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

[Kaivan]

I know that it's been some time since the posts were made, but I think that we should probably keep any serious ideas about buying the features and mechanics we want off of the forums, and to ourselves. What is or isn't on the server isn't for sale to the highest bidder(s).

When someone says to you they received x, y or z from another player whats the issue?

Only Derrick knows who does or doesnt have particular information etc.

I have had 2 GM`s tell me that player doesnt have this information, one was not even a GM at the time the other said he had issues talking with Derrick.

Isnt Derrick the only one who really knows this?


EDIT: Ive brought it up 3 times with person in question and 1st time they told me LOL past is the past, 2nd time they said "Who could have told you this?!, knowing full well I told him who said it" and 3rd time player posted a convo with Telamon saying he has the code, which he clearly got from somewhere.

Odd is all im saying, I was ordered to drop it so I will but id like to point out only Derrick knows who he does and doesnt talk to and I dont see any reason why he would inform anyone else of his every action, especially when he has a record of not being on for months of end to talk to staff or players.

EDIT #2 why was I ordered to stop talking about something another player told me? Even though what this player told me led directly to him getting banned by my hands? Isnt player to player info fair to share?

EDIT#3 This same player accuses me constantly of paying for items with IRL cash and calling for me to be banned (#cagecave) so I know saying intentional lies is allowed, but still thats not the case here.

I suspect that you're misinterpreting what I said. My post was in reference to what Kabal said.

I don't have any time to address the rest of what's been said in the rest of the posts, I'll have to address it in the evening.

[Lambo]

Bringing back events will not make as great of an impact as many may precieve.

Everyone can debate different avenues to improvement, staff members and community members alike have poured countless hours/dedication into areas to improve UOSA. None of which have proven greatly successful yet but if players keep injecting positivity, enthusiasm, and fresh ideas something will eventually give. Opening the flood gates for a robust booming community.

UO is an enigma in the sense everyone wants something fresh but nostalgia and not changing is what gives UO Second Age it's charm and appeal.

Staff involvement and communciation is and has been an issue with UOSA for a very long time. But we are quick to point blame when we as a player base are not getting our point across or the answers we expect. Maybe the approach and communication from the player base needs to be re evaluated as it seems as though staff has built up a wall to deflect the constant negativity which in turn hinders their ability to manage and communicate effectively.

The community is also looking for grand fixes or ideas to boost the population and quality of life on UOSA. It's a lot easier than that. The true and tested way to enhance gameplay is to simply play the game. Players such as rose , vega , etc. who have consistently injected themselves into the game world making an impact. There is always exceptions to the rule I.e big scams extreme grief of new players. But for the most part in UO any impact or presence within the game world is a positive one. Whether that be helping a new player or pking someone all impacts enhance gameplay in some way . Too much we get caught up on a certain player making a negative impact . When in reality if they are in the game world making something happen it is helpful to the server .

I personally have not been the best at this which in turn has helps my personal life a great deal. But if your goal is to improve UOSA simply entering Britannia is the best form of server improvement you can gift to the server.

[Dustyn]

We won't be able to bring in any pvpers if we don't bring in pvmers first... because a pvper is going to log in, check if there's anyone to fight, and if there's no one, they go.. PvMers are going to stick around for a while because farming takes more time. It also increases chances of encounters with Pkers, which could also trigger pvp... So basically, you need to bring in more features for PvMers, either a special dungeon opened only in week-ends with something special, pvm leaderboards/contests, something that isn't going to change the UOSA MECHANICS, but would enhance the gameplay. Because as it is, it's crashing down. We had 200~ last year, we're down to ~80... There's some serious questions to ask, players just don't feel like they have anything to accomplish anymore, it was once 800 I believe, we lost 90% of player base? What are we waiting for ? If this gets to 10 players online, this is never going to go back up like it used to be. I've seen enough shards like this die.

