POT Choice to remove Single Player Online Mode

That happens for a lot of things.... like trying to fix everything with a YubiKey.

 

Then obviously you bought the town with the risk that the town could be a complete failure. You took a bigger risk than most others since most people don't mind about SPO, while you think it will 'destroy' your town. Basically you are saying that if you don't get your way then you've wasted thousands of dollars.

 

They have talked about making some pots full loot. That is a variation. How does that differ from any other variation?

 

Why can't people on these forums just disagree and not take it personally? I don't take it personally when people disagree with my ideas, I only take it personally when people attack me personally. I'm sorry Jatvardur that I don't agree with your ideas about crowd sourcing security. I haven't even posted in that thread for weeks. Do you think maybe you can let it go and just accept the fact that we disagree?

Now back to our regularly scheduled OP.

 

Baron, if you want to talk to the devs and not deal with people on the forums, just send booze or deliver it in person to port. You get all kinds of stuff then.

 

Some of your comments were directly personal. The indication of that is when I used one of your exact phrases and got modded plus a stern comment (from a mod via PM: it was deemed as a personal attack. What does that tell you?). I asked for reasonable discussion. You didn't bother. Reap what you sow I guess.

 

Again, I don't make personal attacks and I don't take attacks on my ideas personally. That's why moderation happens the way that it does.

Feel free to attack my ideas as much as you like, that's good for healthy discussion.

 

A moderator deemed it to be true. An apology would nice.

 

I'll be happy to continue this conversation in a PM.

 

^

Nothing more to add. Would be great to see you admit error, at least once.


(even though I gave a public apology to Drocis in another thread he is refusing to do so publicly here. A mark of character. Nice).

 

While I understand your concerns, implied or otherwise of the SPO , and the monetary issue as well; I believe the confusion, is a matter of perception. What you have perceived as a legitimate concern in the implementation of your concept of what your POT needs to function as a PVP Town, may or may not have been addressed accurately in a way you can commit to. As I understand the agreements , I believe we all have committed to thus far, nothing is yet "written in stone". The problem with your presentation of this matter is that you , nor I , have developing privileges. We , as I understand the process, can give input, and receive an occasional response, but unfortunately, if it is not what we would like hear, have no recourse but to abscond to the actual developers. While I commiserate completely with your opinions, which by the way are valid as I understand the PVP side of it , sometimes we must choose our battles gently, patience indeed , can be in this case, your very best friend.

 

Well said, I couldn't agree more.

What I have done here is pushed my idea out for public consumption and debate. Not because I'm trying to stir the pot, but because I legitimately want what's best for the game. I've followed this game from almost the very beginning, and I have complete faith that the developers will weigh my concern in due time and make a decision based on all the facts. But that day appears to be well over the horizon, and I do not expect a reply from the developers for some time.

So while my request is formally on my POT submission page, I feel the public discourse in this thread is helpful, at least to some degree. For one, it's clear that there are strong feelings on both sides of the issue, but it's also clear that I'm not in a silo asking for something that is completely unreasonable (based on a number of responses in this thread). So when the devs finally do decide to weigh the facts, I believe this thread supports my request well.

 

@Baron Drocis Fondorlatos If you really want to do something to benefit Rats Nest, then make sure you can access it from the Verdantis mainland. Someone mentioned in a previous thread that it was possible, but I failed miserably today to get there. I ran back and forth on the coastline hovering my cursor over the island, and one time the name Rats Nest did actually flash on screen for a fraction of a second, but I was moving when it happened so it was gone again before I could click, and I couldn't find the right spot to stand to get it back. I must have spent 10 minutes trying to highlight the island so I could click on it. I guarantee that you will have neither single player nor multi player visitors if no one can reach the island

 

What you should really do is push for the inability to ban from home or make homes private. If you want "real" PvP as you have put it previously........do that.

 

Thanks for the feedback.

I'm totally with you on this. Rats Nest is actually accessible from the Verdantis coastline, however it's very tricky to find. I've complained (requested) a fix to this several times, and the developers have made some adjustments but not yet to my preference that the path be easy to find (read: there's a boat that takes you to Rats Nest from the shoreline). I believe we'll get that in time.

Because there are so many "connection" issues currently, and because I plan to use a future unbuilt template for Rats Nest, I've been trying very hard not to pressure the development team right now. I have a lot of faith that over the next 3 to 6 months we'll have everything in order, it's just going to take some patience.

In the meantime, I can tell you that in order to reach Rats Nest from the Verdantis coastline, you must turn the camera angle slightly and be northeast of Westend (the NPC town next to the boat that takes you to Verdantis Shardfall). You can see the location in the screen shot below.

Please also note that Rats Nest is now but a shell of what it was in R22 and what I envision it to be in the future. Because I'm spending so much of my playing time grinding, I just haven't had the ability to also rebuild the entire town. I'm currently planning on rebuilding the town once I have a better template to work with (and that may not happen for months).

