by Azaroth | October 8th, 2009
Being free to play is great – until it comes to enforcing the rules. There’s little justice to be had in a world of self controlled reincarnation.
Enforcing the rules isn’t even the biggest problem. One of the most frustrating things I come across when I sit down at night and try to work game systems out onto paper is how inject some sort of account accountability. If it’s Whacking Day for instance and the goal is to get the most snakes – what is to stop someone from opening up eight accounts, macroing the Whacking skill out in the forest, bypassing the character limit on snake collection, and then bypassing the account and IP checks when they turn all of their snakes in for rewards?
There’s a simple solution for other games. Either you’re paying for your accounts and if you want to open 20 of them that’s fine with us – or our game is free, casual, aimed at kids, and we don’t implement systems that can be in any way exploited or interesting. You whack away at your monsters and nothing you do has any effect on anyone else whatsoever.
I’m in the middle here. Wondering how I can approach this, I turn to the illustrious rabble on this blog. How do you run a free game if you want to have interesting and meaningful player participation without leaving everything entirely open to exploitation. I could put up a WoW server and let people collect as many soulbound christmas muffins as they want, I suppose. But I’d like to do an interesting UO server here, and I see no way to do that without some way to definitively track users as human beings.
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Yah…I think we shold be careful with this…Slow skill gains seems like a awesome idea in theory…I m not really sure how many people want to spend 40 hours in front of the pc to be gm Magery…and another 10 days to be gm resist…. I would…I m just worried about the overall community…
I would. :)
But you’re quite correct, of course. I’m certainly not positive it’d be universally enjoyed.
Well, all I can say is “it’s been tried the other way”. I’m not talking 1000 hours to gm a skill by any means, I’m just saying it should cost 300k worth of regs to GM resist,as opposed to 110k. Skills SHOULD gain much faster in dungeons, and dungeons should be the best method of making money in the game period. Better than fancy shirt tailoring macros (yeah i did this on IPY too), better than MIBs and all but the highest treasure maps, and those things should be fucking rare too.
Players having a ton of accounts isn’t the problem, it’s players making a ton of characters. Get to the root of the problem, and you can fix it long term.
I would also like to mention i’m one of the power gamers who rolls with 5 tank mages on most servers i play. One blue archer in order, one blue archer in a chaos guild, one red swords mage for pking, one blue swords mage for dueling and then another just because, and this is nothing compared to what some people amass. I had a guildie named castro who owned a giant keep, like 6 towers, giant villas, had 6 of EVERY character type and multi billion gold worth of items and estate. If money was harder to come by, it would have take him to 3x as long (this took him about 2 years) for the “boredom” for him to kick in. This is true for pretty much everyone. Everyone has a point they hit on each server, where they have acquired everything they cared to acquire (be it skills, houses, trammy items, a stock of tournament trophies, a pile of heads whatever) and get tired of playing and quit. The game has inherent flaws that make it eventually play itself into a corner after awhile, your job is basically to attempt to beat that feeling back for as long as possible.
And no sult, i wasn’t telling you to fuck off in that post, it was definitely faust.
That’s exactly the point. Having GM magery and GM resist should be an accomplishment. It should mean something the way it used to.. You should have to invest some time in order to make it to that point.
Otherwise those things become the standard, which means no one will play the game other than macroing until they get to that point.
If people aren’t willing to put in the effort to achieve those things, then they don’t get them.
Again, where I’m going with this is that a huge chunk of the game gets missed with allowable macroing because the shard starts, and immediately the standard is 7X. Because of this, everyone just macros in order to achieve that high standard.
Let the standard evolve as people play and develop their characters. That way people won’t have the idea of “oh well I can’t play yet because my character isn’t ready.”
What this means is that the game is always fun and you are always interacting regardless of if you’re completely new or if you’re a 7x.
Create an atmosphere where new players feel like they can jump right in and play the game, rather than creating something that feels like they need to create an account, then just macro for a week, then play the game.
I think this would actually be way more appealing than you guys think it would.
not to mention it would absolutely eliminate the problem of too many characters and self reliance.
