UO Second Age

I used to wonder about this when I first joined UOSA, and I'm still wondering if anything can be "done".

On any/all OSI shards, there persisted housing that had been placed before mechanics were added that disallowed housing-placement inside any GuardZone: I know it's silly, but it almost "breaks my immersion" whenever I ride through one of these big, empty lots (that --on OSI-- used to be prized, busy-player-vendor, or "I'm-bragging-rights-mfing-rich-to-own-one-of-these-houses-and-actually-live-in-it-bitches", player-created town 'suburbs').

Let me say right now, that I am not asking to have these areas opened-up to permit housing placement by players.

Otherwise, is(are) there perhaps some scheme(s) that might help the shard? Let UOSA (administration) use these spaces to do stuff that might make the shard more appealing to new/returning players.

Does UOSA need a gold-sink? How's this: admins slap down a big-brick in that huge empty lawn south of 'Britain West', make it public, and allow players to rent vendor-spots at exorbitant-but-manageable rates; this gold will not simply go from vendor-player to house-owner-player (and remain in Britannia) but, instead, will go straight down the (gold-)sink ...

Anyone else have more/other/better ideas?

SS

I'm cool with the idea of having a few of these pre-patch houses available. I'm more interested in owning a small house on the roof of a tower honestly... Anyways, I think that it would suck to make this a gold sink and would think it more fair to make it a lottery of sorts with a limited number of pre-patch houses being placed.

On Pacific there was a patio across the road from EBB. Was cool.

Mens Rea wrote:On Pacific there was a patio across the road from EBB. Was cool.

sounds very gay!

I personally like the large tracts of unspoiled land that have been preserved. There’s enough empty space around the world that we don’t need to muddy up our cities with more construction.

There’s also just no good way to determine who would get a vendor slot, and who wouldn’t.

If you make it a lottery, you’d suddenly have an influx of day old players in the lottery as players try and game the system to get a slot. If you make it an auction only the super-rich would get the slots to the detriment of most of the shard.

If you win a lottery pick, do you get to “choose” what type of vendor so there isn’t 15 reg vendors? What happens when a price war breaks out between a couple vendors? What if the vendor goes empty? How do new people joining the shard get in on the action, because they most likely wouldn’t be able too? Can you sell your vendor spot if you no longer want it? It does have value. What about when a vendor starts selling empty spell books as full ones like we see around the moongates? Doesn’t that devalue most of the “bank” houses that people paid millions for? How are you going to reimburse them for the change? Give them a slot?

There’s hundreds of questions to ask an answer and this shard is diverse enough, no one will truly be happy. There’s a very good reason you don’t kick a sleeping bear in the nuts. What you propose is a sleeping bear.

Adding stuff to the open space has to benefit or harm every player equally. So adding say a museum, or a dueling pit or NPC vendors would be fine. Player vendors or player purchasable housing would not. If they build some event specific properties, it would be cool. We have a bag ball pit that was created. The conservatory in Britain is basically a Rares museum, so it isn’t without precedent. There’s lots of cool things you could do. You could open a new player information booth that would be staffed by vets. You could create a house of horror which is loaded with traps, and have contests to see who gets through. You could create an archery course to hold timed events. You could create wizard battle arena’s where there is a barrier preventing any melee attacks and they live and die by their magery skill. There’s tons of “color” you could add to the game without breaking the era accurate mechanics.