[NEWS]Trial Accounts and You

[Oriana]

Trial Accounts and You
Hello everyone!

The design team has recently been provided with better tools to identify paying accounts versus free trial accounts once a player has logged in. Up until now content and systems within UO have not been designed in a way that discourages exploitative behavior, treating both types equally.

As you can imagine, this has led some very negative consequences. Resource farming, scripting, house placement exploits – these are all things taken advantage of by unscrupulous individuals abusing trial accounts. In turn, we’ve had to put hard caps on usage of various game features; for instance, having to wait an artificial thirty days after making a character before you can do certain things.

We now have the tools in place to accomplish two major things: restrict usage of some features to paying subscribers, and release the “character age” restrictions in others.

Some examples would include:

• Only letting paying subscribers create/trade houses
• Make BODs only available to paying subscribers
• Remove character age requirements for placing houses

Those aren’t the only things we’re looking at, but before we get too ahead of ourselves, I’d like to solicit your feedback.

I strongly believe this new ability will make the game healthier, and reward loyal players while removing the ease with which our systems are exploited. I should reiterate that this is only an effort to fix a gaping hole in the way we design our systems. This isn’t a change to the way UO’s subscription model works in any way.

Our definition of trial accounts does *not* include the free game time associated with buying an actual release of the game. That first month of paid subscription entitles you to *all* the benefits of a regular subscriber. These restrictions will only be applied to the free trial accounts.

We’re currently targeting these changes for Publish 58.

I’m opening this thread to discuss:

• Discussion on the impact of being able to restrict trial users from some systems
• What systems you feel are meant for paying subscribers
• What current “age related” restrictions you’d like to see removed

Thank you,

Tim "Draconi" Cotten


To give your opinion please go to this thread on Uhall.

It's up to us to voice the changes.

Oriana

 

[SuperKen]

The economy is fine.

FIX PVP.

 

[Obsession 1]

The economy is fine.

FIX PVP.

Agreed, but that still doesnt solve why im always out of gold.

 

[Millie]

All everyone has heard is Fix pvp for months. And the Dev. Team has been trying to do that. It's nice to see them take an interest in other aspects of the game, go read the thread and I think you will see In the long run this will also help pvp.

 

[Biske]

All everyone has heard is Fix pvp for months. And the Dev. Team has been trying to do that. It's nice to see them take an interest in other aspects of the game, go read the thread and I think you will see In the long run this will also help pvp.

There will always be someone somewhere saying fix pvp no matter what they do. We like to call them the losing team. An unfortunate side affect of modern thinking I suppose. Nobody ever wants to face their own shortcomings, or work to overcome them, they simply want to blame it on others and demand that somebody fix it for them. That’s how Trammel happened... and insurance... and superpets... and uhhh... Therin. Anyways, hopefully the devs have begun to learn this lesson, because I cringe at some of the ridiculously horrid ideas that you see at uhall, and while I hope that nobody in their right mind would do such a thing... well look at their track record in the past.
Where do you think their dumb ideas came from then?
In fact I do recall seeing a super dragon thread once... Course a few of the posters also wanted to ride them... But that would just look silly. Which is why they probably did dreadmares instead.

Maybe we should setup like a town watch... have all the sane people start a thread flaming militia. Because when the 90% who are somewhat sane keep quiet and all you hear is those 10% who want to ride purple anacondas what choice are they left with really?

I think that is a good idea though, in fact I would go even further with it, like restrict them from using trade windows and xfer servers. I know initially that sounds silly but when you add those things to the list they have already it takes out virtually any potential duping avenue. Which is pa much more lethal use for trial accounts then simple scripting.

 

[Millie]

I cringe at some of the ridiculously horrid ideas that you see at uhall, and while I hope that nobody in their right mind would do such a thing... well look at their track record in the past.

Yes I have to agree here, although off thread a bit, A fine example is the thread that is demanding that you have 80 vet to bond a pet because of PVP. Do you realize how Crafters would just give up the skills of crafting. Most mules have not room for more points, and with our old game, I'm sure we would be told that " we had to do it to all pets and not just pvp pets. We are unable to code it in any other way".
And because the the 10 % keep Screaming for it and it has been stated it will be looked in to and addressed.

In the long run I believe that limiting trial accounts is a good start to balancing this whole game no just the pvp part of the game.