Question for the Devs

[Crysta]

How come every "content addition" since SA has been one annoying grind or another? Even worse, how come the stuff you've added that forces people to work together to complete it because of overly strong enemies that rightly shouldn't be so undermines the need to work together by then giving out one of a large number (usually 1 out of 10 or so) of required items to continue whatever it is you're doing to only a single player of said group?

Are you literally trying to get people annoyed with the game and quit? I am quite serious in asking this question and hope for an answer.

Also, only really looking for a dev answer here, not a random discussion.

 

[LordDrago]

Also, only really looking for a dev answer here, not a random discussion.

LOL. Your cracking me up!!!! LOL

 

[Crysta]

I felt it was nicer than saying "players don't need to post here". Great reading comprehension there, btw.

 

[LordDrago]

Like asking for a sip of water from a firehose. LOL

 

[Madrid]

I don't mind grinding I just don't like seeing the work and time I put in goto waste with things decay, that sets me through the roof (honor,loyalty, faction points...you name it). The removal of timer of peerless keys if somehow done to be able to mitagate greifing would be a good idea also.

There's nothing wrong with having to work and put in the time to get the goodies in the game.

Don't get me wrong certain things aren't fun to do many times over (mining, lumber jacking,fishing) on the other hand I don't want things being handed out like candy and made easy.

I'm also tired of hearing the word "grind". No game I've ever played has been any different as far as putting in the time and going through the hoops to reach your desired goal.

If you do things in moderation then they aren't a grind. If your doing something non-stop then I can see how it becomes a grind.

Instead of grinding 3+ hours or more on one thing why not spend an hour a day for a week. "Moderations is the key to life"

 

[Sevin0oo0]

I agree, but I think the concept began a little before that, with restricting instantaneous access to dungeons, by Paying or questing to enter.
SA and newer just made it more pronounced

 

[Lady Storm]

Simple answer:
Community size was shrinking due to lack of grouping players or so they thought. Solo'ing had become the norm. It was evaluated that to make the players group up for activitys would bring some to group up on their own hence make it a more group game again. It didnt work, too many of us had odd hour jobs and players from across the world had different time constraints. Most importantly the real world changed. If you think about it the world of UO followed the changes in population and use of the game. UO Dev over the years have tried to get back that cohesive magic we had in the early days that was slipping away. The Dev we have today cant be blamed for the sin's of the past dev but they can learn that not always do we want or need to be turned to cattle to play uo.

 

[Driven Insane]

I'm also tired of hearing the word "grind". No game I've ever played has been any different as far as putting in the time and going through the hoops to reach your desired goal.

Part of this the RNG irritation.

Think about how Doom used to be where you could go round and round the gaunlet for months on end and never get a single thing. Finally they changed the drop system and at least then you knew that you time would eventually end with a reward (maybe not the reward you want, but something).

The RNG when it comes to drops is a horrible system. They really need to look at alot of the things that still work on the RNG drop system and fix it so we don't feel like a mouse on a wheel, endlessly going around and around with no idea if a reward ever awaits us.

 

[LordDrago]

I don't mind grinding I just don't like seeing the work and time I put in goto waste with things decay, that sets me through the roof (honor,loyalty, faction points...you name it). The removal of timer of peerless keys if somehow done to be able to mitagate greifing would be a good idea also.

There's nothing wrong with having to work and put in the time to get the goodies in the game.

Don't get me wrong certain things aren't fun to do many times over (mining, lumber jacking,fishing) on the other hand I don't want things being handed out like candy and made easy.

I'm also tired of hearing the word "grind". No game I've ever played has been any different as far as putting in the time and going through the hoops to reach your desired goal.

If you do things in moderation then they aren't a grind. If your doing something non-stop then I can see how it becomes a grind.

Instead of grinding 3+ hours or more on one thing why not spend an hour a day for a week. "Moderations is the key to life"

One answer could also be multiple paths to reach a goal. Why have to kill 600 graverobers to reach a goal. Why not kill some, find soomething else, recover something else, make something else, provide some service, etc...all adding to the accomplishment of the goal?

