by Azaroth | March 26th, 2010
Consider wars as they existed traditionally in UO for a moment. O/C if you want, and Factions if you have experience there.
What’s your general opinion? What would you change, what would you add.. what do you hate?
What do you feel would be a great “war” system in UO? How should it work? Why would it be great? Who would it appeal to, and why? For how long?
How can you make it appeal to both hardcore gamers and more casual gamers? What about newer players? Should they be able to get involved?
I’d love to hear your perspective on this. If you could make some requests before an IPY system was set in stone, what would they be?
Edit: By default, this has now become the place to discuss Razor and EUO, I think.
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I began writing under this topic, but the amount of alcohol in my system combined with it being 4:44 in the morning is preventing me from communicating my opinion, so I’ll just reserve a spot for me to explain why a faction system is something we would be better served without.
I know, incoming stones…
Make sure you elaborate. I’m interested to hear why you think there shouldn’t be one.
Azaroth, I played 97-2001, never played IPY which I regret. I’ve tried the free shards but most as your aware are shit due to the Third-party apps, script kids etc..
Personally, I loved the original Order and Chaos system. Mainly because its so fitting with the Ultima Lore, the virtue system and the history between British and Blackthorn. The faction elite shields were also awesome. The other aspect to this is that the Order/Chaos war would be eternal and not fizzle out or be hampered by overpowered alliances, as long as the sides were more or less even in numbers, I guess that would be a factor. I cant remember if virtue requirements were needed to join the factions now but that would stop noobs joining and give membership some “status appeal”.
I think it would also encourage people to behave themselves in keeping with their character, i.e if a Gloriouslord starts killing blues, he should get kicked from Order since this would be out of character for the faction, however I don’t think Dreads could join either factions?? So, for Chaos it would probably be different, maybe a lower negative karma rank then dread however if they became to high in karma they equally they would lose their Chaos membership etc..
On a a different note, I have a couple of questions on IPY 2.0:
1. I understand your going to try and block third-party apps like Razor? Is this looking possible or still no progress here? I have heard of ways to block these apps by forcing access to your shard via a seperate client-app. I’m not knowledgable in the area but the idea of forcing people to use a third-party app to actually login to your Shard makes sense since it would allow you to control certain parameters of peoples systems that the normal method might not? You probably already know about it but I thought i’d mention this.
2. Will you be restricting multi-client running, so people can’t have 3 or more characters all running off 1 PC and thus GMíng in hours or running archer bot scripts to use them as an army etc?
Cheers.
I think there are important points to be had here…
While more factions doesn’t necessarily limit your enemies, it may limit your selection of allies. Although people enjoy guild wars. So.
As far as everything else…
1. What’s a Razor?
2. Yueah. IPY restricted clients and forced users to apply for another connection if there was more than one user in their house. I don’t love that solution, because it’s a pain in the ass for multi-player households. But I also don’t like people running 14 clients to macro.
We’ll see.
Razor as in, UO Macro/script/helper programs like UO Extreme UO Assist etc.. Some people love em, I personally hate them since it’s clearly not how UO was designed to be, it simplifies PvP, speeds it up and generally just boils PvP down to who has the best hotkeys setup (chain cast, auto heal etc) The general attitude seems to be though to be if you can’t beat em, join em. I just don’t know if it’s possible to design a shard today without these programs being in the equation, like the old days.
I know. I’m just not commenting right now. ;)
I’m personally against using macros for pvp. I like macros for getting my skills up and i like the health bar on the top of my screen that is from razor. I also like the band aid self hotkey with razor. But other then that I have to admit razor does cause some complications. But without it, it would just be such a pain in the ass to get stuff started up. A lot of the people now and days who plays uo has rl jobs to do they not kids anymore and don’t have all this free time to make there characters like they used to. As For the O/C system I’d like to see something similar to the faction system implanted in uo for example Have a sigil at the chaos castle in brit and one at the order castle. Maybe like a weekly event for O/C. Give like a 1 hour heads up before it begins so people could get ready. Make it so like the winner of the town gets like some sort of reward/bonus (cant think of any real valid ideas atm) But this just sorta my suggestion, cant really say this would be something everyone would like with all these picky players out there now and days. But in a nut shell just fuse O/C and factions.
UOAssist was released in 1998 only a few months after UO was released. EZMacro and other macro programs were common place when the game first released and they have simply been expanded upon into programs like EasyUO. These programs represent an integral part of the UO experience since they remove a great deal of the tedium that is involved in UO. However, this does not mean that I support every feature that have been implemented as part of Razor / UOAssist since many of those related to PvP make healing / targeting far too easy.
I ran EZMacros and used UOA/UOE, etc. I wouldn’t say they’re integral to what UO was. I’d say they became integral to what people expect of UO – but only because of those programs themselves.
UO became a game that was powergamed instead of played by a certain audience, and they think that’s what UO “is” because of those programs. I’m sure some people think EasyUO is a part of what UO “is” now.
I’d say that’s only because the problem was never squashed.
That people felt macroing was completely necessary was a design flaw, but game design is never perfect. You can say they should have figured out how to ban macroing effectively and then they should have changed the game to be less tedious.
I think they tried that with things like power hour. I think I’ll be trying that with things like dungeon scrolls. But I don’t think there’s really a great fix until you install a virtual interface and make people actually learn to sew. Until then, you’re just pushing buttons and getting something to push those buttons for you will always be easier.
But part of the reason that GrandMaster mages, blacksmiths and so on (I remember people thinking it was amazing that I had GM Swords at one point) were few and far inbetween at one point and then really weren’t a bit later on wasn’t because they sped skill gain up or anything – it’s just because more and more people started macroing.
The point is that macroing fundamentally changed the game into something where maxing your character out was the necessity, because people were achieving that goal in greater numbers with third party programs. UO was never meant to be a game that you played unattended – that’s stupid.
All of that being said… its’ what people expect of it now. So I’m not sure if changing it will even be something that’s accepted.
VERY TRUE….
Wow, you really hit the nail on the head
I GMed swords in 3 months and everyone in my guild that had been playing for 5-7 months was in amazement and it was a huge accomplishment…
but taking razor out of the game means that this elite group of 5-15% of people will find a work around and own everyone…
I notice a lot of people reminiscing about O/C and how much fun it can be, but in reality it loses its appeal since there is no real purpose or goal beyond revenge or winning ‘honour’ by defeating your enemies.
Factions is a much more interesting option since it adds in an element of purpose that is lacking in the O/C system. The factions system clearly isn’t perfect in the form that it existed on true UO servers or in the way that it is presented on shards like UOG: Hybrid, but it certainly would spice up wars and conflict while also providing a way for tradesmen to contribute via faction weaponry/traps.
I intend to reform the Love Blues guild if O/C town fighting again gets out of hand.
Although, the Love Blues “harassment” technique no longer functions when all town fighters jump on the factions bandwagon.
& Fuck Factions unless there’s a worthwhile incentive for holding & defending a town.
I suggest you push out twitter updates, Az, for when your town is under attack!
This topic is exactly in line with the other suggestions about macroing and skill gaining.
first, new players would get involved because they wouldn’t have to be 7X to fight provided that wasn’t the standard right out of the gate (ssee other threads for explanations). I hope those suggestions are seriously considered.
