The elephant in the shard.

[Rammar]

By using automated programs to eliminate the work and effort that go into performing all the 'tedious' tasks, the tasks that are intended by the game designers to do, players don't have to play parts of the game which they don't like. This leads to the game becoming fragmented, with each player never playing the whole game but only a fraction. Eventually, each player is only playing their favourite fragment of the game, and the shard isn't a living world with all players playing the same game at the same time. Rather, the shard becomes a single-player online zone where each player chooses to play with other players only when they want to. That is not Ultima Online, that is Ultima partially-Online.

By and large this is so, but Ultima Online has always been a conglomeration of thousands of sub/meta-games.

After looking through this thread more, I'm a little more encouraged by the slight increase of people who seem to understand the negative social impact of these automation programs.

Don't be fooled. Most everyone just wants their own little corner of the world to be easy. "If I don't do this, it should be hard as f--k... but if I do, I should be able to afk that crap in a night."

[rwuser]

No, id agree and say people are "slowly" starting to come around.

Despite, the amount of time it would take for it to propogate to the entire shard would probably be decades or so.

And this "coming around" would be more attached to the global mindscape of UO players, who are finally starting to realise that what destroyed their game wasn't just trammel: That was just the final nail in the coffin. It was also the slow ebbing crawl of the assist programs, which removed the character growth part of the game (Where the player would grow as well as his character by dicipline and determination). I must say, it didn't always create the nicest people, but they had much more colour then the people who did it the automated way. Not to mention, those with the actual time to give to the game were the ones playing, not this generation of "wanna-be" blacksmiths and castle owners who somehow convince themself that they were as good as the previous guys by razoring their way to what they have now without being there 90% of the time. UO wasn't a casual past time, it was something that was part of people's lives.

On a side note: The GM's kept the shard healthy back in the day by keeping things in check and preserving the world. So to fix this problem, if its ever on the table to be done, either UOSA uses a middle-man program to control things, or they pick up 60 or so GM's to cover the population (usually need around 10%).

[xenoglyph]

Kind of a pointless discussion. Any forced client changes would only affect the noobs. It wouldn't take long before hacked clients spread like wildfire.