I have been away from UO for quite a while about 3 years, real life and responsabilty made playing and maintaining my accounts impossible. Since I handed off my main accounts (Well trained accounts) that still had anywhere from 3-5 months of time paid up to a good friend to use and it seems lost them not from the friend not wanting to give me my accounts back but because they seem to perm. linked to his master account. That though is neither here or there and we are trying to figure out some way to get at least my oldest account or two back to me.
In the meantime though I have some 48 month - 76 month old untrained house holder accounts. Nothing special about any of them other than they have some age on them. I have been back in game about 2 weeks now and have discovered many new things some good and some really stink.
I have found combat training is more difficult and that my old method of training combat is gone from tram. It used to be take the nooblet character to despise and start training from the 50s-120 in despise working my way down the dungeon levels as I gained appropriate skills. I learned recently I can still do this in Fel not my favorite place to train but better than nothing.
Mage, necro, spirit speak, eval int, resisting spells, bushi, chiv, etc. are all easier than ever to train and LRC suits are easy to put together now days. Jewels to get to 80 mage at 50 real skill are not hard to find in fact in making my hiding stealther I went into the depths of Covetous to train lock picking in the rotting corpse cage which is not there anymore but found a dungeon full of stuff I won't be killing anytime soon if ever. However there was a provo mage farming so in stealth mode I started peeking inside his kills. After about 20 trips loaded down with tons of brittle, cannot be repaired major magic items I was in no shortage of high end training gear for virtually every skill set to train up with.
Money was a problem as I needed power scrolls and I had a whopping 3-4 mil spread across my accounts. Good luck played into that as I found 3 IDOCs in my wandering around that yeilded a lot of resources and what I didn't need for my own use I set up a vendor and have sold. One IDOC had 1.2 mil normal boards, 120k fw, 60k blood, 40k Heart, 190k yew, a bunch of oak, 90k barbed, 120k horned, 300k normal leather and around 200k of each ignot and a commodity deed box with all the resouces nicely deeded fo me. Yeah obviosly a scripters house that fell. The second idoc was a 18x18 that produced tons of old school rares, a box of 115 and 120 power scrolls, 6 of those +5 stat cap replicas and 62,000 stones of imbuing ingredients amazingly I hade free run of this IDOC for over an hour before anyone else showed up. 3rd IDOC was not as impressive it had a whopping 10 crates locked down in it but I camped it anywway. Lots of people came by looked and said it was a waste of time. When It fell I was the only one there First crate had 60 chargers of the fallen in it, second crate had 15 heritage tokens and a bunch of heritage token items, 3rd crate doom arties 23 in all, 4th crate 60k of each reg deeded, 5th crate 9 etheral rides, and the final crate worth anything had a dozen heritage tokens, two full sets of darkwood armor, 3 sets of the blue mage armor and 3 sets of the jewel sets and more 120 scrolls and a dozen or so 25 stat scrolls and 100 mil in checks in another crate. Nope not worth doing that nearly empty little idoc at all.
So in 2 weeks I have a etheral or charger ride for all of my toons on all of my accounts, stat and power scrolls to build my 7 main toons with, I would like to say more money than I will ever spend but I can burn through hundreds of millions very fast. I have 10 accounts with 10 houses in strategic locations. LOL 3 48-55 month accounts with 39 hours of young status left and no skills.
I have managed to get my necro/mage to 110 necro 112 spirit speak, 111 mage, 100 inscription, and 102 eval over the last two weeks of casual training a hour or two a day combat is hanging out in the 80s and 90s as I look for someplace half way decent to train.
Things I am pretty much in the dark about are Imbuing and anything Temur or Gargoyle related, reforging and some of the events like magencia and haven getting IMO screwed up. I am not understanding why they ruined despise tram side for what it is now. Seems they could have put that in Fel to go along with the risk VS reward the devs always talked about before I had to leave. Or better made it in a new hole in the ground instead of the New Haven mine becoming a very bad place for homeless despise critters.
Overall I see a lot of new high end content that appears to be very gold or credit card intensive to take part in. Not much for a low end new players to cut their teeth on and a lot that would simply make a lot of returning vets log in a couple of times and leave again. The learning curve is large and complex unless you have been in game and been through the various evolutions and additions. My knowledge ends at SA and I have and always will love UO despite some of the things like my old trained accounts being linked and locked on my friends master acct with his accounts. Don't get that at all. Never have been a golem or kitty trainer so those fixes mean nothing to me, although I was known to pull up shadow els to train pets on.
In the end my thoughts are put despise back as it was popular and actually well used or atleast redo the god awful new haven mine into something that can be used by low to mid level toons to train in with some efficiency. Needs spread out and atleast aother level or two to dump the harder things like ogre lords into. Can't complain about my IDOC luck as it was like winning the lottery 3 times in a row. I look foreward to getting trained up to be able to do some of the high end content and have a lot of reading and practicing to do to get up to speed on imbuing and reforging as it should be. I do think though that if I was a true new player UO would be a difficult game to get into and I wonder how many people start playing and quit playing before ever leaving New Haven. Of course new haven is not very impressive in comparison to old haven which was laid out well and easy to navigate as well as offering a lot to explore and many things to train up on. Even the old moongate with its lizardmen and corpsers was a good place for training. Now it just looks crammed together and well sort of a half baked almost good idea that didn't quite get there.