A faction type system would be awesome, not sure if you saw my suggestion about having different virtues appear orange to each other, but that would be a cool system too.
Any type of war system is acceptable and successful and is determined by the players and size of player base. Population increasing = increasing pvp. You could actually have no in place “war system” at all other than the guild stone functions and it would catalyze itself.
saw some pics of the beta. Blasphemy that I’m not in it. :D
the beta of IPY or are you referencing something else?
I think it’s easy to get nostalgic about the days when having a GM title was looked at in awe, but the reality is people’s attitudes about MMOs have changed in general. Back then we were all a lot younger and this experience was a lot newer. I didn’t mind getting dominated by people with higher skills than me for two or three months because I was a kid with nothing else to do, and I thought the whole idea of an MMO was the coolest fucking thing ever. It’s different now. The majority of IPY players are not going to be able to sink 40 hours a week into playing– but there will undoubtedly be a minority that can. If you take away macroing, pvp is going to be dominated for an extended period of time by these people that are able to sink massive amounts of time into playing. Unlike when UO started, I don’t think most people, especially seasoned PvP veterans, are going to stick it out for a month or two until they can compete.
As for factions/ O v. C, I’ve always been a big faction fan. Some fixes would definitely be in order, but factions had a cool way of incentivizing fights in random places and creating “hang out” spots. Factions really put life into cool areas on the map that people would otherwise never go to.
The problem with factions is how to incentivize participation without putting in all the dumb faction gear, horses, etc. I think one cool idea would be to make faction members get a percentage of all vendor purchases in towns they control, but I don’t know if the coding for this would be possible.
I would like to think that 90% of us have jobs, families, school, hobbies and other games to play other than UO. I dont imagine many will log in for over 10-15 hours a day.,
er.. week ;)
I actually did play IPY 10-16 hours a day (occasionally) when IPY was at its peak. Fighting in Trinsic was like sitting at a slot machine that kept hitting the jackpot. You didn’t want to leave while there were still bodies to loot.
That being said, those were very different days for all of us. I was still in college, so I didn’t have any responsibilities outside of going to class. Now that real life is in full swing, I definitely fall into your bucket of people that are unlikely to play more than 10-15 hours/week. I’ll probably play a lot initially, but it’ll definitely wind down over time.
I think the perfect combat/pvp system is that of which benefits the entire shard, whether or not everyone participates in it.
What i mean is, perhaps adding a PVM element of the game.
For example…
Lets pretend we have a faction system.
In this system, it is required that the factioners require a ‘moonstone’ in order to take over a city, or do different things.
These ‘moonstones’ can only be obtained by X creature in X dungeon.
This monster(s) can be either really difficult (ancient wyrm type of monster that is unprovokable) with a high drop rate… or something really random with extremely low drop rate (ie orcs or orgre lords – provokeable)
This centralizes pvp in an odd/dangerous places and also allows everyone to participate.
Eventually these ‘moonstones’ are going to be worth a lot of gold which can act as a nice money sink.
please understand that your assumptions about what people will or won’t do is still based on the idea that 7x is required and standard immediately.. If it’s not, then the amount of time you’re suggesting people “must” put in to the game is a moot point, moreover, it’s entirely contradictory to the idea to also say 90% of people won’t put in said time.
If that’s true, that means 90% of the population will be on a similar skill level and will be playing and interacting all the time instead of macroing in their houses in order to achieve a standard (because that standard would not exist).
Robin is right about Razor.. some of the functions aren’t really necessary, but they certainly make the game less tedious and easier to manage / organize. The bad things about it as we’ve discussed in great length already are the automatic healing features and completely easy targetting features.
again, you need to avoid this scenario at all times.
New player logs in.
“ok, I’m ready to play. What do I do?”
“Ok, first thing you need to do before you can play is stand there and macro your character without actually playing for a week or two.”
“Lol, this game is stupid. Bye.”
That can, will, and does happen.
my 2 cents on factions-
-blessed runic weapons (especially high-end) were game breaking
-faction mounts were too buffed with no trade-off to the owner
-sigil capture times were just silly (the whole capture system
could use a revamp
-faction balancing was a joke…
-siege perilous style good/evil with balanced abilities would
be awesome!
please for the love of god don’t grant additional anything regarding skills.
Another thing you should try to do, since every mechanic in UO is dependent on there being people there to use it, is make sure that people don’t get bored with the shard.. Or, at least get bored slower. Tons of ways to do that, and in my opinion the best one is to make it extremely hard if not impossible to become self reliant, again stressing the importance of my previous suggestions.
Sultani is spot on. It’s a very important fact that people need to get. At face value people think that by slowing down skill gains everyone will need to put in 12hrs a day to stay competative but this ISN’T the case.
What will happen is it will bring down the “average joe” level of skill significantly on the server, so instead of everyone running around 7xGM knowing everyone else is 7xGM, the vast majority of players will be only 1xGM or less. People will still be on an even playing field. Additionally, if players develop slower, not only is the recognition and sense of achievement greater but it also opens up more tactical gameplay since people will have to focus their time on specialising and choosing which skill they wish to GM. e.g should you use magery on someone who might have GM resist when you could use archery etc…ultimately by slowing down skill gains it will diversify PvP, make it more interesting, increase player sense of achievement and provide people a longer aim to keep playing for.
Yes, there will always be kids who player 19hrs a day and who you can’t keep up with but if that was the case even with a fast skill system, the likelyhood is they would still kick your ass since they clearly would have a much higher amount of playing experience and skill (and uber macros). 5 kids playing 19hrs a day being 7x GM when your 1xGM still means 99.9% of the server are at your own skill level.
I’d even go into why I think Attribute gain should be slowed down, I still remember the first time I saw a Glorious Lord player ride into Britain on a horse in full plate and I nearly shit myself with awe, because back then just being able to pick up a halbard or wear plate was a great achievement. AGAIN, using the same logic as above wearing full plate and using halbards would be a rare sight at first and the average joe would be in lesser armour, but you’d still be on a even playing field with 90% of the server since like you, they wouldn’t be able to use it until strong enough.
Cool. Someone finally understands what I’ve been saying.
I will try and keep this short and sweet.
To follow up on your comment about skill gain, the system that OSI put in for SP worked out pretty good. ROT (Raise over time) put a restriction on the number of points you could gain over a certain period of time. Again a third party program was developed called egg timer that told people when what skill could be gained so they could log in and work it if they weren’t already. But that is relatively harmless.. the only problem is this punishes newer players who come in 3 months down the road when everyone is 7x GM.. but maybe to START the server could run with ROT to keep everyone from just power gaming their way to 7X. This would force people to actually go out and play! Well I have gained my 5 points of archer for today and I am at 63.8, and 61.5 tact and 59.3 anat, what should I do for the rest of my 3 hours of gaming time tonight? Stare at the wall?
Doubt it. They will adventure out, or craft, or go talk to other players, whatever they DO that isn’t macroing is HELPING your server. This is why SP was so succesfull under ROT, OSI was able to figure out a system that actually promoted player interaction as opposed to casting Ebolt on yourself in a house trying to avoid getting CLed to death by random griefers.
This would also make dungeons a huuuuuge hot spot because the only way to gain besides with your ROT gain, or once you reached your max gains for that day, is to farm the SOULBOUND BIND ON PICK UP (sorry for the WOW terms but lack of a better term..) scrolls. So now you have people with an even greater excuse to go out and get these scrolls.
