Spice it up

[Prince Caspian]

OK, you are now the head of EA Mythic for a day. You got your feet up on your desk and your super ubermensch latte in hand. Time to lead the troops.

Give five items for the devs to work on for new content. This does not count to address the long-standing bugs we all know and detest, because the devs are tirelessly (snicker) working to eradicate those as we speak (snicker).

Just five fresh new things to intro into the game. Go!

And shall I hold you calls, Mr. Big Shot, sir?

 

[AzSel]

Make potions even more reliant on alchemy skills to be effective.

Make consumables like enchanted apples and orange petals to be reliant on magic resist skill.

 

[BeefSupreme]

Redo the original dungeons

 

[Martyna Zmuir]

Revamp the antivirtue dungeons with better themes, minigames, and quests. Revamp all Fel/Trammel cities with decor and NPCs on schedules so the cities feel lived-in. Add many broad spectrum quests for all character types with meaningful rewards. Add overland spawns to the continent that are interesting. Add sea-themed spawn to islands. Remove the clusterfrack of serverlines from Bucc's Den.

Rebalance magery so mages aren't neutered compared to melee classes. Replace 8th circle summons with 1 menu-driven spell a la Polymorph. Create 4 new direct damage spells for each 'elemental' resistence. Un-nerf mindblast so its useful.

Revamp the house cusomization tool to include ALL house tiles. Complete the tilesets with the missing pieces. Revamp locked down containers to include cascading permissions for nested obects. Allow as many co-owners as someone wants, multiple houses co-owned per character.

Scrap the broken luck system and revamp all loot tables to cut down on the objects nobody ever loots. Redo the RNG so its actually random and not streaky.

Expand the vendor/bartender system to better support player-created quests and content. Give players limited ability to plop down a small spawn point for said quests.

 

[Babble]

Let the developers work out a contagious Zombie script.
Such Zombies attack all Monsters/players/Npcs.
Upon death the monster/player/NPC becomes a Zombie too with greater strength than normal monsters but slowly lose hitpoints and decay.

In the meantime while players try to contain and fight the 'plague' I let the developers redesign the facet spawn. Starting with more dynamic spawners and work on possible invasion systems.

Either make some town houses rentable or set it so that monsters take over the towns and kill off the traders if it does not get defended. reducing the many Uo towns we have on fewer settlements and possible player towns.

 

[RavenWinterHawk]

Example.

Fishing up a chest opens a curse of the undead. Skeletons appear on yourship.


Digging up a chest creates a collapse. You find an unstable entrance to a cavern. Its temporary and collapses once explored and monster fought for loot.


My axe broke striking a lever in a tree. I click it and unearth a cache of loot.


And other gizzillion randomizations that can occur.

They game is dying. Let us find random adventure no matter where we go. At least a chance.

 

[longshanks]

make the cheating pvpr's suit turn into a lacey pink tutu and their weapon into a sunflower

 

[Vlaude]

Change Luna to Fel ruleset with no insurance without prior warning to anyone and sit back and laugh while the fun happens.

 

[a slave girl]

1. Mystery gate that spawns once a week at a random location somewhere in the world and if found by a player and entered gives a quest that if completed within a specific time period, awards the player with a unique item with their char name on it.

2. Naked arena battles every Saturday at noon.

Example:

Tailor Wars: Naked tailor enters the arena and are handed just a participant robe for males plain dress for females, are each given the same small bod to fill and then tailor tools and resources spawn at random inside the arena. First tailor to complete their bod wins a sash or apron as Tailor of the month and is eligible to compete for tailor of the year at years end.

Free gametime could be the prize.

Should work for most crafts/skills as well as pvp arenas.

3. For a while I have been thinking online games should award cash prizes once per month. I am not sure how or what in game content should be used to accomplish that though.

Maybe it would work better for Wow and their arena teams (maybe that's where I got this idea?) than UO though.

It would be more of an advertising gimmick to lure new players in.

4. For sure rare pet color spawns since pet dyes still aren't here. They can start by adding black horses since they never nuked the black faction guard horse exploit horses.

