by Azaroth | August 22nd, 2009
While we can go over the topics I have concern about repeatedly, all that’s being accomplished is addressing my concerns. I think it’s pretty fair that we address yours.
If you’ve got a question or a concern (or even a suggestion) no matter how off the wall, post it for a discussion. If it requires more attention than it can get in the comments section of this post, I’ll make a new post dealing with it direction.
At the moment I have two or three more planned discussions regarding IPY 2, and then we’ll move on to 3.0 discussion.
Loading ...
How do you plan on running IPY 2.0′s economy? Will you use a closed system economy where only a set amount of resources can exist, or an unlimited creation of resources that are constantly flowing out of the system via constructed drains?
I have always played primarily as a Crafter and I believe the most successful shard would be one that relies on a player economy. All items used in PVP should be craftable items. Anything less than all and you have removed the crafters purpose. If better items drop as loot or can be purchased via NPCs this dilutes the importance of armorers and weaponsmiths.
Above all of the gameplay concerns, please do not host the server on the East coast. A central location like Chicago or Dallas should please most of the players. It sucks pinging 150ms from the best coast… I mean the West coast.
150ms + horses is just one more reason why UO Second Age annoys me.
Totally disagree with the above. Would you consider hosting the server in Europe? Pretty please? :p
fuck europe.
i dont mind pinging 150, i have forever.
Spellcasting with 150ms is acceptable, but horse chases are a failure. Especially since latency tends to increase as you run around ingame (for me anyway).
Spawning reagants around the map please, always liked that on other t2a servers and can’t remember if IPY did it or not.
Punishment for reds is also a touchy subject. I personally thought the 10 minute res timer penalty was a brilliant middle ground. Everyone macros these days, so all perma-statloss does is serve to keep players from actually playing the game. Temp statloss is something that you should also consider, something similar to faction statloss, as opposed to completely fucking a PK over for a week and a half for getting ganked one good time.
You should also do something more for order/chaos than the standard in game system. I hate renaissance, but about half of factions is/are good concepts. Mostly just looking at the points system/ top player/ top guild / top faction (in our case, order or chaos) that is published straight to a myuo type website similar to .
Take it from someone who’s been playing every t2a freeshard since IPY, the order/chaos scene dies out real quick these days, but yet somehow fagtions on uogayfers still has tons of action. I think it has something to do with the e-peen extension that comes from a [punkte.
Hosting : Middle america goes without saying.
Donation reward system : Do you have enough steam to get the server going for a few months without donations? If you do, this really opens alot more options up for donation items. Consumeables make great donation items, but not at server birth. You can sell so many reagants to rich lazy fuckers if you can find a way to soul bind them. Of course, even if you can soulbind something like that, you don’t want them selling for the first 3-6 months of server life. I know some people will probably disagree with something like selling reagants and other consumables, because these things are ALWAYS in demand. You’re only gonna sell so many sandals, but an active dueler can EAT through thousands of regs a day, and these items are just coming from the NPC vendors anyways.
I’ve got alot more to say on alot of points, I’ve staffed on a few uo servers (something I dont think I would ever like to do again) so i’ve got some good perspective on the grand scope of things.
Only other tip i can give ya lie about your numbers, especially at launch day. Yeah, 1200 (arbitrary number) online the first day is great, but if people hear there are 2300 online the first day, by the third day you might actually have a real 2300 online, because word spreads on shit like that like wildfire. No one gives a fuck and moves to a new server with no one on it, but if everyone think it’s the next big hit and going to be stable, they will flock to and start up again like mad, inflating your once fudged numbers to a reality.
http://my.uogamers.com/ Forgot the link for the myuogamers page
Servers will likely be in Chicago.
Hello all. I am very excited to hear about the possible rebirth of IPY.
Ultima Online both official and player run has been a smoldering pile of shit for the most part ever since the end of IPY.
Yet Ultima Online remains the game with the most satisfying mechanics, fun factor and gameplay to this day. I personally have a feeling that as Pisces stated, the rebirth of IPY will catch like wildfire.
My own suggestions:
1) Lay down the huge Media Blitz at the very front end. Make sure you’ve got everyone telling everyone on your icq lists etc. that IPY is BACK.
2) Create a donation system for people to build their characters with donation cash, or at least do not make skill gain slow. This is one of the (very few)things i believe that div actually has right.
People are tired of building characters at this point. It has become so tedious over the past decade that even the allure of an exciting shard may not even win some players over because of it.
This is just my opinion, but I think people being able to buy the stat and skill balls for cash is not only good for players(no tedium of building ANOTHER character on ANOTHER shard) but also for the administration(there is suddenly a reason to run the server beyond love for the game, and there is nothing wrong with that, running the shard becomes worth your time etc.)
Just make each ball cost 5 bucks a pop. Bam. 10 bucks and your character can jump straight back into the IPY world like it was never gone.
3)Copy the EXACT CODE from IPY. The mechanics of IPY were great and no other shard has been able to emulate the balance. The only thing that I would suggest doing differently here is what another poster has suggested, and Disallow Explosions from stacking. Easy UO scripting is still a problem that there is seemingly no counter to, I believe guilds could come back and start Robo Dumping again.