Order/Chaos. Was a lot of fun. Especially when it first started and you could also kill fellow Order/Chaos that were green. What eventually ends up happening is that everyone just declares on everyone and its an all out war. What i’d like to see is a throw back to the times when you actually warred a guild. When guild wars first came in it was like ok XXX is talking smack lets declare, alright lets fight. Then it was guild on guild for a while, sometimes a third guild would enter the equation but in most cases those two guilds would recruit players to help beef up their numbers which just further escalated the war.
Order/Chaos is a lot of fun because it really opens up the playing field, but a standard war declaration system really makes it personal. I think rivalries will still arise from O/C, but the rivalry always seemed more intense with a guild on guild fight instead of a cluster fawk in Deceit pit room. No matter what system you put in though players always have the option of just doing the guild on guild fight as opposed to the O/C, so I say do the O/C leave it as is.
I would prefer that factions were left off of the server. They are cool and fun and it gives people that dont have friends or a guild a chance to pvp on a team, but then again it doesn’t. All of the faction bases are outside of guard zones so there is nothing stopping people from player killing. If I was you I would try and do the Order/Chaos wars as a faction fight instead of factions itself. This would be like a magnified version of the guild vs. guild war declaration I was talking about before. Give like 4 towns to control and we have to fight over them. Order guilds can still war other order guilds, but maybe they declare peace to make sure we get this town tonight etc..
The other option is do factions, remove the stat loss on death and cut it down to two or three sides. I think that four is too large. Initially it will see success, but we want something that is sustainable. I think cutting out Council of Mages or TB is the route to go. Cut out TB and move CoM base or something similar to that so we can have the epic large scale red blue green orange grey purple black named battles that happen at SL and Minax base.
EasyUO… god I hate you. If there is anyway to track this program and ban people for it, please do this. In regular UO now all you see is scripts, its an auto pilot game and that needs to not happen to your server.
Razor has a lot of EasyUO functions, you can run a lot of the same crap through its options that you can through EasyUO… so even allowing this program could be trouble. However if you use the ROT system then you don’t have to worry about macroing anyway.. at least not skills.
Well.. so much for short?
I think the answer to the ROT system hurting new players by being unable to ever catch up (and alot of other issues that arise from an aging server) would probably be yearly server wipes… Not only would that “reshake the sandpit” so to speak and level everything off, but it would also resolve the inevitable economic inflation problems and keep the competative edge sharp, a bit like seasons in football etc..
Depending on the rate of skill gain and time it takes to GM a character, it could be better wiping every 2 or even 3 years. certainly at the current rate of most shards where you can GM in a few hrs, 1 year wipes would be not be unreasonable.
I know this may be a point of contention and perhaps outside current scope however if implemented with a reward system that carried over to give players incentive then I think it could work. Rewards like Titles and/or rare untradeable decorative items that offer no unfair advantages could work.
A few thoughts:
I like the idea of RoT. In fact, I like the idea so much that I’m giving “Resources over Time” some thought.
However. RoT, while seemingly very functional, is also very unfun. I do remember starting on Siege when it had RoT before the wipe (I have no idea if it had RoT afterward). I remember thinking “Wow, this SUCKS!”.
However, the idea was functional then, and it’s damn functional now. How to catch up is certainly a problem, of course… but I think that if you leave RoT in, people have more connection to that character they built, and will likely stick around longer. Things can be done to ease the curve for genuine newbies without kicking RoT out and making all of the veterans feel ripped off, I think.
Which can be done, mainly, I think because something like dungeon scrolls meshes so very synergistically with a RoT system.
RoT – Benefits actual gameplay, restricts macroing. Automatically. No need for detection or police.
Downfall? I’m playing, I’m not macroing, I want to gain more skills and I’m stuck. This sucks. Even if I go play normally, there’s no skill to be had.
Skill scrolls works here. Perfectly. When you’re done gaining, go jump into a dungeon and look for them as long as you want. Drop rate is pretty low, so nobody is forced to… but if you really want that edge, or even if you just want to put thirty minutes in and try your luck… go ahead.
I also, and correct me if I’m wrong, but I remember RoT being very literal. As in that there was a limit on how often you could gain 0.1 skill – period.
While that sounds good from my chair, I know it doesn’t sound good from yours. Because I sat there and played it as a player, and I hated that shit.
At first glance, I’d suggest a cleaner RoT system with an absolute daily limit on skill gains. Something achievable by the average player (especially at the lower levels), and no point-by-point restriction. You can get on and gain your skill points every day in any way you’d like, though skill gain would still be relatively slow and the gain cap would be fairly low (again, something that gives it purpose… not something that a normal player would never, ever attain). If the maximum daily points are left something like they were in the original system, I’d probably like to add a dragging negative gain modifier to make gains slower as you reached the upper levels of the daily limit. You can call it gain fatigue if you like, but I’d rather do that instead of a straight up time limit on individual skill gains. Mainly because you punish those who want to hit those upper echelons of skill gain (while still allowing it), and all of the more casual players get to gain as normal.
On top of that, you still offer skill scrolls and double skill gain in dungeons, and, hopefully, you watch as the general game becomes more active instead of everyone just macroing to the top.
Now, it’ll backfire if people REFUSE to play the system and aren’t at all interested in UO without autopilot, sure. But that’s okay, really. I’ll take that chance if we’re working toward making a better UO.
I like the idea, I like the thoughts in this thread, and I hope you guys keep posting. Perhaps I’ll hold a RoT poll at some point.
RoT is a bad model. It’s one of the reasons I never joined my friends in EVE even though their RoT model accumulates even when you’re not playing!
Also, an RoT model focuses on the average or below-average player who is less focused on achieving GM and I don’t know this for sure, but I feel that the majority of the UO free shard community are more hardcore and extreme players in most respects and are more intent on getting 7x and PvP than having a game where you have to struggle to achieve these things. Overall, I just don’t believe that an RoT model fits the demographics of the server in terms of playstyle and would server to alienate a large number of people, but I may be wrong.
You’re right. But if I went down that road entirely, I’d have skill gates, purchasable stat balls, and so on.
From the beginning I’ve said that I’m not afraid to alienate people. I’ll do what I feel is best for the game (though I haven’t settled on RoT yet… I haven’t even spent two hours thinking about it), and if there are people that want a quick McUO experience and don’t care at all about the health of the game world… they can, I’m sure, find that somewhere else. Not that I’m trying to be a dick.. but I’m not sure how else to put it exactly. This will not be the fast food approach to UO, again, whether that means RoT or not.
Which I understand is controversial, because that’s what most people playing free UO shards are looking for. But there’s a reason I have no interest in putting vanilla IPY up. I want to try to do something a bit more with UO.
“I also, and correct me if I’m wrong, but I remember RoT being very literal. As in that there was a limit on how often you could gain 0.1 skill – period.”
I don’t recall the exact numbers, but the amount of skill which you could gain in 24 hours depended on your current skill level in that skill. The max amount of skill one could gain in one day increased as your skill raised. Skill gain was actually easier with RoT once you reached the 90′s as your skill gain was gauranteed on the first try. I gm’d a tamer on Siege and I remember walking out of my house door, taming a rabbit and gaining .1, walking back inside and logging off of that character for the day. Anyone who trained a tamer on OSI during that period knows that getting .1 taming when you’re at 98 could take a while. RoT did a good job preventing entirely macro’d characters. And yes, there was RoT after the wipe.
