#1 rule, Don't copy UO..... period...

I'm in agreement. But mostly because we are part of a large role-play community, and the other MMORPGs do not give us the ability to play together, unless we level together. And even if we all COULD, many wouldn't want to. Many of our community just like to socialize, role-play and decorate houses, they don't really want to level crunch. This is the first game that seems to offer us an alternative, an alternative we sorely need.

Lara

 

I scrounged most of my gear from the ground near banks when I started, a hobby I never really gave up. Through this I met my local merchants (I lived right outside of Umbra in Malas), there was a merchant row outside of town leading to Luna. I also hung out in Luna as I had a lot of friends there, and I met quite a few merchants there. I was never a crafter so thier services were important to me and it made for a better game world, it made it a more 'real' experience for me and them. It helped you want to play even if you weren't intrested in adventuring.

*I even ventured into merchanting, I had a male merchant dummy with his back to the street, in a tri-corner hat pink puffy pirate shirt and fancy vest and shoes holding a lantern, and he was not wearing pants. I named my store "A Fancy Lad's Booty~I got wood." I sold lumber of all grades. People would leave books in my inventory with comments thanking me for making them laugh...sometimes complaining. A local big merchant guy offered me a check for 2mil for the rights to the store and kept me on as a supplier for 20% of the lumber profit.
Those cool events would never have happened without "live merchanting".

 

There are certain things WoW did early on that were really great ideas.

Then, they started catering to the complainers and lazy people, and now you can practically play that game with your eyes closed.



You have auto-dungeon queues which always result in someone dying and going "uhhh. where is the dungeon even at.".

You have quest blips on your map, so you can just play connect the dots/find shortest path and run across a zone and gain XP while skipping all the flavor text.

Heck, you can even mouse over enemies and see if they drop what you need.


Why even play? The game's basically doing it all for you.


That being said, the WoW card game and figure tabletop game are pretty great.

 

WoW, I don't know where to start, I don't want to offend you, but you clearly don't know what you say.

UO has always been (and every game I've seen) an "Item based" game from it's very beginning. Let me ask you, what do you prefer? a dagger, broad sword, or kitana of vanquishing? UO had all these from day one. And of course if given the choice you would pick the best of the best, the vanquishing weapon, you would be a fool not to.

Lets try this example, I have 100 copper ingots (5 stacks of 20ea), I have learned the "market" and have sold many ingots for 5 a stack, but I go to the AH and there is two guys trying to get 100gold per stack, one guy selling for 50gold and the price just goes down to 20gold per stack, I try to sell mine for 10gold per stack and all the copper ingots just sit there no one else comes along to undercut me and my ingots come back to me, I look again and the same offerings are there, I go back to what I know sells and price mine for 5gold per stack. Almost instantly they sell, so I check to see if the buyer relists them and they don't, I would say the "free market" system is working great and basic economics says not to price gouge. You say that undercutting is bad, well you don't know a thing about it, sorry, it's called "compatition", free enterprise not "monopoly".

You say you want interaction, well I don't know of a single person who will sit in their house 24/7 just to interact with a buyer, I know I'm too busy for that, I got places to go, people to see, I could log off and balance my check book or eat dinner.. Lunna was just a vendor mall, most owners didn't even build a structure they just had a plot with wall to wall vendors and the ones that did have structure were guild houses, and they refused to sell to anyone out side their own "click", it was rather discusting running around trying to find any deals at all, they were all priced the same "outragous", rampid inflation thats the UO economy.

It may not be a challange to you, but I found it very competative, learning the "market" takes time and the market is always changing from day to day, sale to sale. I know many players will disagree with me, but they are only price gouging. The hardest thing for a seller is trying to guess what to price an item for, I read it on this board somewhere a guy said he bought a rare weapon then relisted it for 100 million and it sold, what he didn't say was that he ripped off some newbie and bought it for 1000 gold, what a nice guy, not. You don't see that with an AH.

I think that's what everyone is afraid of....

I would like to see every item in game offered on a royal vendor, priced by the game, if it sells the price goes up 1% if it sits there, the price drops until it does sell, let there be a limit on how much gold a player could accumulate, set it at 1 million. Let every item that spawns in the game be offer on the royal vendor. Let crafters make any item that spawns. Take pricing away from the players. What a novil idea. Lets have a poll. Am I joking or Am I serious? It would surely be different and never tried before.

 

I don't think "item based" means what you think it means. Were there magic weapons in UO? Sure. However, those weapons were very minimal and combat wasn't driven by them. Plus, in the years before they changed the weapons to have actual stats, the amount of Vanqs being dropped were also pretty minimal and the grand majority of players used weapons and armour that were crafted by smiths.

