The "Quality of Life" tweak thread.

[Broner a G]

This is a thread for suggesting what are known as "quality of life" changes. These are basically small changes that would make life easier without affecting game balance or taking any real time to code.

Requests for feature additions do not fit the bill at all. Requests for bug fixes might, if they're minor persistent annoying ones.

First example, one I'd love: Ditch the health decay on undead created via the Animate Dead spell. This would make riding a skeletal steed viable without exploiting that ancient bug we all know about.

Coding required: You can never really know with UO's crazy code, but this would seem to require minimal effort.

Balance effects: Also minimal. Animated dead can't take much punishment (I've seen a skeletal dragon created via the spell die to a wandering healer!) and you can't heal them anyway, so it's not as if this would result in everlasting undead.

Let's hear yours.

 

[Lorax_Pacific]

I can help with a couple of improvements.

Imbuing gump: Once you select the item and perform the imbue don't go back to the top menu, but leave the gump on the current view. I hate having to constantly select use last item.

Next: If I'm on a tab in a crafting menu then stay on that and don't go back to the top after I make an item. Like say I scroll a bunch of pages in the carpentry menu. Then don't go back to the beginning, but stay on that menu. If needed have an extra button <top or home> to get back to the top menu.

Create an armorers tool that helps with making customers suits. You should be able to select a person and keep viewed certain pieces of their suit. Then you can add in suit pieces and simulate the imbuing process. Then there would be a button to order the suit which would bring up a targeting cursor to target a book. The order goes into the book telling exactly what the person wants as well as all the ingredients needed. The armorer could give the book to the customer for the customer to get the ingredients. This tool should be able to see all the combinations of armour stats on the simulated suit.

The customer could put the ingredients in the book. The armorer could bring up the gump and the customer could see what the armorer is creating. The customer would drop the book on the gump and consume the ingredients during the imbue without them having to be handed over. I have a big picture of a suit building tool and enhancing the crafters abilities that I would create if I was a developer. This presentation isn't complete, but that's the idea.

-Lorax

 

[Broner a G]

That last bit sounds more like a feature request, but yeah, those first couple things are great. Tiny, easy changes that nevertheless have a tangible positive effect on players experiences.

 

[A Thought Elemental]

 

[Warpig Inc]

For the crafting dig, the last ten created option works great.

One simple none world destroying game change. Dull Copper Elemental having 25 ore. Pipe dream would be spawning them also with the gargoyle pickaxe.

A GM tinker should never make exc. tools like a sewing kit with 50 uses.

New soulstone feature that takes none crafting skills that can be copy transfered to another character. If I have a swords or mage character on the account already trained in that skill. Why not ability for new character to have the same skill level as long as they are power scrolled enough or to their cap. Sure there is no timer on the stones now. So why not be able to copy a skill?

 

[Reth]

No more hourly crashes with the EC would be a big quality of life plus.

 

[Merion]

Making stuff stack!

There are so many things that should or could stack (fish pies!), but don't. Fix it!

 

[Jhym]

If they won't do that (every single necro would have a train of skeletal dragons after them) perhaps at least let us HEAL the blasted things, perhaps by using bodies like we do with spirit speak. Or a new necro spell, "Corrupted Life" that heals only reds, negative karma and undead.

It annoys the crap out of me to get a good group of followers that die almost immediately after I start fighting something major.

 

[Jhym]

One annoyance I have is the "stop" timers we have on most skills.

I know they are supposed to stop you from continually spamming something, but there is really no reason to have a timer more than 3 seconds or so. It might also have something to do with keeping players from hogging the server, but overall it is one of the most annoying things while you are crafting OR fighting. Barding it's worse, though at least they mostly fixed the 'fail' timer so it doesn't hurt as badly.

But I just don't see a reason to waste our time on a client timer because they can't code server queues properly.