I have been seeing quite a few threads lately calling for another Spring Cleaning event, so I thought I would address the issue.
The original Spring Cleaning event, which happened way back in 1999, was instigated for a simple reason: there was no limit on the amount of worthless crap that people could hoard, and the servers were dying under the weight of it all. Stuff had to go, or the game would have become unplayable.
The second Spring Cleaning event, which occurred fairly recently in 2008, was instigated for a different simple reason: players had yet again hoarded tons and tons of worthless crap, and although the servers were much more advanced and thus had no problem storing it all, players just would not stop complaining about all the worthless crap they had hoarded.
Now, you may take one look at the two Spring Cleaning events that UO has had, conclude that the common denominator is "players hoard worthless crap," and conclude that this is the underlying problem. It is not. The real problem is that there exists so much crap to hoard that is worthless. The true solution to this is to ensure that almost every item in the game can be used as an ingredient, in a quest, produces something to be used, or decays; in other words, make things not worthless.
This solution is not easy, cheap, or fast. As a result, it is unlikely to be realized any time soon, if ever.
So we must go with a solution that is far easier to implement: Cooperative Collections as year-round Spring Cleaning.
Step #1: Cooperative Collections should be worked on to make them more fun to participate in, as opposed to the current system wherein one needs only to slide out a few of the bookcases in the Britain Library to reveal the poorly hidden "Scripters Only" signs.
Step #2: Rewards and turn-in items should be added in, subtracted out, and rotated back and forth on an active basis. Have a recent event that generated incredible amounts of deco items to the point that everyone and their third cousin twice removed has hundreds of instances of it? Rotate out some items from one of the collections and rotate those worthless event items in for awhile.
Step #3: Simplify the act of turning in items. The Treasures of Tokuno events featured an NPC that, when you stood next to him with a selection of said treasures in your backpack, would throw up a gump listing them all; you need only click one to turn it in. A modified version of this should be instituted for Cooperative Collections:
tl;dr version: Spring Cleaning events happen because there are too many worthless items. This can't really be fixed, though, so the quick solution is to add these items off and on to the Cooperative Collections. Also: Cooperative Collections suck, so we should fix those at the same time.
The original Spring Cleaning event, which happened way back in 1999, was instigated for a simple reason: there was no limit on the amount of worthless crap that people could hoard, and the servers were dying under the weight of it all. Stuff had to go, or the game would have become unplayable.
The second Spring Cleaning event, which occurred fairly recently in 2008, was instigated for a different simple reason: players had yet again hoarded tons and tons of worthless crap, and although the servers were much more advanced and thus had no problem storing it all, players just would not stop complaining about all the worthless crap they had hoarded.
Now, you may take one look at the two Spring Cleaning events that UO has had, conclude that the common denominator is "players hoard worthless crap," and conclude that this is the underlying problem. It is not. The real problem is that there exists so much crap to hoard that is worthless. The true solution to this is to ensure that almost every item in the game can be used as an ingredient, in a quest, produces something to be used, or decays; in other words, make things not worthless.
This solution is not easy, cheap, or fast. As a result, it is unlikely to be realized any time soon, if ever.
So we must go with a solution that is far easier to implement: Cooperative Collections as year-round Spring Cleaning.
Step #1: Cooperative Collections should be worked on to make them more fun to participate in, as opposed to the current system wherein one needs only to slide out a few of the bookcases in the Britain Library to reveal the poorly hidden "Scripters Only" signs.
Step #2: Rewards and turn-in items should be added in, subtracted out, and rotated back and forth on an active basis. Have a recent event that generated incredible amounts of deco items to the point that everyone and their third cousin twice removed has hundreds of instances of it? Rotate out some items from one of the collections and rotate those worthless event items in for awhile.
Step #3: Simplify the act of turning in items. The Treasures of Tokuno events featured an NPC that, when you stood next to him with a selection of said treasures in your backpack, would throw up a gump listing them all; you need only click one to turn it in. A modified version of this should be instituted for Cooperative Collections:
- Double-click NPC.
- Click button marked "Turn In Goods," or something similar.
- Gump pops up with a pictorial list of all of the auto-detected items in your backpack (and recursively in sub-packs) that the particular collection takes, all as handy buttons.
- Click one of the item buttons to turn that item in.
- If the item button you select corresponds to a stack, another gump pops up asking for you to type in how many out of the stack you would like to turn in.
- When you're done, go back and click "Claim Rewards," or something simliar, and either choose a reward(s), or withdraw your points in ticket form and sell them, a la Spring Cleaning 2008.
tl;dr version: Spring Cleaning events happen because there are too many worthless items. This can't really be fixed, though, so the quick solution is to add these items off and on to the Cooperative Collections. Also: Cooperative Collections suck, so we should fix those at the same time.
