f13.net

...for existing accounts, that is. So if you had a UO account in the past, download the client (http://www.uoherald.com/downloads/) and go run around. I hear good things about the enhanced client finally being ready for primetime, though I haven't used it yet. Stygian Abyss expansion has been out for a little while now, so there's player gargoyles around now. There's a mini expansion coming out on the 12th that is supposed to add smooth sailing, custom boats, and ship to ship combat with pirates and merchants and shit.

I'm probably resubbing again. FUCK YOU STOP LAUGHING. Just bear in mind that the banksitting place is Luna now, not Brit, and some of the shards are probably pretty underpopulated now. Great Lakes is okay, Atlantic has the most. Dunno about the others. Oh and the High Seas Test shard needs a beta client you get from somewhere.

Don't resub, you might get PKed again. In Trammel, in the middle of July.

You just never know.

Douchebag?

Fethers?

Yeah I think I heard somewhere that this game had PK in it for like the first 15% of it's existence. I'll be careful, thanks.  :oh_i_see:

(http://www.wtfman.com/uoevil/images/rape.jpg)

Wow.  I kind of admire you for still being so hardcore into this game.  Sadly, I'm one of the few who played from release until right after Trammel.  I didn't quit BECAUSE of Trammel, but since that was the first MMO I played, my fond memories are tied up in the "wild west" epoch of the game.  Going back isn't the same. 

We should play.  We can talk about Civ 5 all day in front of Sinij while he wishes he could PK us.

Sold!

Woops, I meant to post this in the MMOG forum. Anyway I'm not super hardcore into this game, I just don't have anything against playing it still. I'm coming back after a couple years away.

Sinij, go back to trolling about Steam. At least it's somewhat relevant. The only thing less relevant than posting about UO is posting about some PK shit they got rid of a full decade ago.

This thread needs more charts.

And fuck Trammel, that's all I got.

You know why I can't get behind Trammel hate (other than the amazingly obvious reasons)? Because Trammel begat Siege Perilous, which was the awesomest uo experience of them all.

Loved UO when it came out, big time.  Tried going back 5-6 years ago for the hell of it and found it to be unbearably bad in comparison to just about any other game. Really the slogan should be...

"Do you like black and white tv's? Still use BBS and newsgroups? Is nintendo a bit too 'fast' for your atari sensibilities? Try UO with a free trial! (but you're gonna have to pay later)"

It's dated, badly.

Not that this is particularly on topic but I'm not maknig a new thread just to say the same deal is up for DAOC and Warhammer.  I'm not sure why now though because as far as I can tell nothing substantive has changed in either game for at least a year now.  Well, except for the population I guess,  and not in the good way.

I actually wouldn't mind seeing what is new/up in UO except I can't get my old login info from before.  I'd really like to use my old account.  The only issue is that the account is like 10 years old and the email has obviously changed since then.  I'm gonna call their support line and see if they can do anything about it.

The ISP that hosted the mail I registered for UO with hasn't existed in nine years.

I just called EA customer support and got someone to help me.  I'm getting my old UO account back!!! Whooo hooo!  I had to verify the date of birth on there, the address (which I got a little wrong), and the phone number (which I totally didn't know).  He verified my name and I guessed the email with hints from the rep.  Hell I was ready to verify the characters on there if he needed it as I remember those better than the other info, but I didn't need to.  Man I can't wait to see my old characters and how they were setup.  The only thing is they were on Chesapeake so that server might be fairly dead if it even exists.

That would be a funny trip to log into a ten year old account and see what is left there. Wouldn't be the same for me on Chessie without my giant villa on one of the northern peninsulas. Or the daily pk raids and exploiters breaking into it.

I was thinking this through my head and I'm the same as Sky.  Without my house/s that I had and all the furniture and other items, it wouldn't be the same.  I'd probably go find a few mongbats to ebolt and then get bored and log out.

That's what happened to me the last time I tried to resub about 2 years ago too.

It is still fun to see them still updating and running the servers.  Quite amazing really.

Kind of makes me think "Just how fucking idiotic do you have to be to NOT make money on an MMOG? You practically can't kill them no matter how outdated or byzantine they become."

And then I see the crater that is APB and go "OH, THAT'S how idiotic  you have to be."

Thanks for the heads up.  I'll download it tonight and take a jaunt through some of the old cities to see how they've held up.

Then I'll log out and probably stay gone.  :awesome_for_real:  I'm afraid the barrier to entry is probably a bit too high to do much else.

lolol

Yeah, that is one thing I do miss is my 2 story (I never bothered with a keep/tower) that was so cleverly placed out in the middle of no where and there were NO other spots even possible way out where I was.  My neighbors were the mongbats, ettins, ogres that roamed around there.  I barely even saw a soul out there.

Oh and my other house that I had near Vesper that I had a lumberjack gathering script that would auto hide me and he would gather lumber and if attack he would run back to the house and drop the logs and lock them down before he dies.  It work great :)!  I still want to see out of curiousity how everything is coming along as I have a weird passion/love for that game.  Even looking at the new graphics and all just makes me a little more giddy to see it.  Maybe not subscribe as Darkfall is my newst interest, but definitely see it.

Actually interesting thought. What provided UO longevity while couple much newer titles are already in the grave? My theory is that key to UO "success" is socialization meta-game, in a way UO is closer to Facebook/Tweeter than any other title.

Amazingly enough a tower in good location, off-color mare and blessed black sandals will keep person logging in and subscribing a lot longer than entire dungeon set WoW has. The same thing was true from the very beginning - I still remember how big of a deal were duels and who PKed who on miner and how it could determine your standing in a PvP social ladder. It wasn't so much for PvP aspect of it, but for socialization involved in it and status of "best dueler in X" that came with it.

Newer titles following a lot more "guided ride" approach and as a result I don't expect nearly as much longevity out of them. For example WoW will die moment they stop pushing expansions. I think designs that came after UO missed key points with push of instancing and compartmentalization and complete lack of "attachments" like house and social symbols.

I'm tempted to download and log in, but I'm not 100% positive I would want to.  The game felt dated when I mainly stopped playing back in 2003 (or so), and I imagine on logging in I'd regret the loss of my tower and all the crap I'd locked down inside of it.

I'd even done a reasonable job of decorating all the floors of it, including a "lab" filled with hard-to-get items.

Holy fucking hell, I'm downloading 1889 MB of data?  I guess I'll play tomorrow then.

 :oh_i_see:

I can't recall my password, and have no idea what email address the account is registered to.  Meh.

Hah.  More accurately, I couldn't recall the account name, but I had switched the account to an email address I still use.

I have everything except 2 GB of data!  I'm almost excited.

Not really.

UO's longevity is certainly helped by having paid off all its development costs long ago and what is probably a healthy number of low-activity / zombie accounts. Plus as it ages it may actually get cheaper to run, depending on how EA is financing its servers.
If by 'die' you mean 'fade from its current glory', then sure, but WoW is a game that could lose 90% of its current players and still be in a pretty good shape.

Post-UO MMOs offer plenty of attachments and also learned a whole number of things about problems with open world titles.

UO is pretty much a living fossil. I don't just mean that in the vague sense that it's old as hell but still kicking around with expansions and live events, I mean it's pretty much the definition of the term.


EQ successfully radiated like a motherfucker and passed on it's genes all over the place, much to the chagrin of some people. UO just keeps swimming around the ocean floor like a coelacanth, a relic from a bygone epoch that the other fish have nevertheless never quite managed to compete out of existence.

But what the hell, I've played it off and on for long enough that the clunk just doesn't bother me anymore, and nobody else is trying to make a game like this. Nobody has tried since Raph with SWG except for a couple of indie titles attempting to replicate the essentially completely different game that UO was in it's first couple years

I know I always say this, but someone needs to set out to create a modern version of latter-era UO with the intention of grabbing maybe a few hundred thousand subscribers and then keeping them for 15 years. SWG could have been that game, but they decided a few hundred thousand and a slow but not unprofitable decline wasn't good enough and we all know how that went.

I mean think about all the complaints you can level against a game as old and with as many different prior dev teams as UO, and then remember that despite all of that EA is nonetheless still paying for new development and live events. There are people who will pay for shit like this, and once you've got them it's hard to get rid of them, even if your game looks like Super Nintendo.

Anyway, speaking of that whole EA returning players promotion for all 3 games, how hilarious is it that Warhammer Online is sitting in dinosaur jail with a couple of relics like UO and DAOC? Jesus. STATION PASS YOU FOOLS. STATION PASS.

I'd be down for that.  I loved DAoC, and UO.  Plus there's some small enjoyment to be had with WAR.  Just nowhere near enough for a monthly subscription.

 :heart: UO Test PVP  :heart:

Is there even a test server still, and do people still pvp like mad on it?

I don't have my account anymore as I sold my main one to someone for a check in the mail.

There's a test server, right now it's dubbed High Seas Test and is being used to beta the ship to ship combat and stuff, but my character I rolled there years ago to test something else was still there. No idea what people do or don't do on it.

Man even in the oldschool client there's nifty new menus for managing available titles and insuring your items. And there appears to be a faction rep panel. WTF. I need to read up, I have no idea what's going on.

I very much agree, and not because I want to go back to azzraping noobs, but because I am honestly sick and tired of DIKU clones showing "teh ride" down my throat. Now, we will violently disagree on what shape this sandbox going to be and what kind of rules, if any, need to be enforced, but it is nice to see 'the enemy' too getting tired of EQ clones.

NOOOOO!
They took down the Abyss Shard and made that crap Siege.

Siege was fun, but ROT insured it was a stillborn idea.

Gawd, this is absolutely terrible.  We actually paid for this at one time?

I more or less have no idea how to play this anymore.  Or even why I should play.

I tried downloading the newer client, but damn I can't get past the login screen.  I type in my info and hit login, but nothing at all happens.  WTF!

Tried Sonoma, went to Wind.  Got overrun pretty fast by two daemons and a couple liches.  Ran out.  Poor nightmare died.  Fortunately I had the nightmare on a orb thingy, got nightmare back out.  Considered grabbing white wyrm and letting them all know who is boss, but said fuckit instead.

Tried looking in on Pacific.  Laggy.  Actually had the client freeze from lag at one point.  Close out client because it won't let me log out and back in.  Log in, freeze stutter step back up to Moonglow, where I log out in frustration.

I don't think I can even play this for free.

Just a hunch, try changing your password.

I'll try that now.  I even tried creating a trial account and even that account won't log in.  when I hit the login button nothing at all happens.

Firewall?

My UO account name/password aren't tied to my current email address.  I don't think there's any way to recover it.  Ohh well.

edit: Ohh hi, unlimited tries.  Got it.  Hah.

I've thought about playing UO again, but it would be like ruining a wonderful memory.  I think UO is one of those games that is more fun in retrospect than it was in reality. 

The point is not to play, just to dick around for an hour and be left with your memories.   I would never do this if I actually had to pay money.  My last resub was a LONG time ago. 

You're probably right.  I'm just weird.  When I quit games that I really was passionate about, I usually delete all of my toons.  It's like putting closure on a chapter in my gaming life. 