I agree, the majority of the content of Ultima Online during this era, was character development, and the things you had to do to get there. It’s where the adventure came from. You HAD to go to shame, to hit some earth elementals to get some swords up, and some money for supplies. Macroing takes away so much of the interaction and content behind UO. The only problem is, it is really hard to ban without a punkbuster type system, and even that isn’t full proof.
Which brings us back to your original suggestion of manual checks and enforcement.
Will some of it get missed? Sure. But even the possibility of some sort of enforced sanction is enough to reduce peoples’ willingness to risk macroing.
I see your point regarding the unique naming, but it does curb it somewhat.
Another idea out of the blue is a type of “power hour” that is earned. If skill gain must be harder to curb grief, then some sort of way to earn a “power hour” might be nice.
Examples:
Doing “quests” will earn some faster skill gain.
Being in a Dungen yeilds higher combat skill gain.
Just throwing it out there…
Az, there is no real way to curb multi-clienting by looking at IPs… I for one have remote access to well over 100 unique IPs, yes I am in IT. So the only real way to think of handling this would be a system I mentioned above, which of course have its major pros and cons… (excluding development time and debug time)
I think that a lot of these posts are getting at something very important:
The thrill is in the journey, not the destination.
I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but I can say with certainty that the most fun I ever had in UO was when I had things to work toward.
Dueling was never so fun as when I (and the majority of players at this time) had skills in the 80-90 range.
On IPY I pursued a long-standing goal to own a keep. When I finally got it, I essentially quit playing.
It’s a very strange thing, that we as humans will essentially do everything in our power to try and grasp the carrot-on-the-stick, but on some level we also understand that once we finally grab the carrot, our enjoyment is going to soon diminish and we’ll have to search for a new carrot. We owe it to the process to try everything in our power to get it, but it’s also more fun when, try as we might, it’s still elusive. Of course, it’s a delicate balance. If there’s no chance at all of grabbing the carrot — if, for instance, skill gain is made so slow that someone might play an afternoon and have nothing to show for it — then most people will just move on.
So, as for what these topics are getting at, I think everyone is right on the money that things have become stale and formulaic. At this point, all the veterans know how to create powerhouse characters with surgical precision. It’s almost not even a game at this point. As for why we do this, I’m not sure, it’s really besides the point, but the effects that this has are profound. The people who know this game the best are burning themselves out the quickest. Worse yet, because of how UO is structured, when these players get bored they start to prey upon those weaker then them, and at that point there’s really no turning back. It’s like a hot tub when the PH gets out of whack. Once bacteria starts to thrive, everyone who hops in is going to have some gnarly rashes to show for it. This is how most free shards are at this point. Hopefully this isn’t the last time that I’m able to compare a UO shard with some sleazy hot tub party.
Simply, I just don’t think things can work so long as people can master the game in a matter of days. I don’t think sweeping changes are necessary. I think small things will go a long way. It took years for a community of 200k to figure out how to master UO’s 8×8 skill gain pattern. Similar communities have created intricate programs to automate as many processes as possible. If some basic things can be tweaked in order to make it so those can’t function as well, it will ultimately allow for people to enjoy the experience longer.
To try and steer this ship back towards course (forward left, forward left, forward left), I’m going to make a half assed attempt to tie this together. Measures to limit clients are a good move. Measures to make it less appealing to use multiple clients are a good move. Measures to make it harder for people to automate and master gameplay are a good move. Etc. Etc. And yes, if we analyze each of these in-and-of themselves, the ideas are going to have holes, because that’s the nature of a microscopic viewpoint. But I think that if all of these things (and others) are done across the board, even in small doses, then the pieces of string can be stitched through each other like some kind of crochet figure that my grandma makes, which is hopefully the last time she ever comes up in this discussion.
I think the higher skill gain in dungeons is a GREAT idea, although I still feel that the skill gain should be relatively slow so the dungeon crawling isn’t temporary.
The problem with a power hour is that it sends the message that it’s only worth it to play for one hour a day and any other time spent is wasted.
I like the quest idea too, but I have a different spin on this.
Instead of having “higher skill gain for completing quests,” What if there were chain quests to be completed inside of dungeons where at the end you received an item like a “+.3 to ” scroll? There’s probably bad things about this, but I’m just throwing it out there.
