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The Single Biggest Fundemental Thing VvV is Missing

JC the Builder

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When you login to play UO you usually have something you want to do. Whether it be a treasure map, going mining, hanging around Yew gate, etc. This is true for anyone playing any video game.

The dilemma for myself, and what I imagine many others, is there is nothing in particular that I want to do in UO. Thus I am not logging in as often anymore.

The biggest reason for me to login in the past 15 years were factions, IDOCs, and champion spawns. I like playing with our guild and competing against other people/guilds. If you are familiar with all three of these systems and how they have evolved over time then you can understand my frustration with UO today.

IDOCs are just unfun; housing demand has plummeted and the loot is pretty worthless. Champion spawns went from being a group activity with economy control to a solo sport with character transfers.

Then you come to mass group PVP. When factions came out in 2000 it was the best thing ever. I remember the first few nights there were corpses littered everywhere in Felucca. You had huge three way battles with dozens of players, sometimes over a hundred. This went on for over one year.

Then the classic development neglect kicked in. It would be eight years before factions saw some small additions which once again exploded participation numbers. It created new interesting dynamics with champion spawns. Then things went off the rails trying to do things that players didn't want. Instead of giving players reasons to participate in factions, the focus was on adding leaderboards for healing and stealthing.

I could go on all day about this. The point is that in factions, champion spawns, and IDOCs you can make plans. If an IDOC is going to fall at 2pm then you know to be there at 2pm. If the faction sigils are stealable you could tell everyone we are going to start guarding Thursday at 10am. When Harrowers were something people wanted to do our guild might plan to do one days in advance.

In Vice vs Virtue there is nothing to plan. It goes 24/7 with no stopping. You get the message that a city is being attacked, but if you go there is a 90% chance you won't see anyone there and you capture it yourself. The capture means nothing other than a few points. You can't lose those points or have them taken away from you. Group PVP in UO has been reduced to the same mindless fighting you see in Call of Duty or a World of Warcraft battleground.

The bottom line is I want a system where myself and other players can plan to do things. It is the biggest thing missing in this new way of group PVP.

It is sort of ironic how the governor system was added to Trammel which incorporates these concepts with elections and trade deals, yet they were removed from Felucca. So now in Trammel players can control towns and get bonuses while Felucca gets nothing. How messed up is that?
 
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FrejaSP

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In Vice vs Virtue there is nothing to plan. It goes 24/7 with no stopping. You get the message that a city is being attacked, but if you go there is a 90% chance you won't see anyone there and you capture it yourself. The capture means nothing other than a few points. You can't lose those points or have them taken away from you. Group PVP in UO has been reduced to the same mindless fighting you see in Call of Duty or a World of Warcraft battleground.
I like the it the way it is. Maybe you need to tell in GC, that you are in town looking for a fight.
Also your alliance can make deals with an enemy alliance about guarding the town a given time a week and try to win it.
We are few on Siege but we do have 2 hours group fight each weekend and several small fights at week days. If I say hi in Gen Chat, some may go check active town to see if I'm there.


The bottom line is I want a system where myself and other players can plan to do things. It is the biggest thing missing in this new way of group PVP.
You want it all on a silver plate without doing any work yourself. VvV is basely an alternative to being red, a way to PvP without taking counts. It's still a new system and Devs are going to improve it. VvV is not Faction, it's a tools, you can use to build RP events and to find a fight.

It is sort of ironic how the governor system was added to Trammel which incorporates these concepts with elections and trade deals, yet they were removed from Felucca. So now in Trammel players can control towns and get bonuses while Felucca gets nothing. How messed up is that?
Instead of complaining, try to help finding ways to solve the problem. Why not make the Governor system work in Fel too so Trammel control their towns and Fel can control theirs with bonus and everything. You could even say, players need to be VvV to vote in fel, run for Governor or claim town bonus.

Then you come to mass group PVP. When factions came out in 2000 it was the best thing ever. I remember the first few nights there were corpses littered everywhere in Felucca. You had huge three way battles with dozens of players, sometimes over a hundred. This went on for over one year.
It's not VvV's fail, UO have few players this days. We had lots of players on Siege before Faction messed up our old alliances. Faction was sure not perfect, the way VvV work with Guilds and Alliances are way better and the fact, that you do not have to split the guild in a faction guild and a crafter/PvM guild are great. It's much more like old days, where guilds did have different playstyles, and the PvP'ers would guard the guilds non PvP'ers.
In my opinion, VvV is a step in the right direction. If I had a say, I would make it work on all facets, but it will take a lot of coding to make it work with the trammel ruleset as we can't have trammel players go orange and get killed.

Faction did split Siege in 2 Communities, that's not the case with VvV, every guild do have crafters, PvM'ers, treasure Hunters, etc. and VvV PvP in same guild and it works great, except UO as whole inc Siege need a lot more players to get the fun back.
 

JC the Builder

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There was a situation on Atlantic a long time ago which could have turned out to be one of the greatest PVP moments in UO history.

To set the stage: the Shadowlords was the strongest faction in Atlantic since introduction. We consistently captured towns and defended against all odds. At some point the entire shard plus even people in our own faction joined forces in the Council of Mages to take the crown.

