2 months here, my impression

General discussion pertaining to the Demise shard. Off-topic posts will be moderated.
Ghost-
Posts: 5

Re: 2 months here, my impression

Post by Ghost- »

remove heartwood kits. make the rewards useless like doing other npc quests. Demise removed TOTS why not remove these kits? that will resolve 90% of demise issues. How?
1). 90% Afk scripters are running resource gathering for wood... This would be eliminated - if this wouldnt resolve the issue, (because people just sell wood and money in demise is useless then simply make all tree resource at a all time low percentage).
2). 90% of afk scripters are running this heartwood quest... the "clean up bratainia" point system still work here? if so, i feel like thats afk "Gathering" as well.
3).90% of afk scripters are FLOODING Demise with archers because of these kits... because its easy access to bows/ ect.
4.) Why nerf mage casting in fel? ohh because of uosteam.. hmm. possibly block or filter out mage / casting scripts in fellucia back to razor era macros.
Simply rent a coder and allow him to modify some code lines in demise coding to not allow such things to even be present. Hell, you did it with autoloot. "Negotiate with server" is an option after all.
I understand you cant rewind time to the golden years and maybe donations fear the change. but lets face it, this game is old af. just my two cents but i feel this is legit argument
atomic chicken
Posts: 499

Re: 2 months here, my impression

Post by atomic chicken »

Got a better idea, put everyone’s armor and bows to 0/1 durability and don’t tell em, boom economy fixed
Vampire337
Posts: 47
Location: Cincinnati, Ohio

Re: 2 months here, my impression

Post by Vampire337 »

I always enjoy the views that the devs should just block what 90% of a group is doing because they themselves are not doing it. UO is too alive for how old it is; we need to piss off those what still play!
atomic chicken wrote: February 15th, 2021, 1:11 am Got a better idea, put everyone’s armor and bows to 0/1 durability and don’t tell em, boom economy fixed
*evil chuckle*
atomic chicken
Posts: 499

Re: 2 months here, my impression

Post by atomic chicken »

Vampire337 wrote: February 19th, 2021, 7:28 pm I always enjoy the views that the devs should just block what 90% of a group is doing because they themselves are not doing it. UO is too alive for how old it is; we need to piss off those what still play!
atomic chicken wrote: February 15th, 2021, 1:11 am Got a better idea, put everyone’s armor and bows to 0/1 durability and don’t tell em, boom economy fixed
*evil chuckle*
:]
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Calvin
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Location: UK

Re: 2 months here, my impression

Post by Calvin »

Vampire337 wrote: February 19th, 2021, 7:28 pm I always enjoy the views that the devs should just block what 90% of a group is doing because they themselves are not doing it. UO is too alive for how old it is; we need to piss off those what still play!
atomic chicken wrote: February 15th, 2021, 1:11 am Got a better idea, put everyone’s armor and bows to 0/1 durability and don’t tell em, boom economy fixed
*evil chuckle*
in ref to heartwood quest sry:

90% of the people are only doing it, because they have to.

if you make 1 thing clearly the best thing to do...

it's not like it's something people love. it's something they have to do to keep up. something which stops them doing other things, which they might enjoy.

... if i make it so as the only way to get food, is to punch yourself in the face, you might find that 100% of the population after a few years, are punching themselves in the face. that doesn't mean they like it.
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Calvin
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Location: UK

Re: 2 months here, my impression

Post by Calvin »

look it's really simple, when you win, your brain gives you dopamine.

it depends if you want the game to be a constant dopamine drip, or something with depth.

... these people are actually addicted to heartwood. like, not even metaphorically. literally.

it's one of my personal pet hates tbh.. that games have become candy crush instead of chess.



...

you mighta noticed 99% of people play sampire. 99% of pvpers are mage.

this is literally called "not being balanced"

its all within the devs control if they wanted to fix it. but they are scared to alienate the current face punchers.
it is a tricky situation tbh. it's what happens when you let a new norm take over because you've left it so long, it becomes much harder to correct.

all it's really doing is getting rid of any new players that dont wanna conform to script grinding.
you cant just say "everyone likes it" after you've gotten rid of anyone that doesn't.