O/C and factions: O/C is great the way it is, if it were the only way to be warred to another guild I think that would be just fine. Factions are also very fun, though. Factions give players who do not pvp as much or at all, more incentive to play. Anyone who participated in factions when they first came out probably has some fond “raid” experiences. I recall some fights that looked like they could have been 100 vs 100, and it was a big deal to win. While killing oranges in UO is fun enough, that wasn’t the only thing on the line. Everyone had something that they wanted from the faction system and they were fighting to get it. What factions showed us is that more people would be interested in pvp if there were more incentive, and that is what factions undeniably achieved; getting more people involved in pvp. In my opinion (and seemingly everyone elses) factions need adjusting, but they were a hit. To name a few changes; do not allow crafted blessed magic weapons/armor, if there are mounts then remove bolas (an item used to dismount players, if you didn’t know), perhaps decrease the amount of time it takes for a sigil to mature (or whatever it was called when you officially win a town) from 24 hours to something like 12 hours, try to put a stop to faction point farming (the act of killing your own characters or res killing for faction points), and add more incentive to participate and win in the faction system (for example: more items to be acquired with silver that don’t unbalance anything economy or pvp wise).
Razor: Razor offers so many ways to make gameplay more fluild and less tedious. I played UO without UOA for a long time, it was always my opinion that most of those features should have been added to UO to begin with. Never mind the ability to create sophisticated macros through razor, the real gameplay enhancements are within the available hot keys. Playing UO without a hotkey for the following would be painful to me: drink potions, bandage self, arm/disarm weapon (much faster through razor), use-once-agent (for popping pouches), target random enemy/innocent/murderer/criminal, to name a few. Those are all very legitimate macros that should have been in UO to begin with. Razor is a great UO tool that enhances gameplay for the most part. Yes it is fairly easy to make macros for just about anything, but you are limited with razor, and if people don’t use razor to macro their chars they will do it another way.
EasyUO: As we all know, with EasyUO it is possible to make a UO macro for just about anything, be it mining, taming, chopping wood, or reading poetry at WBB. The goal then is not to go after EasyUO in general, but to go after those using “illegal macros” like mining. The word on the street is that the use of EasyUO can only be confirmed manually. If that is the case (and it seems to be) then there needs to be some manual enforcement. It wouldn’t be difficult to determine if someone is macroing taming unattended, the trick I suppose, is finding them. Find them, ban them (or warn them as seen fit), and post it on the forums for all to see. That would be enough to prevent me from macroing illegally.
Some of the most fun I had prewipe IPY was trying to trap Talwin’s miner bot on the Minoc bridge while he slept.
After each night, his script would improve, and he wrote it to the point where he had the ability to do everything from chopping impeding boxes to running to the healers.
This clever tenacity is why I don’t believe macroing & unattended resource gathering is a crime or should be policed. Let the players sort it out in game, learn applicable skills while doing so, and have a good time while doing it.
Why do we need so many rules in this sandbox?
If every situation was policed by players, I’d agree wholeheartedly.
It’s not.
Player justice can be bolstered, but it’ll never be a complete solution.
Give me a break, though. My solutions will seem stupid and illogical from the viewpoint of real game developers.
Of course, they’ll probably be seen as stupid and illogical from the viewpoint of hardcore UO players.
I suppose if a compromise ends up making everyone think you’re stupid, it might JUST make you stupid.
But we’ll see. I’m trying to meet you guys in the middle while still giving this shard a chance at long term viability. Give me a chance, and if I fuck it up… play another game. K?
Yeah right dude.
Like any other game has got Teh Blacks…
I’m obviously busting your balls, as I’ll be happily willing to adapt to whatever ruleset you deem fit for your shard…
Just don’t fuck up fight night while trying to assimilate your grand visions. IMO, Fight Night was what got you your magazine blurb.
I’ve always been pretty fond of the faction mechanics for the most part. Blessed weapons have no place as most people would agree though. I think the biggest thing would be to find a way to promote ‘faction allegiance’ so that players actually want to participate actively. There are clear countermeasures that can be implemented to restrict people from faction hopping or w/e, but it’d be nice to think of an outside the box solution. One that encourages the positive instead of restricting the negative. If I think of something good, I’ll bring it up.
Also, I kinda like the idea of using O/C as the backdrop for factions. O/C has always been the playground for Pre-Ren PvP and I think it would be interesting. Minax, CoM, TB, and SL just seem a bit out of place. The big downside is that this reduces the amount of factions to two which takes away from the dynamics that comes with four factions.
EUO is a plague on many free shards. I’m not saying macros to gather resources aren’t achievable in Razor, it’s just a lot more elaborate and efficient to use EUO. As jamie pointed out however, the key will be to enforce the resource macro rules in game manually as well as possible. It’ll be up to players to help staff crack down on resource gatherers.
Razor has a ‘negotiate features with server’ feature set up which is very useful. You’d need to force everyone to use Razor to log-in which could make some people unhappy but I think it would benefit the shard overall. You can disable some features of Razor that really don’t belong in the game (off the top of my head, smart targeting) and I think this could help control which clients people use to connect to the server. It’s something worth looking into.
With the scroll system, RoT actually seems like a great idea. Make it scaling so it just gets harder as you gain more in a day.
I’m -really- not fond of forcing everyone to use Razor.
I’m not either, but it might be the lesser of two evils. And considering how many people already use Razor, it really might not be a big deal.. I just brought up b/c it might be the way to go to restrict people from using PlayUO.
People waiting to be 7x GM before pvping is part of the problem with the mentality of todays UO. Players should be playing and PvPing right out of the gate. RoT seems good and bad. For the most part, I feel its a good idea because as posted above, it will make people play the game as opposed to macroing in a house for weeks and weeks.
RoT does place some serious restriction on newer players. What about having RoT take effect after your total skill points reach a certain amount? Or when a certain skill hits a certain amount? Like it gets super slow once your skill is 80ish.
O/C- I always liked this system and am all for it. Any of the pvp systems that are put in will be great because those who want to participate in PvP will do so either way. I always did think guild wars were more personal and added some fun to pvp.
Factions- As Jamie said, it adds some incentive to PvP for players that normally don’t get involved. As long as spell damage works in town I think it’s a good thing. I also like the idea of removing 1 of the factions. I personally think the good/evil would be a lot more fun then factions.
Razor- My views are pretty much the same as everyone elses on this. I enjoy the features that I’m use to and the ones that make gameplay less tideous.
EasyUO- Should be illegal as should any other type of client or third party program that paves the way for cheaters and people to ruin the game.
Playuo Beta 13 needs to be made illegal and blocked if/or when possible. Just my bit of advice.
Just going back about the comment comparing the ROT system to Eve’s. This is correct, Eve Online (the most successful Sandbox game to date, perhaps bar UO in its prime ) uses this system. Yes it has its flaws, but no where near as many as not using it in my eyes. The problem with Eve is, it’s gameplay is boring as fuck generally. However, the ROT skill gain system is one of the best things about it IMHO. If people want instant x7 GM gain, then theres god knows how many other free shards they can go to. You never get anything for nothing in life, and so when creating a virtual world there shouldn’t be instant gratification either.
