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That is something I want for years: Delete all timers and make them vendorable! Please! We all know we like to farm some keys more than others - I, for my part, hate farming Shimmering. But I would love to buy them and hoard them! Same with Exodus (easy to get but time consuming). Furthermore, this would be a nice business for newer players! I see that Medusa keys are being sold for 2-4 m (per set) on General Chat. Thats a quick source of income, given that 1 set takes about 20m to farm.
The dev argument against removing the timers on keys is that it somehow "invalidates the content," regardless of the fact that someone would still have to farm the keys.
Sure, it would allow a group to skip a chunk of "content," but then that's being done right now with the current 5-day timers...mainly because gathering keys is insanely BORING. So...yeah...their argument is fairly weak and ignores the reality of how UO is actually played.
Sure, it would allow a group to skip a chunk of "content," but then that's being done right now with the current 5-day timers...mainly because gathering keys is insanely BORING. So...yeah...their argument is fairly weak and ignores the reality of how UO is actually played.
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To start, I would make the suggestion of increasing the time to either 14 days on some keys (Medusa, Lady Mel, etc.) and to 30 days on others (Shimmering, Paraxymous, etc.).
Also regarding the keys... some of the new hunts in Eodon need to be made easier to key. Keying for Zippy is a real burden that makes it almost not worth doing. I bet most people haven't even attempted to do it since it first came out. The final boss is a good fight, so it's a shame that the process is such a grind.
Also regarding the keys... some of the new hunts in Eodon need to be made easier to key. Keying for Zippy is a real burden that makes it almost not worth doing. I bet most people haven't even attempted to do it since it first came out. The final boss is a good fight, so it's a shame that the process is such a grind.
I think Key are OK as they are
The further flaw in this argument is the fact that it is inconsistent with other game content that functions the same way. These keys are essentially a consumable resource, just like ingots, wood, regs, scrolls, etc. Those items have been around since the beginning without the need for timers, yet people still mine, chop trees, buy up vendors... I'm not sure how removing the timers on keys would somehow produce a drastically different result.
Timers on keys need to go completely and they need to be vendorable. There's just no sane reason for the timers to exist.
I did it for a week, then stopped. I hoarded keys and just did the war when I wanted to go down there again. It got boring quickly and I stopped after about a week, although I did make a decent amount of gold off of all the Moonstone Crystals I sold.
This sounds even better.
No keys (should) mean more people doing the peerless encounters =
1. Brings the price of the drops down which is great for new/returning players and anyone really.
2. More of a chance to meet new players and make new friends as hopefully it would draw more people to do them.
3. Revive some old content.
The timers on keys exist for one reason alone. Preventing scripters from having a reason to mass create keys and sell them.
Personally I think keys should be removed from the game entirely as they are (like @DJAd said) often times harder than the actual boss. This is mainly because pretty much every boss in the game is out of date with what the devs have done suit wise. There arent many bosses i cant do by myself with very little tactics. Which is why i rarely pvm these days. Through the years of devs updating everything they have seem to forgotten to update the old content to keep it somewhat balanced with what they are doing in other areas of the game.
Regardless of what they do or dont do with keys I can only hope they revamp old content instead of pushing new content out that makes old content useless.
Personally I think keys should be removed from the game entirely as they are (like @DJAd said) often times harder than the actual boss. This is mainly because pretty much every boss in the game is out of date with what the devs have done suit wise. There arent many bosses i cant do by myself with very little tactics. Which is why i rarely pvm these days. Through the years of devs updating everything they have seem to forgotten to update the old content to keep it somewhat balanced with what they are doing in other areas of the game.
Regardless of what they do or dont do with keys I can only hope they revamp old content instead of pushing new content out that makes old content useless.
And then you will get the people who say "The encounter isn't WORTH doing because of difficulty" and around and around we go.
I'd say leave most encounters the way they are, thus allowing a progression of sorts for the fabled "new player."
Most new bosses they just crank up the HP to ridiculous levels and give them annoying specials which they use far too often. Yes, I know this is to theoretically combat player power creep, but I just don't want to see EM event-type boss mobs become a regular thing.
Most new bosses they just crank up the HP to ridiculous levels and give them annoying specials which they use far too often. Yes, I know this is to theoretically combat player power creep, but I just don't want to see EM event-type boss mobs become a regular thing.
Also need a loot bump for all these bosses, except Exodus.
This. Problem is that many things in the game are soloable or have a habit of 1 hit killing anything that fights them including GD's being torn to shreds in no time at all... so even with a mass mob of people the encounter is NOT FUN.
Fun is NOT Grinding, Fun is NOT dying in 1 hit, Fun is not spending hours gathering keys to go to an encounter that lasts less than 2 min to walk away with NOTHING gained for hours of work.
If I go out and mine or lumberjack I will have some return on the time invested... though with the randomization of ores and woods it is certainly a much smaller return than it used to be even if you only strip mined years ago when ore nodes didn't move you still got more of a return on the time invested than today.
