Discussion for Dev Team & Players

[Ancient Sosarian]

Hail Devi gods,

Blackrock Golems, especially paragon ones, Minions of Scelestus, and Night Terrors have left many, especially on lower population Shards, utterly frustrated and having NO fun engaging these creatures.

I ask in this discussion for a civil discussion of these creatures; what Folks like and dislike about them, if any are having fun engaging them, and ways to make these fun or at lest not frustratingly lacking in fun.

Despite efforts many remain unsure if Night Terrors are Bardable and what the quest item drop rate is on them. Logrus, or any other devi-gods, we beseech thee to communicate with us.

Folks, please keep it civil and constructive,

An SoS

 

[fraidy cat]

Well, I tried the Minions once...BRIEFLY...lol. I was one-shotted in a matter of seconds, then killed immediately after ressin' by one of those ninja-spiders, so quit that quest just after taking it.

The Night Terror's I happened upon by accident, and left quickly as nothing I did seemed to damage them in the least.

As a new(er) player, after an extrememly disappointing experience at an event just after I started this game (someone's funeral?) (disappointing due to player behavior, not anything related to devs or em's), I'm a bit confused. There was lots of talk a bit ago about changing things up to help new players a bit, but I'm not really seeing any of it (or not looking hard enough...lol).

I was excited when I saw the announcement of the Gargoyle Queen quest on the Stratics main page, but again disappointed when I went to try it as it seemed impossible for me to even attempt (inst-killed in one shot by a minion, then immediately killed by a ninja-spider after ressing). The day I went, there was a nice crowd gathered, but no one was able to take any time to talk as they were too busy running from the minions and trying to kill them...a few days later, once everyone had gotten the rewards, the area was deserted.

My suggestion would be to try to balance each quest so there are multiple ways to complete it. I know the vets are aching for some new content that's challenging for them, but honestly: not everyone's been playing for several years and built up a bulging bank account and overflowing house of uber goods. I know, I know, in balancing quests as I suggested it leaves open the door for exploitation of the easier methods, but there needs to be some manner in which new(er) players are able to participate. Otherwise, it gives the impression that, despite all the talk to the contrary, recruiting and retaining new(er) players isn't really a priority here.

Maybe quests could be set up in "tiers," much like the proposed 'trade-in' event that's supposed to be looming on the horizon. The biggest and best reward would be reserved for those able to defeat a powerful creature (like the Minions or Night Terrors). However, there could be several lower tiers (maybe 2 or 3 to avoid too much work) that would have weaker rewards and an appropriate creature to defeat for lower level/new(er) players to participate as well. Just a thought...

 

[unified]

This is another case of the ongoing risk vs. reward argument. Essentially, the game has worked itself into a catch-22 situation. The population is too small to warrant Ilsehnar remaining plagued with paragons and the recall restriction to a point of no longer making sense.

While the meer nature of things says we should really never be able to solo every creature in the game, reality dictates that there should not be creatures so difficult to fight that groups are necessary because the population is not large enough to support it. No creature should be able to kill you in one hit, but if it is powerful we should be hit within inches of life and be able to flee and give up trying to fight it.

Back in the day, you were able to drop a dragon, but only after nearly an hour of jousting it. Even then, a dragon could not one-hit kill you. This was fun.

 

[pgib]

I think they have this problem with high damage templates and they are trying to solve it the wrong way. Raising mobs hit points to the sky simply leaves the rest of us with no other choice but to jump on the "sampire" train (meaning the two or three type of characters that can hit for XXX points a second).

That said, the mobs at hand have good and bad sides.

For example you can use the environment and the behavior of the minions to kill them: a kind of creative killing which is great but once you find your way you still need astronomical times to finish the task because of this mass of hit points you have to deal with.

The night terrors have this frenzy teleport that is very funny, at least to me, they randomly grab and mostly insta-kill you, funny too, yet they have, how many, 30-50 thousands hit points?

It is not a horrible idea to have people form hunting groups (a player submitted bounty-hunt system could help) but, at least where i play (Europa), it is not so easy to find more than four players for a "public hunt" (even if you are in a guild) and unless they are all sampires that number is rarely enough.

As suggested, tweaking the monsters so that their strength (and loot) depends on how many players are engaging it could be a solution: when the event start and everyone want to see what's happening you have very big monsters with high chances to drop something interesting (for those who are interested), when the wave goes off brave adventurers could still enjoy the fight.

 

[pgib]

Back in the day, you were able to drop a dragon, but only after nearly an hour of jousting it. Even then, a dragon could not one-hit kill you. This was fun.

I still remember the old times of the "hit and run" The joy when i killed my first ancient wyrm (and i was a macefighter back then). Those were fights.

