[sm0ke]

It's okay, criticism is fine and I understand change is not always comfortable. We just had a tourney and it went OK but to be honest most people haven't adapted to the new changes at all. Think of it as playing back before everyone had mastered the fighting style, people are not employing all the tool at their disposal terribly well so the true balance of things is a little obscured. This is fine, but it needs time for player knowledge to catch up for us to see how things are really going.

I saw minimal use of harm, no use of fireball, mindblast, mana drain or explosion, and little use of any potions except mana (still loop chugging for a lot of people I think). Also poison timing was poor from most the fighters. I do not mean this as criticism, this is day 1 of a new system, it would be extremely surprising to see people fighting perfectly. I just hope over time people explore the new options and see what they can do. In some cases I don't think people even had hotkeys for the new spells.

I disagree that regen is random, if anything it means you have to pace yourself and the rate is fixed, there is no random element to it, you can still "burst" 27 mana with a pot which is quite a significant amount and when converted by spells into health also is more than a GH pot so it's not like they are useless.

Both poison mitigation (of 100% in fact) and mana regen are the norm in all other types of UO (OSI pre-publish 17, AoS, SL etc. etc.) even in newer versions of Sphere as well. So, it's not like this is some wild and untested theory. I appreciate people here like 51a and that is why we have maintained that half of mana management comes from potions and the mitigation of poison is very low at only about 30% and does not even apply to potions.

I don't think the low clients has anything to do with the changes, we have been trending down and also the reboot was only a few hours ago, a playerbase low is normal since all the AFK macroers are kicked off.

There's so many reasons as to why the playerbase is declining constantly and yes ofc I do think some (minor) but some people did leave because of this change. I won't go through it or bother to try and argue about points, you're not seeing it as a player but merely as a creator who keeps trying to defend it saying people are not adapting to "YOUR" standards. I've tested this PvP for a good week or two between the test server and the portal in the casino and even when it went live I played in the first tourney.

So what the mana has a rate of regeneration doesn't mean it's balanced or dependable you regen at a certain pace. where as you can drink a potion and receive that "WHOLE" mana at once instead of it being spread out over time like regen. Honestly nobody cares what versions of UO stuff came from they just like playing a balanced and fun style which tbh I don't see it like that by adding things like harm mindblast etc like I said you won't be able to force people to use all spells in the spell book they'll use whatever they want.

But as far as it goes I still think this poison and mana regen system should both be removed and returned back to normal.