... well you can. but.. well.. i suppose you'll just have a smaller more niche population.. and a variety of tribes doing it their way... urg..


“You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time”.”
― John Lydgate

gotta be tolerant i guess
Vampire337
Posts: 47
Location: Cincinnati, Ohio

Re: 2 months here, my impression

Post by Vampire337 »

I have a hard time imagining that this game is so enticing that people are doing something tantamount to "punching themselves in the face" here. It's a game. There's an automated way to get lots of money, so people do that. Particularly when they don't need any skill to copy MB's script and feed the bot. And if I'm honest, it's not even the most efficient way to make money here. I do much better with my custom mining scripts. They're tweaked to be pretty efficient, and there's far less RNG to producing material to sell at whatever the market wants to pay. If people don't like the fully-automated grind they don't need to actively manage, they would get tired of it and leave. We are effectively the least efficient bitcoin mining operation I can imagine.

I do understand most people play a Sampire, and yes it's because the game is unbalanced toward a class which probably should never have existed in Sosaria. I don't follow PvP because I wasn't fond of it on OSI servers, and now that it's just scripts it's less enticing to me. But you are saying exactly as I've said before: the core UO game suffers from a lack of talent and investment. The UO storyline ran its course and they added content to fill interest for money. And the free servers are a labor of love, so I don't fault their devs for not being aggressive at reinventing a game even EA is milking as far as it can.
all it's really doing is getting rid of any new players that dont wanna conform to script grinding.
you cant just say "everyone likes it" after you've gotten rid of anyone that doesn't.

... well you can. but.. well.. i suppose you'll just have a smaller more niche population.. and a variety of tribes doing it their way... urg..
That was the point of my last post. People like to fly in, suggest that you deter most of the 'active' playerbase because who's just monitoring bots, because unattended play is the devil, even if it supplies what economy this beast has. And the truth is that if you did everything they asked, they're not likely to outlast the bot-watchers. I don't agree with this perspective, but I chuckle at its creative naivete. It would most likely kill the game unless it heralded a full revamp, and then Demise would be just like EA shards, where some people play the game and say it's great and the rest complain that "T2A was better" "ML was better" "SE was terribad", "gargoyles and imbuing is trash", "I want to ride a flying donkey demon", etc.
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Calvin
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Re: 2 months here, my impression

Post by Calvin »

Vampire337 wrote: February 19th, 2021, 11:36 pm If people don't like the fully-automated grind they don't need to actively manage, they would get tired of it and leave.
that is the problem, they did. now we only have the population that didn't leave, so to change it back to appeal to a wider population again is difficult.

Vampire337 wrote: February 19th, 2021, 11:36 pm he UO storyline ran its course and they added content to fill interest for money.
the storyline is just back story.. the actual present storyline, is us. that's the entire point of the game.. we make our own story.

like phil's auction tragedy. the great earthquake. the illshenar armour destructions. all sorts.
these are events in our story. the story of our world. a world you can be a part of. THAT, is the appeal.

that's what EA never understood.
Vampire337 wrote: February 19th, 2021, 11:36 pm That was the point of my last post. People like to fly in, suggest that you deter most of the 'active' playerbase because who's just monitoring bots, because unattended play is the devil, even if it supplies what economy this beast has. And the truth is that if you did everything they asked, they're not likely to outlast the bot-watchers. I don't agree with this perspective, but I chuckle at its creative naivete. It would most likely kill the game unless it heralded a full revamp, and then Demise would be just like EA shards, where some people play the game and say it's great and the rest complain that "T2A was better" "ML was better" "SE was terribad", "gargoyles and imbuing is trash", "I want to ride a flying donkey demon", etc.
you are right in a way. to change the game to accommodate these new people, would alienate the older people.