In the meantime though I have some 48 month - 76 month old untrained house holder accounts. Nothing special about any of them other than they have some age on them. I have been back in game about 2 weeks now and have discovered many new things some good and some really stink.
I have found combat training is more difficult and that my old method of training combat is gone from tram. It used to be take the nooblet character to despise and start training from the 50s-120 in despise working my way down the dungeon levels as I gained appropriate skills. I learned recently I can still do this in Fel not my favorite place to train but better than nothing.
Mage, necro, spirit speak, eval int, resisting spells, bushi, chiv, etc. are all easier than ever to train and LRC suits are easy to put together now days. Jewels to get to 80 mage at 50 real skill are not hard to find in fact in making my hiding stealther I went into the depths of Covetous to train lock picking in the rotting corpse cage which is not there anymore but found a dungeon full of stuff I won't be killing anytime soon if ever. However there was a provo mage farming so in stealth mode I started peeking inside his kills. After about 20 trips loaded down with tons of brittle, cannot be repaired major magic items I was in no shortage of high end training gear for virtually every skill set to train up with.
Money was a problem as I needed power scrolls and I had a whopping 3-4 mil spread across my accounts. Good luck played into that as I found 3 IDOCs in my wandering around that yeilded a lot of resources and what I didn't need for my own use I set up a vendor and have sold. One IDOC had 1.2 mil normal boards, 120k fw, 60k blood, 40k Heart, 190k yew, a bunch of oak, 90k barbed, 120k horned, 300k normal leather and around 200k of each ignot and a commodity deed box with all the resouces nicely deeded fo me. Yeah obviosly a scripters house that fell. The second idoc was a 18x18 that produced tons of old school rares, a box of 115 and 120 power scrolls, 6 of those +5 stat cap replicas and 62,000 stones of imbuing ingredients amazingly I hade free run of this IDOC for over an hour before anyone else showed up. 3rd IDOC was not as impressive it had a whopping 10 crates locked down in it but I camped it anywway. Lots of people came by looked and said it was a waste of time. When It fell I was the only one there First crate had 60 chargers of the fallen in it, second crate had 15 heritage tokens and a bunch of heritage token items, 3rd crate doom arties 23 in all, 4th crate 60k of each reg deeded, 5th crate 9 etheral rides, and the final crate worth anything had a dozen heritage tokens, two full sets of darkwood armor, 3 sets of the blue mage armor and 3 sets of the jewel sets and more 120 scrolls and a dozen or so 25 stat scrolls and 100 mil in checks in another crate. Nope not worth doing that nearly empty little idoc at all.
So in 2 weeks I have a etheral or charger ride for all of my toons on all of my accounts, stat and power scrolls to build my 7 main toons with, I would like to say more money than I will ever spend but I can burn through hundreds of millions very fast. I have 10 accounts with 10 houses in strategic locations. LOL 3 48-55 month accounts with 39 hours of young status left and no skills.
I have managed to get my necro/mage to 110 necro 112 spirit speak, 111 mage, 100 inscription, and 102 eval over the last two weeks of casual training a hour or two a day combat is hanging out in the 80s and 90s as I look for someplace half way decent to train.
Things I am pretty much in the dark about are Imbuing and anything Temur or Gargoyle related, reforging and some of the events like magencia and haven getting IMO screwed up. I am not understanding why they ruined despise tram side for what it is now. Seems they could have put that in Fel to go along with the risk VS reward the devs always talked about before I had to leave. Or better made it in a new hole in the ground instead of the New Haven mine becoming a very bad place for homeless despise critters.
Overall I see a lot of new high end content that appears to be very gold or credit card intensive to take part in. Not much for a low end new players to cut their teeth on and a lot that would simply make a lot of returning vets log in a couple of times and leave again. The learning curve is large and complex unless you have been in game and been through the various evolutions and additions. My knowledge ends at SA and I have and always will love UO despite some of the things like my old trained accounts being linked and locked on my friends master acct with his accounts. Don't get that at all. Never have been a golem or kitty trainer so those fixes mean nothing to me, although I was known to pull up shadow els to train pets on.
In the end my thoughts are put despise back as it was popular and actually well used or atleast redo the god awful new haven mine into something that can be used by low to mid level toons to train in with some efficiency. Needs spread out and atleast aother level or two to dump the harder things like ogre lords into. Can't complain about my IDOC luck as it was like winning the lottery 3 times in a row. I look foreward to getting trained up to be able to do some of the high end content and have a lot of reading and practicing to do to get up to speed on imbuing and reforging as it should be. I do think though that if I was a true new player UO would be a difficult game to get into and I wonder how many people start playing and quit playing before ever leaving New Haven. Of course new haven is not very impressive in comparison to old haven which was laid out well and easy to navigate as well as offering a lot to explore and many things to train up on. Even the old moongate with its lizardmen and corpsers was a good place for training. Now it just looks crammed together and well sort of a half baked almost good idea that didn't quite get there.