Adds some variety and also opens up the "event" to other styles of play.

 

[MalagAste]

I've often wondered the same thing... what's up with the grinds lately????

I mean hey Sifting Sand is about as exciting as paint drying... I was liking the fight with the mobs and the gold made there... but after going thru about 200 sifters the "fun" factor has gone to zilch... the drop rate of the fragments is so low that I can go thru 10 or 15 sifters and not get enough of the fragments to make one item.... and after hearing that I could NOT obtain the scrolls.... I kinda decided I just didn't care anymore. I haven't sifted a single thing in over a week.

 

[Crysta]

Really? You can't get the scrolls? Damn, that sucks.. really wanted them. Er.. And this is the only off topic post i'm making here. Yeah.

 

[Viper09]

There was actually a thread a while back which turned into a nice discussion about grinding: Worst grinding mmorg ever! top 5! | Stratics Forums

It was my opinion that every MMO has grinding, all content revolves about it. What makes the difference is perception. Some find it fun and don't consider it a grind, others don't and see it as tedious. Grinding is not so much the problem as whether or not it will be considered as fun to do.

 

[Zero Day]

The purpose of content is so people spend time playing or more importantly spend their money because they think spending their time will be enjoyable.

The motivation for spending time is enjoyment or reward.
Developing content that is broadly enjoyable is much more difficult that creating a reward and content that requires a time/effort investment to deliver that reward.

To control that time they can require repetition, difficulty, or just put in a wait period. Recently players have been griping about difficulty so they replaced that with repetition. Guess that marks a flat out wait period for the next content dump.


UO is an MMO, (focus on the second M being Multiplayer).
Multiplayer implies some sort of player interaction. In the early stages of UO, everybody made money their own way, and it wasn't uncommon to purchase services (blacksmithing/tailoring/taming/tinkering etc) from other players who invested in those skills so you wouldn't have to.

At that time however, the scale of useless-usable-useful-extremely-useful was a very thin range. Not to mention the lifetime of equipment was shorter since potential for loss was much greater.

As an attempt to keep the game interesting and keep up with competitors, the game systems and equipment have been constantly evolved and updated taking that usability scale and making it much broader.

In order to keep selling expansions, and keep people playing the stuff introduced has to be either more fun or more useful than the previous iteration.
Players don't just want something different, they want something worth changing their play-style for. ie they want a reward suitable for the "work" they are going to have to do.
So the rewards get more powerful/more useful.

If the rewards aren't useful people wont do the work. If you give out the rewards too easily, they are no longer special, nor are they really rewards since the work done was so easy.
If the rewards become easy and are still very useful, they become standard equipment and thus boring since everyone has/is doing the same thing.

Taking power scrolls as an example. They are pretty much a standard requirement. So everybody "must" have them. If they were easy to get they wouldnt be special. But since they are, people farm(ed) the hell out of them.

If they dropped off mongbats, the market would be flooded and nobody would bother after a month.
So they made it something that benefits from having multiple people involved. That way farming is not completely easy, and you have multiple people spending time to get that reward.
So to discourage single party farming and instant gratification which lasts a short term they make beefed up mobs rather than new systems.


They probably spent exponentially more time designing the royal city in Ter Mur, as compared with Corgul, Scalis, Or any dungeon revamp including the loot update, but which gets used/appreciated more.

Bang for the buck its pixel crack over content.

Also less risk since almost everybody appreciates a good item, not everyone may appreciate new gameplay systems.

UO isnt a game backed by the confidence and aspirations of a company looking for a long term quality product and devoted customer base. The financial investment. and re-investment in UO has been negligible at best. New technology (client/servers/patcher) has all been the result of hand me downs from other projects jury-rigged into UO's framework.

Its more of a testament to the amazing capabilities of UO as a game that its still around rather than ANY non-maintenance action taken by EA.


Personally I think UO is the bonzai tree of the MMO world. It's a beautiful miniature dwarf of what it could have been if it had been given room to grow.

