UO Second Age

Kyrie wrote:I realise it's never gonna happen but I'd be happy to see some of the UO:R stuff on here, just not trammel. Some of the skill changes and a few of the houses like the sandstone and small mage tower would be fine with me.

We've been playing our era target date for twice as long as the era existed its self now. Something has to give eventually.

I did actually keep playing with UO:R for 6-12 months because even though the decision to split the worlds was wrong and did finally kill the game, I was having a good time with all the new mechanics. Had lots of fun with a disarm thief and a nox mage.

Yeah, I played through UO:R as well, obviously. It was when I first started using UOAssist, as well. I had a Healer/Alchemist mage and had some fun with Purple potions.

One free shard I played many years ago (Acropolis, it was called, I believe) implemented a UO:R style ruleset. They had a smaller, custom map too which was great for the smaller population. They had pre-cast with UO:R rules and it made for some really awesome PvP. At least in my opinion. I had a Macer Hybrid type character, a poison dex monkey (with Magery for Noxing), a healer/alchemist pure mage and a standard tank mage (I later dropped Tactics and used her as a dueling mage, just using weapons for poison or concussion blows)

Anyway, I am not trying to suggest this server should be changed to a UO:R ruleset or anything but aside from Trammel obviously, I feel UO:R brought a huge amount to the PvP mechanics in UO.

Corbin wrote:Trammel was terrible.

Agreed! I was even over PKing when it came out but it just destroyed the feel of the game.

Corbin wrote: Special moves broke PVP in a lot of ways for a long time.

Can you quantify this? I don't feel like it did. It seemed to make things a little more balanced, as far as I noticed. Pure mages weren't at a disadvantage, from everything I noticed. It made dexer ganks a bit harder to escape but 3 or 4 on 1 should be a little lopsided.

T2A was the peak period for Ultima Online.

The Real Sandro wrote:T2A was the peak period for Ultima Online.

In which way?

Subscription wise, it peaked in 2003, during AoS. Most other ways of judging are purely personal opinion.

I saw a video on youtube stating that T2A was the peak period for both revenue and players.

I may have been given bad information, but not a big deal.

I imagine there is a relationship between the T2A era, the age of individuals interested in playing UO, and just overall demand for a T2A shard.

The Real Sandro wrote:I saw a video on youtube stating that T2A was the peak period for both revenue and players.

I may have been given bad information, but not a big deal.

I imagine there is a relationship between the T2A era, the age of individuals interested in playing UO, and just overall demand for a T2A shard.

I think it is just mostly due to Trammel destroying the entire feel of the game and T2A being the last period pre-Trammel.

FireofMarauder wrote:Subscription wise, it peaked in 2003, during AoS. Most other ways of judging are purely personal opinion.

Subscriptions peaked due to things such as Bulk Order Deeds and implementations that gave obvious rewards for having multiple accounts. Whereas subscriptions were peaking, the number of actual players was dramatically less than during T2A. If you factored in the number of people who started a new account for a new house when Trammel came out and the number of people that had 5, 10, even 15+ accounts for doing BOD's, then you'd see that the actual number of players plummeted shortly after UO:R.

I will agree that UO:R PvP was my favorite Era of PvP, but that entire Era is tarnished in my mind as a result of the Trammel Ruleset.

I remember so many thriving communities in-game pretty much going belly-up with the introduction of Trammel. It was a divisive action. It was not good for the game, overall.

In addition, the Trammel Ruleset by its very definition allows for rampant inflation as there is very few "checks and balances". This allows power-gamers to get massive amounts of money and destroy the economy. You get this to some extent no matter what (powergamers will be powergamers), but in a Trammel Environment it is exponentially worse. This then creates such a large barrier to introduction to new players, that they generally give up. In the end, this stops new players from sticking around. The concept of "Trammel" works well in a console game, but in a MMORPG and persistant world, it eventually breaks the game in a sense.

I'm not even touching on that Item Insurance garbage they introduced...

Basically, Trammel is horrible.

I wouldn't have minded Tram so much if they had made a new map for it...

Making a carbon copy of the world made it so most players had no reason to ever go to the original UO lands (Felucca).