But i think that every mob in the game should be soloable, by any "template". Not easily and not in the same way but we are legendary things after all: and what is a legend supposed to do if not achieving impossible goals?

 

[Dermott of LS]

...

As a melee style of player, being maxxed out in Resists, HP, Dex, Parry, etc etc etc and STILL getting one-hit killed is no fun to me. That's not "challenge", it's just suicide. If having extra people healing and them being unable to keep up is also happening, again... it's gone beyond a reasonable challenge in my opinion.

Sure, you can always let a dragon tank, but that pretty much defeats the purpose in the melee tank build anyway.

I don't mind taking a while to kill a creature. But that on top of insta-kill shots is just lame.

Also, it's worse when it's effectively the first type of creature for a quest chain and one where you have to grind for a certain number of widgets to turn in.

Save the insanity for "boss" monsters. They should NOT be used for non-boss storyline/quest kills as they drive away people from being involved.

Look at the first Ophidian invasion that would cycle through rounds of creatures starting with lower end and getting tougher until you hit the berserkers. That invasion had what has to have been the best accessibility for any combat character. They could plow through the lower end to get the spawn higher and work towards the berserker, or if they couldn't handle one of the creature levels, they could "fight the flanks" peeling off lower end creatures, and even the lower end creatures had rewards that made them worth hunting.

 

[Lord Frodo]

Very well said Dermott of LS.

A GD can not tank these things alone.
I have 2 BOOK #1 and it takes a group to fight these, which is ok, but to get no reward at the end is not good and the loot is junk. Lower the HP on these things and damage output, but let them remian a group activity. That way we will have time to keep the melee style players healed.

 

[MalagAste]

I am fed up with the Night Terrors.

I thought the Minions were ok if you were a bard or Mystic.... otherwise they stink bad. My Bard was happy to be useful for a change.

The Night Terrors.... they just stink.

It's annoying enough that they teleport all over.... worse that they take you to them into area's of the map you can not escape from....

They have WAY more HP than they require. I mean I like a challenge as much as the next guy but with getting teleported and having to chase them all over the map I don't think they also need to have near as many HP.... half what they have would be fine...


Blackrock Golems were fine. These things Do NOT need to be paragons.


I think it's great they are trying to build new monsters... but seriously those Night Terrors have enough with casting Revenants every other turn... and the continuous teleporting about the map.

And they do NOT need to pull you to them... I was so fed up after finding myself inside the stairs.... and then walking by getting pulled onto a ledge with 4 of them..... that was enough for me to start asking myself why do I still play this game?

 

[DevilsOwn]

didn't do the first encounter in this storyline... my usual hunting partner and I couldn't make a dent in the minions.... and after reading these posts I'll not be attempting this part at all


I'm here for fun, not frustration, and the Ophid invasion is a very good example of fun for everyone, thank you Dermott

 

[Waylander]

I can understand people frustrations when it comes to minions and night terrors but i have to say that there is always a way to kill them.

Spend a bit of time playing around with them and im sure you can figure it out.

Bards made minions easier yes but I found that i could kill them on my archer and mage chars without a bard.

The do need to have thier life dropped tho as it does get very boring taking 30 minutes to kill something.

The trick to killing the night terrors is to keep them away from ledges and pay attention to how they teleport backwards away from the damager. Position yourself and pets so that it teleports away from ledges and away from its max range (spot it teleports back to spawn point). In this case a disco bard does help again but isnt always needed.

Tactics always help. If it isnt working, stop, think and adjust your tactics.

 

[yars]

my take on this is:
If your going to have creatures like this, at least make the reward suitable.
and yes its gottem progressively worse from the golems up to these night terrors, sure where there is a will there is a way. but all this for a set of books and no hints to even what there for? i thnk devs throw these things in as merely a distraction to keep us busy til they can pull something out of their A$$. and btw stop forcing team based stuff on us, i for one rather like playing alone, its why ive stuck around all these years, if i want to "team up" ill go with my RL friends that really know. i dont come here to play well with others, i come here to escape!!

 

[Uvtha]

In my opinion events should involve players on all levels. So if you need to get some item from some monsters it should run like the TOT event, along with multiple levels of monsters. Boss monsters give really high number of points (even enough points to make the next drop 100%), then lower level monsters with much smaller amount of points.

That way super geared up people can solo, or they can group to polish off bosses, and be done right away, and the lower level people can battle the lower level spawn for the eventual reward.

There need to be more than one way to get things done. Just dropping 20 boss monster spawns on an island is not the way to do it. Not only because bosses are limiting to uber players and groups, but because eventually the groups will thin out once everyone gets what they need, and it can end up being a GIANT pain to go through the quest. I for one gave up.

