One, I was on the wrong end of Vanquishing weapons. While they were nasty, a player who was GMed and wore GM armor wasn't done in with 2 or 3 hits (edit here, I should say "swings"). And GM to GM is a world of difference than, say, 120 to 110. Especially when you start adding HCI and DCI with gear.
Unless I missed something, it wasn't AoS that introduced power scrolls, but rather, power scrolls were introduced as a silly way of drawing people back to Felucca. Consider that initially, the only place you get your hands on one was from a Champ Spawn and then only in Felucca. You can't exactly blame that on AoS.
As for Vanquishing v. GM, you're looking at it rather simplistically. I mean, honestly, the people on the receiving end of a Vanquishing hit were definitely killed pretty instaneously, it's just that at the same time they were hit with the blade, they were also hit by a precast energy bolt or flamestrike, or god only knows what other spell. I mean, there were a great deal many strange mechanics going on that exacerbated the PvP situation. As far as PvM went, well, that's always been a strange dynamic in the game anyway, because since UO doesn't scale ability based on skill level (even to the point that it remains skill based but adds bonuses to your three stats based on intrinsic level to those skills), the only way monsters become "scarier" is by their ability to instakill you anyway, and at that point, it doesn't matter if you had GM, Vanquishing, or whatever else.
Two, time and costs of advancement. It takes a LOT more effort to be competitive now.
False. Extremely false. So false it's not even funny. First and foremost, way back in the day, you didn't have 89.1 in a skill, you had 89, and you had no clue whether you were gaining or not until that skill hit 90. Regardless, there were several publishes that have made skill gain much easier over the course of time because many skills were taking so long.
As far as the time and effort to get weapons and items and armor to be competetive, that's so completely untrue that it's not even funny. An average player could run out and play a few hours a day for a couple of days a week and have enough money to buy from player vendors what they need, and that's assuming that they had to pay exorbitant prices.
Three, now they've had to reduce the effects of damage in PvP, while leaving more of it for PvM. In cases such as MOB fighting, there's a much wider gap between the gear maxed character with specific skills and those who aren't.
Um... no. You've got nothing to back that up with other than opinion. There are definitely not a ton of people complaining about how difficult it is to fight mobs.
And really, how can you argue this with me when Basara just posted how it does in fact affect the game play between players? How can you argue when the affects on trade is so obvious, with so few vendors left in the world?
Well, let's just start with, "I don't look, no offense to Basara, to Basara as the end-all, be-all source of knowledge and wisdom within UO." Just because someone else has an opinion doesn't mean that I suddenly go, "Oh, I see... they must be right."
As for me arguing about the effect on trade... I don't think I made any such argument. In fact, one might even ask how you got onto AoS at all in this thread since it was about moongate function, and even Basara was wondering what special brand of crack you had loaded your pipe with.
The answer to all of UO's problems, plain and simply, is NOT "AoS."
And let me say this too, because it's an easy thing to misinterpret from my comments. It's not the items and gear, it's the power increases and gaps between items and as a result the players. It's just gone way too far.
Err...
Which has nothing to do with AoS.
In fact, most of the issues have to do with bad balancing when the Devs added new skills into the game. Sure, there was a period when Necros were overpowered (and the sampire itself is an issue, sure), and a period where paladins were way under powered and a period where they were crazy good, and so on and so forth.
Thing is, many of the issues have arisen in the way skills have been combined with each other, and the way that UO handles some things that maybe it should handle better.
But those issues have arisen not just in the Necro/Paladin group of skills, but presently afflicts any mage who isn't weilding spell-weaving, has made a subset of magery known as mysticism a nearly useless complement to magery and rather its own strange crafting backup skill, has afflicted the samurai and the ninja, and so on and so forth.
But the argument you basically make is "things should never change." And my response is this: UO would have died a long time ago had things like T2A, AoS, and so on had not come out.
