There was a fair bit of Ultima Online news in November, which I should probably at least remark on.

Publish 95 was pushed to the Test Center shard on November 3rd. This Publish added a bunch of “Holiday” rewards to the game (decorative items and tile sets), and also updated the Huntsmaster’s Challenge (the object of which is to kill Tigers and Myrmidex Drones, it would seem). The Bulk Order Deed system also saw significant updates, and the Publish introduced the Artisan Festival to the game:

The Artisan Festival is a new crafting event that allows crafters to take advantage of the new Bulk Order update to turn in Bulk Order Deeds for virtue & vice themed holiday rewards!

• The Artisan Festival Event is active between server up after December 1, 2016, 12:01 AM ET and January 1, 2016 12:01 AM ET.
• The Artisan Festival occurs in any of the Governor cities with a treasury balance of at least 1,000,000 gp.
• Town Criers will announce which city is currently active.
• The Artisan Festival lasts for 3 days in each city during the event
• While the Artisan Festival is active within a city, players may turn in Bulk Order Deeds to elves at a specially decorated location within each City,

Publish 95 was then pushed out to the Origin, Izumo, and Baja shards on November 9th, and then to all remaining shards on November 16th.

More recently, the team at Broadsword Online Games have been testing some changes to Ultima Online’s combat system:

Based on player feedback we have some combat changes ready for testing on TC1.  These changes are currently active on TC1.  These will not be deployed World Wide for quite some time and are subject to change.  We wanted to give everyone interested a time to provide feedback, so head on over to TC1 and check them out!  You can read all about the changes here.  Don’t forget to send us your feedback here.

I’m not familiar enough with combat in UO to really comment on the adjustments to skills and abilities listed in the change notes, so I’ll leave it to those of you are are more familiar with the game to comment on whether these are good things (or not).