5. I seriously think that any treasure chest should have a random chance of spawning anything in the game, even if it's a 1 in a million chance. For example a charger of the fallen.

Ok some of these are ideas I have had for some time and mentioned before and some aren't really new content.

To be honest I don't really know why I bother with UO anymore.

I mean for four years I have stayed around and bit the exploiters are Kings of UO bullet. (Sent in screenies of duped and exploited items thinking someone would correct them). What a boob I have been. It's a cheaters game.

My reasoning was that the game is better than the sum of it's players and staff. That there was hope the game would get a better staff and a better quality of players at some point.

But the staff keeps making the same old mistakes, over and over and over...

You guys do realize that the dye tub exploit has been done before with leather tubs, YET YOU DID NOTHING TO PREVENT IT WITH THE WHITE LEATHER TUB.

DUH?

I see the Stratics ad >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> beside this message box (FISTS OF F U) and want to tell James Nichols about his bug fix post of today:


FISTS OF F U minus the 'FISTS OF' dude!

You did half the job AS USUAL, guess you deserve half your pay check this week huh?

Remove the tub AND the cloth made by them or leave the tubs, it's the right thing to do.


God it's like talking to a brick wall.

 

[Alvinho]

Let the developers work out a contagious Zombie script.
Such Zombies attack all Monsters/players/Npcs.
Upon death the monster/player/NPC becomes a Zombie too with greater strength than normal monsters but slowly lose hitpoints and decay.

In the meantime while players try to contain and fight the 'plague' I let the developers redesign the facet spawn. Starting with more dynamic spawners and work on possible invasion systems.

Either make some town houses rentable or set it so that monsters take over the towns and kill off the traders if it does not get defended. reducing the many Uo towns we have on fewer settlements and possible player towns.

I like this idea but to expand on it making the world dynamic, lets say someone is in despise killing all the lizardmen on level 2, after X amount is slain they then attack brittan and stop spawning in the dungeon because all are out invading Brittan, once beaten back then they start the cycle over, that was just a example, but it adds a different dynamic to the game, and more than one dungeon set of monsters can attack different cities depending on what monsters are being farmed, a revolt of sorts from the spawn, again that is just a example.

 

[Zosimus]

1) Actually have a dev assigned to LISTEN to the community and READ stratics. Have them take notes and ARGUE that this is what the community wants when taken back to the arm chair quarterback. Design polls to verify information for the community to vote on to clarify if its truly wanted or not.

2) Look above

3) Reread number one.

4) If still not sure use number one as a reference.

5) Know what classic means and use point number one.


A more possible version that would possibly happen then the above 5 that wont would be....

1) Make higher end monsters and bosses harder and improve the loot.

2) Make quests rewards more stable not so random and discouraging.

3) Fix factions and eliminate the high end arties. Make new faction arties that ONLY work against faction players and facton monsters. ( Basically makes them useless against non faction players and monsters)

4) Make magic resist work as it was intended.

5) Give endless trials to DaoC if they cant fix anything

 

[Viper09]

I would be hoping that EA doesn't start another mass lay-off and lose my job the day I get it. lol

Then I would have random invasions on a random town a couple times a day, maybe more with special rewards such as power scrolls, stat scrolls, etc given to the people who defended the town the most.

 

[Adol]

1.) Complete the entire set of 8 Virtues, as well as redesign Justice so it can be gained in PvM... one suggestion is Justice is gained by bring the Pirates back as we already can do now in High Seas. Redesign Sea Market so the Pirates are taken to a Court Room instead of the current bar Biggles sits in... it would certainly lessen the disappointment of spending all the time and resources only to get a single light cannonball that doesn't appear to do much at all!

2.) Introduce more text based quests; we've had a few already during special events, but there should be some permanent ones to bring back that classic single based Ultima experience. In particular, we should have a greater sense of the NPCs actually mattering in some way (others have mentioned sleep patterns, so perhaps having different "shifts" so some NPCs can go to sleep whilst others keep shops open)... investigative quests will give them a bit of backstory.

3.) Bring in more environmental effects, to give more flavour to different towns and locations. Moonglow should be a mystical, magical city for instance, with twinkling lights and eerie auras...

