Wandering guards for the criminals

UO still has around 100k players. Even today. Compare this to the 250K it had at it's peak, and that means it's still running at 40% capacity after 16 years. And this doesn't even count the tens of thousands of players that still play on the free shards. (I'm on one that still has the vanilla UO going.) I dare you to name another game with that kind of longevity. And there's a reason for that longevity. UO is, to this day, filling a niche that is otherwise unfilled. Another game like UO would go uncontested in that market, and would kill the original UO so EA can stop leaching off of it. (Mostly I just wanna hurt EA whenever possible... But that's just me.)

 

^-This.

I have to disagree here. If anything, I think UO showed precisely how letting the players control the world can make for an incredibly immersive and realistic RPG environment. Prior to the split of Felluca and Trammel, and prior to the absuridty of all the changes EA made to the game, the only flaw I would say I had with the "Players Policing" in UO was that it didn't go nearly far enough. Sure, vigilante justice got boring after awhile becuase 99% of the time, by the time a person managed to get a notification to you that they were being ganked, and you manged to get to the location, the PK was long gone with no way to track them down.

Now, give me a skillset that I can train up to track the guy down, across swamps and cities, and you've got a full-on "The Fugitive" situation on your hands. For me, that would never get boring (just as "fishing" for PKs never got boring for me in vanilla UO). Eventually the PK would either escape my tracking (he'd have to be smart enough not to make a bee-line for his house, and run through mob infested areas to keep me busy until his trail goes cold) or he'd get caught, at which point I'd kill him, take his ear, and turn it in for the bounty posted by the person he ganked. This would have a number of different advantages: For starters, no more camping a body and repeatedly killing them. You're just begging to be swarmed by bounty hunters within minutes. Next, no more PKing just for the sake of PKing. If it puts you on the run, you'll think twice before ganking an innocent person knowing that it'll stop the flow of whatever you're working on today. (Of course, dueling is another thing all together. No murder counts/bounties for losing a duel). Third, you have now made PKing more immersive and realistic, and actually FUN. A game of cat and mouse where as the PK, you're on the run trying to outwit your hunters... Or perhaps even draw them into a trap to kill them yourself? And finally, you've created a system where those who WISH to focus on the PK part of the game (PKs themselves, and bounty hunters) are now drawn to each other, and drawn away from the innocent players who like the "danger" of a PvP world, but might prefer to just tend their gardens.

Make it so multiple people can get the "bounty" request on the same PK, and a significantly high enough bounty will set an entire posse after the PK (I would also notify the PK every time a new hunter is coming after him, so he knows who he's running from). This chase would be an amazing part of the game, and would make the game police itself in an incredibly fun way.

 

Ooooo, just thought of this, too:
Include your tamed pets in the hunt. Train them to track humans, too, so once they've "got the scent" they can help find people when their tracks go cold, or when they're obscured (like in a big city). So here's what that would do to your skill trees:
Let's pretend like in original UO you had 700 total skill points to spend, and each skill could max at 100. So if you've maxed your human tracking, find hidden, human magic-tracking, and bounty-hunter skills. So you've already capped out 400 of your 700 points, leaving you a paltry 300 left to make you ACTUALLY able to fight the guy when you find him. You'll probably need to dump those into some resistances, armor, and attacks. This leaves you zero points for animal lore or animal taming, or animal training, so you're certainly not going to go out and get that bloodhound on your own... So you'll have to either buy him from someone who has tamed and trained it to be a tracker (suppose pets had their own skill trees with, like, 300 skill points to spend?) or you'll have to hire a guy that does nothing but tracks people for a living, and he'll lead you to him... (If I remember, you had to have at least some rudimentary animal skills in order to even have a pet in UO). While the bounty hunter MAY easily find the guy on his own, the tracking animal would significantly increase those odds.

