If not Trammel, then what?

[EVeee]

A post that I made last night got me thinking about this today and wondering if there were really any good alternatives to Trammel....

Yes, we're all here because Trammel sucked. This goes much deeper than that and I'd like to move past that knee-jerk reaction right here in the beginning.

Like I said in the other thread, I played in T2A. Started in early '99. I know how it was. Hard as hell to figure out what was going on. You didn't research the game and memorize game guides before playing; you bought the game and fired it up and THEN tried to figure everything out. Tough as hell to build skills - on purpose. OSI wanted people to macro attended, and who had unlimited free time and no life whatsoever to do that? But forcing people to do it reduced bandwidth and forced people to log in frequently - the game demanded loads of your time and this creates obsession/"stickiness". They wanted you to have a reason to keep logging in, they wanted you to keep reaching for more and grinding countless hours away. But they didn't have a clue how things were eventually going to play out.

I don't know what it was like to start before '99. I'm not saying that it was easier earlier on because it very well might not have been. But in a way it was differemt. I know that people who started in 1999 not only faced the problems of learning the game and building characters, but also the huge problem of All The Players Who Started Earlier. It seems obvious that OSI didn't realize so many players were going to consider PKing the "endgame" of UO. It was available as an option but it became the entire point for many people. You ran mule characters until you could build and fund a badass PK and then that's what you did with 95% of the rest of your time online. Because killing monsters forever just doesn't give you the same 'kick'. And there was no counterbalance from the good guys - veteran players who didn't PK became merchants with vendor houses and crafted and muled away the time. They stood around town banks talking and showing off their masks and sandals. They weren't gearing up their Lords and Ladies and sallying forth into dungeons to cleanse the world of reds, save the newbs, and kill more dragons. If you PvMed it was because you were poor and you HAD to or you were one of those oddballs who never got tired of it. So the PKs mostly had their way with the new player population.

Because you couldn't macro unattended and because it took a forever (literally) to GM almost any skill, new players went running off into the world with half-assed and even quarter-assed characters who were barely ready for PvM let alone PvP. People wanted to play, not build skills for months on end without having any fun. So I'm not exaggerating in the least when I say that two veteran PKs would drop a group of seven newer players, quickly and often. And nowhere was safe. There were SO many people playing that reds could (and did) hang out ANYWHERE and expect to see some blues to kill before long. It wasn't just about the dungeons, although they were constantly occupied by PKs. They scouted mountains looking for miners. They ran around the woods west of Vesper looking for lumberjacks and rune-less fools.

Me, I broke down and bought a veteran account off of Ebay. It was either that or quit for me, and I didn't want to quit. I knew I could enjoy the game but I also realized I was getting nowhere fast with my new account. I got my ore and wood looted more often than I made it to a bank with it and the few times I'd had successful dungeon expeditions the group was so large that my cut was 2 gold more than useless. Fortunately I resold the account just before Trammel got rolling, but that's not the point. The point is that I had the average started-in-1999 player experience and in a lot of ways it really sucked. If you didn't know some powerful established people, you were going to get beat down a lot on your way up and you paid OSI for the privilege of that slow abuse month after month.

Now you can say "crybabies", "waa waa", whatever, but OSI is a business. They weren't about to tell newer players "Suck it up or quit, you pansy-asses". Every single person represents more revenue and so they don't want anyone quitting. I don't believe that the situation for all new players was necessarily at the breaking point right then and there, but once you saw what was going on it wasn't too hard to figure out that it was only going to get worse. The newer players who DID stick it out and succeed would follow the same trends as the earlier players; eventually the world would become too glutted with full-time PKs for newbs to do anything but get their butts beat and quit. And it probably wasn't far off.... the game had only been up and running for about a year and a half when I started and it was already pretty rough. Two years in - Trammel was born.

So if you're still with me at this point - if you understand that OSI had to figure out some way of breaking the trend - then what else do you think they could have done besides Trammel? They had to figure out a way to attract new players and get them to stay and what was happening already accomplished the exact opposite. You couldn't just ask vet players to "be nice". You couldn't just tell new players to "deal with it". So what then? I hated the idea of Trammel but to be honest I haven't been able to think of one good alternative to it that would have accomplished what OSI needed at the time.

[Magus]

Thanks for the good read very well thought out.

[Colin]

Good post and well thought out but as a small counter, CCP (and the EVE community) basically tells new players to "deal with or quit" and it works for them. Different game and different times I know.

[Braden]

Can I get a copy of the Cliff's notes or TL;DR notes please?

[EVeee]

Can I get a copy of the Cliff's notes or TL;DR notes please?

