Why is this game still tied to Levels?

I swapped weapons to one i have no skill in and the low level bandits took me down to half health in roughly 10 seconds, I didnt lower my dex or anything all i did was change weapons.

I went to try it with the newbie zone wolves and spiders and they couldn't hardly hit me. Im unable to find someone with high Blind Shot so far so i havent been able to get my dex lowered to test it but its looking like at level 64, the newbie wolves and spiders in solace bridge are not a threat, but the bandits i go to to make money and gain xp as a lvl 1 guys do still hurt me at a noteable rate, tho i can kill them in fewer hits because of my skills

 

Fair enough. I have my dexterity at 33 (subterfuge dexterity innate locked at level 45). I don't think strength is not that relevant, but it is around 40, a little higher with armor. While these are not exactly beginner figures, they are nothing to write home about. I have deliberately kept them relatively modest.

Exercise in absurdity part 2 (picnic with my little arachnid friends) was done naked and with no weapon equipped. With damage resistance and avoidance both at around 1, the DPS was of course slightly higher. So I allowed only 4 friends to participate, but allowed slightly more time for this one. I had ham, bread, ale and fruits, my arachnid friends had me. We all had fun. Results from both picnics:

First picnic (self-crafted armor on and weapon equipped, dmgAvoid 9 dmgResist 17, 3-8 small wolf spiders)
Seconds: 4061
Total damage received: 3944 DPS: 0.97
Hits: 2649 Misses: 8895 HitPct: 29.00%

Second picnic (naked, no weapon equipped, dmgAvoid 1 dmgResist 1.26, 4 small wolf spiders)
Seconds: 6008
Total damage received: 10340 DPS: 1.72
Hits: 2853 Misses: 10750 HitPct: 26.00%

There should be nothing surprising or unexpected with these results. And I remain under the impression that level difference is the factor that is really relevant.

Verifying this should be relatively easy: Train dexterity up to around 30-35 when the character level is still on the low side. Go to North Valeway (or a similar place with abundant supply of eager little arachnid helpers). Have a picnic with them - or at least try to have one.

 

Uhm. Why the debate. Chris has said it works both ways.
So again that feeling that suddenly things aren't challenging anymore comes from adventure level. The shift is that you can hit them while they hit you less.
Which produces a very similar effect as gating and make being high level avatars more boring.

 

Exactly... the adventurer level comes from skill levels basically it should just be an abstraction layer, but it somehow factors in the equation.

Of course we can abstract even more and say the disparity should be smaller but thats not the only issue.

The game being built with that abstraction layer so blunt makes it less fun because everything is tainted with that gating formula and you can see that, you can feel that, however you want to call it its extremely distracting and ruins the replay value of some scenes.

To me its just another bad mechanism that divides the playerbase trying to match them based upon levels instead of ingenuous combination of skills, just like the way the server matches you with supposedly "similar" players based upon an abstract calculation and sometimes leaves you alone in an instance while the "main" instance isn't even full.

Its something that works in games where "to each his own" is the law... like WoW, the next player could care less about what you do. Rather Ultimas taught us the values of collaboration and virtue (sacrifice, compassion, valor) and the model should flow along those lines.

 

Thank you captain obvious

 

You're welcome General OT

 

I had the same results as helm. It doesnt really bother me much tho because those thigns are the absolute bottom of the food chain and are pretty easy even if you're new. Most of the game i still have to watch my back in and im fairly close to the top.

I dont think the argument that UO didnt gate really holds up because a newbie player with no skills couldnt go into destard and expect to kill something. They needed to have some degree of skill first.
Likewise, a high level player coudl stand there and let mongbats beat on them all day, and they would never die

 

hahaha, I rofld

 

Hmm that is not exactly so... an ingenuous group of two players could use a tactic to 1 - aggro the mob and manage to survive with potions 2- use AoE spells and or poisoned weapons and or archery to actually defeat the foe.

You didn't see the situation where something was impossible because they are not in your level range, I have seen people exploit the bad AI for sure, but thats not what I'm talking about of course.

Mongbats did indeed after EA changed the rules do nothing, but previously you didn't want to even crash for 7 minutes at a moongate because 2 mongbats could actually do you.

Was there room for improvement in UO ? Sure... is there room for improvement in SotA, sure... that is why we're having this thread

Lets not forget that many of the devs have MADE UO, and we're already using many, many of the things they invented in the current title sometimes for nostalgia alone. So here we're merely saying that they forgot a quite important detail that led people together in the past.

These days people get angry if they can't solo everything in the game, in UO most of the time you couldn't solo everything (in ultima you had companions), the goal was getting people to collaborate and use their combined strengths.

 

im not seeing where you cant do that here. If a newbie archer in UO shot arrows at a ancient wyrm, they would miss almsot every time, and i think his health would have regenerated faster than you coudl damage him unless you had a whole bunch of newbie archers shooting at him

 

Sure, that is EA's UO... after the gear started to make differences and you could raise your skills to legendary level because people like to be superman Then they had to make the creature skills way over 120 to make sure there was still a challenge for people with overpowered gear (which became more important than skills).

No improvement of AI, no added effects and skill combinations... really EA did the worse job possible, I wouldn't use that as an example.

I'm talking about the intention of the dev team when they made the game.

Sure a dragon could be more than 7x gm, and have boosted stats, but you could still wound it and as you said, many new players could band up together and get him the curve was a parabolic function not an exponential like we see here.

Don't tell me you don't see the difference please, just look... there are creatures I can never even hit, that never happened in the original vision for UO.

Also another detail you seem to overlook is the fact you used intelligence skills like eval int and anatomy to judge the creature. Again not based upon levels and quantity of skulls.

So you could go all around destard and say, oh this dragon too powerful, lets skip it. This one looks good, lets try to use our blade spirits slash paralyze slash poison tactic.

And then you realised he had too high magery, because he would cure way too fast, ok lets find a yet weaker wyrm. There was none ? come back tomorrow someone might have cleared the dragons... or :

It was organic, and often led to players stepping out of the dungeon and look for more people to join their party, etc. We got this dragon to half health please join with us fast we can get back to it before it heals too much !

Again nowhere I said it didn't work, its just how its implemented (without enough skills to cover variety) that is not aligned with the vision.

We were told not to expect new skills, even thieving is supposedly pushed back to ep.2... so what I'm seeing here is an opportunity to do better with what we already have.

 

But i was talking about somewhere around the tiem T2A came out. I had to have range to try to take out really hard stuff as a newbie because they would kill me super fast if i used anything melee range, an ancient wyrm woudl 1 shot kill a new player and the arrows i shot at him almsot always missed. By the time Ilshnaer came out, ancient wyrms were alot easier for me to take on alone as a warrior.

Im seeing the same thign in SotA, because your hit chance on any creature is never 0, no matter what your level is.

 

Many new players can band together to kill high level stuff in SotA Im willing to bet. I havent tried, but a lvl 1-5 player can solo kill a lvl 20-30 monster, and i think 30 levels above your level is the msot your hit chance will decrease. And your hit chance is never less han your crit chance, so if your melee, you can switch from like, a lognsword to a dagger and your hit chance will increase. and i think spells are only blocked by dodge and Block.

 

Sure, but you're talking about the biggest monster in the game at that point, a monster thats not meant to be killed really. There were many like this in UO that could one hit kill you and thats why they led us to collaborate and combine skills in an ingenuous way.

Now in SotA, I will have to try again in the light of your observations, but last time I tried to team up with a few people around level 30-40 we had trouble even landing one hit on an elder wolf, while earlier I could solo those creatures.

Perhaps its been reajusted I will try again. Attenwood said this was by design however, probably the elder wolves all had high stats but its still a wolf and I'm still a magical avatar. I don't even THINK about attacking a dragon or a phoenix until my skills are very high, obviously.

Its the general impression it gives that is counterintuitive. 4 quite grown avatars can't get rid of a wolf by ingenuity, we have to boost our dps and hit chance.

This is not Ultima in any way...

 

The game is so far away from UO and Ultima that it is disturbing.

 

Can you name some similarities?

Why is that disturbing?
I can see some pros and the obvious cons to having levels