No I am referring to when you died at the steps of one of your house hiding houses in yew.
And field fights its not even funny how fast you die. Your only hope is to run away as fast as you can.
That'd hold water if I had access to any non-public houses in Yew on Atl. Which, last I checked, I don't. Anyway, not gonna continue this. If you wanna trash talk, take it to the HOT forums...but I won't be reading it.
Since this is long, I'll try to keep my answers brief. But it's a well thought out post.
Mods & imbuing weight: agreed. Even reforged pieces can go over the imbuing cap, I believe? And Legendary Artifacts do so easily - had global loot been phased in more gradually, the power creep of gear wouldn't have gotten out of hand as badly as it did, I'd guess. But there's no way to say that for sure: the guys who were multiboxing places to no end would have done it regardless, which I'm sure you'd agree with. No way to know how much loot they would have gotten if it had been added over the course of several publishes, at any rate.
$$$ made: Right. FF14 has A LOT of cosmetic items, emotes, etc, and services like UO (character editing, server xfers, etc.) I haven't bought any since they don't interest me, but I'd imagine they pull in at least 100k a year just from those alone.
Lack of balancing: agreed. pet publish could have been ironed out more, same with the pvp publish. I know most of the playerbase doesn't pvp, which I'm not going to criticize - it's their choice, just as mine is to do a little bit of everything (except crafting.) But that's how an MMO should be - if you like a certain activity, you should be able to do it. But there should be a...hmm, I'm not sure "reward" is the right word. Maybe a reason to do it, which goes back to crafting in UO. Unpopular as it was after new content syndrome wore off, there was still a reason to go to the Revamped Doom. Same with Shadowguard (before they "fixed" it anyway.)
Cross-servers: I get the logic, and as an FF14 player, I love the idea - they do that with all of the data centers, each of which have about a dozen servers. If you're on the same datacenter you can play with people from any of the servers on it.
Risk v Reward: yup. While there's no real "risk" in FF14, the highest-end content is very rewarding, and challenging. However, like anything, once you've learned it, it's not a challenge anymore...but getting to that level of skill is part of the journey. In UO, what risk is there? If you die in pvp, you lose some consumables. Wow, big deal. You can go back to your house and restock. On Siege, you can lose your suit, which sucks. That's not the level of risk I'd add (unless it was the pre-AoS era), but some people like that.
Agreed on the free shards - I know the devs have their bosses, which the free shard guys aren't restricted by. They ARE the boss. If Mesanna's superiors don't want to promote the game, there really isn't much they can do. Games like WoW and FF14 are able to promote themselves through name recognition alone. UO, in 2018, doesn't have that luxury. It's a 20 yeard old game that has to compete with games that are much "prettier" and more dynamic in terms of available content. Sure, UO has plenty of content, but there's no real reward for doing it. That's a problem that needs to be fixed.
3rd party programs & afk macroing: Yup. I've used them in the presence of the devs, as have others. But I've never had a problem with afk macroing for skills. Resources and afk farming, yes. Do I like the fact that they're so wide-spread? of course not. But I've grown comfortable with my program of choice. I'm on the fence with it being made illegal - I know the ToS should be enforced, but the client you mentioned is RIDICULOUS. I watched a guy displaying what it could do on YouTube and it's insane.
The only people I've seen with vids of OSI UO have been on Youtube - Twitch is free shards. I've watched a few and chatted with one of the broadcasters.