[WarmApplepie]

We won't be able to bring in any pvpers if we don't bring in pvmers first... because a pvper is going to log in, check if there's anyone to fight, and if there's no one, they go.. PvMers are going to stick around for a while because farming takes more time. It also increases chances of encounters with Pkers, which could also trigger pvp... So basically, you need to bring in more features for PvMers, either a special dungeon opened only in week-ends with something special, pvm leaderboards/contests, something that isn't going to change the UOSA MECHANICS, but would enhance the gameplay. Because as it is, it's crashing down. We had 200~ last year, we're down to ~80... There's some serious questions to ask, players just don't feel like they have anything to accomplish anymore, it was once 800 I believe, we lost 90% of player base? What are we waiting for ? If this gets to 10 players online, this is never going to go back up like it used to be. I've seen enough shards like this die.

ill drink to this!

[Kabal]

We won't be able to bring in any pvpers if we don't bring in pvmers first... because a pvper is going to log in, check if there's anyone to fight, and if there's no one, they go.. PvMers are going to stick around for a while because farming takes more time. It also increases chances of encounters with Pkers, which could also trigger pvp... So basically, you need to bring in more features for PvMers, either a special dungeon opened only in week-ends with something special, pvm leaderboards/contests, something that isn't going to change the UOSA MECHANICS, but would enhance the gameplay. Because as it is, it's crashing down. We had 200~ last year, we're down to ~80... There's some serious questions to ask, players just don't feel like they have anything to accomplish anymore, it was once 800 I believe, we lost 90% of player base? What are we waiting for ? If this gets to 10 players online, this is never going to go back up like it used to be. I've seen enough shards like this die.

Main problem is that GMs lack either the time or motivation to code in any changes. Strange thing is Derrick seems intent on keeping the shard running but can't/won't throw the shard

a life preserver, why fund a shard that has no on on it? With the money he could save ending the shard he could probly buy himself a fancy dinner at a nice restaraunt for himself and

his wife once a in a while.

[Chicanery]

It was exciting to see that events may have been reinstated based on Rose's post. I think it can be very beneficial for the shard to host the old CTF events if increasing the population was a priority.

Anarcho clarified that this wasn't going to be the case, and that was to be expected. I think most of us have accepted the direction the shard has gone and can even admire the Administration's ability to stick to the era accuracy framework even with the feedback that the community has given. Both good and bad.

Although I think events, especially CTF, would benefit the shard. I think there are other aspects of the shard that we have to address that could have helped and potentially can still help the shard grow.

1) Understanding that the learning curve is extremely painful for new players.

This can be anything from a new player getting town gated on their first red character with their best equipment and getting blown up in town. I think the community, including myself, could have done a better job. In all fairness, I've tried to do this, but please follow me to my second point.

2) The shard atmosphere is terrible.

I am obviously part of the problem. However, that wasn't always the case. If you search the forums, you can see where I turned into an evil SOB. It was when I tried to address the first point I listed above by creating a player assisted "New" or "Young" player guild that the community could help grow. Frankly speaking, I was trolled out of even wanting to do that. I was able to run it for two weeks, I had assistance from Telamon, my own guild, and others. But after two weeks of defending, in my eyes, a very beneficial and strong position and unsupported accusations from trolls, I just didn't want to help anyone out anymore. I would say that the the community trolling my threads to help individuals was when I turned south quickly, and made efforts to become the individual most of you perceive me as in the UOSA community. That in addition to events getting pulled, but the weight is heavily on the new player guild getting trolled out.

It was easier for me to play a very terrible villain, and try to encourage someone to take the throne of a superman to help shard grow. I was destroying the shard's trolls by being trolling the trolls, all by trying to encourage someone to take the throne and be the face of the good guy for the UOSA community. However, being a troll and villain can also be very exhausting it is dealing with other people taking things too personally, and dealing with the framework and rules inherent to the shard. For instance statloss after an LOS you didn't know could have been exploited and losing the 25 vanq halberd on that character, ugh! Painful!