 

[Woodsman]

It was my opinion that every MMO has grinding, all content revolves about it. What makes the difference is perception. Some find it fun and don't consider it a grind, others don't and see it as tedious. Grinding is not so much the problem as whether or not it will be considered as fun to do.

Grinding takes the place of content in a lot of cases. If you didn't have grinding in games, whether World of Warcraft, Diablo III, or yes, even UO, people would blow right through the content in no time flat, and be left with nothing to do.

Look at early RPGs, including Ulitma VII - if you actually looked at the amount of time spent completing them, they aren't that long really. The difference is that you are all over the place, interacting with all kinds of NPCs, etc. and not spending hours doing the same thing over and over in the same locations.

There is a huge amount of difference between 4 hours of specifically grinding away at something, and 4 hours spent wandering around and fighting random mobs as you go and just exploring. It takes a lot longer for a development team to come up with content for the latter. Like somebody else said, grinding is easy to do. Blizzard has like 4,000 people working on Warcraft, probably hundreds of designers, but at the end of the day Warcraft is a grinding theme park, because even with all of their thousands of people working on Warcraft, it's much cheaper and easier to put people on the roller coaster and have them doing basically the same thing over and over, even if the scenery changes a bit, than it is to truly create a full sandbox. It's also a lot hard to screw up.

It's why UO, Darkfall, and EVE Online, and even Star Wars Galaxies (prior to CU), stand alone - companies do not want to do sandbox MMORPGs, because it's expensive and it's easy to lose players. Those games, besides being sandboxes, never managed to crack the half million subscribers mark, even though three of them had a headstart on Warcraft (although EVE Online is moving towards the half million mark slowly but surely). Sony completely botched SWG leading to its premature death. Darkfall has had its ups and downs, UO has a fraction of the players it once had and there doesn't seem to be any long-term plans for it outside of a grpahics update, and while EVE Online is doing well and just hit 400,000 subscribers, they are having to watch their step since they've had some recent missteps.

UO is slowly moving towards the grinding theme park - you could argue that the champ spawns are basically that, since many times it's the same people doing them over and over to get the stuff to sell to others. I think sometimes we don't notice it as much because UO has been all over the place - several different dev teams, the Pub 16 and AOS changes, and because of the longevity. And we've just come to accept it.

 

[TheGrimmOmen]

Grinding takes the place of content in a lot of cases. If you didn't have grinding in games, whether World of Warcraft, Diablo III, or yes, even UO, people would blow right through the content in no time flat, and be left with nothing to do.

Way to hit the nail on the head. I don't think I've ever seen it stated that clearly and succinctly. I'm not making a comment on how this applies to how we are doing things with UO, just agreeing with your statement as it applies to game development in general.

-Grimm

 

[Rupert Avery]

Content for me is like a series of books, you might love the full series but I bet there were parts that didn't interest you. You still read it though because you want the full story

 

[Jhym]

It honestly is laziness, mostly from the standpoint of having to come up with quest or event threads that won't get easily broken by the players. We've proved over and over that there are people who specifically will do strange things just to see if they can. (Which honestly is supposed to be what QA testers do, but that's another issue.)

I only accept grinds when you are doing something that gives you distinctly better results for some thought and effort on your part.

For instance, the protesters would have been much more interesting with some tweaks -- perhaps there were npcs with more "points", or if you give some npcs money and food they start to follow you as a "leader" and help you with other protesters. Perhaps you could find "ringleaders" who get more points with hints from other protesters (using forensics, better chance?) The idea would be to have you think about what you're doing and get rewarded for it, rather than grab npc, click garbage, go to guard, get points.

Doing the same thing over and over and expecting an interesting result is largely insanity. Which implies developers think we're all insane to play their games.

 

[Cirno]

Grind is a highly subjective thing.

To the developers' credit, at least with the new content, they've been trying out different approaches to their content, rather than making it "just another monster spawn".
Arresting rioters, clearing garbage, sifting things from sand.
To me, that sure beats new limited time monster spawns.
Perhaps not by a lot, but that ain't nothing.

The problem is that people focus on the destination.
That way, the journey just becomes "the thing that's in the way".

