lets try and cut the Dev team a break shall we?

[Chardonnay]

Thank you Devs for allowing cheaters to still use their favourite client.

Thank you Devs for never finishing the Virtues.

Thank you Devs for dumping Stygian Abyss.

Thank you Devs for the lazy FOF.

Thank you Devs for taking 4 weeks for each publish doing nothing but adding Turn-Ins and Events instead of KR Bug squashing and whatnot.

Thank you Devs for allowing scripting of all kinds 24/7.

Thank you Devs for making UO's PvM a Tamer's Heaven.

Thank you Devs for all those bugs abused in PvP to go over cap in damage.

Thank you Devs for making skills useless just because gimps exploited them on their gimp PvPers.

Thank you Devs for dumping PB.

Thank you Devs for dumping ANY method that would drastically reduce gimping templates.

Thank you Devs for making WOD so over-powered in PvM, now if we aren't a Wraith Form WODer or a Tamer we can say good-bye to arties and peerless loot.

Thank you Devs for letting consumable items like Conflagration Potions and Bolas destroy skills.

Thank you Devs for never balancing out Poisoning, Disarm and Dismount issues and their respective countering methods.

Thank you Devs for the monster AI getting improved.

Thank you Devs for turning Nerve Strike into renamed Paralyse instead of being creative.

Thank you Devs for allowing Vampire Form to be used through Items.

Thank you Devs for making Crafting useless unless you are into The Sims type of gaming.

Thank you Devs for making several skills impossible to gain without scripting.

Thank you Devs for making ALL items available to players instead of keeping some of it for NPC location decoration, in fact thanks for ruining the essence of some things being "Rare".

Thank you Devs for giving us all the goodies from other games like Recipes to craft items and other cliche elements, instead leaving out the really good ideas like Dual Wield of weapons.

Thank you Devs for ruining Stealing/Snooping.

Thank you Devs for not replacing Item ID with something actually usefull like you did with Arms Lore.

As your customer I am doing my best to still pay you, still play and still ignore these things because I like being with my girl and my friends in UO and have been doing so ever since AOS.

And yes I love insurance for items, your only good idea for ages and it still sucks, in other games you don't even have to pay.
Getting someone's money in PVP sucks I'd like new reasons to fight people.

*Returns to Mindless Drone mode and logs back in KR*
You guys can flame this post all you want... Enjoy.

QFT...YOU GO BOI...!!!

 

[galefan2004]

I'd like to see some stuff changed. I would love to see a lot of the core elements of the game changed. I don't believe that better items should come from crafting then from high level monsters for example.

However, all in all, I think the developers are doing fine, but I'm not going to stop requesting things that I want to see in the game.

 

[phantus]

Agree to that. What is QA? Quality Assurance? Does quality assurance assure that the new publishes are of good quality?

I'm not sure, but that makes sense to me. Lay off the current quality assurance.

Lay off QA? Are you serious?! UO's QA has consistantly let through gaping bugs and holes for a decade. What's worse is I can no longer count the number of times on my hands that old bugs showed back up that were once fixed. Anyone else?

No, there is no rest for the wicked. The UO team needs to up the bar because the competition is not lowering theirs.

 

[galefan2004]

3. Current Event: I don't know where you've been fighting the spawn, but it sure got a HELL of a lot more intense on Lake Austin (pun intended). We have Demon Berzerkers for the first time since the FIRST DAY of the vanguard, and even going near the Nujelm palace entrance is getting to be lethal, as the spawn will now teleport OVER the walls surrounding the palace ground - including Berzerkers, Demons, EVEN THE BRIGANDS AND ELES! If that's not more intense, you must think an 8.0 earthquake is a foot massage. (MOO!) HOWEVER, they still need to fix the vanguard getting stuck underground. I don't think the fix they attempted worked in Nujelm.

They said that the VANGUARDS themselves would spawn more intensely. It seems that they have because you can almost unlimited circle towns to keep killing Vanguards.

The changes that allowed mobs to pop all over the place when you are fighting them was STUPID. There have been many times that I've been killing something and it just ports away into a building or up a ramp. I want that power in PvP. As I told my friend...they gave monsters speed hacks in response to players using them.

I still believe that berserkers in Nu'jelm was a bug of some sort. I think the code there is messed up and should be spawning deamons and not berserkers. If that isn't the case then explain why there is no other place that Vanguards spawn berserkers. The berserkers even kill yellow conned npcs. Anyone that has the patience could easily farm old school black sandals now because they still spawn on npcs.

 

[galefan2004]

If they'd actually fix some of the many bugs, problems, glitches, whatever in this game then we could cut them a break. Oh wait, what's that? We get new house deco? YES! Just what I wanted, forget making the game more fun!

We've been on this event cycle, if you can call it that, for several months now, correct?. I do appreciate them trying to give us something to do, but the Vanguard event has been going on for over a month now, right? I haven't noticed any major changes to it. The moonglow spawn went on for about two months with no changes also. Is it really that hard to add new content every week, or even two weeks? The same exact thing for months at a time gets extremely boring...

WoW has 1000x more resources then UO. They make 1000x more money then UO. They still push out new content about once every 3 months, so it obviously is harder than you realise to push out new content.