but it's also kinda missing the point. what those people are actually doing, is quitting, and telling you why they quit.
ya dont have to throw the baby out with the bathwater, you can take note of what their grievances are. you dont have to change the whole world to be what they want. but you can notice that it's a problem, and seek to mitigate it to some extent. maybe enough of an extent that the player wont leave. while not too much to make your current player leave... there's a word for it... it begins with a B... ;)


they're very cautious these days.. i dunno if it's a good thing, suppose maybe it is. back in the day they'd just change stuff and tell you to deal with it :lol:


im very tolerant lmao
i was complaining for like 10 years and didn't quit :lol:

still fkin complaining in a way rofl.
but still here. it is a thing, but it's not the end of the world.
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Calvin
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Location: UK

Re: 2 months here, my impression

Post by Calvin »

do you really think that getting rid of the HW quest, but allowing people to get the runic fletching kits in another way, would make people quit?

jesus, are people only playing to farm easy gold and do some pvp? :/

maybe.. some...

i understand taking away people's livelyhoods is a very bad move, but if that is the only decent way of making money in the game, we have a much bigger problem than i thought.
Vampire337
Posts: 47
Location: Cincinnati, Ohio

Re: 2 months here, my impression

Post by Vampire337 »

The same guy who said these people are on a literal dopamine drip, circles the wagons to ponder whether the people on said dopamine drip would quit if you took it away? Not claiming to be an expert on drugs, but I feel like you've answered your own question. :D

Truth is, no one *needs* heartwood. They just need it if they want to play the game like everyone currently does. If you don't have 10mil for a crimson cincture, you're just not playing on the "average" level. But if you just wanna casual trek through the gank squad at Doom and own & decorate a couple 18x18 houses, you don't need to fit the mold. You/they/we simply choose to because that's the game you're here for.

Honestly, I assume everyone who plays either bots Heartwood to feed their PvP guild or to feed their PvM guild. When you talk "the only decent way of making money", almost no one is building wealth manually. So the only ways folks find to be "decent" are automated, and right now the least effort to deploy is Heartwood. I don't think killing the Heartwood quest engine insta-kills Demise, but unless MB has a backup plan to release, I betcha the folks who man the bots won't remain long without it.

I'm not complaining, (yet). I enjoy the discussion, and I hope to find some way to plug in and help make something better.

Edit:
the storyline is just back story.. the actual present storyline, is us. that's the entire point of the game.. we make our own story.

like phil's auction tragedy. the great earthquake. the illshenar armour destructions. all sorts.
these are events in our story. the story of our world. a world you can be a part of. THAT, is the appeal.

that's what EA never understood.
On this I disagree. The playing through of the Sosarian world events was the draw. I killed Mondain. I made the Avatar an icon of virtue. I outsmarted the Guardian's jump puzzles in Pagan, and learned about the balance of virtues and vices and our shadow selves. I beat the crap out of some single player Ultima. Then to come into the world and play it from not-the-Avatar's perspective, and with swarms of other players, THAT was the golden age of Ultima. The walled fortress of Trinsic filled with undead scenario was probably the most fun UO ever was for me. The rest was managing whiny guilds of entitled newbies and demanding heavy hitters who were just looking for an excuse to leave. Player run events, towns, roleplay, that was all well and good when I was in my 20's and worked at McDonald's. Now I'm double that and have a big house and jobs and kids and a wife and I just do not got the patience for managing online people that I used to have.
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Calvin
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Re: 2 months here, my impression

Post by Calvin »

Vampire337 wrote: February 20th, 2021, 12:53 am The same guy who said these people are on a literal dopamine drip, circles the wagons to ponder whether the people on said dopamine drip would quit if you took it away? Not claiming to be an expert on drugs, but I feel like you've answered your own question. :D
... not really.. it's not like anyone that quits anything addictive then kills themselves...
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Calvin
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Re: 2 months here, my impression

Post by Calvin »

