Now that the population is low... (Derrick, pls chime in)

[Roser]

Suprise,

I really don't think you have any idea what you are talking about here. I've been playing on this server for over 7 years, and continue to play every day, sometimes for multiple hours on end, and I can tell you the economy is not "ruined". If anything the economy has slowed and opened up major areas for merchants to take advantage (due to lower pop).

If a tamer (pvm) is able to sit at elder gazers with 5-10 dragons for about 14-15 hours uninterrupted by PK's and uncontested by another tamer, then yes they can earn close to 1 million gold (good luck with that). This is the absolute pinnacle of what is possible with PVM regarding gold farming, and I completely fail to understand how this "ruins" the economy.

The price of regs/kegs has been consistent for the longest time, magical weapons and armor are roughly the same, rares, server birth's, clothing, resources, etc, are all relativity the same as they have always been in the way of market pricing. If there has been a change to any of these things its been a small drop in price due to there not being as many buyer's around.

I really do not understand your argument here... Are you trying to say that new players have a greater barrier to entry in these markets? Help me understand your point here, because you seem like you are just spouting off nonsense.

There are only two markets that have dramatically changed over time, one being the "grand fathered" blessed items, and the other being the housing market. The housing market is SO dirt cheap right now due to there being a low pop that pretty much anyone can afford whatever they want. The blessed items (neons in some cases) have gone up in price due to a large amount of them ending up in inactive players banks or worn by players who have not logged in in years. None of this has anything to do with tamers farming 100 gold/hour.

There are countless collectible's around for people to spend gold on, to the point where it is nearly un-ending. There is something for everyone and to have everything is damn near impossible. After 7+ years I am still exited to continue my collection of the things that are most important to me as a player.

So please if you could explain exactly what the fuck you are talking about, it would help a great deal, because I really don't understand any of your points.

Lastly, if you want to make your own tamer I have created a quick and easy guide to do so, and I will spend hours with (almost) anyone in game to help them GM taming.

[Surprise]

Good job promoting dragon turret abuse. Even barding is too much work and hardly lucrative by comparison. After all your hard work, what remains is 30 unique players rotating their 10 dragons at Elder Gazers. I guess a shard in which the vast majority of players make infinite gold while doing virtually nothing is uninteresting. But what can be expected from a 20-year old game with exploitable rules and no mechanism to fix them? Enjoy your paradise.

[Drunk'n Disorder]

About every six months for the past 5 years I have played the shard for 10 days or so, made a 7X, farmed a house, realized there is no point to anything, and then gave away the gold at the bank and deleted the heroes. I wish that were not true.

Joined over a year ago and made 4 posts... Yup, you've got this shard nailed. You are Grandmaster UOSA for sure. Maybe you felt like the economy was dead because you don't participate in it? I always wonder what someone's motives are when they come into a thread on a message board for a shard they claim to hate.

[Silverfoot]

There are no more automated PVP events?

[Surprise]

I do not hate the shard. I said in my original post that the widespread dragon turret abuse has destroyed the economy and caused me not to play. This Rose player took offense because he is a promoter of dragon turret abuse. I guess we will have to disagree about whether players making 1 million gold in a day is era accurate or a good thing for a T2A shard.

[Chicanery]

If you take a step back and really look at this shard, and get a general flow of discussions on the forums regarding the direction the shard should go. It's relatively fascinating to think that these are similar discussions that were held in the year 2000 (or 2001?) which gave birth to UOR and eventually Trammel.

I simply think that at the very end of the day. If your game, in this case Ultima Online, can tip the scale towards providing enough entertainment to all player types (i.e. PVM and PVP) that counteracts the headaches (i.e. getting griefed excessively). You have a foundation for success.

I've been typing and deleting sentences for the last 8 minutes or so now, with the fear that my tone may be negative. Which isn't my intention at all.

So I kindly present the following formula:

E = Entertainment
P = Population
G = Grind / Griefing activities

P = E - G

You can see that the population is positively affected by a positive entertainment factor and negatively affected by a positive griefing and grinding factor.

There are a ton of elements that make up entertainment on this shard. It's usually expensed at someone else's entertainment, increasing someone else's grinding activities and ultimately having a negative effect on the population. Frankly, there are also a lot of grinding elements on the shard that have a negative effect on the population. Dying and losing all your stuff, taking 15 minutes to get a dead character back on its feet, and other attributes. In other words, era accuracy Jk... not entirely...

It's also important to mention that the population, based on the formula above, has a positive effect on entertainment and a negative effect on the grind (voting, promoting player run events, using resources to benefit other players so that the population stays high and so forth).

So I would say to the administration and to the active player base: Focus on what you can control entirely and simply increase the entertainment portion of the formula as much as possible. If the population was a # 1 priority, I would even bend the era accuracy values for a temporary term.

There are obviously other factors, but this was a short, sweet, and simple way for me to attempt to get a point across.