I am the opposite- if I really liked the game but got burned out, I want something to return to if the urge strikes.

My experience is, at least so far, underscoring this in bold red ink.

There's plenty of open world stuff I could be doing, but the thing is, there's no one left to do it with.  My experience last night is UO is largely a poorly done single player game, with an interface that tries hard too hard to crib from WoW.

I actually had fun on some freeshards. Just PVPed and macroed and did IDOCs and shit. Had a few f13ers there too, was pretty cool. Brought Chinchilla here, from there ;) I always sold my accounts when quitting. I like money.

Wise man.  I really wish I'd sold my SWG account when I quit; my resource stockpile was worth something like a couple hundred dollars at the time.  Then the CU happened.  :-P

Pretty much echoing what was said earlier.  Not sure if I can survive a run on a public shard - something about macroing was one of the few reasons I could return to UO (albeit free shard style).  Plus, gear based shit.

Yeah it helps to have a buddy who's a crazy UO fanboy as well. We both came back from WoW a few days ago and he's already plunked down a small house, opened a shop selling archery gear/ammo, and asked me "Why did we ever leave?" I've put down the foundation for a somewhat larger one on Buc's Den (because we're gonna pirate NPC merchants when the mini-xpac comes out, yarr) and did resisting spells from 0 to 100 in like two hours without any third-party programs.

If they seriously boot you for macro'ing these days, I'd be amazed.  Why would they care at this point.  Hell, I macro'ed on public shards during my 7 year stint from public launch on.  I even had a house next to one of those players that had an "in" with the GM's so they could run player-run events back in the day.  He would flip me shit about it sometimes, but nothing ever happened.

"Dren was up all night last night working on something.  He's VERY dedicated!"

I thought I had mentioned this, but UOAssist is pretty much built right into the new client.  There's even an option for writing LUA, although I have no idea how much can be done with it.

I hadn't played with it much, but from what I saw, it'd be trivial to Use Last Object, Use Last Target, and there was even a number of times to repeat var.

This is actually pretty astute. I just talked to a girl on Atlantic today who was just starting UO for the very first time. In 2010. Her previous gaming experience consisted of Facebook stuff, and she pretty much peed her pants when I explained that you could customize a house and decorated it and use it to grow plants and stuff. Someone tried to get her to play WoW but she wasn't interested.

And of course WoW would implode if they quit putting out expansions. Anyone arguing otherwise must have never played it. The whole thing is designed from the ground up in such a way as to require it. Too many months between raid tiers and people start getting antsy. Of course even UO is still cranking out expansion content, so there's no reason to think WoW would ever stop. It could shed 95% of it's users and still be bigger than almost everything else out there. There will likely be WoW expansions coming through 2025 at least.

Just came from a "meet and greet" with Atlantic's new Event Moderator. Nothing big, but they're soliciting for story/event suggestions. Got the URL for their website. http://atlantic.uoem.net/

It's nice this sort of thing is still going on.

Screeny.

The roleplayers I used to run poetry contests with would probably all agree with you.

I made Sure the windows firewall is allowing it. Made a 14 day acct. Still no luck ;-(.  I wish they had some tech forums or something. The knowledge base has no info on my issue. It's as if it isn't register the fact I'm hitting to login.

I really am surprised WoW still doesn't have player housing and other fluff like this.  That game is really ripe for it.

Housing is kind of an ace up their sleeve, so I think the longer WoW goes without player housing the better. They could easily add it, but why when they don't need to and can play that card in a time of desperation?

As for UO, it's weird, looking at WUA's screenie actually got me excited. I didn't play this much at all so I'll give it a go while waiting on Rifts/GW2 since I just couldn't get hooked into EvE.

That said, is anyone else playing? If so, room for a nub to leach a bit of info and maybe some gold from you?

I would still be playing UO if it wasn't for all the weird shit that reduced the "Ultima/medieval fantasy world simulator"-feeling. By weird shit I mean things like transparent horses (really old weird shit, but it was what started the downfall for me), neon-colored ridable beetles, glow-in-the-dark dye-colors.

Also, the reduced/completely different quality of new creatures/animations added to the game after... uh...second age? Don't even get me started on the "enhanced" client...

Welp still can't get in.  I even disabled my firewall.  I will just create a new 14 Day account when I get back from my mini-vacation and see if my new desktop will not run into the same issue.  If it does then I may just say screw it.  I just wanted to revisit my old character for nostagia reasons.  I'm loving Darkfall and gonna love it even more once I get my new desktop setup.

I'll be around on Atlantic. I'll admit that the event staff actively soliciting for lore/story input has me intrigued. Especially since these guys have the power to do things like make permanent changes to the landscape and give out custom titles.

I thought I'd poke my head in here since some of you were following IPY 2's development. I don't necessarily want to hijack the thread from the EA UO direction it's had, but our beta website just went up at noon today.

www.inporylem.com
 (http://www.inporylem.com)


Oh, and our client is only ~350mb. So. ;

Uh? This seems very interesting, Azaroth. How many average players do you have there? Is it stable and fun already, or everything is still super-beta and "about to be implemented"?

EDIT: "Enter Game" button leads to a 500 error. I guess I just gave myself an answer to that question.
EDIT2: And beta starts November 1st. Ok see you there.

Beta is starting on November 1st.

So no, no download for you just yet. ;)

Behold, even the Sinister Lord Nythrax cares about breast cancer.


Anyway, High Seas mini-expansion hits in a couple days. I hear it's unsurprisingly buggy but my buddy is all ZOMG WE SHALL BE PIRATES so I guess I'm getting it anyway.

All those newer mount sprites end up making that screenshot look like it's from a bad Flash game and not the UO I knew and loved for three-ish years.

UO never looked good. Even if we restrict ourselves to isometric sprite games from the late nineties, Baldur's Gate and Diablo both came out around the same time and looked much prettier. Don't kid yourself, it pretty much always looked like a Flash game.

It's like all those people who think George Lucas magically turned into a shitty writer when (and only when) they themselves were 30 years old instead of 8. Then when they see a decades-old review ripping apart Mark Hamill's wooden acting and bitching about shitty dialogue in the old movies, well fuck you all that eerily identical criticism only coincidentally became true about movies that came out after I quit being an uncritical child!

Don't do that again. I'm saying this with my serious face on.  It's not even remotely amusing anymore.

On topic, I never minded how UO looked.  It was functional for the most part, and that's all I really care about in a MMO.

I haven't gotten to log in yet, and may not before this is all over.  Just haven't had the time.

I disagree. Back in 98 when I was cooking WUA jerky outside of X-roads I had zero objections to how it looked. I mean it was little bit gristly, but I didn't mind.

Nice looking site! I plan on checking out your server once it is up, when I can find some time. Let me macro, I have twins.

I don't make serious posts in Politics, I don't even make epic posts about WoW lore anymore. GAWD.

(http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTxSSFa4TlkK9ZjuJWBB0KtbYbVMci-f76eibQg9LXa_EYqWM8&t=1&usg=__TLGLQtBUNJqzFZi6ajjFBuLDr-U=)

I do however appreciate the implication that my antics were, at some point, amusing.


You know when everyone tells you to eat their ass, that isn't really what they mean.

Anyway the free thing ends either tonight or tomorrow, so that's pretty much that. If I think the boaty shit is worth posting about I might do so after I've had time to mess around with it.

You could make your own LOLLLLLLLLLLLORE thread in the WoW forum.  I'd be powerless to stop it.  I probably shouldn't be telling you this.


That'd be interesting.  I had a lot of fun time in UO with boats.  

Speaking of WoW lore, how accurate is WoWPorn is according to WUA strict canonical view of it? Could Orc do it with Night Elf?

How old is UO now, like 15? 12?

It just turned 13 this past month, I do believe.

Christ, most of us don't own cars that old anymore.  :why_so_serious:

Macroing is legal, possible, even encouraged. (As long as it's not resource macroing and/or EasyUO use. We're tracking that very carefully and it will be clearly against the rules.)

Macroing is also slower and more expensive.

We're trying to strongly encourage players to go out and play the game, but we're not going to ban you for having twins.

Nice, at work I can work on making money and at home I can macro. Strange I game more now at work than I do at home.......

Either way, looking forward to November 1st. I'll see how many friends I can drag with me. I doubt many, but would be cool to get some of the Freeshard guys like Cheddar, Dren, Tragny, Chinchilla, Nix, etc to give it a go.....

This is true of every successful AAA subscription mmog in existence.

Quitters. I've had my car since 1997!  :drill:

There were cars in 1997?

"Are you telling me that you built a time machine... out of a DeLorean?"

There were a couple of teenagers and a twelve year old screaming at each other in chat earlier tonight. One of them bragged that he had been playing since all the way back in 2008.  :why_so_serious:

No. But it was consistent. The new art is not consistent with the old art. Every mount but the old horse looks like it's something pasted in from another game.

Exactly. The new art makes the game look more like a freeshard with monster models converted & imported from baldur's gate 1.

The new art drove me a little crazy, actually.

Pulled out my dragon.  It was... pink.  Not red.  Pale pastel pink.  I put it away in a hurry.  It was also rather huge.

Pulled out my white wyrm.  Darned thing was scarcely bigger than my nightmare, and was all angly and jagged.  Looked like a legendary pokemon.

Looked at my imp, it was still kind of a green blur on green grass, so I couldn't get a good sense of how it looked.

My ice snake looked terrible.  Like a piece of rope or something.

My nightmare and ostard looked good.  Actually, the ostard looked very nice.  It's one of the rare dark blue skinned ones, and it was very pretty.  Sadly, ostard takes up a slot, I'd rather use the nightmare (it's fairly well trained) so back into the stable it went.

I think UO is still a decent game overall, but it's definitely something you want to play with at least 3-5 people, so you have a small social network to hang around with and do stuff.

I also took a quick look at my fire horse (I couldn't figure out what it was by looking at the name in the stable) and it was... a fire horse.  Again, nightmare > fire horse, so it went back into the stable.

So far the ship stuff is an enormous crafting grind for no real reward. Pirates aren't worth any real loot or anything. We'll see if they balance it, but if they don't then no one is going to remember that this stuff exists in a few weeks.

So yeah, I'll report otherwise if it changes (which I think it will because there's a minor shitstorm in progress on the forum) but for now the whole ship thing is a giant bust. The crafting required is COMICALLY overcomplicated, and a single ship battle represents a five or six figure loss of gold once you factor in all the resources needed for ammunition and repairs.

1. Take some boards and craft them into charcoal.
2. Buy some saltpeter from one of the few NPC vendors that sell it.
3. Get some sulfurous ash from a mage shop or whatever.
4. Combine all of the above to make black powder.
5. Combine black powder with cloth to craft a powder charge.

Now you have a powder charge! But you still need cannonballs or grapeshot, fuses, matchcord... There's a fucking multi-step crafting process needed to make matches to light your cannons with. They fucking expect you to craft fuses, and the swabs to clean out the cannons.