Vampire337 wrote: February 20th, 2021, 12:53 am
the storyline is just back story.. the actual present storyline, is us. that's the entire point of the game.. we make our own story.

like phil's auction tragedy. the great earthquake. the illshenar armour destructions. all sorts.
these are events in our story. the story of our world. a world you can be a part of. THAT, is the appeal.

that's what EA never understood.
On this I disagree. The playing through of the Sosarian world events was the draw. I killed Mondain. I made the Avatar an icon of virtue. I outsmarted the Guardian's jump puzzles in Pagan, and learned about the balance of virtues and vices and our shadow selves. I beat the crap out of some single player Ultima. Then to come into the world and play it from not-the-Avatar's perspective, and with swarms of other players, THAT was the golden age of Ultima. The walled fortress of Trinsic filled with undead scenario was probably the most fun UO ever was for me. The rest was managing whiny guilds of entitled newbies and demanding heavy hitters who were just looking for an excuse to leave. Player run events, towns, roleplay, that was all well and good when I was in my 20's and worked at McDonald's. Now I'm double that and have a big house and jobs and kids and a wife and I just do not got the patience for managing online people that I used to have.
this is interesting. i suppose maybe people play for the narrative. it's never been something i've ever played anything for really, so could just be overlooking it.

ultima was good.. but imo it was the freedom that made it the stand out game it was.. being able to kill anyone... being able to follow the banker home, kill them in their sleep, steal the key to the bank, loot it of all the gold, take the body to lord british and have him res it, then go back and deposite all the gold into your account. that sorta thing.

but to me it's the freedom that UO carried over much more than the narrative. but in an mmo, that freedom comes with the cost of letting the players define the world.

it kinda does in the single player as well, except it's all much more stage managed. bosses are singular, once killed they stay dead. the player can change the world, the closest wow ever came to this was letting you put onyxia's head on stormwind bridge. everything else was static and instanced - because it was essentially a single player game, just with co-op. uo is a true multiplayer, so you cant really rely on narrative, because you cant customize the world for every player. unless you instance it.

i remember when i first played second age, people lived as blacksmiths. like, that was their character, their job, their online world - being the blacksmith. that was the original plan of uo really, to make the NPCs, PCs. so you bought food from the player baker, iron from the player miner, weps from the player blacksmith. and in that capacity - yes, you could steal the blacksmiths stuff, or kill and loot the baker.

he removed the problem of having to instance the NPCs, by not having NPCs. obviously it didn't really pan out. :P

you know there's like tie fighters and moonbases in the original Ultima narrative right? :lol:

honestly i think the core of UO is solid gold. but i do think it would benefit from some modernizations, taking some pages out of the modern games book, with things like daily/weekly quests. an on rails intro/tutorial (which i think we have to some extent actually), perhaps *some* instances - again which we already have, that's what peerless are. there's probably a bunch of updates you could implement.

like, what if the daily quest required a party of 3+. what would that do?
what if the reward was like 7x something, hand in for something else.
whats the value of the big prize? now whats the value of the smaller things of which you need 7.
see, it would make players interact more, actually group up, just stuff like that.
and then oh! im having to group up a lot, well this guy is regularly on, and i group with him a lot, we're getting strats made up for the instance, maybe we should make a guild. see how it works?

how are you gonna macro grind something you can only do once a day and need a group of 3 for?
it's just an example, but do you see what i mean?

now that thing, does not require work, it requires time. how much time, does a rich person have, and how much time, does a poor person have? the same.

so how much, is this item worth?

some advancements are gimmiks, some are cash grabs, or ways to monetize things. but some, are actually good evolutions of the genre.
like have you played dune 2? it's an rts. you literally have to click move, then click the position. right click to move would help that game a lot.

