It's really been endemic of the kind of design we have been getting since around High Seas. System that in concept are fun, and engaging (like the fishing quest, ship battles, town loyalty, the sand sifting quest, that story quest about finding a cure for the gargs, and others) but the design choices on how those systems are interacted with are rife with tedious and pointless anti-fun that must be repeated ad infinitum if you have any desire to interact with the content at all.
This is just another example of that kind of design. And it sucks.
True, but this is what was pretty much bound to happen when a small, and shrinking, team of systems designers apply a conceptual systems approach to game design. They claim to 'play' but in all honesty, it seems pretty hard to believe - we just get more and more complex, unintuitive systems to grind down (or grind us down). There's been little sign that any of them spend significant time playing to have
fun, unless they really are all the rare types who find battling a random number system entertaining. Most people don't.
The reasons relatively few people are involved in PvP, fishing quests, sea battles and so much of the potentially great content is easy enough to define (harder to solve, but that's life!) - for most players, they are not enjoyable enough, usually not because of the concept but because of the system design. Never intuitive, very rarely integral and immersive regarding the game world and it's history, and normally amounting to an equation of time spent/complexity of procedures/reward items received . Works for some, not for most, and UO needs more things for more people, not more of the same grinds.
In shifting towards an item-based game system, there's been an unintended drift into an item based mode of thinking and designing. Many claims are made about the age-old risk and reward argument, but only part of that is taken on board - adding some items or skills or properties that make going somewhere and doing something more 'rewarding' in an 'ownership of nice stuff' sense can work to a degree, but the real reward that would get people involved is to make the process FUN. The line of thinking always runs 'we want more people to go to Fel, so put items there', 'we want people to do this mission, so have an item reward', 'we want more activity at events so give out more items'. The idea of 'we want people to do this thing so let's make it more FUN for them to do it' is so underapplied it's as if they forgot a game is played for entertainment....
That's what good game designers specialise in, and what process centred developers regularly miss. No matter how clever the idea, how neat the programming, how original the thinking, if the result is a non-intuitive timesink it's a bad game design.
