My little nephew forgot to lock the table down!

Hello.

During the waiting time for SotA i decided to show my little nephew how nice Ultima Online was.
We joined 2 months ago a free-shard that recreated the pre trammel time.

So basically the paradise time for all you PvP and PK supporters.

My nephew (14) invested alot if time with me to build up a nice decorated house. He is new to the game. As we are separated 15000 miles and with 9 hours time difference it was a very nice way feeling connected.

Yesterday he did a major mistake. He was hunted from PK and ran into our house . I just had changed it to a vendor house and explained
him the importance of locking the tables to protect all behind it. I had used already all lockable options.
Unfortunatly he did not understand that the PK could watch him from outside unlocking the tables and he also unlocked the most valuable chest with weapons worth 500 000 gold. The Pk surprised him and killed my unexperienced nephew. All his PK friends came with gates and they looted all items in the house. The made jokes about him and resurrected and killed him again and again before he could enter the house and ban them. Why humiliate someone. It is just a game. Calling him stupid and teasing him.

Basically he called me yesterday at 3 in the morning full of anger.


I am angry at myself introducing the so called golden times of Ultima Online to him. And feel ashamed afterwards of the way the other players acted.

We got a fun game for a family over 2 month ruined in less then 30 minutes.

I just learned my lesson and hope that the Developers of SotA protect us players from such set backs.

I thought i share this, because to many of the PvP fans of early UO make the time only sound like paradise. But a lot of players had to deal with too hard set backs. Some even game breaking. And i just got reminded the hard way.

 

Been there. I made almost the exact same mistake. Learned from it and now I will be more careful for the rest of my gaming career. Hopefully he shrugs it off as a lesson learned, and that one bad mishap won't deter your nephew from joining us in the new world. For every bad person I met in UO I met 3 who I would call friend.

And as always, Trust No One.

 

Some players shrug, start anew, and rebuild. Some players just leave the game never to return. I believe, though, that the second kind is more numerous.

BTW, before someone raises the aspect of players having to learn to deal with setbacks: far more than knowing how to deal with setbacks, this relates with what the player finds fun. Being able to deal with losses and setbacks, and being able to still have fun while dealing with them, are very different things, and the having fun part is not something that can be learned.

 

In order for the game to last, and not be subject to massive revision, it will have to be stable.

In order for the game to be stable, it will have to be able to both attract and retain a sizable player base who find it's current incarnation to be desirable.

Events like this demonstrate perfectly what the flaw with FORCED OPEN PvP is. OPTIONAL PvP doesn't do this. Even when the option is set at login and cannot be changed until logout, it doesn't do THIS, because the player who experiences this would know that he CHOSE to log in to OPEN PvP.

Events like this are directly responsible for a huge number of potential players abandoning UO, or never coming to it in the first place. Those players, and the economy they represent, both in and out of game (think subscriptions and game sales), will find OTHER places to go, and not ask for any of our approval or advice, if SotA forces this kind of experience on them. Note, FORCES.

If SotA has options, like the slider, that can be set so that this is the world I play in, and this kind of thing can and does happen to me, I won't mind. BECAUSE IT WAS MY CHOICE. But if instead something I'm unaware of causes this without my knowledge, my permission, my intention: If an event like this happens in my gaming experience without me having or being aware of the choice, I will mind. At that point, it will matter less to me WHY it happened, than what I can do to FIX it. The difference between it being a setting I missed and it being a malicious hacking event that compromised my server, the difference between a game glitch and a friend pulling an April Fools day prank, will be irrelevant to me. What I will care about is regaining control over my voluntary entertainment hobby. If I cannot regain that control IN the game, I can always regain that control by CHANGING games. That latter option would represent SotA failing to retain membership. If that happened to a lot of people all at once, it could destroy the game.

I think that my reaction there is very mainstream.

 

That is a touching post Myrcella. Its one thing for a grown adult to experience that, but for a 14 year old to have to go through getting murdered in his own house, robbed, looted, res-killed, ganked, and verbally insulted is the equivalent of virtual ****. In some ways, I've always struggled to take cyber bullying seriously, but that story definitely makes things more real.

 

Yeah, I have no idea why you'd design a game which actually rewards that kind of behavior. Lineage2 was a fairly hard core, PvP friendly game, but the only people who dropped loot were PKs, towns were off limits to PvP, and storage wasn't touchable.

 

I wonder how many 12 year old PKs there were in UO?

 

By listening to general chat....all of them? hehe

 

Yea UO is not a easy game, it takes more then a couple months to get good at it, I hope he keeps trying.
Maybe SotA does need to ease todays gamers into scenarios like this so they understand what they are getting into.
Start off with losing maybe a few items then all your items, then losing your companion, then your boat and then house or whatever.
Yes still allow people to play modes where they don't lose anything but maybe a scale to move on and compete with harder penalties.