I could imagine the dynamics of guild against guild pvp being changed in very interesting ways if it weren’t possible for a guy to just drop dead from 3 explosions at the same time. I could see things like dexxers and interruption playing more of a factor in the battles instead of just who has the best caller/gets the spells off first.
That’s all I got, thank you Azaroth for considering bringing IPY back. It really makes my day. I got banned from divinity message board just for mentioning it.
Take care, and good luck.
I imagine you would, yes. That’s one thing I certainly don’t look forward to. Intershard drama and shit talking! Yay!
Seriously. Just count me out. People can make up what ever wild stories they want, I’m just ignoring every single bit of it this time.
I also can’t do skill balls, I’m sorry. It’s against every core belief I have when I think about what UO should be. No offense, and it’s a fine idea because I’m sure it’d put money in my pocket. I just can’t.
Hopefully this won’t just be “another shard”, though, and people can enjoy themselves a bit. But then again I haven’t played every single IPY clone that’s existed since 2005 – so if EA put up a classic shard today with strict anti-macro rules, I’d play happily.
We’re in agreement about the robo dumping, though. It really ruins the game.
for the record there was no shit talking, I wasn’t spewing flames or anything like that I just said “I guess that guy in that other thread wasn’t lying when he said IPY was coming back” and I was banned the next time I logged in. So I wasn’t trying to get any drama started or anything like that. I’m a 28 year old man now and what I would enjoy more than anything is a great UO shard run with solid professionalism and willing to clamp down on annoying kids on the forums etc.
And I can totally see your point on skill/stat balls being against the core of what UO should be. It’s just always very frustrating when you build up all this stuff and build characters and wealth and use your real life time on slow skill gain building characters, or grinding out cash in dungeons, and then one day Poof! Servers shut down. I would just be afraid this would be a big momentum slower at this point in time.
But whatever your decision on this matter I will be here regardless, and I will be bringing friends.
Be well
I actually just meant in general. I wasn’t assuming you were talking shit. I can just imagine that banning for the mere mention of IPY betrays a negative enough general attitude to lead to some drama down the line.
But hopefully not.
;)
I’ve said several times now. If the owners of the current Pre-UO:R shards have a problem with me putting IPY back up, they know my email and I’m totally willing to talk about it. I’m not going to hunt them down individually and ask their permission, but I have no problem discussing their concerns with them and considering their point of view.
I’m pretty excited at all of this IPY talk. IPY was my first real UO experience as I only got to play OSI here and there at a friends house back in ’99. Since then I’ve been hopping around a lot from shard to shard as most of them ultimately led to disappointment. I guess I’ll give my take on the various points brought up and some of my own (wow this post got long):
1) Skillgain – Accurate to IPY. I was only able to make 2 tank mages in the span of a year or so. Granted I wasn’t spending that much time macroing/farming but rather playing when I could but it definitely is a lot better when everyone doesn’t have 3 tank mages done the first month. Additionally (and more importantly), not everyone and their mother has a mule to make themselves weapons/armor/pots/etc and so player vendors will be of use.
2) PvP mechanics – An IPY replica would be ideal. I think most people would agree that accuracy just isn’t the most fun. UOSA (as mentioned) has god-awful 1v1 (if anyone can explain to me how random interrupts make it more skillful, please do), 2v2 is pretty bad as well. Bigger fights manage to work out but when you throw in mounts, it gets borderline retarded at times. Divinity has a pretty solid system but the constant idiotic changes that took place for no reason whatsoever just kept turning players off from the shard (see 6). I’d also consider putting in a random 3-6 second timer on explosion pots so at least people using Razor to macro perfect throws get eliminated.
3) Unattended Resource Gathering – I think in the end, your best bet would be to hire some staff members with the sole duty of checking around for afk gatherers. People will just about always find ways around anti-macro code. To do their job, the staff would only need access to a few ingame commands. If someone is caught, the staff member should always record an RPV of them trying to communicate with the person so there is always hard proof of the ‘crime’. I realize this may be tedious on a shard with 500+ people, but I’m sure there could be some script made that makes it easier to track who’s mining for several hours straight.
4) Keeping the non PvPers attracted – As mentioned earlier, slow skill gain creates a demand for crafters which is a good start. You also may want to consider a custom BOD system that gives some form of reward like the old daily spawning rares (fruit baskets, etc; no valorite runics though obviously). Another idea is the plant system (may need to be customized a bit as well). I know it sounds corny, but you’d be amazed what those types of ‘mini-games’ can do for a shard.
5) Sync dumping – I’m probably biased about this as I’ve been playing with the same group of people for a few years now and our style of PvP heavily involves syncs. I think you should be extremely careful in how you approach this topic b/c I strongly believe screwing around with this can turn off a lot of players. For me, the most fun PvP in UO is two medium sized groups engaging (4-6 people) in a fight that lasts for 10+ minutes because both teams can properly position themselves for heals and then even if the fight goes to 3v5, the 3 can still rally back. On Divinity, we were given shit for setting off a sync alarm but it was really nothing more than a witch hunt. After a few of the accusers jumped in vent with us, they were setting it off with us too after a bit of practice. I understand with things like hacked PlayUO clients or EasyUO scripts, their may be some distaste towards groups that sync well b/c of the possibility that they may cheat. However the fact is, with enough ‘practice’ and experience, a group of players can become damn good at syncing AND healing and that’s what makes UO PvP fun for a lot of people. Implementing measures like random delays or unstackable explosions will probably just end up in super easy healing for most guilds and detract from the shard.