Now I don't want to come across as being against super bosses have drops only attainable from them, but those sort of monsters should be regular content.

Events should be something EVERYONE can enjoy, and that should occupy a good deal of time, but not be super stressful or tedious to engage in.

 

[Zosimus]

Tactics play a key and Im sure there are plenty of ways to attack these with the right templates and set up with enough players.

Its the shortage of players depending on playing time and shard they play on is one issue the OP has also. Not all players can be on at prime time. Not all players play on heavy populated shards depending on location.

Players shouldn't be forced to move to shards they dont want to play just to particpate in events. Also, it's the player choice to stay on low populated shards and the devs cant be blamed for the players choice of what shard they want to play on. Then yet again the devs cant make the events easier on lower populated shards for their sake and have it hard for higher populated shards.

So what can the devs do for lower populated shards with such events? I have no true answer for this. Only point I can make when they took away skill and made the game more item dependent the end result is such events with high and hard hitting monsters.

 

[ECO Director]

Yep they were tough until you learnt about them, now not so tough.
You just have to know where to lure them and go for it.
Three folk can chop one up in a reasonable amount of time.
I for one am glad to see a creature that can't be killed solo, everything else in UO is to easy.

 

[Sevin0oo0]

but if it is powerful we should be hit within inches of life and be able to flee

That is already there to an extent - the only problem is they Forgot they linked HP to Stamina, wth? If you're within inches you'll still get dead because you're frozen in place from the stamina loss ( 'course mobs get the opposite, w/ Both speed and defense chance increases when 'within inches'). both are stoopid changes, imo

 

[pgib]

everything else in UO is to easy.

I consider this idea of using the template that best suites the task at hand very horrible 'cause the game started with no other goals than living a funny virtual life. Few days ago I was shocked when a guy told that he couldn't come to try a Slasher because he had not the right template.

If you try to play a role (that doesn't necessarily mean role playing) you will find that the game is nowhere near being easy.

But then everyone is free to play the game as he likes more.

 

[Lady Storm]

While I comend the Dev for making more interesting quests and great thought out loot/prizes. However...................

On many shards I play that do not have big populations any longer. I for one dont have the luxury of calling many to say hey lets go kill..... it just wont happen.

I LIKE to hunt alone or with just my kid. I know I am not alone in this respect.

These monsters are so over the top its worthless to go do things I know we cant do together or alone.
Time is a major factor.
This is the truth for most players who work a 5 day week. They get a few hours of play if they are lucky a night. I personally know a friend who has 30 minutes a night to play before he must go off line. You cant get much done in 30 minutes.
I am not alone in this. Many players like to solo play in UO and making players group up is pertty hard when what population a shard has is ether too busy, has done it and dont need to any longer, or worse yet is not on when you personally got the time to play. See that is the big factor the Dev hasnt taken into consideration. The solo hunter who cant group. They cant scale down the monster to fit 1 player this I understand but when a quest monster takes 4 players to kill in a reasonable time fraim.. its too much if you cant get the 4 to do it!

The average player cant fight these monsters alone... so they there fore are sitting there collecting uo dust, and fustrationg the players to the inth degree.

Stop trying to group up players I say, if we want to group we usualy do without your help.

 

[AirmidCecht]

At the very least, they could update the Minions et al to react the way Juka Lords do:

"Nice try Airmid! Excuse me while I one hit kill you!"

"You think you are a match for me? I have dev powahs!"

*grins*

Ok in seriousness, when we do champ spawns the boss is just that. Very rarely can you solo one with normal warrior/mage skills. They are challenging yet not so overly so that it makes it too hard for a nice group to balance out their skills with each other and take it down. The fact that you work up towards the final battle with degrees of monsters makes it all the more fun.

Just a thought to weigh in here.

 

[Adol]

This quote from Lord British himself sums up, I think, the design ethos the Dev Team are now following;

"In almost all RPGs these days, that grind mechanic has been repeated in every facet of your virtual life to the point of, for at least me, distress," says Richard Garriott. "Slice the game any place you want and you'll find that exact same game mechanic used over and over again. What you're really doing is having people spend time. You're making them waste time in order to level up."

So why do games keep going back to the grind? "If you look at Ultimas in general -- not just Online but Ultimas in general -- Ultimas have very customized storylines. A customized storyline is very expensive to build and takes a lot of time and effort. To do 10 more, and 10 more, and 10 more, is something you can create algorithmically, and it works very well. So as much as those hard core 'role-playing' gamers in us might complain, the level grind works astonishingly well."

