Thoughts about stabilizing playerbase and other new/old ideas

Thoughts about stabilizing playerbase and other new/old ideas - Printable Version

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Thoughts about stabilizing playerbase and other new/old ideas - Useless - 05-23-2012

First of all I have say that you guys got a great shard running here! (No, im not just posting this so GMs/Admins will read the rest more interested Tongue

its just what i think!)
I am still quite new to this shard and many might think who am I to make stupid suggestions... IÂ´ve played anough other shards and even gmed/admined a bunch of instances/rebirths of a shard for quite a few years to not be a complete UO noob Tongue

But i think the main competence i got is: I am quite new to this shard (fresh view and such stuff...)
So maybe it helps if I post what I liked and what I disliked when I started.
My first thought was: Damn this is huge, not meaning the map but the content of the shard. tons of quests, secrets and opportunities and ways to get started. The starting skills and the mercenary camp was quite motivating, because when i decided to return to UO my intention was to have fun and to be honest, I didnt want to macro my ass of for months to get a half way decent character to survive. Also that there is no skillcap is great imho, cause I dont have to decide upon certain skill-combos. Getting cash with hunting is easy and quite balanced, too.
BUT (yeh, sorry) there were also things connected to the above which kinda reduced my personal motivation again:

While it was great to start a char with quite decent skills it was a lil disappointing when I asked around that most trading skills (also ressource gathering ones) are quite hard and expensive to gain and also take a huge amount of time. First thought was: I cba to macro all day and night just for 0.1%. I gave it a try (and still am) and noticed that the above is true. Generally and with my own experiences running a shard my opinion there is a lil split up. Easy gains means that especially with no skill cap its nothing special to get all skills ruining the economy and trade (noone would buy anything if they can craft it). So im not suggesting that! But also I think the gains are a lil to hard considering UO is quite old and many (maybe even most) ppl play it for the good old UO feeling and not to sit and wait for gains. So finding the balance is surely quite hard because both ways (having hard earned gains to be proud of, or easy, short-term motivating, easy gains) can be bad. So what I totally loved (and missed here) on other shards was the "power-hour"-feature. Ive seen two different ones there: 1. a time based - skill gain chance was multiplied during a certain time of the day (which is bad for an international shard imo) 2. a personal power hour - (first hour of gametime within 24 hours has skill gain chance multiplied)
Anyway this lil thing might keep some ppl logged in for at least that hour and it wouldnt hurt the diversity of skilled chars to much. (I personally will try to macro my ass of anyway but some others might not be as patient as others)
Another idea could be some sort of crafting quests (which were quite popular on our shard, we called em Bulk-Deed-Orders). Npcs gave out simple-hard tasks for players to craft certain things, ie. a blacksmith wanted you to craft 100 dagges, 20 mails, 20 kite shields (those orders were depending on your current skill lvl so even if it took a while it was possible) As a reward you got a decent amount of cash (at least more than the ressource cost), certain skill gains (also depending on ur % ie 2.0% around 40% and 0.1% above 95%) + a chance for some rare reward item (trade related ie a special pickaxe with like 200 uses which digs up twice the amount of ore etc.)
These bulk orders could work for any trading skills in any combination and would at least add something to aim for while just macroing (+ you finally just have to trash/npc the items u make)
The seconday effect would be that more ppl would be online just macroing, which would mean that for others it would look that more players are playing which will make them stay for a while longer. (if this was a sphere shard I could throw in some scripts, but I hope you get what I mean anyway)

There is really not much I can suggest which would make things "better", but trying to throw some more ideas in anyway.
Another thing I liked on other shards and/or was quite popular on ours encouraged a lot of pvm, especially grouping up. Except for the hunter slayer event there are not many things encouraging partying up and hunting together.
1. Elite mobs (Similar to OSI Paragon) - In rare occasions instead of a normal mob an elite version of it will spawn, being like 5x as hard as the normal one BUT with more cash on it + a good chance for an elite chest full of goodies (and at least 1 real rare item). Of course for small mobs like skeletons its entertaining to hunt those alone and get all the reward for yourself, but imagine one of those named balrons or other tough ones. Sure thing tons of evs would do the trick so those mobs should have certain imunities: auto-dispelling summons, immune to poison, para and field spells and of course immune to provocation. (So you actually have to hit it the hard way to kill!)
2. Epic mobs - Imagine a boss mob, rarely spawned on certain areas which would be the hardest thing you ever fought against. Each of those would have special abilities which would need a bunch of ppl AND a good strategy to kill it. All of those would be immune to summons, para, poison and field spells of course. Also they would have an incredibly high health regain rate, so a single player simply cant do enough damage per second to kill it.
2 Examples from our old shard:
- An earth elemental like thing which is pure melee and not very fast walking, but very fast hitting (and this very hard, like 50-100hp depending on armor). The special abilty was that it had a good chance to teleport you right to it when you hit it. Sometimes it also made u drop your weapon/shield/armor piece. (This was one of the easier ones)
- A dragon summoning a bunch of drakes (immune to each others fire breaths) and casting an inferno spell (an array of random flamestrikes in the direction it was facing) - basically a mob where you have to run like hell to beat it.
There are tons of options for special abilities, but the main intention is to create a mob where you have to think and plan and hold together. (it should take at least half an hour to kill one)
The reward would be huge (of course it should be based on the minimum amount of players you need to kill) with lots of rares and also a chance for unique items (ie for a similar dragon epic we had a gem which allowed you to learn the dragonÂ´s breath (was not very overpowered, because it was based on your own strength (spherelike) but it was damn cool and impressive Tongue