 

[galefan2004]

Which is why I've always believed that they should set aside a small team for no purpose other than to completely re-write the entire code and bring all the 10 year old codeing up-to-date. Huge undertaking I know, but imagine how much easier things SHOULD (not nessasarily, I know) be for them to work with afterward.

For the most part though, I honestly do appriciate them for their work.

If they are going to rewrite UO from the ground up they might as well write UO2. I would love to see a UO2 come into being that learned from the mistakes and kept the bonuses of UO. Slap on a decent UI and WoW like grpahics and you might have a game that actually had 1 million or more subscribers.

 

[galefan2004]

You can defend, lets say, Nu'jelm on a 15d/o char? Mmmhhmmm. You have enough items to turn-in for all the deco on a 15d/o char? Mmmmhhmmmm. I can't be bothered to do anymore but you get my point.

You and your crappy post are going on my ignore list Sir.

He partially has a point? Why would you bother to spend millions on a suit for any character other than a tamer when you can spend about 1 million a tamer suit and do almost anything in this game next to solo. The real issue with this game is the stupidity of its armor/weapon system (both obtaining the items and the items themselves). If they addressed that issue then this would be a much better game.

 

[galefan2004]

I'll give the dev's a break when we have stuff happening like they have on the japanese shards , or they cut my sub's in half , i sure as hell aint getting my money worths compared to those shards !!!!!!

That is so completely true. They should at the very least mirror what is happening on the Japanese shards.

 

[galefan2004]

Thank you Devs for allowing cheaters to still use their favourite client.

Kill legacy and kill UO. I don't know why some of you really can't grasp that concept. If you got rid of the legacy client, most of the players (myself included) would leave UO. The KR client is just horrible. Also, running an occasional script to avoid the tediousness of stupidity in the systems shouldn't be considered as cheating. The problem is that the players refuse to play with the tedious systems that in place. Its time to consider chaning the systems.

Thank you Devs for dumping Stygian Abyss.

We still don't know that it is dumped...its most likely postponed.

Thank you Devs for taking 4 weeks for each publish doing nothing but adding Turn-Ins and Events instead of KR Bug squashing and whatnot.

If they wouldn't have wasted the time they did on KR maybe you wouldn't be whining about SA? Its not unheard of for publishes in popular MMORPGs to come every 3 months (or longer), so be happy you get them every 4 weeks.

Thank you Devs for allowing scripting of all kinds 24/7.

They need to fix reasons people script. They need to ban the most insane exploiters and scripters. They need to fix the systems so that people don't need scripts to compete. The system issues created the scripts in the first place.

Thank you Devs for making UO's PvM a Tamer's Heaven.

It always has been. However, its only dexxers that think they are weak. Dexxers do 2x the damage and take 2x the damage that tamers do. Pets have no real ways of defending themselves other than hps. Its normally easier to keep a good dexxer alive then to keep a pet alive against a peerless or dark father.

Thank you Devs for dumping PB.

Developers DID NOT HAVE THE FINAL SAY on PB. The players DID NOT want it. They listened to the player base. I really don't understand how you can't comprehend that. PB was a stupid system for catching exploiters (especially considering that at the same time they were wanting to impliment they tracked down billions in duped gold without it).

Thank you Devs for making WOD so over-powered in PvM, now if we aren't a Wraith Form WODer or a Tamer we can say good-bye to arties and peerless loot.

Dexxers and archers still do more damage than both tamers and spellweaving necros. If you aren't doing enough damage adjust your template. This game was never about all templates being equall. If you think WOD is oped then add SW to your template.

Thank you Devs for the monster AI getting improved.

I think you mean the monsters getting so uber buffed that they aren't nearly worth killing for the measly loot they drop now. I'd rather kill a blood elemental than a normal lich. One drops 300 gold and the other drops 1000. There is an issue there.

Thank you Devs for allowing Vampire Form to be used through Items.

ABSOLUTELY nothing wrong with this. If they plan on changing it then they need to come up with other ways to improve dexxers and archers so they can compete with tamers and mages.

Thank you Devs for making Crafting useless unless you are into The Sims type of gaming.

Yes because crafting armors and weapons and artifacts are all about playing SIMs. Although, I will agree that BODs are way to easily scriptable.

Thank you Devs for making several skills impossible to gain without scripting.

They aren't quite impossible, but they are so much easier to do with scripts that people are just going to script.

Thank you Devs for making ALL items available to players instead of keeping some of it for NPC location decoration, in fact thanks for ruining the essence of some things being "Rare".

I really do thank them for that. There shouldn't be rares. Rares are a stupid part of the game. All items in the game should be obtainable by people that work hard enough to get them (without buying them).

Thank you Devs for ruining Stealing/Snooping.

Yes thank you developers for making it so someone with 50/50 skill can't greif other players all day long. That was a horrible change? It happened 8 years ago. It was a change for the better. If you don't like the change then go play Seige or don't play UO.

And yes I love insurance for items, your only good idea for ages and it still sucks, in other games you don't even have to pay.
Getting someone's money in PVP sucks I'd like new reasons to fight people.