I ranted about this on the forum and got a bunch of the Stratics Monkeys hooting. You think I'm a UO fanboy? You have no idea. NO IDEA. God I forgot how easy they are to troll. I got at least one of them temp-banned or something when I pissed him off enough to call me some piss-weak bullshit that would get laughed at for it's sheer lameness anywhere else.

Other threads are cropping up though, because this is just too ridiculous and will be as dead as the Deceit bone wall in a month if they don't change it.

I feel better about IPY's Pirate system all the time.

Ok, that sounds 100% retarded. Is the ship to ship combat in anyway fun at least at the end of hours of attaching the leg bone to the ankle bone to the shin bone?

You know, at some point you'd think that the MMO industry would learn, but 2010 has been just full of surprises in that department.

God every time I go back to look at Stratics the community gets worse. Everyone there is Peaches now as far as I can see.

Oh good god, Peaches.  I had managed to forget about her.

/shakes fist at Reg

That crafting chain would only be of interest to hardcore crafters, which most people are not.  That it takes hours, and costs thousands of gold, to do something with little to no reward, just somehow figures.

I wouldn't know. I'm not a crafter and the headache/reward ratio is too fucked for there to be much of a secondary market. This stuff isn't really going up on vendors in any quantity, the whole thing has just sort of fizzled.


It's not even so much that they're fanboys, it's that they're these blinkered saps who try to comment on MMO design despite not knowing basic things like the fact that player-to-player transactions aren't a gold sink. They've never played anything else besides UO, and if they have then they've certainly never understood it.

Everytime I go there I feel like Tony Stark sent back in time to the caveman days. It's fun feeling all nerd-superior, but god damn it gets irritating typing something relevant and getting back "ook eek".

Maybe it's not quite as bad as it initially seemed. It's really just the same four or five retards responding to your trolls over and over again. They're just all moderator types with silly titles who have posted over a hundred million times each.

This must be what happens to a really, really old game community where almost everyone has moved on to something else.

Seriously though. Five years ago you wouldn't have got much argument when you said something uncontroversial like "People won't be doing this content 2 months from now if you can't make money at it" no matter how mean you were in the way you said it.  Mythic must seriously have the absolute bottom of the barrel working on UO to have let them put out an expansion like that in the first place.

One star talent five star drive?

The really hilarious bit is Hawkeye. The dude has been hanging around UO for well over a decade, waging a quixotic neverending one-man campaign for exactly this sort of expansion. I think it's only been in recent years that he's quit posting in-character with "Yarr matey!" pirate talk. So it finally comes out, several presidential administrations after he began asking for it, and what's the verdict?

That he's not going to be doing this after a month because it's a huge net loss of resources to do even one battle.

It's times like this I wish they'd just put the game out of it's misery so that some decent non-PK freeshards would start cropping up.

Edit: Incidentally, you guys have NO IDEA how much work it took for me to waste $15 on this crap. I could write a whole rambling article on the atrocity that is the EA billing system. At one point I seriously found myself on the phone, somehow talking to a rep for something called "Littlest Pet Shop Online" who had no idea WTF Ultima Online was when I asked to be transferred.

DO IT.  I require documented hilarity.

Did you sign up for Littlest Pet Shop Online? Don't leave us hanging!  :grin:

Okay, here goes:

All right, well first I go to their usual code store and try to buy the High Seas upgrade like normal. I get some bullshit error about my card not being good, when it's the same card I just used to renew the account. I try this a few times and it's not getting anywhere, so I head to the forum.

There's already a bitch thread in progress because a bunch of people can't buy it. The current Producer of UO is hanging around the thread, doing his best to take people's information and sort out their orders personally. He links to the EA store, which is also selling the code.

All right, the EA store. That has to run a lot better than whatever bullshit relic system is in place for UO itself, right? So I hit up the EA store, navigate past all the shit about sports games and shooters, and hunt down the High Seas upgrade. I go through all the normal bullshit, hit accept, and now THIS is giving me an error too. First it's just putting the error up on the same page, then it's taking me to a separate error page that just says "error" basically. Great, very informative.

So I go back to the forum and join in the bitchfest, simultaneously trying the UO store again. Every god damn time I try to confirm the order it spits a completely different error at me. The producer is still on the forum telling a tale of woe about how their third-party billing system might be having problems with IP addresses not matching credit card addresses, while everyone expresses incredulity that such a stupid fucking check would be in place at all.

Anyway finally one of these fucking UO store errors spits out a phone number! Dial bla-bla-bla and hit 7 to speak to a representative! All right the EA/UO phone people have actually been pretty solid and useful over the years, so fuck this web shit, I'm giving them a call.

So I call up. The computer message is a lot less "HEY KIDS DO YOU LIKE RADICAL EA FUN?" grating than it used to be, so points for that. The voice starts listing options for Pogo and shit, but whatever, I already know where I'm going so I hit 7.

"Hi, I'm Pete (or something), how can I help you?"

Surprisingly, the dude actually sounds American. I could swear I talked to a (very polite, helpful) Indian last time I called about something a couple years ago, but whatever. Anyway I tell the guy what I'm trying to order.

"This is actually the line for Littlest Pet Shop Online, can I transfer you?"

Derp! Oops! Sorry, that stupid website told me a different.. ahamata hamata... sure you can transfer me.

"What was that game again?"

Ultima Online. Jesus I can tell the dude has never even heard of it.

"Okay, I'm going to transfer you. Just in case you need to call again, the number now is 9 for the 'all other games' line, okay?"

So the dude transfers me, and I sit on hold marveling at the fact that Littlest Pet Shop Online has it's own number on the menu but UO is in the "what the fuck ever else" category. Finally I get transferred to a cute-sounding and also American girl talking to me from what sounds like Grand Central Station crammed into a boiler room.

"Hi, this is Cindy (or whatever), how can I help you.

So I tell her what I want.

"What game was that again?"

Oh Jesus.

"Let me put you on hold for a minute."

She's going to go find someone to ask what the hell an Ultimates Online is, I can tell.

Finally she gets back and is all prepared to just charge the expansion to the card already listed in my billing information. I tell her that's great, fire away. Except there's some kind of problem and she can't actually manage to bill me from THAT end, either. She puts me on hold again.

She gets back after a good long time and tells me that there are going to be two failed attempts to charge my card and then one successful one, and something about how she had to use a coupon, and whatever the fuck. I don't know, but it's pretty clear that things are a fucking mess on the back end, too. But whatever, I got my expansion.

Twenty minutes later the bank calls about the suspicious failed attempts to charge my card. But everything is all right, and I was charged correctly in the end.

I got a survey in my email and gave Cindy (or whatever) flying marks for managing to help me out when it was plain that she had no idea what I was talking about and was working with broken tools. Their dumbass system sent me two identical surveys, so I filled them both out. I don't know if she gets credit for both or what, but that's fine.

I get back to the forum and I have a PM from Cal Crowner the producer, the UO guy in that dorky "re-enlisters" video we all had a laugh at, who had seen my deranged ranting about website errors in the Stratics thread and wanted to know if he could help me out. I told him the phone guys had already handled it. We chit-chatted back and forth for a couple of messages. Seems like a nice guy who genuinely gives a crap.

But here's the thing. I've heard in the past how a bunch of EA people read here but don't post. (I think Jeremy posted here once or twice back in the day when she was Community Rep, but that's it.) I never paid that any real mind, but when I briefly got hold of Tim Cotten a couple years ago back when he was the UO producer, he was all "Hey WUA" and knew exactly who I was. So I know at least a few of you guys are probably reading this.

Look, I can forgive you guys the hilariously shitty billing system. That isn't really within your control, and I know you guys try to do everything you can, right down to developers calling billing personally on behalf of customers.

But this shit with the ships requiring a ludicrous craft grind, costing a bunch of resources to operate, and enemy ships giving pitiful rewards? Not the least goddamn bit acceptable. The frustrating part is that it otherwise basically works. There are some bugs cropping up on the forum that range from goofy to serious which need stamped out, but the UO ship movement system that has been choppy and worthless from 1997 to 2010 is actually smooth now.

So you made this basically nice thing, and then took it out and shot it in the head for no reason.

I'm the deranged UO fanboy around here. If I'm not happy, you're fucking up. Fix this shit, or those couple of stupid cheerleader faggots on Stratics I milk to keep my bitch-threads going will be the only supporters you have left.

(Note: I don't begrudge any gays their buttsex, but "faggot" is too good a word not to use.)

... but what would Peaches do?

Show your Graphs or GTFO!

The day I can't spend 90 seconds in Paint to make a UO-related chart is a sad day indeed.

(http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e121/GrimDysart/derp.png)

It's a sad day when Comcast is doing better at their billing departments than an online game.

I'd like to think that the terrible UO billing system is a symptom of the game just being a million years old and almost completely forgotten by EA. Then I remember that out of their three traditional-style MMO offerings, one very new, UO was the only one that managed to NOT charge their customers dozens of times in one month a little while back.

It's not even a UO thing, EA just sucks at this.

Everyone has a point where they find their preferences/tolerances on the outside of 'accepted standard'. Especially in self-selecting medium like MMORPGs.

WUA, you can start your decade-long "bring pre-Pirates biotch" ranting, turn in your Fanboi Membership card, you can pick up new uniform from the pile in the corner.

What is wrong with having an item being crafted using multiple parts? It is no where near the extreme of FF14 20 different items to make a fishing pole. None of the materials to craft cannon components are rare. Crafters complain about having nothing to do. Now they have something to make and sell, it is too much work.

Not being able to light the cannon with a regular torch is dumb though.

Damnit one of them followed you here.  Thanks, WUA.

JC runs the UO wiki that is pretty much the main source of information for the game, since the Stratics database is a hilarious mishmash of outdated information. I'm not aware of him being utterly retarded, though he does have some rather suspicious opinions on how making crafting so tedious that most people quit doing it makes it viable for the people who can put up with it. I'll flame his post later.

Anyway I think I'm going to get my 457th Stratics ban soon. I should just tubgirl the place for lolz and hop on a different account, but meh. The last 456 tubgirls didn't teach them anything, and one weekend of trolling is about all of that place I can take for a few months. I'll just take this opportunity to publicly laugh at their attempts to turn their heavily moderated den of blithering morons into anything but a UO fansite. The WoW Stratics site wishes it was half as active as the WoW subforum here.

I say we make them chart fight to death - strongest, meanest Trammie gets to stay and we all win?

So, how many parts does it take to make a cannon, how long does it take to farm materials, and if you started your mining and lumberjack macro back in 98, how many cannons would you be able to make now? Most importantly, what does Peaches have to say about it?

Fuck you Sinij. Not for calling me a Trammie or generally mocking the game, but for entertaining the notion that some Stratics nub could ever defeat me in forum PVP. Fag.  :awesome_for_real:

This is not the comparative benchmark you want to use.

Saltpeter is mandatory for making gunpowder and exists only on a handful of vendors that are basically camped to death by would-be gougers. A pretty ridiculous design, but they've added a few more vendors and I know for a fact that they plan to make it obtainable by mining in the near future so whatever. Mostly it's two things.

