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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“Zigo-U- Says:
October 16th, 2009 at 11:37 am
Skill gain was pretty tough on IPY compared to what we are used to now, but not like 3.0 will be; I suspect anyway.”
I hope skill gain is difficult for all the reasons posted above.
Keeps people motivated to play.
As a Pre-UO:R fan, I’m a little reluctant to ban macroing. But the reality of present day is that the situation is different and it should probably be done.
Speaking of changing things – I was just going through the old scripts. It looks like there was no recall/gate in dungeons to begin with. I don’t remember it that way, but I must be nuts. It’s right there.
AZ, not to be off track, should we start a forum, so we can start several threads on several topics? I find that I am going through an adventure reading through the comments then get confused on what to comment on… haha
Sooner rather than later.
I need the website done and ready to go, and I need forum moderators so I don’t need to spend my time babysitting and deleting porn/spam and moderating flamefests.
The time will come, just relax. I intended the blog posts to start as discussion that went on for a bit while I figured things out and set everything up. Forum goes up today, people expect shards tomorrow. I don’t want people getting hyped up and thinking “Any day now!” just yet.
People are getting pretty antsy already, and I can’t start caving to that obviously. That situation will snowball into me releasing a server that isn’t ready. UO players will still be there whenever it’s ready, so it’ll be released at that time.
So I’m calm, relaxed, and still in my thinking cap stage. There are a lot of things to get done before we start any sort of open beta, even.
Until then, I collect opinions on specific topics from you guys. It’s easier for me to control and keep organized. When I feel you guys need a messageboard as a community for yourselves (and the shard is relatively close – probably when I start first phase beta), then it’ll go up.
And you are talking about the beta for IPY 2 now?
Oh, who even knows anymore.
…
Yes, I am. ;)
so beta is going to start next week?
lol. :)
I hope you’re joking when you say you expect to have a website finished, forum, relatively close to completed shard, and first phase beta all in a week, keuse. :)
FYI Az, I’d be happy to offer my services as a beta tester in case you’re looking to keep that relatively closed. Just thought I’d throw that out there for when you’re looking to open a beta in like April. :P
Oh, if only I could keep my mouth shut and everyone would settle down into expecting beta in April.
I would like to apply for the position of forum moderator.
And since you’ve known of me for about 5 1/2 years now I demand that you give me the position.
I am not a fan of no recall in dungeons.
That no recall into dungeons really is sparking some memories for me. I remember dungeon entrances being hot spots for a time, and why else would anyone go there if you didn’t have to.
I’m almost a fan of that.. makes it tougher to PK players deep in a dungeon.
Wasn’t like that on IPY, though, was it?
Skill gain on IPY was fair, took a few days to GM magery then maybe a week or two for resist.
Any chance we’ll see it up before Christmas? I have a long break from school starting early december!
I think no recall/gate in dungeons is a good thing. Other than the sense of danger it adds because you’re unable to just escape to safety at any time you like, it also creates an interesting dynamic with PKs – it makes it easier to track down prey, certainly. But it also adds an element of danger for them.
One of the biggest problems with being an anti-PK in UO is that the PKs are usually gone when you arrive. Well, this prevents that in spades. They’re in there, and they’re only coming out one way.
So yeah, super easy for PKs to hunt people down. Also easy for anti-PKs to hunt PKs down. Especially if you have, say, quest NPCs in dungeons that will announce through criers or guards in town when crimes are taking place.
If you’ve got statloss in, it becomes both fruitful and very, very risky for reds to go hunting in dungeons.
As far as release… I have no comment, sir.
I still contend that this focus on PvP is a mistake.
That’s not focus on PvP. That’s dealing with PvP as a reality.
Want to see me deal with the base problems without the cumbersome duty of needing to work with a classic ruleset? Gotta wait for the second shard.
We can complain about how it kinda sucks that classic UO has problems and so on. The fact that it has so many glaring flaws is the reason I’m doing the second shard. But if I wipe them away on the first, it’s not a classic ruleset anymore. All I can do is deal with them in an inoffensive manner that’s uninstrusive to the body of the ruleset and try to make mild improvements to the situation based on the tools provided in the context of the ruleset (and those rules are very often bent pretty far).
In a lot of ways, that sucks. It’s halfassed and ineffective most of the time. But that’s the hand you’re dealt when you do a classic ruleset, because once you muck with it too much it ceases to be classic.
I was referring to the second. I assume first is pretty much set in stone.
Well, more or less. Unfortunately it kind of has to be.
so..is statloss going to be in or not? I cant remember if we discussed it
http://azaroth.org/2009/08/13/ipy-2-0-discussion-3-statloss-and-pking/