This whole Era Accurate Argument

[Van Raily]

Well said, sir.

[Smelly Ira]

My opinion on events is that they are for the most part a minor nitpick. We could pull all the events off the schedule tomorrow and we would have a wholly accurate T2A shard, exempting a bunch of trophies floating around. When it comes to mechanics or UO:R housing that same fact does not apply; once you add UO:R housing, it's here, and like customized vendors (which is something we are removing and never added) it lingers forever.

Well firstly Dereck, i've found you to be anything but unapproachable.

I don't get the events though, how can something that provides a feasible way to make money outside the normal game -in a sandbox game- be nothing but a a minor nitpick, they seem to have a pretty major effect to me, both economically and in terms of removing players from the game world during them.

I feel like I am definitely on the side of keeping things as accurate as possible, and I do think all the written justification for the events I have seen is pretty much ridiculous. Most of it seems to be the logic of "well OSI shardes had their own events, so we can have ours"...the thing is, obviously these instanced, automated daily events bear more in common with a game like WoW than they do UO...they do not fit the rest of the game.

Since you mention it though, for the record here..why don't you remove them? I seem to remember a thread mentioning that maybe this was tried in the past and it brought down the number of people playing to a degree that they were put back in.If this is the case I can accept that as a reason, less players could be a valid reason to not consider dropping events.

However I would rather see it expressed that way than to see some questionable justifications of automated events within the era accuracy framework, even to a noob like me these arguments are pretty thin.

I hope this didn't come off as sounding rude, in general I think you guys are excellent at communicating your points of view and where you are coming from, one of the things that has kept this shard so much fun for me is that the staff is obviously clear minded and driven in the way the shard is run. There is a level of professionalism here that makes me forget it's a freeshard sometimes..so don't take any of the criticism as an attack. This is the one subject where some of the staff conversation has made me wish for a better explanation..the "policy vs. mechanics" things just doesn't hold water to me, policies you make, such as having automated events, affects the mechanics of the shard..they aren't seperate things.

[Pro]

Since you mention it though, for the record here..why don't you remove them? I seem to remember a thread mentioning that maybe this was tried in the past and it brought down the number of people playing to a degree that they were put back in.If this is the case I can accept that as a reason, less players could be a valid reason to not consider dropping events.

However I would rather see it expressed that way than to see some questionable justifications of automated events within the era accuracy framework, even to a noob like me these arguments are pretty thin.

already did it and playerbase fell and poo got alot more boring.

[Derrick]

Thanks for the responses

I didn't mean to sound trivial in the previous thread (regarding armories), that was a response to a specific example I'd seen on previous pages. I had not at the time of that posting read the entire thread either :/

This may go into triviality again, but regarding things like stew; it's just something i haven't gotten too, or don't have complete information on. It's shocking how much little stuff still needs to be done after three years of development. Those items were given out during a holiday, but it wasn't done with the intent of introducing a rare so much, we gave out a lot of apples on Halloween too.

It's all been a very slow progression towards correctness.

On to the major point of discussion though. I stand by my position that events happen outside of the regular world and a lot of players do enjoy them, however that alone is not a justification for anything. I've looked at this a lot of different ways, one of which being that they sort of fill in for our intentionally low staff levels which prohibit us from doing as many in game seer type scenarios. That being said though, the staff of UOSA has been very active lately in running unique shard events. This has been much more uncommon for the most part on UOSA in the past.

For now, I'd like to say that yes, the events are a mechanic of the shard, yes there was not any equivalent on OSI in 1999; however they didn't have the capability of doing anything nearly as complex as these events at that time. I'd also like to add that I really did enjoy developing the events and actually have a few more in queue that I've been meaning to get out there, but completely lack any time to work on them.

To the other issues which generally involve policy such as Razor, Light Filters, accounts per person.

These are very hot subjects but here's the facts as I see them.

• Razor is the only program that we have available that comes close to what UOA was in era, a legitimate and common helper app that I and everyone I know used.
• Some features from Razor such as light filtering was only available in 1999 in other third party apps which OSI/EA forbid.
• To restrict Razor features, you must require Razor to connect to the shard.
• I don't use Razor, and do not want to be forced to use Razor.
• Forcing Razor is not era accurate.
• Razor causes my client to hang up.

Until we have a better solution we are stuck with Razor. I am not a fan of the light filter. I spent days of development in the last patch fixing nightsight to be accurate and most will never see those changes.

On rules in general:

• OSI had a lot of rules.
• OSI did not enforce many of them whether for lack of human resources, inability to monitor, or that they just didn't care.
• We don't have all of the rules that OSI had.
• We are very serious about the rules we do have, and assess harsh penalty to violations of those rules.
• Philosophically, I do not believe in having unenforceable rules.
• I do not want to tie up our staff interfering in what would be considered normal game play in the respect that even though it may not have been permissible to do certain things on OSI, OSI did not enforce those rules, thereby making those actions era-accurate.
• Making rules which inspire undetectable circumvention are counterproductive.

On the account limits:

• Crafty individuals can find ways to circumvent any limitations we impose under our current system.
• We would love to find a way to put more accountability into account creation.
• We already spend quite a bit of time policing our current policy which is relatively liberal.
• I will not go into the details of how limitations can be skirted, but the bottom line is that I feel without a better accounting system, additional restrictions only serve to restrict those who would obey the rules willingly, and would actually create a further divide.
• The more difficult it is to open an account on UOSA, the less players will we will find in game.

There is and likely always will be a lot of work to do on UOSA.

quite often when involved in lengthy discussions of major issues, the only response I hope to see is yours or other those of the other staff. I do like to see other players' opinions and perspectives on the issues of course, but quite often these debates go back and forth for countless pages while we wait for a "final word" on the matter.....so believe me, your posts are far from unread.