4.) Kingdom Reborn artwork to be resurrected for the Enhanced Client, or if nothing else, just the honkingly ugly dragons.

5.) Design a Greater Cow, which squirts milk instead of fire, and it's MOOOOOOOO triggers an earthquake spell. Or at the very least, give Cows as well as Bulls a Bovine Herd Instinct.

 

[Jhym]

1. New basic Bard music for all instruments, selectable and interesting to hear. Also, song-making capability, up to 64 notes on an instrument that can also be your bardic skill songs.

2. Add new, randomly used AI scripts that are attached to mid and high level creatures. They should give the creature(s) a strategy, possibly leading the players around or even talking with them to get something. Most higher intelligence creatures should talk and not automatically attack unless provoked or diametrically opposed to the player (faction, reputation, race, color of armor, last thing they said, etc.) I prefer a world where conflict isn't 100% required, but that you can also interact to potentially do other things. (think of a monk, trying to "convert" ninjas; or a necromancer attempting to lay spirits to rest for their own purposes, of course.)

3. Mini instances that are triggered in certain hot spots as well as in the wilderness. An example might be various dragonkin that live in a cave near one of the swamps but are a bit smarter and can call for help. Or a knocked over tree that reveals an underworld cave that you can explore, but only lasts a short time before you are kicked out by an earthquake.

4. Just force a revamp of factions instead of letting the players argue. The only possible way to get a usable system is to implement one and let people try it. The more you let players decide by committee, the less you ever get done. However, the factions need to tie into the overall plot lines of Ultima, and should be run by EMs at the top end, to allow them to guide the factions into interesting scenarios, rather than just a bunch of random fighting between guilds that aren't particularly different.

5. Increase the size of the worlds by 4 to 8X. Stretch the map initially, then fill in as needed, map current coordinates to specific coordinates on the new maps and just patch it all in one day. Or use the current map as is, and extend it further out to add in Tokuno and any new islands or continents. Make the world so big that people complain they can't get to the other end within a day.

 

[Restroom Cowboy]

OK, you are now the head of EA Mythic for a day. You got your feet up on your desk and your super ubermensch latte in hand. Time to lead the troops.

Give five items for the devs to work on for new content. This does not count to address the long-standing bugs we all know and detest, because the devs are tirelessly (snicker) working to eradicate those as we speak (snicker).

Just five fresh new things to intro into the game. Go!

And shall I hold you calls, Mr. Big Shot, sir?

Methinks you should spend some time thinking about how much time the devs put into trying to make this game work for everyone. I actually tried to imagine the scope of what this team deals with these days, and honestly it seems inconceivable due to the sheer amount of stuff they are dishing out...preparing...working on...putting together.

The outcome of my thoughts is that any other team in the past would have trouble keeping up (I know some of you devs. have been around for sometime...but things sure seem to be different now with the current TOTAL team ! so no disrespect to you old timers!) ...especially with the small staff that keeps up on the development of things. For instance, I get the feeling Mesanna puts in countless hours not only from the office but also from home. If we see this type of dedication from one of their team, you know others are as well behind the scenes.

Take a moment to humble yourself under the overwhelming amount of data this team is crunching out. Oh and take it from someone who up till not long ago and their own issues with the devs...that is until actually seeing the dedication they are putting into this game we play everyday.

Oh and if I offended any of the team in the past...my apologies...I have seen the light!

About your initial comment...lets just work with what we have? Let them sort out the rest as they are able eh? We have cheat detection, better boat movement...more content...more exciting pvp...yet it seems no one is happy. Imagine that.

 

[Petra Fyde]

I think I'd rather give the dev team 5 new members to help deliver it all - or more preferably 5 past devs returning who would be able to dive straight in and not need to be trained first.

 

[MalagAste]

I think I'd do a combination of Martyna and Galens suggestions.

Though I'd scrap factions all together and add in a new system one based more on your playstyle where everyone would have to join. You would either be Evil with varying degree's like the system of Karma.... Becoming Chaotic Evil.... or you are Neutral or you are Good up to Lawful Good. All Evil and Good are Orange to one another and green to each other all Neutrals are Blue this of course would only apply in Fel. Your actions will determine what side you are on. Each would be given a City of Power to protect and defend and doing so would earn you points in Fame. Working together for your side will earn your city rewards. And the more fame you earn for yourself the more you earn in rewards. For good earning points in Virtue will also count towards reward.

