LOL. This is what happens when you have a focus group of 90 percent trammies. The sigil thing was ridiculous as far as points went. Who's trammy idea was it to hide the sigils and the stone to put it on????? No pvper will sacrifice a skill to add detect hidden its a complete waste of time. Sigils were never hidden in factions!! Most points should be given for kills in town, then alters and then sigils. Its a PVP system that thiefs can be involved in, not a THIEF system with hardly no PVP. But anyways IDC cause I basically quit playing since VvV destroyed pvp.
The notion that VvV "destroyed" pvp is preposterous.
So here is the 411 on having tramelites in the focus group. If you want to enlarge the population of UO that pvps, you are going to have to find a way to bring folks that don't normally pvp in. It's really simple like that. And guess what, it worked! For a few glorious moments the towns were filled with action, and the adrenaline junkies, like myself, were ecstatic.
See, people want to participate. And there are a lot of different playstyles in UO. You wouldn't take your straight parry mage to solo Paroxysmus. Well, you might, once, and then you would learn something and change your tactics. Put my dexxer on his own in an open field battle against a parry mage, and I am almost guaranteed to lose eventually. As part of a small team that includes any kind of ranged offense I am a game changer. I can harry, I can disrupt, and just when you think I am out of the action I can wheel in and throw a greater exp that makes all the difference in whether you should have had a gheal up, or made that combo against my team mate work.
Fel isn't just about combat. It is the open sandbox of the game, and trapped boxes and bagballs aren't "cheating". Those things are in the mechanics of the game for you to use if you can wrap your mind around the pros and cons of doing so. Like a quarterback sneak, some things, if not overused, can be highly advantageous at an opportune moment.
And so, in order to make the tent bigger, you have to be willing to include: the healers, the thieves, the tamers, the poisoners, the mad scientist stealth alchies. My friend, the playing field of pvp is not yours, it isn't your guilds, it is for everyone who wants a piece of it. Some do it for powerscrolls, some do it for resources, some do it for the thrill (I suspect you and I both fall in this category, because, well, it's addictive), and some would do it for banners and ten point pinks. Or at least that is how it would start. Again, it's addictive.
So the choice is out there. A bigger pool of people with which to play, or more grind. Because what the devs won't be doing is handing out points and banners and ten point pinks for free. That is as right as it is obvious. I think the challenge to them is to find some balance between, work, time, challenge and reward. I don't know if there is some metric that can be used to balance the small shards vs the large shards, like looking at total number of VvV players logged in on any given shard and awarding points on a scale in that fashion. But I will say this, again. The vast majority of people are not going to put hours and hours in to make no gold, and receive no other real benefit. If on my little shard I can make 100 to 150 points wasting my time as a sitting duck on an alter when I could be doing Narvey or Lady Mel, again, or spawning, then I would consider the time well spent.
I hope someone got videos of the chaos on ATL. I would really like to see that. I wasn't there because I was busy doing it, playing the game, on my own home shard.
Would be interesting to know who 'tested' this idea out and said "yeah, this will work."
