ICM, here's some additional feedback for you in response to your questions about Siege. I made characters there a few years back for some little "projects" I was doing (e.g., tracking activity at the zoo and the community collections) but really didn't get started playing there until about March of this year. Now it's the place where I spend 99% of my play time and the houses on five of my six currently active accounts are on Siege.
I need a change, and I am thinking it's time to play siege. But I know nothing about the shard really, and I have heard a lot of people saying siege is dead. I know that just because you don't see anyone doesn't mean they arn't there, but I had some questions mayb some hardcore siege players could help me out with.
How is the population on siege? Is it wandering most of the time looking for people, or is it pretty eventful? Are there any em events on siege or dueling events, etc etc.
After several years spent hopping around and playing on many of the shards with small populations, I think Siege's population is actually higher than on many of the production shards, including Sonoma, Legends, Lake Austin, Napa, Origin, Oceania, Formosa, Arirang, and a couple of the Japanese shards.
One of my characters is an emissary in the NEW guild. Sometimes certain playful folks like to use incognito spell and disguise kits on their characters in an attempt to coax her into going to strange places (e.g., Bucs Den) to pick up their "new" characters and guild them into NEW. While such situations can be quite entertaining, I don't always have the time or desire to get involved in them. As a result, about a week ago I started keeping track of character numbers that show up in General Chat. So far, I've noted nearly 100 different numbers. What that means is that
at least 100 accounts were logged into Siege in a week's time, since you can only have one character per account. Given that I don't play 24 hours per day and therefore have missed a lot of numbers, many folks rarely talk in General Chat, and we're in the summer-time lull for UO, I'm pretty confident that there are at least 100 people who
regularly play on Siege.
I guesstimate there are probably 3 or 4 times that number that have worked on characters there in the last few years and still have active accounts and therefore could jump on their Siege characters and play them if they had more reasons to do so. How many inactive accounts have trained and equipped Siege characters, though, is anyone's guess.
Siege players come from around the globe, so you're likely to find someone to talk to in General Chat at almost any hour. I notice the most PvP activity being discussed in General Chat between approximately 5 and 11 pm Eastern Time. I think Gilfane and its allies do a daily group hunt every morning. A lot of the PvP guilds regularly do champ spawns and peerless. Gilfane also sponsors a champ spawn crawl every other month or so to help members of the NEW guild with getting higher level power scrolls and stat scrolls, with any excess scrolls being donated to the NEW guild to hand out to future members. These usually happen on a Saturday and seem to get a good turnout from a lot of the regular players on the shard. Gilfane and others also periodically sponsor other types of events open to the whole shard (e.g., the Miss Siege beauty pagent in June, find the missing person or the dropped check contests).
EM Drosselmeyer seems to be our assigned EM but we haven't seen much of him the last few months. Mesanna has also indicated she plans to use Siege as the training ground for new EMs. So, as far as EM events go, Siege hasn't had many of them lately but at least there seems to be some hope still left of having more in the future.
The place where you're most likely to see characters around is in New Magincia, which holds a large number of the shard's shops. Other good areas to find shops are around Zento; near the Britain, Yew, and Minoc moongates; and, if you look hard, maybe in or around Luna (Luna is not the shopping mecca it is elsewhere).
Can someone explain the skill gaining system for me.. I don't understand it completely..there is a maximum amount of skill points you can gain per day? Clarification would be awesome.
As others have indicated, once you hit 70.1 in a skill, your gains in that skill are governed by the Rate Over Time (RoT) timer. You get a gain from each use of the skill (even if you fail) every five minutes while between 70 and 80, every eight minutes while between 80 and 90, every 12 minutes while between 90 and 100, and every 15 minutes while between 100 and 120. There is no longer a daily cap on your RoT skill gains. (Stat gains are limited to 15 per day, however.) Skill gains below 70 are the same as elsewhere, with the exception that you cannot buy skill gain from an NPC trainer and since there's no New Haven, there's also no accelerated skill gain area. If you start out with 0 in a skill, you gain very quickly off both your successes and failures up to 25.0. Advanced training dummies (if you have purchased the right theme pack) can help with weapon and wrestling training up to 65 skill.
Training tinkering skill uses more ingots (up to 70.1 anyway) than elsewhere because failures use up ingots. You can't sell your crafted items to NPCs. However, for all crafting skills, you end up using far less in resources than elsewhere because of RoT. Even training poisoning skill can be done pretty cheaply in terms of how much night shade you use if you get creative in how you train (poison weapon and then actually go use it to poison stuff). And if you plan to train inscription, you don't have to plan on burning through tons of regs and blank scrolls if you train it with a little creativity (e.g., copy books and make blank scrolls out of wood pulp that your cook made out of bark fragments gathered by your lumberjack). Since almost no NPCs sell bandages and none seem to sell cloth, if you need to use either one you've got good incentive to get some of your skill training off the ground by shearing and killing sheep. (There's lots of other little "tricks" to making skill gains less monotonous and more productive but this is already getting too long!)
I loved training skills once you hit RoT. I had my first three characters (a peace tamer, a miner/LJ, and a well-rounded crafter) finished in under two months, even without using any SoAs and just two SoTs for mining and blacksmithing. And getting to 120 imbuing....unbelievably easy, quick, and so cheap compared to elsewhere!
And finally, how does one go about getting soulstones on siege? I understand you get one character.. and that would be boring to me.. I have played UO on prodo shards for awhile and I use my soulstones daily. I wouldn't enjoy playing the same template day in and day out.. So is there a special system in place to aid in this? OR do I have to wait a year to get a vet reward stone?
You can buy soulstones from the uogamecodes site, use a vet reward, or buy a legacy token from another player. A fair number of players who start out on Siege buy the legacy tokens from the website and then turn around and sell them in-game to raise gold. Lately, those tokens seem to have been selling for anywhere between 2.5 to 5.0 million in Siege gold. There are also one or two players who sometimes sell other types of tokens or expansion codes for Siege gold. And you can often find players who are willing to trade Siege gold for gold on other shards, especially Atlantic. I
think the ratio quoted for those trades is usually in the range of 1 million Siege gold for 5 to 7 million gold on another shard. Soulstones are very popular on Siege because of the one character per account limit. I've never used them much in the past, but once I started playing on Siege I found myself investing in a handful of them to finish off all the crafting skills. I know a lot of other people have much larger collections of them and Siege is very lucky to have a few people who diligently collect and store abandoned soulstones in the hopes they can someday be returned to their owners when they get the urge to play UO again.
Siege is a great place to make some new friends and find some new challenges, ICM. If you learn to never go out with stuff you can't afford to lose; keep backup gear; realize Siege isn't just for PvPing; aren't an obnoxious jerk who talks/brags too much or scams people; remind yourself daily that it's all just pixels and making more gold is truly not that difficult; and that 99.9% of the people on the shard really do want you to stick around even if they PK you or steal from you once in a while, you will be just fine and, I think, have a real blast on Siege.
Hope to see you soon on Siege!
