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Screenshot:  Ultima Online - A Kingdom Reborn (http://www.uo.com/uokr/UOKR/screens/screenshot03.jpg)

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Kal Ort Por?

edited because I can't spell...  :-D (pun intentional)

Uh Murg, could you translate that into stinking newb please?

Lol, Vas Flam dude.

Amazing... a UO 3d client that doesn't look like warmed-over ass.

Details. (http://www.uo.com/uokr/UOKR/UOKR.html)

Wow, looks nice.   I might actually try UO if it looked like that.  Not that I'm a graphics whore, but I find that low-res stuff hurts my eyes lately.  Even my beloved MoM gives me the squint headaches.

Crop por
lol gaurds help

but seriously that looks fucking awesome.

I think you mean Quas An Wis. And it looks like Lineage now. Keke la.

That does look good.

My remaining vestige of skeptisicm is simply this: Are they updating the gameplay too?

Don't get me wrong, I know Ultima Online was conceived as incredibly ahead of its time.  However, my experience with a fairly recent version has been that it's generally awkward and klugdy.  The game update rate is apparently set to be 14.4k baud modem compatible.  Also, it was a very newbie unfriendly experience with a lot of vital functionality hidden behind unbound macros.  There's a lot more to be done with the Client/Server interaction than upgraded graphics.  There's a lot more to the gameplay itself they could do to enhance it.

More shots -

Longish url - stratics board link  (http://boards.stratics.com/php-bin/uo/showflat.php?Cat=1&Number=6782997&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=31&fpart=1)

That is not a 3d client. Those are isometric, and in this day and age its an embarassment. UO probably originally did isometric because they couldn't do real 3d for an MMO. Nowadays, there's just no excuse. Sorry, Isometric outside of a diablo clone is just blech to me. It has the immersive value of Cubis.

The shadows (and their varying length/size) would suggest it is a true 3D client just like NWN, Dungeon Siege, or Titan's Quest is 3D even though the view is top down isometric-style.

Given item #1 on the list I posted, we can certainly hope they're addressing these things.  From the way they make it sound, they're building an entirely new client and interface from the ground up.  And I've seen the devs bitching about the update rate in the past, so it's certainly something they're aware of as they get down to whatever it is they're doing.

Other things I've seen them gripe about are the uberness of items currently, and how it's nearly impossible to lose them thanks to the insurance system.  And sure enough, the bosses in the ongoing invasion scenario are dropping artifacts with the "cursed" tag, meaning they drop to your corpse no matter what.  I smell an experiment on their part.  I'll just bet they use this new shiny as the spoonful of sugar to force down some much-needed item nerfs.  I think they want to take it back to the old model of items being less powerful, more commonly available, and possible to lose.

They've more or less openly admitted that some of the decisions made by past dev teams have been fucked up, and I can't help but get the impression that they're going to try to undo some of them here.

This is all nice, given that it is not doctored and given that it would actually work on hardware produced before 2010.


Some?! What part of Turbo-Robot-Jesus-Elf-Clown-Dressed-In-Neon looked to you like a good idea the morning after? Trammel aside, moving from viable economy of supply and demand based on crafting toward mudflation on steroids item-centric Jack's complete lack of economy is nothing short of a mmorpg tragedy. It is nice to see developers realizing this, but isn’t it A LOT too late?

Kal Ort Por - pearl, drake, moss - UO's magic words for Recall, instant travel spell and means to escape danger. OP meant - get me out of here.

If its a true 3d client, who in their right mind would play it from an isometric angle unless, and I stress unless it was a click-a-thon like Titan Quest, where to be honest, they could have spared me their zoom-in close graphics, since it added jack all to the gameplay. In an MMORPG, I guess I just expect more than an arcade game's graphics.

We like it that way, now go play with your toys while adults talk.

There were no proper MMOGs beyond text MUDs. There was no such thing as a mass market 3D graphics card. The few true 3D games like Quake 1 were groundbreaking titles. Two years later when EverQuest was released, it was very controversial that they required a 3D card.

I have never played UO, because I got into MMOGs for the very fact that EverQuest was 3D. I was a Gibson/Stephenson sci-fi reader looking for the metaverse/matrix.

You know it's well-received when Sinij makes multiple consecutive posts in a UO thread without once bitching about Trammel.

I just had an odd thought though.

Let's say it's 2011, and UO is still plugging away.  Someone somewhere will find themselves saying "This game is 14 years old, and it's been ruined for 11 of them!  I'm 40 years old and I used to pwn noob azzes back when I was in my 20's!"

That was my impression, Tale. I remember Mech Warrior blowing my mind when it came out, sometime around the same time that UO came out? Noone expected an MMO that did true 3d. You're right, many of us were jonesing for a Gibson metaverse/matrix, and EQ delivered. That said, 'true 3d' existed already back in 1985 with the original Flight Simulator from Microsoft.

I don't mean to be a wet blanket to UO fans' excitement about a new UO. I just would have expected something, well, a wee bit different after, what, 10 years? Not just graphical improvements on a theme, but an actual different approach, since I thought the original approach was constrained by necessity, not choice. Maybe its like dominos. You just can't really improve on them, they are alwas going to be little rectangular black and white pieces, no matter how fancy they are.

Archetype Interactive, the developers of Meridian 59 a 3D MMORPG which came out a year before UO, would disagree with you.

The first Voodoo Graphics card came out in 1996, again a year before UO.

Quake didn't originally support hardware 3D cards (it was software only) when it was released in 1996 and the hardware version, GLQuake, came out in January 1997. Also Ultima Underworld was a much earlier true 3D game engine (you could fly under bridges and stuff) released in 1992.

I suspect that converting it into an over-the-shoulder game would be A) ill-received by a lot of existing players, B) tantamount to just deleting the game and re-developing it from scratch in terms of expense, and C) unwise from a business perspective.  You don't want to make your 3D expansion box a mandatory "buy this or cancel your account" item, and you certainly can't have people running around the same gameworld on two such wildly different clients.

Anyway, when this comes out next year I will obviously buy it.  Once the release-pains are over I'll let folks know, and then some of you should seriously consider giving it a shot.  It's got no classes, no levels, it's sandboxy, you can custom build your own house down to the last bit of floor tile, and it'll have graphics that aren't total ass.  You know you've wasted money on less interesting premises in the past.

EDIT to reply to a Sinij edit:


If anyone over there were thinking in terms of "too late" would this project even exist?  I mean despite the horrible graphics, fucked up decisions, and general age of the game, it's managed to hang onto 130,000 subscribers while other newer games have either been reduced to cellar-dwellers or died off entirely.  So why not at least give it a shot?

Given the state of affairs at SOE and the fact that EA is still putting eggs into the UO basket, it's entirely feasible that Ultima Online will still be chugging along when the last Everquest and Star Wars Galaxies servers finally go offline.  Now who would have given that even an outside chance of being the case back in the day?

I thought of Meridian 59 when I was typing, but as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't count. Like The Realm doesn't count. Sorry, I know that's cruel. It wasn't on a grand enough scale to be compared with MUDs and subsequent MMOGs. I also thought of SubSpace, which I tested from alpha 0.79 and played for two years, but it wasn't on a grand enough scale either. I'd count those games as generation 0.5, so I decided to say there were no proper MMOGs :)


Yes, but it was an expensive add-on, like today's PhysX cards. I don't know anyone who has one of those, and I could say the same in 1996 about Voodoo cards. Maybe they both count as mass market in strict terms, but it's not practical or affordable for your average user to have one and we can't say today what the trend will be. When UO was in development, I don't think anybody would have thought of doing anything for Voodoos with an Ultima game. Then again, I spent half of 1996-97 without computer technology, living in a tent and travelling on a bicycle (and the other half as an IT journalist).


Hmm, I didn't say Quake supported 3D acceleration, I only said it was true 3D (as opposed to Doom). When Romero released shareware Quake I was on efnet #quake (between server splits) chatting to CliffyB who was hyping something called "Unreal" :) I also thought of Ultima Underworld, which I played through obsessively on a 486DX in a student newspaper office at night (I was the editor), from start to almost-finish (I screwed something up and couldn't finish it without cheating). I thought of saying Descent too, which seemed fully 3D to me well before Quake, but I decided to just say Quake.

Topic? I think I'll try UO when this comes out.

Not to split hairs, but if we want to talk about groundbreaking early 3D titles, wouldn't it be a mistake to not mention Descent? Which I'm pretty sure came out in 1995. In fact, I vividly remember buying it.

For my mac.

I've been wrong before though.

People say that about Joust and such already. Hell, Street Fighter 2 came out nearly 12 or 13 years ago and people reminisce like that (and about when arcades were still popular0 every day. How many fighting titles have come along that have crashed and burned? You could probably name 10 for the dreamcast alone.

UO may be getting a shiny layer of paint and it's held up so long because sprites do that. Too bad everything under the hood is still wrecked and the game will still be fugly. Just not AS fugly. I hate to say it, but 130,000 people (or whatever) can be wrong and often are.

fethers

If it truly is 3-D then isometric or over the shoulder or first person is an academic question.  It's just a question of moving the camera and all of the previously mentioned viewpoints are available with little to no effort.

Where the dark-elf ninja vampire white women at?

I think you're right. I mentioned it, just above you. We used to have huge Descent deathmatches and team play across a LAN after work. Good times, mostly involving people who had never played a computer game before, with a 50-50 gender balance, pizza and alcohol.

On-topic edit: one of them later became a UO addict and was found sleeping under his desk one morning.

Yeah, I wouldn't guess it's a question of 'would it work' but more of "it would look like shit."   UO's a pretty flat world, given it's top-down nature, yes?  No hills, rolling plains mountain ranges or dips in terrain or twists in the various dungeons.  Doing something like a true 3d w/ movable camera would require a complete redesign of the world for it not to look like ass.

  Not only that, but stuff I've heard about over the years, like "running enough screens away" or "hiding behind a tree/ rock/ house" all of the sudden aren't possible anymore.  That changes the entire nature of the game, and I don't think that'd make current players happy, unlike a simple graphics polish.

Maybe no proper 3D MMOGs, but there were a number of games that would labeled years later as "MMOGs" once the term was invented. But as usual, innovations happen before they get categorized by folks who need to think of things that way.

I think that list needs to include: 0) Changing the fundamentals of play. Going to a 3D world for UO would change how the game is played, things like line of sight, how combat works, how decorating works, all of that. This wholesale change would basically require B, and that spawns C. At this point, any change is mostly for the current UO players, and nobody needs to look any further than SWG:NGE to see what happens when wholesale changes are delivered poorly and with the wrong message. Everyone cites that example. Even folks who've never played an MMOG and only talk now because Wired did talk about SWG. It's really the most rabidly pure form of negative PR possible.

Personally, the changes to the graphics in UO alone look good. It's still ISO, but there's obviously room in this world for ISO based games or the entire RTS genre would go away. The screenshot you linked shows a pretty good depth and quality. If they're willing to go that far to vamp engine and graphics, I wonder how deeply they'll go into game play. For the first time since I left in 1999, I feel like there'd be something here worth checking out again.

Here's my lame-o post for the day.

I don't mind isometric games but the one stupid thing that keeps me from playing UO is this: The angle. Something about UO's 45 degree iso angle gives me a headache. I couldn't tell ya why. I prefer the angles used in Diablo and other games (33 degrees maybe?) UO's angle is harsh on my eyes and brain. It wrecks my perspective or something.

[/lame-o]

Confirmed on Stratics:  All the horrible neon colors are going away under the new client.  Yay.

That sounds about right to me.

I love sandboxes, but I have no desire to play UO.  This graphics update doesn't change that.  It's probably a nice bonus to current UO players, though, which is great.  For them to yank the rug out from under their current players in the hopes of attratcing newer ones with a more 3d game seems like a waste (might as well just release it as a new game anyway, it's not like they're paying for the license or anything).

I do strongly suspect that it's not a true 3d client, anyway.  There is no perspective in those screenshots and (I assume) you won't be able to rotate the camera, so it's going to be basically indistinguishable from 2d most of the time anyway.  Monsters casting shadows don't seem to take the geometry into account, either; looks like they're prerendered and then projected onto a flat plane underneath the monster (or something).

I get the feeling that UO long passed the SWG level of alienating their existing playerbase.  Anybody that's left after the Renaissance Client, the Felicia/Trammel split, Elves, and Ninjas probably has learned to expect major revisions.

Anybody still playing UO or SW:G should have a leash round their neck, a ball gag in their mouth, a rubber suit on their servile body, and a butt plug with a tail on it rammed up their arse. Smell the glove, MMOG bitches.

There are a lot of gains to be had from pseudo-2D (2D games created with 3D models and using 3D rendering).  One of them is that 2D sprite animation is a dying art, it's harder to find artists who can do it well. Frankly a 3D model looks smoother, less repetitive, and with modern rendering systems can react to ambient light and other environmental effecs in a way that 2D simply can't.

The Torque Game Builder is much improved from the version Orbis rejected last year, if it could have done then what it does now, we would probably have used it (TGB is 2D through 3D).

--Dave

I'd answer rationally, but I'm lost in this fanboy fantasy where a combination of this expansion and Sony's continuing rape at the hands of Blizzard conspire to close the 50k subscription gap between EQ2 and UO, and the look on Smedley's face when he realizes his flagship next-generation MMO has fewer subs than Ultima fucking Online.  I'll admit it's not bloody likely, but it's not utterly impossible, and man is it a compelling thought.  It's like a guy you hate sitting on the side of the road in a broken down Porsche while an old woman in a Model T putters by and gives him the finger.

Anyway...

The difference between UO and SWG is that even when the developers are adding stupid things to UO, they're at least adding things.  When the SWG developers decided to add the NGE, they for some reason felt compelled to also tear out features/content willy-nilly regardless of the big bleeding holes they left in the game.  You might think Necromancy is a stupid skill to have in UO, but nobody is forcing you to use it, and it's a hell of a lot different than someone saying "We decided tamers suck, so no more tamers ever!" out of the blue.

What about TROOBLACK?

Stolen from the Stratics thread, a direct comparison between identical locations.

Old UO
(http://www.kuanti.net/wind_before.JPG)

New UO
(http://www.uo.com/uokr/UOKR/screens/screenshot02.jpg)

How do most people play these days? With the old bitmapped-based client like what you showed or with the often-tweaked "3D" introduced with Iishenar? I personally didn't like the latter much.

The former. It's smoother, looks nicer and it has that classic feel. It's nice to see that they're retaining that old UO look with the new engine.

It is, if nothing else, an interesting example of a unique business approach.  Of the original Big Three, two have had sequels.  One (AC2) was a total failure and has been outlived by its own predecessor, while the other (EQ2) has performed underwhelmingly and holds fewer subscriptions than the original.  (At least according to Bruce, usual disclaimers apply.)  Neither attempt at a UO sequel ever got off the ground, however, and now EA appears to have comitted to updating/evolving the existing game instead.

If this little plan is successful, and delivers a return in subscriptions/retention sufficient to make the expense worthwhile, I'm going to go ahead and pound a couple nails into the lid on the coffin of the MMO sequel concept.

The new pics look nice. I admit I'd likely never play it, but that's because I've got too much invested in other MMOGS (the primary one being RL friends & wife paying WoW). But it does look very nice. I hope it does well.

If they made a new shard and a more intuitive (or more functional and moddable) UI, I'd consider trying it out again assuming I wasn't horribly addicted to another game at the time.

I have no problem with the top-down view.  I actually miss 2-d games where Ifelt like I was walking around a painting.  Even the best 3-d games still have too much of a q-bert feel to them to me.

I had always assumed UO looked like it did because it wanted to be Ultima VII Online.


HA!

Wow, there are a lot more monsters in New UO.

That's cause they've been feeding on all the horses.

I have to say, I'm very intrigued. UO is still best in a large number of things.

I think that WUA has a point.  There's not nearly enough scoffing in this thread.

I was too busy rolling my eyes back into my head to scoff. At this point, this is like polishing a turd. UO2 kthx.

This is just one thing I'm curious about, and I've never heard it explained or bothered to look it up, but how do ninjas, samurai, and paladins fit into this "no class" framework? Or are there just skills that enable you to be "ninja-like"?

It's funny though, with the small amount of time I spent playing on that grey shard (Metropolis), the one thing that never bothered me was the graphics.  These do look better, but I wonder if it would "feel" like UO playing it.

If they do undo some the item mudflation, I could see myself giving this a one month run if it's not buggy as hell.

