[Carding]

I won't lie, nostalgia is making me tempted to play. But I'd like to know how the server works (with respect to the old .51a sphere). I'm sure there are posts that cover some of this, but I had some very specific questions so I thought I'd just post and if someone points me at an FAQ I've failed to notice that's fine with me.

So, here goes:

1) Just to get a basic grounding, I assume the system is programmed to closely match the original IN in terms of weapon damage, how poison works, how bandages work, scrolls, uncapped skills etc. If any of that is untrue please enlighten me!

2) Do previously unused (broken) skills from sphere now play a role? Namely evaluate intel, anatomy, magic resist, etc. Also have you implemented bonuses that were previously broken e.g. damage bonus from having GM lumberjacking, magery bonus for GM inscription etc.?

3) Does poisoning skill do anything? It used to be mostly broken too I think.

4) What era of IN have you tried to recreate - invul + vanq + scrolls or high-end craftables like HFs, HHs and so on? How scarce (or not) are reagents for potions and blank scrolls?

5) Are you implementing any non-pvp features from AoS. e.g. high end tamables, champions, customisable housing, insurance etc.

6) Do all spells work as in sphere? e.g. have you deliberately kept curse, bless, mind blast etc. broken? Have you changed the dependence on int for some spells? Especially the (badly broken) mana drain.

7) How does your stat cap work?

8) Have you implemented the new combat mechanics; namely being able to hit moving targets without using the "attack last target spam bug"?

9) Do you use the old paralyse mechanics (unable to use items but able to cast) or the (intended) mechanics (unable to cast but able to use items)?

10) Wands? Magic jewellery?

I'll probably have more but that'll do for now. I probably got a bit carried away in fact, but I'd like to have a good understanding to see if it is something I want to get into. Also I would hate to relive the ridiculously disfunctional way the pvp system on IN ended up towards the end under Alric and KMs watch. Arya and I spent a long time making a patch to fix the economy and pvp problems on IN1 only to have it shelved because the admin wanted to maintain the "value of high end craftables" (probably the biggest reason the IN economy and pvp system died) - I'd hate to go through that again.

[Taran]

I'll answer the questions as best as I can to my knowledge off-hand and someone else can fill in if I missed something.

1. That's true, we spent countless hours mimicing how everything worked on IN1. I'm sure there are some stuff that we changed afterwards but the basics should definitely be the same.

2. All skills work now, some work better than others. You need eval int to be able to do more damage with magery, you need anatomy to heal better with bandages etc. Shade hates useless skills and items and tends to figure out new ways for players to use everything. Lumberjacking doesn't give any PvP bonuses though, neither does inscription.

3. Poison is mostly used for hunting and it works pretty good once you GM it.

4. When we merged with XUO a while back the PvP was quite different from IN1, but all XUO aspects are gone here. We are however still adjusting PvP and haven't really recreated any IN era yet. So far people mainly use regular weapons, but we have custom craftables such as HH, SoV and HF as well, although the recipe ingredients are quite hard to get.

5. Oh yes! We have a lot of stuff from AoS that doesn't have to do with PvP. Housing, crafting menus, monsters etc. Too much to write here, hehe. No insurance though, that's a big no-no.

6. No spells are "broken" here, everything works but not all spells are very useful. I'm not so sure about the dependence on int actually, I think the dependence was much higher on IN1 than here. Mana drain isn't something we have taken a closer look at, but we would be more than happy to balance it if players help with testing.

7. Total stat cap of 300 with a max of 120 in each stat.

8. Well you don't have to spam "attack last", but if you use "attack last" you will swing more often.

9. We use the old paralyze mechanics, if you get paralyzed without equipped items in your hands you can cast but not move any items. If you get paralyzed with equipped items in your hands you can neither cast spells or move items.

10. Wands exist but they are rarely used. I think they are just too uncommon and we might make them less rare. I think I made them deal less damage though since they have much shorter delay and no power words. We don't have any magic jewellery.

You should definitely login and have a look around. I can't even count how many hours, days and weeks we spent converting RunUO to Sphere 0.51a. It's a great experience and you really get the feeling of Sphere except for all the annoying bugs.

Hopes this helps

[Shade]

Meh Taran beating me to posting... and I typed out like 26 pages of info too.

[Taran]

Well I had like 38 but my comp crashed so I just summed it up instead.

[Ziggy Stardust]

You can sum it up with that they made RunUO feel like Sphere, and thanks to that we run on RunUO now the staff were able to fix all bugs, but keep the sphere feeling. So the PvP and the feeling and everything should be the same, but "disabled spells" now work. I don't think that they have made the "previously disabled spells" play a big role in the PvP tho, so you probably won't notice a difference with that.

You can look at it as if they took all the best things from IN1 and all the best things from the other IN-servers and mixed it together into what we have here, a great bugfree shard. Test it, if you like it you'll stay, if not then you may have wasted a couple of hours of your life, no big deal.

Oh and when u're poisoned you can't use bandages, so you have to cure yourself or use a bandage on yourself to cure the poison and then another one to heal with a bandage.

[Carding]

Thanks for the info, I'll probably give it a shot if I can get certain other individuals to join in...

I am a little worried/curious about some of your answers. Inevitably the massive advantages of high end gear really killed the system on the original IN, why not recreate the system as it was earlier in the server's life when it still worked pretty well? It's early days and the impact of high end gear is unlikely to be apparent yet but if you include things like HFs/SoVs in their old form it is inevitable that they will widen the gap between the established/best/richest pvpers and the new/poorer pvpers, which is really not a good things as making players go bankrupt to fight kills not only the pvp system but the economy as well.

