The main reason I am upset is because I am seeing people take advantage of a system in a way that wasn't intended. In my opinion, the box was added to award the average player for exploring and solving a puzzle. No harm there. But when a group of people start logging dozens or more characters in the room on every single shard and start farming it for the sole purpose of making insane profits with little to no effort is just disgusting.
Keep in mind though that if they didn't put this stuff in to help the average player, the average player would STILL be behind. This does give them a chance to catch up in whatever means they see fit (ie: wait to get the prize themselves, or pay someone else who has logged in on multiple characters to get what they end up needing).
Anyone remember the spring cleaning event? After a while they added a quest which rewarded you a 25,000 point ticket. Well people created dozens of newbies and ran them through getting a 25,000 point ticket with each one. I think if done early enough they were able to delete them after 7 days and do it again. So people who actually were in line with the spirit of the "cleaning" got screwed while the people who took advantage of this quest got rewarded beyond their wildest dreams.
Actually, no one got "screwed" by this. Yeah, the people who were farming the 25,000 point tickets across all of their accounts were able to pull together a lot of points and get things like Sorcerer's Suits (I'll admit, I'm one of them... but then, I pay for a few accounts, so yeah, I should be able to take advantage of paying for those accounts while only really playing 3 of them every once in awhile, I think). Now, I didn't make new characters, I simply used existing ones, but still...
However, the other side of the equation is that if they hadn't put in those 25,000 point tickets, then only the people who had never thrown anything away ever, or those who had hoarded, would have ever seen those items. Which meant that the newer player was at a complete disadvantage.
So yeah, someone ended up with "more" of something, but at least the newer people were able to get something in the first place.
I am just sick of these systems getting taken advantage of.
It's not so much about "taking advantage" than "those who play more will have more." It's always been the case and always will be. Yeah, we all pay the same monthly fee (in varying quantities, mind you), but some of us play 2 hours a week. Those people won't ever be able to compete evenly with those who play 20 hours a week. There's just no way to effectively balance that -- unless you're just playing an FPS. And even then, the person with 20 hours play time will probably be more adept at the FPS than the person with 2 hours play time.
P.S. Pre-AOS shard please
No thanks. There's no reason to return UO to a time when it had reached the limits of its mechanical potential for equipment.