PS. The game was ruined when they put motherfucking elves in it. But you can still have fun with ruined things, I mean.. someone's still doing Madonna, rite?

Like this...

I'm sorry, but EA taking UO to GlamourShots isn't going to do a thing for it. Putting Grandma in a new dress and slapping on some make-up isn't going to cure her Alzheimer's. All she's going to do is look at the pictures and ask, "Who's that painted up Jezebel whore?"

There's better ways to spend your money.

I only just noticed that WUA mentioned that he would buy this.  Are they actually going to charge for this?  Any benevolence I might have felt has left my body.  Through my anus.

At this point paying for UO is like paying for sloppy seconds from old one-legged whore who also happens to be your sister – you do what you got to do if you are desperate enough but there are ‘fresher’ alternatives around. I personally think UO's problem is not graphics, it the fact that gameplay fucked beyond any redemption thanks to generations of rampaging moronic developers. Too bad there are yesman like WUA that kept UOs corpse animated for that long. IT IS TIME TO LET GO.

It's all a bit like magery requiring evaluating intelligence to do any damage.  The ninjitsu skill has a bunch of abilities for enhancing melee, but in ways that require the hiding and stealth skills in order to be effective.  Since you can only have seven skills total, and each "class" skill usually has a couple support skills that tie into it, you have to consider carefully when making a hybrid.  Necromancy is virtually useless without spirit speak, bushido is somewhat nerfed without parrying, and so forth.

My main character does have necromancy and bushido, but I had to make some signifigant sacrifices in order to get it that way.  I don't have healing or anatomy, which means I have to largely rely on life-leeching to stay alive, and about half the bushido abilites are useless to me since I didn't have room for parrying.

By the same token you can stack bushido and chivalry onto the same template for uber melee damage, but you're going to have to forego some combination of healing, anatomy, parrying, and resisting spells, making your ability to avoid and/or heal damage rather suspect.

You can even stack chivarly and necromancy onto the same template, but then karma comes into play.  The effectiveness of chivalry spells is dependant upon having high karma, while every necromancy spell you cast lowers your karma.  So everytime you cast a necro spell, you'd be self-nerfing your chivalry.

You end up with some weird templates running around, but for my money it beats the shit out of the world being populated by thousands and thousands of the same eight character types.


NEVAR!!!1!

But Horde can play paladins now!  :evil:

WUA did have a point eariler about MMOG sequels, though. EQ2 is doing worse than EQ, AC2 died...who's to say that UO2 wouldn't be an equally bad move?
I mean, it's EA - designing a new game client is a level of magnitude easier (and cheaper, no doubt) than a new game.

Although they could take the SOE approach, and just fuck up a new game engine (EQ...twice), a sequel and a (different game) revamp.

There's been really no statistical basis by which to say a sequel is any good or not. Two main titles that haven't done well/died versus a really small barely-heard-about game (http://www.atitd.net) on version three and doing as well as the prior two did.

Hey, that's nine to you bub! Anyway, it's just the Class thing at all, be it the 9 of WoW or the 342 that SWG launched with. It's hemming people into roles. Of course, it's largely been proven that most people prefer that, but that's irrelevant. The genre is big enough to keep UO and EQ going forever.

I HAVE always wondered... what's the point of an MMOG sequel?  Evolve the world, sure.  Have expansions, sure.  But an entirely other game? 

At most I would do something like the SWG NGE and call it a sequel.  Use most of the existing code, but maybe give it a graphics overhaul and add some map territory.  Making essentially another of the same game seems silly to me.

Also, I would leave out ATITD.  Their sequel model seems more like expansions to me.  I mean come on, they have released three in what, four years? Most houses can hardly keep up that pace in expansions, and Blizzard CAN'T.

I'm not up on ATITD.  Are these multiple versions running at the same time, or does one just end as the next begins?  Because that's not really the same as the EQ/EQ2 situation.


Like I said, it's an interesting way they're going with UO.  They've apparently finally given up on ever doing a sequel, but between gameplay changes and now graphics, it's an entirely different game than it was four or five years ago.  And "rofl elfs" aside, that's probably a good thing.  Retention would probably be worse if melee were still the same "autoattack + bandages" game it was back in the day.

ATITD ends the game and starts a new one. It's just a game with a time limit. It's not sequels.

Good question WUA, and good point Numtimi. ATITD are true sequels. EQ/EQ2 and AC/AC2 are/were concurrent worlds. I imagine SOE thought they'd eventually close EQ1 because EQ2 was going to be the great success. But if they ever thought that, they've certainly wizened up by now.

The genre is too young to see what a "traditional course" is for an MMORPG. Therefore it's hard to know whether a sequel is even appropriate.

Do EQ & EQ2 combined have more subs than EQ would alone if the sequel had never been created?  More than likely.

Given the expense of developing and maintaining two games, was doing so the best idea?  Probably not.

I'm tempted to go ahead and say that developing two different MMO games based upon the same IP and basic design concepts is more a recipe for pointless redundancy than anything else.  I know that AC2 was by all reports just a very bad game, while EQ2 was trod beneath the feet of the WoW juggernaut, and taken together that seems to leave some wiggle-room for opposing viewpoints.  But I still think the core premise of the MMO sequel concept, that players will be inclined to migrate from Game 1 to Game 2, has been disproven.

EQ2 didn't just fail to make a dent in WoW, it failed to surpass the current incarnation of EQ1.  Not only did EQ1 players neglect to cross over to EQ2, but those who did quit EQ1 seem to have done so in favor of WoW.

MMO players will hold very tightly to the game they've grown accustomed to, but once they do make that break, they break cleanly and are up for grabs.  They'll go for the coolest-looking thing around, regardless of whether it's tied to the name and IP of what they've been playing.  So why bother making your new game a sequel to the old?  Having the old game's name on the box clearly WON'T draw players of that old game over to the new, but it just might turn off the people who had no interest in the old game in the first place, and don't want more of the same.

I also have the opinion that a sequel to a MOG is unnecessary.  You can call it an expansion or an upgrade, but extending the life of the original game seems like the best course.  UO is an example of this, as is EVE.  EQ is also.  None of those resemble the game at initial launch.  I'm not saying that EQ didn't need a rewrite or redesign or something, but spawning an entire new system was probably not the optimal solution.  On the other hand, I vastly prefer EQ2 to EQ, and you'd likely never get EQ2 without starting over completely.  Or at least without an enormous number of "I CANCE$LED MY ACCOUNT^ TODAY!!!11" posts.  If you want to make a new game, make a new game.

The concept of a sequel to an ongoing game is obviously a relic of the singleplayer genre and everyone should have known better. Unless of course you essentially kill the first one and use the sequel as kind of a mega expansion.

In any case, I'd be willing to go back to UO for those times I don't feel like playing anything else, but it STILL has a lot of barrier to entry stuff in it as far as I can tell. The UI is SHIT, total utter shit. It's way more outdated than even the graphics. They also need to up the user friendliness of UO by about 10x and remove a lot of the tedium. Oh, and add in some PVP that isn't gate camping or agreed upon guild war faggotry (and no I don't necessarily mean PK, could be an arena or something to dick about with when the rest of the game gets boring).

Until then, meh, seeing screenshots of UO always brought on the nostalgia and made me want to play again. The updated graphics are just going to remove that pull.

The "updated" graphics really won't mean anything to me. Unless I can pull the view down into a 1st-person or good 3rd-person MMOG, it'll still just be a 2d ISO game.

I agree on the sequel thing. MMOGs come with sequels built in. Nothing is sacred in these games, from what the world looks like (what engine number is EQ1 on now?) to how it plays (from the tame, like EQ1 to the, err, not, like NGE). Sequels are launched when a company needs a bunch of new cash made on box sales and hopes to grab a lot of players who've never played before. But what's been shown is that box sale expansions can also drag back a lot of former players, and advertise to those anew, if done right. Of course, the "done right" part includes not focusing exclusively on your current players to the detriment of the game being attractive to new ones.

If you take the current state of both games (EQ1=200k, EQ2=175k) and combine their subscription counts (based on MMOGchart, so take this for what it's worth), they don't come anywhere close to what EQ1 was at it's height (550k).

This doesn't answer whether EQ1 would have suffered handily at the launch of FFXI, WoW and GW. Nor does it answer whether EQ2 cannabalized EQ1 no matter how hard SOE tried to spin the message. But it does show that a heck of a lot of cash was spent for not even a return they achieved with the "broken" patchwork of bailing wire and duct tape that was EQ1.

And all that makes me think of is: "Why the fuck don't they make games like X-Com anymore? Fuck 3D engines -- I want turn-based, squad-based tactical combat with fucking aliens.

Agreed.  I gotta figure this is half the reason they're re-doing the client and not just pushing out a graphical update.  While the old graphics may have "charm" to certain people, the old UI is just a disgrace and needs to go.

I really could give two shits if it's 3d or 2d so long as it's good and new. UO is not new, and an interface upgrade is mandatory. But even then, the game is creaking with such age, layered on expansions, ninjas, ninja elves, samurai ninja elves and robot samurai ninja elves with steam engines, it's going to have to go the transformative route to make me even consider it. A 3D look to an isometric 2d world? Not interested. But if they took the same game and made it fully, 1st person 3D, I'd consider it.

And gave all the elves AIDS.

You know, that makes me wonder -- everyone always clamors for more in these games. We always want more quests, more room, more depth, more choices, more variety, more loot, more places to go, more zones, more and more and more.....

But I don't think that's true. Take UO -- there's an entire generation of MMORPG gamers that have never played it. Pretend, for a moment, that the gameplay would be appealing (let's avoid UO sucks/rocks and just concentrate on the concept here). Say this new upgrade is all great. Updates the interface to modern standards, updates the graphics, updates the engine, and makes the game feel all fresh and shiny like it was a 2006 new release.

Would people try it? It'd have all that depth -- expansions, changes, updates, a large and sustained user-base. What people are always clamoring for. Years worth of material.

I don't think they would. Not without that shiny "UO2" name. (Probably not even with). Because even if it's new, it's old. Who wants to show up and spend all that time catching up with everyone else? People who have played for years and years? People want "new" and "big" because they don't want to feel like they're treading ground others have already passed through, mastered, and spent years nitpicking at.

In one sense, you have to make the sequel. Because there comes a point when all the new shiny, the updates, the expansions, the overhauls -- even if they're brilliant and polished and awesome are, at best, just going to make ex-players take another look. It won't bring in many new ideas. Because it's an old game. It's always an old game.

Having such a mature (in the MMOG sense, not actual mature) user base is actually going to hurt UO in this regard. People already have their houses, their GMx7 (or whatever) characters, the economy is already inflated to hell and back. Why WOULD a new player play it? They'd constantly be behind the curve, the same as an EQ server where all the newbie areas are empty. At least with UO, the difference between a vet and a newbie isn't great, but from what WUA has said, I get the feeling the items have become the difference.

It's just my kook theory at this point, but I've said earlier in this thread that I think an item nerf is coming.  The latest scenario bosses drop "doom artifacts" which are just about the top-notch items in the game.  Except these artifacts have a property that causes them to always drop to your corpse no matter what.  I'd bet money that they're carefully monitoring what these droppable artifacts go for in proportion to the usual ones, and how willing people are to use them.

It does make me wonder what a developer should do when faced with a fading game. If you want to make UO2, should you make it an updated UO? Or should you go in an entirely different direction, figuring the people who liked UO are staying with UO and you want different people for UO2?

Or should you do what CCP is doing, and say "Screw sequels" and just keep evolving the game? But that leads to really high learning curves if you don't keep adjusting the newbie experience...(And admittedly, CCP's skills system makes it easier for six-month newbs to compete with multi-year vets in PvP).

Or should you just roll the dice, and hope Game version 2.0 is so much better than it lures the people from one to another? Maybe shut down the original version to help it out?

Keep the old game running, spending as much money on facelifts and revamps as is justified by business it does.  Then make a different game on a different IP.  Don't revisit the premise of the old game until it's gone.  At least that would be my plan.

That certainly sounds like what Mythic is doing.

Agreed. Cannibalizing your playerbase and splitting them over 2 games, requiring twice the overhead, seems a stupid notion unless those games are different enough to expect to bring in sufficient numbers who wouldn't play the other.

Did you jizz yet?

Tell me this.  Will I be able to play this using merely my original release CDROM?  It's a horrible pain in the ass, but it worked, and I had lots of "neat" things due to the fact that I had a eight-year-old account, SO if there isn't anything else to pay for AND there's some sort of - I don't know - hint of direction for a n00b, I might be tempted to try this again.  Although I was somehwat disappointed that they deleted my original character.

OK, yes, EVE is down for maintenance right now.  I might be temporarily insane.

I hate you.

I sold my original account and had to stare at other people's vet rewards with envy last time. It wouldn't even let me use certain dye tubs. :heartbreak:

Out of some kind of insane nostalgia, I logged into Chessie. The place is absolutely dead empty deserted. I hit the banks in Britain and Moonglow and... nobody... I think I saw three other PCs. When I was playing actively three to five years ago, I'd have seen more people than that even in Fel.

I know there is much hate here for the bank sitters, but not a single one at the Britain bank? that's a huge hint about population.

Oh, yeah, I'm cooler than Elvis, lookit me, I got some kinda beetle in my electronic pants but I still don't know where the fuck I spawned and everybody else has horses and chocobos and shit!  This isn't Brittain, where's God-damned Lord Brittish, I gotta ask him where the fucking interface is!

I don't think the really old installation discs work anymore, and I suspect they'll want you to buy a box to get the new client anyway.  Of course, neither your account nor it's recorded age have anything to do with what disc you install from.


Yeah, the game is sporting a little over half the subs it was three years ago.  (Which, for as old as the game was even then, was it's all-time peak.)  But try Luna bank in Malas.  When Britain was invaded by uber-monsters about a year and a half ago, everyone moved to Luna.  On some shards, the banksitters stayed in Luna even after the invasion was over.

Speaking of city invasions, I'll go off on a tangent and praise the scenario they have going on now.  Ophidians are spawning in Skara Brae, Papua, Serpent's Hold, and Vesper.  The monsters drop various bits of shiny and weird plot-related items that are supposed to become relevant later.  As they're killed, individual spawn points shut down, allowing you to push the front back across the city.  At the same time, tougher and tougher critters spawn.

Eventually, if a large number of players descend upon a city and kill every single "boss" Ophidian, then that's it.  They're beaten, and won't come back.  On Europa there have been a number of shard-wide events based around clearing out particular cities, and at the moment only Vesper still has spawn in it.  Not counting Felucca, of course, where every city is still full of monsters.  Invaded cities don't have guards, you see.  Yes Martha, there are still PKs in UO.

Anyway, they've been doing city invasions forever, but this is the first one where players have actually been able to win, as opposed to just camping spawn until the devs decide it should be over.  I'm enjoying the shit out of it, frankly.


Sigged.

I made it work last December with my first-press, vintage disc.  I had to edit some files, but it worked.  The movie made me chuckle.


I suspect they can suck my EVE-playing dick.

Fuck them and the chocobo they rode in on?

I don't understand why people would expect to get this new client for free. It's not like UO releases an expansion 2 or 3 times a year like EQ.

I don't know why people would pay for this old broken shit. But hey, pretty up the client and bleed those suckers dry I suppose.

My bet will be to give away the client for free, but also do some kind of content based expansion in conjunction with it. A lot has to do with whether or not they are going to continue to support multiple clients, but from comments about keeping the requirements low, I'm guessing that they're not. If you were going to continue to support a 2d client, why would anyone care if your 3d client was higher spec.

And thanks, I'll go pop around Luna. It's been a while and the invasion sounds like a lot of fun. I've always enjoyed the regular events.

Wait -- Bard's Tale Skara Brae (and not that new shit -- we're talking 15 year old "You're attacked by 99 fucking skeletons, bitch" Bard's Tale)?

Same name (taken from a real place) different city.

So this doesn't tempt the discerning eye of Eric "This NGE thing looks like a good idea!" Schild?  EA should just throw in the towel and break down crying right now then.  Either that or quote you on the side of the fucking box as some sort of MMO revamp anti-savant.


I know nothing about Bard's Tale, but Ultima has had a Skara Brae since Ultima IV in 1985.

The Bard's Tale was produced by EA in 1985 as well. Reading up on it (bless you, Wikipedia) it appears you could import characters from Ultima III and Wizardry -- I didn't know they were done by the same group. (1985 was a LONG time ago!).

