Obligatory WUA UO post! Game free through the 12th!

[Slayerik]

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

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

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

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.

[WindupAtheist]

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

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



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

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.

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.

[Rasix]

I don't even make epic posts about WoW lore anymore. GAWD.

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.

If I think the boaty shit is worth posting about I might do so after I've had time to mess around with it.

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

[sinij]

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

[Fordel]

How old is UO now, like 15? 12?

[WindupAtheist]

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

[Fordel]

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

[Azaroth]

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.

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.

[Slayerik]

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.....

[eldaec]

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

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

[Paelos]

Quitters. I've had my car since 1997! 

[eldaec]

There were cars in 1997?

[Brennik]

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

[WindupAtheist]

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

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. 

[Sky]

UO never looked good.

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.

[Xuri]

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

[Soulflame]

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.

[WindupAtheist]

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.

[WindupAtheist]

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.

[Azaroth]

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

[Sir T]

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..

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?

[UnSub]

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.

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.

[Reg]

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.

[Soulflame]

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.

[WindupAtheist]

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?

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.

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.

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".

[Reg]

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.

[Ashamanchill]

One star talent five star drive?

[WindupAtheist]

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.

[Soulflame]

DO IT.  I require documented hilarity.

[UnSub]

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

[WindupAtheist]

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.)

[sinij]

... but what would Peaches do?

Show your Graphs or GTFO!

[WindupAtheist]

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

[Paelos]

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

[WindupAtheist]

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.