In the past years, I did't liked the way the UO Dev Team released easy content just giving new dyes for everything. I also have to say that I do not like at all the neon effect of most elemental items. The current OSI UO reminds me too much some unofficial (and unprofessional) shards I used to play some time ago.

The good news is that suddenly the current team decided that neon colors are bad. 

Some devs answers, taken from the forums:

Thread: umm Hued Dragons
Comment: No more stupid colors in UO.

CatHat: Amen, to that! Hueing should be the last possible resort to things. - Especially if some of the colors are nightmarish Neon.

A lot of the art in the past was made without the intention of hueing happening to it - so it doesn't work too well on many things. One of the things we've worked on is to make sure that new art is capable of tasteful partial hueing so it doens't look totally like its been dipped in a vat of color. Secondly, We've also asked the designers to not use harsh neon hues on things. Thirdly and most importantly we don't want to design things where we do a cheap-o shortcut of 'oh well we'll just hue it". Sometimes it happens - but we're throttling that way back.

New art only - hehe - well it keeps me employed right?

And again, in the same thread:

Comment: Perhaps we will see the hued colored plants look more natural to where the peddles and bulbs on the plants are the only things colored rather then the whole thing.

CatHat: Darn right - again - its about the wrong way of hueing things in the past. They just have to be aware of how this stuff is used when they make things. Leveraging a Partial Hue in a manner that doesn't suck is important - its the right way to do things.

2 sayings come to mind - one of my favorites, "Work Smarter, not just Harder"

And, as our producer Darkscribe.is fond of saying, "its all on the table"

And more....

Comment: What will you do to fix stupid tokuno dies -, elven hues - hair dies, reward cloth and how will you prevent your nice friend to add more stupid colours?

CatHat: Easy - I speak to them about it and work with them to see what we can do about it. Actually, yesterday I went to them and spoke to them about Hues on some new things they've in progress - and spoke exactly on the topic of a few of the poorer choices of some Existing reward colors - and they spoke to me about -"oh what can we do about improving Elven Hair". So a lot of what you guys see - we see too.

I've said it before - but 8 years makes a lot of stuff to go through.

The difficult thing about an MMOG is -that once stuff is released to the public its very hard to go back and fix. Sometimes changes means taking things away from people basically and that irritates folk who like what they have ya know.

The whole HUE coloring thing sorta balances on the 3 main disciplines here - Firstly, When the artists make things, they need to be done so if/when a HUE does happen to it - it works very very well - preferrably a partial hue to make it look spiffy and so details aren't lost. Secondly - Engineering needs to iron out any bugs in the backside of the hue system - so design has no invisible pitfalls. Thirdly, designers need to implement it with real care and caution - probably refering back to the artists if they're in doubt about if they've nerfed the art too much, and if another approach might be possible.

In other words - real teamwork fostered by new leaders enabing us to do things right.

A lot of what we're doing right now is just working on backside / internal stuff - making sure we have more understanding in the team - more internal checks and balances, and tool improvments so there are far fewer 'mistakes' that perpetuates that drift. Makes no sense to go and fix things up if you're just going to break em again as quickly - lol.

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