On carrots – All of that is pretty much the reason behind the concept of 3.0. I didn’t start out intending to do two servers. I just figured everyone would want the vanilla server up.
More and more solutions are discussed here for problems that you run into with a classic ruleset, but we need to realize why I put this post under the banner of “3.0″. While IPY has never been a server that’s been too afraid to change things that weren’t fun or didn’t make much sense, there ARE going to be a large amount of people who want to stay away from all of my solutions. So things like this go into the 3.0 pile.
As far as slowed skill gain, there’s certainly the effect of newer players hopping on, seeing no progress and getting discouraged. However that’s countered by doing something as simple as increasing skillgain from 0-50-60 or so (although not so fast that you feel as though you’ve hit a brick wall after 60 and quit because of that).
You can also introduce quests that reward players with skill gain and are pretty easy to find and complete early on.
Not on carrots themselves I mean, but on the fact that things are to the point where nothing is truly new and that there’s no game beyond maxing out your characters, getting a big house and lots of regs and PvPing. If that’s your bag.
Slow skill gain is AWESOME. Sure it sucks, but lets face it, this is our LAST SHOT at ultima online. (at least for me)
Here are some reasons why slow skillgain rocks:
1- Not as many pk’s – especially those harassing new players. People will want to interact with the shard events and even sitting at the bank when they are bored to get a sense of the population. So this will mean that most people will create a second character to pk/pvp with – making pk’s more scarse for the first few months of the shard.
2- A sense of worth/accomplishment. Once putting in tons of hours/gold into a character, they will feel good and want to play. They are less likely to break the rules/use easyuo scripts.
3- More player interaction. Everyone will have low skills, and if you make macroing melee skills on other characters even slower than being in a dungeon, this means more people working together in dungeons instead of alone in a small house (Especially if housing prices are higher)
4- Like others said, people that can make 7x gm mages/tamers/provo in a couple of days for under 50k gold play for a few months, get bored because they have everything plus fifteen million gold, and quit. This will make the shard last longer – if it has an expiration date.
So far I like these ideas in this thread:
2 Accounts Max
2 Characters per account
Slow skill gain
– Faster skill gain inside dungeons
– Or Fast skill gain from 0-65, slower as you get higher
Increased prices on raw materials
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Dislikes:
No macroing. Simply nobody is really under 18 years old and doesn’t have some type of job/commitment that would allow for the hours needed.
Unique naming. Its simply no UO without some cracker having your name and running around like a lunatic.
Credit Card verification, it’s simply just a matter of giving very personal information out. There are better ways to get people to commit.
————————————–
Final thoughts:
I want a real pvp/pvm/looters delight/no carebare in sight/omgwtfowned type of shard and I think a open forum like this is bad ass to get to a point where a shard would thrive and be great for that type of environment. Now awaiting the next topic.
Adding onto number 3…
I remember when I first started playing ultima online, skill gain was slow, it took me 3 months to GM Swords, and having a house – even a small house -was a HUGE feat.
Now everyone powergames to get gold, gets a house, macros a mage, pvp’s and pks everyone including new players, is an asshole and quits the shard or is banned.
You can throw a wrench into this playstyle that ultima online is now by making skillgain slow, limit accounts/characters per ip, increase skillgain on monsters, and make housing prices high.
UO can be fun again, not just a powergaming/macroing hassle.
Saying something like “no one is under 18 therefore no one would be able to commit the hours needed” implies that it’s NEEDED that you’re a 7x in order to play. That is exactly the kind of thing that I thought I addressed.
You miss the point entirely with this. It wouldn’t be NEEDED that you play for a ridiculous amount of hours because the standard would NOT be 7X right from the get go. Therefore people would actually play the game WHILE they are developing their characters and not only AFTER they are done.
See?
You can’t say “no one would play because they don’t have enough time without being able to macro” when the structure is built in a way where you do NOT have to be 7x in order to actively play the damn game.
I don’t know how to make that any more clear.
the argument against not being able to macro would only be true if it were understood that there were a huge amount of people who were already 7x. Since that’s not true at all, then you don’t need to be 7x to start playing because, hello, no one else is 7x either. Therefore you don’t “need” to spend any huge amount of time actually playing.