1) Most of this added complexity does nothing to help crafters. Some of it can be done on any human character thanks to their Jack of All Trades racial. A lot more of it can be done on a newbie character with basic NPC training. Most of this shit does nothing but make the process of supplying and firing cannons a bigger pain in the ass than it needs to be, without giving crafters anything they're ever going to make any real money from. Crafters could sell cannons and gunpowder without the need to make or worry about bullshit like matchcord, fuses, swabs, etcetera.

2) The large focus on crafting a bunch of pointless components and sub-components and the resources needed to keep a ship in good repair, combined with the sub-par rewards for actually killing pirates, makes the system a headache and an economic loser.

Money isn't hard to farm. Like I said in one of the threads on Stratics, these pirates could sail up to the bank and kill themselves and for 10k most people wouldn't even sail back to the Sea Market to turn them in.

I've been registered on this forum for 4 years, thanks.

If you think crafting a couple items is tedious then maybe you should purchase your cannon supplies from people who don't.
Once you have the supplies, it only takes 5 clicks to make a new cannon shot.

1) Ingot --> Cannonball
2) Charcoal + Saltpeter + Sulfurous Ash --> Black Powder
3) Black Powder + Cloth --> Powder Charge
4) Board + Water --> Potash
5) Potash + Yarn + Water + Black Powder --> Fuse Cord

Take Cannonball, Powder Charge and Fuse Cord to fire your cannon.

This reminds me of the Mythbusters episode where they tested whether you could fire Cheese out of a Cannon. (The conclusion was that you need the right type of cheese but if you have it its damn effective)

Just a pointless post. Carry on  :oh_i_see:

You obviously don't get it.

This reminds me of steps required to fire a rifle in WW2OL. Does UO have flying boats/tanks yet?

Meanwhile in any sane universe it would have been...

1) Open Alchemy
2) Some shit + Some Other Shit --> Powder Charge
3) Open Smithy
4) Some Different Shit --> Cannonball

Done.

Match is an infinite use item, you only need to make 1.

The point still stands that making the materials needed to fire cannon shots only requires crafting 5 different items. Of course it is annoying to make only 10 at a time. If you make dozens of hundreds, it is just like making potions but you're making cannon supplies.

Also both clients have built in crafting loops since Stygian Abyss so you can set it to make a certain number or as much materials as you have.

Then why bother having them exist? Along with swabs, another step I left off, they serve absolutely no other purpose in the game except to add some extra shit to carry around and clicks to fire a cannon. They coded that shit for absolutely zero reason.


It should take all of two steps.


It's not that it's impossible to do, it's that it's pointless bullshit with zero upside. They could make you craft sword hilts individually, after you craft wire to wrap around it, and get some leather, and blah blah blah and it wouldn't make crafting swords impossible, but fuck why bother? Add that to the fact that ganking a pirate rewards about 3 or 4 minutes farming worth of gold, a shot at one of 8 pieces of a rare item that will be worth 50k in a few months, plus more of these resources I thought crafters were supposed to make, and eventually no one is going to be doing it.

The cannon cleaning and loading was done for balance reasons. Would you like a World of Warcraft cooldown instead?

So if you were in charge of design this is how they would be made:

1) Ingot --> Cannonball
2) Sulfurous Ash + Cloth --> Cannon Charge

Such a simple system encourages players to use their mule instead of considering buying it from other players. Ten years ago people crafted because it was "tedious" to remake all those armor and weapons constantly. Some people liked doing that. So you bought your equipment from them. But this doesn't apply today according to you. Everything needs to be a Staples Easy Button.

Why do some quests need to have multi-part? Why can't I bypass point B and move to point E to kill the end boss? I don't care about your story, where's Sephiroth? Maybe because it is less fun.

Listen dipshit, it's either so five-clicks simple that I should STFU about the tedium, or it's designed to be so overwhelmingly laborious as to drive away everyone who isn't a hardcore dedicated crafter. Fucking pick one.

And of course I'd rather have a cooldown instead of a cooldown plus pointless clicking. What kind of stupid-ass question is that, and what the hell does it have to do with WoW? Hit your hiding skill. Now try to hit spirit speak. Oh shit, UO has global cooldowns on active skills.

I'm not even going to bother with the "derp derp easymode derp" garbage except to tell you that you ought to be embarrassed to say that shit in 2010. I suspect someone else will wander along and bother sooner or later, someone who hasn't already had their fill of flaming Stratics tards who missed (or failed to understand) the last 10 years of MMO design.

You are an immense disappointment.

I am trying to say that the current way it is designed is not tedious or laborous, it is just right for what UO crafters currently need. You resort to name calling and saying I'm from Stratics (which couldn't be further from the truth). I thought we could have a nice discussion on the dynamics of multi-item crafting but it appears you can't handle it.

I don't consider that a cool down. It is a delay to allow the time it would have taken you to perform that action. A cool down is when you cast a spell and it doesn't let you cast another of the same one for 60 seconds, 5 minutes or 1 hour. Right now cannons actually take skill to fire quickly. You are proposing a cool down which will let someone push a button every x seconds along with whatever other fighting they want to do, instead of having to mix in 5 cannon firing actions along with their normal fighting.

You're describing a system wherein someone will possess a character in every way capable of crafting the required items, but will instead decide to purchase the items from someone else because making it themselves is too... what? Tedious. The steps involved aren't difficult to understand. They're just... say it with me... tedious. Go ahead, give me a better word for describing "I could do this myself but fuck it, there's too much clicking!"


If you want me to be nicer you're going to have to smarten up and quit saying shit like "No it's not irritating drudgery, it's just extra clicking to keep people from wanting to do it! Totally different!"


You don't consider it a cooldown? Well, um, tough shit because that's precisely what it is. This is what I mean when I say you don't know shit about game design. It's not "a delay to allow the time it would have taken you to perform that action" or some blinkered nonsense like that, it's a goddamn cooldown to keep you from being able to hold down your macro and hide in short order even with minimal skill points invested.

You hit your hiding skill, and you either do or do not disappear based on a skill check. After that you're prohibited from trying again for the next 10 seconds. What else do you think the term cooldown describes? In what way is this not one?

Besides which, the real reason for all the clicking isn't to keep someone from getting a spell off between shots. It's to validate the idea of bringing multiple gunners by preventing someone from running up and down the length of the ship firing multiple cannons as they go. Problem is they still would have been better off just slapping a "you must wait to fire another cannon" cooldown on the player.

Have the act of firing the cannon cancel spell targeting and drop you out of combat for X seconds afterward if you really find it necessary, but don't just cram in a bunch of spergy "herp derp now click your swab to clean it, now put in another fuse" just to slow the process down with bullshit clicking. That sort of shit is BEGGING to be scripted.

Edit: Oh, and I'm not up for being dependant upon other players for every one of 457 different crafted items. If they ever make ship combat economically worthwhile, I'll probably be rolling my first-ever crafting mule. The skill requirements are well below GM, so why shouldn't I?

 :awesome_for_real:

WUA, do you mean to suggest that you did not sexually climax during the forging of the Blackrock Sword?

jcthebuilder, the shit you're spouting is why UO only got the one sequel it deserved: Darkfall. You're really arguing in favor of adding MORE hassle to a game, while simultaneously trying to redefine traditional MMO terms.

Ideally I'd like a crafting system based on unique experimentation, like the original AC1 magic system pre Split Pea.  The "improvement" later games came up with over UO is to link crafting to level progression and reduce the RSI factor, if you dislike leveling up a crafting alt, then all that really happened was to replace part of one form of tedious activity with another.  The basic aim of requiring some sort of effort/time investment to master a crafting profession remains.  I don't like leveling or repetitive mouse clicking, we all know which is currently more popular, but I'm not convinced that one offers less "hassle" than the other.

Except the crafting a billion biscuits to level bit, y'all are really making me miss crafting in SWG.  <sniffle>

Me too. I want to consider how my armor with this mineral vs. that mineral stats make mine better than the next guy. Then I can run it through my spreadsheets to make the ultimate piece I can sell for 2.5x the average demand price.

Yeah I like that stuff. Don't judge me!  :awesome_for_real:

Okay, then everything has a cooldown. Moving an item has a cooldown. Logging in has a cool down. Moving my mouse from point a to point b is a cooldown. That is ridiculous. There needs to be a delay between actions so you can't do something such as chain Fireballs like a machine gun until your mana is empty. The game developers decided that 6 seconds for most action based skills is a realistic delay before you can perform another. Skills such as Arms Lore have a much shorter delay because the idea behind it is much less time consuming.

On the other hand you have a Conflagration Potion (added a couple years ago) which only lets you toss 1 every 30 seconds. Due to its powerful ability to make a fire box, the developers decided to balance it by putting an arbitrary limit on the time in between uses. That is what a cool down is in game design, it is an arbitrary limit set by developers to balance the item/ability. I personally consider this lazy design and when UO launched there was nothing in it that was used this way. I can throw explosion potions as fast as my hand will allow, but this conflagration potion says it needs another 29 seconds before I can use it again.


Anyway, I just wanted to correct some misinformation about how cannons work. You are saying it should only take 2 items, I'm saying 5 is not unreasonable. It is a 3 item difference so people can take what they will of it.

Wait, are you suggesting the term cooldown can only be used when there isn't a "in game/in character" reason for something to have a delay?  If they came up with a reason that potions couldn't be tossed more than once every 30 seconds that referred to the game world rather than the game mechanics would it suddenly not be a cooldown?

Your argument makes no sense.

I'm saying if you use a timer to determine balance then it is lazy design. It is extremely easy to say "you can only only use this item once every 10 minutes". It is more difficult to work out that you have a stomach and it can only hold X pieces of food, so if a player eats 5 items they can't eat anything for another hour. If you eat 5 of the +5 strength cookies you will have 25 strength, but not be able to get extra dexterity or intelligence.

lol, quote and modify buttons look the same

Oh I see, your arbitrary limits are somehow less lazy than their arbitrary limits, I understand now.

That delay between spells to keep you from spamming them, that is a cooldown. That's the god damned definition of a cooldown. When you offer the requisite input to activate a particular skill/spell/ability and the game says "Sorry, you just pushed the button for X but you'll have to wait, you can't do that again yet!" that is a fucking cooldown. The cooldown doesn't represent the time it takes to accomplish the task, because you don't need to wait out the length of the cooldown before receiving the benefit of the skill. You don't use Arms Lore, wait six seconds, and then receive a report. You use Arms Lore, receive a report as soon as you click the target, and then must wait six seconds before you can do it again.

Most skills in UO have at least a small chance of succeeding even at a very low investment of points. The purpose of these cooldowns isn't because "realistically it would take 10 seconds to hide yet only 6 to study a weapon" but to keep someone with 20 points in 10 different skills from being a god because they can just hold a macro down and burn through 12 failures in 3 seconds to get their success.

A blacksmith can churn out pieces of plate armor pretty much as fast as he can hit a button. There's no real cooldown on it because there are already mechanisms in place to make it desirable to raise the skill as high as possible. They don't give a shit how long things should realistically take.