They weren't. Bard's Tale was Interplay, Ultima III was Origin and Wizardry was Sir-tech.

It's definitely not deserted.  Chesapeake was the first shard last week to down the sub-boss Yrigor, and *end* chapter one of the ongoing events.  The clues from that dungeon lead to the URL, which then released the above screenshots.  Not sure if a Chesapeake player was the first to figure out the puzzle (or just make a lucky guess), but they were the first to defeat the event itself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skara_Brae

And now you know, and so forth.

But they allowed you to import characters into The Bard's Tale? Companies sure played nicer back in the day......

I still have found memories of that game. And the Wizardry one where you woke up, and you were the bad guy. That one was fun.

Because they won't get my money otherwise?  And they are a bunch of chocobo fuckers?


Back in "the day", a "game company" was some nerd in his parents' basement.  There was a lot more solidarity.

Incidentally, I've been to Skara Brae.  It's pretty damn cool.  In fact, the Orkneys themselves are really fucking cool.  I could see myself retiring to Kirkwall.

Official announcement.  Assorted details.  Blurbage from Marc Jacobs.  Implication that Mythic is already at work on the expansion, even though I was under the impression that the acquisition wouldn't be finalized for a little while yet.  Stuff bolded by me.  No, those aren't links.

Ho.Li.Crap. How the shit did I not know about this back then?! I loved both games and never saw that connection.

Johnny come lately indeed.

It apparently wasn't available on all platforms. I don't remember it being an option on the Apple ][ version (which did have the other two games available on it) but I may have just forgotten.

Oh that explains it. I was Apple //e until my first Mac.

Same here. My first games were The Bard's Tale, Space Quest, Zork, and Hitchiker's Guide. I think Starflight as well. I didn't get my first PC for several years after that.

Still, I learned BASIC at the age of like 8 or so. It was something to do with the computer after I'd beaten a game, and was waiting for my mom to shell out for another. :)

All my Bard's Tale/Ultima/Wizardry experience was on the old stalwart, the Commodore 64. Yes, for you kiddies out there, that means it had a full 64kb of RAM (38911 bytes free!).

Heh- found a screen shot-

(http://www.myoldcomputers.com/museum/comp/museumpics/c64screen.gif)

Wow...memories!

So it's all but officially confirmed that Jacobs burst into the UO dev catacombs with a bullhorn and shouted "GET UP YOU LAZY FUCKS!"?

The cursor is not right.


Aaah shit!

As far as I can tell, the chain of events goes like this:

1)  UO team begins working on something around the beginning of the year.
2)  They state that a "big announcement" will be coming soon.
3)  News breaks that EA is purchasing Mythic.
4)  UO team cancels announcement, makes vague reference to talking with Mythic people.
5)  Stratics monkeys predict the doom of UO and a free pass to Warhammer for UO players.
6)  UO team denies imminent doom, states that plans may be getting "more ambitious".
7)  Players discover the UO:KR teaser site via clues from an in-game event, and here we are.

The amount of changes shown here reveal an origin well in advance of EA closing the deal with Mythic. I will give Mark credit for maybe pushing them along to a quicker release, but you can't just slap together a new game in a week without it being an obvious attention grab. There's serious deep level stuff he may have fast tracked, but I gotta imagine they've been on this awhile.

Thread title edited to be more useful.

I agree that there is a lot here, but there is no denying that a good coach can take twelve losers to the playoffs.  Surely there was a lot laying around from the debris of the past few years, but I find it sort of difficult to think that the team was suddenly just inspired to put a lot of it into a huge update.  But who knows, I don't have any facts or anything, just a gut feeling.  Angry gut.

C64 in Flash (seen on boingboing.net)
http://codeazur.com.br/stuff/fc64_final/

That's actually where we agree. I think they were working on this all for awhile, planned to announce it fairly soon anyway, and it is coincidence that Mark is here now to help them along. In my opinion, the only difference between him being at EA now and not being at EA, as it pertains to this expansion, is the attention the expansion received. Without Mark, this would still be a thread here, but not as much talked about in other places. With Mark it's news on top of news. A year from now people will think he did it. Maybe that's what EA wants. No idea.

I learned it at about the same age, but that was because the best thing I had was my VC20 with a whole 8k! (Outside of my Atari 2400) I had a tape drive, but it worked like shit.  If I wanted to play a game, I either waited for the tape drive to take 10 minutes loading, or just type in the whole 8k's myself.  I started making my own games soon after.  My best was my own Raiders of the Lost Ark game.  It was the popular movie at the time, and I was a fanboi too.  It was a challenge, even then, to stay within 8k though.  I still  boggle at the memory of it.  I think I was more of a catass on programming the games for that system than I was for playing them.  I think I just threw away my design notes from them all last year.  :cry:

Minor update.  EA is listing the following job opening (http://jobs.ea.com/pljb/global_jsp/applicant/DisplayJob/JobDetails.jsp?display=1&pljbHome=/ElectronicArts/United_States/applicant/index.jsp&id=4021).


So yeah, it looks like they're not just slapping some shit onto the client ala UO3D.  I don't know precisely what they mean by "rebuilding the world" or how ambitious this rebuilding will be, but the more the better.  Wouldn't it be sweet if they preserved the housing, but spread it out across a larger and totally redesigned world, and finally cut down on urban sprawl?

I hope they have learnt the lessons of NGE and aren't too ambitious.

Unless they up and turn it into a Diku, it would be almost impossible to fuck it up SWG style.  I mean for all the hundred pages of hand-wringing, the bottom line regarding the NGE is "Don't turn your non-Diku into a Diku, because anyone who wanted that is already playing WoW."

The game's already changed pretty significantly, but yea, not in the slap-in-face sorta way. New engine on one of the few remaining "old" games is good. I doubt they even want to mess with the old formula, or even would know how to. EA's idea of getting "serious" about MMOGs was buying Mythic for the sure-win Warhammer license.

(not that "sure win" equals "beats WoW", just that it's a far easier sell than a decade-old isometric game based on a license few modern gamers even really care about)

Sounds like a job for our resident mmo necromancer, Brian Green. :)

I guess we know who bought that other There license.

I think Raph should apply for this job.

Hehe that would be awesome. DD is back and badder than ever, bitches!

Incorrect history. The CU (the first revamp of SWG which occurred months before the NGE) was the revamp that turned it into a Diku. It did not work and they were in a mess, so that's when the NGE came along. And the NGE was an attempt to turn it all into a MMOFPS.

Then more broadly:  "Tinker with the game, but don't try to change genres.  You idiots."

It's like they invented New Coke, but instead of being cola, New Coke was actually a brand of butter.  And then they sat around wondering why all their cola customers weren't buying New Coke Butter.

Now tell me how this would not apply to UO:R?

Just fuck off.  Nobody cares.  Not even me at this point.

For the record, SW:G was always a diku, it was just veiled with layers and layers of bullshit.

Does "diku" even have meaning anymore?

I used to have a little Diku mud and once I made everything out of bread code and ate it.  It stood up pretty well and only crashed when I tried to eat my words. 

Just sharing....

o.O

The SWG changes took away a lot of the core value for the existing players.

Turning UO 3D or rebuilding the world doesn't do that. That doesn't mess with the core reasons people play UO.

 :rimshot:

Because the majority of players were playing a PVE game and having that interrupted by PKs. As a PVEer, I had no interest in sharing a world with the PKs at all. They were playing some game, but it was totally different from the game I (and I think the majority) of players were playing. PKs weren't part of our experience, they were an interruption of that experience. The minority of PKs were, in effect, changing the genre of the game for the majority.

I think that's an issue that the PKs never understood. We didn't view them as part of the game. They were a bug. UOR patched the bug.

The sad thing is, PvP in UO had so much potential. I remember Garriott going on and on about "You can be evil, but you'll have to do it thematically!" And Raph saying how the Ultima single-player series was about learning the virtues, then the online game was about applying them. And so on and so forth. And visions of kingdoms warring against each other, bandits (REAL bandits that don't go "hed up ur ass lol"), and yeah, it's been said a buncha times; a couple fuckwits screwed it up for everyone else. I made a thief, and an insta-rez bank-monkey stole my newbie gold not ten minutes into the game.

So we have the ultimate grief; the Trammel and Felucca split. LOL PKS GO 2 MIRROR.

 We all know that up to the moment UO:R released hordes of Dreadlords were camping guard lines and runegates and after UO:R released PKs and all other types of griefing magically disappeared in a happy-go-lucky Trammel.


 UO:R wasn’t there to solve any global problems, we all know it created a lot more issues than it solved, it was released with a sole purpose to compete with EQ, since WoW was not yet released and at the time trying to out-DIKU EQ was the thing to do with your mmorpg.

This is brilliance. The NGE derail was countered by possibly the only tangent with more power --- UO's bitchslap to PKers. And to make it all the better, the UO:R tangent actually brings the thread closer to topic.

Bravo.

UO:R solved everything.  Four out of every five UO players moved to Trammel and never really looked back.  Subscriptions increased, finally peaking three years and several expansion later, and the previously-discussed churn was reduced.  Even as the game nears ten years old, it's still profitable enough to justify major development.

The game is approaching a decade old, and the shit you're still on about is just a fucking footnote from the game's first couple years.  At this point it's like bitching that Nintendo Co. jumped the shark when it dropped the words "playing card" from it's name in the sixties.

You obviously still do.

WUA I think you are too experiencing Entitlement Issues, don't worry your entitelments are still in place. Now go play your robo-ninja-elf-samurai-bug-riding-neon-touting-artifact-using character and pretend that U in UO still stands for Ultima.

Oh I was a counselor in UO and a Pre-pub 9 Guardian in SWG...perhaps Im doomed to be tortured by MMO's, maybe I oughta go drink some New Coke Butter and end it all.....


Side Note: As a counselor going on player calls the biggest whiners were always the dreadlords....ALWAYS.

I jailed (yeah they had an instanced Jail FYI) 2 one time, the conversation went like this:
Me: Thats it Im taking you two to Jail, your behavior is way out of bounds (theyd sandbagged (blocked in 3 players in ghost form) some players and wouldnt release them)
DL1: FU A-hole Counselor
DL-2: "                       "
ME: ports them to Jail
Them: (after leaving them there a few hours) Dude your so unfair, this is a violation of my rights!
Me: ROFL Cry more noob....

Payback is a Bitch in a robe.....

I sure miss my glowy lantern sometimes when Im playing an MMO...

I don't know, we could try a politics derail. Just gotta get a good opening.

sinij the problem is the numbers don't agree with you.

You can claim that UO pre-Trammel was a better game, but you can't claim it was a more popular one.

I'm logged in right now.  And a year from now I'll be playing in Trammel on a spiffy revamped UO client while you scream about how UO is ten years old and has been "ruined" for eight of them.  Lawl.

I'm sure he has a graph somewhere that prove his numbers are correct!

(http://128.255.244.60/graphs/Pres04_WTA.jpg)(http://www.eriposte.com/war_peace/iraq/world_support/gallup_intl_2003_by_country.gif)

Who was the retard that paid $1.02 for a $1 maximum value contract?

I think graphs are clearly labeled.

This is why freeshards are good, and while they'll be even better come the new expansion. Take a little bit from here, a little from there and you have a better game.


Couldn't have said it better, OSI is a joke these days. I just want my old school PVP shard to look good.

More information released. (http://www.uo.com/uokr/UOKR/uokr_faq.shtml?sssdmh=dm24.95074)


In addition, developer Pat Malott (aka Leurocian) has apparently rejoined the UO team, much to the delight of the Stratics monkeys.  I will admit I'm pleased as well.  He was behind the "paragon  monster" system and the associated minor artifacts, as well as the last huge monster AI upgrade.  The systems he was behind always seemed to be the ones that were finished, working, and fun.

Shiny!


Too bad the fucking game will still be item centric.  I may still be drawn in, though.  I am finding Asherons Call to become stale; all anyone does is level level level.  I need adventure!

No, you were the one who didn't understand the game.  UO was meant to be a world, and in a world there are bad people.  If you had taken time to read the original manual, OSI flat out told you not to leave town unless you had a group of people with you who could all protect each other.

Of course, you can't maximize your gold intake when you have to split it with others.  Better to be greedy, die a bunch, and whine to devs for protection.

That's because a large number of vets bought extra accounts so they could place big houses on the new land.  It wasn't like a bunch of 14 year old kids went "OMG MOM!  5 YEAR OLD UO IS SAFE NOW!!! PLZ BUY FOR ME!!111!!"

I just know you have a graph for us Arnold. C'mon now. Don't be shy.

(http://www.mcnblogs.com/mcindie/archives/images/rodentile.jpg)

UO came out in late 97, and Rennaisance was like mid 2000.  It wasn't five years old.  It wasn't even a full three.  The market was much less competetive then, and it WAS immensely easier to talk my friends into trying the game when I could assure them that all the PK grieftard horror stories they had heard were a thing of the past.  Seriously, nobody fucking likes full-loot open PVP.  They just don't.  Deal with it.

I mean are you, and sinij, and some of the other usual suspects from the Stone Age early years of UO this defensive about EVERY unpopular thing that you happen to like?  When you order pizza, do you loudly lecture everyone else on how people really love anchovies, and it's just a conspiracy from pepperoni manufacturers that keeps them down?

(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)
(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)
(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)
(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)
(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)
(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)(http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/movies/sheep2.gif)

(http://img114.imageshack.us/img114/6299/growthsm9gy.jpg)

I never thought it'd be ten years later, and we'd still be arguing over whose playstyle is more fun. I'm not being snide or anything; that totally blows me away. TEN YEARS after Ultima Online came out! And here we are today, the same people, the same arguments.

I <3 U Guyz

UO was the first MMOG a lot of us ever played and for some reason we always stay passionate about our very first game even if we've stopped playing it years ago.

I don't really talk much about Asheron's Call... then again, I was in middle school, so I doubt I'd remember much to argue about anyway. It's just you UO guys :P.

UO was my first graphical MUD, too, but you don't see me airing my sandy vagina on the internet about it.  I just fucking quit playing.  Before this magical Trammel, too, which I still don't really understand.  I logged into UO last December and honestly wasn't sure if the virtual LARPers around me were able to gank me or not.  Since, you know, there isn't a manual or UI if you are using the fucking release CDROM like me.

Speaking of PvP only games, ARCHLord lauched with a whopping 2 US servers.   They had talked about a PvE only server, but decided at the last moment not to bother, as 'no one had any interest in it'.

The PvP is still no loot, no xp loss, just a free trip back to town.

Of course the PvP people are not happy as there is no point to it, and the PvE people don't want that free trip unannounced.

So ARCHLord has struck that perfect bad balance - a game neither style of player wants.

Well, why not? After all, the intial design was for a game I never wanted.

:heart:

I normally wouldn't go to such lengths to flame one particular poster, but since Sinij has been fagging up every single UO-related thread for the last two years, including ones like this which have nothing to do with the Rennaisance expansion, I took five minutes to throw this together in MSPaint.  Note that it even has one of his direct quotes from the infamous AW chart thread.

(http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e121/GrimDysart/loltard.jpg)

/chairnoise

(we got ourselves an old fashion'd CHART FIGHT!)

My favorite pvp quote of the day, from Amazon.com's CoV DVD comments:

Oh, and I don't wanna be left out of a CHART FIGHT!
(http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart3_files/Subscriptions_12180_image001.gif)

That's not a chart. That's a Jackson Pollock painting.

Dear God. That is some high-test cowardice, right there.

The sad thing is I see people like her on the CoH forums all the time, whining about how they want the badges you get from exploring, fighting monsters, and completing objectives in a PvP zone (oh and the special powers too kthx) but think it's a terrible design flaw that they have to expose themselves to PvP to get any of them.

BZUH.

--GF

Sometimes I forget that there are players like that.

I don't understand their fear. Didn't they ever play sports or compete against other kids in school? Tetherball? Foursquare? Spelling Bees? Hell.....Chutes and Ladders? Or are people who do those things considered sociopathic retards as well?

Cowardice and fear have nothing to do with it. It's about a preference for certain things in a game that they feel PVP detracts from and a disinterest in what they see as being offered by PVP.

Believe it or not, some people avoid competition not because they're afraid to lose, but because they simply don't feel it's that enjoyable. Cooperation and socializing is what I prefer to do with my leisure time, not competing.

Read her letter again.