The “its unfair I want to x7 GM in a few days so I can play the game” is the philosphy that has turned UO into the sit in house and macro shit what it is today on most shards. “Playing” the game should be part of the GM’ing process not something that happens at the end…OSI knew this, and so should we.
Agreed.
I like where this is going. Especially if longevity is something you’re all concerned with. If everyone has a 7x everything after like the first week, then you’ll start to see people demanding gold sinks, people getting bored and quitting, inflation, etc. you don’t wan’t to blow your load too early, so to speak.
OSI actually did a great job of keeping peopel involved. Where they made mistakes is when they had in place game mechanics to combat the simplicity of macroing, then when they removed macroing, they failed to understand that said in place mechanics also necessarily had to be removed. Prime example..
time to macro off a long term kill (don’t believe it was differentiated at the time), is set for 8 hours. This was deemed far too easy to macro ff, and OSI ups the time to 40 hours. Macroing is removed, and the 40 hour timer is kept. What?
Someone mentioned that the players playing on IPY will be more hardcore and want that 7x GM skill set etc.. well I am not sure if you played SP, but the hardest of the core for power gamers and pvpers were found there.
That shard was packed full of some of the best guilds and players to ever play this game. And I will tell you, taking time to actually build a character again besides bone wall training or archery bug macroing was a thrill for me. As explained by another poster, ROT was fast up until the 60′s, then it started to slow down and kept slowing down the farther up you got. So say 2 points a day in the 60′s, then 1 in the 70′s, then .5 in the 80′s, then .1 in the 90′s. It wasn’t by day though it was a set number of hours between each .1 and like I said egg timer would go off and let players know when they need to train what skill, because it was actually kind of complicated for the average player to track.
I am not saying we have to use a ROT clone from SP, but a ROT system as we have already highlighted punctuates many of the aspects we are trying to promote in IPY.
So we have covered the bonuses we have cleared up how it actually works, lets talk about what I remember from my time on SP.
Some people on SP it took them years to hit multi GM, they were the more casual player, however 7x GM’s were still a rarity even a year into the server if I remember correctly so these people could compete.
I can’t remember how long it took me to hit 7x GM, but I do remember it was a respectable amount of time and it felt like an ACTUAL ACCOMPLISHMENT. it is like you said, I had ties to that character, I had actual time invested and it felt for the first time since the old days that this character actually meant something.
Remember in the old days when you would see a Great Lord Duke, Master Swordsman, or Dread Lord Anton, Adept Archer… well that is what it would have been like on SP if we had the old rep tittle system. Very few people for the first while had a GM skill, we got months and months of fighting at the journeyman, expert, adept levels.. without a ROT system that will last 1 week.
Back to Order/Chaos, I think that there were some good points made after my post about O/C being fine as is. I think it was a great system, and although I do miss the days of guild vs. guild, I think those wars can still take place inside of the O/C and the game has evolved past that, or even the player base has evolved past that. I am still not a fan of four factions though, I think three is plenty. And all the bases need to be outside of town in a remote location.
Just to add and make sure this point is made.. the reason that the old days (97, 98) were the most fun for many players in this game I don’t believe is simply the rule set, but because most people actually played their toons.
Macroing only becomes the norm if it is the easiest path. If you remove it from being the easiest path (go ahead and use 2k of each reg, you still only gain .3 in that time frame) then it will not be an issue.
Players will always go the easiest route, that route for a ROT system would be farming skill scrolls in dungeons. But we don’t want it to be a PVE grind like WOW, it is a fine line to walk. We don’t want people monopolizing dungeons so new players have zero chance to come in and again it is an unfair advantage, similar to if a player starts 3 months later, he can’t get in to continually farm those scrolls.
So maybe a cap on scrolls could even be put, this would insure that a player has the chance to dungeon hop for a few hours each day, but we won’t see guys still hitting 7x GM in that month because they have limitless play time. Now this again is a fine line because you don’t want to remove incentive for the guy who has no life to play… but I think the majority of your player base WILL have lives and alienating those who don’t actually might be a POSITIVE for the overall community.
God why am I capping my words.. I hate it when people do that.
Oh my god ok one more point that came to me sorry for the scatter brain, I took some new N O last night despite the 4 hours before you sleep warning… and well I didn’t get to bed till about 3:30 and its now 8:30 and I have a paper to finish for work before noon… and I am very productive right now on your site :p Ok..
The biggest thing for ROT with me that we have over looked thus far is it also serves as a solution for the PKing problem. If you were to go a stat loss route with ROT you could reduce the % of stats to say 10% or 15% as opposed to OSI’s base 30%.
Imagine a character that raises 2 skill points a day in the 60′s or .5 in the 90′s losing 15% of his skills. I would say that is a pretty big risk, no? I would say that would deter the game from becoming a red bloodbath in every dungeon, no? This adds a major risk vs. reward element to PKing and would drastically reduce the number of reds running around.
I gotta tell ya.. the positives are sure adding up for this ROT system, maybe it deserves that two hours of thought now.
Also, please cheer for my Flames… there is a glimmer of hope.
First, no. The Flames are done and you need to give it up. Trading for a whack of Maple Leafs was never going to get you anywhere.
Second, statloss in RoT is interesting. I’ve got a lot of thoughts there, but I’m doing red penalties just a little differently with a different set of goals in mind.
I’m probably picking out the least important point in your posts to respond to, but I think it’s crazy to suggest that people aren’t drawn to the ruleset and that they are looking for a sense of accomplishment. The point isn’t to discourage macroing and make people play so that they can achieve this sense, rather, the point is to not entirely skip over a giant piece of the game that’s been missing in every single player ran / free shard ever in order to focus solely on end game.
With that said, I’d be willing to bet that 95% of the people if not more, quit UO either because of a real life obligations or because of mechanic changes concerning PVP.
I am fully aware that this cannot be proven by individual case by case basis, but in my particular situation, these are the things that made me stop. First, precasting was removed. That was almost enough by itself. Then , no healing through poison.. pvp turns into poison arrow / harm spam and nothing else.
Then, dexers who cried because they sucked and failed to realize that a well geared / well played dexer could always absolutely rape the F out of a mage, were given the ability not only to kill a mage in 3 – 4 swings, but could also cut their mana in half AND paralyze them with hits, while poisoning them. Then, they were given buffed retarded weapons.
in short, my reasons for not playing had very little to do with sense of accomplishment, and I believe that as a whole, reasons such as mine would be fairly universal.
I quit the game as soon as it was -announced- precasting was being removed. Seriously.
Did the proceed to screw PvP up? Sure, eventually.
But while UO:R PvP was bastardized in a lot of ways and not as good as what they had before, I could have also stuck around and enjoyed it for what it was. There was also the chance that something better was coming down the pipe for PvP (it’s not as though they attempted to make something worse). But I had no interest in checking that out, and that was my problem – not theirs.
I chose to quit. I chose to quit because I wanted absolutely nothing but the exact thing I liked and I was totally and completely resistant to change.
Well, UO would be shut down right now if they would have never changed it. None of you would be talking about Pre-UO:R PvP, because it would have been around for an extra decade and there would have been no scarcity of it, so you’d all be dead sick of it by now.