6) Shard consistency – Amongst other things, a big cause for Divinity’s destruction was the changes that were generally unneeded and only arose b/c a few people cried about something to the right person. UOSA also is constantly changing things in the name of accuracy only to change it back a few weeks/months later when they find out there is contradictory evidence elsewhere. This doesn’t just apply to PvP mechanics. It also has to do with how often events are held, what kind of rewards people can expect, etc. Changing the frequency of events from month to month is a nuisance to newcomers. Maybe do 2 tourneys a week, a CTF/DD/something new, and then one monthly big tournament event and stick to that with rewards that are always consistent. Maybe a named sash for weekly tourneys and then a piece of black for monthlies (a la IPY).
I know just from reading these discussion pages that your entire objective is to establish a common set of features so that this will not become a problem in the future but I just want to stress the importance of this.
7) The ‘Red Problem’ – I’m not a huge fan of statloss b/c it encourages reds to roll in groups and then flee like pansies when there is a slight chance they may die (*95% of the time). Perhaps the best route to go is to encourage PvPers to join Order/Chaos. Maybe this will come in the form of a custom factions system where you can’t be red to join in? Combine that with entire account going red when one becomes a murderer, and maybe it works out well? I know the factions system doesn’t necessarily fit into the Pre-Ren scenario, but it’s an idea (I guess pisces has already mentioned this).
8) Neons/donations – Not a huge fan of the bright colours and it’s debatable whether it attracts more players or not, but you can consider picking colours from a special dye tub for sandles/clothing. They aren’t as shiny but offer some unique options. Additionally, name change deeds would be a good seller since skillgain will probably be relatively slow. Super-sized potion kegs (unfilled), some unique house items unattainable in game (stone chairs/table, etc), bear rugs, etc…
9) ‘Respectful’ community – I can imagine this is going to be one of the hardest things to maintain so I’ll put out a starting point. UOSA does a good job of keeping their forums clean by creating a separate forum specifically for shit-talking that is only visible to registered members. Additionally, their main IRC channel follows the same rule and they have a secondary channel that’s for PvP talk. It’s a nice touch to have clean forums as it’s appealing to newcomers especially the more ‘mature’ players which is what you probably want most.
I guess that’s enough for the time being :/
I have to respectfully disagree with the line
“unstackable explosions will probably just end up in super easy healing for most guilds and detract from the shard. ”
If there was one thing that was not Completely Perfect about IPY, it was the fact that there was a total of 3 different spells + Arming your weapon that took place in a field battle between 12 people.
The main reason for this is because it is simply the most effective and obvious strongest tactic. If 4 guys drop all of their explodes on a guy, there’s a good chance he’s gone. SOMETIMES you could get lucky and land a heal on the guy before he gets instakilled, but hardly. I certainly don’t remember any 10+ minute battles, it was always just each side taking turns dropping someone and whoever could score the quicker edge and drop more guys won. And that’s cool and all, that’s definently skill, but I think it certainly chokes diversity in combat strategys and class diversity.
Making explosion unstackable would certainly force people to adapt new tactics, but I don’t think it would be accurate to say that people would be like OMG IM NOT PLAYING THERE because of it. The game would be a lot more fun if the
Personally, I would love to see dexxers of different types be included in the big fights. They never are though, and it’s because it’s just so easy to get in vent and drop explosions on dexers and take them straight out.
It’s just waaay to easy to combo a guy relative to how difficult it is to heal him, making all mage groups the only viable and logical choice.
Could you not see how the pvp tactics would become less robotic and obvious and more creative and flavorful if all mage groups were not the only viable option?
I think there was a point in time where if you dropped more than one explosion spell on a guy, only one went off. I coulda sworn it was this way before UO:R came out.
Be well
I’m glad someone else is taking it upon themselves to address the potential issues for me so I don’t start ranting on another UO freeshard discussion. :)
I agree with everything Mazer said. Regarding the predicted success of the shard, here’s what I foresee.
First of all, IPY was really the first UO freeshard with a ruleset based on the T2A era. With all of the other failed replications and sorry 2nd rate shards that have come out of the ashes of IPY, the return of the original juggernaut would attract HUGE masses of players. I’d be willing to bet that the majority of active population from Divinity, metropolis, Hybrid, Demise, UOSA, and whatever else there is, would ALL come and play here.
It’s simple. IPY is legendary. Who wouldn’t wan’t to experience it?
I’ve said it before, that largely known and respected guilds attract players. Posts from guilds like + – and c2w and simple word of mouth from them will do wonders for initial population.
If HMU would ever answer his Emails I’m sure he’d be in on this too.