) The reward should just be something special which u cant get anywhere else, even collectables (ppl usually love to collect sets of stuff)
As i noticed staff does really a lot to encourage pvp (which many ppl like) to make it worth logging in, but personally I dislike pvp and so I usually go hunt mobs, whenever IÂ´m not macroing. Maybe im the only one, but I think it couldnt harm if pvm could be made more interesting aswell.

Enough for now... my best regards to all those who managed to read on until this point Tongue

And dont hesitate to flame/shout/curse on me, i wont take it personally Tongue

See ya ingame! (sorry for bad english, it was a lot better once, a long time ago :p)

Thoughts about stabilizing playerbase and other new/old ideas - Mister Pickles - 05-23-2012

Useless Wrote:While it was great to start a char with quite decent skills it was a lil disappointing when I asked around that most trading skills (also ressource gathering ones) are quite hard and expensive to gain and also take a huge amount of time.

Many people have asked countless times on past versions of Imagine Nation if trade skills could be made easier to gain. The answer has always been NO.

I believe it has been brought up several times regarding this shard. The answer was NO. It's not going to happen. They're unflinchingly rigid when it comes to the skill gain. It's basically an issue that is not up for debate.

Useless Wrote:Another idea could be some sort of crafting quests (which were quite popular on our shard, we called em Bulk-Deed-Orders). Npcs gave out simple-hard tasks for players to craft certain things,

Are you sure they didn't call them "Bulk order deeds"? I left OSI before BODs were introduced. I played with them a little on UOGamers. It was a lot of fun.

The staff can't be arsed to do a lot of things on IN. I imagine asking for BODs to be implemented would be a lesson in futility.

Useless Wrote:but personally I dislike pvp and so I usually go hunt mobs, whenever IÂ´m not macroing. Maybe im the only one, but I think it couldnt harm if pvm could be made more interesting aswell.

You're preaching to the choir. I've always wondered why PvP was such a huge focus.

I spent some time running around T2A and that map is way underutilized. Khaldun is extremely boring and the tentacles aren't even spawned. I took a boat and explored the waters around the northern dessert. There are some decent spawns, but for the most part it's uninteresting. Most of the snow covered islands have some basic mobs. The only tough mobs I saw were a dragon, Lady of the Snow, and some blizzard gazers.

There's a large area of land on the eastern side of the map only accessible by boat. There is really nothing there but a few animals and one reaper. I saw a moose!

Thoughts about stabilizing playerbase and other new/old ideas - kyleus3 - 05-24-2012

to see tons of mobs go to shame area and there are tons around there.
as for the BOD's. I really like that and remember that, espically so you dont get bored making the same thing over and over...

Thoughts about stabilizing playerbase and other new/old ideas - Useless - 05-24-2012

I donÂ´t say we should do it like OSI did (unless majority would want that Tongue

) Possibilities are endless Tongue

However I wonÂ´t judge staff as i simply havent met any of them nor have I seen how things get implemented/changed (yet). But I remember quite well which mistakes we made with our shard, had the same feeling about skill gains and that and sticked to those things without even thinking about any another way Smile

As said, the skillgains themselves are not to bad if time is no matter and you hold onto an old game like UO... but who is really... IÂ´m fine with sticking to the current gain rates, but wouldnt see a harm in making macroing a lil more interesting.
Tho I never got into RunUO scripting so I dont know how much effort it would be... thats why I always liked sphere (esp .56b) because once you know the glitches there were endless possibilities.

Thoughts about stabilizing playerbase and other new/old ideas - Gang - 05-24-2012

RunUO 2.2 much more stably/advanced than even 56b , actually ;p And stuff like XMLSpawners, RunUO menus and so on makes it much better platform to staff at as well. You can add so much stuff ingame with a use of XMLSpawners, while on sphere you had to have access to a server to do at least something. The thing is, it's pretty hard to make RunUO look spherish. So , certain people spent months scripting this one, and making it look the way it looks now took 3-5 years. Too bad Taran took the sphere menu's out, we also had that as well, only it wasn't as useful as RunUO ones but certainly proove much better nostalgia feeling + injection runs smoothly with them. :p
I myself yet to see a server which would take so much C# scripting as this one, mainly because it's WAY too much for a hobby and people who have skills to do something like that usually prefer to program at work instead xd