Faction Overhall?

[Berethrain]

In light of the promise for a complete overhall for factions, it leads me to ask what left is there to overhall? Wtf? Why dont they just fix the problems so they dont have to!?

I mean I will even point some of them out;

Problem: New Faction Items - We've all come to realize pvp has become mostly item based and has been for some time. To give an incentive to play factions they gave new shiny items. Not a horrible idea, but the fail here is people getting them and staying in trammel.

Fix: Keep the faction items in Fel only. In addition, to make silver useful again for these items, put a decay rate on them. For those who would say I don't have time to farm silver is bull****. If you have time to play UO, you have time to farm silver once in awhile. It's wasnt meant to be a free ride to suit out all your toons in an hour.

Note: For faction members who have no other suits I can see this being a complaint, but we all know you've made a trammel char and suit before. You can do it again. And if you haven't, then it shouldn't be a problem anyways. And for those in trammel that will say that's not fair, it's not supposed to be. You earn what you get.

Problem: Exponential Point growth. - This was a dumb idea to begin with. What the hell was the point in this? Now you have point farming taking away from factions and contributing to keeping items in trammel. Part of factions was the braggings rights of having points. Now you see stupid **** like a mule having 1 billion points.

Fix: Wipe out points, take off the point transfer command, leave the kill cycle alone and make 1 kill worth 1 point. I cant really think of a reason to take 10%. The higher number of points, the faster the decay rate. Pretty simple.


Problem: Ranking system - This has been ****ed up pretty much since the beginning of factions. And now with the exponential point growth, it's even more pointless.

Fix: Get rid of it and make the ability to wear faction items solely based on obtaining a certain number of points not rank. Let's face it, ranking wasn't going to be fixed anyways.



Other Notes:

Faction guards need to be updated, and need the ability for a stay command while being able to attack oranges that come up. They shouldnt wander aimlessly off everytime an oranges gets within 2 screens of them unless you tell them to and then killed in a few hits. It's this or set them to rubberband at a shorter distance. (This would also fix the ability to drag them out of guard zone into a base)


Factions need the other vendors such as Necro Regs and the controlling faction should have control of NPC Vendor Pricing on all facets.


Make other faction traps more feasible in use, or get rid of them.

Take away the ability to attack others in the same faction. The griefing really does get old. The reponse will be join another faction, but it happens in all factions and there is no excuse for it.


Leave stat loss the way it is.


Make war horses unable to bond.

Forget the idea of involving crafters and healers in factions. Factions has been ****ed up to bad to even bother implementing this. Besides, Healers? Really? What are you going to do this time? Toss them 10 points for throwing a greater heal? Don't be rediculous, it's a part of factions anyways.

Give thieves 1 point per sigil for completing a corruption cycle.

Take away the ability to enter a house with a sigil. The idea isn't to steal a sigil and run to the nearest house.

I'm sure there's more but at the moment it's all I can think of.

 

[Poo]

Give thieves 1 point per sigil for completing a corruption cycle.

Take away the ability to enter a house with a sigil. The idea isn't to steal a sigil and run to the nearest house.

dont agree with some of what ya say.
dont disagree with some of what ya say.

but the above 2 i must say i definatlly dont agree with ya on.

have you ever tryed to run a thief into a base protected by a script running field mage backed up by a guild of three of dexxers?

hell, they should be giving out points for a theif that can even get close enough to SEE a sigil let alone touch it.
forget stealing it!!!

hiding in a house i could care less about.
i prefer to just hide in the forest anyways.

but lets be honest.
i dont think a thief on any active shard has gotten the stealing points in months.
there isnt a sigil ive sen on the shard i play that dosnt get passed around 20 times before someone can get a defence up and hold it.
forget getting the 10 points.

it was a good idea, but not good IRL play time.

personally, i think theives should get points just from touching the sigil.
you steal it off a pedistal no matter where it is ya get a point.
ya drop it off... ya get another.

why?

cause killing thieves is fun!
and nothing sucks more then squishing a theif and not getting anything for it!!