And anyway, why would rewarding people for actually playing be a bad thing?
If you want people to be able to macro, what the fuck is the point of having a skill gain system anyway? Everyone knows how to make a character so damn well that the only negative effect of skill gain for them is the increased energy bill created by leaving your computer running.
Hell, if you want to be able to macro, why the fuck not just let everyone start as a 7x, since apparently according to kiljox, you “need” to be 7x to play.
Classic example of someone taking a structural problem and trying to say it won’t work because of an individual level argument.
In other words:
I’m sorry for fausting things up, but I can’t help it because, uh, I’m faust, in case you guys forgot.
Okay, so that’s all out of our system. No more trolling or baiting in either direction. We’ll all agree to that and I’ll play babysitter and step in when someone starts out of nowhere.
Azaroth:
“NPC custom order/time limit system that are handed out one at a time and dish out random orders that, when delivered, provide little +0.1, +0.2, etc scrolls.
Making skill gain slow is a fantastic idea, in my mind. But I think there also need to be rewards for -playing- that help people who actually do play instead of just looking for ways to macro and rewarding the people who find a really, really private spot or whatever.”
What if you put little +.1 combat skill scrolls on monsters as loot that would spawn? Like lower level monsters could carry like +.1 Swords scrolls that would drop maybe 1 out of every 10 and u just double click them and they add .1 or whatever to the skill on the scroll. They would be random, like lower level monsters would drop +.1 fence or swords or tactics or wrestle whereas some of the stronger, more magical monsters can drop possibly the coveted +.1 Magery or Magic Resist ever 1 out of 40 or so.
damn these skill scroll are a great idea
I agree, but they shouldnt be transferable.
Lefty
also true, the person who finds it has to keep it
Everyone who’s drawn to these types of UO emulation servers seem to miss the point of why they even play UO to begin with. They think it’s to become a hardcore war guild, to become an elite duelist, or to have the most successful vendor. What made UO…UO was the fact that it had sustainable goals.
Mark my words, EVERYONE who complains about it being too difficult to level skills, or get a huge house, or acquire whatever it is they want to acquire will be complaining about there not being enough to do 8 months down the road. Eventually the “true” PvPers will just be logging in to scout around for fights only to log out 30 minutes later, totally missing the other PvP groups who are doing the exact same thing. Random encounters in dungeons will just stop happening, you won’t see people just lounging around at the bank working skills and chatting. It’s a vicious circle.
Sustainable goals. Make it somewhat easy to level up to a reasonable skill that’s decent for competing in the game, but then have the gains drop off so that people really have to work hard and may never even see end game. That’s UO.
Very true occular patdown. One thing I would like to add though is that almost everyones has already seen whats its like to be 7x. So the end goal isnt satisfying enough anymore as it used to be (on OSI, I would thought I’d get GM resist for example).
Thats why I suggest there has to be a lot of new stuff added to the game, so it stays entertaining. The thrill of getting a 7x is a lot less than it was 10 years ago.
Lefty
Here is where I link the last topic and we go back to discussing that, I guess.
:)
That scroll idea is the best thing that Geryon has ever said.
Good game [for real real]
I like the skill scroll idea, but I agree that they need to be non-transferable. Otherwise, you’ll have veterans selling GM skills to new characters.
Ive read the majority of posts in this forum and here is what I think.
Slow Skill Gain: This is very important, for all the reasons stated above so i’m not really going to go over this one with anything other then a simple thumbs up.
Discouraging / banning macroing: This is probley the most important element you can enforce. When new people come to this game because their friend told them its the best game ever, they log in, and find a word they cannot relate to. To expect a new player to accept that the character creation phase is completed while at work or asleep must seem rediculous to anybody who hasn’t played the game for a decade. This strange unrelatability imidiatly deters new players.
Credit Card / email validation: This is a terrible idea. If you expect people to hand over credit card info, to a free server admin, you are going to see a dead server instantly. The email thing is not so bad, but if you exclude hotmail and gmail then you are really going to cut off a lot of your younger player base, as most kids have gmail / hotmail accounts. (Hell I’m 22 and I only have a gmail)
Thats my 2 cents.