I understand the frustration here, but it would be easy for me to spend 30 hours a week in the forums alone. I've spent an hour this morning on this thread alone. Often the same topics pop up every week or two, and I've often comment on those topics time and time again; while these issues (such as the ones in this thread) are valid, and i do care about them, I just can't spend my days in the forums. I do sometimes intentionally avoid reading these 10 page threads because i simply have other things which require my attention, and I know once i get into these issues it's going to be at the cost of making progress on the things I already have a plan to resolve.

There's never a "final word" though. This shard is a work in progress and new ideas pop up every day.

Well sometimes there is a final word, but those are obvious final words, like "no we won't add custom housing", usually players answer those types of threads sufficiently.

I am usually very reachable. If you feel an important thread is sitting in my blind spot, please bring it to my attention. There was a time when I was able to read every word printed in these forums, but it's just not possible anymore.

[Manfromx]

I kinda felt the response was a final word too as it kind of summed up what we were debating with an official statement.

Good arguments here and like I was saying earlier it's not like you're denying that there are some inconsistencies Derrick.

I haven't tried the events yet myself so I can't comment on them but I'll assume people like them enough that they haven't been cut yet.

Maybe a brief FAQ style stickied post on this topic will help if this is a regular occurrence. A simple Q and A format would cut down on some debates at least.

Q. Why can't changes be made to less useful skills or items. I.E. Leather armour, arms lore etc etc

A. As stated in our mission objective the goal is to preserve T2A era as closely as possible

Q. Why can't things that don't directly impact gameplay be added. I.E. New items, houses, dyes etc.

A. Even small changes would take us away from being a true T2A shard. Even though some things might seem beneficial in the long run we feel it is best to stay with our stated goals.


And so on and so on

[Derrick]

Aye, it would be nice to have a faq that addressed these questions. If anyone is willing to submit a draft I'd be happy to help with it. In addition to your answers which are very accurate, there are additional reasons as to why we even care about emulating the era at all.

We don't make changes to existing accurate mechanics because we don't believe we have the capacity to divine the full implications of those changes.

We don't intend to design a new game.

Accuracy is our niche. There are many fine free shards out there run by people way more creative than myself which have very interesting custom systems.

We intend to focus the talents of our development team on attaining full era accuracy; hundreds of players have contributed thousands of hours of time and effort researching discussing and determining the correct mechanics of many in game systems, a lot of work still needs to be done to correct these systems, and to pay full tribute to the extensive work that was done. It would be an affront to this work for me to spend time intentionally introducing in-accuracies to the shard.

I am just a cog in the wheel here, but I'm the final cog when it comes to actually getting mechanics on the shard. I hold myself to a duty of finishing this thing, and honoring my commitment to everyone else who has put so much into UOSA. In the end though I often recognize that I'm a bottleneck in the sweet whisky jug of progress; I wish i could move faster on a lot of the issues raised.

[Manfromx]

Well the shard is great and I think any improvements from here on out will be relatively small. It feels about as close to T2A as I could expect (where do I find the UO demo, I really want to check if spears count as bladed lol)

I think any proponent of change is actually paying you a compliment because they see what you've done this far and think this is the team to finally get it right . Start with what definitely works, let it run and then tweak small things. Though you're right. Game breaking things could happen. Law of unintended consequences is in full effect. Such are the perils of game design .

The frustration some express is probably because we see it as a missed opportunity. We mean well though!

However I'm glad you stick to your goals and have a commitment to what you promised the community. We just need a few more servers and admins like this. It'd be great to get my T2A fix here and then go check out another server with a big community and balanced gameplay. I just need a way to fit more hours in a day .

[Donk]

When this shard is 99.999999% T2A accurate and the only changes to be made are arguments about how many pixels wide a backpack's usable area is, maybe it's time for a spinoff Siege Perilous T2A era shard

[Derrick]

I am extremely humbled by all the people who care about this shard. This was honestly just a little programming project of mine.

I really want to check if spears count as bladed

I just checked the demo, long spears, short spears, hallys and axes can all be used to carve corpses.

I do often think that once we get this down it's going to be an excellent basis for another shard (SP has been discussed), assuming that we are able to do that without segmenting the population too much.

It really does come down to how short life really is though. It seems that there's less time in every new day than there was the day before.

[Karik Verlee]

We won't start rolling into UO:R once we're done though, although I do think that we can continue to add more features such as quests and what not for additional content far into the future.

So does that mean we're(eventually) headed to UO:R or did i just miss read this horribly?

Edit:Re-read a few times and finally got it. I did misread it. My bad

[BlackFoot]

no, instead of moving into UO:R more unqiue event/quests will be added to UOSA and we will live in the bliss of the T2a era forever.

[Faust]

I do often think that once we get this down it's going to be an excellent basis for another shard (SP has been discussed), assuming that we are able to do that without segmenting the population too much.

A true accurate UOR shard would be a much better hit. It's just sad that Trammel would have to be included for any sort of era accuracy, unfortunately.

[Karik Verlee]

So what was so great about UO:R? The biggest thing I remember was Trammel and new house designs.

[Pac]

So what was so great about UO:R? The biggest thing I remember was Trammel and new house designs.

Didn't they kill precasting too?

[Faust]

I very much dislike the UOR era as stated many times in the past. However, the majority of the players left in the shard scene enjoy it very much for some reason. The Pre:UOR players have been in the minority for quite a few years now. If you think about it.. AOS was released 7 years ago. There are some people out there that believe a true accurate AOS shard is 'old school'. UOR is much older and there are a lot more die hard players from that era left compared to any other. True veterans of the game have mostly moved on.