 

[Berethrain]

have you ever tryed to run a thief into a base protected by a script running field mage backed up by a guild of three of dexxers?

I've come across people macroing fields while playing other accounts plus a group of tamers, mages, and dexers yes.

But there's no point in handing out points everytime you simply get close to a sigil.

but lets be honest.
i dont think a thief on any active shard has gotten the stealing points in months.
there isnt a sigil ive sen on the shard i play that dosnt get passed around 20 times before someone can get a defence up and hold it.
forget getting the 10 points.

I know there are thieves on Great Lakes who've completed the cycle. Myself included. The other shards I cannot speak for. But the same applies. 1 point per sigil cycle is plenty considering they're thieves also considering they received nothing before. Otherwise, if they received a point for grabbing a sigil guess what would happen?

They'd bounce the sigil back and forth between multiple accounts in two different factions to farm points. I'd even be ok with say up to maybe 2 points a sigil cycle, but anything more is just excessive. Especially if they moved the kill points to 1 point per 1 kill.

Earning points isn't meant to be easy.

 

[Berethrain]

I've decided instead of an unbondable war horse, they should just decay like the rest of the faction items do. This would still create a use for silver and less of a pain in the ass to keep. Or perhaps only rideable when you control the city the horse breeder you got it from is in.

 

[Poo]

and why do you hate war horses so much?

 

[Ls Jax Ls]

Because the only reason he probably kills people is because they don't have a mount

 

[Berethrain]

I have nothing against war horses, but in order to give more of an incentive in factions, such things need a tweaking.

If I were in a guild or actually play as much as I used to I'd certainly go for the dismount gank. What guild doesnt, just the name of the game.

However playing solo with different types of chars, trying to dismount them is pretty pointless (if i can with that char) unless they speedhack and on an ethy 1 vs 1. Then yes, I'd try and kill them with a dismount. I'm ok with this, even if it makes me the most terribad suxxors pvper ever.

 

[Cardell]

War Horses should not be changed in any way.

 

[ReaperNI]

Alright here my take on it UO is a playing feild npcs monsters on different levels of diffculty and a rule set THATS IT. No matter what they change people will find a way to abuse the system. If i were a gm a few things that can be changed is

1)make entrance to tb strong hold on the other side facing out of town. and completely move com base out of maginca. problem being sheriff calling factions guards to fight there sigils battles.

2)make point/rank system about bragging rights only or maybe killing a higher level of faction member giving more silver on uo set scale ex:level 1 give 40 silver level 10 gives 1000 silver(not sure on what amount should be)

3)Remove rank from faction items and make items of different levels variy durabilty on item level rank 1 255/255 rank 10 50/50 this would make items more likely to need to be replaced without putting to much of strain on farming silver.

4) 1 kill 1 point. Make ranks set number base ex: 1-10 level 1 90-above level 10

5)Make Same faction members unable to attack each other. This would help Bring some unity back into factions and would on side note help with lore of game.

6)For God sakes have a gm sit atleast an hour a day at pvp hot spot and start jailing scripters this has gotten way out of hand and made pvp nearly impossible to avg player without scripts.

7)Break all faction/non faction alliances they had there time abused it now lets be fair grandfathered or other wise allied. either break all of em or let everyone do it.sorry you didnt start playing on such and such date now you must suffer for the rest of the time you play.

8) if any of these changes are used give me 10 mil for each idea used lol!

Thanks for reading TYR

 

[A Rev]

Agree with most, In my opinion they need to make faction defences more fun.

Now, i know its an old system and people like the way it is...wel some anyway.

First of...there should be no faction base within guards. END!

Second, i totally disagree with the whole unable to attack the same faction thing. I mean, it is annoying but hell its PvP.

Third, i would actually have a WHOLE new type of base. They would actually be strongholds...on islands, the whole island is faction zone. There by only factioners could enter.