(im trying not to post academic stuff, but the fact is, this is what the science is. they literally do things like test the average attention span, then aim gameplay to be that length. it's really more about the people than the game.)

sorry if i've been a bit short/confrontational, feelin a bit grumpy :stick:
Vampire337
Posts: 47
Location: Cincinnati, Ohio

Re: 2 months here, my impression

Post by Vampire337 »

Calvin wrote: February 20th, 2021, 1:19 am ultima was good.. but imo it was the freedom that made it the stand out game it was.. being able to kill anyone... being able to follow the banker home, kill them in their sleep, steal the key to the bank, loot it of all the gold, take the body to lord british and have him res it, then go back and deposite all the gold into your account. that sorta thing.
Ultima was just another homebrew generic RPG, made by a guy whose friends called him "British" because he was one of those goobs who picks up an accent just because. But by Ultima 4 Ultima became an explorative into "virtues". Money was left out all over but you couldn't take it. You could massacre anyone, but you shouldn't, etc. It was the beginning of a lot of concepts we still use in games today, the internal good vs evil and the motivation to do good rather than only get rich. D&D would later do well with many of these concepts in Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, et al.
Calvin wrote: February 20th, 2021, 1:19 am but to me it's the freedom that UO carried over much more than the narrative. but in an mmo, that freedom comes with the cost of letting the players define the world.
I refer to UO the first true MMORPG, which is factual, but the reality is it was just a beautiful client frontend on what was just another MUD. I was going to love it because I was already entrenched in their history. But it was the quintessential MMO, in the same way that Doom (or Wolfenstein 3D) was the FPS. But since defining the world happened in MUDs (and D&D campaigns) already, UO put makeup on the pig but it didn't invent that.
Calvin wrote: February 20th, 2021, 1:19 am it kinda does in the single player as well, except it's all much more stage managed. bosses are singular, once killed they stay dead. the player can change the world, the closest wow ever came to this was letting you put onyxia's head on stormwind bridge. everything else was static and instanced - because it was essentially a single player game, just with co-op. uo is a true multiplayer, so you cant really rely on narrative, because you cant customize the world for every player. unless you instance it.
Despite being HUGELY into Warcraft games and history, I never touched WoW. I had played enough UO to know that I threw away a fair chunk of my life in an MMO, and another MMO where I already knew ALL the backstory because I'd beat every game and expansion for hundreds of hours was not going to be conducive to me paying rent ever again. I did play GuildWars, and they did a beautiful job of instancing in what I played. It was hokey, but it let you play solo without getting ganked. UO's greatest strength and weakness were that you could get ganked pretty much everywhere. Adding Trammel "fixed" this, but broke its soul at the same time. You weren't meant to live in carebear land, even if you hated the reds for wasting your time and taking your stuff.

That being said, I think UO could be very story driven if someone wanted. I once drew up a pretty ambitious plan for how to do that with the RunUO engine: create a world where players exist in an age past. Every year or two add a new expansion which is the same world but expanded in size, new tech because its a hundred years in the future, and players can 'gate' one way into the future, where the godly players of ages past don't quite cut it with the new skill caps and loot tables. Every NPC has a routine, they gather and collect and sell and give quests for things they can't get themselves. It would be every bit as intensive as the original UO was dreamed up, but with 2020 era computing power (I run 2 R420 ESXi virtual hosts with an R720XD and around 30TB usable space, so it's not hard to throw together a 'cheap' system to host a startup from indefinitely). You could tier the instancing to eras, and let players choose in a semi-simultaneous universe what era they'll play in (likely multiple characters across ages, ofc). Then you can create world altering events in one age and have the results affect the next age. But no small feat for a devteam, so unless I get a team who wants to work for me, I won't see it happen.
Calvin wrote: February 20th, 2021, 1:19 am i remember when i first played second age, people lived as blacksmiths. like, that was their character, their job, their online world - being the blacksmith. that was the original plan of uo really, to make the NPCs, PCs. so you bought food from the player baker, iron from the player miner, weps from the player blacksmith. and in that capacity - yes, you could steal the blacksmiths stuff, or kill and loot the baker.

