The problem with the current event arc is not only the grinding, but a mix of grinding with various other factors. This will be a long post explaining why it is a poorly designed event cycle so far and why the grinding it introduced is not the same as grinding for gold, items, imbuing ingredients, fish orders etc.:
Act I began with the rioters inside the cities who had to be arrested using a rope that can be obtained from the guard captains. It goes like this: you find a rioter, you double click the rope, you target the rioter and return to the guard captain. In the beginning of this act, while the players knew that this type of action caused them to gain some “loyalty” for the city, they had no idea what this loyalty will be used for. It was later discovered that it takes arresting 500 angry rioters to get to the top loyalty rating, Venerated. Players worked hard to achieve that loyalty rating without even knowing what it will be used for. Mesanna told that we were getting loyalty for a purpose which will be revealed at a later date. It was later discovered that even accidentally killing one of the rioters cost multiple times of arresting rioters. Some of the players who were playing evil characters killed the rioters and since the system was acknowledging the evil actions, they thought that the negative loyalty rating will be used on somewhere too, which was later revealed that it won’t. Then it was discovered that Venerated was not actually required to get a city banner and it was also discovered that our loyalty ratings rapidly decayed. When the players ultimately gave up maintaining their loyalty ratings and let it decay, they’re told that logging in once a day will solve the decay issues.
Since much of these poor game design issues were “discovered” by the players, Kai posted City Loyalty Ratings Explained on uoherald. There is no playstyle involved in this act, you have to do the same thing over and over again without using any of your character’s abilities, skills, items etc., or any of the abilities of yourself as a veteran player, to earn an item and a title. This is not the good old grinding which you fight against the monster AI, RNG, etc. using your fighting skills, maybe your slayer weapons, your lrc fishing rod or some baits, this is a poorly designed event act that involves a very unfamiliar type of grinding to UO players: the mindless one, since you didn’t know why you were doing it and you didn’t need to use much of your brain functions. Most players who complain about the grinding recently still maintain the terrible memories from this act, losing the hard earned loyalty rating to decay (which caught them as surprise since it wasn’t mentioned anywhere beforehand), spending days near the monitor for an activity less fun than “watching flies f***”…
Act II began with a quest which you need to get one sample of purified blood from the blood dungeon and return it to the shirron of the juka, upon which she tells you where to find the meer and the juka heirlooms. This act involvs killing grave robbers, who reflect 50% of the damage dealt, to get the juka and the meer heirlooms with a lifespan of one day which you need to return to get a statuette, and not a cool statuette like the vet reward ones, just juka and meer creature thumbnails. Each grave robber drops a heirloom and you need to return 100 of these to get the lesser statuettes or a total of 600 of them to get all four statuettes. Killing a grave robber takes about five minutes (unless they spawn in Paragon form), thus you have about 50 hours ahead to get all the statuettes.
This was a novel idea from the developers, making the players use their pvm skills for the event, after all we all have various skills, why not use some of them for an event? However, nobody cared about the ugly statuettes and most were more interested with the cool juka and meer heirlooms, which we will discuss later on the fourth act.
Act III implemented the Underworld dungeon’s puzzle board to Exodus dungeon. Completing one of these puzzles drops a punch card to your backpack which you need 50 to get a nexus deed. Now, since the previous act is only participated by the players who are extraordinarily good at pvm (or have a lot of time on their hands to compensate for their weak pvm chars), this act was actually refreshing for the most since you don’t need any skills to participate. I said previously that you didn’t need any skills for the first act, but this was different since you need to use your brain to dodge the monsters inside the dungeon and to be able to solve the puzzle. Overall, not a bad act, but not the best either.