Change needs to happen. Hopefully it’s not a crapshoot, and hopefully things improve.
I’m producing voluntary change. There’s enough artificial scarcity of oldschool Ultima Online to keep free servers going (each one temporarily) for quite some time.
But nonetheless, you all can stick your nose up at it, or you can play and see if it ends up being pretty okay.
If nothing else, it’ll be different.
(Note: This was a general statement. I’m not mucking with PvP very much.)
“the point is to not entirely skip over a giant piece of the game that’s been missing in every single player ran / free shard ever in order to focus solely on end game.”
I think we all need to remember that there was never an end game in UO and one the major problems I always see on these player run servers is (as stated a dozen times) is that people spend all their time macroing taking away that old school feel of UO. Even on IPY there wasn’t too many people that were out Pking and PvPing until their characters were finished.
I am diggin the whole RoT idea, I for one would love to actually play the game instead of macroing up the next time I give it a go.
I do agree with you though Sult, and my reasons for not playing UO are exactly the same as yours. It had nothing to do with the lack of a sense of accomplishment. At the time anyways.
UO never had and endgame? Every single player run shard ever has absolutely zero interaction during development stages and focuses only on endgame. I guess I should clarify and state that by endgame, I refer to the stage at which your character is completed and the experience / content that exists at that point. UO very much does have endgame. It’s just that people are stuck in this mentality that said endgame must be achieved before you can even play. That’s bad.
No, that’s the “end OF the game”. ;)
An endgame is something that’s foreign to UO players. The endgame in UO is collecting more gold, hoarding more of the same stuff, and killing more oranges (for some reason).
There is none. The endgame is the choice to muck around with what’s already there. There’s a set of flags that change for a PvP endgame so you can kill each other. That’s… about it. But that’s only an endgame because you’ll suck at it if you don’t keep up to everyone else that’s using it as an endgame.
I agree, i wish that skills would stop gaining at 85 so that the game would have more templates and different levels of chance/skill would finally be in affect.
(more fizzling for mages, newbies can get right in and have a DECENT chance instead of being killed in one combo)
Rather than an RoT model of skill gain, I think it would be useful to simply implement a gradually decreasing rate of skill gain that starts out fast when you log in each day and slowly decreases per hour/minute played.
Actually, “End game” is something only applicable to Themepark MMO’s like WOW. It’s what you do when you reach Max level and there’s no more Grind to do or anywhere to advance.
Sandboxes like UO don’t need “End game” because you never get there. Yes you can max your skills but theres always more wars to be made, plotting, greifing, monopoly or mass genocide, whatever floats your boat. Content is player driven here unlike MMO’s with an “End Game” where the content is developer driven and you can’t do anything different till they release an Expansion…
World of Warcraft has skills and crafting and an economy. Why can’t they have player driven endgame that keeps 10,000,000 people happy?
“theres always more wars to be made, plotting, greifing, monopoly or mass genocide, whatever floats your boat.”
See, and I mean no offense, but you just named a long list of essentially three things as your endgame. One of which was “griefing”. Griefing is not an endgame, and people work toward economic domination anywhere there’s currency. World of Warcraft has people sitting on the Auction House all day, like any game.
So really.. you just named your endgame as “killing other folks”.
Well, okay. But, first, that’s possible in a lot of games. Second, it’s not an endgame.. and third, frankly, it’s even LESS of an endgame in UO where there’s no structure and no reward other than looting corpses. Which, yes, can be very fun. But really only for a while.
I say that sandboxes like UO -do- need endgames. Maybe they don’t need one for you personally, because griefing and killing is enough for you. Maybe. But it needs one if it wants to house more than a few hundred like minded ne’er-do-wells who think griefing is an endgame. Griefing is what happens when bored teenage males first figure out what online anonymity is. And besides, there’s nobody to grief if everyone is.. there to grief. A diversified player portfolio is required to have a truly vibrant world. To have that, there might need to be some things in the game that you don’t really want to use.
Trust me, I tried it the other way before. I think we can strive for better. And I think it can be done in such a way as to make it totally ignorable if you choose not to participate.
You’re not referring to the muck at the bottom of the toxic waste barrel are you?
I was giving the whole RoT idea some thought over the last two hours. I love the idea and I think it would be a great way to squash the “Anti-Social” character bulding but what if it did scare people off. I know that Az has said he isn’t worried about alienating people but at the end of the day playerbase makes a huge difference on these player run servers.
What if you were to mask the system. I liked the origional idea of slowing skill gain down in houses. Make it take three times aslong to raise the combat/magic skills outside of a dungeon (to prevent wilderness macroing and causing it to be way more expensive to raise a skill like Magery. Still having those skill scrolls drop off random mobs.
Now that I’m saying it RoT does seem more logical but it’s just an idea.
ok, so it’s true that the only thing treated like an ‘endgame’ for pvp is the arrangement of certain flags.
what about every other class of character? as soon as your skills are maximized, the only thing that changes is the venue in which you perform the exact same actions that you’ve been performing for your entire tenure in the game, made even more true if you haven’t actually put in any real playing time until your character was finished.
consider a tamer. Tamer macros up to 7x. Regardless of the purposes intended for this character, the only thing that changes at all in this game is the pixels he’s targetting after he types ‘all kill’, perhaps the color of his clothes, and maybe the numbers in his bank account.
That’s only made to be untrue if some sort of other mechanic or content type / skillset is put in place by a development team, or, the tamer has to perform other actions before he can reach that point.
You can take literally every other style of player in UO and the same type of thing can be made applicable. I won’t go through them all, because no one would read the same thing over and over again.
In short, I do not agree that content is driven by the players in UO. All that changes is where in the world you’re doing the exact same things that you’d be doing everywhere else depending on current concentrations of population. Which, is driven by an incentive to be allocated in a certain spot, which would be made so by developers.
the sooner players realize that all they are doing is the same repetative thing over and over again because they started putting in real play time with that already being true, the sooner they get bored and quit.
a slow build and delaying of that realization is a wonderful thing.
Petition for blog to be renamed “Designing The Matrix”.
I posted this way up high but thought it was a good idea, so I want to re-post it, but I imagine it will be shot down.
What if after your skill is 85 or 90 on show real, that is as high as it can go? (with 90 taking absolutly forever to get to)
This would create a higher level of chance/skill to be involved in the game and a lot of interesting templates… not to mention newbies could log in with 50 of a skill and not get owned in two hits by a dexxer or mage
in exception of trade/resource gathering skills
I’m unfamiliar with any UO tool other than Razor. I do know people that are, though. From what I understand there are programs out there that are arguably too good. Angra mentioned “playUO beta13″, I’ve heard that’s one of the “arguably too good” UO tools.
If people are not forced to log in using Razor, are there other ways of preventing people from using more questionable 3rd party programs? Does forcing people to log in through Razor even prevent them from using a program like PlayUO beta13?
I think this is an important, not-so discussed issue. Another UO tool that does too much that I don’t understand how to use is exactly what I don’t need.
Also, why do some people seem to be against Razor?
Well, I can only again speak for myself, and I’m not even against razor per se.
What I’m against are certain features in razor.. Things like the ‘healself’ hotkey are retarded. You automatically heal damage as soon as it’s taken.
That and features that make targetting and synching even easier than they already are.