he removed the problem of having to instance the NPCs, by not having NPCs. obviously it didn't really pan out. :P
One could write up a psychology thesis on what makes people want to do what it is they do in multiplayer RPGs. Most just want to be the most impressive character in an online world to feel more important than they do IRL. A "life" you can win when you get home from an underwhelming job taking crap from people you hate. Some were content being the much-needed smith, but over time there were so many smiths that it wasn't so special, and the only thing OSI/EA offered for the longest time was faction rewards and rewards for continuing to pay the subscription fee (account age rewards). I won't say they killed their game, but they been milking quarters out those machines for a long time.
Calvin wrote: February 20th, 2021, 1:19 am you know there's like tie fighters and moonbases in the original Ultima narrative right? :lol:
I don't ever watch the UO intro video that I don't laugh and tell *somebody* that you never kill Mondain with that sword; you use a "blaster" like it's Star Wars because that was the best ranged weapon. :D Ultima 1 was the age of Ultima being just another homebrew PC RPG. Like the first Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen had to have a lot of fluff removed from the rest of the series when they made it an amazing 5-game epic. No one built a game thinking they were gonna need room to expand to many sequels.
Calvin wrote: February 20th, 2021, 1:19 am honestly i think the core of UO is solid gold. but i do think it would benefit from some modernizations, taking some pages out of the modern games book, with things like daily/weekly quests. an on rails intro/tutorial (which i think we have to some extent actually), perhaps *some* instances - again which we already have, that's what peerless are. there's probably a bunch of updates you could implement.
"Core" is a little ambiguous. The client is so dated, tho I wouldn't want to *lose* the classic look and feel, I think they need a proper mobile client before they can do dailies/weeklies. Expand to the real masses because being a PC client game, you're cornering out people with good hardware because your client is so tragically dated, and while it should run perfectly on anyone's iPhone it isn't compatible, and they'd fold bank if they could just get random people to try out UO as a mobile game. And I know for certain dailies & weeklies would render the game entirely unplayable to me, so while I know you're right it would work because that's how the formula of gaming as a business goes, I find myself angry to hear it said.

On the other hand, if by core you mean the core server side aspect to the game, that's also dated. It also needs a revamp without losing the old heart. And while RunUO is cute because it runs on C#, we're deep into the world of Docker containers being far more efficient than Windows VMs. There's plenty of room for improvement if someone really had the reigns of a dev team. Ultimately, I think you don't necessarily mean either of these, but you mean events and such. Which is the cheesiest of "improvements", and the most likely for a company like EA/Broadsword to bother implementing.
Calvin wrote: February 20th, 2021, 1:19 am like, what if the daily quest required a party of 3+. what would that do?
what if the reward was like 7x something, hand in for something else.
whats the value of the big prize? now whats the value of the smaller things of which you need 7.
see, it would make players interact more, actually group up, just stuff like that.
and then oh! im having to group up a lot, well this guy is regularly on, and i group with him a lot, we're getting strats made up for the instance, maybe we should make a guild. see how it works?

how are you gonna macro grind something you can only do once a day and need a group of 3 for?
it's just an example, but do you see what i mean?
I think I get the scenario. I think it would turn UO into something that's already done a dozen times in other games, and UO would stop being whatever it is now. Which is a shell of what it was, so maybe I'm just old and resisting change. Ultimately it would play out like BODs: People will find the most efficient way to jump through the hoops to get the required items in the cycles offered, and they'll repeat until they get the good stuff, pushing the supply & demand functionality until the low level rewards are trash left at banks and the high end stuff becomes so common that it's a new currency. It's ESO's dailies. I enjoyed daily grinding the thief guild quests for a few months, and selling the loot on vendors, which required you to be in a guild to sell, and if you didn't sell well they cut you so you had to be good. And it got tedious after a few months and I quit with sub time on the board. It was SOOOO tedious and horrible, despite the game being actually amazing.
Calvin wrote: February 20th, 2021, 1:19 am now that thing, does not require work, it requires time. how much time, does a rich person have, and how much time, does a poor person have? the same.

