I voted yes.
I would have voted "Yes... but it depends heavily on execution from developers, the economy, the expectations of both EA/Mythic and the players, the decisions EA is going to make in the near future sparked by recent events, and everything that happens AFTER the classic shard goes up".
But there was no option for that, so let me explain.
First, let's run through one of the most basic truths of the situation:
The population of Ultima Online is declining. It will very likely continue to do so.
Now, this has plenty of implications. Some affect the discussion at hand in the short term, and some in the long term. Others, both.
But short term, what this means is that the crew working on Ultima Online isn't 75 strong. It also means that it's very unlikely that there are going to be many more hires any time soon. You simply can't justify it logically to EA beancounters.
In fact, Mythic recently laid off 21 customer service employees, half of their QA, and all of their playtesting group. That means the likelyhood of a dedicated team moving onto a "classic shard" project is basically nil. In fact, if I remember correctly, Runesaber took Siege on as his own pet project and did it in his own time - so that's how that got done - and that was during the height of UO's popularity, when the ability to get more people hired, by the team lead no less, was probably much increased over what it is today. Because of that, people WOULD have to be taken from work on production shards, at least partially and temporarily.
That's pretty unlikely for a couple of reasons. One being that, you know, these guys are actually probably kinda busy. On things they've designed themselves, and ideas they think are going to be good for UO.
The other being that the players who are paying (and I'm on Stratics, so that's you guys) are, you know, /paying/. If you're paying, it doesn't matter if you want a classic shard. You're paying. If you're paying and playing and you DON'T want a classic shard, it might very well upset you that resources (however potentially little) have been redirected from things that are designed to make YOU happy. So that does matter.
So at what point is it an intelligent policy to take a shot at former players at the risk of potentially upsetting your current players? At what point do you chase possible dollars when you may be upsetting the people giving you real dollars?
Well, one MIGHT argue that point is now. One might.
Here's why.
The population of Ultima Online is declining. It will very likely continue to do so.
This is significant because subscriptions are /already/ at a level that EA finds unnacceptable. Mark Jacobs can be quoted as saying that EA tried to shut UO down in 2006. Now, Mr. Jacobs is a smart guy with a law degree - so I'm sure he convinced them real nice when he made his case for EA to hand UO over to Mythic, give it more time, invest in UO:KR, etc.
Regardless of how well the man argues his cases, we've got extenuating circumstances. Plenty of them, actually.
EA is laying people off. UO:KR was a substantial investment and failed to deliver any significant impact on subscriptions. Warhammer recently closed 40 servers.
Well, we can call that the big three, anyway. It's enough to talk about for a moment.
Now, the judge going ahead and deciding on the death penalty for such a respected elder of the community would be quite surprising, I think we could all agree. But it would have surprised the hell out of all of us in 2006, too. So given all of these problems, how likely is it that EA has Mythic in their crosshairs - and how would the aging Ultima Online be affected if it were?
We're talking about a couple of things here. Both your continued enjoyment playing Ultima Online, and the jobs of the people who may be affected. How long are both of those things really going to be around following the current course and in this economy? Brushing things like this off because UO has never been shut down before is a little nonsensical at this point.
Here's where putting aside short term selfishness and looking out for the long term health of the game comes in. Even if just for a few moments.
Whatever you can do to add subscriptions is good. Especially if they come in somewhat significant numbers. You may disagree with me entirely, but I don't think another expansion of the type that hasn't really captured any attention outside of the UO community is suddenly going to create any type of massive, or even moderate, turnaround. A lot of current users will purchase it however, so you can count on UO being alive for that long.
But.. how long?
I can only assure you of one thing:
Not long.
Get your arms in the air about UO "doomsaying", but outside of the (very small) UO community, UO has been dead a good long while. Again, 2006. Outside of Stratics and a couple of other small communities, not many people would have been very surprised - and even less would be talking about the event right now.
But don't get your arms up too high, because I actually mean a couple things. In fact, anyone that hates the first thing I say in this entire post will almost always get mildly giddy about the second thing I say. It may or may not be intentionally structured that way so all of you mushheads pay attention. Ahem.
Anyway:
It's not all good news, however - and that's either way you look at it.
A classic shard is one way to guarantee some offspec attention to Ultima Online. It'll create a splash.
"So, it'll be successful?"
Absolutely. Yes. Affirmative. Damn straight. Count your chickens, farmer John. So on.
In fact, I (as in me, personally, the guy typing this) could erect a classic free shard this second and have at least a thousand concurrent users playing twenty four hours a day. This is fact, and can be demonstrated at any time.
Would it be as successful as it would have been four or five years ago? Well.. probably not. But that doesn't make it a bad idea.
This does:
The Element, and Being Told "No"
Grab some old code or fake it, that's your choice. But throw a classic server up just like that, and what you've got are PROBLEMS.