 

Nice sob story. You knew what UO was like prior to intorducing him to this, I've seen your posts. I guess you should have taken into account today's fragile youth before you introducing them to evil PKs, UO is no fruit ninja.

Have no fear though, the magicpvpsliderbarthingy(TM) will solve everyone's problems. Myself, I'm going to select the Fu11 L3wt option with a side nub rings and a bacon sundae. Mmm perfect, BECAUASE THAT IS MY CHOICE and THATS the world I want to PLAY IN.

Oops, something appears to be wrong with my keyboard... I'm not yelling, I promise...

 

Update on the happenings:

Some very nice players heard what happend.
They aproached my nephew and me and right away started helping us ingame.
They took my nephew and me on a tour to a jungle with 2 tamers with nightmares and 4 dragons in our company. They hunted 1 hour zyclops and told us we should loot and take all magic items.

And i got a lama and he a oystard to ride!
We both had alot of fun. Now my nephew told me of a blacksmith called smithy who is teaching him how to set up his bag so it is almost impossible to steal anything from him. And they will make a house tour explaining all the tricks how to secure himself perfectly!

That i must say gave him back the fun very very fast and i myself am very impressed.

This is great lesson showing always players around to help if you are in trouble. Happy this is now turning out to a positiv experience


What also the SotA team can learn from this:

If you have a strong friendly player community the more they will balance out on theirself to keep it fun for all.

Hard to influence. But if i look at out current SoTA community i have a very good feeling!



Myrcella

 

If I had a white cat I would name it "Midnight". If I had a toon that was a blacksmith I would name him "Miller" or "Fisher" but never "Smith" or "Smithy", but that's just me.

 

Actually i agree with you. Will change to a trammel including shard. Options enough.

Should have done it from the start

 

Great story, and one of the reason people are so against PvP and open loot. Those PK'ers probably went on to complete a quest to save a churches stolen donations. Those PK'ers are a prime example of how kids dont know how to RP.

I doubt they were playing the role of terrorist, or the role of murdering theifs. They probably just happened to see an opportunity and took it... then griefed your nephew.

This is what I talk about when I say I love open loot and open PvP but, the system needs to RP back to the players. Want to be a murderer? Then get hunted by deadly rangers, not being allowed into towns for supplies, Vendors dont want to sell to you, Guards attack you and players can "free" kill you for cash. Murdering thief’s in the middle ages would be living in the caves of hill sides.

"There is a generation of gamers that do not know what RP means thanks to bad games like WoW"

I hope your nephew is not deterred. Look at this as an opportunity to explain to him what RPing is, that those kids were probably not RPing and Lord British is going to save us all.

 

Was actually the reason for this thread to point out that PvP and full loot is something horrible? What is questionable in this story is how OP could suggest a 14 year old to play a game that is rated mature +17?

http://www.esrb.org/ratings/search....Publisher=Ultima Online Blackthorne's Revenge

And where are your statistics that people are against PvP and full loot?

I believe most of the ones that follow SOTA and is looking forward to play the game is actually in favor of consensual open PvP and full loot.

I agree though with consequences for being a murderer.

 

Let me start by saying that I'm not a fan of "early UO". I thought it was a poorly designed game. So much so, that after a month or two after release I never played again.

I'm not following SotA because I thought UO was something wonderful and fantastic, it wasn't. I had played a lot of MUD's that far out did what UO had going on, and they were more mature in their design. That said, UO was the first and best graphical game available at the time, I just had higher standards and didn't want to put up with the kind of thing you described in your post above.

However, I love PVP and I don't want to play a game that doesn't have it. For example, I've never in my life even considered playing WOW or Everquest. Neither of those games have PVP (not really).

So one thing to keep in mind is that PVP is not the cause of your nephew's struggles, poor game design is. The way UO (and all other games) have been made, there's simply too much risk versus too little reward.

 

Based on the millions of people that play games without it (or where it's so watered down that it doesn't really count as actual PVP anymore) that's a generally accepted fact that this point.

 

First off, only 3 versions of Utima Online were rated Mature the rest were rated Teen. Second, the ESRB does not rate online interactions, and these ratings are only based on static content in the game. As such, that statement is really off topic because the OP's story about the griefing action provided by the online interactions have nothing to do with the game rating by the ESRB.

Lastly, they rating is a guide for parents. The OP has the right to decide what games are appropriate for their children, and I am sure "May be ganked by anti-social bullies" was not on the ESRB rating descriptor.

 

I believe that the silent majority following SotA is PvEers.

 

Statistic? I dont think I gave any to be held to. You sound defensive BTW.