Ok firstly I am supposed to be quitting UO so I shouldn't even be here.
I started playing UO in late 2002, myself and my four kids.
I had been playing console games for a while before that so I was accustomed to playing solo, and after some false starts on shards with pretty names like Formosa and Oceana, I finally settled on Baja.
I played a female smith/miner pretty much solo for a year and a half, only talking to one or two people on Baja during that time.
I am not sure if it was because I was always out mining or if people were just stuck up back in 2003-2004.
Anyhow one day one of my daughters came and said Mom you can dye pets on test.
So I said cool let me go check it out.
I logged on to Test Sosaria and didn't leave test shard(s) for 2 years. It was way more fun than Baja, even though test back then we started with 1000 gp just like any newb char and got no freebies except char advancement gates in the EM hall, and if a dev happened a long and felt like giving us a free ethy.
Lined up in front of Brit bank on Test Sosaria was a row of pedestals with dye tubs locked down on top, courtesy of Speedman.
My first dyed pet was a dryad green horse.
My coolest was a pink psychedelic pack beetle (blue originally), dyed by Farmer, umm, Underhill, I think, pretty sure that is/was Leurocian, creator of paragons (and maybe a lot or all of Ilshenar as well).
Hanse, the UO designer who designed Malas, was on Test Sosaria a lot, he built a small house attached to the guard tower near Brit bank and set up 8 universal dye tubs for us.
He co-owned a couple of players who friended a few more and they dyed things for us.
Hanse was nice enough to stop in every day and redye the tubs, since one tub could dye over another, and sometimes someone would dye over a tub and we'd have two or more the same color. Once a saboteur was let in and he dyed all the tubs the color of mud.
:<
The universal tubs could dye anything except our underwear, sewing kits, and glass potion bottles. I think that's all we could NOT dye.
I personally love color and think pet dyes done correctly would add a lot to the game in terms of players being able to create more unique characters.
There may be 100 Bobs on Atlantic for example, but only one of those got lucky enough to get a black horse with a green eye, which was one of the colors of someone's pet on Test that had been dyed by a Dev. Hue number: 1198
I am all for pet dyes in reasonable colors, the current pet 'freshner' dyes on test are NOT reasonable since the entire pet is dyed one color.
I'd probably prefer pet dyes be offered in game via a menu as a reward for solving an abyss puzzle rather than something in a bottle that could be duped, since I despise gold sellers and can already see their greedy little eyes lighting up at the thought of another way to profit off UO.
Say yes to pet dyes!
