[UO Herald] Publish 77.0 Comes to TC1

[RaDian FlGith]

250k Silver? So I guess you are planning on staying rank 1 every month?

I'm not quite sure how the ranking system works anymore -- but in the old days, I swore that it was percentage based, and thus only the most frequent (ie: hardcore) players hit the top ranks and the rest was disbursed based on points and participation. How does it work these days? If it's still proportional, then yes, I'd say a lot of people can expect to stay rank 1.

 

[Promathia]

? If it's still proportional, then yes, I'd say a lot of people can expect to stay rank 1.

Its not

 

[RaDian FlGith]

Guess I should read more. Is that what the moonbound thing is? I get annoyed reading pub notes, seeing new mods and getting 0 explanation as to what they do. So I quit checking up on stuff :/.

I'm not sure how you could have missed the stuff about the Moonbound property if you read the patch notes:

Faction artifacts have a new Item Property: Moonbound

• Moonbound items are Indestructible when in a Felucca ruleset area. They will frequently repair themselves to maximum durability, and will not lose maximum durability.
• Moonbound items are Ephemeral when in a Trammel ruleset area. They will lose 1 point of maximum durability per six minutes spent in active combat.

Pretty clearly in there. I'd call that significantly less than "getting 0 explanation as to what they do." Since you're actually participating in a discussion in the thread in which said property was announced, I'm not quite sure why you would "quit checking up on stuff."

 

[RaDian FlGith]

Its not

If that's the case, then it becomes somewhat though not significantly less painful *once you hit higher ranks, which is a good thing. Like I say, I'm definitely in support of the tiered system... but even at 2,000sp for an item, that's a lot of silver every 30 days.


* edited to explain this: Yes, I agree that at the lower levels to higher levels, it is a significant jump in the cost of silver. However, from the farm-time for say 5 faction pieces (10,000sp), it's still a significant amount of time for PvE in a PvP system. And while the answer of "just go buy gold" sounds nice, if your primary character is a factioneer, I'm not sure where you're getting the gold to buy it from without some sort of outside system. Again, not saying that no farming should be required, but I see it as a bit of a high curve given the other two variables (less useful as a regular item in Trammel -- you can do it for short stints, but definitely not as your main source of armor) and the 30-day rebuy period.

 

[RaDian FlGith]

They'll pick up speech from inside a container or when being held by a player or a pet. Or a vendor (they can be set "not for sale" for this purpose).

I am curious to see what creative uses people will find for these.

I know a particular player on Great Lakes that... already had creative uses for the existing ones.

I must now request 32x32 plots that are customizable... mind you, I just want the center 18x18 customizable... the outer edge just needs to be a two-story wall with enough thickness to keep him out. It's not too much to ask for, is it?

 

[Cetric]

It's an interesting idea, but I'd sort of say it would need to be an inverse thing. The more towns controlled, the cheaper it got for people who didn't control towns. Which is why I'd avoid it altogether.

Essentially if you based it on town control, then the people who controlled the most towns would become artificially more powerful for having done so -- which on an RP sense makes sense, but for PvP equality burns the equality bridge immediately -- which is sort of the obverse of leveling a PvP playing field.

I would imagine this would cause base fighting, because people would want to control the towns, creating pvp. it would also give the rp sense of factions a tool.

 

[Driven Insane]

I wish the artifacts were just gone and factions would go back to being what it was, a fun team-based. cat-and-mouse, "capture the flag" type game. I don't expect that'll ever happen though. The arties ruined it for good.

QFT.

The Devs have completely screwed the pooch on this and either the artis are to easy to get, or to hard. But either way the fact that they also added extra mods to existing artis made the situation even worse. If the artis were the same as their normal counterparts, this entire situation would be less of an issue.

 

[Woodsman]

I do wish things went back to simpler ways as well, because it seems like the more complex things get, the more attention they require when there are issues that affect a lot more people.

 

[Raptor85]

I wish the artifacts were just gone and factions would go back to being what it was, a fun team-based. cat-and-mouse, "capture the flag" type game. I don't expect that'll ever happen though. The arties ruined it for good.

