I'm rapidly losing faith in Jeff. He's supposed to be steering UO into better days, but it seems like he is asleep at the wheel. Perhaps its from a bit too much publish related booze.
I'd love to know how these arc quests made it past his desk at the design doc stage, what they lack in fun they sure as hell aren't making up for in creativity. He tweets about "Virtuous things" that, as of yet, haven't seen the light of day...while the peasants literally revolt in UO. Might want to attend to the property that's actually generating a profit (last we heard) a bit more, rather than those still in the theoretical stage.
unfortunately UO is a game too big to manage for 10-15 people...
in order to bring the game out of this quicksand it would requires MUCH more money and people, but EA is clearly unwilling to seriously invest in UO.
Actually we have 2 client: 1 that lives in the museum of modern history with the commodore 64 and the second is unstable and clearly still in permanent beta.
Publish after publish the game became always more complex and new players are totally lost (just watch the embarassing Wayback Wednesday Review video).
IMHO people just don't play UO only and if you played other games you get habit with physics and many new technologies that makes the games graphically more desirable, so we reach a point where new contents just can't excite people anymore...
New artifacts are just like the old ones, new monsters abilities cannot be seen unless you don't randomly read about it in 1 of the thousands text line of the journal.
For example just see the void pool event: the idea is great, but the void pool is like a cat litter and that's the definition of that square thing given me by a friend that I tried to brought to UO.
Another example is the audio effects, when you run the footsteps make always the same sound no mattere where you are running (also out of sync on EC).
What about the fact that you MUST log everyday or you lose virtues, loyalty and faction points? this just makes the game a work...
The last thing that makes UO always less attractive is the monthly price: 13€/month is actually too much for a game in the current state.
To conclude I'd like to say that the current dev team is doing a good job, the fault of the current condition came from all the mistakes made in the past and from EA that just forgot UO. It's possible that the only way out of this mess is a fresh start with an UO 2...