Would also be cool if the pets weren't controllable characters like they are in EVERY other game. In every game that has pets, they're a tool. No different than a wand, or a sword. Just another tool you use in your day-to-day. What if pets had personalities and stats of their own? Where you could tell them to attack, but you didn't TRAIN them to attack, or not be scared of battle. You yell, "Attack!" and he runs with his tail between his legs and pees in a corner. Or maybe even runs off and is never seen again, because your "animal control" skill or whatever isn't high enough.

 

It's realistic, sure. It's also great when it works because you feel like what you're doing really matters...

However, interest tends to taper off. Having a sturdy playerbase of players that are interested in being Judge Dredd isn't guaranteed. Once that group starts to disappear, things go south very quickly. What you're left with are people who go 'HOLY CRAP WHERE DID ALL THE LYNCH MOBS GO.' as they run in terror because they suddenly aren't as safe as they got used to being.



What worked initially when the game was a new thing eventually gets old. People get tired of their beloved, immersive game being realistic in the worst sense: It feels like work.


If you get on UO now and go run around Felucca, it's a trainwreck.

 

>UO still has around 100k players. Even today.

d-does it?

So much this!
Call RG Immediately!

 

Felucca was a trainwreck THE DAY it was released. I remember this all too well, and it was specifically the reason I quit playing UO all together back then. A simple study on the psychology of the players would have predicted the inevitable result of the Trammel/Felluca split (though to be fair, those studies didn't exist then).

Basically, you have three kinds of players. The "gank anybody, har-har it's fun to gank noobs that can't fight back" type, the "I think games should be 100% rainbows and candy, and I should only be able to be ganked if I choose to" type, and then the rest that fall somewhere in the middle. These "middle" players are neither PKs, or pansies. They want to play a game that DOES run the risk of them getting ganked occasionally by a PK, where there IS some risk involved, but not a situation that's so oppressive that it's simply no fun to play any more because every few steps they're getting ganked by a heavily geared 10 year old that has nothing to fear because there's zero repurcussions. Obviously, I fall into this "middle" group.

The polarization of Felluca and Trammel did the inevitable. The ubar-ganks flooded Felluca, making it impossible to even play in that environment, and the candy-coated Trammel felt like a giant daycare. There was no longer a "middle ground" for those players that fell in the middle. And there hasn't been one since. This same polarization is seen in every MMO out there, where you're either walking around with a diaper and a binky, or you're on a PvP server where you can look forward to dying a few dozen times a day, so the deaths have minimal impact.

In the original UO, dying wasn't common, but when it did happen, it sucked. There are PLENTY of games out there (and by plenty, I mean every single other game out there) that has the bases covered for the two extremes. I wish upon a star that at some point a game will be created that will be for those of us in the "middle." Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this will be that game, either.

 

This sounds cool, but only when the pet gets within a certain range of the culprit. The pet can't sniff out the target from half a world away. Maybe the pet has to be able to reference the sent to something, like tracks at the scene of the crime?

 

Oh definitely. The way I picture it in my head is there would be physical "footprints" on the ground that "age." Only people with the appropriate "human tracking" skill levels could "see" these footprints (they'd glow or something, with their brightness being related to their age). So you could be hoofing it tracking these footprints trying to catch the guy. If the guy's smart, he'll run through mob infested areas, stealthily dodging the mobs, so when you come through suddenly you're having to fight mobs as the tracks continue to fade out. When you've lost the trail, you can get your pet to "sniff out" the residual trail that you can no longer see, and the pet will sniff the area you point to (where the old footprints were) and then start running towards the next available visible footprints, assuming the trail hasn't gotten so cold they can't "smell" it anymore. Basically, it would just extend the amount of time you'd be able to track the guy.

There would be other things the guy could do to more rapidly "age" his footprints too. For instance, if you gave him a "tread lightly" skill, then depending on his skill level, his tracks would fade x% faster. Maybe at a certain level, he gains an ability (with a cooldown) that allows him to walk a short distance leaving no tracks at all. In this case, he may have walked a short way away, hidden in shadows, waited for the cooldown, walked a little further, etc. So as the tracker, his tracks just stop. Your magic skill shows he didn't port out or log off, so you know he's either close, or you'll be able to find his trail again by spreading out and searching for the tracks. Now would also be a good time to use your pet to see if you can sniff him out just in case he's nearby hiding.