Agreed, and now that they're coming back again (the 30 days thing doesn't really effect them much for me, they're lootable on siege anyways, so this change will essentially just mean having to constantly farm silver AGAIN like post 2009 on siege to constantly keep suits available for pvp...they just raise the bar so much I'd have to spend millions per suit to match them, if i tried to do it without I'd have to pawn my castle just to keep pvping for a week... Coming back without rank requirements for all pretty much seals the deal for me though, I'm not messing with that nonsense again and I'm not sticking around to watch it kill the shard again, this time I'll do the smart thing like all the major pvp guilds on siege did last time and be one of the first ones to pack up and head out.

 

[Tina Small]

Coming back without rank requirements for all pretty much seals the deal for me though, I'm not messing with that nonsense again and I'm not sticking around to watch it kill the shard again, this time I'll do the smart thing like all the major pvp guilds on siege did last time and be one of the first ones to pack up and head out.

I will be sad to see you go. You'll join the many, many players who lost a good part of their reason for playing (doing peerless, going to Doom, doing high-end crafting) when faction artifacts came on the scene and the smaller, but still important, group of people who used to be pretty dedicated to factions who faded away when all the changes turned it into the meaningless mess it is today.

Stay in touch, please.

 

[O'Brien]

I do wish things went back to simpler ways as well, because it seems like the more complex things get, the more attention they require when there are issues that affect a lot more people.

How about we embrace quality over quantity and fix the major embarrassing broken stuff in the game, and then start thinking about adding shiny new complexity? Just a thought.

 

[Kojak]

I keep seeing these posts over and over again about big broken stuff - what the hell is broken - I don't see anything that terribly broken on a day to day basis when I'm playing - I just don't get it - what's wrong with you people

 

[Petra Fyde]

Silly question: What would happen if silver was cursed?

 

[O'Brien]

I keep seeing these posts over and over again about big broken stuff - what the hell is broken - I don't see anything that terribly broken on a day to day basis when I'm playing - I just don't get it - what's wrong with you people

Of course. I'll tell you something that's major embarrassing broken stuff, and you'll say it's not major.

Well, imagine you are new. You have a question about the game, and you ask in help chat, and get no response. Then what? Well if you were new, you might click "Help" on the classic client paperdoll, and then click "General Question about Ultima Online." Do you know what that does? It brings up your browser and opens up a broken link. That's a major fail and embarrassing.

Are you telling me they should introduce new and improved communication crystals, harpsichords, ephemeral, moonbound before fixing things like that? What's wrong with you?

And that is just off the top of my head. For more, check out Bug Tracking.
That is a very small, incomplete list. Most don't even bother posting bugs. If any significant number of those are fixed, I'm sure hundreds more would be posted. Some would say that's to be expected with such an old game. I say on the contrary, it's absurd with a game after 15 years of development.

 

[Maximus Neximus]

Well, I never once got silver by farming it AFK or using a stealth tamer and I can't recall even bringing a BOS along either. If you wanted to find my characters, they were pretty darn easy to find and kill. But then again, I never had much silver, just enough to keep my trap removers stocked with trap removal kits and to keep up a supply of trap deeds. (When I started playing in factions, silver was mostly used to make trap deeds and trap removal kits and when someone wanted to buy a faction horse.) The only faction artifacts I've ever bought were a pair of stormgrips each for two pally faction archers on an account I later gave away to a guildmate. (I think I bought one or two bottles of the powder too.) All the changes made to factions in 2008 pretty much killed my interest in it, although I still have characters (mostly thief/trap remover/tracker/detector characters) in factions on Baja, LA, Legends, Napa, Origin, Pacific, and Sonoma. I wish the artifacts were just gone and factions would go back to being what it was, a fun team-based. cat-and-mouse, "capture the flag" type game. I don't expect that'll ever happen though. The arties ruined it for good.

Speaking for PvP with no consideration for RP, IMO, artifacts brought factions back to life. With near zero reason to hold sigils, why would people play factions? There needs to be some benefit to owning towns. With artifacts you had a reason to be involved and try and gain rank. There was a carrot at the end of the stick that you could actually get. For quite a while there was actually base defenses again. People were actually out fighting and enjoying PvP.

 

[Winker]

In my younger days I used to be able to spend 40+ hours a week playing UO, which was great as i could achieve quite a lot. There was plenty of people to play with and life was sweet. We would PvM for a while and then PvP for a while.

Scroll on 12 years latter, i now spend maybe an hour a day playing UO. I want to spend that hour having Fun PvPing. If i die 3 times...there goes my hours game play sat out in Stat loss. There is no way in hell i can farm enough Silver to be able to keep the faction arties and PvP.