She considered closing her account simply because City of Villians EXISTED.

That goes beyond anything you stated. She also completely overstates how much PvP is a factor in CoX (not much), as if the entire game world came crumbling down.

Then she closed with this line:


Dislike PvP for whatever reasons you want, but the person who wrote those words is someone who lives in fear.

[edit] I do believe however that no one really dislikes competition. Everyone, in some way or another, will compete in trying to land a job, or in garnering the attention of someone, or in proving or disproving a point, or in the buying or selling of something. Just because you're not carrying a virtual rocket launcher in your virtual hand doesn't make it any different.

Hell, some of the most cutthroat and hostile people in mmo gaming are "carebears", simply because they're willing to go so far as to villianize other players and protest for a playing ground all to themselves (which they sometimes even win). If anything, they're "competitively spirited".

Even this woman above is partaking in some form competition by taking the time out to write an Amazon review.

What if those zones didn't have PVP but instead had random purple mobs that could only be won by using a random obscure tactic, combo or just sheer dumb luck. Would her supposed aversion to that indicate fear and cowardice as well?

What?

So every player you fight or see is equivalent to a fortune bound, "obscure" tactic using purple?

She didn't like CoV because of its influence on CoH and the promotion of PvP in both games.

Much like Numtini, I prefer a cooperative experience over a competitive one.  It is fairly common, although many of the competitive types do not seem to really understand it.

Lant, very nicely said

Its happened before. I'm playing wow again. entire roster well 2 servers worth of toons. every thing alliance can make. And I'm really grooving on warriors and rogues until I get to lvl 20, well 18 ish. Then I find I cant bear to play anything but priest, druid and pally. I dearly love co-op play in a supporting role. This is not a suprise I was a cleric main in eq. But the snap of my attention from the leveling levels to the first instance is very telling. And is great fun to me. This probally means something deep that I am way to much of a moron to appreciate but whatever.

I can enjoy cooperative experiences too. I'm neither here or there. A game is a game. [edit] So long as it's a game.


Anyways, I really don't understand how she could feel so displeased with the PvP content to the point that she'd want to cancel her account -- simply because she didn't prefer a competitive experience (sorry for the long sentence). I don't find that to be a very good reason at all. The bulk of the game (at least 90%) is still "cooperative PvE". Buying CoV wasn't going to roadblock her preferred method of gameplay.

You think you're pulling that out of your ass, but you're not.

Those mobs are called "giant monsters", and they show up in most of the zones of CoV and select zones of CoH, and there are still badges there. Two giant monsters actually show up as ambushes. (And let me tell you, you haven't lived until you exit a warehouse, hear in team chat "wasn't there supposed to be an ambush here" and then 50 feet of scrapyard robot jumps up onto the overpass. Good times.)

If anybody quit CoX just because of the potential of being run right the hell over by a giant monsters, then yes, that's fear and/or cowardice beyond the call of all rationality, because giant monsters have about as much relevance to the badge grind as do other players in a PvP zone. The only difference is that giant monsters don't hunt you down at the hospital if you whine about them killing you.

--GF

Most of em are still upset over the Trammel/Felucca split. Me, I'm still laughing about it.

Seriously though, I think they take the competition outside of the game. I used to think they were just trying to get more sheep to prey on, and thus convince more people to support their playstyle. I don't think that's the case anymore. They have to pwn you IRL too, and the place they bring the fight is on the message boards. Kinda goes along with the recent debate (http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/10/05/players-who-post-posters-who-play/) over whether the forums and chat are part of the game.

I was perfectly happy playing on SP.  Everyone on that server wanted to be there.  But we kept getting code bleed from the Trammel servers, and finally, they just up and changed the game completely.

I'd probably still be happily playing the game, on SP, if they hadn't done those things.

I think the thing that annoys me most about games that patch in PvP after the fact is that it inevitably leads to a massive rebalancing/nerfing of the existing PvE skills to accomodate it.

That is the difference. The giant monster is there for your group have a good time, but the PVPer is there to make you lose.

Many thanks to whoever de-fagged my thread.  Rasix, I assume it was you.

/bow

Yar.  I just don't think I could have yelled SHUT UP loud enough through the internet.

Just thought I'd bump this to blab about the Halloween event that started today.

Typing "trick or treat" will bring up a targeting cursor, and selecting a friendly NPC will usually get them to say something polite as they deposit some candy into your inventory.  Usually.  Every once in a while the NPC will yell "Trick!" and something strange will happen.  Some of the more interesting ones include...

*  Being instantly blown into giblets, with bodyparts left lying on the ground.  You don't lose any insurance money to this particular form of death, however, which makes it pretty much trivial.

*  Being polymorphed into a monster.  No special gameplay effect, you're just turned into a randomly chosen creature for about ten minutes.

*  Having to fight your evil twin.  An NPC duplicate of your character will appear, complete with all your stats, skills, and equipment, and immediately attack.  I thought this in particular was really cool.

In addition, grim reapers have been spawning in certain cemeteries.  They have ridiculous amounts of HP, good melee, a couple of unique wide-area debuffs on top of all the necromancy spells, and can drop artifacts.  They switch targets frequently, but when they're locked onto someone they'll follow that person to the ends of the earth.  They'll even follow you across the world if you cast recall to escape.  Naturally everyone who gets targeted recalls to Britain bank, and chaos ensues.

The last couple of in-game events, this and the ophidian invasion I referenced earlier in this thread, have been really good for a change.

There is also one which will make your character scream, then trail/spurt blood for the next 10-20 steps.  No actual damage taken.

I was on Europa at 3am last night, meaning 8 or 9am local server time, and Brit bank was still a warzone.  A crowd of people was there fighting one or two grim reapers at a time, while people continuously gated between cemeteries looking for more.

Oh, and there's a very uncommon "trick" where you go invisible for a few minutes and can't reveal yourself, even by talking or casting.  Which means that every once in a while some guy in Felucca starts getting hit with spells and has no idea where they're coming from.  lol

That sounds like the first month of release.  What's next the trick that turns you into a ghost and lets you rez inside someone's house?

Given that it's a VERY uncommon trick, that it lasts for only a short time when it happens, and that this entire event is going away in a couple of days, I'm willing to let a few things slide.  A would-be PK would have to spam "trick or treat" literally all day just for a couple of minutes of inviso-ganking.

People camped rubicite armor for a month in EQ1. Being able to invisiibly kill people is 100x more fun. I would die laughing as my victim fell to the ground spamming "WTF!?" and I was never a PKer in UO.

Halloween event is over, and I never heard any hue and cry over the invisibility thing.  /shrug

In other news, Tweety (http://boards.stratics.com/php-bin/uo/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=6916046&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=31&fpart=1) is the new UO community rep.  Lawl.

That thread has the worst goddamn sig images I've ever seen. And I've visited places like Gaia Online and Cyworld before.

God. They made Wilki a designer? Yuck.

Holy crap, it's like they followed the 'Fantasy Montage Signature' technique to the T.

These people are soldiers in the army of badly photoshopping text onto even worse images.

Who'd she piss off to get stuck with that job?

It's almost a shame Lum left for NCSoft - imagine him as the UO CS rep. :-D

I notice now that someone named Jeremy Dalberg is actually the one taking over Wilki's role of Community Coordinator, while Tweety is referred to as Director of Community.  Is she splitting her time between DAoC and UO now?

This must be playing havoc with her duties as a fairy.

I would not have pegged the current UO playerbase as complainers.  Not ones to be taken seriously, anyway.


And yet they all look vastly better than UO.

Speaking of sigs, Tweety has this as hers on Stratics:


At which point one of the Stratics monkeys discovered this:


And Tweety replied thusly:


So Mythic is the all-in-one EA MMO division, with WAR as it's flagship title, and DAoC and a cleaned up UO filling out the roster.  At this point I consider a Station Pass sort of deal to be almost certain.

Holy crap.  :-o Truly UO is so old that it has become new again!

Amazingly enough, a station pass with those three games might not be a bad thing at all.

In other news, there's been another duper/cheater/whatever purge.  This one supposedly followed a great deal of observation and planning on who to go after, so while they only nailed 400 accounts, the effect has been very visible.  They didn't just nail a bunch of secondary accounts used to cheat, they paid attention and took down the primary accounts belonging to the cheaters.  Several very high-profile merchants on Europa were summarily banned, their shops standing stripped of vendors when the shards came back up.

I haven't checked this personally, but the noise I've heard is that a couple hundred auctions were quickly removed from a Europa-specific auction site, and that the eBay price of gold has gone up signifigantly.

Yeah, I might actually cough up a few bucks for that. Only if they eliminate spriggans from DAOC though.

They are breaking up with tradition of nearly randomly banning wrong people. It was to the point of comedy how dupers always got away and wrong people always got banned in all UO 'purges'. Now if they got 'classic' server going, perhaps with new 3D client, they might get some people playing UO again.

Almost worth $10 per month!

I'd go with $15 a month, which essentially means you get DAoC and UO for free.

Doesn't Mythic already run "classic servers" for Camelot?  I could see them doing something similar here.  At least eventually.

I don't know, I paid $22 for just SWG and MxO for maybe half a year. Although I wouldn't do it myself, I'd file paying $20 for War/UO/DAoC as "not insane".

Another note:  Now that Mythic is in charge of UO, they're apparently mulling over banning eBay sales.  Tweety says they won't have an answer on the issue for a while yet though.

Ya I remember people buying 3-5 new accounts for houses when trammel opened.

I found eBaying accounts in UO actually let me re-sub and de-sub more easily.  Starting UO from absolute scratch would really suck. It is nice to be able to buy a combat capable character and a small house. Of course, this was back when there were no empty lots in Trammel - unless you spent weeks IDOCing - but that was never high on my list of reasons to re-sub.

Thing is, you could pretty much RMT through EA even without eBay.  All of the for-pay services like shard transfers and name changes come in the form of tokens.  What that means is you pay EA your fee, and your character gets "a name change token" or whatever in their pack.  That can then be used, or sold to other players for gold.

So one could buy a token, then sell it for gold, and buy an advanced character token or a house or whatever.  And from a buyer's perspective, it's nice being able to purchase those services with your UO play money instead of actual cash.

I'd really like to play UO on a pre-trammel server that has a good population and rules against macroing. Do private shards that fit my requirements exist?

http://www.metropolisshard.com/

May want to post a hello message on the UO boards, never know who is in the wayback machine.

Should be fixed to read...



Cheap shot I know.

Latest in Mythic's UO plans, selling Ultima Online key chains and beer mugs (http://www.mythicstore.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWCATS&Category=6).  While this is sort of a WTF move, I'm pleased with all the attention they're giving my beat-up old game.

Weak.  Lame.  If UO was really hardcore, those mugs would be leather:

http://www.jesterleather.com/gallery/gallery.html (http://www.jesterleather.com/gallery/gallery.html)

When is this fucking new turdpolish expansion coming out?

Spring of the coming year is all that's been said thus far.  And to pad this post, a little baseless speculation upon the fact that the integration of Punkbuster into UO has been canned.

A)  It probably didn't work that well in testing.

B)  Someone from Mythic came along and said "This sucks anyway, let's just build something into the new client like WoW and whoever else did."

C)  Cheat protection isn't worth much if it's optional.  I expect that the new client (though probably not the associated expansion content) will be available for free as soon as EA feels it's sold as many boxes as it's going to, at which point support for the old clients will be phased out.

That shard is not against Macroing, but I had fun there. Good PVP.


My weigh in...

I still don't understand why they never made a new server with legacy settings. People had only been asking begging for it for years. I know I personally would have resubbed in a heartbeat, along with a crew of guys I know.

I totally agree with what someone mentioned earlier about it being damn tough to get people to try an old game, due to the "these guys are gonna have all the gear, experience, tricks and what do I get besides owned?" thought process. Hell, I'll admit not wanting to try a year old game for the same reasons. For me it's start at launch or probably not at all. Like EVE, since I heard it was a great PVP game I had considered trying it but after reading up it would take 6 months of training to even get a decent ship. Fuck that. I had tried to get some friends to try UO out but most the time they were just too far behind. A game as aged as UO should let you start as a 3x GM in certain skills, and leave more advanced ones for you to work on. Give the new guy a bone, and old players re-rolling probably deserve it anyways.

Another example of a great game (to this day) is Subspace (2d space shooter MMO). But I pity any noob that tries to roll in and play in Chaos zone or Powerball. The learning curve is just too steep and you are playing against people that have been refining their skills for 10 years. Same sort of thing applies in most any game that is skill based PVP and is not a FPS -  like SS or UO.

Well, you'll be gank bait in a straight-up fight for a while, yeah. In a group or fleet engagement, you're actually surprising useful just a week in.

I still agree with you on the "leg-up' thing on grey shards (at least). Probably why 100-500x rate servers for Lineage 2 are so popular, although that's probably exacerbated by the fact that Lineage 2 is grind from hell.

I like SB approach - 1-2 hours of newbie island then off to a druid farm for finished character. Original UO had ultra-long advancement, it took years to GM some skills without macroing/bugs. Resist, parry were super hard skills, eval and anat were not possible without macroing. On a positive side you didn't had to be 7GM to compete, most had 2-3GM and were fine with it.

Eh.  I was the head newbie wrangler for my UO guild all last year, and we had a lot of people who were fresh to the game.  We'd have two dozen people online, and a dozen of them would have been playing for three months or less.  All of the ones I kept tabs on are richer than me now.  I started over fresh on Europa a year and a half ago, and while I'm hardly a powergamer, I daresay my current gear setup is worth some millions.

Anyway, that's not why I'm posting.  I'm posting because Wilki, the former community monkey and current developer, decided to poke his nose into a Stratics thread about "Wah, I was unfairly banned for duping!" and completely blow his stack (http://boards.stratics.com/php-bin/uo/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=6938579&page=4&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=31&fpart=4&vc=1&what2=postlist&selv=&vwhich=).

EDIT: misread what WUA posted

Hmmm...I could give it a try as long as I can actually contribute.

Thats how it works most the time for me, I go from the 'guy who shows up and gets owned' to the guy people depend on to be there to lead shit. lol

Read up on Goonfleets achievements.  Its amazing what one can do as a noob in EVE.

Resist and parry were easy, but I was a dirty arrpeer and was always sparring with the militia. Eval and Anat didn't mean shit until I didn't give a shit anymore :) I stuck with my tank-mage long past it's prime. It was still a useful character for a long time, fun to play. When it wasn't, I moved to Siege and started a non-combat character, no magery, nada.

Oh, Sky (the UO character) also got his resists up in the era of firewalkers...so there's that.

Update.  New client being logged onto production shards for bug testing, to be shown to the public next month in Georgia at one of UO's traveling dev team "town hall" events.

Bump this when they release classic server.

P.S. Trammel sux PK rulez!

Thanks for keeping us updated.  I am curious how this will all pan out!

Too bad I'm in WDW on that day.  Very close to my previous house.

Looks like good stuff. If I had the slightest interest in playing UO again.

Quad-directional movement is so retro!

On a peripheral note, it done snowed in UO today.  Here's me at Skara Brae moongate.

(http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e121/GrimDysart/snowen.jpg)

Holy crap, NICE. I'm impressed because I thought that would be impossible given the nature of the graphics engine...not without downloading a new game map, anyway. I like their solution to that.

That is kind of cool, actually. Did the frigid cold kill mongbats instantly?

It didn't kill flowers, so probably not.

Somehow I thought you'd be taller.

They presumably do it the same way they handle dyes -- they change the color palette of the tiles/objects.

You look like Darth Vader with a mace.  Still waiting on that new client.

I think 2007 graphics would have been better, but I can live with 2001 graphics. I will consider trying it out as long as it's not scrapped before release. Trusting EA is like trusting a serial killer offering to give me a ride in his van.

From what I understand it is pretty easy.  Azaroth would know better than I; its one of the reasons that player run shards are easy to mold into what people like. 

In the early days of UO people were even able to pick up the rare tile here and there and carry them around. 

Forest tiles match up one for one with the snow tile palatte.  They just pointed the forest tile # to the matching snow tile.  Then the canopies on the Trammel trees are just dyed.

I heard it did kill the flowers, but only on pre-Trammel servers.

This is my New Years present to WUA, a free bump for his pet thread.

Folks,

   Just so you know, the UO guys are doing a really great job on all the new stuff.  We're really pleased with their progress to date.  I can't answer any questions about it but since you guys have showed interest, I thought I'd pass that on.

