Azaroth

Oops. A little late this time. Kind of a busy weekend.

This week we talk about Kings, future plans, and what I might do differently if I could launch IPY 2 again.

TheAppropriator asks:

“How has the server met or not met your expectations regarding the quality and type of players attracted to the server? Any thing you’d do differently if you could change the first month or two after launch in respect to those expectations? What has been your biggest disappointment and your biggest achievement since launch?”

In regard to the game systems implemented and the immediate and ultimate reactions to them, IPY 2 has been interesting.

I think that where your core community comes along for the full ride, reads the blog, reads the wiki, reads your forum posts and knows what systems are there and why they’re there… it becomes deceiving during the development process. The majority of the people on the server are just people who have followed someone else to your game, or started playing because it’s UO and it’s a big population, and so on.

A lot of people don’t understand the systems and usually know little or nothing about them. Frankly, they sometimes can’t be bothered to understand them beyond “It’s different, and it’s preventing me from doing X that I’ve always done / expect to be able to do.”

That’s the problem working with UO. Or, I assume, trying to rework any game in this fashion. Most of the people that play already like the game. They’re probably not going to bother learning about the new things you’ve done with it until they’re negatively impacted by them in some way. At which time they’ll typically become disenfranchised. Which is really unfortunate.

You also can’t break people of certain things. I think that I foolishly thought that you could change how people have been playing the game for over a decade.

As long as it’s UO, people will expect and demand certain things of it. Even if those things are silly.

For instance, people that want to macro are just going to macro. It’s designed to be slow and painful, but “possible” to macro.

No matter. They’ll either not bother learning about that or why it happens to be designed that way, or they’ll disregard it, macro, and then subsequently complain about how slow and painful it is to macro. Or complain about how playing the game sucks and they would really rather not.

Now, I think skill gain was too slow, too. Not “too slow” full stop, but “too slow for what the average player expects out of Ultima Online in 2011″. That didn’t help the macroing situation, which of course made macroing skill gain even slower.

I genuinely felt people would have more patience and pride in the last major hurrah for one of the greatest games of all time. When UO was launched, grandmasters were nearly unheard of. If you hit your cap every day and snag some skill scrolls in dungeons, it’s designed to take about a month here. Getting your character to a reasonable level (~80), is actually fairly quick and can be done in about a week or so.

The problem is that, even though some of our users really do try to groove with the skill gain rate and actually do agree with it in principle, ultimately they’re subconciously clawed at by the fact that they’ve played UO servers for years and years that allow you to complete characters in a week or less.

None of this is to say that I think slow skill gain is wrong, or is wrong for IPY. Or that I think the players that think gains should be faster are wrong. I think we could have ultimately achieved MORE success with fast skill gain, but I was never concerned with just grabbing as much popularity as possible at any cost.

I do think, however, that skill gain should be faster right now. Or, specifically, the Rested Casual Bonus values should be tweaked to provide a larger front end bonus and a softer back end cap. Truthfully, and I’ve said this many times, I reckon that it doesn’t much matter how quickly your skills gain within the confines of that daily soft cap. To a reasonable point, of course.

So to answer the question directly, yes, there are things I’d do differently. We’re still very fresh out of the gate though, and I think I’ve still got time to correct a few of the issues. I doubt those that are gone are too far gone – and if they are, their interest in playing UO again was probably not the strongest to begin with… and they might be gone soon anyway.

I don’t think I’d ever scrap the new things we’ve added, even though pirating has largely become a tool of griefers, skill gain is complicated and massively misunderstood, O/C gets flack for being different, a work in progress and not what people are used to, and reds are CONSTANTLY kicking up a fuss about Paladins and Detectives despite the fact that anyone in their right mind understands what a mess IPY 2 would be right now if there were nothing holding the reds back.

What I think I’d do, if I could do it again, is largely twofold:

First, I’d keep the systems we’ve added, but I’d soften their edges. In this particular situation, the mindset of the average user wasn’t necessarily considered QUITE enough. The systems should have been fun and new, but less obtrusive and ultimately arcane to the average user who has never, and will never, read the blog. I don’t think we did a BAD job of this by any stretch of the imagination, I just think more time could have been put into making changes transparent to those that didn’t know about them or want to know about them.

For example, when people leave their boats sitting around right now, they often don’t understand that they’re GOING to get sunk. Then they can’t figure out where the ship went or why, and they page Game Masters upset. Because of that, we’re looking at adding small, non-PvP fishing boats. Something we considered before launch, but never did because we put more consideration into the frustration of the wrong people (that is, the people that would get upset because they couldn’t sink certain boats).

Second, I’d launch TRULY feature complete. One of my biggest regrets is not having PvE endgame content in place for people who are finishing their characters are are getting tired of EVing Balrons down right about now.

Portals would have kept new users interested, or at least provided a positive note to their early experience, I think. Not only that, but the people complaining that having to play the game to gain skills at a decent rate SUCKS because they hate playing the game might have been a little happier with more interesting PvE content (something that UO quite obviously lacks).

