UO Second Age

I'll try to condense the thoughts/discussions me and my friends have been having to avoid TL:DR responses, so here it goes.

I love UO, it was my first, and longest mmo to date (played for 4 years on real servers, long enough to get my ethereal when those were released). I've unfortunately had a few extremely disappointing conversations with friends about this server recently, and all we can do is ask, where did the fun go. Here's what it boiled down to for us.

Patch Fixes - In real UO, when mechanics were broken, you at least had faith that they were going to be fixed eventually. The problem with this servers stance, is that instead of having faith of an eventual fix or balance, the opposite happens, people pull up ancient threads about players complaining about broken/undesirable mechanics, that get implemented for era accuracy. Even when some of these were obviously patched up shortly after/at UO:R release, they're ignored, simply because UO:R isn't the era we're trying to emulate, regardless of the fact that these bugs would have been fixed eventually regardless of the content UO:R added. This greatly takes away from possible enjoyment of the shard when things are being broken instead of fixed.

Combat - In real UO, combat balancing was something that took a backseat to overall gameplay and mechanics, which I agree with (there's plenty of other aspects to the game besides combat), but obvious flaws with the system were slowly addressed with time. Veterans on this server complain that dexers are boring, yet refuse any introduction of eventual working mechanics to make them more enjoyable. With the latest combat patch, one thing keeping me and many of our friends starting here interested, was that we'll at least be able to swing on the run, making these endless, stamina refreshing chases, end with damage on the move. We could live without melee skills, special weapon hit chances, etc, but with the implementation of swinging on the run, there will at least be points in fights where damage will be getting dealt while chasing, helping to out dps mini-heal spam. Sure enough though, this changed, not only was swing on the run not implemented, but now we occasionally witness double hally/bardi swings, and people tell us dexers got buffed and mages got nerfed. Yes it's nice that dexers swings actually get closer to the next while moving, but not being able to swing on the move and having to stop results in the same problem of dexers on this shard prior to the patch anyway, you'll never finish someone off who you can never stand next to for a second to pull your swing, and fights become endless chases with broken combat mechanics. Keep in mind that if you search, people also say that they could swing on the run, but it could have been attributed to lag that allowed it, and the UO:R patch eventually just made it work properly. On a server with no lag, and refusing to actually impliment the fix from UO:R, this makes the build unplayable for most, and a major thing that pushes people away from this shard all together, as even with working mechanics hally mages would still be a top tier pvp class, but with current mechanics there's literally no reason to play anything else. I could also go into detail about how broken/terrible archery is, and how poisons are way way too weak/easy to cure, but I've spent enough time on this section as is,

Housing/Ghost-Town-Ism - I don't care what anyone says, if they somehow claim they had 2-3 accounts back in the day, but giving every player on the shard a house for every character on the 3 accounts, totaling 15 houses per character, is both ridiculous and greatly takes away from anyone wanting to start on the shard/get housing near friends also starting up. We've somewhat managed to get housing near each other, but no where near the degree we would have liked, and all smalls, all because the world is filled with empty houses that people refresh once a week and never login/use otherwise. I can't even fathom how many past guilds/groups of friends started here with hopes of housing/town making only to come to the realization that the server is loaded with people who barely play, but login once a week to keep their inactive ghost towns alive. 15 houses per character, is both ridiculous, unrealistic, and un-fun.

Automated Events - I fail to see the logic in people who argue to remove them completely, they're probably the most important thing to a shard like this in terms of letting new players learn how to play and getting the community together. If events were more frequent and each type had a morning/night hour once during the week, many more players would get to participate and new players would be able to learn faster. Instead, from what I've heard, events were more frequent, until people complained enough to have them tuned down, which again is another point against the enjoyment of the server factor.

Chaos v Order - The only faction wars available in T2A, and incredibly broken. People claim it's about town control, but with no swing on the run and no magic in town, no competent player will ever, ever die. This has turned into thief warfare, where players just steal, heal, and run. Also, people from your own faction can attack you without penalty, throwing any sense of comradery out the window since after/during your fight with a chaos faction member, suddenly you're being attacked by an order player as well. Why Lord British would allow his soldiers to murder each other, is beyond me, if it's in for accuracy, it has to be the most broken mechanic preventing such faction wars from flourishing, followed closely by no magic in town/swing on the run for town fights. If those things were addressed, it could actually be a decent faction mechanic, instead, I'm assuming they're the way they are for "accuracy", as broken/unfun/unused accuracy as it is.