I will say though, that the only reason field pvp turned into three spells being cast is pretty simple. 3rd party voice communication programs. Don’t really hav eto say anything else about that issue.
Sorry dbl post.
For the people (and there will be many) that didn’t play IPY initially, you’ll probably have a hard time convincing them they can’t cast more than three mini heals in a row. :)
Man I’m getting stoked for this. I’m going to jump at any chance to test proposed mechanics for PvP.
GOD vs [?] vs FS! vs c2w vs -U- vs FGN vs + – vs B&B gogogo!
Hah, good to see Sultani here as well. Really think a set of forums would be useful at this point Az. These boards aren’t bad but even a quotation function would be a really useful addition.
Iced: Personally (again, a bit biased), I don’t think the current PvP trend is robotic as you call it. The better groups are the ones that are best at adapting to different situations on the field. Being able to identify who has what spell up, where everyone is positioned, what the surrounding area contains in terms of houses/LOS blockers, etc, and how to react to those things. When you talk about fights where guilds take turns dropping each other, I think of colonial warfare where soldiers lined up and took turns shooting their muskets. That’s definitely not how I see high level UO PvP.
That aside, I see three problems with introducing a mechanic like unstackable explosions.
The first being, if you do this to explosion, you’ll probably have to do it to flame strike and energy bolt as well. What if somewhere down the road, the large groups migrate to just syncing bow shots on the field? Change that too?
The second is as I mentioned earlier, most guilds will not die in a close to even numbered fight unless they are damaged a lot in a short period of time (<.25 seconds). That's just due to the fact that people are for the most part, better healers now than they were 5-10 years ago (and why I think the change is unnecessary to begin with). That's one of the main reasons dexxers get drowned out in bigger fights. They deal a lot of damage over time, but rarely enough in bursts for it to matter against a competent group. Tank mages are the preferred template because of their versatility. Dexxers, not quite as versatile. Spread the damage on synced explosions out, good healing groups will rarely ever die in a fair numbered fight.
Finally, you have got to consider how it would affect smaller group fights (ties into the above point). 2v2 up to ~5v5 would suffer a lot most noticeably.
I've pointed out why dexxers are less viable in big fights but I'm not saying that they are totally worthless. You argue that dexxers are first to be targeted. I see that as a bonus as at least we can predict who the dump will most likely be on making the heals easier. The alternative, one I’ve rarely seen on the field, is to roll an archer dexxer. At least that way you can keep some distance. I think adapting fundamental game mechanics to cater to a certain play style is bogus. I dunno, maybe that’s what Az is going after so maybe this is the intention.
Anyways, not trying to be a dick here, I don’t see how making more room for dexxers in large fights will make PvP any bit more strategic. Sure, it’ll change things up a bit for a short while, but I strongly doubt that the PvP will be ‘better’ per se. Perhaps you can elaborate on this.
I’ll add in to point 6 I made earlier (shard consistency). Establish loot tables during beta or w/e for mobs/treasure chests/MIBs and get them right early on (gold and magic items). I can’t stand the amount of shards launching and then after a few weeks realizing they have an abundance of vanqs and have to start nerfing certain mobs.
regarding magic weapon drop rates:
I don’t think an extremely tiny drop (like divinity’s) rate needs to be implemented initially, but it shouldn’t be ridiculously easy to obtain high end weapons either. What this means is pretty simple. No permanent statloss for reds.
Divinity needed a way to stop the magic weapon influx. With a small population and not very many true PKS, the only way to do it was to nerf drop rates significantly, because people could farm spawns for hours at a time without seeing other people.
With the size of population we’re going to have here, PKs will keep the PvM community in check. When there’s more risk associated with farming, magic items will be more rare. This wouldn’t happen if reds had statloss because there wouldn’t be anything to keep the pure PvMers in check.
I said that the drop rate shouldn’t be ridiculously small initially, but it should be relatively smaller than normal.
Everyone is going to be making mages to go farm and make money with, and everyone is going to get the magic item drops that come with that. You aren’t going to see very many PKs until players get established (especially if statloss is put in), which would mean that initially there would be a huge surge of magic items getting dumped into the shard. Checks and balances. If you remove the checks, you get no balance.
Couple of other things as I read more of these posts.
Making explosion unstackable would just mean that people will get more players in their group to sync ebs and bowshots. What’s next, making bowshots, weapon hits, or ebs unstackable too? You have to realize how bad 2 v 2 fights would be like this. No one would ever die.
regarding people scripting syncs / pvp, those claims are laughable. and in fact, a large part of the accusations actually were jokes. Guilds like + – and -U- got accused of PvP scripting all the time.. Even to the point of having a GM follow them and watch what they were doing in vent. None of the GMs or players could prove they were scripting because guess what, no one was scripting.