Mark

Since you can't answer questions, I won't ask any.  I'll just tell you what I hope you do, since you're here.

1)  Enact a sort of Station Pass deal.  I consider this a foregone conclusion because I'm assuming that you guys aren't idiots, but one can never be too sure.  I'm not about to pay another fifteen dollars or whatever to play DAoC or even WAR, but if I can get all three for a modest increase to what I'm already paying for UO, you'll probably keep me paying that moderately higher fee forever.

2)  Do your best to exterminate RMT from UO.  I know efforts like this are never totally successful, but go at it anyway.  It's gone totally unchecked for years and it makes life way too easy for the professional eBay assholes who are so prone to exploting.

3)  Give Sinij and friends their retro-shard.  Lots of people seem to want one, you did something similar for DAoC, and it doesn't hurt anything to try.

YES.  I would suggest doing what NCSoft currently does (as far as format).  They have SOE beat hands down as far as ease of getting back into their games; I for one would love to see a similiar set up but filled with a better stable of games. 

I buy all my NCsoft games via the intardnet.  When (if) I get a hankering for something it is extremely easy to DL it, resub, and hop in.  Hell, it would be sweet to see EA allow some sorta merger system with NCSofts current setup; charge 40USD or so a month to play any NCSoft game or EA MMO.   I bet it would make oodles of cash!

I have mixed feelings about RMT.  I do use it; it is a wonderful way for me to play a system that I would not normally be able to play due to time constraints and whatnot.  As Lum says, its all in the design.  I never RMT'd for EQ2, AC or WoW.  I have probably for every other game (and that is a LOT of games).

Yes.  And do not use silly mechanics to slow down gain.  Siege Perilous was my main reason for hopping into UO last year, and the stupid fucking limited gains per day caused me and my 2 buddies to quit after a couple weeks.

My 2 cents, SirBruce style.

Nice to see you got your 1 post for the year out of the way early, Mark  :-D

We are all ears whenever you have more to tell us.

WindupAtheist,

   As to a Station Pass, I may mixed feelings on this one.  On one hand, I think that it is good because it can save people some $$$$ and can encourage people to try another game.  OTOH, I think that it is bad because it might "leave money on the table" and that money, especially in the case of a new game, will need to be made up somewhere.  As a long-standing opponent of RMT in most MMORPGs, the last thing I want to do is have to find additional sources of revenue from the players to cover the huge cost of developing a AAA MMORPG.  I also think that in the case of games based on licensed IP, that having a All-Access Pass can lead to lots of complications and hurt feelings.  Back in the Gamestorm days, that situation came up a bunch and while it was always resolved, it was tricky at times.  And I'm left to wonder if things would have worked out so well if the amounts that we were talking about were based on today's MMORPG sub-rates and not the comparative handfuls of people who were playing back then.  I also find the math of it amusing such as "We have 1M monthly subs on our system, 400K are playing Game 1, 400K are playing Game 2 and 500K are playing Game 3.  We rock!"  Every time I hear that I have a weird flashback to Reganomics.  :)

    As far as a retro-shard, we'll focus on getting the new stuff working well first and then we could look at other possibilities.  I'm all for different rulesets for games if demand is there as DAoC has certainly proved but now is too soon to even consider it.

WayAbvPar,

   Hehe.  I'll never post anywhere globally near as much as I did back in the pre-DAoC launch days but I've certainly posted more in the last year than I have in a while.  Lack of time and the TDJ (Tom, Dick and Jerky) factor have been a deterrent for me as were the death threats (even called the Feds in once) and general level of abuse once certain people (EDITED: and I don't mean anyone on F13 just to be clear) saw where I was posting and then followed to ladle on more nonsense.

Mark

Mark

The question is, how many people are there who will pay... say... two $15 subscriptions for two of your games?  Yeah, you're losing a few bucks if you sell those guys access to the whole roster for a package deal of $20 or $25.

On the other hand, what about the guy who comes in specifically to play WAR, and gets a little burned-out after a few months?  Do you want him taking his $15 to Blizzard or Sony?  Or do you want him increasing his payments to you by $5 or $10 so he can dabble in DAoC/UO/TSO (or whatever else) while still keeping his WAR account open so he can occasionally drop in to check on his guild and the latest patch?

People are going to float between games, so give them a reason to stay under your tent when they do it.  At least that's what seems sensible to me, although I don't have access to any relevant subscription figures, so maybe you know better.

And I know you want to rout out the RMT from UO.  I also suspect you're not sure whether it's a good idea, given how long it's been running unchecked.  Well I play the game, I see it from the inside, and I say go for it.

I'm not sure I could handle the graphics in UO after such a long time but a reto-shard sure is tempting.

Go look at the first page!  They're adding slightly-less-outdated graphics soon!  ZOMG!

The worst thing they could do for a retro shard is to add ROT or some other rule that would prevent people from jumping in and competing in shortest possible time. I'd say let people start with 2 skills at 60, one at 80 and 150 in stats, so even brand new characters are somewhat capable of fighting back. It should still be 7GM cap, but maybe create separate cap for non-combat skills and limit to 1 character per account.

Another challenge will be deciding what to bring over and what to leave behind. I see no reason not to bring over customized housing or anything crafting/interface related. Whole item system with resist, luck and such should be abandoned. New skills, like necromancy, chivalry, should be left behind. On other hand I don't see a problem brining over controllable combat moves or leather armor for mages, but it is a significant deviation from classical rules. Skill scrolls should be limited to +10 or removed altogether, there should be no +stat scrolls. Item insurance must go, there shouldn't be a way to bless any equipment aside from your clothing.
 

One thing I don't like in modern UO is the "suit building" process.  Gotta find the right artifacts with the right mods, then find other pieces to build around those to come up with a balanced set of properties.  Change one piece and you may well have to change every other piece to compensate.  I miss being able to do this:

Me:  "Light archer suit please."
Smith:  "Ok, what type of ore?"
Me:  "Shadow iron.  How much?"
Smith:  "Say 5k.  Want any weapons with that?"
Me:  "Sure, a war axe and a mace."
Smith:  "Okay."

Bam, fucking done.

Ugh, I forgot they changed the armor so drastically.  Skill based game turned item centric?  Not sure if a new interface and pretty shiny will be enough to draw me back in.  Mark, I beg of you, grab a spare server and throw up a classic shard. 

Me love you long time?

Why are people still talking about UO like it matters? The game was sucktastic shit when it launched and it still is, the only difference is it was sucktastic because of PKs at launch, now it's sucktastic because of the total destruction of the Ultima brand this game represents.

Jesus, Diablo has better graphics and gameplay than UO.

Early UO had a tension to it that you just couldn't find in any other game.  I think that's why so many people romanticize it.  I have fond memories of the game myself, but so little had to do with graphics or actual mechanics... it was more the intangibles.

Eve has some of the same feeling- no telling who is your friend and who isn't 90% of the time. I have found that I crave that feeling in games...pure PvE makes me stabby now.

My worry about stepping into something like UO is, man, that game is OLD.  The players would be so far and away advanced.  I don't like to have to do a massive grind to get up to speed.  It's the downside to MMO age, I guess.

As for the pass - it'd interest me.  Because 1 MMO is my limit.  Who has time for 2 anyways?  Maybe some people but their opinions can't be worth much if their lives are that unsucessful. 

But for a few bucks more I could dabble in another.


It's also interesting... how doyou slice up that pie in a pass?  Specially with EA managers monkeying with it.  And Warhammer has a Gamesworkshop license.  Wouldn't be worth stepping on toes when you have a good thing going.

I have to quote the both of you, great and precious summarizations. 
Actually, it's hard to believe we still have to explain UO to people. After all these years, I think there are just three options:

a) you were there
b) you did your homeworks, and know what the adults are talking about when they say words like "UO" or "PVP"
c) you suck

Some of us liked it. *shrug* That's the only way to explain it. Some of us thought it was fun.

Show me someone who likes Texas Hold 'Em and I'll be glad to point out their faults, because I think Texas Hold 'Em sucks. That doesn't stop other people from liking it.

Holy shit. I like Texas Hold 'Em *and* UO.

I just won't play poker online, and won't play UO offline. I suppose that's the only thing that saves me from being a complete loser.

Then again, once your days consist of PartyPoker.com and yelling "Lightning Bolt!" at people dressed in green hosiery and running around in a corn field, I don't think you give a shit about what anyone thinks of you.

As far as a retro shard, I'm still trying to get someone to talk to me about that.

*Eyes Mark up and down*

I think looking closely at Redemption as a starting point for classic server is a good idea.

Mark Jacobs seems open to ideas.  If we have a sekret forum for anything (as far as new ones), and if he was serious about implementing this, and they were open to ideas, I believe this would have the most benefit currently.  At least until we weasel our way into WHO.

It indeed would be a fantastic starting point for a classic server, being that it was a TOTAL IPY ripoff.



And I can only say that because the people who ran it are my very very good friends, and the head admin is my best friend in the world :P

She actually started it up because she felt worse about me shutting down IPY than I did :P

It was definitely a good shard though. There's a lot to be said for having an infinitely level-headed person at the reigns (although I'd dispute that on a personal level sometimes  :-D). Plus, having a sexy little British firecracker at the head of any shard is probably always a good idea.

Ooh I hope she sees this and I get some brownie points.

Folks,

1) I am serious as well as open to ideas.  I'm still open to a private forum here if that comes about.

2) In terms of a classic server or new rulesets for UO, a lot will depend on how things go in the next few months.  I can't and won't promise that we will do new rulesets till I see that the new client is working well as we hope it will.  I'm the ultimate skeptic so as always, I'll believe it when I see it.

3) Azaroth, I replied to your email so you can stop eying me, especially up and down. :)

4) UO is indeed an old game but it is still going strong and I believe it still has some life left in her yet.  EA is backing up this belief and if all goes well, I hope we can do more with the game over time.  I'd love to see UO continue its run into the next decade and longer if the community supports it.

Mark

MJ Posts.  It is now only a matter of time before HRose turns up and claims that he wrote an article on the Cesspit which pre-empted the UO design docs by 18 months.

Yeah. I think I missed the "private forum" discussion.

My problem with ever coming back to UO is that I'm finding it hard enough to play my main MMO (WoW) along with several other side games that I can start and stop (GW, Mark of Chaos, Gamecube games.)  Also, I have a few Beta's burning too.  UO is not a game that you can pick and put down when you want.  Out of any of the games I've played since UO's launch, UO has been the most social-centric.  It wasn't about the game mechanics necessarily, but about the guild relationship, the adversary relationship, etc.  You can't keep that part of the game strong unless you are there pretty much every night.

When I played UO strong it was like that and had the best "feel" of all the games I've played.  When I started taking breaks and playing it more casually, it lost its shine.  Newer games have much better mechanics for that type of play, so why bother.  I can play solo 90% of the time in WoW and it fits that game.   The guild interaction in WoW is a chatroom, so persistent play isn't near as important as in the past.

It may have been a small thing, but being able to see each other represented as small avatars standing next to each other while you discussed things was important.  It provided just enough connection to your character that it felt like you were amongst friends or enemies more than usual in other games.  It is hard to describe.

Either way, due to my age and responsibilities these days, I can't dedicate that kind of time again, so the newer games will win out no matter what you do with UO.

Gah, I was thinking that a classic shard would be a great idea, but then I realised that it would be hosted somewhere other than Australia and the idea lost its appeal. :cry:

It got buried in the Vanguard thread under bile and crosstalk.

And Hrose.  He is very verbose.

I'm sure that'll teach me to spend more time on messageboards.

At least yours got nuked.  Nothing personal, but it made my eyes bleed at times.  Yet I could not help checking it out every so often!

That's unfortunate.

WTFman.com has reopened their messageboards; too bad my e-mail is banned (or gmail is, who knows), so I cannot register.  Every so often I put on my torn dress and delve into the underbelly of gaming sites.

Who would have guessed that WUA UO's thread would be useful. Wonders of Intraweb.

I think main points of a classic server should be a) No Trammel b) No alts c) Classic 'drop all your loot' crafting and combat system.

So to make it simple - No Trammies, no alts and no artifacts.

I only came in here because someone said jizz.

Wow, I think I've developed internet instincts.

My first instinct was to Google image search for jizz and then post it, and a split send later, I had the realization that no, that would be an awful idea.

Pity...your 100th post is a nice round number to be banned on  :evil: :evil:

You could always edit his post, add pic of jizz and ban him for that. I promise I won't tell anyone.

I agree. All that itemization jazz really got away from what UO was about: simple systems to foster player interaction, for good or ill. I still think people can't have nice toys, and I still liked the old Siege Perilous server the best.

I liked that people couldn't get into it quickly, and could only roll up a single character. It drastically lowered the amount of douchebaggery on the server. That server had a great community and was some of the best UO I'd played, couldn't go back to a ghetto shard after that. People tended to be invested more in their characters. Sure, you had entire guilds of jackasses, but you generally knew them, where they hung out, and they were invested in their jackassy characters. Reputation meant something, and I don't mean the cheesy hard-coded system.

I've been thinking about SP a lot lately, I just wish I had the time to invest in playing. The very things I like about mmo are the barrier to my playing mmo.

Actually, classic shard... I would be more than happy with Siege Perilous alone if it wasn't for that crap about limited gain per day or something like that...

Hey! I never did nothin' to nobody.  :-(

Should ban you just for thinking of it!!!  Get F13 shut down at work with jizz links =P

I can't believe a single post changed this from "getting something important done: the musical" to Jizzgate: F13.

The art of

(http://ipadventures.com/images/derail.jpg)

I don't suppose someone can come along and (yet again) split and den the obvious spam if this is in danger of getting locked or something?  I believe everyone, myself included, will be happier if my UO news/blathering is confined to one thread, rather than a new one created everytime there's something to report.

No.  Meandering is what makes F13 so beautiful.  Embrace the beauty.

WUA I can lend you my flame template, hope it will help you defend this thread.

If I get really bored, maybe.  OK, everyone, back to UO news/talking. 

Any more dumb crap will get split.

I found this post in my UO archives. I still think most of it (minus specific examples) stands.


Since then they proceeded to roll out AoS and FUBAR-ed PvP mechanics.

Wait, your what?  I thought I was the crazy UO obssessive.

Thread derailed? (http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/356393)

But to be halfway productive, the new client looks pretty good.  However, I'm still not going to play UO if it's full of samurai elves and shit.  I'm still a sucker for the potential that game has, the way a bunch of adventurers can wander into some guy's bar and kick back together or run off into a cave and hack on things or go fish up some sea monsters to fight for treasure.  That potential, however, is wasted as far as I've seen.

You need a girlfriend.

I have to say that it might be worthwhile to keep this thread clean and organized since I don't think there's been a productive UO discussion since 2000.  I only played release-version UO, though, so I am probably not to be trusted.

The samurai stuff is generally tasteful enough that I don't mind.  I even have GM Bushido on my character because it's useful to my template and unobtrusive.  (It's just a set of combat moves, your character doesn't scream "Corp Por" in Japanese or anything.)  The elf crap was just poorly-considered focus group nonsense, in my opinion.  Hopefully the next race they're adding will be something sensible and will dilute their influence a bit.

Thats a lot of assumptions about my sex, martial status and sexual preferences crammed into short sentence. I keep archive of my rants and raves as a way to monitor progress of my mental ret^h^h^hdegradation. That and some of my posts are funny and good for a chuckle or two later on.

I was hedging my bets in case you really did have a UO archive.

Regardless of who you are and how you identify, that would imply you are married and like women.

Or liked women at some point.

Or think of your husband as femme.

Do you sit up at night in the dark and chuckle over your various bon mots and a cold beer?

Every night. Don't you? If not, you should.

Quotes from this week's "Five on Friday" thing which I think might be relevant to the thread.



In terms of in-game events, noise is that either Moonglow or Luna (or both) will be destroyed.  UOAM has picked up a smashed-in copy of Moonglow floating out in space where players can't reach, and Luna is on fire on Test Center.  Sure it's just Test, but there was something about "city of paladins laid stone from stone" or some such in the event NPC dialogue a few months ago.

New player experience needs to be built up with the brand new interface.  ie.  Build the interface then spend some time working on the new player interface.  To do otherwise is to engage in failure.  I would be willing to help test this (from a QA perspective).  Not attempting to garner a free invite on stuff, just offering services. 

