Dear Lord British
it is many years since I met you the last time on the Atlantic Shard during a guild festivity of the Lost Order Akalabeth south of Yew Bank, which you attended.
I'd like to give a brief overview of my personal experience as a newbie and later stage of my character and personal developmenet in UO. I won't talk about my personal end game, since PKs were no issue when my character and my personal way of playing were finalized.
I started to play UO in December 1997, when Dread Lords were still roaming. Even though I died frequently the PKs didn't bother me much, and here is why:
1. Other people helped out with lost gear
2. I didn't need much gear anyways to play as a new character
3. Most "blue" players you could trust (Old notoriety system)
4. The monsters dropped very good amounts of gold and gear for a new character and they didnt drop it randomly but always
5. NPC gear was pretty cheap
6. Several new players together could wipe a decently skilled player killer
7. NPC towns had everything you needed as a newbie
8. What ever NPCs didnt have was provided by other players advertising or the close to town player houses and their vendors
9. Good monster spawns around npc towns (Britain graveyard as an example)
10. Ability to make my own gear to a certain extend inside and close to the protected player town (Leather, wood, chicken feathers
Of those 10 points for me the most important were
Nr. 4 + Nr. 5 ie Monsters provide enough money to attain good gear without having to farm for hours. Many people, players, no matter how old, mature or how many MMO's they played do not like to lose hours worth of playtime each time they die during their learning curve and especially early on (Nevertheless UO offered many means of escaping and gave you a secure bank). So by ensuring that "loot" is "easy" to replace with good drops and cheap items (the quality might not be the best), this experience is not a total negative point but part of this world/game.
If I recall right, you could split a Slime in UO into 8 clones, giving you lots of loot and +-900 gold total, enough to buy a full chain set + weapons and regs.
During my later playign stage, lets call it young adult if my newbie stage would be comparable of being a teenager, PKs were much more anyoing, since I actually had more "to lose". This didnt just meant gear I was wearing being more expensive, also I would hunt much further away from secure environments and thus also having gathered more items of value which I would lose. What were my issues:
1. I did not know how to defend myself let alone how to stay alife
This might sound stupid, but there in 1998 were no way to learn pvp as a non player killer ie Dread Lord. You could not fight your guild friends and learn (No guild system yet). Thus I didn't really know when to heal, when to run and how to strike back. Later on I learned how to do it but interestingly many players did not see it as mandatory to be able to learn to defend, attack or flee even later in the game when guild systems were etablished. In UO you were able to out heal damage even against un even odds.
So what would I do for a futur game:
1. What UO had back in the day (Secure towns, easy loot for newbs)
2. A solid notoriety system with draw backs for players chosing to be cutthroats but not to harsh
3. If there is a virtue system why not use it. I never understood why the different shrines of UO had no meaning. It could have been part of every character that per virtue he can gain points by doing certain tasks giving him possibilities like (Just examples!):
If you pray of the shrine of Justice near Yew, you can get points and you raise your status/affiliation to it. Reaching 100 in the Justice Virtue points gives you +2 damage vs player killers. Nothing too dramatic, still nice. You can lose those points though since they will rott away if you do not follow the virtue regularely or if you do evil deeds. If you follow the same system with the shrine of Sacrifice, you can die once by another player but you will keep your gear you had on you when praying at the shrine the next time. On death you lose points again, making you to regain your points. if you die without 100 you will lose your gear. You can only have one Virtue high. Murderers only get the virtue of chaos.
So a player can also deceide if gear is the most important for him or not.
I could write on for ever , really important is that gear does matter much early on, that there are secure ways to learn the game BUT not secure in the sense that I am detached from the rest of the game world, means of escape (recall) and maybe even a way to keep your gear on death at least once every few hours. Oh and Player skill dependant pvp and not tab target.
PS: I forgot overhead ingame text from speaking. even if 3D, if you cant talk directly to someone in game, the atmospehere and the options of peacful confrontations are lost. Chat boxes are the worst.
PPS: The for me biggest reason for people quitting UO early back in the days were the stat/skill/house breakin and duping bugs, giving parts of the population a huge leap forward of character development on resources, making them half gods early on, destroying everything that moved. The same thing happened in the only game that had similar free mechanics, Darkfall. While there might always be a gap between veterans and new players, the first months of a game create the fundamental player base. Like in RL online games, and especially MMO's need a large middel class, else the social environment will fail.
