Need help with Math - Housing

Hi all.

Some of you are veterans of Ulitma Online.

I have a question currently bugging me.

How many Player houses overall did a Ultima Online Shard have.
How many Player houses did all Ultima Online official shards have togehter when most Players did Play the game.

thought i find some reference in the Internet. failed.

I was just wondering what the difference of the Options to have Houses will be compared to
SoTa with 1 Shard and Hex System compared to
UO with only 1 big map and many Shards. ( forgot how many they had. 20?)

I slowly am not sure anymore if the Shard System back then realy had so many more housing Options.

 

It's totally an apples to oranges comparison. Knowing the answer to this question wouldn't be any benefit.

For one thing, the number of houses per shard in UO depended very much on the sizes of houses people put down. Since players were free to place houses wherever they would fit, a player placing a castle would effectively block a boatload of small houses. In SotA, conversely, there will be a set number of lots, and each lot can for sure accommodate at least one house.

Different shards also had different levels of activity, meaning on some shards it was always fairly easy to find a spot at least for a small house while on other shards it was next to impossible. Since the shards were separate in this way, it made no difference at all to players on a busy shard whether there were spots open on a not-so-busy shard. It's not like each landmass was accessible to players between shards.

UO (especially in the early days) also had a very different real estate dynamic. Houses changed hands very frequently. In the early days it was even possible (and fairly easy) to steal a house! Oh, the humanity!

Lastly, SotA's hex structure means that Portalarium can add lots at any time even without expanding the actual world. Just take a hex, give it a once-over, and fix it up good as a new village. Voila! More lots! This was not possible in UO because the world was persistent and not instanced. Modifying the UO landscape in such a way would have meant lots of work for the developers and cross-server changes. Not good mojo, mon.

Oh, and we also have no idea how many people will actually play SotA. That's kind of important to deciding how big a deal X number of lots is.

 

Thank you. Thought they must have had known back then how many small houses did fit on the map.

 

I really doubt anyone measured it. Even if you were calculating for a given house size, it would have been pretty tough to make an accurate guess because of the way geography affected house placement. There were lots of areas, for example, where it looked like you could put down a house just fine, but the system wouldn't let you because the area was slightly inclined, for example, or maybe there was a small but immovable rock there. I doubt anyone could even give a ballpark since placement opportunities were so irregular.

 

I might give it a shot and PM Darkstarr. If anyone should have a clue. Then him

 

I don't think they did. In the beginning you could place houses on things like stumps and stuff which was buggy at best and then over time they removed it so calculating lots from shard to shard was next to impossible, and the available space depended on how hard players were willing to try to put one there and when.

 

Shroud of the Avatar, Episode 1, is slated to be 128x128 or 16384 hexes.
Ultima Online, at peek subuscribers had approximately 250,000 subscribers.
If Shroud of the Avatar, Episode 1, achieved the same live of subscribership, and each and every one of them (worst case scenario for housing, and not likely to be approachable) that would be 15.25 lots per hex.

With even a holdfast being able to have lots for 3 dozen accounts or so, I don't believe it's going to be a problem.
And, episodes 2 through 5 will each add landmasses equivalent to episode 1, or greater.

 

For what it's worth, when UO had about 200,000 players total, on Pacific both trammel and felucca were completely full. Thinking this was around 2001-2004 era. In Trammel first came out I had a sandstone patio house, it was the biggest one I could find a spot for. There were still plenty of "homeless" people, but most of them co-owned houses for storage purposes. I don't know about other servers. And like Lord Trenyc pointed out, due to varations in housing sizes, you could either have 1 castle or 20 small houses. So they could say it could support 15,000 houses per server, but only 5,000 if the largest possible houses were used. and those numbers are probably way off, likely around 3,000-5,000 was the average number of houses per server. The land mass back then was fairly small. How many servers were there in 2003? around 15? These numbers are just pure guesses. Likely not too helpful.

 

Myrcello throws the calculator into the ocean. He walks over to his fruit bascet and grabs a apple and a orange.

Sometimes just eat and do not compare he says to himself.
He takes a big bite of both and enjoys the intresting taste.

Thank you all for trying to help. Deep bow.

 

Don't forget that UO expanded their housing placing area by every X of years decrease the things that made placing impossible "You cannot place due to this being uneven" or what that message was. I remember OSI advertising that.

 

Yes, and even now there are "improperly" placed houses left from that time. I thought I read somewhere that owners still have to refresh these houses, while all the properly placed ones now auto-refresh as long as you pay your monthly fee. I'm on Great Lakes and placing used to be impossible, where now recently I dropped an 18x18 not far outside of Malas. Only took 15 years, but I finally got something larger than a shack. lol

Oh, but I hear almost every day that a keep in Fel is about to fall down.