We should have probably had PvP content for mid-level users that’d pit them against other mid-level users to break up the monotany of building a character for the users that are MOST motivated to 7xGM and the LEAST interested in doing anything but macroing to (QUICKLY, OR ELSE!) get there.

That’s easy to say, of course. Less easy to do. Nobody launches totally feature complete, even though it’d obviously be best to. World of Warcraft launched without any endgame raid content whatsoever. Remember UBRS? A raiding game with a huge budget launched without raiding.

I think people will afford us the time and opportunity to deliver some strong PvE content and expand on the PvP content.
So in some ways, my expectations were that players would be game design fans and not players, to some degree. I found out that players are always players. They want what they want, and don’t give a rat’s ass about the theory behind a system, or why that thing that’s preventing them from having something or doing another thing is “better for the health of the game world in the long term” or “actually helping you out by preventing others from..”.

They don’t care what others are doing. They want theirs. But others better not be getting ahead. They don’t care what’s best for the game world long term. They want short term fun. But it damn well better be there long term, too.

You have to understand that perspective and cater to it. I think I already understood that, I just didn’t understand it quite well enough. For instance, the RCB system that provides a boost to initial skill gain and slowly lowers gains throughout the day to a soft cap is a good idea. It lets people “get theirs”, but it also prevents everyone else from automating their way to a character that will dominate them and completing said character in a time the average user could never fathom of completing their own in.

The gains were probably just too slow. The boost, when held up against the regular skill gain of the other servers they had been playing, didn’t feel like a boost. So what they’re left with, from their perspective, is just a daily skill gain cap that keeps getting worse and worse.

That’s not so good.

I think, right now, softening the RCB to allow quicker gains up front would be a very good idea, and would have been a very good idea from the start. So we’ll probably be doing that. We should have even named it something more “UO”. People don’t always understand, or don’t want to understand, new things sometimes. It could have been quicker up front and described as a mix between Power Hour and RoT. Power Over Time. POT. Everyone loves POT, right.

Anyway. You can expect some changes coming soon that address what we feel were the (few!) weak points of our launch. I think everyone will be pleasantly surprised.

Al Bundy asks:

“I was casting Ev’s at destard and there were two Red named Original colored llama’s that spawned I believe it was Tina and Moe or something. Anyway Question is Does this random happening mean anything? Is there something I have to say or do to obtain something from this event? Its only happened to me twice and i’ve tried to kill tina but they disapear pretty quick. “

Tina and Ham are just one of our little “Easter Eggs” in the game. Fun and largely meaningless things to find that are usually references to bad television shows or movies. How amusing!

Boba asks:

“what are your plans for name change deeds? i have personally been bugging you about it for my crafter. I need to know if its a yes or no so that i can continue with the same character or make a new one. “

Well, we don’t want to make you reroll. We also don’t want to totally destroy the entire point of the unique naming system.

Name change deeds may become available at some point relatively soon. However, I can’t see them being usable very often, and I think your old name would probably be noted in your profile.

Nocturne asks:

“Is there a team able and willing to run some RP endeavors should they arise? Who should we contact for such things? Some shards drop monster spawns and “mini events” on the fly.. would be cool to see this level of interaction again on the server! “

I’ve been wanting to begin a larger storyline to get players more involved, but I just haven’t had the time to this point.

People actually DO love those little events. From the perspective of a player, I’m sure they would be very fun. So we intend on doing these more regularly, yes.

Bob and a Half asks:

“Is Britain always going to be where new characters spawn or will it ever be chosen by the player//randomized?”

Britain’s guard protection level has been set on “Lax” for quite some time now. This is not ideal whatsoever for new players getting into the game for the first time.

So yes, the new player spawning town will end up moving around to whichever town best welcomes new players. Right now very good choices would be, I think, Yew and Skara Brae. Perhaps even Nujel’m.

King Moonsquad asks:

“How do you feel about the way the various cities of Britannia have turned out after this first wave of elections? (Now second).

How do you feel about the King system as it currently exists and do you have any plans for future improvements to it if you are not currently content with it? “

I think it’s worked out about as expected. I think it’s been an interesting experiment and a worthwhile addition, though the original concept would have probably been even more fun to watch.

There are still things to add that would be fun. Revolts should go in, but we’re a little wary of its potential for being exploited. Pirate control of city ports draining treasuries would be fun, and I believe is partially coded right now.

So we’ll see. I think I could probably talk all day about what Kings is, what’s gone on with elections, what various Kings have chosen to do with their territories, what my expectations were and what I’d love to see / change in the future, or even if I could just do it over again. I think I bored everyone with my first reply though, and I should probably just write a book if I’m determined to be long winded. “The Rambles Of A Pretend Game Designer” sounds pretty good.

I wonder if I could give them away.

Morrolan asks:

“Are there any plans to create promotions or in-game systems that will attract and keep new players? “

Yes! We hope to reach out to both new and old players with our double skill scroll weekend (this weekend!).
Beyond that, we really hope new players will enjoy the Portals that are coming. ИкониikoniПодаръциикони на светциикониикони