@Ahuaeyjnkxs: Keeping stat loss doesn't mean making UO a "candy land". Far from it. UO had stat loss from the very earliest days through T2A. Back then, being a red meant something. The best reds were practically legendary, and players knew to run if they saw them. I know that you hated losing the character, but didn't love the fact that your very name gave the majority of the blue population a sense of dread and awe? That blues would see you from a screen away and start running, or recall out? That your name was cursed by whole guilds of anti-PKers?
The very point of stat loss and lots of other penalties for being red was to make life hard for reds. Being a successful red character was something that only a real hardcore gamer with exceptional skills could do.
Being a successful red was something that a lot of players were very proud of. Take Vader, for instance. He was red, and he survived for years. I think somebody paid like 10 million for his head, and put it on display when he finally died, back when gold sold for $100 per million on eBay, because it was a piece of UO history. He was a real UO legend, and was worshipped in death, as he had been feared in life.
Yeah, being a red and dying usually meant something very close to perma-death. And that was part of the game. You had to be one of the best players in the game to turn red. You were both feared and respected. You were a legend.
You had to pick your targets, and you knew when to run away. Taking out stat loss was one of the things that helped to turn UO into candy land. T2A without stat loss wouldn't be T2A.
In today's game, I returned to UO last fall, after a year and a half absence. I had to join faction, then kill a bunch of enemy factioners just to get the faction gear that you need to play effectively these days. Even my PvM characters joined, because that gear is a lot better than anything you can get any other way.
One of the first things I saw was that most of the reds today are practically clueless, in terms of actual survival skills in an old school environment. I had to join a PvP guild for my own survival in Felucca these days, so I found out that PvP today doesn't resemble PvP during the classic era. Practically everybody runs a script that casts their spells for them and throws their pots for them. It does everything but wipe their noses for them. They die every 5 minutes. And they kill everything in sight, whether it's enemy factioners, enemy guild members, members of their own faction, or even fellow guild members who got a scroll they wanted. There isn't any reason to be careful. There isn't any reason to choose their targets. There isn't any reason not to commit mass murder. There isn't any reason to think before they attack. They raid every single champ spawn that a trammy guild tries to work, the second that the champ pops. They have faction gear, which gives them a huge equipment advantage over the trammies, in an equipment-dominated game. They have all the power scrolls, because the trammies aren't allowed to ever finish a champ spawn. The trammies do all the work, the PvP faction guilds get all the scrolls. Then the faction guilds slaughter each other for them and put them on their Luna vendors for the Trammie guild to buy. A lot of the richest trammies do have skills at legendary, but they have to do a LOT of gold farming to get them.
In the old days, a group of reds might stage a raid, but they didn't just kill everything that moved. Death for them meant severe penalties, maybe even character death. What stat loss did was it made the reds careful. It meant that they were mostly real hardcore gamers with a lot of experience and battle skills, not some script kiddie with a penchant for mass murder.
In a T2A environment, most script kiddies today would work for weeks to make a 7x GM red character, die in a matter of minutes, suffer stat loss, figure out that once they had suffered stat loss once, as a red at just 80 skills, they were sitting ducks for every blue in the game, either delete the character or sit out their timer to turn blue, depending on how many counts they had, then become more careful about how often they indulged in a murder spree. The average AOS PKer might keep 3 or 4 short term murders on his character in a T2A world, but he would be really careful about his targets, to keep it under 5. Out of the hundreds of reds on Atlantic today, I could probably count on my fingers the number of them that are really skilled, and could operate as reds in a T2A environment. Most of the reds today might have 10,000 murder counts, but they have also died 50,000 times. When they figured out that death had meaning in the T2A world, they would have second thoughts about playing a mass murderer who attacked everybody they saw, on sight.
In short, Evocare's decision to remove stat loss and all of the other penalties for red characters was part of what turned UO into a "candy land". It existed pre-T2A. It was still there during the T2A era. PvP was alive and well back then. So was PvM. And crafting worked pretty well, too. With only the best players becoming reds, we didn't have the mess that is Felucca today, where it's practically insta-death for any blue who dares to step out of a moongate.
ub 15 follower spots.