We're all grown ups, I sincerely think, we all work really hard with our jobs one way or another, and we play games to just have fun. But when you take the fun out of a grinding MMORPG, no one is going to want to play that game. It's that simple. Events obviously help elevate the fun factor significantly, but I think the community can do a better job of not removing the fun factor entirely for other people.

3) Opinion: The swing on the run (SOTR) patch made the pvp less competitive and easier for individuals to master the tank mage faster, and not cycling through different patch frameworks

I could be wrong, but I think the support for the SOTR patch wasn't as strong as other patches that were implemented. This is based on my own memory during the T2A era with OSI, and from what I can recall reading the forum post surrounding the patch.

Again, this is my opinion, but this patch made it harder to field pvp (ultimately discouraging it), made duels last longer (making them more expensive), and made the pvp scene less competitive. I know most of you probably weren't around before the SOTR patch, but before this patch, it was harder to swing from a defensive position to an offensive position, because you had to charge your halberd hit by standing still and focus on tabbing to ensure you can swing your halberd.

Also, if it's reasonable, I think it would be interesting to see the administration "cycle" on a reasonably timely basis between different time frames of the T2A era. Right now, I think it's based on November 1999. Why don't we try another month for a 4 month period or so? It may help encourage people to make another character and play a different style and so forth.

All in all, I don't know if I was ultimately detrimental or I helped the shard thrive based on my contributions mixed with my evil play style. I'll let someone else debate that. More importantly, I was happy to participate in this shard during it's thriving times and even during its not-so-thriving times. I also hope other people can enjoy it equally as much as I have.

Back to work everyone!

[Roser]

To Chicanery's points:

I fully believe that the old auto events can be re worked into a system that fits the UOSA stated goals, these things don't have to be seen as "non era accurate". It would take a good amount of work to get done, but if we had the old events exist in fellucia, justify the use of sign up stones, fix exploits, and remove invulnerable zones (with the exception of the direct play area) this could be a system that is entirely brand new and custom fit for the T2A era.

The original T2A developers created a ton of custom content that varied from server to server, this speaks to the fact that they sort of just did whatever they wanted to with what tools they had at the time. I believe that the UOSA developers have put content limitations on themselves that the original developers never had - UOSA dev's seem to want to limit themselves to replicating a fraction of the custom content that actually existed in era. I say get creative with it, keep the mechanical accuracy's as accurate as possible, but do not limit yourself to what you can do with those mechanics. This is one of the reasons Boomland is hailed as a hero around here, he is being creative.

Ok I got a little tangential there, back to Chicanery's stuff...

1) Understanding that the learning curve is extremely painful for new players.

This is a general Ultima Online issue given that it's an old game yet remains one of the more in depth games in existence. A fraction of the population on UOSA has always been around to help with this learning curve, and in the past some staff members were fully dedicated to the job. These days as the population has dropped dramatically, so have the helpers. This is an issue that sort of fixes itself with higher numbers.

2) The shard atmosphere is terrible.

I agree, the community management here is highly lacking. It takes a ton of heart and dedication to weed the garden of this community, its a difficult job. I've suggested a few things in the past that work very well in other online communities (namely Twitch), but anytime I do I get instantly ridiculed by the trolls, and ignored by the administration. Good community management is such an integral part of keeping an internet community healthy, and we simply do not have that here at all.

It's interesting that you mention your experience with a new/young player guild and how you got trolled out of doing it. It just so happens that in this past week the guild "NEW" who spent years helping new/young players get a foothold here finally had enough of the abuse that the senior trolls had been giving them that they quit UOSA completely. And guess what, those senior trolls are really proud of what they did and remain completely un punished, save a slap on the wrist at best.

3) Opinion: The swing on the run (SOTR) patch made the pvp less competitive and easier for individuals to master the tank mage faster, and not cycling through different patch frameworks

You are lumping in two highly different PvP changes that were implemented at different times. One being "Tab cycling" and the other being "Swing on the run".