The rewards for successfully defending the sigs apart from the old classics. Is the ability to add certain vendors/traps/whatever to your stronghold.

Maybe you can have faction [non magical] ki-rins/unis/ you know different horses. These can be bonded but...BUT can only be ridden while you are in control of that town. So you can ride around on your red/green/blue/purple Cu/Ki-rin/Uni/Swampy/Polar bear [see where im going ] As long as you fight for that right.

Maybe even give them a special ability...like the ki-rin can cure you, the cu can heal you, the uni can faction rune, the polar bear gives cold resist, te swampy works like a swampy.

You can have the Towns say minoc/trinsic gives the swampy [mining/armour] Moonglow/mag gives the uni/ki-rin [both magic].

Umm how about different types of traps...paralyse traps?? teleport traps?? You know a little more ingenuity on the devs part, each trap is tied to a town...no town...no trap. Costs silver to use [have to charge them].

Those are just a few ideas ive come up with in the 5-10mins its taken to write this reply

 

[GalenKnighthawke]

It bewilders me why people don't realize that the point exploits are the root of many of the other problems. Without the point exploits, people wouldn't be able to use items in Trammel and forget about Felucca, simply because they would have to be doing stuff in Felucca in order to earn the items at all.

At any rate, this post was made today.

The relevant part is:

We are also doing some cool new stuff with factions that will begin testing on a live TC soon.

So whatever they are doing it's soon.

Ironically, I just got back in Factions late Sunday/early Monday. Just in time for (presumably) major changes being more or less imminent! *chuckles*

-Galen's player

 

[Tina Small]

Ironically, I just got back in Factions late Sunday/early Monday.

A little bird just told me that. What I want to know is when you'll break down and make a character on Origin. Hmmm??

 

[Tina Small]

I have mixed feelings about completely removing the COM and TB strongholds from towns. I've always thought the fights in Britain were a blast, even when half or most of your group is red and being guard whacked is a strong possibility. The way I feel about it is that if you put a red character into factions and plan to do any town fighting, you'd darn well better realize what it means and plan to be on your toes. Make being a red in factions mean that you're a skilled cut-throat, rather than just a cut-throat. (Damn WoW for luring off KDL!!!)

What I really wish for with factions is that some genius will come up with a way to promote true teamwork in lieu of individual glory or gain. Give us challenges that can be met and rewards (if absolutely necessary), that can be gained only by working together as teams.

I guess that's why I liked the way factions used to be. Before the crazy bonus points and points for stealing sigils, the point system generally gave you an idea of who was the most skilled at killing the enemy. (Yes, there were a few obvious pointholders, e.g., Coke & Son, but everyone on GL in factions knew who was dumping points into that pointholder and you knew its total was probably accurate because everyone was so active.) Without faction artifacts, who gave a damn if a lot of thieves didn't have points? Why would a faction thief want a war horse, the only thing besides bragging rights that made you want to have points? A faction thief who owns a warhorse is either a stupid faction thief (or maybe the rare backup surprise thief--anyone remember Not Worth It? I miss him!). Without faction artifacts and a screwed-up point system, if you were active in factions, it was simply because you enjoyed the heck out of it. Plain and simple. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. You did it because you enjoyed the teamwork, the challenge, and the people you played with and against.

Something else I always liked about factions before it became totally screwed up was that people involved in it were intelligent enough to realize that your group didn't ALWAYS have to be the winners and didn't ALWAYS have to hold all the towns. And that in fact, if you insisted on trying to cram your leetness down everyone else's throat, sooner or later you soon had no one else to tangle with. And heaven help you if you were a faction known for using lots of dirty tricks. (I guess what happens in that situation hasn't changed, has it though? Why some people think it's ever a smart tactic boggles my mind.)