Oh, so a "delay" only becomes a "cooldown" when it hits some arbitrary length of time that jcthebuilder doesn't believe properly represents the time taken to accomplish a given task. Yeah, let me just write this down. Herf.


You pretty much talked yourself into a corner with that bit about how the crafting isn't deliberately tedious (It just has a bunch of extra clicks to keep most people from wanting to do it!) so you're just going to pretend none of that happened. Gotcha.

You call a click tedious even though an item pops up in your backpack a second later. I call spending several days hand crafting the same desk plaque 150 times tedious. To each his own.

You still haven't told me what word besides tedious should be used to describe a system that discourages players from participating by piling on superfluous clicking.

I'm waiting.

 :popcorn:

I don't get all the wailing about the tedium of crafting. Did UOAssist stop working or something?

Compared to the fact that battling pirates is a money-losing proposition I think the relative tedium of making the cannon supplies is fairly unimportant.

If 5 clicks are too many, I would like to know which game out there you consider to have the ideal click to craft ratio. Then I can provide a retort.

Sorry champ, but you're the one who said a simple system would encourage people to use their own crafting characters instead of buying items from dedicated crafters. Now you have to explain how a system which discourages people from using their own crafting characters with the addition of pointless clicking is anything but tedious by definition. You're left trying to claim that A=B but B≠A and you're floundering.

So either answer the fucking question or piss off back to some soft safe forum where nobody can call you a fucking tool for being a hardcore MMO guy for years and still not being able to define "cooldown" in a way that doesn't make a board full of people shake their heads.

I need a reference as to what you deem an acceptable level of crafting. Making 3 items to fire a cannon shot does not seem very tedious to me. I want to know what game you think does a better job at this so I can respond to you.

I'm just gonna assume this is a gimmick account of WUA's, and he's arguing with himself for laughs.

No. You've been quoting the last three sentences of posts and trying to avoid giving a meaningful response to anything for a while now. Forget that I exist. Forget that we're talking about UO in particular. I want you to tell me the difference between these two things.

1) This adds extra steps and thus encourages people with crafting mules to buy their items instead.
2) This adds extra steps so tedious that people who could do it themselves would rather pay money than bother.

Spoiler alert, there is no damn difference. The same way there's no difference between "a delay to keep you from spamming" and a cooldown.

Frankly I think you're wrong and the crafting shit won't even stop anyone from muling. (It's going to get me to start muling, if they ever add a good reason for me to participate.) That doesn't make what you said any less conceptually ridiculous. The crafting bullshit isn't a huge roadblock, it's just laughably pointless because it serves no purpose whatsoever.

The "cooldowns are lazy design" from a guy playing the online successor to (a series of) games that invented (AFAIK) variable swing speeds in a pseudo real time game is a dead giveaway.

The biggest problem with UO trades, any crafting annoyances aside, is the lack of a centralized selling system.  I remember I managed to find an armor/weapon vendor, bought items from that person for months, and then one day the restocking stopped.

I made my own blacksmith at that point, because I didn't want to:
1. Traverse near and far until I found a vendor that restocked on a reasonably frequent basis
2. I didn't want to depend on that person, knowing they'd probably stop someday

The last time I quoted the first paragraph?

You just don't like my response so you are ignoring it. I am not going to respond to every single point because it would be boring writing an essay. This isn't Stratics. I am responding to what I think is most important.


I don't really know how to respond because the question you asked me isn't a question.

It is very obvious you don't like crafting in general. It is a pretty niche area of MMOs which few people enjoy compared to monster bashing or PVP combat. You even mentioned earlier you don't have a crafter. But just because you don't enjoy it does not mean it should be changed. I don't enjoy fishing. Should they rework it to satisfy me? For the people who do enjoy crafting and want to play with it, you have to design it for them. The people who seem to be complaining about cannon crafting are non-crafters at the moment.

In the past couple of years the UO developers have been struggling to make crafting as enjoyable and profitable as it used to be. In Mondain's Legacy and Stygian Abyss they added rare material drops to high end monsters. But that didn't work. Now they are trying out something new by having several components go into something which gets used up. It only costs about 50 gold to make a cannon shot. The real investment is the time spent putting it together.

So you have a choice, hunt monsters for gold and buy cannonballs or craft them yourself. Either way you get your items.

For the past several years there have been websites which search every vendor in the game for you. Everyone is using these.

Post an introduction thread in general and people will take you more seriously.  I think thats the disconnect everyone is having.

I think the disconnect people are having is a few people already know who I am and just don't like me.  :oh_i_see:

There are like... 3 people who have sub'd to UO since 2001 around here.  No one knows you.  Just posts a quick intro thread, it will do wonders.

Psychos.

I don't even need to quote, we all know who you are. The only thing that missing now are charts.

Sorry to bring it to you, but we don't give a fuck... so from now on you are "that crafting guy".

Yes, we eat our young here.

How to craft a Powder Charge

(http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/1174/craftingpowdercharge.png)

How to craft a fuse cord (which I mislabeled a match cord)

(http://img823.imageshack.us/img823/9889/craftingfusecord.png)

WUA proof.  Ignore Mr. JC

Rasix pass some of that popcorn this way.

I like how you are claiming I am a regular here and making my name out to be a conspiracy.

All I wanted to point out was cannons are not difficult to figure out, lol.

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/82533/Futurama_Fry_Looking_Squint.jpg)

You've given up trying to argue that a cooldown isn't a cooldown because of random reasons that nobody else can understand, now you're blathering to get out of explaining your own words. Look at these again.

1) This adds extra steps and thus encourages people with crafting mules to buy their items instead.
2) This adds extra steps so tedious that people who could do it themselves would rather pay money than bother.

You stated number one. I stated number two and you objected, even though they're the exact same goddamn thing. I'm not really interested in naming some other game's crafting so you can run around counting how many clicks it takes. Instead I'll just post my own chart, incorporating yours and adding my own MSPainted icons because I'm too lazy to clip real ones, showing everything it takes to go from raw materials to firing a cannon.

BEHOLD THE ELEGANCE! My favorite is still the eight-icon block that all goes into making a match.

I'm not even going to bother anymore. You are all over the place and I have gone over the same explanation several times and you just keep coming back with "oh you're not responding to this, this and this". I understand your opinion that every item should be crafted in 1 button press. I don't think that is how it should be. We will all just have to live with you being wrong.

You've blatantly ignored the same request to explain the difference between what you espouse and sheer tedium, you've long since given up trying to explain your nonsensical opinion on what constitutes a cooldown, and you've embarrassed yourself with the ridiculous notion that anyone here besides me knows or could possibly give a shit who the hell you are.

You've done nothing but make an asshole out of yourself, say stupid things, go silent or frantically try to change the subject when confronted with how stupid they are, and then make dipshit posts like this about how clearly right you are. Fuck back off to wherever you came from.

It is extremely obvious you've grown frustrated that you haven't gotten me to respond with a huge rant. You are just attempting to bait me into blowing up over your circular replies. Anyone who reads our exchange from the start can see I attempted to explain that the new cannon related crafting is a lot more simple than you made it out to be. I also attempted to explain how it is a good attempt to revive crafting in UO which is currently a shadow of its former self. Here at the end of our exchange you are practically screaming "look at these words, tell me how they are not the same!" I've already accepted your opinion, why can't you let it go?

My faith in JCtheBuilder is shattered. :( I will continue to believe.

Setting the mood. (http://images.wikia.com/u5lazarus/images/1/1c/U70018.ogg)

Also, since this place actually gets mod traffic I might as well mention that one of the IPY threads in the UO subforum has been severely douched up.

I love crafting.  Mindlessly gathering a bunch of materials and clicking a lot is not crafting.  It's repetitive motion for people with OCD.

The topic asked if IPY would deliver. I posted my opinion that it wouldn't. Then someone goes off saying IPY was the holy grail of UO gaming and people flocked to it and it was actually more popular than real shards. Then he goes on to claim EA shards suffer from up to 2 hours of downtime per day (lol, try 20 minutes past 8 years).

I'm sorry, for some reason I just set some people off by trying to correct false information.

No, you set people off by being an assgoblin of the highest order who evidently feels the need to fall to his knees and phallate EA at every opportunity, while trolling some dude who's making a freeshard for a now shitty game made during the neolithic era, and another dude who absolutely does not need to be trolled at all in order for him to get into batshit insane arguments. (but we love him anyways)  Then, you rebut with a passive-aggressive deflection of blame onto other people for taking objection to your reasonable corrections, which are seemingly some sort of self-obfuscation designed to prevent yourself from realizing that every fucking game ever made makes extensive use of some form of timing mechanics to prevent imbalance, and that UO's convoluted crafting trees and heavy emphasis on shittons of player input to make and fire a cannon are fucking woefully outdated shit.  Likely a result of you being a tool and living in a fucking cave for the last seven years.

I'm sorry, but for some reason people think I'm an asshole.

I don't want him banned for an intro thread.  

Stratics account (http://vboards.stratics.com/members/jc-the-builder.html) with 2,412 posts, youtube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/JCtheBuilder), blog (http://jcthebuilder.blogspot.com/)


He plays on felucca, looks like WUA Kryptonite to me, so welcome.

Edit to add, It just occurred to me, maybe that trammel thing was a bad idea.

I still reside in the same house on Felucca Atlantic if anyone wants to come pay a visit. I would probably kill you though.

(http://img832.imageshack.us/img832/649/myhousew.th.jpg) (http://img832.imageshack.us/i/myhousew.jpg/)

You missed a link to the guild I'm in: http://www.hot-guild.com
My main character profile: http://my.uo.com/cgi-bin/my_chars.pl?52616e646f6d49565961cde26cf0ccc53a9bc40b44fd791838dc9c2bb91b9aa6b9d2c9a16bfa0065c6dff5a8822bcd73
I used to post videos on Veoh before Youtube became good: http://www.veoh.com/collection/ultimaonline
My favorite ice cream is Strawberry

I know exactly what he's getting at.  He's playing a game that the vast majority of people here have moved on from, he's defending their implementation of a crafting change for a game he still likes and plays.  I'm not sure I agree with him about the crafting involved to make a cannon ball, although his point about combat being more complicated because you need to think about crafting actions during combat is perfectly valid, but I certainly don't agree that everything would be better by adding a global cool down.

In an argument over simple cool down verus tracking mountain goats down, skinning them, boiling their hides, stealing a leprechaun purse during a full moon and then combining it all with the blood of a virgin, while near a magic whirlpool, just to make a cannonball or whatever stupid shit is involved.  At least with the mountain goats idea, I can ask how high the mountains are.

If anything in WoW that involved shooting a cannon expected you to carry around a ramrod to load it, and a swab to clean it afterward, and don't forget to put a fuse in it, and so forth, there would be riots. At the end of the day, having four buttons to click in order to shoot really isn't any more fun than one.

In any case, I don't really care about that. If they made it worthwhile to do so, I'd click my four "SHOOT->ORLY?->YARLY!->SHOOT!!!" buttons just to have something new to do. The main thing I spent a few days trolling Stratics over is the lack of reward for bothering in the first place.