Source: Gamasutra - Features - The F-Words of MMORPGs: Fairness

We have a small dev team, with little time to craft true storylines. So they are giving us grindy quests instead. And in my own experience, like that of Garriott, it's killing my interest in the game. I know there is new content, for instance, but grinding away to get at it just puts me off logging in.

For instance, has anyone even seen Charbydis yet on a production shard? I've done about 40 fishing quests since it went live (with the associated fishing) and not even got one of the summoning items so far.

I've killed about 100 Minions, and got 6 books due to the split loot. I haven't even looked for the second stage of quests, because the first part was just so boring and time wasting. You can't even set the scrolls as public so other people can read my duplicates; they just sit in my library now, looking scroll-like and unloved.

The difference between those and champion spawns is that there's a much wider skill set involved in fighting a spawn; the rewards are much better spread amongst all the participants (even if they only get piles of gold; but I mean, really? ONE scroll, sometimes, on a minion?!) and have a clear, and personally useful purpose to them. As yet, we don't even know what the Gargoyle books are supposed to be building towards (and considering the disaster that was the rebuilding of Magincia, even fewer care now than then).

Ultima Online's chief virtue is that it's a sandbox that we can have fun within; turning it into a Korean style unforgiving grind is absolutely not the way forward.

 

[Klapauc]

I consider this idea of using the template that best suites the task at hand very horrible 'cause the game started with no other goals than living a funny virtual life. Few days ago I was shocked when a guy told that he couldn't come to try a Slasher because he had not the right template.

If you try to play a role (that doesn't necessarily mean role playing) you will find that the game is nowhere near being easy.

But then everyone is free to play the game as he likes more.

The game basically forces one to either have more then 1 account or using soulstones. On 2 chars of mine i use soulstones alot, the other 5 have a very fixed skillset i dont change much. The only good general purpose chars atm are archers/throwers and mystics, on others you will find you have to swap out some skills now and then ,or you will find that you cannot fight certain things at all.

The sad thing about those high hp event/quest monsters is, that mages and tamers are often out of luck here if they want to solo them, where there is always some way to set up a dexxer and kill them. Sampire is not really needed, you can solo kill a fair amount of high end monsters just fine with bandage healing and pots.
New or casual players are also left out here, only chance for them is to find a decent group.

I need to be careful now how to explain the next point without catching to many flames or hate.
There are players who perfectly know their char, use hotkeys and every consumable/item/legal trick to their advantage.Also having a good knowledge about what and where they fight, knowledge that sometimes comes only by collecting enough grey robes and thinking about what caused them. There is a whole lot in the game you can use to survive better.

Then we have people that are not used to all of that. To make it even worse, add equipment issues and gimp templates to the mix.
Now you have the reason why some people get one-hitted while others think 'oh, only a [insert random mob here],nothing to worry about' .

The game isnt as simple as it once was. With all the skills and items we got, there has to be something that is challenging and hard to do.
What we got in uo is nothing compared to wow for example, where there are bosses that require groups of 20 people to play nearly perfectly individually and as a team.

 

[Martyna Zmuir]

Significantly less HP, tone down the special moves/powers (seriously, must everything spam poison these days?), and spread them out a bit more.

Quests should be fun for all. Grinding on overpowered mobs for an hour just for the chance at getting the needed item isn't fun for most people - especially the more casual gamer. Not everything needs to be a Slasher/Stygian level experience to be fun.

 

[Dermott of LS]

...

There's nothing wrong with a Stygian/Slasher level encounter, however a front-page quest chain shouldn't START at that level... maybe end there, but not start there.

 

[Merion]

I did only get two of these epiphany parts because after doing 4 blackrock golems and needing my whole play time I have per day for that, I said: "screw this!"

I found a way to do the minions (provoke two onto each other, apply an archer or thrower, go watch TV for half an hour), but even tho I already killed 9, I only found 4 books/scrolls. So I fear I need up to 20

Hearing that this only gets worse with the next step, I'm greatly losing motivation. And I'm the only one in my guild who even still bothers with these quests.

Giving mobs ten thousands of HP is clearly not a good idea. Not at all! There are better ways to include groups and pose a challenge.

What about making a mob immune to all but magic damage until he was hit with a certain amount of magic damage. Then switch to immune to all but melee damage, then ranged damage, etc. thus involving different players and templates in one fight.

 

[pgib]

It is hard to find 4 people for a hunting group, imagine to have to find 4 of one kind then 4 of another one and so on.

Let monsters scale with the number of players fighting it (more players, harder mob and greater loot/drop chance for non quest items).

There would be a reason to stick together and yet it would be possible to fight them for those who can't join a public or private hunting group.