Something else that never bothered me was the "no beneficial acts" rule applying everywhere in the game. I think in many ways it helped promote a close bond among your group and also kept you on your toes when you did things on your own. Want to go participate in some Tram event? Go right ahead but either go with a partner or two or be man/woman enough to not pancake and moan about having to run some distance to a healer for a rez. And I'll admit it that yes it was occasionally fun in Trammel to see the puzzled comments about why someone couldn't heal your character or your pet. Maybe that rule (and not having GDs) made tamers in factions more of a rarity too. Back then the only faction tamer characters other than my own that I ever saw were Poo's and Coke's and they actually PvP'd with their pets (rune beetles, mares and frenzied ostards). My tamer chars were mostly used for getting pets for guildmates and trying to slow down thieves my tracker tamer found in the sigil room.

I think the balancing rule had some merit too, but if it's ever reinstated there has to be some periodic cleansing of the faction lists to get the inactive characters booted out.

I'd also like to see a much more active role for crafters in factions. The stuff crafters can make now specifically for factions, other than trap deeds and trap removal kits, is basically useless.

And if factions evolves so it is shard-wide, I think the quit mechanism needs to be modified so you can quit as a ghost. I've never tried to do that, but I'm pretty sure I have tried accessing the faction stone in the sigil room as a ghost and got the message I couldn't use it. I'd hate to see people unhappy with being in factions and unable to quit because they can't get to the faction stone alive in order to quit. I also think there probably need to be some areas and events outside of Fel where your faction status is suppressed and becomes irrelevant.

Edited to add: I remembered a while after I made this post that Talos also had a faction tamer before the days of the greater dragons. The one he had on Baja was a ninja tamer. He was, of course, on the enemy's side and oh so persistent. Don't think I ever laughed so hard as the day he was running around in cu sidhe form and using a cu sidhe. Good fun.

 

[Arabella]

I have mixed feelings about completely removing the COM and TB strongholds from towns. I've always thought the fights in Britain were a blast, even when half or most of your group is red and being guard whacked is a strong possibility. The way I feel about it is that if you put a red character into factions and plan to do any town fighting, you'd darn well better realize what it means and plan to be on your toes. Make being a red in factions mean that you're a skilled cut-throat, rather than just a cut-throat. (Damn WoW for luring off KDL!!!)

What I really wish for with factions is that some genius will come up with a way to promote true teamwork in lieu of individual glory or gain. Give us challenges that can be met and rewards (if absolutely necessary), that can be gained only by working together as teams.

I guess that's why I liked the way factions used to be. Before the crazy bonus points and points for stealing sigils, the point system generally gave you an idea of who was the most skilled at killing the enemy. (Yes, there were a few obvious pointholders, e.g., Coke & Son, but everyone on GL in factions knew who was dumping points into that pointholder and you knew its total was probably accurate because everyone was so active.) Without faction artifacts, who gave a damn if a lot of thieves didn't have points? Why would a faction thief want a war horse, the only thing besides bragging rights that made you want to have points? A faction thief who owns a warhorse is either a stupid faction thief (or maybe the rare backup surprise thief--anyone remember Not Worth It? I miss him!). Without faction artifacts and a screwed-up point system, if you were active in factions, it was simply because you enjoyed the heck out of it. Plain and simple. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. You did it because you enjoyed the teamwork, the challenge, and the people you played with and against.

Something else I always liked about factions before it became totally screwed up was that people involved in it were intelligent enough to realize that your group didn't ALWAYS have to be the winners and didn't ALWAYS have to hold all the towns. And that in fact, if you insisted on trying to cram your leetness down everyone else's throat, sooner or later you soon had no one else to tangle with. And heaven help you if you were a faction known for using lots of dirty tricks. (I guess what happens in that situation hasn't changed, has it though? Why some people think it's ever a smart tactic boggles my mind.)