The flame war with JC has been fun but I wish you could get some of the really awful Stratics characters over here. That Popps guy would be amazing!

Stop for a second and think do you believe UO should be more like WoW, UO should be like the better version of EQ?  Is the lesson from the last ten years that all games should be like WoW because that's the most popular way to design a game?  Instead of people suspecting you are arguing with yourself via a gimmick account, you want me to quote you saying the exact opposite?  Saying there's room in the market for a sandbox mmo with a few hundred thousand subs?

Yes?  Is that supposed to be hard or at all objectionable?

What on earth would be the point of turning a 12 year old game into a 12 year old bad copy of WoW?  They're well past the stage of attracting new users.  At this point their best bet is just to hold on to as many of the old users as they can for as long as they can.  If those people wanted WoW that's what they'd be playing already.

Can't be both?

In UO, a complicated crafting system makes sense because the objective is to have lots of items and options, collectors like to display their individual preferences in a house/fort/castle that can also be customised, rares being the top end items.  The exact number of clicks/items needed to create a cannonball can be argued, with me generally taking the view that the fewer the better, but replacing it all with just a cool down?  That doesn't fit with the game logic.

In WoW, a simple crafting system makes sense because the rares are largely obtained through mob interaction and WoW is largely PVE based, resources are limited and spread out to slow down how fast they can be gathered, even mastery in crafting professions is level restricted.

You might as well suggest removing housing from UO, WoW doesn't have it so it can't be that important.

My feelings on this thread so far:

 :oh_i_see: :dead_horse:  :awesome_for_real: :popcorn: :facepalm:

Btw, I love hardcore crafting (as evidenced by my Galaxies mancrush) but some of the shit yall are talking about having to do to fire a cannon? Yeah that's not even fun in spreadsheets.

Galaxies required a bit of thought (and patience and business acumen) to pick the best materials to make the top tier of gear.  What is described there is nothing but grind.

I like your summary.

Yeah, or they could go F2P, monetize the fuck out of it, and put it on Facebook.

That's really not something to froth your neckbeard about.  That's like a slow pitch over centre plate for a six year old.

RE: Slyfiend

Incidentally, Blizzard has actually announced an intent to go F2P with WoW as it reaches the end of it's life.

HEH!


Yeah but you could fit UO on Facebook. Although by the time WoW is ready for the F2P thing, the web might be ready for a WoW client too....

In terms of quality of life and ease of use? Yes. Yes. Yes.

A system should never insist upon a greater number of inputs than it has potential outcomes. The cannon does only does one thing, it fires. There is absolutely no good reason to require four inputs just to generate that single output. Functionally speaking, CLEAN->LOAD->PRIME->FIRE is no different from FIRE->CONFIRM?->CONFIRM?->CONFIRM? but we'd all rightly shit a brick if anyone put three layers of confirmation on anything.

Similarly, there is no good reason for... say... crafting matchcord to be a separate process from crafting a match, when matchcord has absolutely no reason to exist except to be made into matches. No one is ever going to sell matchcord. No one is ever going to buy it. It's an extra and completely pointless layer of meaningless pseudo-interaction. One that is, for the most part, new to UO with this expansion.

A few infrequently-crafted tinkering items like clocks have useless intermediary stages, but for the most part crafting any one item is one step. A sword is made out of ingots, not ingots made into a blade combined with ingots and leather made into a hilt, etcetera etcetera. Crafting a robot golem requires some ingots and a couple of dropped items but only a single intermediary step.

When putting together...

(http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSkmFSuZAKAxXJsO8CXjrtp2R4AogXsS3zGDmh5Ktybp0ElWzs&t=1&usg=__cj9mqMD-HlUQhLUExqzfc61GAXA=)

...is less complicated than manufacturing...

(http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRjKDFzQpPGiYPn3_3PCMBg5H6QlYw020wdN6pBv6MuZI0aZa4&t=1&usg=___XAmG7hlZRVXz0yz89_eJ7bDHLk=)

...then yeah man, something is amiss.

Ok granted, I still think you have to have a certain level of crafting complexity to keep things interesting.  Is it overly complex in this case?  Maybe, it's been too long since I played, I don't trust myself to judge.  But if you personally don't have a crafting character, as was stated earlier, then I do think your threshold for all the involved bullshit is liable to be lower than "normal".  But I'm aware that "normal" in this case refers to people still playing UO in 2010, so maybe that's not a bad thing.

But who would win in a fight between ED-209 and a UO player-crafted ship?

The Mech would win, if he had posted a tank picture, I wouldn't have been so sure.

If ED-209 keeps its distance and moves around a lot, the ship is unlikely to hit it with anything important and the robot can just spray it with gunfire and rockets until it runs out of ammunition. Whether or not this constitutes fatal damage will likely depend upon whether or not an uncontrollable fire is started.

 :awesome_for_real:

Anyway, I'd be a lot more sympathetic to a lot of this cannon crafting shit if some of the materials could also be used to... I don't know, make bombs or rockets or something. If they served some purpose besides just being the pointless in-betweens of an ABCD progression. Having a resource that can potentially become one of several useful products is one thing. But if the resource exists for only one reason, then sweep that shit under the rug with the four zillion different tools and intermediate stages nobody gives a shit about that would otherwise go into making a sword or breastplate.

Except the extra steps are really not interesting.  Other games have pretty much conclusively proven that crafters are appreciative of mini-games, exploration, and customizing their own work.  Which is where EA should have taken UO crafting, if they really want to go down the path of catering to crafters.

Which might not be the most sound business decision, because UO's reputation for crafting is preceded by it's reputation for corpse rape.

I'm really hoping that this actually happens. 

Based on number of charts, the new guy is pulling ahead.

So the expansion has been out for a little over a week, and on Atlantic I'd be doing well to fire one shot from one cannon for a price any less than 4 or 5 times the total reward of bringing down a pirate. Almost no one is selling the shit, and those who are selling are charging ludicrous prices.

Basically, it's mule or get the fuck out. Or sort of the exact opposite of what assgoblin was hoping for. You still won't make any money even if you mule, but at least you won't go bankrupt in two days.

The pirate loot is obviously not balanced correctly. You only get like 5k and it will cost double that to fire enough cannons to board the ship. It takes about 20 minutes to take down a ship. The only known reward is you can get enough pieces to make an Orc Ship. In the end the booster could have used another 2 weeks beta but it had to be rushed out.

Now they have to work on 13th Anniversary gifts, 13th year veteran rewards, Halloween events, whatever they are planning on doing in Magincia, moving the Council of Mages faction base and there is of course that rumor of a big layoff in November.

I said all I wanted to say about it, I had a couple of crafting characters I really liked but crafting sure wasn't enough to keep me playing.

Ugh, firing cannons?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9JiT-TLPJc

You only need to look at the first 45 seconds.

POTBS it is not.

...

That video really makes any argument about how good this pirate ship add on is completely fucking retarded.  Wow. 

Wow, bringing the thrill and excitement of Eve POS management to UO!  :why_so_serious:

 :uhrr: :ye_gods:

:rofl:

That kind of combat also doubles as a sedative.

Reminds me of how tolerant we all were of bad game mechanics 10+ years ago. 

Reminds me of DaoC Siege weapons.


Though those at least had a little power bar meter that you were theoretically supposed to try and time your ram swings with or whatever.

Don't know if you noticed, by the author of that video is our truly jcthebuilder. He really wears the whole cannon thing with pride.

Have they brought back precasting yet?

But but but! If the system didn't revolve around laboriously pushing four or five different things in between selecting huge amounts of weird little crafting doohickeys, there wouldn't be a (tiny, overpriced, mostly stillborn) market for crafters to enjoy!

You know what would have been cool?

If I hadn't been able to duplicate almost exactly that in 1993 by dropping a cannon onto the deck of a ship in U7 with the hack mover cheat.

First 15 seconds.  I am being completely serious right now. 

This is a joke, right?

I mean, the JC thing.  Obviously the pirate boat shit arrrr is CRAP.  But.  How.

How is any of this wanted.  Why would anyone do this.  Forget price of items.  Forget gathering of items.  Assume I can get it all in 5 seconds.

Who the fuck wants to sit there and click that.  Why.  I almost didn't watch the video... but.  Why.  How.  Why.  How.

This made it into production?  Tell me you do not have to pay for this.  I.  What? 

Precasting has been back since like 2000. It isn't exactly the same as the old way, but you can hold a spell for up to 45 seconds and move around. You can't drink a potion or use a skill while holding a spell.

As for the cannon video, that was to show people how firing works.  If I was in real combat I would either have a UOAssist macro hotkeyed to do all that or one of the Enhanced Client built in macros.

You mean I have to press buttons on my keyboard to play this game? How outrageous!

 :awesome_for_real:

 :ye_gods:


 :ye_gods:

I forgot all about UOAssist, UO is about the only mmorpg out there that outsourced all UI development to 3d party.

It's a $15 booster.

The best part?  I could do this in Ultima VII by dropping a cannon on the deck of a ship, both movement and firing worked, and you didn't have to do each step manually - the cannon would automatically consume a nearby powder keg and cannonball.

"What do you want? A cooldown like WoW? Then you'd just push one button and wait for the cooldown to complete! This cannon system is complex for balance reasons!"

*writes complex macro*
*pushes one button and waits for it to complete*

 :uhrr:

Ahhh. Good old UO. The only MMORPG I've played where third party commercial software has been necessary to be competitive in player versus player activities.

Cannon firing is like the iPad, until you've tried it you don't know what you're missing.

So do you want to explain why pushing one key to fire the cannon and waiting on a cooldown would be WoWlike and stupid, but pushing one key and waiting on a macro is totally awesome?

Or is this just one of those things (like "delays" versus cooldowns and "extra steps" versus tedium) where you belatedly realize that you've just said you hate pancakes but love flapjacks and go all retarded and pretend not to understand the question?

There is a different between the one button press you propose and having a one key macro. Even if you have the macro, you need to keep your actions free at the appropriate moments in the macro or it will fail. You also must remain standing next to the cannon the entire time or it halts. There is also the advantage of being able to preload every cannon on your ship for quick firing. The way it is now you could potentially solo pirate hunting. If it was programmed as a cooldown that simply would not be possible. As a small bonus the multi-fire system is great for roleplaying.

I see three distinct methods of firing cannons under the current system. You could press the menu buttons for one. The second involves having it all recorded as a single macro. Then there is the third where you could have each cannon action as a separate macro so you could have an easier time casting spells while firing a cannon. If it was press and forget you wouldn't have this flexibility. It would be press button and wait X seconds before you can press it again.

Firing a cannon while taking/healing damage will take practice to handle well. It adds a whole level of ability that isn't tied to skill points, especially in PVP.

You're right, that cannot be achieved any other way, we bow to your wisdom.

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1143749/Castbar.jpg)

Next time, do your damn homework! :-)  :mob:

Cool, WUA can start measuring his clicks per minute, think of it as starcraft training.