‘target random enemy humanoid’ is retarded.
you can just stack on top of each other and all cast FS, then hold that hotkey down and the first person to get in range of all of you dies instantly.
Yup. That’s pretty stupid right there.
I don’t know about all of you, but I’d give up the convenience of razor to play the game like it was.
You’d even give up auto death screenshot capture?
How else would I have those screenshots atop Trinsic Big Bank featuring your lying at my feet to a duel…twice. Oh right, 56k, 56k.
Add those two to smart targeting. With the negotiate features thing, you can probably disable all three.
I’m fairly sure it’s possible to disable those features.
I would give up razor, as convienant as it was and even though I used UOA to play the game like it was. I’d even love to do away with meditation but thats a conversation for another post ;p
Az, Sultani just to clarify some points.
Firstly, the suggestions I make generallly are not based on my playstyle but what I think would make the server a better place for all, the comment about UO’s endgame having killing, economy or griefing was just an example, personally I don’t dig griefing but i’m realistic enough to know it will happen.
When I say “Player Driven” content, im refering to a trait pretty much indeginous to most Sandbox games, in fact I think its the main thing that defines a Sandbox. It was UO’s organic and open gameplay that self-sustained itself where most other MMO’s need an “end game” due to the lack of said Player Driven content, lets not forget it wasn’t the lack of content that killed UO, it was the mechanic changes.
Yes the devs supply the tools as with all games, but it’s what the players do with those tools that make the content. In WOW Players are given no tools with which to make content of their own.
Example; I go off to gather wood near my house. I stumple upon a dismembered body of an unfortunate neighbour, I’ve heard rumours of a notorious PK stalking my neighbourhood for a while. I hear footsteps and hide. The PK runs past chasing another player.
Now, I have decisions to make here. Do I search the body for anything to retrieve for my neighbour and run away back to safety? Do I pursue the PK for revenge, glory and regain all my neighbours items, gain his respect and possibly a nice discount on the reagents he’s got for sale but at the risk of my own life?
One trip to the woods to gather wood has now created it’s own “quest” of sort of which I have several choices I can make. Along each path many other events may happen which again I will need to make a decision on i.e he may not be alone, he may be a member of a powerful local guild with a tower nearby and my actions have long term consequences, he may already be dead by the time I get there I just don’t know.
This is the “Player Driven” content that UO has and WOW NEVER will have or can have since the mechanics are too restrictive. With gameplay mechanics that are organic and unpredictable like above, “End Game” solid tasks made by the developer/admins are not essential. Yes Az, if you plan to introduce scripted quests or custom events for endgame I think they may certainly help and give additional things to do but unlike WOW-esque games it’s not critical and one things for sure, you won’t be able to keep up with the demand of making end game content since players will always burn through it quicker then you will make it. Thats why allowing self-sustaining content with “Player Driven” mechanics to form by itself ultimately is the key.
Eve and it’s wars, politics and alliances are testimant to this all are player instigated and controlled, I think one of the main factors why its population continues to grow (Eve reference only because it bares similarity in its sandbox, ROT, PVP mechanics to this discussion)
I hated ROT back in the day… totally shitty system for the casual player. It reminds me of Wintergrasp in WoW, where you have to login for 15 minutes every 2 hours. In my experience, it makes players less interested in actually playing the game.
If the aim is to deter macroing, I’d prefer a system that limit gains on the “same” target and disallows gains on summoned targets. It’s easier to implement a system like this for melee than it is for magery, but I think you could put something together that works pretty well. Crafting skills are an entirely different animal. Applying a traditional ROT system to crafting skills means that crafting skills cost less to GM, but take longer.
I think the way we’re going to alter RoT will be nothing but fantastic for the casual player.
Read my comment in the original post and tell me if you think my general thought process is off base.
I think your thought process is well aligned with a balanced system. I made this post before reading all of the other discussions, including the post you’ve referenced… oops.
Hopefully your next post will examine a system that cripples the effectiveness of using EUO for resource gathering.
That’s actually pretty easy. We’ve got some things cooking.
I know nothing about FActions, and fighting in UO was always the means and the end for me – never needed any incentives so I won’t comment on that.
I will say that a few of the features in Razor/UOE and UOA were necessary but they might be part of the UO client now(can’t remember)
Hotkeys for :
TargetSelf
LastTarget
Use Potion of type
Equip weapon of type
And that’s pretty much it. All that insta-targetting shit is bull and I really hope you figure a way around it for IPY2.
Sorry I haven’t been posting lately, been busy irl.
First off let me just start by saying this – Razor, UOE, UOA, UOAM… all of these things are created outside of the game as 3rd party apps because people thought they would add utility and thus resourcefulness and satisfaction to a player’s experience at their discretion.
There is a reason why many of the features that were originally developed in UOA or UOE or Razor are now full-blown features of modern MMOs. This is just the way things go – they become more refined and more complex as time goes on. Whether or not IPY 2.0 decides to fully embrace outside utilities to impact the meta-game on a server-wide level remains to be seen. I think 2.0 could work without 3rd party apps or with them, but it needs to be decided upon before launch imho.
RoT… again this leads to another decision – is 2.0 for casuals or hardcore, in comparison to 1.0, etc. People will accept either or tbh, but they would like to get a bearing before launch [obviously].
Order and Chaos? Dope shit. Put it in. If not O/C, then something similar. There is a reason why MMOs are very zerg-trendy lately, trying to one-up each other to see how many warm bodies they can fill on a single screen for something arbitrary like a “siege” or in UO’s case, a “faction war” [lulz @ the reasoning, but fun times for all lets face it].
I’ll try and stay up on everything now, sorry to fall behind.
In no MMO are gamewide autopiloting abilities a standard feature. Whether or not I can get rid of those programs, I’ll never embrace them.
Where have you been Az? Dude, every single MMO has taken a cue from the pratfalls of macroing a 7x in a tedious manner. There are TONS of autopilot features in today’s MMO – even things that were discussing right now. For example…
WoW has auto walk. WoW has auto swing in melée (a UO hat-tip, but also casual/noob friendly for their target audience). WoW has skill/gold/reputation farmers/grinders that run autonomously akin to a dude macroing FS in his house or mining on his mountain-side doorstep for 56 hours straight.
Eve Online is basically the sci-fi equivalent of training Bonsai plants -the entire game is predicated upon tons of gimps playing AFK on autopilot.
Darkfall… As staff, I saw the horrors of an entire playerbase leaving pennies in their ‘W’ key so they can gain swimming points while AFK for 2-3 days. People running space bar paperweights or G15 macros to swing their noob weapon on a timed pattern at the neArest graveyard, hoping to get some other random retard to pop up Drobed and AFK, meat shielding the hitters weapon proficiency all the way to Grandmaster Glory. All within the first 3 days. 1000s of times.
Or what about people who run massive combo macros on the G15? The ones with the miliseconds pounded out prior, so there’s literally not even a moment to react?
This goes beyond 2.0. It goes further than MMOs. The real issue, and we all know it, it the simple fact that some people try and get every advantage they can, and that includes nebulous, hard to contain areas of concern like 3rd party apps, macroing AFK, macroing to overcome lack of muscle memory and to bypass the reaction time threshold.