I see a lot of you telling us that factions is not about the arties. Well i guess you then dont PvP as the faction arties are way better than the normal arties and even a small advantage in PvP is a huge difference. Thats why they are important. If we cant PvP on a level playing field then there is no point! Just having that small advantage of faction gear can make or break the fight.

Its the equivalent to a football team at the top of the division being allowed to wear football boots but those teams not at the top have to play in their bear feet. Both sides can still play football but who is going to win?

Dev's you just dont get it do you. We need a level playing field. If you cant let everyone wear the arties without having to farm silver for hours on end just get rid of them once and for all. We can survive without them, but its just unfair that you let the hardcore player who has more free time to spend playing UO have the upper hand.

PJ i bet you have noticed that SL have all but disappeared on Europa since they started these stupid changes to Factions. They all left and closed their accounts. Changes like these just force long time subscribers to leave as they feel they can no longer compete.

 

[RaDian FlGith]

I would imagine this would cause base fighting, because people would want to control the towns, creating pvp. it would also give the rp sense of factions a tool.

Truthfully, I don't really see it happening that way. It's one of those "in theory" type things that tends to work just the opposite of its intent.

Not that it's the same situation, but a similar example that Blizzard is trying to fix with their PvP system is that you gain the best PvP gear through continual PvP by spending Honor and Conquest points on purchasing it. Of course, those that PvP the most therefore get the best armor. Those without the best armor tend to die. Thus there is an artificial entry barrier to getting into PvP because unless you have been doing it and continue to do it on a super regular basis, you are outgeared.

That's not to say there is no room for skill in either equation, but I don't think that in general practice your theory would hold up. I think that instead it would create a gear rift, and that's something that I think should be avoided at all cost.

 

[RaDian FlGith]

Silly question: What would happen if silver was cursed?

Meaning that you couldn't send it via a bag of sending? Other than that, I don't think there'd be a large effect, but that might be big enough.

Not sure, as I've never actually tried, but can bags of sending be used in combat? That might also be a solution to prevent last-minute ditches as well.

 

[Petra Fyde]

well, it might have a kind of snowball effect? If the farmers couldn't send the silver to the bank - 1. they wouldn't be able to farm so much because of getting overweight, and 2. it would be a lot more worthwhile to hunt for them?
Possibly precipitating a lot less afk farming and a lot more fighting in dungeons?

 

[Raptor85]

Silly question: What would happen if silver was cursed?

It would be a good start, all the faction stuff should be cursed really, that still leaves other problems with faction silver in that..
1. the entire distribution is broken, some factions can farm it far easier/faster than others (the only real farmable monsters are the daemons and silver serps, the ogre lords take far too long to kill and are too spread out, the wisps give less silver and spawn in a wide area slowly)
2. exploitable issues in the way it drops (it should be like ore, deleted if it tries to fall to a full pack)
3. aside from siege the shards the silver is being farmed on are the same shards everything else is being farmed on (power scrolls, those massive quantities of ingots and leather, etc..)before the transfer token is used to move it to ATL or the like....the "dead" shards that make even siege look like a lively center of commerce, the chance of them dying is incredibly unlikely on those shards so it's not a huge deal to just check once a day and empty the stacks of silver from their pack. Unless you have tons of transfer tokens yourself and lots of time to waste theres not much you can do.
4. even not afk, if you've ever had the misfortune of trying silver farming it's excitement level is just below "watching paint dry" but perhaps slightly above "watching grass grow", the spots sthe stuff spawns are tiny rooms and they're all pretty weak creatures so you're not even in all that much danger, a little bit of life leech on even a pure warrior and you won't even have to bother healing, just watch tv or something keeping an eye on your screen now and then so you're not afk.

 

[Ron Silverbeard]

• • New Magincia, Minoc, and Yew are proud to announce the opening of new Smithy and/or Clothier shops to serve the needs of the citizens!
    • You may visit the “Sand in Ya Britches Tailor Hut” and “The Sandy Smith” right next to the Modest Damsel Inn located on the Isle of New Magincia.
    • You may visit the “Tinderbox Smithy” and “The Elves Thimble” located within the center of Yew.
    • You may visit the “Survival Threads” clothier in Eastern Minoc.

These are just normal Vendors you can buy/sell to/from or do they sell anything special or do you turn in something for loyality points on them?