SOO much could be done with this with some realitively simple to code skillsets.

 

Don't forget scent bombs. Head into a major populace area, pour some peppermint oil on the ground where everyone will walk through it, and make sure you do too. Suddenly those tracking by scent have fifty criscrossing trails to track, and they all smell exactly the same. Bye bye, pooch.

 

Really wish there was a double-like option.

I've put a whole write-up on the idea here:
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/ability-to-hunt-track-other-players.3154/

 

Original idea credit (far as *I* know) to Sir Terry Pratchett, I'm just a dedicated reader.

 

^.^

 

Hardly surprising, given the quality of the graphics and the interface. Given the competition from current MMOs, I'm surprised UO has as many subscribers as that. The SotA 3 month demo is more engaging.

 

This idea extends to PKs and their pets as well, right?

 

Actually there were, for example this one from 1996, and thus from even before UO was released:
http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm
While MMOs were new at the time, MUDs had the same kind of issue, and they had been the object of study by a few researchers for some time already.

I'm not sure players in that "middle" are common, which might be why games for them are rare.

BTW, ever tried UO's Siege Perilous shards? They seem to have rules much closer to pre-trammel UO than the regular shards, so they might be what you want. I believe Owain can vouch for them.

 

Actually, the new graphics update and interface overhaul are the best thing about the new game.

The problem mostly lies with the content. It's empty. The Gargoyle city doesn't seem very alive, there's still nothing exciting to do, and the biggest concern I have when I get on is figuring out which dumb imbuing ingredient I'd like to go farm to generate money to go buy more crap to stick in my house.

They were redoing all of the original 8 dungeons, but kind of dropped the ball on how they play out. Despise has you dragging a pet around to fight that you then take into some goofy battle.


The best part is Shame, but once you've pounded your way to the bottom and realize all they did was jack the monster's stats up, it's not that fun.

 

tl;dr - uo died giving birth to trammel

 

A skill is a skill. What you use it for is up to you. ;D

 

I guess we got the notion from the fact that Richard created that play style as a viable character type in his game. In many cultures magic is considered 'evil' as well. Should mages not expect a fair shake in this game?
Now yes, there will be some in game implications and consequences of actions (like in UO), but it will not be punished to the point of which so many of you want. If it was, all the 'real' pvp'ers won't be interested, and then the rest of you pve'ers will end up with just another boring game.

 

Which one? AFAIK in most of his games RG made being "evil" fairly punishing, and even for UO the initial expectation was that most players would be on the side of "good" and "criminal" behavior would be limited and rare (the fact this wasn't what happened is one of the main reasons Trammel was added to the game).

BTW, "viable" doesn't need to be easy or rewarding. IMHO the game should be tuned to make criminal "careers" as hard and rewarding as "legal" ones. Which means, for example, that a robber that spends two hours hounding victims as part of a small band of criminals should expect to get roughly as much reward as someone that spends two hours on a dungeon with a group of friends, when adjusted for the success rate.

Given that PvP is optional, I believe most PvE players will never expose themselves to PvP anyway. Sincerely, for "us pve'ers", I don't think not having any PvP in the game as a whole would make the game any worse.

Which leaves the whole PvP aspect in an interesting conundrum: given that PvE players can just stay out of PvP, without extra effort or consequences, how do you tune the PvP in order to get more than just the most bloodthirsty PvPers to show up? How do you tune it up to still be fun for PvP players while attracting the kind of less hardcore PvPer, and also PvE players looking for some extra risk, given that the game won't force those players to remain available for PvP?

In other words, this game starts with something very similar to Trammel built in. If SotA's equivalent to Felucca is as harsh as the UO one, expect to see player segregation based on PvP in SotA similar to what UO has in it's Felucca / Trammel divide, in which case I hope you like how UO's Felucca currently feels. So perhaps it's worthwhile to make this game's "Felucca" less harsh in order to attract the less hardcore players.