[imported_Koll Brightlance]

Having come recently to the server, I'll throw in my opinion here.

So far, the crafting skills are hard. That's good. Crafters are necessary. A huge population of crafters would be bad. What I have found is that it's hard or near impossible to find anything I want to buy. This is due to two reasons for me so far. One, the vendor spots in the city are unguarded, and therefore shopping takes on a guerrilla operation type of air. Of course, I can just seek out vendors that aren't in heavily trafficked areas.....except these are extremely few, or they carry very little.

Solutions? No idea. Giving PKs a ready made killing ground is good for the PvP action on the server, and keeps the PK players happy and still playing. It adds tension to a moment that you normally wouldn't feel threatened. What my main problem is, for example, is looking through every vendor in britain or those I can find advertised for greater heal kegs, and finding none after narrowly escaping two pk attempts and a guy staring at me while I look through two vendors when I thought I was hidden. This isn't, of course, a staff problem, it's a player problem. I want to do deco plants and all I can find are Team Tourney Deeds and animal tamer items! I wanted to buy mid level treasure maps, and there are none!

Which leads me to my next point! DUNGEONS. Right now, the dungeons are really cool. However, none of them are at all set up for the standard dungeon crawl and PK dodge solo run. A new player to this server comes on in Vesper, has his Anatomy, Tactics, Swordsmanship and heads into Despise to check it out.....and comes screaming out or dies in the first room.

Having really cool dungeons for groups of players to slowly traverse is nice. What isn't so nice is when I may want to just do a dungeon circuit AND encounter some PKs while I do it. I'm missing that whole old UO feel here. I can't run through any dungeon. Period. It would be nice if there was one, for example, Despise, that a new player could start out in and get their feet beneath them before getting Ebolted to death by a dark skeleton mage. I used to love the fight up to the liche room through the dungeon, able to do it alone. Checking every chest to see if it was locked and had stuff spawned in it. So far, and I stress SO FAR, as I haven't been able to get too far into most of the dungeons, I haven't been able to traverse any dungeon's depths by guile or by stealth.

Also, to actually pick a bone from the other side of the arguement, monster spawn on the server so far, I have found to be TOO high. Killing a room in a dungeon to have it spawn on top of you is nice if you want to continue killing that spawn. Great. But if that spawn is, say, a deep sea kraken, or a spawn of a kraken, deep sea serpent, and a sea serpent, it can get dicey real quick. ON TOP of that point, this specific spawn as an example, cuts into the market for rope, in that there is a flotilla of ships sitting at the kraken spawn, as it spawns every time you kill one.

Message in a bottles, special fishing nets, and treasure maps are insanely common. Why bother making a fisherman if you can just head to this spawn and camp it. I've been here a week or so and have done over 15 MiBs, and have accumulated over 50 t-maps. With the combined haul of the magic items, regs and gold I'll get from all of them, I'll be able to buy a castle.

I shouldn't be able to do this in a week!

If the complete focus of this server is Tournament PvP, then all of this is fine. I haven't been big into PvP in UO, so I may be missing the point to this server. If we're supposed to be able to have a chestful of vanq weapons and the economy is overloaded with them to the point that they cost, at best, 5k gold to buy a new one, then nothing needs to be changed.

As a new player, I was thrilled when I saw my first vanq weapon. I was overjoyed at the second. the third fourth fifth from just the next chest I pulled up, not so much, espicially when I saw how much they went for on vendors.

Please slow down the spawn of treasure map spawning creatures that can be camped easily. Don't change the drop rate, just the spawn. If I have to use a skill to get them to spawn, ala fishing, leave the spawn alone. Make someone work to get more spawn. Or, like I had to do before I found the kraken spawn, have someone along to help kill them when my fisherman char fished them up.

Less treasure maps or MiBs means less magical items flooding the server markets, and makes the "lesser" vanq weapons worth something, and worth using. Instead of seeing only "+20 vanq insert whatever" selling for over the 5-10k cap, all vanq weapons and even power weapons would sell for more, instead of sitting un-used and cobwebby in someone's castle.

I'm sorry, but I disagree with the original poster. I understand it's annoying to get the "only" 12 magical weapons on that level 4 t-map, but maybe they can put other things into the higher level t-maps to make them more worth it, like seeds and rare deco items. Maybe high quality granite, some adamantium ingots, things of that nature that can't flood the market if the supply never turns into a floodgate from too many of that level of t-map.

Sorry for the rant here guys, I do apologize. I just hate to see what I see as a good server have it's economy run into the ground by things that the staff may or may not know are going on, or factors that they can't see because they can't play the server regularly. I ran a Sphere shard for two years on both the Admin and Scripting/ World Building side, and understand that players are sneaky, underhanded, and sometimes, sometimes out only for themselves. It's hard to see the bigger picture when you're the smallest pixel in it.

Thanks.