potamus wrote: Hopefully we get the type of player base that eventually enjoys the learning curve of pvp, practices, and has fun with the system in place here.
And that's the point of this thread discussion, what makes UO fun. IMO, even if you find people who like the pvp mechanics here, what about the other aspects directly linked to pvp. Is it fun to have to hop on and off your horse to instantly fully refresh its stamina, negating the point of mount stamina all together. Is it fun to join a faction system, that is so broken that no one other than murderers lookin to shave off murder counts and thieves participate instead of those actually looking for faction pvp. Is it fun to have to cut bandages one by one, forcing you to either duel account to do it or just go afk while you cut thousands of bandages. Is it fun to be in the middle of an intensely close duel, only to randomly be swung on twice, dropping your health to absolutely nothing.
There's plenty of inconveniences and bugs/exploits, and other problems that were solved later, that obviously would have been fixed should this era lasted longer without an expansion being released. This server caters to a population that strangely enough want specific things broken and inconvenient, because that's how they remember it, and they enjoy it for the fact that it is filled with exploits, bugs, and other problems that hurt the system for most players.
It's hard to debate against people who like it this way, and I doubt they're going anywhere because you will not find another server that happily implements bugs and exploits for the sake of them being "era accurate". However what you do end up with is a lot of apathetic players who are new to the server, being driven off because they're not interested in devoting lots of time to a server that takes steps in the direction of creating bugs/exploits rather than fixing them.
If this was a OSI server, they would fix these bugs in time, not implement/defend them, but instead people hide behind the excuse of "other servers tried and failed", while they run around full speed on their mounts, infinitely refreshing them, while practicing their timer exploits for double swings as they go out and murder noobs who are trying to farm up to get their characters pvp ready, only to find any sort of organized pvp community entirely lacking.
You can tell the playerbase to "do it themselves" all you want, but the reason why certain tools are available in a sandbox like this, such as order vs chaos, is to mainstream the activity to the entire playerbase instead of just some random niche guilds sparring against each other. Doing so brings a constant influx of new players into the fold with a meaningful system, and keeps them there, or at least it would if Order vs Chaos wasn't broken on this server due to "accuracy" and players could actually fight in town but magic damage is disabled and archery is easily outrunnable (obviously I also could go on about swing on the run, but it seems a vast majority of the pages are dedicated to that anyway, and was not the point of the thread as a whole anyway).
Anyway, that's all I have left to contribute to this discussion, I made my points and expressed the concerns of my guildmates and myself, we're still here playing, just no where near as active as we had planned on playing and mostly waiting for something else to come around to catch our interest. Hopefully our experience has given some insight to those wondering why most new players or guilds don't stay, which I contribute to the fun factor being minimal for anything other than a very few specific playstyles along with bug/exploit implementation.
At the very least the thread seems to be inspiring people to get players voting for the server, although I would personally like to see a server with lots of players who stay and become vets rather than a server with a few vets who never leave and lots of new players who join/leave once they're bored to tears or fed up with the system. When you do a search this is one of the most highly respected/legit servers, with NO cash shop, a HUGE draw for a lot of players I know, but even great staff and no incentives doesn't cut it if the product itself isn't keeping the interest of new players.