so how much, is this item worth?

some advancements are gimmiks, some are cash grabs, or ways to monetize things. but some, are actually good evolutions of the genre.
Time is money. There are restrictions to the conversion rate, but there always ends up being one. This is played on heavily in gaming development, and why rich people drop $$$$ on games to avoid waiting for timers. I'm slightly jealous that people found a way to make rich people pay money to do nothing more than skip timers in games.
Calvin wrote: February 20th, 2021, 1:19 am like have you played dune 2? it's an rts. you literally have to click move, then click the position. right click to move would help that game a lot.
I haven't played Dune 2.
Calvin wrote: February 20th, 2021, 1:19 am (im trying not to post academic stuff, but the fact is, this is what the science is. they literally do things like test the average attention span, then aim gameplay to be that length. it's really more about the people than the game.)
This is the root of all badness in gaming, from my perspective. PC gaming was fun when it was low tech and Richard Garriott or Peter Molyneaux could make the greatest things by hiring a team of hungry friends. Now it has become a world where AAA players dominate it because bean counters beat programmers into game release schedules *cough* Cyberpunk *cough*. Indie devs will eat so long as there's Hipsters who are too cool to pay for the latest Assassin's Creed because they want something that looks like Minecraft and PacMan had a weird pixelly baby. The rest is rinse-and-repeat mobile shovelware for the bored housewives. Gaming has become a sort of cynical caricature of itself, or else I'm just cynical because I miss the old ways.

It's hard for me to hate, because as an automation engineer, it is my life to mine data and improve systems. I should love the inherent efficiency in what they do, but it's like driving on the roads and seeing how terribly programmed traffic lights are. All I can do is hate the mediocrity. I miss the days when the game was the product, instead of the attention mining of the people. The bean counter says: Sure developers, *you're* telling a story with this game, but *we* paid for that story, so *we* have no attachment to it, and *we* need to pump in enough content for the sheep to feel full for the $120 including DLCs we're going to ask them to pay. And if *they* won't pay for the content, *you* get a resume stain. Just corporate bean counting, not the soul of making games as I once saw it playing out. :salt:
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Calvin
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Re: 2 months here, my impression

Post by Calvin »

Vampire337 wrote: February 20th, 2021, 3:14 am I refer to UO the first true MMORPG, which is factual, but the reality is it was just a beautiful client frontend on what was just another MUD. I was going to love it because I was already entrenched in their history. But it was the quintessential MMO, in the same way that Doom (or Wolfenstein 3D) was the FPS. But since defining the world happened in MUDs (and D&D campaigns) already, UO put makeup on the pig but it didn't invent that.
lemme read through and edit this reply, but i actually disagree with you here on the MUDs (multi-user dungeons). cos they were just dungeons really.. it is slightly before my time to be honest, but are we not talking about something along the lines of Eye of the Beholder or Bloodwytch?

i dont think UO is this at all... i suppose in the sense of the character, monsters, items... hmm. Doom actually invented FPS is why it is what it is. before Doom it was basically just mazerunner.. John Carmack pretty much invented the whole genre.

bloodwytch was such a good game..


Hired Guns as well.. are they MUDs... hmm, it's really not something i know a lot about tbh, you're going back to like BBS days.

"MUDs are nowadays mostly historical, however some still exist and are running. They were created to be played in a text mode on text-only terminals initially. Today many implement their own clients, however the mechanic remains the same: the whole interaction is text-only. Some implement ASCII-art to represent logos of the games and simplified maps."

ah right okay.. so text adventures with multiple users.. i dont get it. lol

bit before my time tbh, i'll have been about 5 when people were playing these :P
i started early, but not *that* early :lol:

honestly i dont think it has *that* much bearing on UO.. maybe inspired it cos RG played them i guess.. i mean what is it like, rooms with arrays of objects? it's not even object orientated programming :S
s'more like a text advanture made in basic :S
i must be missing something here... anyway, moving on.. lol
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Calvin
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Re: 2 months here, my impression

