Ohhh... those birds!
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Shortest I've ever seen the shard list
- Thread starter LowdownandShifty
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Did you set your "Like a third world country trying to build a water park in the middle of a drought."-button to autofire?
I think the biggest issue is lack of guilds on some shards. People log in wanting to play, look for a guild for a month on forums and in chat, and can't locate one to play with and end up letting their account go.
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Not really into Black Ops, but the other two have been keeping me busy here and there.
I love having Cosmetic Outfits, you should see what he's really wearing...
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Captn Norrington
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Your completely right, I am the leader of a guild that specializes in helping new and returning players and practically all of our new recruits say that they have been looking for weeks with no success at all in finding a guild...and that's on Atlantic, I can't even imagine how hard it is to find guilds on smaller shards. One of the big things that seems to prevent guilds from helping out new players more is the risk in recruiting a completely unknown person. Guilds have to decide if helping the one person looking for a guild is worth compromising the guilds safety, since any new recruit could be a thief or afk killer pretending to be new just so they can find new targets to rob. If only one or two new people are recruited it's easy to figure out who is doing it to remove them from the guild.... but if there are 5+ new people recruited every month, it becomes nearly impossible to track down the one troublemaker without simply removing all new recruits.
It's not just about guilds... though I will say with many issues with "trust" and so many "rotten" apples in the pot it's made it to where many guilds won't guild people for a long time because you know "Fool me once shame on you, Fool me twice shame on me."... Adding people posing as new players and then finding they are "rotten" and start doing things like putting on a thief disguise kit and killing guildies and looting them in Tram and then pretending to know nothing about it..... etc... gets old.
You are completely right. It's just there are so many times you can get burned before you just don't care anymore to help. The other thing that is annoying is you go out of your way to help folk giving them things and what-not only to find 2 months later they are long gone. Waste of resources.
I disagree that helping folks get started was a 'waste of resources', since the odds are many of them would just have quite much earlier without the help, whilst a few who were on the point of giving up end up staying - so although the 'return' on the effort may be smaller than you'd hope, it's still there.
The general behaviour of the population though.... we still had a mass of excellent folks playing, but the good ones seem to be shrinking in number, and the problem ones growing, apparently unchecked. But that seems to be fine by the people running the game, so I decided to get out before it all really went to hell, since I could see no way it was going to change direction. Still miss most of the people, but keep seeing posts and threads (sadly, often ones that are deleted without explanation or reasoning) that remind me why I left.
It does seem like there are a lot more rotten apples in the barrel than good ones. But I know there are a bunch of really wonderful people still in the game. Some of them are why I stay and have stayed so long. Really great friendships that have lasted... Till the end for some... and their memory remains... The more memorials I see throughout the land the more it reminds me how precious those friendships are... and that someone cared enough to remember them.
I have noticed at the last few events on my shard that some improvements have been made. Not by anything the DEV's have done..... nor the EM's... but people. Tamers keeping their dragons back.... not taking them into some of the small rooms in towns. Gargoyles not feeling the need to be constantly flapping and landing... many folk not constantly spamming spells and EV's everytime we stop for 2 seconds... Not dropping 15 RC on the EM every 2 min. Things like that. Yes there still are a few who are trigger happy and feel the need to field the area everytime we stop with 20 or more fields... but it seems to be only a select few that do it.
But sadly it's the ones who constantly act out like a bunch of schoolyard hooligans that are remembered and just ruin the experience anymore. Maybe it's as I get older I have less tolerance for asshattery i don't know.
With a little it of leadership, organization and accountability a guild is able to take a risk on adding a new player while limiting potential damages. In my experience, the majority of people are "good" by default. It's a risk we take adding a player that could potentially turn out "bad," but the "bad" ones end up being the minority. Even so, if I had to go through 9 "bad ones" to find that one "good one" it's more than worth it as it enriches the guild and breathes life into the game.
Man I know I'm probably going to get ragged on for this but I actually like getting killed afk at the bank. I remember being in VEW and someone would always go afk and then come back dead. Then it was a huge suspenseful thing and it was so fun finding out who did what like some sort of mystery book lol. I used to LOL all the time from it and it was fun watching.
I do understand what you mean though. I think the best thing would be to get the current members of a guild to know not to go afk with valuable items etc.
I do understand what you mean though. I think the best thing would be to get the current members of a guild to know not to go afk with valuable items etc.
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For some reason, it is incredibly difficult to do that. I had to tell my guild members not to do that for almost a year before they finally stopped doing it lol....
Its not like a veteran member of a guild can't become disgruntled and do exactly the same thing. I can't tell you how many times I've seen that happen over the years! And in fact, the disgruntled veteran player in your guild can be infinitely worse because they tend to have integrated quite well and friended to lots of areas. So real guild safety never actually occurs. You should never be afraid to take in new players. And if you are afraid then your guild will die off eventually anyways.
Yes you might lose someone concerned about their safety because they don't "know" the new person. As a guild leader would you rather lose a longtime member who is afraid of their security or gain five new recruits?
Maybe doing what WoW has had to do a couple of times, and combine shards, is what is needed?
I was surprised there were still so many shards. Everyone is spread out, so it does make it hard for a new player to find a guild and people. So combine a couple of shards together, increase the population on one shard to medium instead of like three low pops.
There are issues with that, of course. Houses in the same spot being #1, but there could be ways around that.
