(UO expansion) You'll all scoff, but I'm still going to jizz.

[WindupAtheist]

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

[Azaroth]

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

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

[WindupAtheist]

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

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

[Sky]

That'd be great for thieves!

[Yegolev]

Interesting.

[Damn Dirty Ape]

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

[Mandrel]

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

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

[WindupAtheist]

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

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

By default, KR chat will not be "type to talk". It will be modal, as is nearly every MMO out there -- you hit enter, you go into chat mode, you type, you hit enter again, you leave chat mode. Are some existing UO players going to hate that? Absolutely. Ergo, we are going to try and have a "legacy chat" interface option that WILL be type-to-talk.

We are currently planning on three "views" for containers: the list view you saw at the town hall, a grid view (similar to most inventory systems out there), and a legacy view, where items just go where you put them.

Our interface will be very skinnable. If you want, you will be able to replace the background art for backpack windows with art that looks like a backpack, and I have no doubt that within days of shipping KR some enterprising group will announce that they are developing a "legacy client" skin.

And a little concept art:

Gargoyle male
Gargoyle female
Some kinda weird city?
Closer view of center structure

[Azaroth]

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

[Lantyssa]

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

[Sky]

To wonder if gargoyles can be ninjas.

[Azaroth]

Thanks, now I have milk on my keyboard.

[rk47]

To wonder if gargoyles can be ninjas.

To laugh at that suggestion very outloudly.

[WindupAtheist]

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

[Yegolev]

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

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

[Sky]

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

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

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

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

[Alkiera]

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

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

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

--
Alkiera

[WindupAtheist]

Well it's still bare of content, and the links all lead to the old-style site, but UO Herald is up.

[Azaroth]

Boof.

[Sion Verdox]

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

[Reg]

Psycho.

[sinij]

Put this thread to rest already.

[WindupAtheist]

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

[Falconeer]

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

[Surlyboi]

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

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

[Falconeer]

Looks like I am missing something...
WUA, what's this Shard of the Dead II I keep hearing about and that has all the nice events?

[WindupAtheist]

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

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

[Falconeer]

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

[sinij]

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

[Azaroth]

I think they have a couple new ones.

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

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

[Calandryll]

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

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

[Azaroth]

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

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

[Endie]

Jeff Freeman posted a couple of articles, one excellent, the other provocative (which is what trolling on your own blog is called  ) about official boards, their uses, their abuses and their management.

[Morat20]

Jeff Freeman posted a couple of articles, one excellent, the other provocative (which is what trolling on your own blog is called  ) about official boards, their uses, their abuses and their management.

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

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

[Calandryll]

Jeff Freeman posted a couple of articles, one excellent, the other provocative (which is what trolling on your own blog is called  ) about official boards, their uses, their abuses and their management.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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