Post by Calvin »

Vampire337 wrote: February 20th, 2021, 3:14 am Despite being HUGELY into Warcraft games and history, I never touched WoW. I had played enough UO to know that I threw away a fair chunk of my life in an MMO, and another MMO where I already knew ALL the backstory because I'd beat every game and expansion for hundreds of hours was not going to be conducive to me paying rent ever again. I did play GuildWars, and they did a beautiful job of instancing in what I played. It was hokey, but it let you play solo without getting ganked. UO's greatest strength and weakness were that you could get ganked pretty much everywhere. Adding Trammel "fixed" this, but broke its soul at the same time. You weren't meant to live in carebear land, even if you hated the reds for wasting your time and taking your stuff.

That being said, I think UO could be very story driven if someone wanted. I once drew up a pretty ambitious plan for how to do that with the RunUO engine: create a world where players exist in an age past. Every year or two add a new expansion which is the same world but expanded in size, new tech because its a hundred years in the future, and players can 'gate' one way into the future, where the godly players of ages past don't quite cut it with the new skill caps and loot tables. Every NPC has a routine, they gather and collect and sell and give quests for things they can't get themselves. It would be every bit as intensive as the original UO was dreamed up, but with 2020 era computing power (I run 2 R420 ESXi virtual hosts with an R720XD and around 30TB usable space, so it's not hard to throw together a 'cheap' system to host a startup from indefinitely). You could tier the instancing to eras, and let players choose in a semi-simultaneous universe what era they'll play in (likely multiple characters across ages, ofc). Then you can create world altering events in one age and have the results affect the next age. But no small feat for a devteam, so unless I get a team who wants to work for me, I won't see it happen.
I'd played uo, in fact i was on demise when WoW was released lol.

when i went to uni a lot of people were playing WoW tho, i resisted for a while, cos i could see it wasn't UO, and it was in fact some travesty of an MMO where you couldn't drop things into the real world. but eventually i joined to play with uni mates. tbh, it was a frikkin brilliant game. insanely immersive, awesome community of like, everyone. million other things. i just wish everything haddn't copied it, because it was not a true mmo, and it killed the genre. the ride of WoW is fun, but it is a ride, and it does have an end. it's not replayable like UO, you consume the content, then you move to the next content; and the devs have a permanent job feeding the consumers. it was a solid *business* model. that was the problem as well.

Guildwars was more like Diablo 2. had this debate when it came out as well.. the town was basically your lobby, just a graphical lobby, but the whole world was instanced. that's how they managed to make it not have a subscription - cos there was no persistant world to need servers running it, everything was done either locally, or on a temporary server - like diablo 2.

"Adding Trammel "fixed" this, but broke its soul at the same time. You weren't meant to live in carebear land, even if you hated the reds for wasting your time and taking your stuff."

people in general, literally gave the guy no choice. it was the only way for the game to stay playable, and for all the systems other than the pvp one, to have a chance. might be something to do with games and teenage boys, thinking about it...

it actually makes me kinda sad, because it speaks volumes not about games, but about humanity; and i bet making tram was the last thing he ever wanted to do, but there was no choice, it's not a combat game really.. like 5% of the game is combat. but it was the only 5% these kids knew, and it destroyed the other 95%. so.. they had to take the toy away from them, makes any parent sad when your kid disappoints you like that innit ;P

your game idea is actually a very good one. it's not UO tho. you could make a total conversion mod in the UO engine, that could be this, and actually, the time travel and living in different eras thing, is a fantastic idea/mechanic. you'd end up with something like Looper... man that would be cool.

time travel in an mmo... pfff... that is a big door of posibilities, but yeah, not UO, so not on topic really.
... could change stuff in the past and effect the future era... it would take a lot of figuring out, but defo is a niche not explored.
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