Also the attack last target button spam used to cause a lot of rubberbanding, it may depend on what client version you run now but why not simply adopt the newer mechanics? The end result is very similar only less reliant on mashing 1 button. On the same topic, do you still have the archery "insta shot" as a result of the same button mashing?

I appreciate you are trying to recreate .51 and not some hybrid mash up but I think in certain cases the new mechanics would actually make the gameplay better in ways that would have been great on IN but were impossible with the limited coding of sphere. I know that when I was a GM that I and the other GMs/Devs would have liked to change many things and just could not because sphere couldn't do it.

Have you changed the mana regen mechanics at all or is it solely down to chugging mana pots still?

Are you going to be selling statics for HQs?

Maybe someone should make an FAQ (if one does not already exist) about the pvp system, perhaps using some of the answers you already gave here, to let new players (particularly non-INers) know what the server is offering. Might help get people in.

[Taran]

I'll leave the answer about weapons to Shade, since he made some changes to that recently. But we want everyone to be able to PvP, not just the players with most gametime and money. The custom weapons such as HH and SoV aren't as overpowered as they were on IN1.

You don't have the rubberband effect here, no matter how much you press the attacklast button. Actually I don't think I've ever gotten the rubberband effect for anything. I've never tested the archery "insta shot", I'll do that as soon as I get home and check what happens. I'm pretty sure it won't insta shoot though.

Mana regen works like on IN1, meaning you will have to drink mana pots in fights.

Statics are sold both to individual players and to guilds. Thanks to RunUO and a custom house script we can make any building in the world act like a house. You can even build your own static on your own server if you want to and then have staff move it to IN. You still have to pay for it though

A FAQ should definitely be made, if anyone feels up to the task, go ahead and post one and we will put it on the website.
We had a FAQ on IN:X though, I'll move the up-to-date answers to our website when I get time.

[Ziggy Stardust]

(This reply is ment for Carding even tho I'm quoting Taran)

Mana regen works like on IN1, meaning you will have to drink mana pots in fights.

This is true but it is not "bugged" anymore, it is intentionally made this way. You still get mana from meditation but if you get it too fast plus can use mana potions then you never run out of mana, so it's better this way, it is already hard enough to get somebody to run out of mana even when passive meditation is pretty slow.

And Carding I'm pretty sure that the staff team that Imagine Nation has now actually "wants" the same thing when it comes to PvP that you do, which means they don't want a PvP where the best weapon determines the winner, they want a PvP where the one whose the best at PvP wins, but of course weapons still matter, so I don't think they will imbalance the weapons too much, and if they do by accident they should be correcting it so fast that you hardly won't even notice that it was ever messed up, unless you were the poor guy who reported it.

[Carding]

Okay well I think I know everything I want to know for now, thanks!

[Shade]

Just to touch on the weapons a bit. The idea was not to make crafted weapons insta kill people but to give each their own purposes. For instance the HF and SoV, which will be craftable soon, aren't much more than a vanq weapon. However, they will do bonus damage to their opposing counterparts. If you have a HF and you are attacking someone with negative karma, it will do bonus damage and visa versa for the SoV. My reasoning behind this is because chaos and order guilds are always the biggest and having weapons that can take each side down quicker takes those mass fights beyond vent/ts and someone just shouting a name of who to fs first. Otherwise these weapons are pretty normal though. The other custom weapons from IN1 all have special purposes, for instance the dragon slayer sword, it actually is made to slay dragons now. Diamond katanas do bonuses to humanoid creatures, goblin clooba does bonus damage vs orcs and goblins, dwarven weapons do bonus against terathan and ophidians, etc.

This was done to keep them in game with some purpose without players running around with overpowered weapons. Don't misunderstand though, they are strong weapons and if you think you can take a HH blow to the face half naked, you are most definitely wrong.

Also, the insta bow shooting here doesn't happen.

Mana regen rates are almost identical... though I dare say they are a fraction faster here passively but I can't be sure.

Oh and I had a FAQ going, though sloppily formatted, in my 26 page post that I ended up removing since Taran beat me to responding.

[Carding]

I'm not sure I follow the logic that weapons will prevent FS ganking. Unless the weapons are so powerful that they would utterly break 1 vs 1 (which doesn't sound the case). Also I'd point out that alignment and karma do not go hand in hand as low karma comes from PKing and chaos do not necessarily PK, also all PvM raises karma irrespective of your alignment, so that makes me think the bonus to the HF would be of less use than the one for the SoV (as probably more people have positive karma).

I have thought of 2 more questions though;
1) Is bandage curing still instant?
2) Have you restored the critical hit mechanic?

[Shade]

Sorry if I didn't explain the bit about ganking correctly. I was merely trying to state that big guild vs guild fights would go beyond spamming fs, loot, med up and attack again. At least thats my hope, since I remember very little or no combat during such fights in the past and I'd like to see a little introduced and hopefully doing this with the weapons will bring a tiny bit more combat during said fights.

1. Curing poison with bandages takes the same time as it would to heal with bandages.. off the top of my head I think its 3.5 seconds.
2. Hm, I am not entirely sure what you mean with this. Though I can say that there are critical hits and melee damage in itself is quite randomized so that weapons aren't the major factor in pvp over timing, tactics and skill.

Oh and one more thing, if it is not too much trouble, you can do me a favor. Go here and for every question you have asked, simply follow one step in that guide. If done correctly, you should now have UO installed correctly 2 times so you might as well log in. See you in game (hope that works)