Anything to help a new player at all is better than what UO has now, which is zippo.  Seriously, I don't know where my manual is, and just letting me loose in the world is great, except that I remember being killed by everything larger than a bunny.  It would also be awesome if I didn't have to perform brain surgery on the UO client to get it to run; way to lose your IP addresses, geniuses.  Fix that shit before you start putting yellow exclamation points over peoples heads.

They do take you on a little tour where they make you invisible and teleport your newbie character around to watch actual players doing stuff.  And a newbie character always gets a tutorial quest relevant to their skills.  But yeah, it could be a lot better.

Okay... I look at UO and I think... 'Hmm, that game is OLD.  If I were to start playing it, I probably wouldn't be 10 years behind, as things have changed.  Maybe just 5 years behind, or 3 years behind....' then I think, 'no thanks.'

Thats the problem with MMOs.  All about the building up of.  All those expansions, too hard to catch up.  No sale.

I don't think we covered all angles on 'jizz' discussion.

I assume this has been added since December 2005, which was when I last bent the laws of time and space to install and run my original retail CDROM.

News. (http://pc.gamezone.com/news/01_26_07_09_37AM.htm)

The new graphics/UI client will be released for free, with an expansion requiring that client to be released a couple months later.  The new race is Gargoyle, which I love because it's an actual race from Ultima lore and not another Tolkien/WoW retread.

Yeah but....


hhokay.

I guess I don't understand why you'd spend all of that time and money to hand it all over to free servers, who will probably see an upswing of popularity based on that spent time and money.

Which is why EA might just finally put the legal beatdown on freeshards, as per the other thread.

Well. I wish EA good luck with that. They'll certainly need it, with the amount of shards & players out there. I don't think they'll have much more luck if they target the server emulators themselves either.

They don't need to shut down every random kiddie's shard with single-digit peak concurrency, just the big ones.

As above. Then like I've said, put out the fly paper when you dump the garbage.

There's nothing really wrong with small, friends and family type shards. Even though most of these would even shut down voluntarily once legal action on other shards started. But you want any shard that isn't small down, which isn't that hard to do. There are only so many shards with more than 50 people online (and only a few that actively seek, and make, profit). Then you want to offer official outlets for those styles of gameplay, or at least close to it, along with your attractive new client.. and scoop up as many as you can.

Jacobs has said earlier in this thread that a retro-shard is possible but not a given.  Well, I think it's a good idea.

Anyway, noise is that the new UI looks very unfinished at this point.  They still have a few months, so we'll see.  A bunch of the retarded Stratics monkeys are crying about the fact that the new UI uses slotted backpacks like every other game, and now they can't make "backpack art" or something.  Fucking mongoloids.

That'd be great for thieves!

Interesting.

So tempted to resub when this upgrade comes out.  Anyone know how long OSI keeps inactive accounts before deleting forever? 

I resubbed an OLD account last year, like 3-4 years old and it was still there.

Accounts are kept forever.  I've met people in the last year or two toddling around on characters that hadn't seen the light of day since 1998.  Of course a character that old will need a template overhaul and some gear before becoming particularly viable, but an energy vortex is still an energy vortex, and an ogre lord is still an ogre lord.

EDIT:  Some stuff from one of the devs on the new UI.  I'll post the relevant bits.


And a little concept art:

Gargoyle male (http://uo.stratics.com/content/sa/images/gargoyleconcept_t.jpg)
Gargoyle female (http://uo.stratics.com/content/sa/images/femalegargoyleconcept_t.jpg)
Some kinda weird city? (http://uo.stratics.com/content/sa/images/gargoylearchitecture1.jpg)
Closer view of center structure (http://uo.stratics.com/content/sa/images/gargoylearchitecture2_t.jpg)

Despite any various UI problems, they did one major thing right. It still looks like UO. When they started on this, were I able to give one piece of advice, it'd be that.

The gargoyles and revamp are making me consider playing.  Not a high chance, but more than there was before.

To wonder if gargoyles can be ninjas.

Thanks, now I have milk on my keyboard.

To laugh at that suggestion very outloudly.

Given the proportion of the UO playerbase that's Japanese these days, we're lucky gargoyles don't have giant Goku hair.  On the bright side, the ninja and samurai skills are pretty unobtrusive in execution.  A gargoyle disappearing from one place, appearing in another, and hitting someone with a little "Yaah!" noise shouldn't be terribly stupid looking, even if you're thinking "garg ninja" and dying inside.

I will say that if you stopped playing a few months after release, your character will be gone.  Either that or the little sprite was just as sick of the constant ganking as I was and went to live in a NES game somewhere.  On the other hand, you will have lots of weird shit in your inventory.  On another hand elsewhere, it will be enigmatic and/or crap.

If I take it up again, I'm going to play with WUA and let him mold me in the ways.

Honest to Cthulhu....I had a UO nightmare last night for some reason. Maybe too many chicken wings.

I dreamt that I logged into UO and my character was in the spot my house had been and had to run back to safety. I got boxed in by orc mages and didn't have any hotkeys defined and died with a ton of loot on me. Then I couldn't get back to retrieve it. Then I woke up.

Kinda like how I'm almost scared to log in my lvl 54 necro in EQ...I had logged out in the ghoul magi room in lower guk, within aggro range of the mobs there. Good chance I'd get wtfpwned and lose a level (I was close to that when I quit).

Should be an option in these games, if you haven't logged in with a character in over two years or whatever "Do you want to log into your last known location or a safe spot?" Yikes.

EQ1 has this.  If you've not logged that char in for 6-12 hours, (a while, I'm not sure how long.) you can hit a 'home' button, that will put your character at their home city when you log in, instead of wherever you were.  It's nice for when you're deep in the Plane of Whatever on a raid, and suddenly you have to log out for whatever reason.  When you come back, you can just appear at your home city instead of the middle of the dungeon.

--
Alkiera

Well it's still bare of content, and the links all lead to the old-style site, but UO Herald (http://www.uoherald.com/news/) is up.

Boof.

I would drop every game to play a UO retro shard (Pre UOR) . I would even pay more to do so.

Psycho.

Put this thread to rest already.

This thread is my one-stop dropoff for UO revamp/expansion news.  It's free to languish for weeks or months until something worth posting comes to my attention, but everyone can quit fagging it up with spam anytime now.

I want fresh news.
If nothing new comes up in a couple of days I am gonna resub out of frustration.
Saturday I logged in for 2 seconds in SWG to refresh my 42 months old house and found myself in serious needing of Ultima Online.

It's about UO. It was fagged up with spam from post one.

Looks like I am missing something...
WUA, what's this Shard of the Dead II (http://www.uo.com/sotd.html) I keep hearing about and that has all the nice events?

It's a special test shard they've started putting up each year around Halloween, with the events serving as a way for the developers to throw ideas at the wall and see which ones stick.  I wouldn't be surprised to see something like that lava maze, for example, turn up somewhere in the real game after the expansion.

Yeah, it went down months ago.  Let's hope they're more timely about taking announcements down off the site once they get switched over to UO Herald.

The unprofessionality of the UO website is scary.
That stuff on the Shard of the Dead sounds ubercool. It's unfair that it isn't actually in the game. They almost had me resubscribing just to see it... and it's not live. Boo.

I think ever since Calandryll was forced to close UO.com boards and was moved to other projects Community Managment of UO was abandoned and was picked up by Stratics mouth breathing idiots. I think you need CM even if all they do is say "maybe" or "not sure" in 100+ word posts. Your subscribers are not as likely to cancel when they can love/hate/stalk/try to bribe/whatever a person instead of a faceless company that doesn't talk back.

I think they have a couple new ones.

Myself, I wouldn't do that job (again?) for all the tea in China.

Being the visible face really DOES get you stalked beyond belief.

Just for the record, the UO.com boards were shut down after I was on UXO. I actually agreed with the decision at the time, but now I wish I had fought it. Hindsight is fun. I just think if you are really interested in player feedback, if you genuinely intend to use it to tweak (not drive, that's bad) designs, then you have to invest in official forums. Note, I'm not saying it's bad if you don't want that kind of feedback, but if you want it, then you have to cultivate it. And the only way to do that is to host and moderate the boards yourselves. I think official forums are vital for pre-launch and Betas at the very least.

I fully understand wanting the hassle of official boards off in the hands of someone else, Stratics is especially not a bad choice since you can be pretty assured that nothing entirely heinous is going to go on. I'd almost certainly let them handle the headache of IRC for me. I consider IRC little more than a heaving, writihing, spasming anus fest. Anything above 100 users in a channel is something I wouldn't want to visit too often. Over 200 and it's better off being stamped radioactive.

Saying that, I do agree with Cal's post above. Espeically about pre-launch boards.

Jeff Freeman posted a couple of articles, one excellent (http://mythicalblog.com/blog/2006/12/04/forums-are-misunderstood/), the other provocative (http://mythicalblog.com/blog/2006/03/23/forums-are-bad/) (which is what trolling on your own blog is called  :-P) about official boards, their uses, their abuses and their management.

Jeff Freeman aside, I'd like to note that SWG really wasted the potential of their Correspondents program. If you want feedback from the forums, having trusted and thoughtful users willing to work to seperate the wheat from the chaff, consolidate issues and bugs, and keep it all convienent for you is damn useful.

Of course, once they do they, they often expect you to actually read it. Barbarians.

Heh. I'm on the fence when it comes to things like correspondents. To really utilize them effectively, you almost need a full time community coordinator who does nothing but work with them and collect their feedback. Especially for a big, complicated game. The problem is, most companies aren’t going to approve the budget for a person who does nothing but that and even if they do, that person almost always gets tasked with other things, diminishing how effective the correspondents can be. The other issue relates to the almost inevitable feeling of entitlement (especially when you don't agree with their feedback - and yes, it's okay to disagree with the players), but that's partly solvable through rotating the ranks to prevent burnout and doesn't happen all that often. That said, I greatly enjoyed working with the Correspondents on SWG and wish I could have given them more of my time before I left.

Reading a recent article on mmorpg.com about official forums and rereading Jeff's article and opinions on official forums has me about ready to write my own blog post on them. Not in direct response to either, but every time I read someone imply that official forums exist to gag players or control their opinions (especially when it comes from someone in or related to the industry) it just makes me cringe. The notion that Community Representatives moderate all (or even most) negative criticism, even in companies where feedback isn’t a priority, or that moderation isn't a good thing for players is laughable. The evidence to destroy this belief is right in front of you, in every official forum, for every mmog that has one.

If OCR people are gagging players or deleting all negative posts, wouldn’t that mean official forums would have nothing but positive, flowery posts in them? Funny enough, despite the black helicopters and armies of nazi community people stamping out free speech, they’re not. Go read any official forum – I challenge you to find one that doesn’t have a majority of critical/negative posts after going through the posts that express an opinion.

In my years of community relations, I’d say I maybe moderated around 0.01% of the posts. Probably less. I’m totally guessing with that number, but the point is it’s a very, very, very small number compared to the total posts. Interestingly, I’d say at least 75% or more of those moderated posts were reported by other players who were basically saying “We’re trying to give our feedback and enjoy the forums, please remove this post because we don’t want to have to read this profanity and hate-filled crap.” In fact, taking it a step further, I’d say of the posts that were moderated, most were posts that had nothing to do with the game or the developers; rather they were attacking another player. And I don’t care how valid your point is, if you attack another member of the community, your post is going away. And I'm considered one of the more strict moderators.

Anyway, I should stop now. I’m gonna give this all some more thought and maybe write up something more comprehensive later. But to sum up...

Official forums are good. Moderation is good. Both for the developers and for the players. And I say that having been on all sides of the fence, community, developer, and player.

To do that, you would need your own blog.

/peer

Make sure to drop link here on f13 when you put it 'on paper', I'm too lazy to actually check blogs but still curious to see what you have to say.

How about he uses Schild's blog and posts it here?

I think the idea was that it'd be more efficient to deal with player representatives, who could find the signal in the noise for their constituency. e.g. once I asked correspondents to compile a list of things (I don't recall what it was, but something different than just the top bugs list they'd been making. "Annoying little things", or "Stuff that would increase enjoyability" or something like that).

It just wouldn't have happened otherwise, since I didn't have time to hit every forum, read hundreds or posts, compile lists, and then still I'd have missed things they wanted but just weren't talking about much. There were a lot of things on that list which were trivial to fix, change, or implement.

One opportunity wasted there was in not allowing the players elect their own representatives, so when they felt neglected they would have someone to fire. The elections, campaigning, debates, and discussions surrounding that would have created a lot of depth for the forum game, too. That side-effect either wasn't realized, disbelieved, or measured to be of less worth than the control afforded by appointing correspondents.


You always have people tasked with community relations, though. The idea was they'd be easier to relate with if they had some spokespersons.

Biggest problem was where we had our own Puerto Rico's and DC's: areas important and inhabited, but unrepresented.


That'd definitely be worse if they were elected.


Not that official forums exist for that reason, but it is a perk.

Not necessarily as ham-fisted as "moderation" (by which you mean deletion?) of negative opinions, but more subtly, official forums (really just dev presence) enable companies more control of the conversation. Without controlling the opinions, we can control what the opinions are about. Reply to A, don't reply to B, done. The players are talking about A. Left to their own devices, they might not be.

Just examples. You've actually done this for a living and probably know more than I could ever imagine. But no matter how you slice it, management is control. If the company is managing the community site, then the company is controlling it.


Second Life. :)

I would have pointed to Eve Online's, too, but dammit.


Surely there's more to community management than deleting posts...


Oh, unofficial forums are not unmoderated. The question is why players feel they are better served being moderated by the company, rather than by themselves.

But maybe the answer is just that simple: In spite of how little they trust us, they trust each other even less.

Mythic's approach, where they simply give you an email address to mail questions/feedback to, then have a weekly Q&A article seemed to cover that just as well.

As regards offcial forums, I guess I see it as a balance between acting as a sink for noise that might otherwise appear in game, in your inbox, or on useful unoffcial forums; and acting as a breeding ground that actually increases the amount of pointless crap people feel they need to post. In most cases I don't think the positive effect as a sink outweighs the problem of breeding more inane and indignant crap.

Beta boards are an exception ofc.

Ok, imagine this:

Front page blog-style news, etc. Actual community stuff, not a marketing site labeled "community". Every dev post anywhere showing up there as a news update (among other things) written so as to be comprehensible when read out-of-context.

Then, every update there with a link to a forum thread.

But, every server has its own "update discussions"-forum. So you aren't reading and replying to a mass of strangers: the people posting here are the people who play on your server.

Devs have a meta-view so they can see all the discussions as they do now: mass of replies from everyone. If they reply, it gets posted to all the servers' forums and as a front page post, again with a link back to that "update discussions"-forum (with the magical link, which take an individual player to their individual servers' view on that forum).

I think people would behave better, if they were posting on a forum with players they actually played with (at least on the same serve). Dev posts would be comprehensive and easy to find. Devs would still only need answer a question once for everyone to see it.

Basically your whole view of the community site could be filtered to present your preferred server as "the community", rather than a mass of strangers.

How come it's WUA's necro-by-nature post that gets the heavy-hitters?

I guess the problem with all of this is that you are spending a lot of time, money, and effort on something that will never be 'cool', and which still won't attract the mass of non-forum reading players.

Unofficial boards can and do carry server forums. When the community adopts an unofficial forum it feels like the community building something. When the faceless corporation does it, it will always feel like it is made out of plastic and not community driven. You say 'actual community stuff', but how do you actually make that happen without incurring reputational risk and making it look like the company is approving of one faction or another inside of the community? This is espeicially important as more and more games have pvp or rvr elements. You either end up with anodyne event reports or potential controversy, either way, it doesn't help.

Choosing the forum is part of community politics. Community politics are best left to the community. The producers have to remain aloof from most practical community discussions. The easiest way to maintain that separation is just to not have an official board in the first place.

Community management isn't, I think, about actually managing posts or money or whatever. It's just about managing moods. And that is done through information management.
My guess is that players feel that if the info management is officially in developers' hands, than there's a higher chance of such info being true. Or more, a higher chance of developers actually listening to player base.
I could say that it's a psychological thing, but you can't deny that should you be a user/player/customer.... the less filters you have between you and the target of your pleas (the devs), the more you feel like you are being listened.
It's like going to a shop to return a broken computer. If the clerk at the counter doesn't satisfy you, you want to talk with the head.
The closer you feel to the head, the less frustrated you think you are.

