I do wish you’d just stuck to “What I really dislike about the player base is that they’re so hypocritical; they complain about things that they perceive as being ‘wrong’ with the game and yet, even though if nobody used the items they wouldn’t be able to ruin the game like they’re currently doing, the players are too lazy to simply boycott them.” That’s a valid point, although what you have to realise is that even if you don’t play the game competitively (I don’t consider roleplaying a “competitive” play-style – not so much as PvPing, anyway, or building a rare item collection more impressive than that of the person in the next castle across), other people do; they may not like the way the others have rewritten the rules of the game, but they have to follow the rewritten rules as best they can or they’ll be left behind. Some people play UO to compete with others. It’s not really fair to criticise them for trying to keep up with the crowd when that’s how they like to play. They get their satisfaction out of measuring themselves, comparing, hoarding, racing, killing, and above all, winning…
…and there’s nothing wrong with that.
That’s the part of your post that made me look at it sideways and then write one of my characteristic big thread-killing essays: “I play the game the way it is supposed to be played…”. That type of comment, I tend to take umbrage at. Why?
Firstly, I’m a roleplayer. That is how I play the game. Were I not confined to Oceania by ping, I would have left for Europa or Baja years ago, because I know that they have large vibrant roleplay communities and, well, I would very much like to be part of a large vibrant roleplay community – but the fact is that I am stuck on Oceania and will be so for the rest of my UO-playing life (or until I can afford a faster connection.) We have a very small handful of dedicated roleplayers on my little shard, but the vast majority of us are not roleplayers. I’d say that the population is split up pretty evenly between PvMers – who are as quiet as PvMers generally are - and PvPers – including, I suspect, some of the most aggressive griefers in the game (there’s a reason that we’re up to our… thirteenth, I think… locked PvP thread.) When you’re in the extreme minority like I am, you get a good taste of how others perceive your play-style because they are not afraid to tell you. I mean, what are we going to do in retaliation? Sit outside their Felucca castles and fire grammar at them? Monopolise the market on pears and apples? You are a roleplayer too, so I’m sure you already know what the rest of the player-base thinks of roleplayers. Nowadays I’ve become part of the Oceania furniture, sitting in Luna and doggedly maintaining my punctuation through the storms of abuse, and for the most part they leave me alone; when I was newer to the shard I was griefed and harassed almost constantly, and it was proven to me repeatedly that the rest of the players think of us as dirt. Dirt! We’re everybody’s least favourite group of players. We’re the furries of the Ultima Online world.
Now, I’ve been in OOC arguments before – many, many times, some surprisingly fierce; that quote in my signature is not the type of thing that gets directed at a peaceful loving friend to all mankind – about the best way to play the game. “The way it is supposed to be played,” to quote you. According to the PvPers (vicious mongrels but always brutally honest), roleplayers are all socially inept, morbidly obese, bedroom-dwelling recluses who are so unhappy with their own miserable lives that they retreat into a fantasy world and live out their unrealised dreams through a jerkily animated fictional character. According to the roleplayers (including some of the most pompous, self-absorbed, superior pseudo-intellectuals I’ve ever met; not on Oceania, mind you, but in other places and on other games), PvPers are meat-headed grunting apes seething with frustrated testosterone and so bitter about the size of their real-life genitalia that if they don’t get their daily quota of pixelated blood they will shrivel up into a tiny ball of insecurity and die. And according to you, you are a true player because you remain faithful to the view of the medieval world and the original Ultima series, and everybody else is a lazy hypocrite who will happily denounce everything they can think of but will continue to use it regardless in their quest for cheap thrills.
Please correct me if the above description is incorrect, but I suspect that I’ve got it right. I used to think like that too. “This is my Ultima,” I’d think to myself as I watched my character’s text get drowned out by capslock abuse from some neon-clad dismount ninja or another. “What are all these idiots doing here? Can’t they see that neon armour and big magical weapons have no place in the Ultima universe? Why can’t they go play World of Warcraft and leave me alone to grimly watch my medieval nobleman sit in the bank by himself and look like he actually belongs there, even if there’s nobody left for him to interact with?” (Yes, I was and am a bank-sitter; Luna, too. I do nothing but roleplay anymore; I’ve achieved all that I want to in all those other areas, and the bank is where the people are.) My play-style, contrary to popular opinion, was the right one. PvPers were idiots, PvMers were morons, rares collectors were pathetic, and all these people using magical weapons, wearing armour and dragging around hiryus (the pet du jour back then) were being unfaithful to the game. They weren’t playing it the right way. They weren’t playing it as it used to be and therefore they had no right to be playing at all.
The thing is, I was wrong.
I’m used to this sort of attitude from PvPers, but from a fellow roleplayer it really sticks in my throat. To play our own way, we need to rely on tolerance from the other players. If the other players want to force PvMers out of a public place, the people they torment will just come in, do their banking, and go out hunting again. But roleplayers need the public place. If they want to force us into a little spot in the middle of nowhere that only we and our friends know about, they only need to spam over the top of us every time we try to speak. Roleplayers need newcomers occasionally. If they want to abuse every new player who asks about roleplay in the bank, thus ensuring that we get no new blood and our population stagnates, they can. Roleplayers need other people, and if the other people are driven away, there can be no roleplay – and people are easy to drive away. The GMs won’t do anything and the griefers know it. Oceania has been exceptionally kind to me – I have friends in the PvM and rare-hunting circles, and even a few PKers (I will not name names; they would be ganked); even people who don’t roleplay have accepted that I will not go out-of-character and they try to keep our interactions canonically plausible, I am not treated with fear and loathing like the poster below you generalised that we all are, and for that I am thankful – but I still recognise that my play-style more than any other depends on the other players’ grace.
So what am I ranting about? I’m ranting about you saying that your way is the way that the game should be played. This is wrong. This game is a public domain; we are all free to do with it what we will. If you want to roleplay, then roleplay. This does not make you more faithful, or more intelligent, or any worthier a player than a PvPer who doesn’t grief, a rares collector who doesn’t dupe, a PvMer who doesn’t lure, or any other player that sticks to what they find fun without disrupting anybody else’s game-play or – and this is important – forcing their style upon others. Ultima Online is a sandbox. There is no “proper” way to play. All play-styles are equal, all have their own merits, and nobody has the right to criticise how another person plays the game as long as they stick to the rules of conduct and respect the rights of others to play however they want.
Yes, I get abused by PvPers all the time. No, I don’t drop fifteen-hundred-word essays into their threads telling them to cease and desist. There’s too many of them and the attitude is too prevalent; it would be a waste of time. But in this game, with these peers, a roleplayer should know better than to say that theirs is the “only way to play the game.” In my opinion the one thing that the roleplaying community has above the others (besides, obviously, the fact that they and I play the game the same way) is humility. We are a community, a small one, and it’s best to think of us as such. Being obnoxious about the correctness of roleplaying as compared to all other styles wins us no friends and does us no favours; we are already the red-headed step-children of UO, and elitism on our part will only make matters worse than they already are. I would like to see us respected as legitimate players someday. The least we can offer is a little respect in return.
</hilariously serious business>