If you can turn in items on them, can you chose for which city you want the "love" for? I am not loyal to any of these cities...but to Moonglow...so whats the purpose of this vendors - just some turn in stations for BOD's?

 

[Petra Fyde]

you will be able to gain loyalty by where you hand in the bods, therefore all cities need somewhere that people will be able to do that?

 

[Warpig Inc]

Faction players will always complain it is to hot or to wet. They need to turn their attention to another fire. The BoD system rewards have no been updated lately or never.

After some time with current system see how factions system mechanics are bent or abused. Greed is the only drive of factions and not intended spirit. Wipe the slate of factions and bring back Chaos and Order targeting pure PVP across all facets. Just have it when attacking someone in Chaos or Order anything worn without their base name in title falls to backpack. Base name is like Katana, ring, wizard hat, leather leggings and heater shield.

If the carrot for being in factions has the gear on top of the list. Remove them. What happened with the vendor NPC and city function control?

 

[Assia Penryn]

I like the changes to the loyalty and factions. Artifacts should be a 'bonus' and not a crutch.

 

[Tina Small]

Speaking for PvP with no consideration for RP, IMO, artifacts brought factions back to life. With near zero reason to hold sigils, why would people play factions? There needs to be some benefit to owning towns. With artifacts you had a reason to be involved and try and gain rank. There was a carrot at the end of the stick that you could actually get. For quite a while there was actually base defenses again. People were actually out fighting and enjoying PvP.

I understand what you're saying and don't disagree that when the faction artifacts were first introduced, there was a lot of faction activity. But what happened to everyone? After awhile, it seemed like everyone just stopped playing their home shards and focused on Atlantic. Why? That's the part I really don't understand.

Before faction artifacts were introduced, people who wanted to get involved in PvP certainly managed to do so and I'd argue strongly that there were a lot more people PvPing (both outside of factions as well as in factions) on all shards in late 2007 than there were in late 2011. What changed in the interim that drove away the PvPers? Good gear that was easy to obtain cannot possibly be the answer to that particular question (although I'd argue that the introduction of a way to easily purchase good PvP gear through factions had a big, negative effect on PvMers and crafters who previously spent a lot of their game time doing stuff to acquire/create PvP gear and the faction gear definitely had a huge effect on Siege and probably also on Mugen). It has to be something else that caused the huge PvP drop-off, and perhaps we're all wasting our time focusing on faction gear and should really sit down and figure out what else caused the drop.

What do you think contributed the most to PvPers leaving in the last couple of years?

 

[Picus at the office]

It will. The EM version has a "spoof mode" which barks your speech without a prefix indicating it comes from a crystal.



They'll pick up speech from inside a container or when being held by a player or a pet. Or a vendor (they can be set "not for sale" for this purpose).

I am curious to see what creative uses people will find for these.

With luck there will be some sort of limit on what can be spammed. I can not so fondly recall a time on Napa where a certain "church" hosted by a well known "Lord" spammed the bible for days on end with the hope of converting the masses. Nothing like a group of pack animals hanging around the gate, banks and anywhere else spewing anything and everything.

 

[Tina Small]

With luck there will be some sort of limit on what can be spammed. I can not so fondly recall a time on Napa where a certain "church" hosted by a well known "Lord" spammed the bible for days on end with the hope of converting the masses. Nothing like a group of pack animals hanging around the gate, banks and anywhere else spewing anything and everything.

Yeah, that was what was on my mind when I asked. Used to see that on Lake Austin as well.

 

[Coldren]

I know I specifically mentioned in a previous thread that they should have integrated gaining loyalty into every day activities, and specifically mentioned turning in resources to help our cities recover.

Now it is in.... Thank you! I can stop grinding the darn rioters now.

[Edit]

Something just occurred to me... Is there any way to know how much each resource or BOD turn in gets you? Do we have a numeric value for our loyalty on TC now? (Can't log in... at work.. BOOO!)

 

[slayer888]

LoL, so now they try to ask players to farm 100k silvers per character to use faction artifacts for 30 days?

Howcome this system sounds like worse than the previous one?

Faction becomes grinding and farming silvers????

Holy crap, why not you just pass the job to me for once to make a better entertaining life for everyone.

As mentioned 100000 times, if faction is to create around limiting the majority of players, it will be a failed system. The system should be aimed to entertain everyone by setting a new encouragement of participations [similar to that of EM events] with random rewards and allow opportunities for every single players to participate whether it be pvm, pvp, farmers, tailors, smiths, carpentries, tamers, NEWBIES, etc.

