2 months here, my impression

General discussion pertaining to the Demise shard. Off-topic posts will be moderated.
Vampire337
Posts: 47
Location: Cincinnati, Ohio

Re: 2 months here, my impression

Post by Vampire337 »

Can't really blame a bean counter for measuring success in beans, can you? :lol:

UO has a hard cap of 720 skill points. That's true on production shards as well as here. I see it as a symptom of stagnation. We're also using a client with not really much in the way of new graphics in a decade. That applies to production servers and to here as well. My likening of UO to a laundromat isn't about business management so much as it is a statement that the game hasn't been getting much love in the client updates. The only alternative would be to start creating mul updates, and when you hit that point it's time to start building your own client (RIP Iris).

I remember the experiment that was Garriott's dream. To somehow implement a living world where animals somehow bred and players could wipe out all the spawns, (which ultimately showed them that this would never work, outside of technical limitations on the server end). I still follow him on Twitter, hoping to hear some mad wonderful thing he's going to come out with. When OSI sold to EA I presumed it was the downfall of UO. I was wrong that it could die, but it's been on life support for a long time. UO was the first graphical front-end to a MUD, perhaps, but not the last attempt. Games like WoW and ESO may be more focused on milking customers of their monthly dues, but they have a great amount of lore and 'world' to them. And never forget Second Life, which was all world and no game (and, much to my surprise, is still around).

I often tinker with the idea that RunUO could be reinvented (maybe in a Docker container), and given some updated clients and revitalize the amazing game that is/was UO. I even applied to Broadsword in hopes that I could be a part of that. I recently found the resume I emailed them in 2015. They still have the position advertised on their website, so I guess I didn't make the cut.
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Calvin
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Location: UK

Re: 2 months here, my impression

Post by Calvin »

... you only have the extra +20 skills cos it took them 4 years to realize that in 10 years it'd be ridiculous.

i dont think they planned that far ahead lol, or thought it would last that long.
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Vampire337
Posts: 47
Location: Cincinnati, Ohio

Re: 2 months here, my impression

Post by Vampire337 »

Calvin wrote: December 15th, 2020, 4:14 am ... you only have the extra +20 skills cos it took them 4 years to realize that in 10 years it'd be ridiculous.

i dont think they planned that far ahead lol, or thought it would last that long.
Agreed, but it was something at the time. As I wander the bottom floors of dungeons I could NEVER have soloed in 2002 and watch my Cu eat balrons like mongbat sammiches, I'm very aware that the old dungeons became easy only because new content was added and made such things more attainable. Adding greater pets and improved weapons and armor are the way to keep things alive. Raising skill caps would make existing content easier, so you add more difficult endgame content. The veteran PvM crowd gets something new, the noobs get elevated entry level benefits, and the playerbase is appeased because they've all got something new to do every so often. That's the stuff production UO gave up long ago, (I'm pretty sure; I haven't played but half an hour on production in the last decade, and that only thanks to the new free-play program)
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Calvin
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Re: 2 months here, my impression

Post by Calvin »

"They still have the position advertised on their website, so I guess I didn't make the cut."
you have no idea how much that pisses me off... but yeh, they all do it. no-one wants to train people that might leave for a better job, they wanna hire the person someone else has trained.. and they could train like 6 people in the time they have some of the jobs up for.. it's ridiculous.

you're on about the virtual ecology video, i know the one. same thing with trammal really, he had an idea of how it was gonna work, it didn't so they adapted. but ultimately i think the reason he was forced out of the company is because his vision and EA's vision didn't mesh.

but ultimately, i think it's garriot's vision that made uo popular in the first place, and i think the games industry.. kinda the same as those companies that wont train people, wants to cash in on a concept, they're not interested in making a new concept that someone else will then cash in on with a better itteration.

second life is just VR chat.

" Raising skill caps would make existing content easier"
raising skill caps makes the existing content defunct. that is literally the point you are complaining about :P

cos they made 90% of the games content irrelevent. im not complaining cos it makes it feel like your character has really progressed.. but it is how it is. anyway i think it's nice to go back to the old places and wow the newbies ;P
well.. when there were newbies lol
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Calvin
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Re: 2 months here, my impression

Post by Calvin »

i still think it's all strangely sexual..



second life also had a currency exchange thing with real world money if i remember right... wasn't it all like prostitution and unicorns with massive knobs?

i dunno i didn't play it lol
did research it at one point... and was kinda disturbed.
lots of trans people on second life... shit like that.
Vampire337
Posts: 47
Location: Cincinnati, Ohio

Re: 2 months here, my impression

Post by Vampire337 »