The greatest thing about this server, is the great staff and no handouts-payoffs-cash shop-etc sorta attitude it has. However, it doesn't change the fact that the servers current mechanics are so undesirable that logging in is becoming less and less frequent. There are plenty of threads about how to improve server awareness, how can we draw in more players, how can make this server greater, well here's our perspective from the majority of friends I got to start playing here. We were drawn to this server because of no trammel, no cash shop/incentives for voting, looking for a oldschool experience. We became apathetic when we realized how broken many mechanics were, and that they were broken on purpose or have no intention of being fixed due to "accuracy". Within a couple of months, the guild that we brought here that averaged 7-14'sh players online at a time, is now down to 2-3 players. Most of us within this time have finished our characters, macro'd our skills, and are now sitting around with little desire to play after testing/experiencing/going out and doing many of the different mechanics, builds, factions, etc that this server has available. If anyone has any thoughts, advice, or opinions, we'd like to hear them, but this is why, in our opinion, that this server isn't fun anymore, for most of us at least. Some have resorted to being primary thief characters/pk'ing, for a lack of other things to do, but for players like me looking mainly for fair pvp, we're at a loss.

You're right. It isn't era accurate to be able to only place smalls.

If it were era accurate, you shouldn't be able to place anything.

BobDobbs wrote:You're right. It isn't era accurate to be able to only place smalls.

If it were era accurate, you shouldn't be able to place anything.

In real uo, it was also because of the abundance of people playing, not people with 3 accounts hoarding land. I've heard people make this argument before, which kills me, because why do you think servers were 100% filled with housing and alive with city life/player towns/etc? It was because the number of people actively playing, so doing things that discourage new players from coming in like giving every player 15 housing slots to land hoard is terrible for server growth. Eventually, should the player base on this server get to the same level as real servers, and you end up not being able to place a small due to the abundance of players, that would be accurate (although to get the population that high, a lot more than housing would likely need to be changed). The world being a ghost town, is not, you're just foolin yourself and hurting server growth at the same time.

I feel what you're saying about most stuff. Although the housing thing isn't much of a problem. Sure there may be lots of players with too many houses but have you seen the housing market at the moment? The difference between OSI full and UOSA full is at least here you only have to pay a bit over deed to get property almost anywhere, and often adjoining property too. That probably isn't the case on OSI where property is a rarer commodity across the playerbase. Also the idea that all the land is taken is a total fallacy. People are placing houses here all the time. For instance right near where I have my main house in the northern territories (a peninsula L with no adjacent neighbours able to place, spot took me an hour to find back in January) there was an RP town of about 5-6 smalls all nearby each other. They have all gone and about 4 of the spots are still open and have been for months. I could go on but this is already turning into a wall.. to summerise, there are tons of housing spots/cheap houses avilable, this is not a problem here.

The rest of your post though, aye I can see where you are coming from and it makes sense. I just think that due to the solid era accuracy stance that there is nothing that can, or should I say will, be done about it. That's part of the tiny price you pay to play here.

I'm sorry, but I just don't see it that way. On OSI, unless you began early you had absolutely no chance of placing a house of any size. It is my opinion that it is far easier to place a house on UOSA than it was on OSI during the time this shard attempts to emulate.

For the record, my one account on OSI had three houses.

Rhaps wrote:I feel what you're saying about most stuff. Although the housing thing isn't much of a problem. Sure there may be lots of players with too many houses but have you seen the housing market at the moment? The difference between OSI full and UOSA full is at least here you only have to pay a bit over deed to get property almost anywhere, and often adjoining property too. That probably isn't the case on OSI where property is a rarer commodity across the playerbase. Also the idea that all the land is taken is a total fallacy. People are placing houses here all the time. For instance right near where I have my main house in the northern territories (a peninsula L with no adjacent neighbours able to place, spot took me an hour to find back in January) there was an RP town of about 5-6 smalls all nearby each other. They have all gone and about 4 of the spots are still open and have been for months. I could go on but this is already turning into a wall.. to summerise, there are tons of housing spots/cheap houses avilable, this is not a problem here.

The rest of your post though, aye I can see where you are coming from and it makes sense. I just think that due to the solid era accuracy stance that there is nothing that can, or should I say will, be done about it. That's part of the tiny price you pay to play here.

Buying housing isn't a problem, aye it isn't super jacked up prices buying from other players, but to get a decent amount of houses in the same area (for a guild of say 10+ people) is increasingly difficult with all the dead housing, our experience from trying to do it since being here has been the same in most areas we've tried, houses go to greatly worn, you never see the owner, then they refresh before going idoc. Also should they phase out co-owners, as they intended on doing awhile ago (don't know if that's still the case, I hope not), then that eliminates community living with security, another problem and step backwards for the server. It just feels like this server takes too many steps to eliminate or increase the difficulty of group play by pretending it's got a huge population, when it doesn't.

but yeah, I know they have a solid era accuracy stance, but if it's had any effect on others looking to get back into UO like it has me and my friends, I'd consider it far more than a small price to pay. If there was a no incentive, solid staff based, no cash shop sorta UO server that wasn't backwards in their development, I would be playing UO nonstop like I was back in the day. It just seems like the servers population is stagnant because there's a few vets who never leave, and new players/groups of players who come in like me and my friends, farm, skill up, get some housing, and slowly fade away because they've simply taken too many steps in the direction of accuracy instead of what makes uo a fun game. This process allows murderers to get their fix by preying on unskilled new players who also need to get familiarized with the ruleset, but then drags away anyone who wants balance and bug fixes rather than a broken version of a 13 year old mmo. That's how I'm seeing it at least, I pretty much played on this server nonstop for the past 2'sh months I've been here, with the exclusion of the past 3-4 days of random conversation/other games in vent, trying to find some cure to our UO apathy, something I never experienced from UO before.