Honestly, I have proposed how the system works and focus mainly on increasing the purpose and fun for controlling towns, defending bases and how random event occurred for controlled towns which is available to open opportunities for every faction members, newbies to participate without having so much to worry on the basics [what we called basics nowadays?] Basics: Have the basic competitive enough suits without needing a very extremely huge gap in equipment perspectives. Anyways, I aint gonna bother find back my post. Its pointless because they will never get this point. **YAWN**

The way it works really discourage the newbies, new players, old players and most of the pvp professionals. And this is what you called a good system? Holy crap.... honestly, please dont waste further time and pass the job to me.

I am so busy in RL lately and really have barely much time on playing UO or scrolling in this forum, but today I look up and it was a more stupid and disappointing move.

 

[NuSair]

Silly question: What would happen if silver was cursed?

That's an AWESOME idea.

 

[NuSair]

I am sure there will be enough people scripting silver and that have enough silver banked that it won't become an issue. Heck, even as a trammy I have 120k in silver.

 

[PJay]

Interesting the figures who pop on to talk about factions and pvp subjects because as someone whos activly participated in pvp for many years (minus the last 6 months) would understand the introduction of Faction arties did in fact increase pvp activity. Now wether this was because people could make more chars due to the inexpensive cost of arties or because new players could get a decent suit pretty easily i dont know.

However the original system was flawed and i believe it did heavily impact trammel and didnt just effect pvp as intended so change was needed. The first alteration was basically more bugs thrown in and made it impossible to keep stability within your template and even guilds. Second attempt is possibly even worse its attempting to turn a pvp system into a pvm system because it would be near impossible to get the silver required from pvp alone even if you reached rank 7.

However i do believe they could achieve the issue with faction arties being used for soloing in trammel if this is added in its current form that will indeed be the case and this is a positive.
For those trammies complaining about the prices of their arties use your brains because your clearly not a trader of any sort even a novice trader would get items for the market paying out the most and if that isnt on an orny because of the faction arties move to what they do want i.e. Slither.

As far as im concered Factions should and has been the ellite of pvp. In that i mean players who have joined have accepted they are up against the best pvpers and the penalty is 20mins of your game time if you fail to achieve victory (or escape) and these people want to pvp! But they need a reason to be in this system and the threat of stat without any other incentive is enough to keep people away. In one sentence remove faction arties remove factions.

I believe this new system after some considerable tinkering can work but the silver prices are too much they would involve far too much farming in the overall system. It would however sort the trammel issue and it would also mean you would have less chars with faction items which is also a good thing.

 

[PJay]

Taking on the person who suggested silver for faction insurance i suggest as an idea added to the changes that faction arties require silver for insurance. When a player kills a player with faction arties insured he recieves 50% of the total insurance cost of faction arties and 40 silver for the kill this would then create more silver from pvping alone.
Insurace cost example:

Orny 200 silver
Crimson 100 silver

300 silver total to insure when killed by a player from an opposing faction that player recieves 150 silver from insurance and 40 silver for the kill 190 silver total.

The % recieved could have controlling factors should the devs want towns to be pvp areas again so if a kill in a town that isnt under the protection of the killers faction he recieves 75% of insurance cost and if the killers defending a city under his control then only 25%.

I in noway intend these figures to be final they are just a suggestion but if an increase in silver is required to use faction artifacts more ways to generate silver from pvp will be needed.

 

[kaio]

I think the new changes are great
What about the faction horse ? will it still require rank 4 ?

To all the crying about silver... Work hard,pay the silver or don't wear the gear !!!

 

[Mirt]

ITs really time to just admit the arties were a mistake and take them out. Apparently far to many folks can't handle having to work for thier arties at all and it would be simpiler to just dump them completely and make it so that nobody can get free gear and then the economy could determine prices like it was intened to be in the first place.

 

[Sevin0oo0]

in regards to farming mobs, is there any negatives for using faction items to achieve this?
(noticing the Fire Horn rule - "When used against another player the fire horn will do less damage than against a monster.")
is there something like this in effect?
When used against a monster the [faction item] will do less damage than against another player.

 

[Ron Silverbeard]

Just close FEL

 

[Petra Fyde]

Silly question: What would happen if silver was cursed?

I guess maybe it wasn't such a silly question after all