SHOULD EVENTS BE REMOVED OR LIMITED

[Budner]

Yeah I know there was plenty of macroing going on (even 8x8 was bannable I think?), but I never did it. I wasn't even aware of third-party software until long after I'd filled and developed my 5 character slots.

[Lonebob]

Yeah I was in college and kept quitting UO thinking it was ruining my life, lol not sure why either cause I always had a girl friend and other friends. I sold my account every time I quit and I quit like 5 times so I became skilled in working toons up fast. And back then if you were in the top PvP guilds you were made to get the 3rd party programs. When I first got UOAssist and got last target, man that was a cool day. Oh and tip, bind last target to mouse wheel up and target self to mouse wheel down, very handy.

[Biohazard]

My first toon took months to get to master magery back in early 98 but I made a toon when I returned to T2A and had GM magery in about two weeks(I did have a buddy funding me). But the point is we have a decade of exp with this game now which means it will never take as long as it did before. It took the same time before for the most part but we were bad at the game. Now we know exactly where to start and what to do so our efficiency is through the roof. I was macroing in late 98, after my first toon was basically done for that time period, and never got caught by OSI GMs. If you think people didn't macro in the old days then you are sorely mistaken, they just didn't macro at the bank.

you make it sound like you have "paid your dues" and deserve the right to have a finished character just because you already did it once 10 years ago? also the skill gain here is much faster than OSI ever was. On top of this you can multi-client.. so you can macro a character to 7xgm while you are macroing another character to 7xgm while you are playing and making money. it would be faster since we are more efficient i agree but it would be more like "the way it was" instead of "the way it was(mechanically)" which is really just a cop out. Being a GM character has no where near the magnitude of meaning it did on OSI when it takes literally a 1/10th of the time to complete a character and a 1/20th or 1/30th of the time for select skills(smith, taming, resist, poison). plus the availability of resources means you can buy bulk of a resource and just plop your char down in your house and macro him straight to GM blacksmith with relative ease. another negative is everyone and their mom has a 7x GM thus the battles aren't as interesting.. you basically whiff every other swing and when you throw down some spells their 100 resist(that damn near everyone has) certainly blocks some of the damage.

[Lonebob]

No I don't feel like Ive paid my dues, I just got better at it so therefore it never took a long time again. Also I was running multiple clients in 99 along with every other power gamer in UO. It was a simple modification of the program to allow it so I would have to argue that it, along with macroing, it is era accurate(maybe the percentage of population taking advantage is different). If you truly wanted this game "the way it was" exactly then you need a server full of completely new UO players with no prior knowledge of it or any other MMO.

Best we can hope for is a server like this that attempts to get the feel right.

[Budner]

Amen to Biohazard's post. Here's another example: In my first two weeks here, and I probably move more slowly than most of you, I made a 5x GM mage and was hunting blood ellies, drakes and dragons, with relative ease. Back in the day, it took FOREVER before you could hunt things like that. My first two weeks in UO, back in the day, I was killing cows, selling the meat and was happy to do it. Now there is effectively very little challenge. I can cast EV in two weeks and kill anything I want.

The only real challenge, and this is why I love the game, is that there's still an art to stealing, and there's still an art to PvP (which I'm just starting to understand). You can't macro in-game encounters, they're too chaotic.

PvM on this shard, because of the rapid character development, blows. It's not as much fun as it used to be.

PvP, I'd say, is better than I remember it. And robbing all of you blind, is a lot of fun.

[BlackFoot]

Amen to Biohazard's post. Here's another example: In my first two weeks here, and I probably move more slowly than most of you, I made a 5x GM mage and was hunting blood ellies, drakes and dragons, with relative ease. Back in the day, it took FOREVER before you could hunt things like that. My first two weeks in UO, back in the day, I was killing cows, selling the meat and was happy to do it. Now there is effectively very little challenge. I can cast EV in two weeks and kill anything I want.

The only real challenge, and this is why I love the game, is that there's still an art to stealing, and there's still an art to PvP (which I'm just starting to understand). You can't macro in-game encounters, they're too chaotic.

PvM on this shard, because of the rapid character development, blows. It's not as much fun as it used to be.

PvP, I'd say, is better than I remember it. And robbing all of you blind, is a lot of fun.

You are overlooking a very important reason for most things youv mentioned above. Population.
Resources are much harder to come by when you have to fight for them.
On OSI it would take you hours to farm up enough gold to macro evena couple of hours because of sharing spawns with 5 other blues , pks, etc to spend any time training your character. After I was wealthy on OSI I could make a 6x mage in no time as I just macroed it 24/7.
When I first started out it took me months to build a decent character scrounging for not only gold, but for regs and other materials. There was competition to buy regs. Mage npcs were camped constantly.

Resources are the major factor in rapid character development.
I also gmed mining as my first skill in 2 days on osi.

[Biohazard]

You are overlooking a very important reason for most things youv mentioned above. Population.
Resources are much harder to come by when you have to fight for them.
On OSI it would take you hours to farm up enough gold to macro evena couple of hours because of sharing spawns with 5 other blues , pks, etc to spend any time training your character. After I was wealthy on OSI I could make a 6x mage in no time as I just macroed it 24/7.
When I first started out it took me months to build a decent character scrounging for not only gold, but for regs and other materials. There was competition to buy regs. Mage npcs were camped constantly.

Resources are the major factor in rapid character development.
I also gmed mining as my first skill in 2 days on osi.

good point sir... that is simply another problem... every single person on this shard is practically rich.. it takes no time at all to go out and make money or find items worthy of sale. i wouldnt say the economy is in shambles but its certainly not optimal. as you say this relates to population though... its like the loot from monsters is the same as it was in OSI t2a however there just isnt enough people to take it all in.. so its basically a huge monetary feast whereas back in the day it was somewhere between feast and famine... probably closer to famine. really if you think about it... having a stranglehold on resources actually makes people play more and by that i mean it extends the amount of time it takes to complete a specific goal (as in playing longer and not necessarily harder). just a guess that seems fairly logical.