For one, you attract "The Element". Or, to be blunt, "the jerks". And that's not really being very blunt.
This is a simple matter of throwing a PvP+, full loot world at a bunch of hungry wolves that have been starving for years and years.
That's a problem for the classic shards themselves, and there would be some spillover into the general community (such as these forums). But your home shards would be relatively unaffected. Unless the strategy were effective and players started siphoning onto the production shards. That'd be a good thing, believe it or not.
One interesting thing to note is the effect that Darkfall might have on this situation.
I don't believe for a second that Darkfall will have any kind of widespread or long term success. But it has a loyal base of fanboys that can see no wrong in the incredible pool of flaws that is the game and the company running it.
What's interesting about that is that, while you may potentially decrease the userbase for a classic server or set of classic servers, you very likely also increase the ratio of serious jerks to regular players that you're inviting back to your community. Darkfall unapologetically and very unintelligently purposefully markets itself to jerks, scammers, PKers, etc. A certain amount of those people will be happy with that game - for a while, at least.
The jerks aren't necessarily our target market here, because they don't have to be. Our target market are former UO players who enjoyed UO the way it was many years ago.
There are a lot of people who enjoyed classic Ultima Online that aren't jerks, scammers, PKs, etc. Dor, Morgana, and others on this forum and in this very thread are exactly that type of person.
Of course, some of the people you attract aren't the only problems.
EasyUO, for example, must absolutely be eradicated before any type of project like this were to go live. This requires that you not only find a way to detect EasyUO, but that you actually spend significant amounts of CS resources enforcing your rules. Not impossible, because we did both on IPY to some effect, although our particular method for detecting the program was fixed by its creator after we decided to let him know about it in good faith, believing his promise that he'd provide us with a legitimate way to detect the program for our shard. Obviously a mistake, but the scenario proves two things - EasyUO can be detected if you work hard enough at the problem with smart enough people, and a fool and his golden ticket to a fair UO shard are soon parted. Find the solution and let it be known that you have it, keep it a secret, ban mofos. Fin.
Sooner or later, given an effective enough and very dedicated anti-cheating GM squad, people stop trying to use the program in droves.
I also hear that speedhacking is a problem on EA servers. Not an incredibly difficult thing to detect OR prevent, so I'm not exactly sure why it's going on. But I'll leave that alone, aside from saying that all cheating must very simply end before a classic server goes live. Because everyone and their dog will exploit known cheats to the fullest extent they possibly can, and everything about the shard will suffer. PvP, the economy, everything. And it will fail. Quickly. You will have wasted your time.
A good classic shard is a delicate balance of many factors. Allowing EasyUO, speedhacking, or anything else of the sort will kill it promptly.
FAILING any sort of good detection or prevention, this shard will require additional GM support to diligently follow up on reports of cheating. This is even more difficult, because it'll likely cost MANY more man hours in the end, and without known detection in place for programs more players will be enticed into using them. The deterrent would have to be swift and decisive action against the accounts. In turn this will cause a host of problems on its own.
As my security guy on IPY (a lifelong griefer, who now happens to be the GM of Goonfleet on EvE) once said to me - "Griefers are essentially huge nerds who don't like being told no."
When you start banning them, they tend to cause... well, as many problems as they can possibly cause. I hope your DDOS mitigation is strong, and your developers enjoy being e-stalked. My recommendations regarding that particular mess is an entirely different discussion.
Sounds pretty bad, doesn't it?
A classic shard is a delicate flower, and a lot of the people who want one really only want one so they can wreck it. Kind of like that sociopathical kid who spends hours building a sandcastle just so he can stomp it and feel powerful for a minute. Of course, he then cries because his sandcastle somehow got ruined. But no lesson is learned, and don't try to teach one because you're wasting your time.
This is ONE of the things you're dealing with when you invoke The Element, so get used to it.
Fortunately I think this problem will be mitigated by the release of things like Darkfall and Mortal Online, two games specifically (much like Shadowbane) attempting to attract the attention of these guys. It's also always been my opinion that the ratio of good players to jerks and griefers would significantly improve on EA servers, where a more diversified playerbase would be pulled from the population. On free servers, you get a lot of free server players. A lot of people who are currently playing on EA servers, or would be attracted to an EA classic server, just simply won't play.
It can also be difficult to track down and ban offenders (and keep them banned) when accounts are free. Having personal information and credit card numbers is a huge tool against cheating - or at least a really big step up from not having them. You wouldn't really believe how big a step, either. Regardless of stolen credit cards and such, it gives you a great head start that people operating free servers don't enjoy.
The (Golden) Smoking Gun..
or..
You might hurt yourself diving into the shallow end of the pool, because you're not four feet tall anymore.