PS: Sultani we only script dumps when were synching your mum :P har har har jk much love, ya knows? k thx bye!
Can you have flags go off to stream line policing of extra accounts. Like if a characters trading history is only with one other character. Or if a character stays in one location for extreme lengths of time. and if a character has an unreasonable skill template(like a character that can’t recall), ect. You could have reverse flags too, like if a character is very new, their template shouldn’t flag them.
It depends on what kind of data you can effectively record and search through, and whether you want to sit their and think up all the different criteria to look for.
Exactly, but in the end you couldn’t plan for absolutely everything and the system would likely be faulty.
Jesus Az I leave you for like 2 months and I come back to this? I love you and the glimmer of hope you give me when it comes to IPY. Just dont let me down sir, I wish I could find the post where you told me that you would never run another Free UO server again :-P
Look im not trying to read all these posts so let me just throw this out there and im sorry if its been touched on. I say you have a membership fee to a website and through that membership you gain access to blogs, forums, free games etc… You give some kind of unique code to create the account on your server. allow X amount of accounts per membership. If people want more let them buy more.
Yeah if you could make people pay I think that would be awesome.
That would really weed out the shitbags.
I would recommend letting IPY be open to all; this gives you time to figure out how to enforce the secondary (emotionally vested) server and whatnot. Additional bonus; IPY will be good for luring in potential players!
Is there a way to make it so 2 accounts can only log in within a 24 hour period from a single IP address? That would cut down on the majority of people circumventing the “rules” without a large waste of manpower.
I would really REALLY love to see a UO:R Duplicate with no bolas/bola tamers and no wand spamming as well as banned krioss client.
Seriously, UOG:Hybrid would be awesome if everyone didint have 9438594395mills and unlimited bolas/tamers and spammed wands while using krioss client.
PRE UOR was a hit back in its day, but the best group pvp days in my time was uo:r. Fighting 5vs13 and you still coming up on top is priceless.
And also it would have to be sloowww skill gain. Pretty important.
I also like Geryon’s idea concerning skill scrolls since it will promote dungeon crawling rather than macroing. Many people have pointed out these scrolls would need to be only usable by those who killed the mobs and this would provide an excellent opportunity for players to help newbies since they could tank mobs and allow the new players to damage the mobs and collect skill scrolls. However, I think the scrolls would have to be tiered based on monster difficulty ie. a headless would drop a scroll that could give .1 to players with less 65 skill… whereas a lich could drop scrolls that would allow a player to gain .1 as long as their skill is less than 90 so that you could not simply farm low level mobs and become GM…
.1 is not enough i think, it would have to be .5 or around that to make it worth while. Just have the drop rate real low, makes another reason to go farm liches in deceit and it would bring pvp there instead of town fighting
Add another vote for slow skill gain. Sultani and Pisces are 100% correct so I won’t repeat what they said but it would fucking amazing to pvp with less-than-gm characters.
Slightly increased skill gain in dungeons is also a great idea. Make sure its nothing substantial… just enough to get people in the dungeons. Maybe even slightly increase the skill gain based on dungeon lvl/difficultly.
So if outside of the guardzone is the baseline for skill gain, have something like:
1st lvl of a dungeon = base +3% skill gain
2nd lvl = base +6%
3rd lvl = base +9%
and so on
Something that would encourage people to group up and tackle the lower levels.
On the same note, have reduced skill gain in towns and houses (or no skill gain in houses).
Some other thoughts:
-Skills scrolls are a great idea! What do people think of getting specific skill scrolls from specific types of monsters in specific spots? So only mages in dungeons would drop Magery & Resist scrolls… or something like that.
-What about having no skill gain when fighting other players? That would solve a ton of the multi-account abuse. It would also increase actual playing and reduce macroing.
-Why are people suggesting disallowing hotmail/yahoo email accounts? My only email account is with hotmail and if I need to use something else, I’ll just create a dummy account to use which seems to defeat the purpose.
Also, people have said that slow skill gain and banning macroing will discourage new players. From my experience, that is completely wrong. I’ve had this conversation dozens of times:
ME- Dude, Ultima is awesome! You should play.