[Vlastslav]

UO is chaos not event. That is all.

[Biohazard]

UO is chaos not event. That is all.

yes i agree... an event should be something like a town being attacked or the FOA quest and things like that.. events like automated PVP events are pretty lame.. let the populace make their own pvp events.

[Threadz]

cosign

[BlackFoot]

events were removed before. Players ran pvp events. Players did not show up for these pvp events.

[Looky]

You are overlooking a very important reason for most things youv mentioned above. Population.
Resources are much harder to come by when you have to fight for them.
On OSI it would take you hours to farm up enough gold to macro evena couple of hours because of sharing spawns with 5 other blues , pks, etc to spend any time training your character. After I was wealthy on OSI I could make a 6x mage in no time as I just macroed it 24/7.
When I first started out it took me months to build a decent character scrounging for not only gold, but for regs and other materials. There was competition to buy regs. Mage npcs were camped constantly.

Resources are the major factor in rapid character development.
I also gmed mining as my first skill in 2 days on osi.

good point sir... that is simply another problem... every single person on this shard is practically rich.. it takes no time at all to go out and make money or find items worthy of sale. i wouldnt say the economy is in shambles but its certainly not optimal. as you say this relates to population though... its like the loot from monsters is the same as it was in OSI t2a however there just isnt enough people to take it all in.. so its basically a huge monetary feast whereas back in the day it was somewhere between feast and famine... probably closer to famine. really if you think about it... having a stranglehold on resources actually makes people play more and by that i mean it extends the amount of time it takes to complete a specific goal (as in playing longer and not necessarily harder). just a guess that seems fairly logical.

I couldn't agree more with this. This is one thing that makes me think premise of this server (replicating t2a experience exactly) is a bit absurd. The ratio of "resource spawn to population" is no where near what it was back T2A times. And this ratio has a huge factor in your UO playing experience. We are never going to have a population on this server like we did in OSI 1999. But you could decrease resource input so that competition for these resources is more like it was back in the day.

Anyways, I don't expect anything to change here on this server. But to me it seems silly to try and replicate every "technical" detail when things like supply versus demand (resource spawn levels to population) are completely inaccurate to era. IMO nevermind replicating every little detail, focus on bringing healthy ratio of resources/monster spawns to the population level and then we'll have the competitive spirit that we crave from 1999.

[Lord Cavewight of GL]

UO is chaos not event. That is all.

Its one thing to be against events but this statement makes no sense at all.


UO isnt chaos, check out a town sometime and Lord British`s guards will quickly teach you a thing or two about order.

[Smelly Ira]

Basically, it seems like UOSA is era accurate insofar as mechanics, but in the larger aspects of how it's played, it's more like any modern MMO with ease of making "finished" characters, ease of making money, and the presence of instanced events...it is very similar to many other games.

Of course I love playing here and it's a great experience, but it's hard not to notice the contradiction between the mission statement and the reality.

[Corbin]

There are a few things that need to be discussed when talking about era accuracy vs gameplay for players. Where to start...

Adding to some things that several people have said about skill gain and such, there is something to remember: it's not 1998 anymore. One of the big issues that people fail to realize is that this game isn't new. We know the mechanics, we know how to skill and what skills are required, we know how to make money and about the crafting systems. These are things that when we started playing, we knew nothing about and so it naturally took longer to do them as we learned about the new features of a fully online game. Now is that to say that skill gain isn't much faster here than it should be? Not at all. I think skill gain is a little fast, however, people aren't as patient with a 12 year old game as they would be if it was something completely new. Many of us have made many many characters over the years and wouldn't have the patience to sit there for months training magery. It would become a useless grind of people sitting at their banks macroing for months because they want their characters maxed so they could participate. It's a bit of a double edged sword there because it would also scare people away with the "screw this, it's not worth it" attitude while it would promote era accuracy, and now days, people just want to play the game since there is really nothing new to discover.

As I've stated before, era accuracy doesn't necessarily make for a good shard. The game during the era was constantly changing and evolving. Remember that UO and MMOs in general were in it's infantsy at the time and they were still learning how to treat a game like this. There were a lot of mistakes made as well as a lot of things that shaped UO into the amazing game it was during this era. However, to remain stagnant would have made players leave much sooner than if they had evolved, this is one reason why this shard is so awesome; it uses the mechanics of T2A and the majority of the features as well as adding extra features that allow more player development within the game which helps keep players playing instead of getting bored and essentially "winning the game" with nothing more to achieve. Face it, T2A shards have always had a problem keeping players. There are a handful of players who stay and become known and many many more who get cycled every week. They come, play for between a day and a month, then leave never to be heard from again. The other nice thing about these extra events and turn-ins is that it was a way to introduce some of the items which were available in T2A only through exploits/were only available for a limited time and ended up being exploited.

Plus, if you want to get very technical with the accuracy of the era, how about they wipe the shard and everyone has to start from scratch with no Razor/3rd Party Programs or macroing (even attended using a tool that was programmed with macros) and enforced it like Origin did and everyone who is caught using said programs (which can be done if the GM cares enough to figure it out) is banned from the game? Of course, era accuracy will also require a $7.99 donation be made to the site every month as well per account. It will also require they lower the connection to an ISDN with 128kbps to emulate lag and also reinstate bugs that plagued us during T2A years. Sounding ridiculous enough yet? I'm just explaining what exactly you want when you ask for 100% accuracy.