Act IV was designed to give the players an opportunity to obtain the heirlooms from the second act. This was a good idea since they showed that they do listen to their players (Mesanna was responding to the threads about the event back then). You can get a sifting tool for 1k gold which you use to sift through the sand to recover the antiquity fragments, 10 of which constructs a random heirloom. This could have been a repeat of the mindless grinding of the first act, but four factors made it the best act of this event cycle. Only the first one is thought by the developers, which was to make moderately strong monsters to randomly spawn while sifting: random encounters for the first time! The second is the group participation: the sifting takes place in the lost lands desert and a group of players can sift together, chit chat and help each other to kill the monsters that randomly spawn. The third is the paragon factor: the monsters are moderately strong but seeing a paragon version spawn all of a sudden is quite exciting and it is also fun to watch players running (you cant sift while mounted) away from a huge paragon calamari like creature (until it happens to you as well). The final one is the devs, as lazy as they can be sometimes when it comes to code new monsters' loot, copied a creature, together with is loot table, from one of the ML dungeons, thus making it drop ML item set pieces. This is still the best act of this event cycle in my opinion.
Act V only involved the “Call to Arms” event, an hour long live event which the players finally slayed Exodus. They managed to distribute the reward of this event only to the characters who dealt some relative damage to Exodus and not the healers, players who crashed thus missed the fight, players that missed the EM warning and were still occupied with destroying the damaged walls, etc.
Having all these trial and error experiences from the previous acts, they designed the sixth and (yet) the final act, Act VI. First of all, they included two books explaining what to do, as well as how the the system works in the publish notes, so they have provided the explanation beforehand, unlike Act I. Since Act II is only for strong pvm chars, they choose weak monsters and gardening to gather the necessary items as well as alchemy skill to have more attempts to mix the cure. Since most players enjoy solving the puzzle on Act III, they added a puzzle to this act too. They designed a village with laboratory stands to make players interact with each other while preparing the cure, like they did on Act IV. They said that they will distribute the rewards according to the contribution of others (will address this shortly), so every player who participated would have a chance to get a reward, unlike Act V. To prevent scripting, they specifically choose Ter Mur to prevent new accounts from participating and added 243 possible solutions to the puzzle as well as making (hopefully intentionally) two of the five resources needed for the act non-stackable which limited the number of cures to be turned in afk to about 100. Great decisions so far, so what went wrong? Nobody complained about grinding nexus deeds of Act III, this doesn’t look much different after all..
The bad decisions were adding a competition aspect to the event and not explaining the effect of other players’ participation on each shard. The idea wasn’t “each cure counts”, the idea was “if you don’t turn in enough cures, you are not even worthy to receive a reward”.
Yes, most mmos as their base gameplay equal a grind, and this is true for UO on most cases too. However, grinding is something we do to accomplish our self defined goals in UO, like collecting one of each colored fishing net in the game *coughs*. I have four nexus deeds because I thought putting one on each corner of my house would be cool (it wasn’t, the neighborhood started to gossip about Black putting huge dildos on his house and our EMs prohibit the use of nexus deeds, probably for moral reasons). The third act didn’t state a number of puzzles I need to solve or made me compete with others who want a nexus deed too. The same goes for the fourth act. Sure, nobody forced anyone to participate in these events, but isn't the goal of a global event to have as much player participation as possible? Thus, "don't like it, don't play it" is a dodgy argument here. On a broader perspective, nobody forces me to spend hours of fishing and completing orders for the fish monger quests and unlike the act in question, I don’t have a limited time to complete a specific amount of orders. I often farm imbuing ingredients, to sell them or use them to make a good suit (I always forgot to pof the items beforehand!) but that is something I choose to do and I can do whenever I want, and spend any amount of time I see fit. For this act, I couldn’t just casually gather resources if my goal was to get the best reward, I had to gather as much as I could, more than other players, and in less than a month. My contributions should have been “on par with others”, but I had no idea how many “others” (others, and not my fellow players) turned in, I had to top that or get close to that. And after I learned that Odin already turned in 500 (which was 921 at the end of the month), I just gave up, because the event was forcing me to grind more than Odin to at least have a shot of getting a good reward, but my attempts might have also caused him, a fellow player who is liked by everyone on the shard, to not to get a good reward either despite his efforts.
This is why it is a “different type of grinding” in my opinion, more like a grinding competition, and thank you for reading this far.
