Saltpeter. A different opinion...

[kelmo]

Freddie sang. "I want it all, I want it now!" Makes for a fine pop song, but not necessarily true for a MMO. We are not even 24 hours into this. In fact I have not bought in yet. I generally wait till the 'fire storm' dies down to go in.

I see the "Herald" posted we are gonna get more saltpeter vendors. That is good I suppose. For now at any rate.

I did mention less than 24 hours live right? It is better to measure several times, and fix as needed.

I would hope the Devs will own this game. I would hope they will not cave in at the avalanche of "I want it all, I want it now" cries.

We have just begun this merry adventure. Let's not rush to the 'end game'.

PS... I hope saltpeter can become a player created item one day. Along the way seeds of renewal are done... I will leave that to the Devs.

 

[Skrag]

Freddie sang. "I want it all, I want it now!" Makes for a fine pop song, but not necessarily true for a MMO.

I pretty much tuned you out right here. This artificial scarcity of basic crafting ingredients adds NOTHING to gameplay. It does NOTHING but stop everyone from doing everything the expansion is supposed to be about.

"Ultima Online, High Seas! In this new booster pack, you'll stand excitingly in front of a saltpeter vendor for hours on end! You'll get to fight pirates and fun stuff like that, maybe... someday... but for now just camp that vendor for days! Only $14.99!"

Yeah that would sell. But that's what we got. Get out of here with this MMO masochism "look how mature I am, I don't want it all now" garbage. UO is already pretty much a nightmare to play compared to a newer game.

 

[Voodoo990]

In fact I have not bought in yet.

And you have an opinion about the saltpeter, how?

I would hope the Devs will own this game. I would hope they will not cave in at the avalanche of "I want it all, I want it now"

The Devs don't own this game and hope they never do.

Starr Long's (one of the 1st creators of UO Online) thank you speech at the GDC Hall of Fame Award given to UO online where he thanked all the players including; "Rainz, who assassinated Lord British and showed us the players were in control"

I don't know when all this "stop the whining, crying and leave the Dev's alone **** started but its getting really old"

 

[Aran]

As always Kelmo, your opinion is wrong.

 

[Korik Bloodguard]

It's not a matter of ownership, who calls the shots... It's about the right shots being called. Just because they're developers doesn't automatically make their descisions the best ones. Who cares who makes the best decision, whether its from a player or from a granny dusting her carpet with a cat, just make sure the best decision is ultimately made and implemented.

 

[kelmo]

*chuckles* Just be glad I am not calling the shots. If I had my way you would all be on Siege... Just saying.

 

[Heartseeker]

As always Kelmo, your opinion is wrong.

How can a opinion be wrong???

He didn't say it was a fact, just his thoughts.

We are the generation of instate gratification, after all; so I guess we are living up to the hype....

 

[Korik Bloodguard]

Yeah, part of me wishes the siege rule-set was the one that won out over trammel and insurance.

 

[Elric_Soban]

Don't get me wrong, I'm the first one to flame a complainer.. but in this case, it's a completely legitemate gripe.

I think Skrag said it best with,

"Ultima Online, High Seas! In this new booster pack, you'll stand excitingly in front of a saltpeter vendor for hours on end! You'll get to fight pirates and fun stuff like that, maybe... someday... but for now just camp that vendor for days! Only $14.99!"

..that's exactly what we've got. The expansion flows with such a nice pace through the content until you hit the Saltpeter thing and them BAM. Brick wall. End of fun.

Hopefully as the weeks go by, it will become less and less of a problem.. but i doubt it. A hard fix is needed for something like this. Every alchy should be selling it.

 

[cdavbar]

"Ultima Online, High Seas! In this new booster pack, you'll stand excitingly in front of a saltpeter vendor for hours on end! You'll get to fight pirates and fun stuff like that, maybe... someday... but for now just camp that vendor for days! Only $14.99!"