Actually I could just about put up with the four button click fest, but having to fuck with that inventory bag thing along the way because you seemingly can't pile stacks of resources into the cannon would wind me up beyond belief.

This would also be true of WoW UI mods and a gazillion out of game EVE utilities, except the software is usually free or paid for with in-game currency.

In fact, you use third party comms for just about any serious pvp endevour in every game ever.

Well, I don't know about the rest of you guys, but this sold me.   :heart:

Wait a minute, are you people suggesting that UO is well served by bringing in (or possibly back) some kind of mechanism to preprepare  a cannon activation system trigger....

Well I never...

Fuck.  I ran out of popcorn.  Don't let anything else happen while I run to the corner store.

 :facepalm: Make sure to hum a nice English ditty as you go down with the ship, you scurvy dog.

Because it's otherwise too cumbersome, halfwits!

Anyway, I'm sure our new buddy is going to come back and try to tell Sheepherder that casting times are some stupid junk from WoW and "pauses while you do something to keep you from moving" are totally different. I don't think he's been exposed to modern MMO lingo anywhere but WoW and thinks it only describes things in that game.

Meanwhile Hawkeye on Stratics is reporting that the saltpeter vendors on his shard are uncamped and stocking a stack of 40 each. Saltpeter is the prime ingredient of gunpowder, and UO vendors restock a greater quantity of an item (in multiples of 20) whenever they're sold out. The only vendors in the game selling a vital resource being at 40 means fucking nobody is doing it, on that shard at least.


This.

Is it time to go check Stratics again for your "I told you so!!!11" thread or have they banned you by now?

Surprisingly my current Stratics account remains unbanned for the time being. I gave up the heavy trolling days ago though. I felt an adequate stink was raised to satisfy my nerd honor, and ultimately yelling at people who don't understand all of the words gets tiresome after a while.

There are up to 2 dozen vendors per shard selling Saltpeter. Each vendor has the capacity to produce 95,904 Saltpeter per day (999 Saltpeter x 15 Minute Restock Time). Each shard has a maximum production capacity of 2,301,696 which turns out to be enough for over 70,000 heavy cannon shots (each takes 30).

Yeah, it sounds like people really don't like the expansion and it couldn't at all indicate enough supply to meet demand.

WUA & PvP don't mix together. Last time I heard he managed to get PKed and looted in Farmville.

As to JC: UO started in 90th with archaic interface and archaic ideas such as vendor camping/stocking, and managed to bring this early-80th gaming legacy firmly into 2010 by hanging on to Very Old Ideas. While every sane gamer would consider it annoyance or bad design, they consider it content. I suppose you can make an argument that camping vendor or making 200 asswipes just so you can play in UO is as much of a content as farming heroics so you have gear to raid in WoW.

JC is simply is not willing to consider that anything but Status Quo is possible and fighting sacrilege here. Misguided, but understandable.

There is a new method of resource distribution on vendors introduced several years ago. Every vendor can sell an unlimited amount of resources in stacks of 500. Every 1000 resources a vendor sells increases the price of that resource by 1 gold. Every 1000 resource sold back to that vendor reduces the price by 1 gold. Saltpeter was going to use this system.

But Saltpeter was skyrocketing in price from 15 gold to close to 1,000 in the beta test. There wasn't a way to get it other than a vendor. So at the end of beta they had to switch it to the old method.

In the publish a few days away they are adding the ability to mine Saltpeter. So maybe they will also revert it back to the "modern" method of resource vending.

... or they could sell all saltpeter you would ever want, any time, all the time, for fixed price after realizing that shopping for reagents is poor-form "content" ? You have to ask yourself, if this expansion about ship combat or buying saltpeter? If it is about buying saltpeter (or crafting asswipes, but I digress, WUA already covered this in plenty detail) then by all means carry on.

If you don't like player's having control over the economy then you should avoid games such as UO and Eve Online.

By the way the updated publish notes include say they are switching to the modern method of selling Saltpeter. So you will either be able to mine it or purchase it from NPC vendors at an ever increasing cost.

Comparing vendors slowly inching up their stock of a potentially infinite resource for a fixed price to the player economy in Eve is the worst thing you've said so far.

There is nothing slow about it. If you buy 5,000 of a resource such as arrows, that increases the price by 10 gold each. Then someone can come in and sell arrows back to the vendor for a nice profit. The system worked so well it was being exploited until they added a selling tax and now you only get 80% of the value. Sort of like how Eve players were committing insurance fraud and artificially depressing mineral prices.

Artificially depressing mineral prices? I think you have that one wrong. They were artificially inflating mineral prices if anything.

The Hugely rich used to buy up any price that was lower than their agreed price and slam them back on the market at their own minimum price. Since not much high end Minerals made it into empire from 0.0 they could control the price of high end minerals very effectively. And the price of t2 materials was a total monopoly of maybe 10-15 players that made it for pennies and sold it for pounds. (And of course they were using bugs to make the stuff out of thin air) Its gotten a little more mixed up relatively recently of course.

The Mineral price of one mineral, Veldspar, used to have a cap because shuttles were maid of it, and were available in unlimited quantities. SO if prices climbed above that you could buy 100 shuttles, melt them down and sell them to the that buy price.

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=19997.0

Here is my recruiting for our own Azaroth's server ( www.inporylem.com ) and an f13/friends guild. It's a freeshard going into Beta soon. This is my invite to you to either try UO for the first time (with the help of some vets) or return to UO for some good PVP and sandbox fun. We had a lot of fun last time with about five f13ers, and I think it would be awesome to be a part of a level playing field, new server (run by someone from here, with good ideas and experience running a shard).

This may be a bit early (as server launch is probably a bit over a month away), but I would really like to get some interest going. I'll be PMing some of the old UO guys as well.

I might be up for that, Slayer, if there are cannons.

Actually, Az had added a Pirates feature that is completely different from the craptastic one. We'll see if it is good or not, but you can read about it here:

http://azaroth.org/2010/10/24/10-in-10-yarr-pirates/

lol, way to copy EA expansions. Also taking features such as navigating by mouse. There is no innovation there.

No one cares what you think. Go back to Stratics.

Ignore them.  They are just jealous of your encyclopedic knowledge of UO.

It just irks me that Az is trying to play a victim. "Poor me, I have been working my butt off making this new shard and EA swoops in and steals my thunder".

Reality check:

- The developers have been talking about a pirate expansion since Renaissance.
- Mondain's Legacy was a pirate expansion until EA management decided to do something else (the ML build was called High Seas).
- Smooth boat movement benefits everyone, OSI and free shard alike. If High Seas didn't happen boat PVP would continue to suck.

There is nothing really exciting in what is planned for IPY. It is just High Seas with a bit of factions mixed in.


shhhh, No one tell Az that EA is also working on a faction revamp.  :oh_i_see:

His ship combat system sounds way better than the EA one.

I had a read of that article and he has some good ideas in there. I like the way he talks about the economic impacts of ship building. I can imagine people will be begging to pay ransoms to avoid their expensive ships going to the bottom. He was a bit vague on the combat system (but then I don't know UO at all) but it seems more streamlined than the official UO version.

Heh. I'm tempted slay. We'll see.

The main difference is the EA system does not allow your ship to be destroyed. I don't think the IPY system will be able to survive without changes. Griefers can sail around blowing up every ship they see. What if you just want to go do some fishing? A pirate ship rolls up and you recall. Your ship and everything on it is now gone. It costs next to nothing because the cannons shot explosion potions.

This was already a serious problem on EA Trammel because a bug fix was not applied correctly. Players were going around and scuttling player ships all over just for the fun of it.

Production UO Trammel players and the likely players of IPY have slightly different expectations regarding what is or is not acceptable. At least you don't need a flowchart to arm your ship and fire the guns.

If every time you encounter a pirate you lose your ship, that won't be acceptable to many people. If this is really how people like it, then this should also extend to houses. Is there a house you don't like? Throw explosion potions at it until it explodes into flames and burns down. This is the expectation of people who play on IPY.

So the EA system = Trammel everywhere & IPY = a pre trammel griefer paradise?

WTF is this bullshit? Where the hell does he play victim?

Those that can, DO, those that can't, critique and run fan sites.

Guess what...you can't recall to/from Ice Isle either. So if you are going on a boating trip over there you better be ready for a possible fight on the way. Or maybe take a path less travelled. I personally think it is great, but will rarely take part. When I hit the high seas, it will be with friends and we'll be ready for a fight.

A large, established, and enterprising pirate guild could also work out 'protection' deals like the mob. For X gold a week, we won't attack anyone in your guild. You are free to farm gold on Ice Isle and fish until your hearts are content! This is the kinda stuff I hope for in my MMOs, not raiding and purple hunting. An actual world full of risk/reward. A world where you can possibly be murdered, but those that are smart are far less likely. Survival of the mother fuckin' fittest. UO at it's best.

I can't believe how jcthebuilder went from educated, polite recently de-stalked EA defender to aggressive DLRiley-ish assholey offender to Azaroth's humble and cool project in so little time. What is wrong with you, dude? Since you haven't been banned for your dementia about crafting, you are curious to see how much trolling is allowed around here? Anything better to do than make a fool of yourself about UO on the f13 boards? Don't you have any saltpeter to grind or cannons to click these days?

And yeah, what Mrbloodworth said.

I realize it's Halloween and all but some threads are better left in the Graveyard.

Damn players being able to go around doing things just for the fun of it. I hate when that happens.

Maybe if it wasn't so retardedly boring and costly to get a ship in the first place this wouldn't be such a problem?

BUT THEN SHIPS WOULDN'T MEAN ANYTHING!

Srsly, where is the accomplishment?

I didn't know ripping off someone elses work is considered doing something.

And this sounds to me like the reverse; you come in here expecting to be the Guru Of All Things Ultima, whereupon we shower you with praise and thanks for enlightening our Ultima-less lives, then get all butt-hurt when you find out we got our own thing going on.

I came here to clarify some things about the High Seas expansion. I thought it might be helpful to answer some questions about the current state of UO. I see the old dog IPY coming around again so I offer some commentary on that.

To me, it appears you guys just don't like new people on your forum. It is no wonder most posters on this forum have hundreds or thousands of posts.

Joining a community, particularly an established one, takes time. 

If you've got something to add, say it.  Some will appreciate that.  Some won't.  It's the internet.   

There have been various attempts to tackle that issue but the age of the forum and the fact the forum is a forum have greatly hindered the efforts.

Not being a fucking idiot might have helped your cause. Then again, what do I care? Yes, we hate everyone and you should probably just fuck off.

You should feel the assrape to get over 1,000.   :grin:

Doctor, heal thyself!


 It is so freaking ironic that Trammies would PK each other given opportunity. Those filthy, antisocial Trammies must be murderers and rapist IRL.

I'm sad that I missed out on all these ancient UO shenanigans. :(

Now this thread got them all.  :heart: :awesome_for_real: :heart:

Relive them in 3d...

http://www.xtranormal.com/watch?e=20090418123642649
http://www.xtranormal.com/watch?e=20090423203538293

I am so excited for the Grandfather clocks we are getting. Unfortunately they come prebuilt. I would have preferred a 12 part crafting quest to make them.

