Thanks Tina, but we have well over 20 members in our faction. I run the largest guild on Catskills. (if my numbers are still correct) And while activity lately is sporatic every one of them except for one has logged on at least once in the last 6 months. I personally have 5 active accounts with all but four in my guild. Not all run faction points, but they are active members of my guild (I log them all in regularly for one reason or another) and therefore, I suppose, active members of the faction. So I should take my characters out of my own guild so that we can get down to only 20 active faction members? That's unfair.
I've noticed points are updating very late in the evenings. I logged into one character at 8pm and it was rank 5 then again at 10pm and all her faction crimmy fell off and she was down to rank 1. I thought I had her all set to go for the night... That kind of shift in rank shouldn't be possible. It should be a gradual rank change. I don't mind the decay, but the rate of decay is terrible.
I am in the process of making all new suits for all of my characters. I shouldn't have to do this either. After so many years of gameplay I should be able to log on any character I feel like playing and play it. Tonight all I did was make suits. It wasn't any fun.
Tina, before this change not all of my characters were rank 10, but the ones that had to be were, and two that didn't just happened to be because of kills. Presently we are looking at characters who steal sigils as the only ones on our shards (the low fel population shards) with the ability to get rank 10. People will be competing with faction mates for the first one to the sigils. It's an illogical way of determining a war time rank. Mages are the ones who need the most rank to get the faction gear. Usually it's the dexxer that gets the kill shot, as the Mage is usually the one tossing the heals in fights.
A guildmate got a point yesterday off of one orange that was active on the shard at the time he was playing. It was gone by the time he got home from work and logged on today.
I'd like to hear the dev teams explanation as to what is expected of factions now.
Is it supposed to be fun?
The original notes from December 2000 say that the rankings were to be adjusted at 10:00 a.m. local time. I think that was pretty much the case for quite a few years until all the server hardware was updated a year or two ago and it seemed like character, guild, and faction info took a hiatus for a while. After that information was available again for a while, it seemed like the update time was way off, and now it sounds like it's even further off than it was before.
I hope Bleak or Jeff or someone who can speak intelligently about the whole situation will provide more information soon. For a number of reasons, I hated the idea of the faction artifacts from the moment I found out about them and only added the gloves to one of my archer's suits after my guildmates kinda pushed me into it. I knew from personal experience that people who loved participating in true faction activities did just fine and had a lot of fun without the faction artifacts, and everyone else who PvP'd and didn't want to bother with factions seemed to also be doing just fine and dandy, plus there were also a whole heck of a lot more of them around at that time than there is today post-faction artifact introduction.
I think one person in our guild is in bad shape with this change because he used a lot of the artifacts on the several shards where we have faction guilds. The others started almost a year ago fixing up their suits to eliminate the faction artifacts and I think they're fairly well set now except for on maybe one or two shards.
I feel bad for people who became so dependent on the artifacts and chose to ignore the fact that the points were completely out of control and also that the ranking system was obviously bugged. How many times have we all read the posts over the last three years where people joked about how they were rank 10 the day they joined factions? Clearly, it was a situation riddled with bugs and yet many chose to take advantage of it while not preparing for the inevitable corrective measures that might affect them. I'm not trying to sit here and say, "I told you so!" I understand a lot of people didn't necessarily have the time or the gold or the cash to gear up otherwise. And I also understand all too well what it's like to be playing across multiple shards to be able to find decent fights...seems like you never have enough of what you need anywhere without a ton of work and time.
I don't want to see people leave UO because of this. I really hope that there's some kind of a solution from the developers that will ease the pain somewhat for people who were using a lot of the artifacts. I've been trying for a month now to push folks to talk about what they need to have to replace the faction artifacts, in hopes that they would start saying something and maybe, just maybe other players who understand the game needs both PvP and PvM activities in it to survive would step up to the plate and say, "How can I help?" It seems to me that we're all in this together and unless folks pull together and help each other find a solution, the game's gonna die before the developers ever get around to doing something to address situations like this. I don't think they really understood how much of an impact this change would have, or maybe they thought the month's notice that this change was coming would be sufficient for most people to do SOMETHING to patch up their suits in preparation for maybe losing some major pieces.
All I can offer in terms of help is to tell you guys I'll help with imbuing or gathering resources or things along that line. I've got a full blown crafter on Siege (who is pretty poor at the moment in terms of resources); a 115 imbuer/tailor/smith on Balhae; a 110 imbuer/tailor/smith on Origin; a 97 imbuer/tailor/smith on LA; and 80 imbuer/tailor/smiths on Oceania and Great Lakes. (The rest of them elsewhere are too low in imbuing to mention.) All the smith/tailors are at 120 and have GM arms lore, but most of them are also in kinda bad shape on resources because I've been spending most of my time carting loot to them to unravel and haven't had time to gather the high-end imbuing resources. I've also got pretty decent tamers that can gather resources on a whole slew of shards, a few scattered carp/tinker/fletcher characters and some other non-artificer legendary smith/tailor characters with GM arms lore. If there's something you think I can do to help with making stuff, please just let me know.
I hope that other people who might not necessarily be in factions would start speaking up and letting the PvP community know they are willing to help in some way....maybe sponsor Doom runs, do peerless, etc. We have to pull together here because this is a really bad situation. We aren't going to make it to some 15th year anniversary at this rate. And damn it, I know a lot of people don't like to PvP. I'm one of them. I'm really bad at it. But I definitely understand what kind of fun it can be and why so many people really, really enjoy it. Because of that, I don't think UO's gonna last if it gets to the point where the PvP dies for stupid situations like this.
Speak up, folks, and let your fellow players know what you need NOW to keep you in UO. Your fellow players are, I think, your best hope in this situation. Yeah, I know if you made a lot of jokes about Trammies over general chat it might be hard to eat a little humble pie and admit maybe they can help you, but what's your alternative? Run around naked?
Just do it. Say what you need, what you can pay for it, and see what happens. I think every shard has a trade forum. Perhaps use those.