You just explained exactly why I believe they are terrible. If you consider competition and economics to be "undercut till it sells even if you take a massive loss"... well if it were a real business because you'd be out of business within a month.

Of course, let's consider the point that that the items you were selling were resources and didn't have any overhead apart from the time it took you to dig it up. Well what you've described is the cause of massive instability in the economic market. By undercutting you essentially drive the prices down to nothing which causes both a mass influx of buyers but resources dwindle because there is no point in spending the time to obtain them due to the time/value ratio. Why would I spend all my time mining when what I mine up is worth nothing?

However, none of this matters much if you're playing a game that is run mostly on a market of items that are uncraftable. For instance, the introduction of artifacts in UO pretty much made crafting weapons and armour pointless because they never sell due to the fact that they are so much weaker than other items and also have less benefits. The only exception was the occasional very rare "crafted with valorite runic hammer and was a 1/1,000 change of crafting it" and is actually comparable to an artifact weapon.

I don't know anyone that sat in a shop 24/7 either. I know people who spent the majority of the time in their shop when they were in game though such as the guy I mentioned in my little tale earlier. Why? Because he was a crafter and shopkeep. Some people don't care for dungeon crawling or questing. Those are the people who generally find their fun in being shop owners or house decorators. Also, Luna is a terrible example of the way UO worked. By that point, the game was so far gone from what it was that there was no point in having a shop as we covered earlier.

How is pricing an item hard? You look at the market, see what prices items sell for and there you go. Of course, we're need to consider the difference between an item based game and a player crafted market. When you look at later UO when you had all these stats to go by, sure, it was a little harder to price things out, but not impossible by any means once you learned what people wanted and how much they were paying for them. Artifacts had standard going rates for the most part so those were easy to price as did resources. I hardly see competitive prices as "price gouging".

As for the story... AH or not, that kind of scamming can happen in any game regardless of the selling mechanics. I've never heard of a game where someone bought a 100m weapon for 1000. Quite honestly, if there is that much gold floating in a game that a single person has that much, that tells me there is a lot of trouble in that games economy unless you have creatures that are dropping 30k per kill.

I don't think anyone is afraid, they simply understand how AH's are terrible.

If a system like that were implemented, you would have a revolt. It would mean there would be no free or player driven market. It would be, in essence, pointless to become a merchant or crafter at all. In fact, I would truly hope you're indeed joking.

The only thing I agree with there is to allow crafters to make any item within the game. I've been making that suggestion for years when games come out. Your other suggestion; a royal market that sells every item that spawns and has regulated pricing? That's a royal failure waiting to happen.

 

That's the same for any other MMO being marketed today. Take Neverwinter for example: you get a glittering path which guides you through the quest, even through a "maze"; combat is basically "hold down mouse button and wait 5 seconds"; your character auto-picks up most of the loot; traps are highlighted and visible miles ahead, plus they deal almost no damage; you get so many hit points that you only die if you really want to, plus a free healer companion at level 15 just in case you're completely suicidal; the game recommends you what you should wear, which weapons you sould use and so on.

The only "good" point is that gear doesn't make much difference, but I wouldn't call it a good thing in this case. Why? Because the reason why it does little difference is that the game is so easy that you can just run in with two rusty bread knives, hold down your mouse button and monsters will die after a while. The only difference is that they die a little bit faster if you've got better gear.

Anyway, I'm quite sure SotA won't be affected by any these.

 

Millions of people do. I never played it but it does have a very large following.

Does that make it a good game? Depends on your opinion.

But as I said before this game is shooting for a much smaller audience.

 

That's why I like it.
I like action games, not games where you have to research cheats on google and anal-ize statistics.
Dumb it down, I say. The dumber the better.
The real reason I'm not playing right now is because it costs 4000 gold to fly in panda-land, and I have a 90 who has to run everywhere and 2 85s who aren't even going in because I can't get up the funds. I don't play the AH and grinding dailys would take months, maybe longer.

*My 90 got from 85 to 90 by pet batteling but there's no money in that so it won't help with the flying licenses.

 

If this game becomes another hand holding wow clone, which will happen if a lot of people here get what they want, I'm out. That's for sure..
I have faith that it won't be, but some of the stuff I see people posting doesn't give too much hope to someone who wants something new, exciting and different.

 

A lot of people here want a lot of crazy things, and everyone expects something totally different it seems.
That's the bad thing about us all putting our money in and not knowing even exactly what we're paying for.
There will be a lot of un-happy people no mater how it goes.