Sounds about right....ive gotten enough saltpeter to test out my cannons (ten shots worth) still been camping and not a dang thing. (30 hours of this crap)

 

[Uriah Heep]

I have bought in. So what if saltpeter is a bit short in supply...wait till ya can get it.
We weren't handed an open ended box of imbuing ingredients, we have to get them.
Same for ML ingreds.
And don't get me started on mining...yeah I'd rather drop by a vendor and check for saltpeter anyday, than spend hours mining for it.
Or farming a peerless for it.
Give it just a little bit of time, ahve patience, cause one of these days it'll be for sale all over Luna just like regs and ingreds are.

LOL, I never saw in the patch notes where you were sposed to be able to run out with a fully armed fully equipped ship the first day

 

[Luma]

Would be great if it was mined rather than craftable. Make it Mineable!

 

[Zosimus]

Everybody that was actually doing testing, instead of the ones that are mesmerized by shiny new pixels and not testing, should of made mutiple posts and/or pm's to the devs before the release. Not after the release rolleyes:

 

[Elric_Soban]

.....We weren't handed an open ended box of imbuing ingredients, we have to get them.

1) That's false logic; what another player is doing doesn't impede your ability to collect imbuing ingredients.. saltpeter on the other hand is being monopolized.

2) No I will not swing by a vendor and buy saltpeter from a player and feed his greed/encourage his alchemist camping. Anyone remember reg reselling? It's the same principle: Hogging all the resource and dropping it on a vendor makes you an *******. Buying that resource from a player makes you a moron for rewarding the *******.

It's a problem and needs a fix. The expansion has quite literally stalled.

 

[Basara]

And, all this Kelmo-bashing makes me laugh, since I live on a shard where I was able to walk up on a NON-CAMPED vendor and buy 999 Saltpeter last night, before other alchemists were even added.

The problem is not the vendor, but the mentality of the people playing the shard (their attempts to hoard). Kelmo's right.


BTW, there's two types of Saltpeter.

Potassium Nitrate (made from Bat Guano, Bird Guano, and seal crap): This is the type that is, logically, for sale at the Sea Market (as typically the Bat sources were controlled by national militaries, until depleted, while the other two types were commercially exploited, and found on coasts and islands - especially the latter).

Sodium Nitrate: Naturally occuring in some deserts (like the Pacific coastal deserts of South America) from a chemical reaction, and not exploited to any extent until the 1850s (and even then was often considered inferior - but the sources of crap were running out, and few land animals had sufficent amounts of the Potassium version to be used for more than fertilizer).

based on the second type...

They could add Saltpeter as an option to pop up while mining sand, much like ML gems pop up when mining ore, stone, or the small gems.

 

[Elric_Soban]

The problem is not the vendor, but the mentality of the people playing the shard (their attempts to hoard).

No, the problem is EA's lack of forsight in not anticipating that mentality. Like I said in another post(thread? I dont remember), they have all kinds of collective experience in MMO's and the associated 'large crowd sociology'. It's a flat out mistake, they just need to correct it is all.

 

[Shamus Turlough]

They could add Saltpeter as an option to pop up while mining sand, much like ML gems pop up when mining ore, stone, or the small gems.

You would have to pee in the sand and wait about a week, then you could get a viable yeild of a nitrate.


Just sayin

 

[Cailleach]

Everybody that was actually doing testing, instead of the ones that are mesmerized by shiny new pixels and not testing, should of made mutiple posts and/or pm's to the devs before the release. Not after the release rolleyes:

Take yourself over to the beta testing forum and read a few threads. We posted ad nauseum on this subject. And that includes me.

Saltpeter should be on sale, on alchemists shard wide, the same way regs are. If you don't wanna get your own, then you can buy from the player who has the patience to build the stock.

 

[Viquire]

Take yourself over to the beta testing forum and read a few threads. We posted ad nauseum on this subject. And that includes me.

Saltpeter should be on sale, on alchemists shard wide, the same way regs are. If you don't wanna get your own, then you can buy from the player who has the patience to build the stock.