I get that you liked "tab cycling" as it did add another layer of complexity to tank mage pvp, but "swing on the run" was something that fixed a very jenky movement issue in all PvP and pushed forward a more high tempo combat mechanic.

"Tab cycling" was removed to arguably create a more accurate combat mechanic, and "swing on the run" was taken out for a short time (based on conflicting evidence), then re added when it was shown to have displayed broken combat mechanics and evidence supporting it should be in.


Ok that about all I have to say about that... I'm going to finish by leaving an old quote from Derrick that caused many people to linger in expectation after the old events were removed. This was from a thread about the removal of ALL auto events, and was Derricks last post about them...

Thanks for all the posts.

Due to a couple of the issues raised above and one that does rise to the level of a pretty severe exploits, I've discontiued the automated events until the problems can be addressed.

[Nickodemuse]

Ill keep it short and simple http://www.uogateway.com/shard.php?id=74&act=vote Vote! You can vote every 24hours. The more votes we get the more new players that will join UOSA.

[WarmApplepie]

Ill keep it short and simple http://www.uogateway.com/shard.php?id=74&act=vote Vote! You can vote every 24hours. The more votes we get the more new players that will join UOSA.

and shortly there after quit because of everything stated above. I admire the effort Nicko, and i love and respect you, but i feel like youre just wasting your time. MANY of us have done exactly what you are doing right now, at one time i was spamming ALL of the vote site links in irc daily. A few new players came, most left right away and the ones that didnt left shortly there after.

The dude i quoted above nailed it. All i (and quite a few others i played with) really only care about in this game is killing people. I left 3 chars up at normal pk hotspots for 7 hrs. One of those hot spots didnt have anyone on journal. One had 2 players, other had same player 5 times. No one needs to farm anymore because everyone left is rich or has plenty. There's no markets for anything anymore no reason to spend days on end farming for stuff to sell. No farmers = no pks

Im not bothering sitting by my computer waiting countless hrs for people, when theres other games i can log into and get into action right away. Its a vicious circle that WILL NOT get corrected without some sort of Major change.

As stated by GM's, this isnt going to happen. So link all you want, vote all you want. New players will not stay long, old players continue to leave, and the ones that are too invested to leave will be around till the very end.

[Nickodemuse]

I'll keep on trucking! I'm not setting any big goals, shooting for small victories. 1 small victory is raising the vote total, so please vote or keep voting! You can vote every 24 hours! Dont want to derail the subject of this thread, as ya'll were!

[Ahbuddy]

There are still countless tasks, goals, and challenges to achieve.
I am willing to do whatever it takes to keep this shard up.
Our NEW guild is still helping others and thriving.

[Roser]

Good to hear NEW is still around.

[Gork]

*holds the door*

[Wychethyl]

hodor

[Surprise]

We won't be able to bring in any pvpers if we don't bring in pvmers first... because a pvper is going to log in, check if there's anyone to fight, and if there's no one, they go.. PvMers are going to stick around for a while because farming takes more time. It also increases chances of encounters with Pkers, which could also trigger pvp... So basically, you need to bring in more features for PvMers, either a special dungeon opened only in week-ends with something special, pvm leaderboards/contests, something that isn't going to change the UOSA MECHANICS, but would enhance the gameplay. Because as it is, it's crashing down. We had 200~ last year, we're down to ~80... There's some serious questions to ask, players just don't feel like they have anything to accomplish anymore, it was once 800 I believe, we lost 90% of player base? What are we waiting for ? If this gets to 10 players online, this is never going to go back up like it used to be. I've seen enough shards like this die.

PVMers don't play because the economy was ruined by tamers farming 100K/hour. Even if it was technically possible to have 10 dragons at a time in T2A, nobody did that. So something should have been done before the economy was destroyed. After all, what is the point of crafting, fishing, vendors, etc., when a player can farm 1 million gold in a day? If 5 years ago the shard had introduced creative gold sinks and limited tamers to one or two pets at a time then perhaps the economy might still function. At this point, it is way too late.

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.