Alot of the reasons people want unstackable explosions is that field pvp is “too easy” because of vent and anyone can just target someone when prompted. Well, after playing this game for 10+ years, it’s going to be easy for some people. And if it’s so “easy,” why do the same guilds demolish everyone on every free uo shard? maybe it’s not as easy as people are making it out to be?
pisces hit it on the head with statloss. It’s a bad idea to remove someone from being active for any extended period of time. All you are really doing is making them run a macro for a couple days instead of actively playing just because they got ganked or lost a fight. If it happens often enough, there’s the possibility that someone only gets to play like once or twice a week, which will increase the chance that they might not choose to play at all.
donations: It’s not a bad idea to accept donations, but I’ve seen shards spring up where admins accept donations, take the money, then quit and let the shard die. I’ve seen alot of people say things like “I wish I could try the mechanics before I decided to make a character so I know if I’m going to like it.”
For the longest time I figured this was good enough reason to allow donations for skill / statballs, but there are other ways of allowing people to test things. It’s called a test center.
I don’t think you should be able to donate for rare / blessed clothing items because people will just donate and sell them for gold. Rare clothing items should only be attainable through winning events like on old IPY. If you accept donations, it should be a donation. Not a purchase. The word “donation” does not imply that you are going to receive something in return.
Good to hear that dped hallies won’t be part of the shard. I remember they were implemented originally on IPY and then removed, for good reason.
I don’t remember exactly what kind of spell damage delay or recasting delays existed, but the biggest draw back for me for any shard is when people start talking about putting in such things.
I recall IPY having some kind of spell delays.
I don’t know how much they were, but they were there. I just remember the pvp being NOTICABLY better than Divinity ‘no timing required’ pvp.
and regarding Explosions not stacking:
I already know it’s not gonna happen. I have been wishing for this for a long time and it is just too deeply ingrained in the elite players minds to keep it this way.
The reason I want unstackable explosions is for some of the reasons you guys mentioned: Mainly that dexxers are obviously just a terrible choice to have in your guild if you are trying to win fights. I hate how bad this kills pvp diversity, and back when UO was really really good (Pre 2001) pvp was NOT conducted this way at all. There was a mix of all classes involved in the pvp and there was an element of wear and tear instead of just instant death.
I wish that explosions did not stack because I would like to see guilds FORCED to have some diversity in their class arrangement. I don’t care if people try to all ebolt someone at the same time or if people try to bow shot someone at the same time, because doing those things are much, much more difficult than everyone having a spell pulled up, waiting for the word “Drop” and then hitting a button and watching a guy die.
I was in the guild B&B in the last months of IPY. We destroyed basically anyone that we came across with this same strategy. And while it is fun to fight this way, and there is indeed plenty of timing and individual skill involved, I simply believe it’s NOT what UO was meant to be. There are so many possible ways to build your character in Ultima Online but in pvp, there is only one build that works, and I think that’s a shame. And the main reason for this shame is that it is just too easy to kill people with 4 explosions stacked on top of eachother.
Enjoying the debate, be well.
I should mention that i believe the main element that brought about this style of ‘Synch or Nothing’
guild vs guild pvp is the absence of horses.
Everyone being on foot, combined with the very long range of magery, means that people cannot run off screen or maneuver around the battlefield to avoid being blasted.
This fact only further solidifies that mages are the only good classes in large scale pvp, and leads exactly to Revolutionary War style combat where everyone lines up to Wait then Fire.
But I hate horses, and I love everyone being on foot. This is just another point towards making explosions unstackable.
Geryon, UO was not built that way, you’re right. But that’s because it was designed without the consideration of 3rd party voice chat programs.
Even when the game was originally designed, any player would have died to having multiple spells hit them at the same time. The problem isn’t that multiple stacked spells all do damage, the problem is that is ridiculously easy to stack the spells on one target becuase of vent.
PvP diversity of class would only happen if there were no such thing as voice communication programs. With people becoming increasingly better at cross healing because of the synch dump style of pvp, eliminating stacked damage would mean that no one would ever die unless people just all synched bowshots or something.
It doesn’t take any more skill for everyone to press “attack last combatant” when someone says “now” than it does to target the player’s bar when someone says “now.”
This actually just made me have an idea. What if you couldn’t target a player’s bar?
It is still plenty possibel to maneuver and use surroundings without having a horse to run 5 screens away while one person loads a spell. It also makes smaller scale pvp suck because people can offscreento easily in 1 v 1s.
really, what’s the difference if people all have exp loaded or if people all have EB loaded? If only one person has an EXP loaded and the rest of the people just synch ebolts because the exp wont stack, the result would probably be the same anyway.
I’ve called fights where I actually called two targets at once, one with EXPs and one with EBs and killed two people in one dump. I kinda like that tactic and would hate to see it go away. Without being able to stack exp, you don’t really make tank mages any less of a dominant class, you just make large scale fights based on how many people you have to cast Ebolts. Synching two targets with two different spells is a great way to negate being outnumbered.
Not to mention that stackable exps or not, dexers will never be able to cross heal as effectively as mages can, so mages would still dominate in field fights.
Wow. Edit post feature please. :)
I think it would be alot more difficult to switch targets and add something to field pvp if you couldn’t target bars. And I actually think it’s easier, not more difficult, to synch bow shots with a group of archer dexers because you don’t have to wait fora couple of seconds while casting before you position everyone correctly.
Its been awhile since I checked the site and this is very good news to come back to.