[SighelmofWyrmgard]

Nobody's "dragon turret abuse" is ruining my game, nor ever has any such thing.

I won't say, "the economy is just fine", either: it isn't, but the problems there have to do with low-population combined with a 'lack of new blood'.

Most established players have their own craftsmen in their 'barracks': merchant-players are struggling, because they can't justify the maintenance of their vendors, and can't/won't buy wares/materials because they can't sell anything; there's a (small) market for DP'd halberds & katanas, and maybe bandages, and that's about it. Accordingly, new players who wish to craft can only supply town shopkeepers with any regularity, and that can be dull, and not-terribly lucrative.

One thing in particular hurts (new) craftsmen: the shard has accumulated 8ish years of better-than-GM magical gear, and established players have access to 8ish years of accumulated wealth with which to purchase whatever doesn't drop for them.

New players will also be disenchanted by the single-minded, one-dimensional, attitude invariably insisted-upon by most of the shard's 'experts': 7xGM or nothing, no one can do anything but macro until 7xGM, and "pure" PvM builds are nonsense. The only thing about this that I find baffling is that the twelve-year-olds who insisted on thinking this way almost twenty years ago are still, evidently, twelve years old ...

Consequently, a number of aspiring new players simply leave: "take 5900gp you don't have and buy a bunch of skills you don't need and won't keep, and shut your character inside a house you can not afford to buy, and run Razor for a week or more ... then you can play this game. Huh? What do you mean, that sounds moronic? Screw off, you noob, that's how it's done, noob!" Uh huh, of course it is ...

The absence of the events has very little to do with UOSA's present circumstances. If the staff can re-work them to eliminate instances of abuse, and Derrick is satisfied, then I am sure that they could be reinstated: Rose has invested a tremendous amount of effort in devising a "player-run implementation" of CTF that, barring any 'tweaks' still outstanding, is set up to "run on rails"; personally, I think that's extraordinary. All I mean to say here is, "unabusable" events could not hurt, but they won't significantly encourage population growth.

The officers of NEW continue to offer support and assistance to any/all new players they can find, and I have always been ready to offer a 'hand-up'; there are others, individuals as well as guilds, who have demonstrated a desire to recruit and encourage new players.

This game has an outstanding ruleset, but lacks a lot of flair in comparison to more-modern games, and success here demands significant investment: UOSA's appeal is very-much a niche-style of appeal.

Some things we're just stuck with ... So be it.

SS

[Roser]

One thing in particular hurts (new) craftsmen: the shard has accumulated 8ish years of better-than-GM magical gear

Now this is a legit and well thought out thing to bring up.

Outside of bulk GM item purchases for my event's, I really have no need to buy any GM crafted items from anyone, as I have my own crafter and I have a vast collection of high end magical versions of all types of craftable weapons and armor.

It's valid to say that the specific crafting market for GM weapons and armor has taken a hit. This is a problem that sort of fixes it self with influxes of new players who do not have anything better to use. And again, this is something mainly caused by low population on one of the oldest servers in existence, I wouldn't go as far as to blame someone else's tamer for this at all.

[Coholic]

True,

lets wipe server and restart! BOOOM PROBLEM SOLVED

[Roser]

Seem's someone is going around dropping book's authored by "Rose" slandering UOSA and promoting a different server (UOR this time). One of the lines is promoting another server by saying "Suberb economy"...

I'm gonna take a wild guess here and say it was Suprise's handy work. This isn't the first time something like this has happened, and its gosh darn flattering every time.

[Ill Gates]

Seem's someone is going around dropping book's authored by "Rose" slandering UOSA and promoting a different server (UOR this time). One of the lines is promoting another server by saying "Suberb economy"...

I'm gonna take a wild guess here and say it was Suprise's handy work. This isn't the first time someone like this has happened, and its gosh darn flattering every time.

something*

[SighelmofWyrmgard]

Seem's someone is going around dropping book's authored by "Rose" slandering UOSA and promoting a different server (UOR this time). One of the lines is promoting another server by saying "Suberb economy"...

I'm gonna take a wild guess here and say it was Suprise's handy work. This isn't the first time someone like this has happened, and its gosh darn flattering every time.

Hmmmm, yes, I've seen some oddities my last few trips into Brit ... I haven't seen any of "your" books, Rose, or other-shard books, but maybe we might want to start 'policing' the streets: if we can identify these cads, let's get them banned forthwith!

On the other hand, I've seen one or two 'likely-newbies' (but they might be alts of established characters). I'd like to hope such folks are new.

Can we sort-of launch a campaign to guide new players to visit the forums; do we drop books entitled, "New? Visit our Forums!"; could the administration put-up signs on banks, or use the town criers; is there any better way to guide new people here?

SS

[Mens Rea]

UOSA needs a gold sink

[Roser]

something*

Yeah fixed.

[Kabal]

You play video games to have fun and the automated events were tons of fun so it should be a no-brainer to have them, IMO.