I'd also implement an anti-virtue system based on the anti virtues as a way for evil to earn points and rewards.

I'd also add a similar system in Trammel for PvM. That would also relate in Alliances and guild wars.

Finally I'd add a Drow based new Champ spawn Area to the Underdark. After all what is an Underdark without Drow?

 

[Zyon Rockler]

This is complicated because UO is always changing, which causes alot of differences in the way the gameplay or the user interacts with the world.

If you look at some of the things that have never changed, then it's probably those areas that need the most attention.

We couldn't have new graphics or a 3d world because everything becomes to complicated when you try to make changes.

I would like to see the existing world modified and tools implemented that can be used in multiple ways.

1. Weather
2. World Map
3. Spawns
4. NPCs
5. New Dynamic Quests

Let the engineers code and create systems to interact with map tiles and create weather.

Connect the map as 1 world. Pin it onto a sphere and expand.

Place random spawns, allow the spawns to pick where they will spawn, allow them the ability to become more powerful or weaker, depending on combatants. Use interesting spawns and powerful spawns. Start today by spawning The Stygian in Luna Bank and 10 Medussas in Brit.

Check out Oblivion, NPCs have conversations. They also give quests. They have homes they live in. They get up in the morning and they go to work. After work they go to the bar. On Sunday they go to Church. They have personalities.

Simple quests that say, "Something has happened, Please help me," You do the task, they give you a reward or they tell you where to go and you fight something, find item and get to keep it.

I know they already have these types of quests but NPCs could be made to randomly have a quest, so that the same NPCs would not always have the same quest. This system would make it so any NPC at any time could ask for help and send you to a random location to perhaps fight a random spawn, like a Golden Ancient Wyvern that might guard a golden chest, that could only be opened after the beast has been slayed and the quest holder unlocks the chest.

 

[HD2300]

1. Automate cheat detection to suspend accounts for 7 days without the need for human intervention, and repeat daily. Or release patch every 2nd day and neutralize the scripting program.

2. New Tram ruleset only shard. New Fel ruleset only shard with insurance. Orc Booster. Drow (^^) Booster. Peerless Booster.

3. Take WAR's client, reuse as many graphics as possible and add UO UI.

4. Have events every month. Not EMs ones but things like ToT.

5. Go F2P.

 

[canary]

1) Fire all the current UO artists and hire new ones. Have a plan to clean up 2d graphics for a larger screen size, or just make new art that wasn't universally panned like it was in KR.

2) Make city specific quests as well as ensuring each city had its own specific feel. Visit a Nujel'm casino with a bunch of mini games? Perhaps the Lycaeum in Moonglow would allow you better gains in Eval Int? A quest in Delucia would allow you to add a one time permanent +10 hit points to a pet? Etc Etc.

3) Finish the Virtues. My God, they were started in 2002 or something. Regardless, its been forever.

4) Rotating artifacts in Doom, Ilshenar, wherever. This will make the current existing ones rare (while still on the player run market) while providing an ongoing reason for vets to redo places for items. Heck, make it as minor as making the Staff of the Magi a Crook of the Magi. Whatever. Just keep it fresh so the old places still have reason to be explored by people who have done these things for years and years. Maybe change it every 1-2 years?

5) Revamp factions, if only because I'm over seeing people join it, get the artifacts and stick to Trammel without actually being active in them, lol.

 

[Phineas le Monge]

1. Hire some of the EMs to produce content for all the production shards. Some of The EMs have really had some super content and events for the individual shards. They have great ideas, knowledge of the game including its history, and a sense of community that is not present in the game at large.

2. Finish the existing content, from the virtues to Ter Mur.

3. Ban cheaters. Period.

4. Faction items would only work vs factions, not non-factioners or PVM

5. If I got all that done, lets drop some random mini champ spawns in ALL the dungeons, and maybe a city or two. *Giggles with mischief*