Recently Vanguard went the "no official forum" way, and from the user point of view I fail to see any good in it. Devs are doing a great job trying to answer lots of questions across multiple unofficial boards, but that's not easy for them (as one revealed), and it's even harder for us to know if a certain problem has been addressed maybe on a different board from the one we are watching.
This can be less true for the stratics-uo board, but you always have the feeling that you are not on the right place.
The unofficial nature of it give the (probably)false idea that if you aren't getting answers is probably because you are on the wrong board or, worst, start blaming the lack of an official board (where you could be ignored anyway but you would know for sure that it's the right place to ask/be).

As I said, it's psychological, but from a customer point of view I strongly oppose the lack of official forums.

anyway, I'd love to hear Moorgard say something about this. He's been my favourite Community Manager ever for a long time, so I think its point of view would be very valuable. Especially considering he led the EQ2 boards across the hardships of the first months (the bugs, the delusions, the cries, the two revamps) and managed to always have a great, functional, loving forum.

True. looking for a way to deal with the mass of players who do post, though. There are too many servers to cover all of them as separate forums from the dev side, and too many players posting when they're all mashed together.

Seems like more people would find them worthwhile if the people they played with were there (not drowned-out by all the strangers), and if the tone were a bit less .. whatever anonymity+audience equals.


No question, my preference is to let the players build their own community sites rather than this crazy many-and-one forum scheme, but "Let's not do official forums" is a proposal that very few profession community managers like, from what I can tell.


I'm not sure what you mean by 'actual community stuff' as it relates to that... what I mean is, most official game websites are for marketing, even if they say they are community sites. By "actual community stuff" I mean putting content on that website for your current players, rather than content mostly for shoppers.

Vanguard: Order Now! (http://vanguard.station.sony.com/) as compared to Vanguard: Community Site (http://vgplayers.station.sony.com/) essentially.


That seems unlikely to be an option in many cases... it is certainly the minority view right now.

How, do the players speak to the devs, and how to the devs pretend to listen, without devs posting even on the player's own fan forums? (if I understand you right, there).

Mind, I'm closer to sharing your opinion than most. Maybe any. I'd like for a massive amount of data to be spewed-out via RSS, so that fan-made sites could aggregate and present the sort of info you only get from a dev-run site now (and better: the server-level data which is generally ignored in favor of tri-level view of individual, guild, and then everybody (even though no one plays with everybody). So essentially the official site is - but deliberately now - a 'plastic' data-source.

Then community sites can be MyBlog, which auto-updates if I set it to grab my individual character's accomplishments feed (and where I can subscribe via feed reader to friends that I want to keep track of). Or My Guild Site, grabbing a guild feed and filtered member-accomplishments feeds for automated in-game news updates, plus manual updates from guild officers. Or My Preferred Server Site, grabbing a server-wide newsworthy accomplishments feed as well as filtered guild feeds. And maybe important game-wide announcements get spammed-out in all of those feeds.

That is, rather than just having character and guild pages with server leader boards (at most) on an official site only (with or without forums).

But the odds of that seem pretty low, too... there are scary gold farming companies waiting to buy-up those sites, too, plus it's not very "sexy" to just pump out RSS feed data. Maybe not too secure, either, in terms of keeping the company subs secrets.

I don't think it a good idea to post anything anywhere without also making a news update on the official blog/site. And those, with links to the forums on which they posted originally.

It seemed like many news sites specific to a single MMO did this already, even with all the dev posts being on the official site: they repost everything as a news update with a link to the forum from which they found it.

That way you're not out hunting for them, they are rewarding the sites they are using, and they're pointing you to a community to join (which they are listening to).


Oh, and I also think that "unofficially official" boards are sort of the worst of both worlds.


There always needs to be a clear, definitive way to send your words to the devs. Email or comment-submission form on the official website, or whatever, which they need to reply to 100% of the time to let you know you've reached them. Unless you want to speak to the devs and insist that they publish your commentary to all of their users, you shouldn't be made to feel frustrated in that way due to forums being official or not (I think this is necessary even with official forums).

Yea, yea. Truth is I don't have time to update a blog on a regular basis. But I really do want to write something based on all of this. So maybe I'll need to find someplace to host it.

Trust me, you don't have to!


If you put it on MySpace, you can use a glitter-font and give it a cool soundtrack.

Cal is one of those lovely people I believe should have glitter and theme music. 

I’m usually not a big fan of responding point for point because sometimes the sum of the parts of a post gets lost that way. So Dundee, I am going to just post my thoughts on your comments here...

Regarding Correspondents. Overall I agree if done right, they can be very effective. I think SWG’s was pretty close and certainly a good starting point for future developers to look at. I don’t like the idea of electing them however because really they have no power and most of them would wind up losing their position when the development team failed to implement designs for whatever class/gameplay they represented. Which relates to your last point about Correspondents… you made the comment that one of the problems you faced was that you had groups of players that were under-represented. Unfortunately, that will always be the case. Always. No matter how big your development team is, there will also be functions of the game that don’t get attention, possibly even for years. There are lots of good reasons for this, which could include the developers not agreeing that the system needs work, management having data to show that part of the game isn’t a big selling point so doing more work on it isn’t worth it, or simply that changing it is super complicated and the team isn’t ready to tackle it right now.

Those Correspondents and the players they represent won’t care about any of those reasons. All they care about is the part of the game they enjoy isn’t a priority for the developers. You will never avoid this, you can mitigate it, but you’ll never remove it. If one is going to have Correspondents, they need to have a plan in place to deal with this inevitable and mostly predictably backlash. Focusing the community on the designs you are working on right now is an extremely difficult, but vitally important aspect of Community Relations. The better you are at it, the better your game will be and the happier your community will be. I’ll get into that later though.

Regarding official forums. Here I will quote something you said and hope doing so doesn’t remove it’s context.

This is a good thing. No really, it is. And it happens regardless of whether you are on an official forum or not anyway. The developers control this simply by deciding which threads they respond to and which they don’t.

You used the word control; I’ll use the word focus. It’s the community manager’s job to focus the community on the topics most relevant to the development team and doing so is beneficial to both the community and the developers.

The benefit to doing this in an official forum is that the Community Managers can take it a step further and help the community focus on the topics that the development team wants to focus on. Why is this good for the community? Because it means they are commenting on stuff the development team is actually working on and their comments have a FAR better chance of being heard and acted upon in that situation. Now a good community manager would never tell players to “stop talking about archery bugs because the development team is working on melee bugs right now, so shut up!”, but letting them know that “we aren’t working on archery right now, feel free to talk about it, but our focus is going to be on the melee threads for now.” is GOOD for the community. You have far greater ability to manage that on official forums than you do on unofficial forums and the better you are at doing that, the more you can lessen the backlash from players who feel they are being ignored.

As an aside, I’ve always felt the topics for that focus should be set by the development team, not the community managers. All too often, the development team doesn’t get involved enough in that aspect of the service and it’s a HUGE missed opportunity and it makes the community managers job infinitely more difficult. But that’s another topic.

One last quote:
I think that is truer than you may realize.


On another note, I was talking to Tisirin at lunch today and he said something that I thought was pretty profound. A lot of people in the industry (even those in OCR) still see Community Relations as a social exercise. It’s not. It’s a business exercise. The sooner more people come around to that the sooner OCR will become a stronger and more efficient component of the online services of MMOGs.


By the way, I agree 100% with your comments that other technologies could be used to supplement or even take over some of the things that we are currently trying to do with forums or other text medium. The comment about doing a Podcast vs. an IRC chat in your blog is spot on.

EA needs to shitcan Stratics and either go without forums, or go back to hosting their own.  Fucking UO developers and CM people shouldn't be posting inbetween "Interview with so-and-so at WoW Stratics!" threads and below banner ads for EQ2 and gold-seller sites.

Stratics is a miserable, ugly, outdated site with piss-poor performance.  It survives only by happening to have become the main UO site, and is constant in it's frantic unsuccessful struggles to branch out into other games.  I may just go tubgirl them again for the hell of it.

Lum used to have such fun torturing Stratics in the old days when they were going through their trademark and copyright everything that moves phase. :)

Let me guess, Peaches still posts? *shudder*

The key point here is that you don't need an actual forum to do this.

Mythic's 'Herald'/blog structure is just fine.

And I don't think you can ever say 'our focus is going to be on the melee threads for now' without official forums working themselves up into such a tizz that they generate enormous amounts of melee noise and so much melee expectation that everyone ends up disappointed.

Now you might just about get away with 'we're looking at melee issues next week, so this is a good time for you to give melee feedback through our feedback mail system'.

Oh yeah, Peaches still posts.  I mean everyone around here calls me the UO fanboy because I still manage to like the game, but Stratics is so full of vapid cheerleaders that it makes even me want to strangle someone.  The developers could announce how their new expansion is going to be a box full of their own shit, and Peaches would proudly post that she bought three boxes to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Just be glad you don't know who Lord Kynd is.  He has a huge "Say no to PVP!" forum sig with a picture of a drow elf in it, objects to even the sort of consent-based Trammel guild wars I've been involved in, thinks the new race should be dwarves so that people can roleplay them as children, and happily tells everyone that he's crippled and does nothing but play UO twelve hours per day.  He gives me pedo vibes.

Mark, just in case you're still reading this thread, I'm going to tell you that you need to have the UO team withdraw from Stratics completely and just handle CM the way you do for DAoC and whatever else.  It's a sewer, and it makes your game look bad.

Agreed.
Plus looking at comments from some people I know that keep wondering every year how can UO still be alive (they never played it), they often use the lack of official boards as a proof of the lack of support and a hint to the forthcoming end of the game.
They don't know shit, of course, but THEY represent the average human/customers, not the f13-ers.

Well, I didn't know who he was, 'til you told me.  Now I'm getting creepy pedo vibes as well.  Ta for that.

I very much agree with this sentiment, with the following proviso: It is also the community manager's job to make the development team aware of the community's current focus.

To be blunt, MMO development is a shit-ton of work. Most devs focus so much energy on the work they do that they don't have bandwidth available to scan every corner of the message boards. (Note: Hartsman is one of the few exceptions I can name. That dude can run a game team, placate execs, churn out code, and still find the time to scour message boards. Pretty sure he's a robot powered by Diet Dr. Pepper.)

The community manager walks a very fine line and is usually underappreciated for it. They often either hear that "they aren't a real dev" (they are) or "they're just a marketing shill" (they aren't). The CRM is the best advocate of both the player and the developer--whether either side knows it or not.

What forum moderation comes down to isn't trying to stomp out negativity, but to help the voices of reason stand out from the noise. To do that, sometimes you have to ban people. Not because they slagged your company or hurt your feelings, but because they are unable to interact with other humans in a reasonable fashion and need to shut the hell up. The message you're trying to send and the assistance you need to provide is more important than any single person's self-proclaimed desire to be a jackass.

I understand Sigil's desire to allow fansites to blossom and drive the community. In a perfect world, that would be the ultimate foundation for a healthy player-dev interaction. But the world isn't perfect, and more often than not you need to cut through a ton of noise to help the majority of players get the info they need. While you could do that without official forums, it becomes much harder (needlessly so, in my opinion) to provide the focus needed to pull it off.

That's why I support official forums, though if I had it to do over again (and come to think of it, I do) I would offer tighter, leaner forums that encouraged fansites to fill the niches by growing their own communities.

I'm glad there are different strategies being used by different companies. There are strengths and special challenges regardless of the approach, I'd think, so there's an opportunity to compare and contrast.

...

I find this interesting.

By tighter, leaner, what do you mean?

Because surely the massive, overblown, one subforum for every imaginable subject and subset of players, is the only way to create nooks and niches small enough for sensible conversation?

Isn't 'general discussion' always going to be a mess?

I wanted to get back to UO so I did some research and asked a few questions in the stratic boards. Especially about the state of PvP and Factions (which (http://uo.stratics.com/content/basics/factions1.shtml), on paper (http://uo.stratics.com/content/basics/factions2.shtml), sound (http://uo.stratics.com/content/basics/factions3.shtml) great (http://guide.uo.com/factions_0.html)).

This (http://boards.stratics.com/php-bin/uo/showflat.php?Cat=1&Number=7123489&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=&fpart=1) is one of the replies I got:


Mythic, if you are still reading this, say something PvP.

And yet, 9 years later he's still there.  Now who's the idiot in the equation?

Uh?

What's your point man? Nevermind. Got it.

excellent chat -- thank you rednames  :-D

I think the providers that are successful with community management realize it's as much a responsibility to manage a forum etc. as in-game activities.  They know there is a unique meta-game going on, and the main losers are the provider and the uncommitted player when irrational members gain attention.  That is, it's easier to put a casual player off a game permanently with negativity than it is to moderate a hard core player, who can be at any time either pro or con the development team.  FWIW, the sense of community I got from the EQ2 forum was one of the reasons I kept resubbing, and in the exact reverse, why I'm done with Eve. 

This stuff matters -- how communities are managed become an indication to players for how the provider regards their customers and in short, how they might develop the game.  Those inferences aren't always correct, but players still take how the providers care & feed their community as an overall signal for how a player's time and money investment is regarded.  It's all pretty visceral, but the savvy providers know that.  Thx.

Like that's a bad thing?

It is if the virtual cheese is so good that you forget to finish the PvP system you were working on.

Dude...it's UO. The PvP system has been 'finished' since 1998.

I wish. But they felt like it needed to change and screwed it.
Then I read this factions thing that sounds pretty cool and that, apparently, it's broken and never fixed/completed/upgraded since forever.
 

The Faction system was very cool.

Factions are broken and need an overhaul now.  It's such a large project though, it never gets to hitch a ride on a publish. 

Yes. Just look at any of Stratics douches as a definitive proof of that. People like that give creationist valid point, after all how could simple monkey digress so much and not go extinct? So it must be god that created them, because god hates us all so much.

Why does WUA keep digging up my long dead beloved grandmother just to have anal quickie with her rotting corpse?

Well that how I feel about these UO threads.

And if you were tasked with updating a completely clusterhumped pile of spaghetti code to form some kind of consentual pvp in a game most serious pvp players passed up almost ten years ago...you'd slap on the yellow underwear and hop on a pink horse, too. Cheese?

Screenshot from Brit bank tonight.

(http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e121/GrimDysart/WoWLOL.jpg)

I don't think it's ever dawned on me how ravenous a fanboi WUA is until just now.

Hell yeah. Go UO.

Well, I actually snapped that pic to hear the comical outpouring of disbelief from a guild buddy of mine who's always telling me to sell all my UO stuff and move to WoW completely.  As soon as I logged in to sell a few things though, I saw that and had to smile.

But shit, yeah, UO FOREVAR!  I'm level 51 in WoW and frankly killing skeletons in Western Plaguelands over and over is losing it's charm.  I feel another UO bout coming on.

An equivalent screenshot in WoW would have huge numbers of players going "UO? What's that?"

Why do we even heave UO sub-board? You'll all scoff is new water thread.

What is 18X18? A house size?

Yeah a house plot.  Largest custom house size you can currently own.

We have a UO sub-board because months ago Cheddar and friends made some freeshard their game of the month.  Has nothing to do with me, and frankly I don't see the need for one.  There isn't enough UO activity here to justify anything more than the current "guy who still pays attention bringing news on it sometimes" thread.

It was left for WUA and I to call each other bad names in, and for Schildy to change to the latest 5+ player, short lived venture.

We keep it available for emergency game explosions and MMO necromancy.  Shit happens.

Freetardsshards! Play here. http://www.inmaniylem.com/ (http://www.inmaniylem.com/)

If only to log in and page the admin telling him to move you to prison permanently.

It always fun to log in then page GM detailed instruction on how to go about of anal fucking themselves...

So they just wrapped up this event where monsters in the original dungeons were dropping these books that could be turned in for rewards.  Then for the last few days they've had this thing where the Lycaeum was being invaded by evil necromancy-using wisps.  And on Test Center now is this thing where you have to "cleanse" one of the virtue shrines by killing a bunch of uber spawn that's around it, then use it to start this quest-chain that takes you to one of the dungeons, gives you a little bit of backstory, and spawns some sort of boss for you to kill.  They manage to work in lots of old-school Ultima lore, which is a refreshing change from the usual robot-ninja-elf stupidity.

Nothing huge really, but it's nice to see that they have the development resources to patch content into the game while simultaneously developing a new client and a new expansion.

My personal hype-uO-meter is about to explode.