Please tell me ONE game that does not have a pay for death pentalty. In WoW you had to pay to repair your stuff every time you died. In DAoC you had to pay to restore con (until they came up with stupid items and stupid abilities that bypassed that). UO's death pentalty is actually much less harsh then WoWs.

 

[galefan2004]

But nothing has been done which deters cheats, and certainly nothing to make them look over their shoulders every 5 mins, knowing if a GM shows up they will get a ban. Nobody is scared of being caught.

It is more that no one really cares if they get caught. If you catch them and ban them they just move on to other games. Its the systems in UO that need improvement. People are more willing to script the 10th time they have to work magery than do it through "normal gameplay". If they get caught and banned they just move on to other games.

The cheating will never stop if new cheats keep popping up. Action needs to taken and be seen to be taken otherwise it's pointless opening the match box in Luna. It's just a show of what-the-devs-can-do-if-they-wanted-to. GMs need to cart people off, we need to end the cheating in PvP and so on. Otherwise no amount of great content or events will ever make UO a shadow of its former glory.

You can't stop cheating period. Most players are looking for a reason to move on from UO because its been dieing for the last 8 years. Banning them just gives them an excuse to move on. Players cheat because they don't care about the consequences not because the consequences don't occur.

The devs are doing a fantastic job, but they have been not only allowing cheating, they've encouraged it by introducing bad systems like community collections, Heartwood quests, satyrs, golems, shadow eles... all of these offer rewards to players who bot. All could be changed to suit proper players if the bots were nuked.

They made skill gaining easier by adding things like satyr, golems, and shadow elementals. That caused some people not to cheat or not cheat as often. I agree that Heartwood quests are joke in their current form though. Then again, not much from UOML wasn't a joke.

And before the usual quip of "they'll never truly rid UO of cheats Wenchy", let me say this. If EA have that half-baked attitude of "let's just do what we can" then my money is on the cheats. Because you either set out to the job fully and comprehensively, or you stay in bed. Half measures get you nowhere.

Wenchy

If they banned everyone that cheated they might as well shut down the servers. Thats the real issue. People cheat because they could care less what really happens because in the end it is just a game. You will never rid this game of all cheaters because those cheaters still pay $12.95 a month, and EA tends to want that money.

 

[RaDian FlGith]

WoW has 1000x more resources then UO. They make 1000x more money then UO. They still push out new content about once every 3 months, so it obviously is harder than you realise to push out new content.

The difference, of course, being that when they put out a new publish every three months, it's a HUMONGOUS affair. And in the mean time, if they broke something, they release minor publishes to fix it. They also add minor content and update changes in between.

And, uh, who, precisely, other than the DevTeam and EA, do we have to thank for the current state that UO's in?

I would never suggest pushing out new content is a snap of the fingers. I would say that if UO's numbers are growing as Chief Mucky Muck said over on uo.com awhile back, then EA should be setting aside appropriate resources to match the game.

The problem is, at this point, EA is setting aside approrpriate resources. And subscription numbers are probably a lot lower than we suspect. Just look around your severs.

 

[Wenchkin]

We can all make assumptions about what cheaters will or won't do in certain circumstances, and I realise that scripters cannot be removed totally. But EA can either give up or do it properly, that's my point. It also involves looking at why players cheat and removing those reasons. Something I've also suggested umpteen times. But all we've apparently had is token gestures. That fixes nothing. It's worse than doing nothing, because it's like lying to the players when you say you'll get tough on cheats and then don't. When you think you've been lied to you lose trust in that person. I feel we're being fed stories again, I'd love to see evidence to the contrary.

Remember I talked about deterrents as well as banning. I had hoped EA would build on the luna houses burning by starting a staged sweep of cheats. Thus ensuring that casual cheats got the appropriate wake-up call in time to save their accounts. But honestly, I have limited sympathy with players lacking the self control to follow rules, when it's so clearly damaging to the game. I've managed 9 years casual play without cheating, others can too.

They made skill gaining easier by adding things like satyr, golems, and shadow elementals. That caused some people not to cheat or not cheat as often. I agree that Heartwood quests are joke in their current form though. Then again, not much from UOML wasn't a joke.

I hate to say this but all the non mining scripters I've reported were engaged in one of these activities unattended. But the attitude from EA thus far seems to encourage people to park themselves or their pets and go off to watch TV. It's no wonder people cheat when it's handed to them. Then, once you get away with cheating to train a char, your first thought when you struggle to collect resources is quite likely to be "script".

If they banned everyone that cheated they might as well shut down the servers. Thats the real issue. People cheat because they could care less what really happens because in the end it is just a game. You will never rid this game of all cheaters because those cheaters still pay $12.95 a month, and EA tends to want that money.

If EA want to do nothing though, I'd rather they shut the servers outright. The status quo is unsustainable. What would you rather play with, bots or players? Legit players are quitting. EA either leaves it so only bots remain, who then don't have "players" to sell gold/items to and move on; or they try and retain legit players, reform casual cheats and build a functioning game. Players are leaving because of the cheating. Unfortunately the situation now requires drastic action, or giving up. Poking the odd cheat is a complete waste of time.

Wenchy