What would you change about pvp other than just the hitting while running thing?

-swinging on the run
-removal of weapon timer exploits for faster swings/now double swings
-increased poisoned weapon damage/difficulty to cure
-reduced delay/need to stand still for archery shots and damage to go off
-also removal or modification of the ease of avoiding archery damage by running
-removal of all follow me stamina refresh exploit.

edit: also, for factions
-allow order/chaos to do magic damage in town
-change same faction flagging so if you murder/steal from your own faction members you're penalized (give them murder counts and/or removal from the faction).

Those are some of the most crucial changes for balance imo (i could think of a few more to put on the table, but those are critical). They've been brought up/debated in other threads, so I won't go into it in detail here, but they always lose out to the argument of "era accuracy" after someone digs up some ancient archived patch note or random forum post.

Are you sure you aren't trying to re-capture an experience rather than trying to play T2A era UO?

Because you can't re-capture that experience. Its gone.

I've seen this argued and discussed on these forums before, and while I am sympathetic and went through a similar realization, it very well boils down to the fact that the powers that be put down a concrete ideal for what this server is trying to achieve. You've already stated this stuff yourself so I am just repeating things. Even though some changes would be desirable, I am not entirely sure I'd want them to be made once I consider that a big reason this server is successful at what it does is because of how its clear and dedicated goals.

I can understand your and your friends frustration....not liking some aspects of the mechanics and then expecting things to improve with the recently released changes to combat, but I really disagree with your view of the shard, it's policies, and it's design.

From what you say, some of your and your friends' biggest issues with the shard are the unrestricted housing, the nerfed poison system, and the inability to hit while moving. All three of these were big changes that came with the release of Renaissance...

I know you've probably heard this argument a hundred times during your stay here, but...

When it comes down to it, yes not every aspect or detail of this server is perfect, but then there is no perfect server. What one might claim to be a great aspect of a game another might hate...what one might consider to be broken another might consider a feature.

You could say to take the era and finetune it, work out the kinks, etc., but in the end you always end up with an increasingly customized shard...one that gets less and less like the era in the name of balance. How many "Pre-Renn" shards have we seen come, grow and eventually collapse that have done just that.

Of the era, not everything was perfected, not every aspect of the game was balanced, but what we do know is that T2A was fun, exciting, and wholly what most of us consider to be the best era in the entire history of UO. With every patch and update making this server more and more like the era. That is, accepting the era for what it was (flaws and all) and replicating that, makes for a great game.

From the topics of your complaint it seems like you and your friends want a server with mechanics and gameplay of later eras. If that is the case...I'm sorry, you won't find them here.

Sticks wrote:I've seen this argued and discussed on these forums before, and while I am sympathetic and went through a similar realization, it very well boils down to the fact that the powers that be put down a concrete ideal for what this server is trying to achieve. You've already stated this stuff yourself so I am just repeating things. Even though some changes would be desirable, I am not entirely sure I'd want them to be made once I consider that a big reason this server is successful at what it does is because of how its clear and dedicated goals.

I guess everyone has varying ideas of what is considered a successful server then. In our time playing here, field pvp is rare, and generally lone pk's (only pk group that actually travels in a group being the comedians, which is a whopping 2-3 people). City/Faction pvp is even more rare, and if you do find someone, especially in town, chances are they are a thief who's only goal is to steal and run endlessly since stamina never runs out with mount exploits. Player towns/housing in general is all ghost towns, with the occasional person macroing in a house. In short, the server feels dead, or in the process of dieing, largely in part due to changes for accuracy, imo at least, maybe there's other reasons too, but I'm just giving the perspective of me and my friends since all we've been doing the past few days is discussing what we're going to do next.

I'd love to see all of your points addressed, but of course I'm only a new player with no influence around here. I can't possibly see any negative aspects to those additions other than the fact that is clashes with maintaining some status quo.

But it isn't about maintaining a status quo, that's pejorative.

Its about maintaining the mechanics that made people start playing here in the first place.

BobDobbs wrote:But it isn't about maintaining a status quo, that's pejorative.

Its about maintaining the mechanics that made people start playing here in the first place.

It's only pejorative if you take it that way; in a very literal sense it's exactly about maintaining a status quo. There was no offense meant. It simply is what it is.