They even wrote on the just updated website: "Take On Worthy Opponents -- A wide variety of Player-versus-Player (PvP) options, including faction wars for territory control, guild wars for loot and bragging rights, and wide-open, “no rules” PvP for the most dangerous of players."

After all, they are Mythic. I like to think they are going to give factions and PvP some love.

Sweeeeeeeet

All the shit they should have done like 8 years ago  :roll:

Mmh... you know: Origin didn't have the resources and EA doesn't have the skills.
Let's cross fingers about Mythic.

Even if they succeed - what about years of fuck ups, you can't just undo them. For example there is no coming back to player-crafter full loot economy.

If they succeed I'll go back playing it (for the usual 20-25 days...).
Even in its actual form, other MMOs from Killer Frogs Online up to World of Borecraft can just shine UO shoes.

It's just a matter of giving me enough reasons to play it again knowing that the old days are gone. PvP enhancements could do the job.

P.S: I was wrong about Vanguard. Or maybe Vanguard was wrong about me.

Just fixing that for you.

Heh.  I am sure I'm now owed money from someone.

Yeah, I needed to come out of the closet. Now I feel so much better...

Can you have your salad tossed in UO prison?

It is such a weight lifted from your shoulders, isn't it?

Simmah down now, simmah down.  All that really says is that the game has factions, guild wars, and Felucca, all of which are already old hat.  It doesn't actually promise anything new, though certainly a worthwhile faction system would go over well.

EDIT:  God damn Stratics monkeys are crying about having to push enter to open the chat bar now.  EA really needs to push Stratics under a fucking bus.  Seriously, take shit-eating mongoloids screaming "BUT I DONT WANT A SLOTTED INVENTORY I LIKE MAKING SMILEY FACES IN MY BACKPACK WITH COINS!" out behind the barn and put one in the back of their head for the good of the game.

This is the playerbase, of which you are a part of.

I deal with UO players all the time in, you know, UO.  The sort of shrieking imbecile I describe is virtually unrepresented among people I meet in the game, but common as dirt on the Stratics forums.

Also, your sentence should have only one "of" in it.  Pick a spot and commit, damn you.

They should name the upgrade "Ultima Online: Clipart on Crappy Kingdoms" instead. They are upgrading the graphics from 1997 to 1999.

Shit, I LIKE the old time UO graphics anyway. I'm not sure I wouldn't go back to using the old client after a couple months if I still played UO.

But I'm a MMO geezer, since I think the average MMO gamer age is something like 14.

Having the chat open at all times is just fucking stupid, I can't understand why people would want it to stay that way. Plenty of times times I've just said "ffffffffffffffffffffffff" or some other crap because a macro failed to fire a few times and I just dumped it into chat to get rid of it.

I also like unslotted inventories and free-and-easy swinger chat.

Yeah, I'm a UO hippy like that.

Yeah, ditto.
But I've never done smiley faces with coins in my bag.

Granted I'd probably end up shooting myself were I forcefully charged with a task like that, I still enjoy the option being there.

The really sad part is, I believe they're going to keep the old-style backpack as an option.  So the Stratics monkeys are literally shrieking like morons for no reason.

The old inventory rox. That is all.

I am also a fan of the old inventory. I remember the first time I got into the EQ beta and thought "I can only have 8 things in my inventory!?" (6, 8, whatever it was). Sure, you can get a few bags, but inventory management was way more of a chore in every diku after UO, still is. I was just working to make 12- and 16-slot boxes because my EQ2 characters have too much crap and not enough space to keep it.

And somehow a chat bar or window or whatever in UO is wrong, anyway. The great thing about UO was that you actually had to talk to people in person, and you could close a door and nobody could overhear your conversation. Bah.

Never done smiley faces, but it was useful for laying out vendor bags in a nice way.

I must say I like the unslotted inventories quite a lot too. It always makes me feel all Ultima 7 when I see those, and that was the first computer game I ever owned. I still maintain free-and-"easy" chat was stupid. :P

EDIT: Goddamnit. I've gone all post-happy the last 5 minutes and missed my 1337 post count. :heartbreak:

The actual mechanics of talking aren't changing.  You literally just have to press enter before you start typing instead of having every keystroke go into the chat buffer.  Unless you don't want to, in which case you can set it to work like it does now.  It's an utter non-issue.

http://forums.inmaniylem.com/viewtopic.php?id=133 (http://forums.inmaniylem.com/viewtopic.php?id=133)

I guess so. The joys of having a functional prison. The admin is redoing guard AI now so that instead of insta-whacking people, it sends them to jail. I think the preliminary idea, at least at this point, is that when you show up in jail you get two pardon deeds spawned. One is a resource deed, and all resources are available on alcatraz, for 5000 of a resource. The thing is that you can only turn in 1k at a time - so if someone whacks you and takes it, you'll have to start from scratch. I whacked some guy and found his stash of 800 logs for instance, so I guess he needs to turn in X amounts of boards. I turned them into 940 shafts, and hit the gym to work on archery. (the dummies in prison go up to 50% skill instead of 25%, so non-combat characters can be OK in there too)

The other type of resource deed is time based, and I think it's a week. So if you show up in jail with a pimped out character, you'll have to mark something down in order to raise resource gathering skills to get out quickly, or just not use that character for a week.

There's also a PA system in the gym so you can hear the new meat pleading their case in the warden's office. Pretty funny stuff.

Ultima 7 (part 1 + Forge of Virtue) is the greatest CRPG of all time.  The similarity between graphics depicted on the back of the UO box was what convinced me to purchase UO.  Words cannot even begin to describe how much of a sad panda I was when, instead of Iolo, Dupre, and Shamino, I was greeted by p1mP D4dDy, ho juice, and k0rN dawg after creating my first character and stepping foot outside Yew.  Sup thou, indeed.

I was so bored last night, I downloaded Mondain's Legacy and reactivated my account.  All my old characters on Chesapeake were still there.  Except for Luna which was packed, every town I visited was deserted.  Even Britain bank.  Still lots of houses around, though.  

They seriously need to delete like 75% of the cities or something.

Britain, Moonglow, Jhelom, Trinsic, Yew, Minoc, Magincia, Skara Brae, Vesper, Cove, Serpent's Hold, Nujelm, Buccaneer's Den, Occlo/Haven, Delucia, Papua...  That's sixteen.  All mirrored in Felucca, too, so actually thirty-two.  Then there's Luna, Umbra, and Zento.  And Gargoyle City way out in the middle of bumfuck Ilshenar.

So that's thirty-six cities, in a game where you can easily recall to any of them instantly, and where the only thing to recommend any beside the most populated would be either a monster invasion or lag.  The game had around 130k subs last time Bruce did his chart, and of course half of those are on Japanese shards anymore, but even still... give them back their peak of 250k subs and make them all American, and what?  They'd fill up four of those thirty-six cities?

Hey! You forgot Heartwood.

I like that the towns are there.  Maybe not Heartwood, but I like that I can stop by the other towns.  Folks will always choose one to centralize in, and if I don't feel like recalling around, there's always a town within a few minutes (tops) horseback.

Should just concentrate on filling the towns with content and reasons to exist, beyond being pit stops outside of Luna/Britain.  The collection spots are a good start, and the event program made some use out of the lesser used towns.  Just needs more.

Heartwood poses as a city, but it's really just the quest givers's wing of Yew.  It's not like there are vendors or banks in there.  Anyway, I always thought those 'community collections' things should want quest reward widgets, and not resources.  Would give some of those kill quests a reason to exist, and make the collections lest of a script-miner fest.

Don't like posting the same thread twice in a row, but what the hell, it's news.

The misbegotten "3D" client that debuted with the Third Dawn expansion finally goes dead on April 2nd.  A few people are trying to raise a stink on the forums, but it really is just a few people.  There must have been fucking nobody using it.  The original client goes dead when/if they persuade 95% or more of the playerbase to use it, and then that's it.  It's the new client, or nothing.

Also, the "lava maze" thing referenced a few pages back as having been part of the Halloween test shard has indeed made it into production as part of the new quest chain they're patching in.

I wish the 3d client was already dead so I didn't have to waste time downloading that piece of shit as part of Mondain's Legacy.  It was clown-shoes from the very beginning.

I see the 3d client, the backpacks, the chat, and everything as the same issue. And it sounds to me like they're making the same mistake again. The 3d client wasn't great partially because it was hobbled by the 2d client. I think it's that this whole "I'm going to hold my breath and turn blue if my 1997 game changes at all" mentality has hurt UO a lot.

I hope they put in the KR and ditch the 2d immediately. It's long since time and the only way the KR will get the attention it deserves is if it doesn't have to compete with the 2d one. If the KR client is good enough to ditch the 2d client, then it's not good enough to be released at all.

The Stratics monkeys crying over backpack and chat options is one thing, but the rejection of the old 3d client is something else entirely.  That 3d client was pure shit.  I tried using it.  I couldn't.  It actually looked WORSE than the old 2d one, had a terrible memory leak for a very long time after release, and the performance was awful even on machines that buried the recommended specs.

Nevertheless, I agree that since they're patching the new client out for free, they need to make it mandatory sooner rather than later.  Don't go into this whole "two clients" thing again, just grow a pair and make people use it.

I tried that 3D client for exactly one night.  It was buggy, slow, and looked terrible.

I much preferred the 2D client.  That game was all about simple and speed.  I understand what they were going for with the 3D client, but man somebody really screwed that up.

The 2D client is so awesome that I can recall around and buy reags over VNC, so I can keep my magery macro going on one of my new characters.

I dubbed the 3d client Turd Dawn back in the day. Got it free through the Turd Dawn beta. Used it for 15 minutes, sucks.

Though I admit I really don't like the trend to take perfectly good 2d stuff and make it 3d. Civ 4 and HoMaM 5, I'm looking at you.

I quite because of Third Dawn. So that's going away and being replaced by a new engine? I skimmed a number of pages here but couldn't find info on it, and nothing at UOHerald jumped out at me.

I found it here (http://www.uoherald.com/kingdomreborn/faq.php)


Dumping Third Dawn as soon as UOKR Launches.  Three clients would be insanity.

Yea, just swung back to mention I found the UO Kingdom Reborn stuff. Looks like a nice face lift that keeps the establishment players are used to working in,

My recent bout of WoW has reinforced my opinion that a package deal is the way to go for a company selling multiple MMO games.

As it was, I got burned out on WoW and went back to my old game, losing Blizzard $15 per month.  (Not that they'll miss it, but that's beside the point.)  If there had been a stable of second-string games for me to dabble in, I might have gone for a package deal so that I could play those while still maintaining my WoW account to drop in and help guildies.  I would still be using only one person's worth of bandwidth, but the amount of money being made from me would have increased rather than dropped to zero.

EA/Mythic really needs to do a Station Pass for WAR/UO/DAoC/Sims/whatever.  Yes, there are some people willing to pay for two different MMOs simultaneously, but without a package deal odds are good that one of them is just going to be WoW.

Of all the companies out there, I think the combination of "whatever" + UO is one of the most potent for a package deal. As long as they don't get SOE greedy about it.

Completely agree.  I'd love to keep my account active for occasional runs through nostalgia land, but I can't stomach their absurd monthly cost for an old low maintenance game.  I dropped my sub when they raised the price.  Actually, I had 2 subs back then.

I think a EA/Mythic Station Pass is a certaintly once WAR launches, if not sooner. Why lose the core DAoC forever? Keep them hanging on.

An interesting EA/Mythic job posting:


If they're doing another anniversary box for the shelves, then the Stygian Abyss expansion is probably going to be a paid download like the last one.  It's an odd strategy, but someone must have looked at the numbers from last time and decided it works.

Doesn't matter to me.  I'll get the new graphics for free, download the expansion when I feel like it, and just ignore the anniversary box.  Lots of existing players buy them because they pack them with promotional codes for new furniture and shit, but what do I care?

I do wonder what the "other significant development projects dealing with game system improvements" are though.

so it goes live next week?

I'm interested in how it'll all shake out. But I have a history of expecting people to be doing more than they are. I think UO:KR will be an opportunity sorely missed if they don't do a bunch of things that I can think of pretty much off the top of my head.

Of course, what I think they should be doing IS automatically correct. They might as well just hire me for that position and get it over with.

Nah, the termination of the UO3D client probably just means the UOKR client is going into open beta or something.  According to the CM, they have to change the server code for the KR client to work, adapting the 2D legacy client to be compatible with the new server code takes work, and it's work that's just not worth doing for the virtually unused UO3D.

EDIT:  Also, some screenshots from one of the "town hall" meetings.  And by screenshots, I mean photographs of a monitor screen.  Apparently you can zoom in until your horse takes up half the screen (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/robert.jones27/Maryland10.jpg), or out until your character is a little blot (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/robert.jones27/Maryland7.jpg).

Bring back the Ultima IV client, beeyotch!

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ae/Ultima4.gif)

Why the hell does the character health bar have a huge face shot attached? Haven't devs learned that people want UIs with minimal borders/frames and extraneous art?  VG does this as well.

Nice.  I think it may be time to start looking for my old UO cd's.   When is the projected release date?

Like the 8 million people all wetting themselves monthly over a game with a gui using that portrait placement?  Most people don't want what you describe: they want warm and shiny.  Whether they're playing UO is a veeeery differemt story though, I admit.  But the point of this upgrade is surely to entice them.

GOD I loved that game. Very well could be my all time fav.

I don't know, and since it's going to be a free download and not something sold in a retail store for money, they don't seem to feel compelled to give any concrete date.  They did send out beta invites within the last few days, so in all likelihood there are beta players running around on production shards using the new client right now.  I can't imagine it'll be more than a few more months.

EDIT:  DDA & WAP, you guys can play something with the Ultima 6 "client" (http://www.geocities.com/galleondragon/) if you want.  :-D

Ultima 7 was the shit.

Hoe of Destruction pwnage :P

Now, is it just me or is that totally cool?

Now I'm tempted to dig out my Ultima Collection disc and try out U6O.  Sherry the Mouse ftw!

I've dicked around in U6O for shits and giggles.  You don't need a disc at all.

Perhaps, but I now have a hankering for downloading Exult and playing a bit of Ultima 7, at least the Forge of Virtue portion.  Forging your very own Black Sword of WTFpwnage roolz.

So for a couple months now, the ongoing series of events have allowed players to gather pieces of blackrock by one mechanism or another.  It's been pretty common, and for a while I was seeing chunks of it on vendors for 20k each.  Now it turns out that with the next publish, you'll be able to turn pieces of blackrock in for rewards.

And I don't just mean some junk.  I mean uber high-end items.  Doom artifacts, top-level runic smith hammers, all sorts of shit.  Based on the amount of blackrock that has to be floating around by now, I think prices on just about everything are about to CRASH HARD.

Something big is up for them to be tossing around uber items like this.  Months ago in this thread I was speculating that they were going to reintroduce meaningful item decay.  This sudden wave of artifacts and uber crafting items makes me think I might have been right after all.

Arf.  You should change "confides" to "expects": it compresses better with UUEncode.  :-D

Yes, and I suppose I should change "Nelson" to "England" as well, but a picture of England doesn't make nearly as good an avatar.  :wink:

Its funny that you try so hard to disguise your grief title. Your "I quit" drama over it was priceless.

I'm gonna give the staff a little time to neuter Morris here, if it so chooses.  If it does not, I don't want anyone coming in here with their panties in a wad, acting all surprised when I flame him out of his socks.

Too difficult to ignore him?

Good point.

He never gets the font right either, here:


Copy, paste, alter text, save as whatever.html, open in browser, screenshot, photoshop.  Maybe convert the black background to an unused color and set it as transparent so it doesn't stick out on the posts with the light gray background.  Seamless.

Entirely more work than it would be worth, even if the intention were for it to be "seamless" in the first place.

So I scroll up to see a post where you're on a gray background only to discover your posts are on black every time this page. :(

Indeed!  Witness my strategery, as I do it again!

But yeah, a two-minute MSPaint job that fools nobody?  That's called having fun with a grief title.  Busting out the HTML and Photoshop to do a "seamless" version?  That might actually convince someone who didn't enjoy the taste of paint chips while growing up that one was trying to "disguise" their title.

Hey guys, thanks for pushing for the slow kids explanation of a joke I figured everyone understood after the first couple years.

/shrug

WUA is a side effect of UO's spagetti code trained on compilation of stratics posts getting near self-awareness and then going mad... As such WUA is yet to evolve true free will and is not capable of ignoring inputs. WUA still needs 10-15 Trammel threads to get free will concept down.