"Resource gathering and leveling many of the skills is boring and pointless."
I can understand that after 10 years or 11 years or 12 years of playing UO, you are bored.
So here's an idea for you:
Quit.
Why hang around and screw up the game for others who haven't played for eons and eons like you have?
Maybe veteran players are the real reason UO can't get and keep new players?
ha ha ha..if u all think that scripting for skill-ing up, or resource gathering is the main cause that there are no new players coming to play this game you are ridiculously dense.
It is because this game is old, its graphics do not appeal to the modern gamer, and the movement is clunky and choppy on the 2d client, the skill gain system is outdated. And there is no advertisement for this game at all.
and really? you are telling more people to quit? as if this game isnt empty enough we also need the players to help kill this game more by encouraging others to leave
I am a relatively new player myself compared to the rest of you and i must say that i would have found this game unplayable if not for 3rd party addons that reduce the amount of clicks i have to do.
Not only this but i still refuse to do pvp in this game simply because of the clunkiness of the user interface, the movement lag, and the horrible targeting system.
In fact i wouldnt even have known about this game if i didn't see it mentioned in the World of warcraft forums talking about how this was one of the original mmo's.
Ill tell you how i came to play this game. The first time i tried this game was about 1 year or so years ago. The kingdom reborn client was still around and i decided to give it a try. Having played both the 2d client and the kingdom reborn client i decided to NOT play this game because it was so unfriendly to new players. There is no way that a new player could possibly get into a game where a mongbat regens faster than you can hit it for damage.
I remember my first character from 1 year ago, it was a mage and i was casting magic arrows at a mongbat and between the fizzles and kiting, i was never able to bring it all the way down because it regen'd faster than i could do damage. The prospect of having to do this to get magery up to a level where it wont be useless was so daunting to me as a new player that after about one hour or so of being stuck in a building in New Haven i said screw it and quit the game
a few months later i decided to give the free shards a try. The free shards introduced the 3rd party programs that worked like UO assist. It works similarly so i am told except that it allows a loop function which is why UO never approved of it. Anyways, it was through a free shard that allowed what you would call "unattended macroing" to gain skills that i decided to give the OSI shards another try using the same program to connect to OSI like you would with UO assist.
Once i started playing this game on the OSI servers the person who helped me out while i was still new introduced me to the scripting programs which allowed me to train up my skills and get into the game that much faster.
And no i dont unattended "script/macro" because i dont want my account banned but as you can see, getting into this game and keeping a sub for me at least would have been impossible if not for scripting and 3rd party programs.
Finally on the topic of new players subs
Ive shown this game to at least 4 or 5 friends of mine hoping that they would play with me as well. But i have got the same response from all of them. "I will not play a pixelated 2d game thats over ten years old."
I guess the only reason i am here is because i enjoyed games like Baldur's gate, icewind dale, and planescape torment. and the idea that i dont have to constantly raid for high end gear in games like WoW appealed to me, although i keep subs for both games. They simply offer different things and UO does not have what most gamers want today.
Maybe pvp scripting makes it so that people don't want to play but thats not what this thread is about. I would agree using scripts to cheat in pvp isn't cool and is comparable to using fly hacks in WoW arenas that is rampant on the test realm. It affects somebody because pvp is supposed to be a test of skill and gear against a group of players and having a speed hack makes it unfair. But using scripts to skill up and assist in mining and such? that affects NOBODY.
If anything it makes your time and my time a lot easier because resources are a lot cheaper, and i dont want to hear the oh but it devalues the time of miners who dont script, because face it non scripting miners will never put out enough ore to supply an entire shard anyway and there are better ways to make gold in this game than sitting and clicking around a mining cave all day. And if you are going to argue that mining for hours is an enjoyable and fun minigame, then i will tell you that i find it enjoyable to watch paint dry and you can come play count the number of air bubbles in the drying paint with me.
I dont even mine anymore at all. It is much more profitable to turn mined resources into something that will sell for 2x-3x the price. and for much less time.
and how about that argument oh why are you still paying for a game that you dont even "play" cause you are afk all the time. I dont believe that statement. This game as far as i can see boils down to FOUR things that you can do.
PVP
PVM
Gathering/crafting
and RP
only 3 of these REQUIRES you to be at your keyboard for obvious reasons. Gathering and Crafting enables you to do the other three things.