Something else that never bothered me was the "no beneficial acts" rule applying everywhere in the game. I think in many ways it helped promote a close bond among your group and also kept you on your toes when you did things on your own. Want to go participate in some Tram event? Go right ahead but either go with a partner or two or be man/woman enough to not pancake and moan about having to run some distance to a healer for a rez. And I'll admit it that yes it was occasionally fun in Trammel to see the puzzled comments about why someone couldn't heal your character or your pet. Maybe that rule (and not having GDs) made tamers in factions more of a rarity too. Back then the only faction tamer characters other than my own that I ever saw were Poo's and Coke's and they actually PvP'd with their pets (rune beetles, mares and frenzied ostards). My tamer chars were mostly used for getting pets for guildmates and trying to slow down thieves my tracker tamer found in the sigil room.

I think the balancing rule had some merit too, but if it's ever reinstated there has to be some periodic cleansing of the faction lists to get the inactive characters booted out.

I'd also like to see a much more active role for crafters in factions. The stuff crafters can make now specifically for factions, other than trap deeds and trap removal kits, is basically useless.

And if factions evolves so it is shard-wide, I think the quit mechanism needs to be modified so you can quit as a ghost. I've never tried to do that, but I'm pretty sure I have tried accessing the faction stone in the sigil room as a ghost and got the message I couldn't use it. I'd hate to see people unhappy with being in factions and unable to quit because they can't get to the faction stone alive in order to quit. I also think there probably need to be some areas and events outside of Fel where your faction status is suppressed and becomes irrelevant.

Edited to add: I remembered a while after I made this post that Talos also had a faction tamer before the days of the greater dragons. The one he had on Baja was a ninja tamer. He was, of course, on the enemy's side and oh so persistent. Don't think I ever laughed so hard as the day he was running around in cu sidhe form and using a cu sidhe. Good fun.

Nice post Tina! Talos is with us still, He is such nice guy and a great team player!

 

[Nastia Cross]

End guard whacking in towns. Faction members should be able to heal their red guildmates and red faction mates without having guards called on them.

 

[GalenKnighthawke]

From the House of Commons, the following relevant quotes:

Zephenia <JoO> Phoenix mentioned having his head buried in the factions system. Are you all at a point where you feel like you can discuss what direction you want to take factions and what ideas you might have right now?

Mythic_Phoenix We are working to get a lot of good stuff to a public test center. These include a brand new score and ranking system, leaderboards, and three brand new Faction strongholds. For the score system, we want to move in a direction of having scores measure several areas of player combat performance and comparing them to shard-wide averages, to create a system of relative scores that tells you how you stack up against everyone else.

Mythic_Phoenix The fortress changes create new strongholds that are more balanced and move them all away from town guard zones. Our engineers have also worked up a system to allow us to publish the fortress maps to Test Center without affecting live shards!

And:

Zephenia <Galen> As a follow up for my own Faction question,

For the record, they never answered (or posted) my first Faction question, which was more general, thus making my phrasing look odd....Like I was following up to nothing.

and the related one by someone else that was just answered as I type this, does '3 new strongholds' mean there will only be 3 Factions now, or will 1 stronghold remain untouched and the 3 remaining ones all changed?

MythicShade There are going to be 3
factions.

Kestrel Dun-dun-DUNNNN!

And....that was it.

-Galen's player

 

[Arabella]

From the House of Commons, the following relevant quotes:



And:



For the record, they never answered (or posted) my first Faction question, which was more general, thus making my phrasing look odd....Like I was following up to nothing.




And....that was it.

-Galen's player

For one thing I could care less about the bases being moved out of guards zone.

But my concern is the lore that follows along with Faction, I am sure they didn't look at the lore of factions. Right now, we have 2 evil factions Minax and Shadowlords, and Com and TB are the good. With only 3 factions, how will this be balanced?
No matter what faction you get rid of it will screw up the balance........I look for you to delete Com since Mag has been destroyed, then the balance of power will lean towards evil.

Dear Devs: Every time you change something it leads to more exploits and bugs, then we wait for a year for it to be fixed. Do the changes on a real shard for a month after test center, give the actually players the opportunity to test it for bugs and exploits before it goes out on all the shards. I can see my beloved factions going down the tube and players with it again!