NOOB- Alright, you’ve been bugging me for years. I’ll install it and we can play tonight.
ME- Well, you should macro tonight.
NOOB- Whats that?
ME- Its basically a program that builds your character for you.
NOOB- I don’t want to do that. Can’t I just build my guy by playing?
ME- You can… but it will take a lot longer and you’ll be killed a thousand times by people who macro.
NOOB- Ultima sounds stupid. I think I’ll play a more challenging game instead… like WOW.
A lot of these posts seem to be pointing out some really important things that I hadn’t really considered before:
I’m starting to believe that the pre-ren UO experience as we now know it is almost completely closed off to new players. It probably has been for some time, but even four years ago things weren’t developed/understood to the degree they are now. I see this as a huge obstacle. My understanding is that pretty much everyone agrees that a healthy shard needs a balanced community, and that new players are a key component, yet the current landscape is probably more elitist than it ever has been. I don’t have any statistical models to back this up, it’s just the impression I get, so I’d love to hear what people who are still playing UO have to say about this.
For instance, if I take even five seconds to imagine what it’s like for a new player coming to a generally “pre-ren” UO shard, the picture is horrifying and to anyone who actually learns to thrive in such an environment, my Jester’s Hat goes off to you. Certainly, people like this have and will exist. Then again, there are also people who like to carry out fantasies where they are raped. Structurally, I don’t see much difference in the two. For any shard to do well in this day and age, I think something here has to change. There are a ton of variables that can and probably should be tweaked to this end. Maybe, when I have more time, I’ll list some more. But right now, the issue that comes to the forefront is Macroing: I personally believe that reducing the effectiveness of macroing skills and resources is probably the most straightforward way to get this done. Ultimately, I think that many different things will need to be done to many different aspects, but this is a good place to start, and it will give at least some idea as to what, in general, I’m talking about:
I’ve given this quite a bit of thought. On the face of it, macroing skills and resources is part of the core UO experience, at least in the sense that it’s been an integral part of the game since almost the very beginning, and the prospect of pulling such deep roots is a prospect that many find abhorrent. And that’s a good response to have — if too many core components are tweaked, it wont be the same game anymore — but in this case my belief is that it is that these roots are becoming overgrown and they are choking off resources that can and should go to other roots. Essentially, macroing (namely power macroing) is now interfering with and diminishing the effectiveness of other core UO components. Macroing is the grossly overfed child who’s now too big for his britches (a problem perhaps not too uncommon to the average MMORPG player as well), and it is my belief that he needs to be put on a bit of a diet. I’m not suggesting we kill the kid entirely — we probably couldn’t — but even four years ago the problem was out of hand. In the world of EasyUO and Razor, he’s grown morbidly obese.
And if this were self-contained, it wouldn’t be an issue. But this kid is consuming everyone elses food to sustain his grotesque physique. Macroing skills and resources has become to effective that it’s preventing new players from jumping into the game. It’s decreasing engagement for veterans. It’s turning the dynamic game into an elaborate series robotically-controlled actions. This is not the game that captivated me, this is not the game that leads me to write lengthy posts on an obscure messageboard over a decade after my first hit.
Macroing used to be a way to supplement the UO experience, now it’s almost replacing it. This is an example of where I think that some rules/mechanics need to change just in order to restore homeostasis.
TLDR: It should be made harder to macro skills and resources.
“It’s turning the dynamic game into an elaborate series robotically-controlled actions.”
Let it sink in deep like a deep kiwi citrus scrub facial. Profound, yo, I really like Einsacks he’s like Voltaire.
It’s true, Einsacks has some very compelling arguments.
I was talking to my roommate today (a former pre UO:R player) who has watched me play free shards for the past few years. I told him about the possibility of the re-invention of the best pre UO:R shards and how he should rejoin. He immediately mentioned how much focus there was on macroing and external programs (ie. Razor / EasyUO) and how much this destroyed the basic aspects of the game for for him.
This really emphasized to me how much we as a community need to deal with macroing and make it a much less viable means of character creation.
this shard gonna happen anytime soon
Nice post Einsacks!
@ Chad, we waited for you to give the signal.
Lefty