Out of curiosity, a second shard?

[Pied Piper]

Once we get a daily average of around 3000 clients (3000/3=1000 players) I would be down for a Siege Perilous shard.

Til then....no.

[Charla]

I' m not sure if it would split the population.

But it would give a lot of people the possablity of owning larger homes. So many people own castles and keeps and towers

on their 3 accounts, doesn't leave much space for anything but smalls.

Ok I am not saying these people didn't work their uo arses off to get those castles and keeps and towers. I'd judge they

earned them.

But i would enjoy a second shard. My suggestion would be only one account allowed. That would give 5 characters,

which would be enough . Would be a lot to work out, I am sure.

Not sure Derrick could even do it. He's fairly busy with this shard


Be well and safe

Westra

[Pied Piper]

I'm sure he is more busy woth Real Life and this is more of a hobby of love for UO series that he can share with the whole world....but yeah I can tell it is a pain in the you know what to run a shard.....

Yes it would split up the already low population some.

[Psilo]

It's already very possible to own a tower, they aren't too hard to get but take a fair amount of work.

Keeps and castles are harder to get, but heck a tower is enough. Towers are luxurious. There's many being sold and sometimes a spot is open, they get placed all the time.

I placed my tower after this server was already out 2.5 years. Just found a blank spot lol.

[MatronDeWinter]

lol

The problem isn't that too many people play here and thus the house spots are full. The problem is that the majority of people who own these spots do not use them, or are entirely inactive and only refresh homes (or have others refresh them). There are a lot of these "offering newbie housing for free!" things going around. Really, do the shard a favor and deed your unused house when you are too lazy to refresh it. There have only been 2 legitimate, well ran, newbie housing services that I have seen, former $$$'s, and Safir's Village of Awesome.

It's pathetic, OSI had something like 10,000 subscribers per shard. I can understand house plots being taken there. We have what, 300 unique IP's a day, which is probably pretty close to the number of active players (with any degree of frequency), plus/minus 100 or so. How many house spots are there on the whole map? I would be interested to know.

[Pied Piper]

Matron musta just drank a cool glass of "nice" before making that post.

This house is a must have for any new player viewtopic.php?f=72&t=31102

[chainsoar]

Angel Island has a parallel SP server. As far as I can see the few people who still play AI play the SP shard only. The original shard is completely dead.

Nuff said really.

[Kabal]

Why not just wipe the shard we have now! (Then install SP style rules).

This would get me logging for multiple hours a day like I used to, rather than logging in for 30 minutes or an hour every once in a while as I do now.

[Mikel123]

How many house spots are there on the whole map? I would be interested to know.

Last halloween there were around 2400 I think. Figure there could be another few hundred 7x7's placed, and maybe you get 3000 spots total. Of course if everyone dropped their castles, towers, etc., and put 7x7's in place, maybe it could hit 10,000 house spots.

Way too many people log in to refresh stuff though. It kind of baffles me. I've not logged in for about 8 months, and if my bank account was wiped tomorrow, I don't think I'd care. I don't understand why people refresh houses long after they seemingly cease to care about the game.

*****
On topic of the second shard, I think it would split the population too much. That said, I think if we added a second SP-style shard, I think it would be sort of the Trammel to the current shard's Felucca. And I mean that in the sense of... most people would move to the SP shard, and the only ones who would stay in the original shard would be those who had an outrageously large (in their opinion) stake in it. I think it would re-energize a lot of people (I'd certainly come out of retirement for it).

Regardless, Derrick loses money on the one shard we have. If you want to even THINK about a second shard, I think the first thing to do would be to make UOSA break-even.

[Dolos]

This is the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

[Ronk]

Not that I am for or against but, as I always state, there are some pros of a 'new shard'.

1. You can make some drastic changes that you can't really make on an established shard. While its a bad example since an SP was mentioned, changing the number of accounts or characters is a good example.

2. A new shard gives that starting over draw that a lot of people love. Why do you think everyone jumped to that ipy shard? The same will probably happen when AI opens the SP. Everyone wants to go jump over and start from scratch as it can be refreshing.

3. A fresh start without all of the bugs and patching means things are more balanced.

Either way, if something like this was to be done the proper way to do it, in my opinion, would be to advertise it in advance to build up some talk. In addition, you'd want to fix some core big changes before the release (a final answer on dexxing for example) since you would want to avoid as many 'big patches' as possible. And you'd want to come up with a clear set of rules on number of accounts, razor, etc.

[Lagrath]

As a noob who just restarted UO on this server last week (and who brought 13 other new players with him):

the issue for us (and for bringing new players) is not the need for a new shard. We are used to the idea that people are already very rich and have ueber blessed items and that we will never be able to compete with them in tournaments to get silver or gold to get said items

The big issue is really housing, All of us in our new group/guild were shocked to learn that you could have 3 accounts AND that each character on each account could own a home. I am sure that the minority handful of people who were here whenever this server got started own a gigantically disproportionate amount of prime and/or total real estate for themselves and their guilds. While that might be a fun parallel to real life, it's a real disincentive to new people joining when they could go join a brand new shard somewhere else or play a different MMO.