As far as suggestions i’ve seen so far I think doing something with the way housing is purchased would be a good thing. Pre-placing houses in hot spots(Moongates/Vesper Bridge/Ect) and selling them thru the staff or using them as rewards for the active and powerful guilds would be an idea to tinker with.
I have alot of ideas I will write out that might be worth a damn it just might take a bit for me to find the time. One of the things I can think of right now is setting up a designated building in each town that crafters can buy or bid for vendor slots in. This would work as a gold sink and also create a stronger player economy. The idea could run alongside a faction type political system where guilds can align themselves with cities and possibly get discounts or items that are specific to certain towns.
One thing I never saw in UO that I thought would have created a huge amount of interest is a true political system with elections, taxes, and benefits. If each city had craftable resources that could only be bought off “city alliance” vendors it would also make for interesting city trade scenerios that could make for great alliances and wars.
This is all surely unrealistic in regards to what IPY 2.0 is going to be but I have always wanted to see UO evolved the way players like most of us wanted it to be. Not in the way UO:Hybrid just amplified the basic aspects of the game but more along the lines of what OSI/EA did but in the exact opposite direction.
Ill write up some more ideas ive had and try to get them posted tho. Good to see your still doin Good Az and I cant wait to see IPY 2.0!
Yeah you’re right Sultani, come to think of it I can trace back to Roger Wilco, people weren’t using it much yet. My guild at the time was in it but just bullshat and told eachother where the action was.
It was when the voice proggys got better with Teamspeak etc. and ppl started using them that style started to become dominant, and unfortunately there isn’t much of a fix, altho I am fascinated by the idea of not being able to target people’s bars.
Yea, it wouldn’t really do much as soon as people had one person targetted, but it would be much harder to get that target initially, and the slower guilds / groups would suffer. It would also be much harder to switch targets which I think might be a good thing.
Don’t get me wrong man, I agree that class diversity is a good thing, but it’s an unfixable part of the evolution of communications that makes tank mages dominant indefinitely (and cross healing capability).
Oh, did anyone mention that melee and archery hit chance with GM skill MUST be 50% hit chance against gm wrestling? If not, I just did. :)
Open a forum az, this is getting a bit messy.
Non-stacking explosions doesn’t fix the problem and breaks 2v2-4v4 pvp. How in the hell is a 2 person group EVER going to kill a 3 or 4 person squad on the field without stacking explosions? It’s really not as instantkill as you think it is, you just have never been surrounded by actual good cross healers. That’s not meant as a flame or a stab at you and your friends, but it’s the truth. I can not even begin to explain to you how many perfect 5+ person synch dumps I have healed with my guild.
If you want to make the UO more old school, start looking at razor. You can disable alot of it’s features on the server end, and I’m sure with a bit of fingerwork you can disable a few more of them. The biggest problem with group pvp today on modern servers is sticky bars, but short of an officially provided client patch version(pre 5.0 are without the sticky bars), you’re not going to be able to fix this. While I’m thinking about this, I better explain this feature to az because he hasn’t played in ages. In current UO, you grab someones bar, they leave your screen, the bar stays. You can grab an entire guilds bars, recall out, regroup, and recall back into another spot, load explodes, and instantly bust whoever is standing in a bad spot based on these sticky bars, IPY went down before they implemented this feature I believe.
For anyone wondering what IPY’s pvp was like, and how “I don’t remember any fights lasting 10 minutes” just hit up http://www.uomovies.com and filter it by server with IPY. Alot of good, larger battle videos still exist, and yes, some of them even have perfect synch dump heals!
If you build it, they will come.
Also as far as wanting dexxers to be more viable in group pvp, I suggest re-inventing your playstyle as opposed to re-inventing the gameplay. Dexxers with purple potions and archery as a supporting skill are more than viable as field group pvpvers. No, the same fencer poisoning dexxer that destroys everyone in a 1v1 fight isn’t that useful in a mobile group fight. Roll two dexxers, one with your typical DOUBLECLICKFOLLOWSWINGKRYSS template,and another suited for grouping. MethodmanX never had a problem in group pvp, and fuck that guy killed everyone with his dexxer on IPY. I feel you’re on the same page as a thief mage trying to duel. For the record I’ve got nothing against you Icedearth, you’re just a little short sited.
ahh, and we have our first person to arrive and start spewing flames.
You obviously have no idea who I am pisces from the way you described my so-called doubleclick and follow style, and I would appreciate it if you would tone down your negativity. This is a personal blog and not a message board, so I don’t know if the owner cares for immature people to come on here and start flaming eachother…
I do remember who you are, and there was nothing negative about my statements. I feel you are projecting your own inadequacies as gameplay mechanic problems, which they simply are not. You’re the one spreading poppycock about unhealable instant deaths, the same way you and your guild were telling everyone we were scripting on divinity. The group pvp voice chat is pretty much here to stay, and has been for awhile. It’s like complaining about razor at this point, and even harder to ban to boot. On the plus side, some of us adapted to the group voice chat pvp, and have a great time playing it.
I’m not trying to flame you, I’m attempting to display not all of us want azaroth to rape and mame the pvp system he had so you can run a muck on your fencing dexxer.