 

[G.v.P]

Even worse, how come the stuff you've added that forces people to work together [...] Also, only really looking for a dev answer here, not a random discussion.

If you're looking for a serious discussion you should cite specific examples. Speaking in generalities and expecting a dev response is just going to incur troll responses from bandwagon torch wielders ready to spit on the devs for any reason they can.

Everything live, since SA, has been solo'd with the exception of probably Charybdis. Aside from bosses, I haven't had trouble soloing any of the live arc missions. Grinds, yes, I've passed up on some of them. I'll never get those little statuettes because I just don't care to spend the time grinding out the thiefs. However, they're pretty easy to kill.

 

[Lord Frodo]

I don't think it is so much the grind as it is the decay. It is like UO is trying to force us to play more and more if we wish to maintain our ststus. You use to be able to play UO in a laid back mode and still reach the same goal as a power gamer, it just took you longer to do it. Even though casual players pay the same subs it looks as if UO is trying to push the power gamer and forget about the casual player. Just look at your loyality points and think if they did the same for those. What would you do if your Skills decayed everyday? OMG

I understand the decay in Factions because of the way they do the rankings but IMHO I see no reason why anything should just decay because we as players do not play that day or we do other things in UO besides grind out the new flavor of the day. The only thing my points effect any player in UO is in Factions, my points in anything else have no effect on any other player or thier play style. When a game starts to force people to play a certain way then it starts to be no longer fun and becomes a grind. Please put back the fun in UO and do away with the GRIND. UO use to be for the power gamer and the casual player alike but lately it is turning into a choir to play UO just to maintain my curent status. Gone are the days of just logging in your Miner/LJ for the day. Now you must log in all you chars. and run them through thier thing just to maintain thier status. By the time you get done doing what you are forced to do everyday it is no longer fun to go out and do what you use to do for fun. UO is becoming work and not play.

 

[WolFie13]

The purpose of content is so people spend time playing or more importantly spend their money because they think spending their time will be enjoyable.

The motivation for spending time is enjoyment or reward.
Developing content that is broadly enjoyable is much more difficult that creating a reward and content that requires a time/effort investment to deliver that reward.

To control that time they can require repetition, difficulty, or just put in a wait period. Recently players have been griping about difficulty so they replaced that with repetition. Guess that marks a flat out wait period for the next content dump.


UO is an MMO, (focus on the second M being Multiplayer).
Multiplayer implies some sort of player interaction. In the early stages of UO, everybody made money their own way, and it wasn't uncommon to purchase services (blacksmithing/tailoring/taming/tinkering etc) from other players who invested in those skills so you wouldn't have to.

At that time however, the scale of useless-usable-useful-extremely-useful was a very thin range. Not to mention the lifetime of equipment was shorter since potential for loss was much greater.

As an attempt to keep the game interesting and keep up with competitors, the game systems and equipment have been constantly evolved and updated taking that usability scale and making it much broader.

In order to keep selling expansions, and keep people playing the stuff introduced has to be either more fun or more useful than the previous iteration.
Players don't just want something different, they want something worth changing their play-style for. ie they want a reward suitable for the "work" they are going to have to do.
So the rewards get more powerful/more useful.

If the rewards aren't useful people wont do the work. If you give out the rewards too easily, they are no longer special, nor are they really rewards since the work done was so easy.
If the rewards become easy and are still very useful, they become standard equipment and thus boring since everyone has/is doing the same thing.

Taking power scrolls as an example. They are pretty much a standard requirement. So everybody "must" have them. If they were easy to get they wouldnt be special. But since they are, people farm(ed) the hell out of them.

If they dropped off mongbats, the market would be flooded and nobody would bother after a month.
So they made it something that benefits from having multiple people involved. That way farming is not completely easy, and you have multiple people spending time to get that reward.
So to discourage single party farming and instant gratification which lasts a short term they make beefed up mobs rather than new systems.


They probably spent exponentially more time designing the royal city in Ter Mur, as compared with Corgul, Scalis, Or any dungeon revamp including the loot update, but which gets used/appreciated more.