Calvin wrote: December 15th, 2020, 4:24 am "They still have the position advertised on their website, so I guess I didn't make the cut."
you have no idea how much that pisses me off... but yeh, they all do it. no-one wants to train people that might leave for a better job, they wanna hire the person someone else has trained.. and they could train like 6 people in the time they have some of the jobs up for.. it's ridiculous.
That wouldn't exactly apply to me. I'm into the high end of the wage pool as an engineer, and I code circles around most of my peers. I assume it'd be a pay decrease if they did make me an offer, and I'd hafta square my love of game with my enjoyment of feeding the family. I might be better off this way, hehe.
Calvin wrote: December 15th, 2020, 4:24 am " Raising skill caps would make existing content easier"
raising skill caps makes the existing content defunct. that is literally the point you are complaining about :P

cos they made 90% of the games content irrelevent. im not complaining cos it makes it feel like your character has really progressed.. but it is how it is. anyway i think it's nice to go back to the old places and wow the newbies ;P
well.. when there were newbies lol
I don't think I'm complaining about it. It is what it is and I'm here so it must not be too bad. I just like to think about how the world could be a little bit better. I wouldn't say the existing content is "defunct", it just takes on different roles as what was a dungeon full of lizardmen becomes a farm for leather, or Doom becomes a farm for arty drops. I see someone camping a spawn in Ilshenar with bodies all over the floor, and I'm irked that the game rewards them for doing that while I also take note to do that in the future because "that's how you get the ____".

I don't think it would hurt anything if new content came out that made Doom/champ spawns a little easier for noobs and simultaneously a new dungeon that's way harder appeared with new loot that the old timers could drool over. Let the seasoned vets compete for the updated content while expanding the existing content. An idea tempered only by the fact that no one is getting paid to create it. :lol:
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Vampire337
Posts: 47
Location: Cincinnati, Ohio

Re: 2 months here, my impression

Post by Vampire337 »

Calvin wrote: December 15th, 2020, 4:33 am i still think it's all strangely sexual..

second life also had a currency exchange thing with real world money if i remember right... wasn't it all like prostitution and unicorns with massive knobs?

i dunno i didn't play it lol
did research it at one point... and was kinda disturbed.
lots of trans people on second life... shit like that.
Sounds about right. I tried it once and decided it was too boring. I get why it's a great outlet for people who feel trapped in their 'first life', and who's more universally repressed by society than those who take issue with their bodies. I just wasn't part of that demographic so it didn't appeal to me much. I wanted to kill stuff and hoard resources.

UO had a currency exchange thing; it was just highly against the rules. I remember getting really good at farming leather and selling it on eBay. I didn't make min wage, but the idea that I was making money from a game was exciting.
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Calvin
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Re: 2 months here, my impression

Post by Calvin »

have you seen christmas and halloween towns yet?

you'll love those ;)
Vampire337
Posts: 47
Location: Cincinnati, Ohio

Re: 2 months here, my impression

Post by Vampire337 »

I played in Halloween Town a bit. I'm still in the "gaining skills" stage since I returned. Actually started my first sampire, tho I've mostly been playing on my tamer mage and writing scripts to manage BODs.

HTown was fun, but mostly I beat up orcs in the fort until the champ spawned and I died, then I came back and did little more than pick up piles of gold. Which is fun, but I'm hoping to do better in Christmas Town.
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Excorsion
Posts: 157

Re: 2 months here, my impression

Post by Excorsion »

Calvin wrote: December 1st, 2020, 1:33 am just sounds like you're having a good game but you wanna win more :P

lag, ganks, and script are all issues yea, but they are kinda things we have to live with i guess.

not really an issue for me cos i dont rly do the pvp
You missing his point....

Pvp is not everything you and I agree on that... but... pvp is the easiest way to explain what he is getting at... he's complaining about it being to laggy for him to even use scripts to pvp with ... and that is the true root of everyone's issues in any game they play... Choose a server closer to your location.... meaning if demise is high ping to you.. then don't play demise...

not trying to be mean but you have to understand the staff has bills to pay... server fees and such.. they chose the server they have because it is affordable...your just going about a way of to back door a server change...for your benefit.. which sorry the needs of the many out weight a selfish player...

the server change a while back affected alot of players...some good some bad... mine stayed the same mostly... as for script pvp... i could do it.. but why... I find no skill in script pvping...but it seems the greats have left the game... like flood of sonoma.. and a few others... back when you couldn't script pvp that easily. Makes me laugh when HZ and company start bragging about thier pvp.. cause i'm old school...I know what real pvp is about...we talking pvp before power scrolls and you coyuld get a bounty on your head for pking. another example is ambushing someone at thier house in hopes you could loot thier key and then own the house. yes i'm that old... that you didn't own the house unless you had the key.
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Calvin
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Re: 2 months here, my impression