In my opinion, it's also not at all a realistic portrayal of the T2A era, which is this server's supposed driving objective. I played on Lake Superior and Atlantic and some of the later servers for the first 5-6 years of Ultima Online. Huge numbers of people all joined right at the beginning of the shards, and much the same for the later ones. Even without the ability to own 3 accounts, housing would have been vastly more diversified among a much bigger group of people and guilds. This shard did not get to T2A and its current state in anything close to how the original T2A server eras originally emerged.

If you want our opinion, and the mods would be willing to shake things up (either to keep it fresh for current people or to bring more new people in), the solution is not to ever create a brand new shard. The solution would be to limit it to 1 house per account. The people with 10-15 houses clogging up everything would have to make some hard decisions as to which castles or towers they kept versus made a smaller home in a good location. Of course, these people would still have a massive advantage both in what real estate they kept and the money they made selling off the extra homes.

Having a housing limit and real estate in the hands of more people would explode the activity (and keep it continuously active) in the housing market as people are actually encouraged to trade and buy/sell. This change would also increase the value of smaller homes in relation to bigger ones, since there are some good locations where only small places will fit (like around most moongates), whereas currently the original veterans can have it all at the same time. The new land available would allow for the creation of new player towns for guilds or RPers or both, instead of what I see now with 1 person owning entire shorelines or islands and offering up nooby housing out of pity or boredom. The veteran players wouldn't suffer so much because the infusion of cash from the extra dozen homes would lead to inflation in the currency, so they would still be leaps and bounds ahead of new players for things like buying/selling rares.

I know I for one could probably convince more people from the forums my guild came from to join up on T2A if this would implemented. Just a thought- a second shard wouldn't work and is the wrong solution to existing "problems" or "barriers." My 2 cents as a noob guildmaster


Edit: disregard this all if you can only have 1 house per account on this server, which I didn't read anywhere and which would make me suspicious as to how super many veterans there are not playing daily who just log in to refresh houses, which is also kind of sad.

[Ragancy]

It sounds like housing is the issue, but honestly, it's so cheap to buy homes here that it doesn't seem to be a legitimate problem.

If there was absolutely no space, smalls were selling for 500k in random spots, and towers,keeps,castles were 10 mil+ then I'd say yea we have a problem.

You can buy large houses for 10k-20k over deed price. That's hardly worth the effort of placing the house and posting it for sale.

As it is, any new player can buy a small deed and get it placed in about 15 minutes of searching for a spot. The bigger plots are out there but harder to find. I placed two towers in the past month, neither post IDOC - the spots are there.

There was a CASTLE that recently sold for just 2-300k more than deed price. This price/market is more than reasonable.

Additionally, there's free player housing that's advertised and I'm sure many other players will lend you houses if you ask.

[Lagrath]

It sounds like housing is the issue, but honestly, it's so cheap to buy homes here that it doesn't seem to be a legitimate problem.

If there was absolutely no space, smalls were selling for 500k in random spots, and towers,keeps,castles were 10 mil+ then I'd say yea we have a problem.

You can buy large houses for 10k-20k over deed price. That's hardly worth the effort of placing the house and posting it for sale.

As it is, any new player can buy a small deed and get it placed in about 15 minutes of searching for a spot. The bigger plots are out there but harder to find. I placed two towers in the past month, neither post IDOC - the spots are there.

There was a CASTLE that recently sold for just 2-300k more than deed price. This price/market is more than reasonable.

Additionally, there's free player housing that's advertised and I'm sure many other players will lend you houses if you ask.

TBH even from this description I would like it more under the change I described.

I think one reason houses go for so little is because many of the older players already have so many in so many good/decent spots that there is little incentive to buy/sell/trade. If each individual house mattered a lot more, if people had to actually make choices about what mix of big/small houses they had placed around, if there were more people involved in the housing market, if more new players joined the server, if more prime real estate/places big enough for player towns were available to a bigger group of people/guilds, then I think you would see better prices for housing and real estate while at the same time offering a big boon to new players and new guilds. I think it would be perfect for both the obstacle that I'm seeing from my perspective and from the issue you're seeing from yours.

And I would just mention that when I asked about player housing locations during my first week in IRC, the immediate response from all the established players was "Are there even any good places left to place? I really don't think so." And even if you're right and maybe there are some open fields for new houses or even new guilds/player towns, if those are really in the middle of nowhere where no one ever comes by the vendors or wants to participate in events there, is that really any incentive for new players and guilds to join or stay on the server? Especially since newer players and casuals are the ones least likely to have access to magery and recalling and marking on all their characters, and maybe even want to make some "fun" T2A characters or RP characters (macing blacksmith) that isn't forced to get 70.1 magery just so he can actually visit his guildhall somewhere between Yew and Minoc?

Plus, even if houses were selling low everywhere, it's not easy for new players to get these homes if the ones not in prime areas (which are going to be kept due to prime location + no reason to sell for a rich veteran) are often occupied by people who "live" there by logging on once every 2 weeks on a character to refresh it....hard to leave a book on the doorstep for a house that's seen by the owner twice a month Maybe if there were some way to PM the owner on the forums via the house sign? IDK.

[Kabal]

I wish Derrick would weigh in on this thread . . .