What I find most disturbing is that the upcoming booster pack is based on work that Draconi and others were doing before they had to switch to an elven theme and push out the Mondains Legacy expansion. (See Draconi's July 9th post here:
http://vboards.stratics.com/1776333-post60.html .)
So how much money, time and effort is EA really putting into this booster pack if a lot of the work (including smooth boat movement in the classic client) was already done five years ago?
How much of the money subscribers pay do you think is really going into development work for UO versus how much is being used to pay the EMs (including any new ones they hire for the Japanese shards) or is shuttled off for other EA projects? Why is it that Cal and his team only seem to focus on pleasing UO subscribers whose main goal in the game seems to be to collecting ever more pixels?
Have they given up as an impossible task the idea of building new or polishing existing content for players who don't care about rares and deco items but would rather spend the majority of their playing time working with other players to engage in PvP or PvM challenges? Where's the content for players who don't need a rare or deco item dangled in their faces just to get them to team up with other players and beat the snot out of some monsters or other players' characters? Where's the content and fixes for players who don't have hours to play every week; who don't want to pay extra money above and beyond their subscription fees so they can buy gold, power or stat scrolls, artifacts, soulstones, tokens, etc., so they can even begin to think about playing with and against "vet" players; and who don't want to put their accounts at risk by using unapproved programs to speed through "tedious" skill training and gathering of resources?
Why is it that what seems to get most of the attention from the developers/designers/EMs is content that caters to collectors and people who don't seem to cringe at the thought of kissing up to Mesanna and the EMs? Everyone else who pays to play the game has to just sit back and put up with an out of control game economy that scares away new/returning players and discourages the few remaining "casual" players from setting up vendors; broken and/or unbalanced systems; rampant cheating and griefing; and random unexplained "fixes" that no one remembers requesting?
Seriously, if you aren't into collecting rares and/or you don't feel like dropping extra money into the game and/or using cheat programs to "catch up" with the vet players that surround you on all sides, what's the point of playing or trying to get start playing UO anymore? Cal's been blowing smoke at people for almost a year now regarding getting rid of cheaters, while completely side stepping the root reasons why people use unapproved programs. (Throwing more stuff like SoAs into the game is not a solution, in my book.) His announcement Friday that they're only going to ban the most egregious cheaters is a joke. It does nothing to give people any incentive to stick around. Cal and his team don't get it that people who want to PvP or participate in factions are sick and tired of shard hopping and making new characters in a futile effort to find a good, honest challenge. Or if you want to regularly do PvM in a small or medium sized group, the only place left to do it is probably Atlantic shard or maybe one of the Japanese shards if you're lucky enough to speak Japanese and can play during their peak hours.
Cal needs to consider running a closed discussion group for faction and PvP issues. And this time he and his team need to go into it without a pre-established list of changes, fixes, and new content that they plan to shove down everyone's throat. The last "focus group" that they ran before the faction changes were rolled out was just a joke in terms of soliciting and paying attention to people who actually had any faction or PvP experience. One person who actually had the ability to speak coherently and knowledgeably about faction and PvP issues was mostly ignored by the developers/designers and shredded by the multitude of non-PvPers in the group. And the "PvP rebalance" focus group that existed the year before that was poorly thrown together (it seemed to be a knee-jerk response to the debacle that was the introduction of KR) and then was basically squashed by the community person when a handful of players blabbed out of school. So it's been many years now since the dev team has even tried to listen to and attempt to address concerns and ideas for revitalizing PvP, factions, guild wars, etc. in UO. I think one of the designers (Logrus) actually plays UO and PvPs, but I have my doubts that any of the other current designers and developers do or that Cal or Mesanna do. Maybe they PvP in other games, but it sure doesn't feel like they have done much of it in the last few years in UO. And although Sakkarah may have done a lot of PvP before she became a developers, I always felt like the changes she made that touched on PvP systems were mostly made to lure people to Fel in an underhanded fashion (e.g., adding artifacts and SoTs to champ spawns) and/or to reward being able to completely squash your opponent. I never felt like she added anything to encourage casual players or those without much PvP experience to try out Fel and to keep going back there on a regular basis. It always seemed like her pre-developer experience as an "EM" weighed most heavily in many of the additions she made to the game.
Eh, who cares at this point? To me, UO has just become a game about collecting pixels that could just poof tomorrow if EA decides to pull the plug. Sure, you can still play it for hours on end even if that isn't your goal. But the game has become such a dead place, that 99% of the time you're doing that all by yourself. What reason is there anymore to team up with other players besides trying to acquire some item? No one dungeon crawls just for the fun or challenge of it. And who wants to PvP or try to learn to PvP when to do so you have to dump extra money into the game and/or cheat and/or maintain houses, characters, and gear on multiple shards? And why participate in factions when it basically means nothing and when activity at the bases is pointless unless you belong to the biggest guild on the shard or are complacent about cheating to get and keep the sigils? Blech. Not choices I have any compelling reason to make any more.