UO Second Age

In MyUO back in the day, you could see the average skills of all members of a guild. It was a point of pride for some guilds to have an average Tactics, for example, of 100.0, meaning every memeber in the guild had GMed it.

I know our myUOSA is not a mechanic subject to 1999 accuracy rules... and I rather like that it has some increased functionality, I think it's a lot of fun to explore. But, just figured I'd post this tidbit in case it's (a) easy to program, and (b) something other people would enjoy seeing as well.

I remember this and did enjoy it, it was definitely something I remember guilds bragging about or setting as requirements in order to join them

Indeed. Thanks. A lot more has been planned for myUOSA, it's just a matter of getting to it. Winter is coming; more free time ahead.

This would be a cool feature to add in.

On the topic of MyUOSA, why do we have things like

Online status - NEA, affects gameplay. You can check if people are certain people are online and act accordingly.
Kills - NEA, affects gameplay. Total kills is fine, but displaying long term murder counts affects how people play their character.

There are some other NEA features of MyUOSA, but those don't really affect gameplay.

Though this is probably on your list, I would like to point out how clothing on the MyUOSA site is not accurately depicted, ie Daemon Bone Armor, Ranger Armor, and Hued Headgear and certain pieces of Armor. Though this isn't of great importance I'm just a little miffed it doesn't all show up as it does in game. I'm sure this has something to do with classifications within the RunUO code so may be easily fixed or tricky, don't really know since I'm no Pristiq when it comes to computers.

There's always going to be aspects of website stuff that are NEA... I mean, our forum itself is NEA (I don't think UO.com got forums until UOR). Actually, our forum has online status too. Communicating so freely and un-cryptically with programmers in forums is NEA (and I'm aware of those HoC chats, those were mostly fluff and garbage).

I love all the data and information in myUOSA, and I hope we keep adding to it. I think it also makes for good marketing for our shard, for someone to stop by and click Players Online and see 200-500 players, and check out their stats and armor and whatnot, and see the possibilities of the shard.

Forum has no link to the game data though, you can't see if a particular character is online. MyUOSA pulls information directly out of the game and affects how you actually play. It can keep you safe, for example, to check whether certain TG members are online before hitting up tera keep. A house looter can check whether certain characters are online, and then camp their house.

My first thought to this is, "who cares?". Besides you

My second thought is... I think the divide between in-game mechanical accuracy and things that are outside the game itself has been pretty stable. This certainly isn't in-game mechanical accuracy, so presumably it's up for debate. My hunch is that many more people are in favor of these data points being public than are in favor of hiding them. I think there's a ton of ways to figure out if someone is online, with more precision than checking something that only updates every 30 minutes. As for the long-term kills... again, who cares? This doesn't impact me at all, but it might be fun for other people to count their Long Term murders. Should we hide tournament ranks too? If I see someone named Spanky in-game, I'm absolutely not going to fight him given that he's the top tournament winner on the shard. That impacts gameplay too...

My argument is that it's NEA and game impacting, not whether it's a good thing or "favoured by more players". I personally use the online status (which updates every 5 minutes or so) to stalk people, and the "kills" to keep my kill count low so I can kill jerks and not worry about going red. Why don't we just have the [online command in game? Same thing, it's just exported data instead.

And mine is that there's a million NEA things outside of the game. Razor, for one. Macroing. Our forum. etc. I don't think it's a valid argument to be against something outside the mechanics of the shard because it's NEA, when we've consistently operated under the basis that non-mechanical things are sort of up for debate. That's why I bring up whether people are in favor of it or not; for mechanical issues, that's moot. For policy/website/etc. issues, I think it is or should be a factor in decision-making.

I think it is simply a nice feature to have, on top of helping players out with information it draws attention to our forums other than us just being a shard with no out-of-game content.