Darkstarr Mia ?

I suspect the original vision for the game had more emphasis on offline play but development just didn't allow for it. A bit of wishful thinking.

I only really made it to one event but I didn't really find it all that special to the point that it didn't make any story sense. It was really just a mass dragon fest. I fully recognize that a lot of people don't care for story and just want a good time and that's fine. It's just not as fun for me personally. If I was planning a massive dragon attack I would have a lot of story build up to explain why a billion dragons are suddenly showing up at some random town in the middle of the desert. That was one thing that was does reasonably well in early UO events. Trinsic had plenty of story build up. It's the fact that we (on Pac) actually won but it didn't make any difference that really killed it for me. We were told our actions mattered but we weren't supposed to be able to win. Except we did. I actually can't help but wonder now if anyone on the staff even noticed. Did they even pay attention and wonder why so many players were left standing at the end?

At any rate.. if I were GMing here.. it would be a long succession of smaller story driven events leading up to larger ones. You go around to the different active RP groups in the game.. get involved in their stories and build a scenario around them that ties them together into a larger plot for good or ill. Of course, last time I was doing something like that I had access to admin/dev tools so I could build my own villains. Harassing players with surprise mob spawns in always fun too. (Provided you don't overdo it and kill them off right away.. let them struggle for a bit and decide to fight or flee.. always entertaining).

 

I couldn't agree with your sentiment here, more. The story, lore and quests are what I care about most.

 

originally I wanted to see the sieges if not cleared end up in the towns with npc's and vendors all running around with bad guys chasing them until you clear the town then the siege. I think that would have been what it should have been

 

Not happy with the completely bypassable sieges either Sieges were supposed to be a direct consequence of having devotional shrines in a village. It's one thing to be able to bypass control points - nuetralizing Sieges completely takes away one of the few major point of uniqueness SOTA has.

 

I've always had a very different view on how control points should work. Their implementation was always too simplistic for me. They never seemed right.. or even something you could call a control point since there was never anything they 'controlled'. There was never any meaning to doing them beyond an XP grind. That's not a control point to me and having played Tabula Rasa it's not what I expected them to be. In TR when you held a control point you got access to vendors and fast travel for as long as you held it. In Sota, I always thought the overworld gates should be open in the very least if some players held it. I think that alone would've gotten more players interested in doing them. It would've been an even better incentive for NPCs prices on items to drop or some other effect in the towns while the point was being held. But even players going through a control point in a different instance still had to get their way through normally which was always disappointing to me.

As for sieges.. ending the siege never truly ended a siege. You could leave and come right back and start over from scratch. At first, I felt like I wanted to do them but the instant I realized it was nothing more than an XP grind I had no effect on I lost all interest in them. I keep telling myself I will eventually go hunt the cabalists but I've yet to get around to it.. though I should be able to take a few of them on now.

Anyhow, I think we're pretty far off topic now.