Assuming that you're serious -

OSI in 1999 needed a way to attract and keep new players for $$$. "Join and get owned by full-time PK veterans" wasn't working, surprisingly.
Telling older players to play nice - not an option. Telling newer players to deal with it or quit - not a viable business option. Thus Trammel. But like the title says, if not Trammel then what else could they have done?

[Wulver]

The ones who created Trammel were the ones whose sole purpose in Ultima Online was to be a GM nuisance. I don't feel all PKs created Trammel, but the ones who abused their power over new players did. Why do they need to kill the same miner 10 times?

I loved to pvp, it was awesome, but never had a red character and I always stayed in Felucca when it split in two.

Reds kill the easy blue, reds love it, so they stay. Blues hate it, they quit... either way it was turning into a ghost town.

Higher restrictions on killing players, maybe after they are 3x gm minimum they could be attacked?

[Hochete]

Good post and some interesting thoughts.

I also think that external pressure from other games on the horizon probably influenced OSI's decision. Back around the time UO:R launched, games like DAoC were just around the corner. The 'new breed' of MMO was aimed at softening the sharp edges of games like UO and EQ at the time, and surely OSI felt external pressure to bring their own game in line, or face losing newer players to new MMOs and end up with a community full of only PKers.

The big problem with Trammal was simple: segregation. Without new players to pray on, PKs die out, without PKs to fear/play with, new players get bored and die out. UO's main selling point was the fact it had a real ecosystem going on, and tramm/fel destroyed that eco system by removing the single biggest factor that made the game sticky: community.

But it's a good question - what else could be done that wouldn't have had the same effect? To be honest, I don't think there's anything. The reason UO was so good was because it was entirely original, it had no rules to go by so it made its own. The second competitors come along and start making new rules, games are forced to adapt to survive (we still see this today). Like a person jumping off a building because they want to be like a bird, this 'adapt to survive' instinct/fear of game devs is what leads to games doing things that are entirely against their genetics, and is ultimately what causes their downfall.

[Samorite]

maybe you can activate fell option ?

or if you murder a set amount of times your auto fell then a red ?

all grays are fell activated

just a thought....

[the bazookas]

Good read... I personally think you are correct as far as Trammel attracting more customers. However I would be very interested to see how "staying the course" without Trammel would have fared in the long run; do you think over time, people would play other MMO's and realize that the freedom only available in the pre-Trammel UO experience is well worth the "cost" of being open to attack? I can only speculate, but somehow I think that if OSI left the freedom in UO, that it may have been a better business decision in the long run... but who knows? But still, in the short-run (at the very least) Trammel was a great business decision.

I wish that I had played on Siege Perilous--that seemed like a very interesting shard. Having to choose very carefully what your role in the world will be (no alt PKs, etc), and also being more accountable for what you do sounds like it would be quite the experience. Obviously OSI couldn't "revert" back to that kind of situation, but I wonder how it would have been if all shards started out that way.

I also wonder what might have happened if they had limited the scope of Trammel to be something accessible only for a short period of time, and/or something limited in scope to a "training ground", where you can farm and train your characters in peace, but the reward-to-time ratio is much lower. It just seems like copying a care-bear version of the entire world was overboard, and encouraged people to live solely in care-bear land (which really damages the free mechanics of the game that make it so great). However, since a lot of people probably preferred full-time care-bear land experience (at least at the time), I imagine many of OSI's customers would have been very disappointed with a small cordoned off care-bear land area. ImaNewbie put it best http://imanewbie.com/imatoons/ima98.shtml:

[Daemonne]

3X GM etc would fail due to the fact that people would sit at 99.9 x3 hehe

I would suggest a time limit on newly created characters to get as many skill points worked up as possible.

What does it take now for macroed and non-macroed skill gains to GM?
Let's break it down to even just the survivability skills as crafter skills can be done in safety.

Take the amount of time it takes to non-macro skills such as Weapon skills/Magery and its accompanying damage increasing skills; Healing; maybe Taming (count the time it takes to work 3 main skills per character?) if they were grinded 6hrs a day.
Use that as a template for newly created characters to have a "you can't touch me" grace period.
Of course if they go and attack somone else then they burn that grace period and become tangible.
(Why does this sound familiar?)

Edit: AWESOME storyline Bazookas!!!

[Pirul]

Quite simple. Harsher penalties for PK's and thieves. Incremental stat loss up to 50% of skills and stats. Getting kicked out of thieves guild for a week if you were caught stealing, etc.

[Clx]

Good post. This is something I've thought about a lot.