 

[kelmo]

In my humble opinion factions is already down said "tubes". While the artifacts were meant to revitalize factions, I feel it did quite the opposite. Factions needs meaning, a reason... a new direction.

 

[Arabella]

In my humble opinion factions is already down said "tubes". While the artifacts were meant to revitalize factions, I feel it did quite the opposite. Factions needs meaning, a reason... a new direction.

I could of said down the sh****er (no flashy's please),

Change in direction is good! But the months it will take to get the stuff they break in the process won't be.

 

[kelmo]

*chuckles* No foul, no flashies!

 

[Stupid Miner]

In my humble opinion factions is already down said "tubes". While the artifacts were meant to revitalize factions, I feel it did quite the opposite. Factions needs meaning, a reason... a new direction.

What do you think it should be then?

 

[kelmo]

I will have to get back to this later when time permits. I gotta wash the bills and pay the dishes...

 

[Chardonnay]

In light of the promise for a complete overhall for factions, it leads me to ask what left is there to overhall? Wtf? Why dont they just fix the problems so they dont have to!?

I mean I will even point some of them out;

Problem: New Faction Items - We've all come to realize pvp has become mostly item based and has been for some time. To give an incentive to play factions they gave new shiny items. Not a horrible idea, but the fail here is people getting them and staying in trammel.

Fix: Keep the faction items in Fel only. In addition, to make silver useful again for these items, put a decay rate on them. For those who would say I don't have time to farm silver is bull****. If you have time to play UO, you have time to farm silver once in awhile. It's wasnt meant to be a free ride to suit out all your toons in an hour.

Note: For faction members who have no other suits I can see this being a complaint, but we all know you've made a trammel char and suit before. You can do it again. And if you haven't, then it shouldn't be a problem anyways. And for those in trammel that will say that's not fair, it's not supposed to be. You earn what you get.

Problem: Exponential Point growth. - This was a dumb idea to begin with. What the hell was the point in this? Now you have point farming taking away from factions and contributing to keeping items in trammel. Part of factions was the braggings rights of having points. Now you see stupid **** like a mule having 1 billion points.

Fix: Wipe out points, take off the point transfer command, leave the kill cycle alone and make 1 kill worth 1 point. I cant really think of a reason to take 10%. The higher number of points, the faster the decay rate. Pretty simple.


Problem: Ranking system - This has been ****ed up pretty much since the beginning of factions. And now with the exponential point growth, it's even more pointless.

Fix: Get rid of it and make the ability to wear faction items solely based on obtaining a certain number of points not rank. Let's face it, ranking wasn't going to be fixed anyways.



Other Notes:

Faction guards need to be updated, and need the ability for a stay command while being able to attack oranges that come up. They shouldnt wander aimlessly off everytime an oranges gets within 2 screens of them unless you tell them to and then killed in a few hits. It's this or set them to rubberband at a shorter distance. (This would also fix the ability to drag them out of guard zone into a base)


Factions need the other vendors such as Necro Regs and the controlling faction should have control of NPC Vendor Pricing on all facets.


Make other faction traps more feasible in use, or get rid of them.

Take away the ability to attack others in the same faction. The griefing really does get old. The reponse will be join another faction, but it happens in all factions and there is no excuse for it.


Leave stat loss the way it is.


Make war horses unable to bond.

Forget the idea of involving crafters and healers in factions. Factions has been ****ed up to bad to even bother implementing this. Besides, Healers? Really? What are you going to do this time? Toss them 10 points for throwing a greater heal? Don't be rediculous, it's a part of factions anyways.

Give thieves 1 point per sigil for completing a corruption cycle.

Take away the ability to enter a house with a sigil. The idea isn't to steal a sigil and run to the nearest house.

I'm sure there's more but at the moment it's all I can think of.

Where exactly is this Overhall?

 

[kelmo]

You should get out more Chardonnay... There have been rumors and hints about this for ages. *winks*