I note the irony of a UO stalwart coming here and lecturing us about inclusion while also defending the stupidly complex processes that drive players away from the title.

UO players are the most entertaining.

No doubt about that (http://boards.powergamers.net/viewthread.php?tid=339).

lol, to be young on the internet again.

Stratics has some news that EA is launching a Classic Shard..................today.


http://vboards.stratics.com/uhall/226414-%5Bnetwork%5D-ultima-online-classic-pvp-server-back-online.html

 :grin: Shard of the Dead  :grin:

And we all thought EA didn't have a sense of humour.

How the hell is playing in the dark with 10 times skill gain and a lightsaber classic?

They said old school, they didn't say anything about Ultima.

From the Dawn of Time we came, moving silently down through the centuries, living many secret lives, struggling to reach the Time of the Gathering, where the few who remain will battle to the last. No one has ever known we were among you, until now.

Why would you disable shit like insurance and enable lightsabres on a fucking pvp server.

These guys are idiots.

Clearly your not hardcore.

As retarded as you all think this is, I don't get the hate for this rare bone thrown to the niche of a niche that might actually like it. Some people actually DO like to punch pins in their nutsacks (it's true), and some people like to be whipped (even more true). In fact, whips, paddles, canes and floggers are actually a very remunerative niche business. Call this the BDSM of MMORPGs, but there's a market for this and people who want to play it. Don't be narrowminded. It's safe, it's consensual, and doesn't spoil your fun.

Most of what you say is true, except the market bit has yet to be proven.

UO is for sure a much more convenient abbreviation than MBDSMORPG.

Why would you have insurance on a PvP server? You carry what you can afford to lose.

Anyway, I'm glad EA are trying stuff but old-school UO wasn't about constant war, which this seems to be going for. You can let people have guards in Yew and Minoc, and the odd bit of sunshine, and still have a PvP server.

Sigh.

All they had to do was open a real classic server and I probably would have played. Glass swords.... Ugh.

Old school shard sounds interesting. But... One shot glass-swords?  :ye_gods:

It's not real pvp if the other guy has a chance to fight back.

I thought the whole idea of the "classic" shard was basically getting rid of all the changes since 1998 or so.  No more glow in the dark colours. No more crazy itemization. None of that nonsense. A regular old Felucca where people wore iron and leather armour - exceptional if they were lucky and generally kept their vanq swords locked up safely in the bank.

This shard is not meant to be "the" classic shard. It is a test to see how much interest there is. They are making a few quick changes (no item insurance, no blessed items, only Felucca) to make it feel classic. But it is also meant to be a special event shard for Halloween.

Also, leather armor? Mages didn't wear that until after Renaissance.

Of course. That's why mages had to have 100 strength so they could wear plate and wield a hally.  :awesome_for_real:

This is my favorite quote of the day.  You have to let me steal this one. 

My mage did indeed wear plate and wield a hally.

Somebody should have mentioned a pre trammel server before, if only they had known there was some interest in it. 

The whole "test" spin is bollocks anyway, either the new retarded ruleset is popular long term, in which case, doh, keep it, or it's not, which means the only reason to refer back to it is to say there wasn't enough interest in a "real" classic server.

Yep. Mine too.

Ahhh, miss the ole tank mage!

Ve hurl lightning vit strenght!

The shard is now online.

I logged in to see people casting poison on each other and getting guard wacked.

Make yourself useful and setup a live feed from brit bank.

Now I'm getting nostalgic memories of hanging out behind Empath Abbey working on my magery.

Feel free!

This almost tempts me to re-subscribe...

Does this PvP shard gets rid of all new resist/reforge/ninja crap? I doubt it.

Obviously not, who would want to play chess match when you can just punch other guy in the face and topple his king?

Idiot.

They've done "Shard of the Dead" before. It's a combination of Halloween event shard and testing ground for whatever odd ideas they have kicking around. They've had events in the past where you could be turned into a zombie and all sorts of weird shit that never made it into the actual game. I wouldn't put too much stock in the idea of a permanent classic shard actually looking anything like this one in particular.

The conversation was probably less like "How do we gauge interest in a classic shard? I know, this!" and more like "Hey it's Halloween and we've been kicking around the idea of a classic shard. Let's give this year's Shard of the Dead a PVP bent and see who shows up." I know they certainly wouldn't go to the trouble of redacting 10 years worth of game changes until they were 100% sure that a permanent classic shard was a go. If even then.

What they fail to understand is that interest in "classic" shard is mostly from ex-player base, not current one. Trying to measure interest by offering it to current player base is... misguided.

Put classic shard - 100% classic, no crystal meth swords or any kind of other idiocy that went in since 98, and offer it for free for 2 months. This is the only way to measure interest. It doesn't even have to be classic client - you can use whatever 3D clinet they are using right now as long as RULESET is close enough.

I went there to see what was up. I ran around naked saying I was the backpack inspector and snooping people. Some guy ran halfway across town to get away from me. Then he attacked me and was killed by the guards, so I took all his shit and was naked but with his hat on.

And yet, quite a bit of PvP is one overgeared min/maxed jackass roflstomping everyone else around him.

So yes.  Toppling someone else's king is apparently quite fun for some "PvPers".

I'm downloading this right now to get my thief on.  I don't think that pre-Ren (when I played for about a year) I ever swung a sword or cast an offensive spell.  Just give me Brit Bank and I'll be happy. 

Soul, sorry to bring it to you, PvP is not retard-friendly pastime like foozle bashing. You actually have to be better than the other guy at something to win. Sometimes it is just gearing and building your character, but more often than not you have to also play better, have better connections/friends and know your turf. Don't place yourself in the situation where "overgeared min/maxed" player would attack you until you are on somewhat equal footing. If you were starting boxing, would you step into the ring with heavyweight champion and then complain when you got K.O. after the first jab?

There are different games that have PvP. Some segregate/instance you away until you decide you are ready to PvP. Stay safe as long as you can, it is logical thing to do, even if it takes slower to advance. Sure thing is often much better than pie-in-the-sky, especially if you can't go back to sure thing once you left.

Other games throw you in a pool with sharks - in that case accept that winning for you is getting away, or minimizing loss when you get killed, for very long time. Get better at watching over your shoulder, find others who willing to protect you or at least watch your back. Find safety in numbers, remember you don't have to outrun the bear, just slowest guy. Failing that, understand what attackers want from you. Are they the same people time after time? Try offering a deal where you pay them to leave you alone. Are they different people all the time? Perhaps you need to find more secluded area, with less traffic.  Learn not to look like easy target. Don't go back to the situation that got you killed, don't do exactly same thing and expect it to turn out different.

I started playing UO near the end of dread lord days. I would occasionally get PKed, but using rules above I quickly found my place and was never "victimized". Remember, it takes 2 to corpse camp. I discovered Xroads firsthand, and quickly understood that was a very bad place to be. I traveled a lot as new player - I think I visited every city in UO in first month I played, and I didn't even have a horse to make running easier. Eventually I settled in Moonglow and spent most of my newbie time hanging around Moonglow Graveyard that spawned mostly skeletons but with occasional Lich and Wrath. It also had a zoo with a guard zone nearby and run to the bank was relatively short. It wasn't the best place to farm/train but community was tight, plenty of bone armor to go around and there was only one non-statloss PK that frequented our GY. More often than not PK would res us after taking our gold and nobody would loot bone armor since you couldn't smelt it. Once in a blue moon we would chase PK or some noto-thief around as a mob of enraged newbies armed with deadly poisoned katanas. Eventually I maxed my stats and trained skills to 90s. By then T2A hit, so I moved to Spider Keep and got my block high enough to solo Avengers. Then I joined Chaos/Order guild and spent lot of time PvPing. Initially I joined to get my hand on free shield, but liked PvP aspect and stayed for thrills. Macroed my resist to 90s and started dueling.

Thank you for this work of genius.   :awesome_for_real:

As for the PvP is skill versus gear argument-  it is probably a bit of both, depending on the game, but in the end it basically becomes a gank fest.  Of course that could be viewed as a "skill", but whatever. 

Fuck these stupid games and their corrupted files for free trials squarely in the anus.  BOTH this trial and the LOTRO trial download corruptly, no matter what I do.  Don't these companies want my money? 

God nobody remembers how anything works. Roleplaying the town Backpack Inspector to a bunch of newbs running away screaming "GUARDS!" is hilariously fun.

If you are downloading corrupted installs it is likely your computer. I downloaded the client 2 days ago  and it installed fine.

I would have resubbed.

lol, that's classic UO comedy.

Strangely enough, the guy never came back and I haven't seen him again. I was under the impression that when exposed to the fun and adventure of untamed UO, all other games would seem pale and lifeless in comparison. This guy seemed to find himself dead and stripped of his newbie junk shortly after logging in due to some shit he didn't understand, and appears to have gone "Fuck this crap!" and never come back.

That's not how it's supposed to work, is it?  :why_so_serious:

To truly realize the dream of a "classic" UO shard it's crucial that all other less "classic" games be shut down.

Because obvious things are not obvious enough:


I would be highly surprised if significant % of current player base were able to tolerate classic UO due to self-selection process of all changes and player base that went in since Trammel.

10 years ago people said there wouldn't be enough players to support one classic shard.  Nobody knows for sure because they didn't try it.

10 years later the thing that generates most interest among ex-players is exactly the same thing.  Maybe in another 10 years we can say for sure, there's definitely not enough interest to do this.

As many pvp games as you've played, I'd have thought that you'd agree with Soulflame.  PvP MMO's aren't about winning fair and challenging fights for most people.  They're about wtfpwning someone (due to level, gear, class imbalances) and shouting azzrape over their corpse. 

As long as some of you been around, I'd have though you'd realize that griefers and PvPers are not the same thing, nor do you have to have PvP in the game to get griefed.

Soulflame is airing his sandy vagina over getting PKed "in that game" over decade ago. He obviously can't blame himself for being too dumb to avoid getting repeatedly PKed, he doesn't understand why he got PKed so he blindly charges red drape without understanding what happened and why, he just knows his e-peen got slighted.

And yours remains droopy and indistinct without a game in which to highlight it.

Don't worry, it can spring into raging hardon moment I need it to.

(http://www.p0stwh0res.com/images/gay_trying.jpg)

Hey does anyone know where to find that little black and white comic strip that was floating around Lum's back while SWG was in development? The one what had R2-D2 getting PK'd by naked guys in bone helmets and the UO devs cowering away from their near-exploding servers of legacy code?

Man, this thread was awesome.  I read the entire thing (well, I should say skimmed it) while eating dinner at my PC.  Net result:  I'm resubbing to UO.

(http://www.pestcontrolrx.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/06/29/mole.jpg)

Those claws are way to nasty to be on such a little critter.

Maybe it was you who ganked me all those years ago when I foolishly took my new Valorite plate set out to play... and stole only the pants.  :oops:

Fecker ran around BB wearing only my pants for days.

Valorite was rare shit then - I never got another pair. Bastards.

 :why_so_serious: