This is why our shard doesn't "feel" like T2A sometimes.

[Mikel123]

First off, people were clueless. Remember in 1999 we had just gotten away from Netscape Navigator for a couple years, and we were searching for stuff on ask.com or hotbot.com or something. Our only source of info was Stratics, and data/essays on there had about a 50/50 chance of being factually correct.

Second, the game was just starting to explode. I made my first character in late 1999, and I made him have something like 10 STR, 35 DEX, 10 INT and 50 Bowcraft / 50 Lumberjacking. My idea was to make bows for myself and become an archer. The first time I died in-game was to a dog. I had gotten restless with lumberjacking in the woods north of Britain, so I attacked a dog, thinking I could take it. Of course, with 0 swords skill and probably 15 STR by that time, I actually died fairly quickly. So even during 1999, most people you saw in-game were very new.

Third, the skill gain on our shard is much much much faster than OSI, for some skills. Take resist for example... here's a chart of someone's resist gains: http://web.archive.org/web/200003061213 ... tchart.htm If the link isn't working, in short it took him 276,000 gold in reagents to get to 96.5 resist. Here, it's probably 30k.

Fourth, there were far more players online. I mean, it was a rare occurrence to get a spawn of Skeletal Mages to yourself. I remember sharing a lich spawn between 4 people.

Fifth, the lag was still pretty bad even in 1999. And if it wasn't the servers lagging, it was your own connection lagging... or your sister picking up the phone and inadvertently killing your 56k connection when you were in Cyclops Valley about to recall with 4k on you.

So if you're surprised about why you can never kill someone, and duels always end in a draw until sudden death... it's partly because back in the day, almost no one had 100 resist. It would have cost close to 400k, which was a damn fortune back then, because of far less efficient farming (sharing with others), lag deaths, having to run all the way to a healer or an ankh to ressurect, then running to a bank to re-equip. And forget about monsters actually killing you... every time you lagged or lost connection and died, there goes your silver weapon too. And they were far less plentiful back then, since treasure maps were far more of a pain (no websites with precise locations, rune houses, etc) and there were really no widely used message boards to see who actually had something you could use for sale.

[Dagon]

when is all the "this is why it's not...." bashing going to stop? of course it's not T2A. it can be imitated as close as possible (as is stated on the website as the main goal!!) but it will NEVER be how it WAS.

nothing is ever how it was, doesn't matter if it's UO or anything else in life. nothing stays the same and will never return to being the same.

sorry you died to a dog, but you knew how to use your mouse right? you obviously approached the dog, so you should have been able to run away from it before you died (this still applies today and is accurate)

ive got no comment on resist, since i dont even remember what i had for resist back then.. but ok, so it's faster, and you're complaining ... why? if you want it to be slower, for yourself, join duke jones and do it without macroing.. that will make it slower for you.

not enough players ------ because realistically not many people WANT to play a 10 year old game that theyve won time and time again. it's all about the latest and greatest.. plus as far as gaming goes not a lot of people going to spend the countless hours playing like we do.. it's PAUSE - SAVE - TURN OFF - COME BACK LATER exactly where i left off with nothing else in the game changing while i was away. SORRY I MISSED THAT IDOC GUYS I HAD TO GO TO ....... life.

sorry things have gotten too easy for you and everyone else.. maybe you should find the new super hard multiplayer game and upgrade to a modern game.

[Watatsumi]

First off, people were clueless. Remember in 1999 we had just gotten away from Netscape Navigator for a couple years, and we were searching for stuff on ask.com or hotbot.com or something. Our only source of info was Stratics, and data/essays on there had about a 50/50 chance of being factually correct.

Second, the game was just starting to explode. I made my first character in late 1999, and I made him have something like 10 STR, 35 DEX, 10 INT and 50 Bowcraft / 50 Lumberjacking. My idea was to make bows for myself and become an archer. The first time I died in-game was to a dog. I had gotten restless with lumberjacking in the woods north of Britain, so I attacked a dog, thinking I could take it. Of course, with 0 swords skill and probably 15 STR by that time, I actually died fairly quickly. So even during 1999, most people you saw in-game were very new.

Third, the skill gain on our shard is much much much faster than OSI, for some skills. Take resist for example... here's a chart of someone's resist gains: http://web.archive.org/web/200003061213 ... tchart.htm If the link isn't working, in short it took him 276,000 gold in reagents to get to 96.5 resist. Here, it's probably 30k.

Fourth, there were far more players online. I mean, it was a rare occurrence to get a spawn of Skeletal Mages to yourself. I remember sharing a lich spawn between 4 people.

Fifth, the lag was still pretty bad even in 1999. And if it wasn't the servers lagging, it was your own connection lagging... or your sister picking up the phone and inadvertently killing your 56k connection when you were in Cyclops Valley about to recall with 4k on you.

So if you're surprised about why you can never kill someone, and duels always end in a draw until sudden death... it's partly because back in the day, almost no one had 100 resist. It would have cost close to 400k, which was a damn fortune back then, because of far less efficient farming (sharing with others), lag deaths, having to run all the way to a healer or an ankh to ressurect, then running to a bank to re-equip. And forget about monsters actually killing you... every time you lagged or lost connection and died, there goes your silver weapon too. And they were far less plentiful back then, since treasure maps were far more of a pain (no websites with precise locations, rune houses, etc) and there were really no widely used message boards to see who actually had something you could use for sale.

If you notice he included greater heal regs in his estimate for 112,000 gold. A lot of people gmed resist macroing in town thus not having to heal themselves but still gaining the resist. After they changed that, I would just have a friend bandage me over night while I casted on myself. With multiple clients running on UOSA of course we will just bandage ourselves instead of casting heal. Also it takes a lot more then 30k to gm resist on this server, not sure what your talking about.
I agree with you that lag did play a big part in duels in the T2A era. People that had cable back then, or said they had cable did seem to dominate the duel scene. Although on Pac some of the best duelers were 400+ ping dudes from Denmark. Think Baal was his name, he was also one of the only macer tanks that I would see duel in Deciet, but that guy was just a freak of nature.

[Mikel123]

when is all the "this is why it's not...." bashing going to stop? of course it's not T2A. it can be imitated as close as possible (as is stated on the website as the main goal!!) but it will NEVER be how it WAS.

nothing is ever how it was, doesn't matter if it's UO or anything else in life. nothing stays the same and will never return to being the same.

sorry you died to a dog, but you knew how to use your mouse right? you obviously approached the dog, so you should have been able to run away from it before you died (this still applies today and is accurate)

ive got no comment on resist, since i dont even remember what i had for resist back then.. but ok, so it's faster, and you're complaining ... why? if you want it to be slower, for yourself, join duke jones and do it without macroing.. that will make it slower for you.

not enough players ------ because realistically not many people WANT to play a 10 year old game that theyve won time and time again. it's all about the latest and greatest.. plus as far as gaming goes not a lot of people going to spend the countless hours playing like we do.. it's PAUSE - SAVE - TURN OFF - COME BACK LATER exactly where i left off with nothing else in the game changing while i was away. SORRY I MISSED THAT IDOC GUYS I HAD TO GO TO ....... life.

sorry things have gotten too easy for you and everyone else.. maybe you should find the new super hard multiplayer game and upgrade to a modern game.

Um... huh? You think I was complaining? I am far from bashing the shard... I love it here and fervently believe in the mission. This was just a bit of a reminder of things we've forgotten over the past 10 years.

[archaicsubrosa77]

It didn't sound like you were complaining you were just pointing out key facts.

[Hemperor]

Those are all valid points, however as with any decent discussion people will tell you to leave or stop complaining. From the tons of things I've read, resist gains seem far too easy as well as combats.

There are many stratics essays that tell you certain monsters to farm to gain combats at a certain point, it was a multiple month journey building your combats (albeit macroing helps) not a 6 hour nap.

Something worth noting; in the demo it lists an "advance rate" for all of the skills. There is only two different values it gives, which are either:
8000 2000 100
or
2000 500 25

2000 500 25 is on all of the "easier" useless skills (useless in the demo at least) such as all the lores, anatomy etc. Begging, peacemaking etc etc

8000 2000 100 is the value to Resist, Magery, Blacksmithy, taming and just about everything you would assume to be a hard skill (and are known to be). 8000 2000 100 is also the value of every combat skill.

[benny-]

Definitely some valid points, but I tend to disagree with the attitude that "times have changed..."

Yes, there were more newbs back then, lag was a bigger issue and the shards had larger populations filling them, which all led to applied difficulty and increased interaction. But I'll always feel that the biggest differences between now and then are the inaccuracies that still exist here, no one can argue that the game is played anything like how it was played then and all of that is attributed to razor/multiclienting/afk macroing.

Im not going to get off on another one of my 10 paragraph rants about accuracy like I tend to do, but I will say that I think much of the different feel we have with this shard is attributed to the policies and systems that are used by about every single player here. In the big picture of it all, afk macroing affects the way the game is played more than skill gain rates....multiclienting creates far more issues than server lag...dunno, seems kindof ridiculous to ignore major changes between then and now and blame the different gameplay on lag, population and the age of the game. Just my thoughts.

[archaicsubrosa77]

From what I seen, back then UO had more magic...there was more social interaction then just hack and slash. There seemed to be more dialogue before and after engagement, rumours and stories were abound. It was like people actually lived in this world. They made their characters live and breathe.

There is a fraction of that here. It exists but its not the norm. We need to change that.

[Caswallon]

No on weapons skills, you could raise them pretty fast, if you went at it hardcore. Not 6 hours no but pretty quickly.

[Mikel123]

Something worth noting; in the demo it lists an "advance rate" for all of the skills. There is only two different values it gives, which are either:
8000 2000 100
or
2000 500 25

Do you have any idea what those numbers mean, quantitatively? That's pretty interesting.

[Hemperor]

Something worth noting; in the demo it lists an "advance rate" for all of the skills. There is only two different values it gives, which are either:
8000 2000 100
or
2000 500 25

Do you have any idea what those numbers mean, quantitatively? That's pretty interesting.

I don't know any specifics, but I think it's safe to assume "8000 2000 100" means slower gains in general. The three different numbers are probably the neophyte level, apprentive-expert and then master and up.

[Eulogy]

It would be interesting if these numbers represent rough uses per 1.0 gain at the certain skill levels.

[Hemperor]

I think it would be more like
if Random > (RandomDouble * AdvanceRate)
Gain skill
in a general sense, I'm sure it's actually nothing like that.

[Faust]

Those advancement rates were published on Stratics ages ago inside Skills, General - Specifics porotion too.

http://web.archive.org/web/199910130013 ... index.html

There is a SkillCurve variable that holds a static value of 250 associated with this generated file from OSI too. The advancement rates each are probably a third of the skill. For example, anatomy has an advancement rate of 2000 500 25 that represents 0.0 - 33.3 | 33.3 - 66.6 | 66.6 - 100. I'm sure the current value of the skill would have to play a role in these rates along with the skill pool that only allows so much to be gained in a server boundary between all players making it that much more harder the higher you get. I'm sure there are plenty of people that remember how skill gains tended to get harder in the 30's and close to the 70's making it highly plausible.

I know Batlin has done some extensive work on decoding the skill system in the demo. However, he has stated that it's a very complex system that is mind boggling. If he manages to ever break it down he definitely deserves a lot of credit.