveries will result in all manner of rewards being bestowed, including gold and resources. The distance over which the delivery is carried out, and the difficulty of it, factor in to the determination of the size of the reward.

Finally, Publish 86 also overhauls the game’s loot system somewhat, spawned magic items will now be endowed with various properties by means of a new, automatic loot property generation system. The “Cleanup Britannia” feature has also seen some changes…and, of course, various bugs have been squashed.