Firstly, I don't think the actual idea of Trammel was an error, just the implementation of it as a mirror. A smaller, entirely new landmass could have been 'a trammel'. Somewhere for players to start in peace, learn the game with a tutorial, or whatever. A land they would aspire to progress past within a month or two, and be ready to move into the 'real' UO, hopefully with some street smarts and some friends. Not a mirror that divided the community in half, and each shard into almost two separate shards.

IPY2 also touched on something that wasn't considered enough on OSI - rewards for good behaviour, rather than solely punishments for bad. If ways had been implemented (the virtues? a better bounty system?) to encourage players to help others...
How many times have you heard people explain why they switched to PKing? Even ex-hardcore 'anti's' - myself included - did eventually. The rewards and fun were just far greater as a bad guy than a good guy.

Edit: Thieves guild suggestion above is good too.

[EVeee]

Interesting replies!! That's just what I was hoping for, a wealth of new ideas and viewpoints

I like the idea of a limited Trammel, the bazookas. A place where new players could learn a few things and build skills before getting thrown to the wolves, yet not somewhere that you would want (nor it would be worthwhile) to stay forever. Sounds like a winner to me. Done right I think it could have been very useful. Maybe it could have softened the blows of Felucca enough to make a full-time Care Bear land unnecessary.

Siege Perilous did sound interesting, and one of the good things about it was that players knew up front exactly what they were getting into. It was hawked as a very hardcore shard. On the regular shards the situation had just gotten away from OSI and the game experience they were trying to sell wasn't exactly the same one they were delivering. I gave some serious thought to your hypothetical "What if OSI had not created Trammel or anything like it?" situation. Pretty fun mental exercise, thanks! I figure that, as I said before, the world would eventually have become too overrun with full-time PKs for playing a start-up newb to be even remotely viable anymore. Their subscriptions would have been on a steady decline as players quit and probably left for other milder MMORPG experiences. At this point when the company wanted to see growth and instead saw losses, corporate and tech heads would have started to roll. They would have to have done SOMETHING. As a business they could not have simply maintained the same online world and waited for their players to have a change of heart and come back while showing horrible figures month after month. So I think if they never went the Trammel route then they would have had to totally embrace the rough-and-tough PK experience and used it as a marketing strategy/selling point. They would have had to make it more appealing to the PK-loving consumers since they'd have lost and given up on "nice" players. Of course, even if you wanted to play a consistently violent PKing game there'd still be the question of how you could build up a character in the first place to ever be competetive..... well, lol, there's my answer for whatever it's worth

Pirul - harsher penalties for crimes always sounded like a great idea to me but I could never make up my mind about whether or not they'd have scared away the PKs instead of the newbs then. Maybe the majority of players would continue to PK and/or thieve regardless, maybe they'd have changed play styles or jumped ship; I don't know. I'm sure that there's a line between punishing PKing and choking it out completely and maybe there was more room for OSI to play with it.

Clx, you hit a home run there. PKing = twisted fun and highly profitable. Being a good guy player meant... killing monsters for infinity, denying yourself the fun of PKing for no reward whatsoever. Woo hoo. I'm not saying that PKing was always or even often challenging during T2A, but at its worst it was never as dull as EVing a dragon to death. Giving players some actual incentive to be good could have made a world of difference.

I might just be dreaming but you guys actually have me believing that maybe all three of those ideas could have been used together to create an awesome UO experience that would have negated the need for Trammel entirely and kept players of all types around. Allowing unattended macroing might have helped just a smidgen too, haha

[Clx]

You've got it completely right.

If UO:R had;

1. Opened a small, new land, with Trammel rules. Perhaps 1/8th the size of the old lands. Players could remain there as long as they wanted, but the main intention would be as a newbie/learning land. 1-2 towns, 1-2 low resource dungeons..

2. Limited players to 1 house each whilst changing the landmass to make placement easier.

3. Revamped the virtues system to promote 'good' behaviour. Provided rewards that matched those available to PKs/griefers, etc. The Az/IPY2 Paladin idea didn't work, but he was on the right track.

4. Provided some better 'end-game' content. Maybe a better version of Factions, or something along the lines of the Champion Spawns that came later.

...then the game would have been great, an improvement on the t2a era.

Instead we got:
Communities divided in half
A destroyed economy due to unrestrained 'farming' in Trammel dungeons.
Huge unused landmasses.

Obviously this is all easy to say in hidsight, but I fail to understand how they ever thought a Trammel mirror of the old lands was ever going to be a good idea.

Thanks for this thread!

[Missy B]

these are all interesting ideas. i just remember that they changed the entire balance with fighting. i got my ass kicked daily when i was building up a mage. then as soon as i get a decent tank mage, it had all changed. i had to carry spell books, i couldnt precast. all those little changes ruined it for me. i went from getting my ass kicked to being good finally only to have my ass kicked again.