Bang for the buck its pixel crack over content.

Also less risk since almost everybody appreciates a good item, not everyone may appreciate new gameplay systems.

UO isnt a game backed by the confidence and aspirations of a company looking for a long term quality product and devoted customer base. The financial investment. and re-investment in UO has been negligible at best. New technology (client/servers/patcher) has all been the result of hand me downs from other projects jury-rigged into UO's framework.

Its more of a testament to the amazing capabilities of UO as a game that its still around rather than ANY non-maintenance action taken by EA.


Personally I think UO is the bonzai tree of the MMO world. It's a beautiful miniature dwarf of what it could have been if it had been given room to grow.

I agree with about 95% of what you are saying the only thing that i have to differ from what you are talking about is the power scroll hunting thing, i don't mind having to try and farm them, and actually grinding is part of the game like you said with the MMO being a Multiplayer thing lmao I can't stand people that just want things handed to them or things to be extremely easy, if that was the case they have the wrong game to play! My complaint is about the whole pvp thing pvper's cry about something about something has to be nerfed and POOF its changed and it affect the pvmers of the game! Now with the latest thing being them crying and whining about the hail storm, and now it SUCKS and to topple it off i can now hit my summons and my guildies, really VERY lame! I don't know where this is going to stop! I think some people need to open there eyes and see pvp has been dead for years now and you can't make every buddy happy so why don't they make the general population the pvmer's happy in this game! Back to the whole powerscrolls i don't want to have to be raided and killed by some lame pvpers bc they have noone else to kill and nothing better to do but to come and kill me 9 times out of ten they don't even finish my spwan they come kill me and wait to see if i return, IS THIS THE ONLY THING THAT'S KEEPING pvpers in the game? For some reason it is not letting me make my own post to ask a dev about the random questions that i have about the whole pvp thing and when is enough going to be enough, don't people understand that tram was put in to keep this game alive and that there are only 1 fel and 2 things in the abyss fel based look at the other parts that are part of tram 80-85% of the UO world once i am able to post some questions myself i will make a HUGE post on the whole pvp thing! back to the whole grinding thing this game wouldn't be called an MMO IF you can do everything solo and I'm SUPER happy that it isn't this way just shows that it is easier to get the things you want or need from being in a guild and the more and better teamwork you have the easier it gets to obtain your goal! Again VERY well put on your post **tips hat** have a great day

 

[WolFie13]

I don't think it is so much the grind as it is the decay. It is like UO is trying to force us to play more and more if we wish to maintain our ststus. You use to be able to play UO in a laid back mode and still reach the same goal as a power gamer, it just took you longer to do it. Even though casual players pay the same subs it looks as if UO is trying to push the power gamer and forget about the casual player. Just look at your loyality points and think if they did the same for those. What would you do if your Skills decayed everyday? OMG

I understand the decay in Factions because of the way they do the rankings but IMHO I see no reason why anything should just decay because we as players do not play that day or we do other things in UO besides grind out the new flavor of the day. The only thing my points effect any player in UO is in Factions, my points in anything else have no effect on any other player or thier play style. When a game starts to force people to play a certain way then it starts to be no longer fun and becomes a grind. Please put back the fun in UO and do away with the GRIND. UO use to be for the power gamer and the casual player alike but lately it is turning into a choir to play UO just to maintain my curent status. Gone are the days of just logging in your Miner/LJ for the day. Now you must log in all you chars. and run them through thier thing just to maintain thier status. By the time you get done doing what you are forced to do everyday it is no longer fun to go out and do what you use to do for fun. UO is becoming work and not play.

Well i totally agree with the whole having to keep things up that's why i put the whole city loyalty thing to the side and left it for awhile but from what the "new" patch says that most virtues and the loyalty points shouldn't no longer decay but I haven't checked that part out yet to be honest bc they also said the ladder problem was fixed and that is a lie still problems with the whole ladders!

 

[Lady Storm]

I agree with Grim. The grind is needed. I do know it is hard for those who prefer the solo life and detest groups.... yes and the fact many shards are kinda sparce of players.