Everything anymore is becoming more and more about wasting time grinding away at things and less and less is about community and coming together to do things.
It would be nice if just to get in you had to have a group of at least 4. While yes many would take their own accounts as "extra's" many others wouldn't. Would be nice as well if the more people were fighting the faster things spawned in dungeons and the more things spawned. Take Destard for instance... 2 people can totally wipe out every dragon in Destard in under 10 min and keep the spawn so low that you have to run around the dungeon for 2 min to find anything to kill... this is NOT FUN. This happens in many dungeons... more than 1 person in them and there is nothing left to fight in short order because the spawn rate is sooo low... the spawns should be able to tell that they are "losing" and ought to increase ...
Would also be nice if drop rates of things increased the more people are there... Again this could be easily exploited and we already have issues with multi-boxers... but if they honestly did something about multi-boxing and made it known that it won't be tolerated I think you would see that quickly end. Perhaps don't ban the account but second offense to being caught Multi-boxing could be that your characters are all deleted. I'm fairly sure the expense of replacing all those characters and all the gear would be a deterrent if it were carried out. After that 3rd strike then I'd say ban them. Easy way to tell if it's a Multiboxer... Ask them all to form a line in a certain spot... if they move one by one... it's a multiboxer... if several of them move and form your line... it's a bunch of players playing together really well. One thing that would mess them up a bit .... Randomize the clicking of the entry... don't have the pop up pop up in the same area on the screen for everyone... upper right, upper left, center, middle right, middle left... etc... limit the time it's on the screen making it harder for them to get them all in. Make everyone answer a question before entering with different answers. Switch the proceed and not proceed buttons around so multi-boxers can't just one click entry.
There are ways to improve the game that don't have to be a grind.
Eh, that sounds good on paper, but in practice you're not going to sink a meaningful amount of gold out of this inflated economy without making the keys too expensive for "regular" people. Add in the fact that 99% of boss runs in this game seem to end with the player leaving empty-handed and I think most players would just decide they were losing more gold than they were making and giving up.
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I see it the other way around: they're already not worth doing because they're too easy and the loot they drop is outdated. Over the years, as gear and templates got stronger and stronger, most of these bosses stayed the same and are now a cake walk even to do it solo, let alone in a group. I'm not saying all of them, but quite a few of them are virtually no challenge in a group as small as 2 or 3 people, let alone if you play in a bigger group the rolls out with 10+ people.
I am admittedly biased toward group play and I think all bosses should be upgraded in their fighting tactics and AI, resists and hit points in order to compensate. I don't have much love for the "oh! but they I won't be able to solo it back-to-back-to-back" argument. I don't believe much of anything in the game should be solo-able because the low-pop shards are filled with hermits that refuse to interact with anyone else.
This I certainly agree with. Keying for the quests should still be apart of the equation. I'm not a fan of the notion of NPCs selling keys or being able to go right to the boss encounter without atleast one person having had to put in the effort to gather the keys. Having to spend atleast a little time questing is not unreasonable.
For Peerless boss loot, with the exception of the Slither, Glacial hair dye, and to a lesser extent CCs and Travesty marks (maybe one or two other items) - just about everything else is over-flooded in the markets already. The overwhelming majority of Peerless drops are worth turn-in points only, unless you want to put it on a vendor for a piddly 100K gold and hope it sells sometime in the next couple of months.
If these encounters were to have their keys changed and difficulty upgraded to be more properly balanced with today's templates, a loot bump would be in order to make it worth while. Overall, I think the concept of addressing key timers, Peerless boss difficulty & AI, and their related loot tables is a welcome upgrade that virtually everyone in game would benefit from. I would rather see any additional changes to Eodon or the Pet revamp put on hold if they were to address this.
Last few trips for Exodus have been duds.
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If I'm not mistaken, the amount of spawn the "war" produces is based on the amount of people with you. So doing it in a big group was a nice challenge. However.. having to key for each item individually in ways that were absolutely painful just made it too much of a grind to continue on with it after just about everyone got their moonstones.
It's a shame, as the final boss encounter was actually a decent challenge.
I agree that the Queen and Zippy quest lines are too long, especially when you have to do the battle each bleeping time.
When I did the Zippy quest, I'd go through the key gathering part multiple times and stored 10 runs worth so all I had to redo was the war. I have 4 runs left but can't bring myself to do the war again and again and gain and again...
At least with these encounters you're guaranteed a prize.
When I did the Zippy quest, I'd go through the key gathering part multiple times and stored 10 runs worth so all I had to redo was the war. I have 4 runs left but can't bring myself to do the war again and again and gain and again...
At least with these encounters you're guaranteed a prize.
That Myrmidex war thing is pure rectal cancer. It could be kinda fun if anything ever died in a reasonable timeframe, but instead the whole thing is the poster child for insane HP inflation.
Yeah looking over the rewards the only thing I wanted was the moonstone thing, so I pickked it up for cheap on Vendor search and said screw this mess.