I was surprised there were still so many shards. Everyone is spread out, so it does make it hard for a new player to find a guild and people. So combine a couple of shards together, increase the population on one shard to medium instead of like three low pops.
There are issues with that, of course. Houses in the same spot being #1, but there could be ways around that.
How about a shard portal... Hop in and travel to a composite shard. You can't place houses on composite shard, but anyone can travel back and forth between the composite and their host shard using the portal.
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I am part of an RP town you don't have that crap in WoW.... and no one cares because they don't "own" anything. But when you have 18 years of history on a shard you don't want to just up and leave.
I can say without a doubt that if I was forced to uproot to another shard I'd quit. My town is on my shard. Moving it is NOT possible ...... there are dozens of places unique to GL's that I for one would be irritated to lose. And I'm sure other shards are that way too.
The best way to work that would be to say take Eodon.... and use it as a "hub" between 4 shards. This gives 4 shards folk to work with and do things with.... gives you 4 shards to spread out on.... and work together... you just combine the GEn Chats and whatnot... you bring the "Team" of EM's together in those shards. THAT would be the way to do it without stepping on toes and hurting players or history.
Yeah, that's why I said houses would be the issue (and probably why no other game has really ever done housing the same as UO).
Could convert to a system similar to Lord of the Ring and have neighborhoods. Same layouts repeated multiple times so on the same server the same house spot is held by multiple people but each neighborhood is instanced.
Similar to the Eodan proposal.
How that would be accomplished in UO, not sure.
The simplest thing would be the Eodan proposal, but I'd extend it to include dungeons, Ish and Eodan (any place that doesn't allow housing). Make dungeon entrances a zone and the dungeons are on a shared shard.
The more I think of it, the instanced neighborhoods would allow for more player towns to be built. But not sure how it would work without compromising the ability to walk from Britain to Vesper and walk by people's homes.
I like the Eodon idea and agreed with Ossy on including dungeons, too. Interestingly... When you go to Eodon you're already on a separate server (the same one as the SA dungeon). It'd be interesting to just route all traffic to/from those areas to a regional hub servers. That skirts the player housing issue and ensures latency is comparable between the players home shard and the hub.
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I forgot about the Lost Lands, those should be on a the shared server as well.
Going forward, any new lands would be shared and not allow housing.
Unless open an area and say "this is a shared housing area, if you voluntarily move to this new land, you give up your Shard-Trammal/Fel/Ter Mur/Tokuno/Malas house" and have to pick a "home" shard that you recall/moongate to when leave the new land.
Going forward, any new lands would be shared and not allow housing.
Unless open an area and say "this is a shared housing area, if you voluntarily move to this new land, you give up your Shard-Trammal/Fel/Ter Mur/Tokuno/Malas house" and have to pick a "home" shard that you recall/moongate to when leave the new land.
I think that functionality already exists--you can only already own a single house. I wouldn't have it changed.
Returning to tram/fel/etc should bring you back to your home shard, but I don't think the new system should give you the option to change "home" shard: If the character was made on shard A, then shard A should continue to be the character's "home" unless the player uses a Shard Transfer Shield. This has two advantages: First it's simple--it doesn't change any of the existing systems. Second, it ensures the Shard Transfer Shields remain relevant and useful in a combined world.
Oh! Then we agree
I wonder how many times this idea has every been floated around and if there's any chance of it working...
You must just have super bad RNG in UO terms. I've been in nothing but pvp guilds for 10 years now. Who are the epitome of scum to the UO world(stratics views)..Never once has anyone been a secret spy haxxor killing us afk... Maybe that's just me :/ I mean I've heard of it happening but like maybe 6 times in the 15+ years I've played.
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There is absolutely no reason that the master of a guild shouldn't be able to disable Trammel guild PVP/stealing. Running a guild in UO is a complete nightmare in ways that running guilds in other games aren't. If you actually bother to recruit newbies it's pretty much inevitable that you're going to have to run around playing "try to guess who's a sociopath" at some point.
@Mesanna @Kyronix
Sadly it seems there is no shortage of Sociopaths in UO.
Do you just add random people to your guild? I mean how does this happen? We don't just "add people" they come in usually on a temporary basis. They don't join and get access to our power scroll box/potion supplies and things supplied to the guild. Maybe try creating a recruit guild and earn your way into full membership. That could be an idea. I mean instead of wasting dev time, implementing a feature that is so easily monitored by a guild master already. That's like going to yew gate with an uninsured slither and being upset when your PK'd and looted. For the record I'm not being sarcastic I'm just giving a few ideas.
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The "create a recruit guild" thing sounds good in theory, and a lot of guilds have tried it but it doesn't work for a very simple reason. The recruits get bored and leave. If they join a guild to have friends to play with and talk to in guild chat, and then they are placed in a separate recruit guild with most likely only a couple other people for a long time they will quickly become bored and quit to go look for a new guild. I have tried it, only 2 out of about 18 recruits actually stayed the full month in the recruit guild, and one of them ended up being the exact thief we were trying to prevent from getting in anyway as we discovered soon after.
I don't know everyone plays different. I just don't see the real urgency to implement this unless the plan to do a full guild revamp. Which added meaning to titles and ranks, and maybe stop the Emmy voting out GM issues.. We just required vent or mumble. We dealt with is having bene acts in Fel for so long. In trammel it's not issue for heals and res and such though.
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