Too long Didn’t read : In my 4 or 5 years of running around as a group pvping, I never once got the notion turning off stacking explosions would make the game more fun. In fact, nothing you said sounded like any kind of fun, and it’s stupid ideas like those that ran Divinity into the ground in the first fucking place.
Okay, so here are my concerns with this:
First of all, I hate you all. Anything I do is going to cause moaning, groaning, blood feuds and stalking of my family members. Let’s just keep the discussion sub-rabid so I can forget how annoying running IPY was and I can have a lapse in judgement long enough to put up IPY 2.0.
Second, I feel on one level that I should leave PvP as it was, let it be bastardized with modern programs, and let the hardcore PvPers have PvP the way they’ve come to like it. The complaints from these people would be very loud because other than the fact that they’re loud by nature, they’re hardcore and they’re used to something being a certain way. I doubt they’d give anything else a fair shake before going on a jihad against whatever I did. I don’t need the drama.
I can make all of the changes I want on IPY 3.0 and people can have the old stuff on IPY 2.0. That was the intention from the beginning. So there’s that.
However.
UO PvP was not meant to be what it is today. Just because a small amount of people have adapted means little to me. Large amounts of people have been run off by the way things have evolved very obviously. What is fun to one person may not be fun to another and so on, and I think the waterslide that generally is an imagined graph of Pre-UO:R population numbers speaks to the idea that something is very wrong with what’s going on.
More importantly – synch dumping PvP is not fun to ME. I get that it’s been adapted to and everyone is set in their ways. That’s the essence of why I can still put IPY up and get anyone to log in. However, I also changed things with IPY because I felt modern circumstances made them kind of ridiculous. This is one of those situations. I think it’s pretty glaring.
But I get nothing by changing things, other than the hope that it will work out longer term. If I prevent something from being done the way people currently prefer it, I’ll get a huge negative response of people jumping on shard x, spamming about how superior it is, and posting stories about myself hiring Jamaican shemale prostitutes (which has really only happened once or twice).
I’ll give it some thought. If I change anything, I’ll note to make sure healing is a little different. Healing was a little different on IPY too though, remember.
It makes me sad that this is such a larger issue.
Forum: In a little while. I’m too busy to babysit a forum right now.
Maybe… but I’m not.
I see the concern about angering a bunch of the hardcore players by not having Synch Dump pvp be the only way to go.
I would love to say that some other form of pvp that wasn’t based solely on Synch Dumping would attract OTHER people to pvp, but I do not know this for sure.
If you are like me, you remember pvp being at its best when you logged in, ICQd your friends to find out what Town/Dungeon the action was at, then you showed up IN GAME to that location to join into a furious battle that was a lot more random and spontaneous. There were character types of every class running around fighting the best they can. These were the Order/Chaos wars of Pre:UOR.
These days, I think lesser skilled pvpers won’t even give pvp a shot these days when they see how mechanized the process is. It’s just too difficult to jump into the fun when it looks so complex and robotic. Even a guy with a Kryss and some bandages/potions who had no idea what a synch dump IS could still make a difference on the battlefield. (This speaks volumes about Order/Chaos as well. Putting everyone into 2 camps instead of it being My Guild vs. The World with every single guild made it to where everyone had allies.)
The challenge is definently going to be finding the balance between the Pisces Iscariot type people and the people who would like to see the next great UO shard not just be another rat race where everyone works super hard and fast to complete their characters so they can jump into the Synch Dump festival.
Synch Dump pvp is completely unappealing to people who have not been playing this games for years and years and years. And even for a lot of people who HAVE been playing for a decade like me.
This isn’t about me wanting to have an easier time on my “Fencing Dexer.”(Once again a tribute to your ignorance, Pisces, I hardly play a fencer.) It’s about me wanting AT LEAST for there a place to be on the field for fencing dexers and all other character classes.
People like Pisces, the conservatives if you will, are just inclined to say “F%&k dexers they take no skill to play everyone in the whole game should just be the same template” etc. etc. when I think UO has shown that its diversity is it’s greatest strength in every regard.
No one thinks back to UO and says “Yeah man, UO was the best MMO ever, you could like get on your voice program with ur broz and cALL teH SiNks.”
I think we’re getting a little too personal here. Let’s try to avoid that.
This is my concern though:
“These days, I think lesser skilled pvpers won’t even give pvp a shot these days when they see how mechanized the process is.”
Which is pretty true. There’s a certain number of people who have gone from free shard to free shard over the last half decade that are accustomed to synch dumping and will flip if it’s taken out. Pretty much everyone else who tries PvP will hate it and quit.
Personally? Even I wouldn’t PvP. I’d duel, that’s about it. I wouldn’t join a guild and get into group battles, because I’m so far away from interested in synch dump PvP that it’d scare you. Hell, if I was looking to play UO again I’d honestly only really want to play on a server where PvP didn’t revolve around that crap. But that’s just me.
That it CAN easily be automated whether so and so chooses to or not is probably the biggest problem I have with it. Automated synch dump battles aren’t fun or interesting or appealing to anyone but the small amount of people who participate in them currently.