I don't gamble in RL, but I'm willing to write this off as a gambling loss if it turns out not to my liking, what else can you do?
I payed for a life-time membership (along with my wife) for Star Trek On-line before release, and in my oppinion it sucked and was un-playable for me (she didn't like it much either). Sad because we are big fans and have been since childhood. We're fans of UO too, but this won't be nearly as disapointing as Star Trek was if worst comes to worst.

 

You have no idea what you're talking about.

By the way, Richard Garriot and co haven't been working on UO for at least 13 years at this point. The game you played is hardly UO as it was meant to be.

The "odds" should be against you succeeding. You should not be getting anything for nothing. Only the bold, the brave and the cunning rise above mediocrity. People botting and farming had nothing to do with your failure, you were responsible for your own failure, live up to it.


Maybe you should go back to WoW.

Psst. KGB doesn't only stand for that particular guild's name. There was a KGB on Chessy circa '99 as well, and it sure as hell didn't bear that silly name. Perhaps when you talk about a guild you should name it by name, not abreviation, unless you mean the KGB

 

All this talk about uo has given me an itch to open my account. I wonder if they have the balls to make uo free one day.

 

Don't feed the troll, people!

 

It is. Free downloads every where and free shards that are run imo better then the OSI shard was taken thats p2p.

 

Before Trammel was introduced, most players who had vanquishing weapons were too afraid to use them so player-crafted items were pretty much the standard. I know the only time I ever pulled out my vanq katana was after getting the server down message at night. That made combat very skill-based, rather than item-based, since most players were on a level playing field with regard to equipment.

 

@Mystic
Its clear you guys are talking about different ages of UO, except he has never played our age. Obviously there's more to it, but it's clear to most everyone by now.

I support ya man! You got a like from me for every post here

@sakuraba
Don't bother reactivating your account, the game is vastly different than it was 13+ years ago. And only for the worst. If you are feeling nostalgic play one of the T2A era player-run shards.

@Devoid
I dont think he's trolling... I think hes just... dumb

 

One of the things I think I loved most about UO. I sincerely hope it is similar in SotA some how.

I'm very much against magic weapons or armor, or at the very least if they exist I hope their effects are minimal.

 

Agreed, I do believe we are discussing different eras.

It's also apparent that my posts in this thread can come across as angry or offensive which really isn't my intetion. Emotions are hard to convert over text though rereading through some of them, I can certainly see how someone, especially someone new to the forums could take them in that way so I apologize Smoker, or anyone else, if that is the case as I certainly don't mean to offend and especially as someone whose job it is to seek out offending posts and moderate them, I need to be more careful about the things I post myself .

 

God said: ↑

So you like WoW because it's simplified?​

I'm the opposite. The reason why I stopped playing Diablo 3 and started playing Path of Exile is because PoE is NOT dumbed down the way D3 is. Reasonable complexity creates depth. Take that away and the game becomes overly shallow.

In terms of WoW, one of the big reasons why I ended up stopping for good was that it was clear that the game didn't just have the oddly placed cultural reference, but that the ENTIRE GAME was made up of nothing BUT cultural references. A few here and there are ok, making almost the entire game based on them got VERY old because it showed a lack of originality. Then to read just how much further dumbed down the game got just makes my final decision that much more final.

From the initial interviews, if you're looking for "dumbed down" you may be in the wrong place as RG stated a few times that he wants to bring back the idea of having the notepad at your side to keep track of things as you run into them without being hand-held by the game every step of the way.

 

By the way, Richard Garriot and co haven't been working on UO for at least 13 years at this point.------- Tell me something I didn't already know, I think even he got disgusted with it and quit too.

The game you played is hardly UO as it was meant to be.----- OOOOhhh, please that argument is long been beat to death. What "IS meant to be", is a Game that is entertaining and Highly profitable, not a "flash in the pan" and then die. And don't try and tell me UO is still running strong, EA will never shut the servers down, not even if there are zero players playing, the last 100 or so hold outs are only there for "bragging" rights, geezzzz....

The "odds" should be against you succeeding.----- Boring. I don't play to "fail".

You should not be getting anything for nothing.----- I never said it should be "free", but to jump through 5 Lotteries and then pay a Billion in Gold, is not my idea of having "fun".

Only the bold, the brave and the cunning rise above mediocrity.---- You sound like a PKer already, I hope you find the game you are looking for... or at lease a Gang to hang with on a street corner, shooting people as they drive by.

Maybe you should go back to WoW.----- I never left WoW, I left UO.