I’m typing this on my iPhone so I’m finding it difficult to fully explain myself and why MMOS do allow autopilot and targeting ass’t, etc. Anyways…
This really boils down to you wanting to provide an equal and unsegregated experience for all, and that is simply NOT possible if 3rd party apps are being utilized in said game, or if loopholes for gaining overall ‘power’ in the game without putting in true work.
I’m finding your explanation difficult, too.
Autoswing? Bots that WoW tries to track and ban? People sticking pennies in keyboards in Darkfall?
These are not examples of why autopiloting has become integrated and accepted in MMOs…
actually, the only features of razor that i like are the restock agent, lighting features, (because it’s fucking tedious to have to cast in lor every couple of minutes), and the arm / disarm hotkeys.
Arm disarm in razor is way less delayed and shitty compared to the one built into the client. Restock agent just makes it so there’s less downtime for poeple when they die. equalling more action.
Also initially, it’s about 1000 times easier to set up your hotkeys in razor than it is to do in the client.
Probably. But if everyone was using the same arm/disarm, would it matter?
If I remember correctly the arm disarm in the client was about a second delay.
It impacted the pace of PvP drastically and if its still like that I know I’ll be whining about it.
But I guess beta testing will point out something like that.
Well, I remember back in the day when everyone was using UOA, and I wasn’t, I got fairly adept at manually arming weapons so that there wasn’t a delay when I went to use the disarm hotkey.
If everyone used the in game rm disarm feature, sure, it would be even playing field, but that doesn’t mean it’s good. That’s like saying “when precast was removed, it was removed for everyone, so it doesn’t matter.”
I really don’t think it’s like saying that. You’re talking about removing an optimized automation and then comparing it to removing a major combat mechanic. I’m not stopping you from arming weapons – or even arming them automatically.
Making that connection, if I can make an extreme example to illustrate a point, is like if everyone had full one-button instakill PvP scripts that adapted seamlessly to what the other player was doing (well, what the other player was scripting).
Sure, it’d be faster. More convenient. And once everyone got used to it, if you took it out they’d howl for blood because everything would be slower and more complicated and not nearly as convenient.
Doesn’t mean the game just got worse, though.
Also, I’m not saying Razor is going anywhere. Or EUO.
I’m just saying that I could live without them.
In fact, I’d love to live without them.
It is my opinion that the negative side to razor is greatly exaggerated. Sultani (I think it was Sultani) pointed out that features like “attack random enemy” could be abused by a group of individuals standing on top of one another (or however they wanted to stand) in order to insta flamestrike the first orange that comes on their screen. This is true, but it’s a very infrequent practice and how hard is it to just click said orange, the answer sirs, is not very hard. As well as that example there are many other not-so-game-changing advanced features that one cannot find through their UO client.
Razor macros can be fairly specific but are limted. For example; one could have a razor macro that auto pops pouches when you get the system message “you are frozen”, drinks heals when your hitpoints reach a set low, drink a cure when you’re poisoned, and so on. All of those are “autopiloting abilities” that really aren’t that fantastic in my opinion. I don’t use any macros like that because for one; it’s super easy to hit your potion/use once agent macro and for two; sometimes I don’t want my pouches to go off instantly and sometimes I don’t want to drink a cure/heal. I could make a million examples of similiar “auto pilot” macros (through razor) that really don’t give much of an advantage to anyone.
Target random enemy/criminal etc… is perhaps the biggest game changing feature (for myself) that razor offers. The funny thing about that is that half or more of the people that I pvp with don’t even use targetting macros (for some reason) and they target just as well or better than me. One of the best duelers I know doesn’t even use last target. Often times it takes more time for me to toggle through my “target random whoever” macro to get a target than it does to just drag the lifebar. These targetting features can also be disabled at least to a certain extent. For example on Divinity the “target CLOSEST player of type” hot keys are disabled. It is only possible to create a “target RANDOM player of type” macro. Which may not seem like a big change but it is. With five oranges on your screen, targetting the one closest to you is far more efficient than scrolling through potentially all of them once or twice. If you really were against these targetting macros I think it is possible to block them entirely (through razor at least) as well. I’m not trying to downplay these features to the point that they aren’t awesome and couldn’t potentially give a small advantage over someone who doesn’t use them, because they are awesome. My point is that razor DOES offer a LOT of “auto pilot” features but none of them are significantly game breaking to anyone who doesn’t use them.
If it were even a possibility to block all of these UOA kind of programs from your server I’d say go for it but allow some kind of program that does the most basic of UOA things like arm/disarm, drink potions, pop para pouches, and similiar hot keys that the UO client either doesn’t offer, or offers an inferior version of. Correct me if I’m wrong here, but blocking all of these programs isn’t even possible, right? In that case what makes the most sense to me is to encourage the use of the most mild version of these programs (arguably Razor) so that people don’t feel as compelled to download one of the less mild programs (ala easyUO) and make the “auto pilot” situation even worse.
And to answer your question: “But if everyone was using the same arm/disarm, would it matter?” It wouldn’t matter in the sense that people would or wouldn’t have an advantage over one another obviously, but the in-game arm/disarm macro is greatly inferior to the razor macro to the point that it’s painful to use. It would actually change pvp (dueling in particular) into something less fluid and more tedious. Half of the time the UO arm/disarm macro doesn’t even work if I remember correctly. Maybe that was just my dialup modem, in any case the in-game arm/disarm macro sucks. It wouldn’t be the end of the UO world if we all had to use it but it also wouldn’t be fun, and I don’t see how it would benefit anything.
I see Razor as the lesser evil of all of the paths you could take. I would even go as far as forcing people to log in through razor as to prevent them from logging in with one of the more advanced UO helpers like “playUO” or whatever it’s called. I already know how you feel about forcing people to use Razor, though, and that’s understandable. Whatever path you do take, I think that you would agree that the best one would be the one that discourages the use of programs and features within them that are “too good”. Clearly peoples opinion of what “too good” is varies, but if you think Razor is bad then I know you don’t want EasyUO and whatever other program on your server. I strongly believe that discouraging the use of more mild programs like Razor will only encourage the use of much less mild programs like EasyUO. Then people really will have an advantage over others because figuring out how to use a script your friend wrote to pop pouches and drink potions is way more complicated than setting your use once agent or your potion macro. On top of that it brings more people into the world of easyUO/whatever else, they will eventually master it, and then you’ll have a server full of EasyUO experts because they didn’t want to use the in-game arm/disarm macro :) I know that’s a doomsday scenario but I think that it’s at least a little bit accurate.
So basically what we’ve established is that somewhere between option A (manually d-clicking spell icons to cast, arm/disarming weapons from your pack to paperdoll, and targeting another player’s avatar) and option B (entirely automated one-button PvP a la Azaroth’s hypothetical), there is an ideal balance.
Here’s to hoping the alpha/beta testers are up to the task, cheers!
having seen and played both styles of UO, (with a delay in arming and disarming and without said delay), yes, the game does get worse if the delay is there.
It’s slower, easier to react, slowed down, and gimped. You wouldn’t think something like that makes that big of a difference, but it absolutely does. That difference isn’t really a small nuance. It’s a big difference.
I think it’d be awesome if you just couldn’t target a player’s bar, and could disable the targetting features in razor (with the exception of last target).
obviously the first statement is purely subjective, but I know that tons of people agree with that.