Light Shade wrote:In addition, the Trammel Ruleset by its very definition allows for rampant inflation as there is very few "checks and balances". This allows power-gamers to get massive amounts of money and destroy the economy. You get this to some extent no matter what (powergamers will be powergamers), but in a Trammel Environment it is exponentially worse. This then creates such a large barrier to introduction to new players, that they generally give up. In the end, this stops new players from sticking around. The concept of "Trammel" works well in a console game, but in a MMORPG and persistant world, it eventually breaks the game in a sense.

I'm not even touching on that Item Insurance garbage they introduced...

Basically, Trammel is horrible.

A lot of what you say there could almost describe the way things have been on the shard.

Do you guys feel like you would not feel so hostile to the post T2A changes if Trammel never existed? Most of the time when anyone brings something up, the knee-jerk reaction of "Trammie" is so severe I'm surprised bones don't snap.

While I think Trammel was horrible, and was the beginning of the end, I disagree that UO:R broke the game completely. AoS broke the game completely. The mechanics during UO:R were pretty solid, imo.

While I understand this is purely just a discussion of people's opinions, let me share my own...

I fail to see how UO in it's current state (OSI) is broken. Maybe we view it as that, or maybe some view AoS as the dead-end, and others UOR, but the simple fact of the matter is people still pay to play OSI UO as we currently speak. Do we? Obviously not, considering we are here on UOSA.

Does that make them wrong? Not necessarily. Clearly they must find some enjoyment out of the OSI servers in their current state to be playing it. Does their opinion differing from our own of what is an enjoyable experience suddenly make their UO broken any more than our own here at UOSA? Not really.

Is UOSA the only available option for a free shard to avoid paying a monthly fee? No. It's not. There are a lot of options available, some of which actually replicate the current state of UO, and also have a player base there as well. Those players continue to choose to play the current state of UO while not paying for it using these free shards. Do you see them here on UOSA? Nope.

The point is that people will always have an opinion of what they find enjoyable. Just because I like to put my pants on one leg at a time and you choose to put yours on both legs at once doesn't make my method any less viable than yours, and it doesn't necessarily mean my way is wrong.

We choose the T2A era because it is what is enjoyable to the majority of us here. That's why we choose to play here. No one here is being forced by the almighty hand of Derrick to log in every day. We choose that. We could easily make another choice to not play here.

On that note: Any one of us could write three books containing all of the decent mechanics that came post-T2A which would enrich the T2A experience in a lot of peoples eyes. However, this era is locked as it is because you can't please everyone (so why bother trying by picking and choosing various mechanics outside of this era) and because it wouldn't be UOSA anymore if they did that.

Like it or love it, we choose to play here rather than other options available to us.

EDIT: I guess I should have said hate it also, but if you hate it then why are you here? You must not realize or appreciate that there's numerous options available to people who aren't seeing eye to eye with this server and the era it is in.

ONEmortal wrote: Like it or love it, we choose to play here rather than other options available to us.

I guess the whole point of this topic, at least for me, is that there isn't a "era accurate" option for UO:R play available, I guess. I was only to find four or five UO:R style shards and they all had "tweaks". Faster skill gain, custom spell timers, no 2 handed special moves for under 85 dex, etc.

I guess it's fair to say I wouldn't want it to be completely era accurate (no Trammel, obviously.) but I guess I'm just tied to a certain era most people aren't, haha.

So I chose the best option that is available. I was just wondering why people like T2A gameplay over UO:R or pre-Reputation and why there are more shards catering to that era.

I guess the negatives that came with that era out weighed the positives

UO:R was origins' attempt at staying competitive with everquest. It completely wrecked the world of pvp. Nothing says awesome like no heals on poison, fencing actually stunning you or swords doing 60 dmg a swing with some 4 day old lumberjack. It was pure horse feces.

Let's not forget the glorious faction system.
Let's all do a 50 vs 50. Those are fun right?

At one point it was all about guild wars in deceit and shame.
Now every swinging di#$ moron wants to make a red pk because they haven't an idea about the way it really was. But i digress....

T2A was a time when it was HARD to survive. You risked every day and THAT was the challenge of ultima online. For all the babies that can't understand how to lose gracefully that's what UO:R was about. Screw the time to get skills, screw the challenge.