Yeah, I dunno if it has to be shard wide, but more than one on two facets is a must, or worse, just the one on Siege.

I too have hopes it will find its way into the crafting menu and expressed those hopes, playfully. I also have not yet bought in for the reasons Kelmo stated, but still give a rip enough to do the testing. It was either not have the reg, or have it, from the sound of things, at 1000 gp per before the end of the week.

I think that would have been an even bigger damper to the spirit of those playing.

 

[Raptor85]

Dunno about your shards, but 999 saltpeter? I've bought it 3 times and so far every time the vendor has only had 20, so after a few hours of playing If i can find an alchemist I can fire my cannon a whopping 8 times (assuming light cannonballs), that's almost enough to scuff the paint on a pirate ship. Not saying that it should be sold everywhere though...but another 2-3 alchs on the floating docks wouldn't have hurt....

 

[Tazar]

The fish-market is not the only place with Saltpeter... We found an alchemist selling it.

 

[Viquire]

The fish-market is not the only place with Saltpeter... We found an alchemist selling it.

interesting

I will also, in case the devs have missed it in the other two places I posted the idea of being able to find quantities of powder (I happen to think it would be cool to find it in a keg, but thats just me) as loot on pirate ships, or maybe as loot on the ghost pirate island encounter or its boss.

*shrugs*

That would alleviate some of the problem. Not that it should be available enough to do away with the need to buy and craft it, but it would be nifty to find say, 50 powder in a keg every fourth or fifth time you achieved a success.

 

[Aran]

Dunno about your shards, but 999 saltpeter? I've bought it 3 times and so far every time the vendor has only had 20, so after a few hours of playing If i can find an alchemist I can fire my cannon a whopping 8 times (assuming light cannonballs), that's almost enough to scuff the paint on a pirate ship. Not saying that it should be sold everywhere though...but another 2-3 alchs on the floating docks wouldn't have hurt....

Vendors need to be "worked" up to anything above 20. You have to buy them out. Every. Respawn.

 

[MalagAste]

Well from what I hear the script runners have already discovered buying out all the saltpeter...

So by the time I get to buying the expansion they should be fairly well well entrenched in buying it out... and should have pretty much every vendor on GL's marked out.

 

[Martyna Zmuir]

Alchemists with saltpeter were added to most docks - major docks that is.

They all started at 20 and all of them on GL were bought out or camped already.

Having a high-demand resource like this spawn in such low quantities and require you to wait 15-45 mins between respawns is, well, stupid.

They were told this would be a massive issue during the beta. Multiple. Threads.

Why should we wait days to be able to play with the booster's content? How is having to camp a vendor 'fun'? Why is an artificial rarity on a high-demand commodity that’s REQUIRED to do anything more than fish and joy-ride on a boat even remotely acceptable?

 

[Basara]

You would have to pee in the sand and wait about a week, then you could get a viable yeild of a nitrate.


Just sayin

Actually, the deserts between the Andes and the Pacific Ocean have huge areas of naturally occurring Sodium Nitrate, that came from a fortuitous combination of mineral deposits interacting with each other via weathering and sedimentation.

Peru actually fought a war with Chile & Bolivia over the region, in the 1800s (if I remember the article I read correctly), specifically because of all three wanting the "Peruvian Saltpeter" (used to differentiate it from the animal-waste-based Potassium Nitrate), and the latter two countries were willing to ally (not something that occurs often in Latin America) to try to break Peru's claim.

 

[Phineas le Monge]

Let alchemists craft blackrock directly into black powder

 

[Mapper]

Let alchemists craft blackrock directly into black powder

Fixes both problems of the Saltpeter and the 'What do I do with my 2000 blackrock pieces that don't stack!?'.

 

[Yalp]

Part of the issue is that during beta.. players provide feedback, but the majority of it seems to be ignored by the developers.

 

[Paldrion]

Make the output more realistic.

8 items input should equal 8 items of output.