But why should i spend 10 hours of nonstop clicking when i can do the same in half the time with only 1 mouse click? so that i can go and do the things that actually have a purpose and is enjoyable?
Once all the scripters are gone, people like you will be like oh the economy is ruined! everything is soo expensive why is it that valorite ore which used to be 1 million gold per 5000 is now 1 million gold per 500?? Why is that crimson cincture that was 15 million over 30 million gold??
But i guess legitimate miners and crafters are happy now right so that solves all the issues in the game and causes everyone who quit over the last 10 years to come back?
No one would quit this game over someone else scripting to skill up, or attended resource gather, maybe even unattended resource gathering. PVP? Perhaps if thats the only thing that you enjoy doing in this game.
But Face it, scripters will always be in this game. They are the backbone of the game's economy now, just like how the Gold and item selling sites dictate the prices of artifacts, gold, resources, etc.
What you are asking for is like asking for Blizzard to ban D2JSP and botting in diablo 2. IT SIMPLY will not happen because these things are so tied into the game that if removed, even more people will probably quit.
I know i will quit using the 2D client if i cant use my freeshard version of UO assist because i am not paying the UOA developers for a license to use their program that is only valuable because they are the only ones who got endorsed by EA.
And i know that if the above were to come to pass i would probably never level another skill again. i simply refuse to spend my time manually clicking magic arrow 1000 times and then Heal 4000 times and so on to get a skill up to legendary.
Here is a comic that is perfect for this discussion, for you people who think that it is fun doing repetitive tasks over and over again
http://www.vgcats.com/super/?strip_id=31
But "what if" that loss of 6,000 cheating accounts then prompts more players to actually be willing to play UO and, therefore, open new subscriptions or renew their old ones because, now, finally, they can play a game free of cheaters ?
I mean, why would it be that if the game is free of cheats noone would want to play it ?
My experience is rather different, over the years I met quite a few fellow players who left the game because they had enough of scripters, or of dupers or of speed hackers, or of house breakers into and so forth.
And quite a few times I heard of players who might have wanted to come back to the game but were deterred by the rampant cheating.
So, how can we say that an UO free of cheating would have less players in the end ?
What if, instead, Ultima Online after it's been freed of cheaters gets more subscriptions as before ?
Of course, noone has the answer to this, but sometimes, in business without taking risks there is not much gains........
there really is no "what if there were no cheats"
very few new people will play this game even if there were no cheating because no one even knows about this game anymore outside of the people who still play it.
As a true new player the first thing you ask is most definitely not is this game cheat free. Its more like is this game fun? how easy is it to get into? and how long does it take for me to get to max level?
And the answer would most likely be no in all 3 categories to the new generation of gamers today.
And people who do stumble upon it by accident would probably think that its some kind of ancient game from long ago thats not worth paying a subscription for.
I believe that in the eyes of most people who have never played any video games before the n64 or EQ1, and the old 2d computer games will not even take a second look at games like this. Personally i probably would not have forced myself to learn to play this game if i was not looking for something different, and was already used to the 2d video game style.
Also from what ive been reading on these forums most veteran players quit because of AOS and the itemization overhaul. i highly doubt that the game suddenly becoming cheat free would suddenly bring these people back. Like previous posters said. if 6000 people were banned at once this game is dead. Those old players most likely have all moved on or are playing free shards now
If anything some of the things that you call "cheats" are actually what makes this game playable for us "new" players who have not been playing it since the late 1990s -2000s and are used to games like WoW or EQ.
what more you all should be glad this game still exists. how many MMO's are gone now? UO is still here, cheats, scripts or not please stop encouraging EA to make this game go under with these ridiculous notions that a mass banning or overhaul that causes macros and scripts to cease to exist will save the game, cause i want to play this game for a few more years and i worry more about this game being canceled than how much gold im loosing to an afk mining scripter. Stop worrying about what other people are doing just because it indirectly affects you and play your own game.
Ahh and this brings to mind one of my favorite quotes from one of these anti scripters who ironically is a scripter herself.
"oh but this scripter who is turning in things into the Museum will ruin the game for the rest of us because it will bump up the tier!"
like yea ok having more items show up on display is going to ruin somebody elses game play makes perfect sense gg.