At the moment I’m just wondering if we can have our cake and eat it too. I’d love to keep everyone happy, but it’ll take some thought. Perhaps free equip O/C shields that bounce stacked spells or something. That way synch dump PvP isn’t so much an opt in thing as it is an opt out. It’s not forcing anyone to do anything (a spell bounce working the other way around would be more forceful in that you’d have to opt in to synch dump PvP in order to participate and the rest of the world would be devoid of it), but if your guild wants to PvP without synchs, then you can.
The incentive would be increased oranges, and a really great looking shield that had no restrictions. Perhaps you even flesh out O/C a bit with points and rewards and objectives and so on and so forth – just to encourage something I prefer instead of forcing it on everyone. I’m not always right, and I get that.. so at the moment I’m interested in considering compromises.
Just a random thought.
I keep seeing the word “automated synch dumps” come up alot, it’s not automated, in the entire time i’ve been playing freeshards i’ve come across only a few groups actually using easyuo to group pvp, and they really weren’t up to snuff with the better guilds who were just good at timing and healing. The rest of us are ya know, still playing the same video game as you.
I realize this is just my opinion, but there are a ton of people who share it. All of the major guilds use and enjoy the vent pvp, if you don’t want the big guilds to play the server is pretty much pointless.
For the record, Divinity at one point (this was during the 1.0 days, when it still had players on it from the launch burst) tried non stacking explosions, and literally every guild quit. My crew, c2w, -U-, FuQ, INC, and whatever the few other big guilds that were still playing at that point ALL quit, and we didn’t come back for ages because of it. Some never came back, because it was just such a laughably bad idea to put on a Runuo server in 2006 where everyone uses voice chat.
IPY was fun and beautiful because of what it was. You’d be shocked how many people have more IPY nostalgia than OSI nostalgia.
SSJ and TP played without vent, well some of the time we did. :p
Dexers are fine considering what skill it takes to doubleclick and follow someone around.
A lot of this stuff should probably be tested in a long (closed?) beta.
Pisces – I’m trying to see the value in your opinion. I really am. That’s why I’m presenting ideas for compromise.
But please don’t try to railroad me with promises of guild boycotts, etc.
Not even, everyone’s going to give it a try, myself included regardless of what kind of server you put up, the name itself is enough to sell it to most of us. Just giving you my opinions because he’s giving you the exact opposite of the coin.
How would you stop vent anyway? It can’t be done can it?
“Dexers are fine considering what skill it takes to doubleclick and follow someone around.”
Thank you Prydwen. That is very helpful to the conversation.
I stand by my opinion. The dexer is completly automated to where only doubleclick and follow remains. I remember chasing dexers on IPY who would set off their trapped pouch the milisecond the para would hit, or other dexers drinking their cure potion the milisecond before the bandaid went off. I can’t care less about some people’s wish to play “something different” or “diversity”. Any playstyle that revolves around doubleclick and follow should have no place in competitive pvp.
If it was up to me I’d kill the dexer class once and for all, he just has to be put down. Removing anatomy bonus to damage would be a good way to do that.
I wouldn’t mind some variation to the mage class however. Something I’ve been considering is raising the skill cap to 800, but then anatomy has to go or everyone will just get that. Then new skills could be put in, but I suppose that wouldn’t be classic enogh for most people.
Maybe we should all cool it for awhile before Az starts to remember why he took IPY down in the first place. :)
As for notalgia, lol Fat Duck exp eq hally 2 v 1.
Hah that shit was funny sult, and I remember that. IPY was so much fun, it really really was. Az you have no idea how much you hooked it up for alot of us, I’ve yet to find anything even remotely close to as good as your server was, and I’ve searched high and low.
The complainers are always louder than the good and thankful players, but don’t let that discourage you. You built something genuinely fun that people have been missing and clamoring for since you took it down. I still remember macroing through that UNBEARABLE lag in november of 04 just thinking “these fuckin suckers are logging out cause of lag and im getting ahead cha-ching”. The server went down like 2 months later, and I still chuckle when I think of it. I miss IPY and the group of monsters it attracted. Yeah it was full of assholes, but at least you can DO SOMETHING ABOUT the assholes on UO, as opposed to something like WoW.
I’ve been waiting on 3 old coders to hop on aim or icq ever since you posted this, and still nothing :(
Yeah, we were getting a lot of DDOS unfortunately at that point. It didn’t help.
I still think you guys will complain when IPY goes up, though. I get a strong feeling that you’re just being nostalgic and no matter how good the next shard is, it’ll never be as good as the original to most of you.
Horses? Maybe that is the key?
Maybe the key to the balance is horses, and the fact that you are able to get off screen of a group of synch dumpers faster.
This in and of itself opens up a wider variety of options.
Perhaps it is the speed of horses that can serve as a counter to the range of spells?
If horses were considered, I would want their stamina to be QUITE LIMITED. Make it to where they are valuable in the combat zone but you will wear them out if you just run and run and run and run them. Maybe make it to where you have to get off the horse and feed it apples to restore some of its stamina every 6 screens or so?