If not Trammel, then what?
Posted: Wed Jul 25, 2012 12:56 am
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.
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.