Now, some of you might know where I'm going with this. Others might not. For those of you who aren't sure, I'm going to make a major, ground-shaking announcement:
Classic UO was shallow.
There, it's been said.
Looking back, it's somewhat hard to understand that statement. You had more than enough to do, and besides, the game is a damn sandbox, Az, and I don't need your stupid WoWish themepark rides to keep me happy.
Correct. If it's 1999.
But I've sat on both sides of the table, and while I understand how UO is looked back on - I also have an understanding of what it's like when affected by modern situations, held up against modern MMOs, and the effect is both largely invisble to players and devastating to the game.
See, the thing about playing online games is that, in general, you play when you're happy with it. You leave when you're bored. If you're generally happy but somewhat angry, you might pancake on the forums or leave feedback. But if you're bored, you just drift off. In a way, it's smarter to keep people stimulated by being mildly pissed off about things (See WoW and their constant and often illogical nerf and buff cycle - very obviously and often just for the sake of nerfing and buffing, changing things up, throwing players off, making them respec, etc) than to simply let things sit and grow stale, inviting boredom.
Problem is, Classic Shardies DEMAND things remain the same. If you change things up, you've ruined their classic shard.
Check.
Unfortunately, as it is, "Classic UO" has a real problem.
Everyone has been there, done that.
For the majority, and especially for the PvPers, the game has degraded to what I like to call "Quake With Swords".
Here's how you play in a nutshell:
Log in.
-(EasyUO) Tailor/Lumberjack/Whatever up a bunch of gold.
- Macro up your tankmage's skills.
- Pwn.
It's a three step program and the dropout rate is high. Follow all of the advice I've outlined in this post to the letter (and sit through my four hour powerpoint presentation on How Not To **** Up A Classic Shard By Doing A Bunch Of **** You Didn't Know Was Wrong), and you've earned yourself an honorable death after about... 10-14 months. Good work, you've now exhausted every possibility that may have even arisen from the attention you've gained and lost.
Now, Morgana will play this game differently. Dor, will play this game differently. But for all of the Morganas and Dors you'll attract, you still can't escape the fact that a solid majority of the people who are going to log into this shard will follow the Tailor/Macro/Pwn pattern and burn out very quickly.
It's not an arguable point. I've watched it.
Mate.
Game over, right?
Well, as UO circa '97-'00 or so exists in our minds, it's at a disadvantage. Not only is the game designed as a sandbox with an array of toys for us to play with that we've LONG since worn out for the most part, but it exists as an evolution stalled in time.
All MMOs evolve. They have to. Just for the sake of evolving, an online world must change. If not, the worst kind of player dissatisfaction -- boredom -- sets in.
Because many of us feel that UO evolved in the wrong direction, what we love is left stillborn. It hasn't had the benefit of ten years of evolution in the direction we'd have preferred.
A Fork In The Road, And Things Left Unsaid... It's All A Little More Complicated Than It Seems
The most basic problems of a classic shard are intrinsic to its nature and prevent it from being a long term success. If for no other reason, I still believe one should exist for the people who would stick around long term - those that love Ultima Online.
Since we all know that ain't gonna happen, here's my advice:
A Classic UO shard will, and I apologize to all of the designers, programmers, producers, et cetera that have worked on the many more recent expansions, garner more attention that UO has seen in many, many years. The problem is that, with a LOT of hard work, the servers (And I very truly believe there'd have to be more than one, even at this point) will have a bustling population for about a year and a half or less.
This isn't simply checkmate.
The attention needs to be used as an opportunity FOR long term success (that's dollars, folks). In the end, things never work out to being as simple as they might seem, and this is one of those occasions. It's my personal opinion that just throwing up a classic server will make a much larger short term impact on account numbers than long term.
What can you do with that attention.
Well, I hesitate to spill my guts here because EA isn't handing me a cheque, and I've seen absolutely no evidence of why I should help them for free.
But I think it's easy enough to figure out, and this post is long enough at this point. Plus, the best surprises shouldn't be spoiled. They don't have the same effect that way. Time them carefully.
Besides, I'm getting dangerously close to devoting my time to proving another point to this company.
I consider this an open letter to EA/Mythic as well as to the fans of Ultima Online, past and present. Use it however you want.
Just please don't argue over it, or attempt to take some of it out of context and rub noses in it. If you do, you're likely not fully understanding what was said, and especially not the points I'm making.
In the end, nobody is right and nobody is wrong. It's all a little more complicated than it seems.
But in the end, I voted yes.
That's because with a lot of passion and a lot of hard work, something like this could be a pretty big success not only for the people who would directly enjoy it - but for Ultima Online itself, and everyone who wants to keep it rolling into the future.
My advice?
Do it, do it right, capitalize properly on the attention and don't just let it fade away.
?