I actually had to put in a bug fix request because the POT of hwaesong is creating a large footprint around my island that makes you click on it instead of Rats Nest.

 

For the sake of argument I'm going to tell you how I see "real pvp" in this context. We may disagree, which is fine.

I believe that PVP at its core is really just a fun game between consenting players. This is similar to the types of games we played when we were kids:

King of the Hill
Hide and Seek
Tag
Cops and Robbers
etc...

There are clear rules in these games. There are clear ways to win and lose. But when we go home at night, kids do not break into our rooms and say "tag you're it!". The point I'm making here is that PVP is a similar type of game that's not meant to be played 24 hours a day. However, from a roleplaying standpoint, it should be available 24 hours a day, and it should be meaningful when it occurs. That's why I support players having a type of "home base" where they can regroup, collect their thoughts, and not be on "high alert" every second they're logged into the game.

Now before you say something about SPO providing that. Please remember that I'm comparing PVP to kids games where players don't get to "play the game" in another instance where they can't be tagged, they automatically become king of the hill, they don't have to hide because they can't be found, or they "win" because there are no robbers or there are no cops to prove otherwise. The difference between being able to lock yourself away inside your house and skipping through the scene in SPO are measurably large.

For one, if you are locked away in your house, you'll have to travel through the scene to get in and out. This is where the consenting game begins and ends in a pvp zone.

 

I truly love PVP for loot or to keep others off "my" spawns/resources etc.. but the meaning of PVP in a POT escapes me. Why would I even live there? Why should I go there? Just for PVPs sake is not really fun for long. They really should flesh out the shardfall idea and work on having a good risk vs. reward system to merge PVE and PVP. Seperation of the two, was the easy lazy way out.

 

I relate to what you are saying. Get home from a long day of adventuring, ready to kick back by the fireplace in your house and listen to a new wax recording of 'Rule Britannia', and wham!!! You get ganked by a thief in the shadows of your home? That sounds kinda awful.

Yet at the same time, enabling PVP in towns does a lot more than that. It allows POTs to be used as 'arenas' where the town owner can (somewhat) control participation, unlike in a shardfall. Enabling PVP in towns brings guild wars to life in a new way - suddenly a guild war is not just in some random scene, but it is brought as a siege on your homeland. Enabling PVP in towns can also help give a POT scene - which is otherwise fairly stagnant - a sense of being alive, that the woods around the house really are dangerous. And then there is the thrill of reading the weekly report of thieves caught stealing from the Rat's Nest governor and being hunted for it. These things result in more edge of the seat gaming potential than a POT otherwise might offer if it was just a static scene.

 

These are great questions, and I can't answer them as of yet because I really don't know what kind of support PVP will have in this game. I'm taking a big chance that the creators of UO PVP will try their best to support SOTA PVP as best they can.

I think the fact that we're getting pickpocketing in EP1 is a good sign that there's going to be more to PVP in SOTA than we may have suspected based on current testing.

As Rats Nest is concerned, I believe that there can be a merger between hardcore fear for your life pvp, and roleplaying. I believe that middle ground will involved a heavy dose of NPC guards and the right supporting mechanics to make PVP meaningful and risk vs. reward appropriate. I could write for hours how I'd do it. But that's not worth a whole lot.

So instead I'm planning on working collaboratively with the development team whenever they say they're ready to talk about the actual development of Rats Nest.

 

I like the spirit of your post, but Rats Nest will not work like an "arena" or have laws that say "no stealing".

Rats Nest only has two laws. Pay your taxes on time and don't attack the Rats Nest Governor (me). Anything else is fair game.

The reason I chose this approach is that I wanted the city to be a place of real danger, but I also wanted people to organically seek to organize and vie for power within its walls. I have no real interest in policing the residents of Rats Nest. I actually think that the people that live there will be so tough that they will have no problem policing themselves. I believe "gangs" may form, and some guilds might make it their home. I believe over time these groups will reach an understanding with each other and there will be times of peace and times of massive instability. But the whole thing will amount to historic and meaningful events that can't be found in other areas of the game.

That said, I do plan to do my best to provide an area of the city that can be used for trade. I don't plan to profit off of this personally, I just think it would be cool to have a shady trade district where players can meet and talk without thinking they're going to be stabbed in the back the moment they visit a vendor. To accomplish this, I've decided not to have NPC shops selling junk that players are perfectly capable of selling themselves. I've decide not to have public vendors and instead only have private vendors. And I'm planning on having as many NPC guards as possible.

Will it work? There's no way to know for sure. I already have plenty of people telling me I'm an idiot that spent tons of wasted money. But I'm looking forward to showing them they're wrong, or at least trying my best to take this idea as far as the community and the developers will support it.

Wish us luck!