Post by Calvin »

i dunno.. this is like what i was talking about on discord earlier:

we were talking about download speeds, and i was saying i have 10mb a second download, and that's fine for everything. but the other guy was saying he wants it faster.

i remember the days of 56k when we played with 350 ping, and got 3.5k/s download speeds..
the difference between 80 ping, and 150 ping.. yeah it's almost double, but it's nothing really. your ping is in milliseconds. so you are literally talking about 0.08 of a second difference..

why does that matter so much to you? other than you're running scripts which assume there is no ping at all. yeah it needs to wait for the reply to come back before it sends the next command. but like.. wtf have you made pvp on this game.

same with the guy before, is there really that much difference between downloading a song in half a second, and downloading it in quarter of a second? or a movie in 50 seconds instead of 100?

er'y-one chasing after the prize so hard they forget why.
(you can actually use that in pvp lol, i call it shiney syndrome - cos like they see the flag and it's shiney so they run for it. you just set up a death trap and let people run into it chasing the shiney)
Vampire337
Posts: 47
Location: Cincinnati, Ohio

Re: 2 months here, my impression

Post by Vampire337 »

It's like outrunning a bear. You don't need to outrun a bear; you only need to outrun your friend. If you have 150 ping and your friend has 80 ping, you're going to understand what bear food feels like more often than he does.

PvP is heavily about reaction time. It's why scripting PvP is a thing. Cast that spell before the other guy does. Drop an arrow before that miner can recall. Run just an extra tile offscreen before you heal and come back preloaded to drop the other guy if he isn't moving as fast as you. Yes, scripting reacts semi-instantaneously (given some variables in your processor and memory loading and bandwidth and ping). But scripts aren't the final arbiter of a PvP victory; the server is. Thus a lower ping is always going to hit the server just a tiny bit quicker.

And as all siblings know, you always want to tattle on your sister before she tells on you.
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Calvin
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Re: 2 months here, my impression

Post by Calvin »

tbh i think it is a sad, sorry state of affairs when the game has been reduced to two people running the same script (because they dont write them, just download them), with the same characters (cos they're clearly the best build, and they read a guide); then just comparing pings.

there are so many ways you could fix that. but you'd all complain cos then you wont pwn noobs that dont bother.. no-one to blame but urselves really.

that's why for all these years i've never bothered to get on board with it. cos i could see where it was headed, but no-one ever listens.

it's cos people played for the win not the game.

i dunno, maybe that's the point of uo tho, cos what you get from winning matters.
maybe uo is the pvp game it is because winning does matter?
it's not what i play pvp games for tho, i'd rather lose fairly than win at any cost.
but then uo is made to be realistic... could be a better way of winning waiting to be found i guess...
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Vampire337
Posts: 47
Location: Cincinnati, Ohio

Re: 2 months here, my impression

Post by Vampire337 »

Hey, I don't PvP, so I wouldn't complain. Nevermind, I probably would, because there isn't a simple couple quick fixes that rebalance things, and what they change would screw with all the game, including the parts I like. Because the only way to get the soup at the bottom of the pot to quit burning, is to stir the whole dang pot.

UO rewards players who PvP because if they weren't rewarded for it they would quit. Not all of them only care about the rewards, but enough do that there wouldn't be much competition for those who play for sport. The "sport" is like BattleBots: you queue up your scripts, let them battle the other guy's scripts, and the winner gets to guffaw like a hyena. It's beautiful, like watching monkeys fight for dominance at the zoo.

I suppose UO PvP is "realistic", in the sense that as automation methods improve, there's less for humans to do manually. Like racing cars. Sure, everyone wants that standard racing 5-speed tranny because everyone just *knows* you can't race with an automatic. Until they started tweaking with the automatic, making it switch more efficiently. Couple grand and a guy can reprogram your car to shift smarter than NASCAR. Now self-driving cars are becoming a thing. As the technology improves, eventually they'll start designing a racecar with full automation, and eventually you find that it's better than the best driver. And that technology is indeed developing right now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FvOCsjPew8

We've hit the point where automated scripting can play a 1998 video game better than humans can, and as an automation engineer I'm okay with that. The days of playing UO fully manual are in the past, perhaps. But there's newer games if you really want to test out your manual PvP aptitude. They haven't fully automated Fortnite & CS:GO, yet. ;)
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Calvin
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Re: 2 months here, my impression

Post by Calvin »

well they have automated them, just you get banned for using the automation (aimbots) ;)

i dunno man.. whole point is to test the human element lol

used to be anyway... these days it's more about tricking you.. see, the way mmos like wow work, is they make the challanges easier, you dont overcome it, you level up and then you beat it without beating it. but your brain still gives you the chemical reward. we just sorta do that now.
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