It was obvious the next weekend we would not be able to prevent the Council of Mages from capturing the sigils. So a plan was devised to corrupt the sigils during the week but wait until late on Friday to place them. The plan worked and the Council of Mages were thwarted.

That is until they paged a Gamemaster who didn't know how sigils worked. COC claimed we exploited some kind of bug allowing us to capture the towns without guarding. Of course everyone thought the towns were safe through the weekend and we had no chance of raiding.

You are never going to see this kind of stuff in VvV. This is the kind of moments that everyone talks about and remembers. Do you even remember a VvV battle from over a week ago?

I remember the time at an IDOC where I stealthed in the middle of 12 enemies. I remember narrowly teleporting away with 16 stat scrolls at less than 20 hit points. I remember playing mission impossible dropping down from the ceiling of Lord British's Castle into the True Britannian's sigil room.
 

FrejaSP

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There was a situation on Atlantic a long time ago which could have turned out to be one of the greatest PVP moments in UO history.
A lot was more fun in the past, where we was more players and the game was less item based. L enjoy VvV, but I never liked Faction. VvV fit the game much better in my opinion. Lets see how it will work out when we get an upgrade to it.

We may never agree, but do not want Faction back, I had hated what it did to Siege sinse we got it. VvV do not split guilds and the community.
 

Lythos-

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Do you even remember a VvV battle from over a week ago?
Like it was yesterday. I claimed a couple alters, gained some points and if i was lucky I saw the same 1 or 2 people that are also just there for points and not to fight.

I remember factions and it sucked. It was set up for the late night player and guilds with absolutely no personal lives that could guard sigils for hours. V3 has opportunities for making gold selling the royal pardons and allows multiple fights per day instead of waiting to have one huge fight to capture a town.

There comes a time when you have to blame the playerbase too. There's only a fraction of the fel players left that were around even 5 years ago and those left won't leave Yew gate.

JC, you can't blame a system when people would just rather do other stuff.
 

Lythos-

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No, Siege is a lot more than just PvP
Lol where? I've ran through the hot spots multiple times for hours over the course of the past few years and I have never seen the 1st person ever.
 

FrejaSP

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Do you even remember a VvV battle from over a week ago?
I sure do, I remember the big fight we have the Sundays on Siege, sometimes, I'm running alot and dying to ganks, other times, I'm a part of a group killing other side.
I also remember all the times, I'm claming alters and someone pop out of hiding and attack me and we fight over the alters. I have a lot fun, even when I die way more than I kill, but I'm getting better.

I like a town take max 20 min, I have a RL too.
 

FrejaSP

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Lol where? I've ran through the hot spots multiple times for hours over the course of the past few years and I have never seen the 1st person ever.
I mean, it's not only PvP, we do PvM, crafting, events together too. We are one community, where all respect each others.
 

JC the Builder

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I remember factions and it sucked. It was set up for the late night player and guilds with absolutely no personal lives that could guard sigils for hours. V3 has opportunities for making gold selling the royal pardons and allows multiple fights per day instead of waiting to have one huge fight to capture a town.
You didn't have to sit around for the full 24 hours. The way it basically worked is a few people hung out to keep the solo thieves from getting at the sigils. You had spies and informants in the other groups who told you when they formed up for a raid. You then put out the call and people came to defend.

Someone was saying how searching for sigils needs teamwork. That is nothing compared to the teamwork you needed to defend and capture towns under the original 24 hour sigil system.

VvV does not require any teamwork.
 

Old Vet Back Again

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VvV is a joke. End of story.

Kyronix had some of the more respected pvp members in the focus group, but he chose to listen to the majority which were Trammel based players. We were all giving him great ideas to make this system more fun and worthwhile. Everything said was pretty much ignored. They weren't even going to implement ressing your horse unless you were a tamer....

VvV has absolutely no reason to participate except to be freely flagable anywhere in fel. You can claim 5 alters untested and get your mount then leave the town. You don't even need to join VvV to participate just heal someone in VvV and you turn orange and then are out when you die.

I mean who really wanted tapestries?? GTFOH with that BS
 

FrejaSP

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VvV has absolutely no reason to participate except to be freely flagable anywhere in fel. You can claim 5 alters untested and get your mount then leave the town.
That's why VvV should be shard wide.

Let VvV fight in Trammel facets but not in guarded zone in the Trammel facet to give new PvP'ers Peace in this old towns.
If a VvV'er is flaget as fighting other VvV, non VvV can not heal them. I know it will take alot work to get coded inter act between VvV and non VvV.

This way we won't see Trammel players being VvV just to get a few VvV artifacts and use them in Trammel. Yes I know, some players would hate to see VvV in Trammel zone, but I see no reason, that VvV can't fight on all facets. I believe we will see a lot more VvV as it will be less boring to hunt on other facets and it will join the community again. It may also make Felucca less scare for non VvV.
 

JC the Builder

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FrejaSP said:
If a VvV'er is flaget as fighting other VvV, non VvV can not heal them. I know it will take alot work to get coded inter act between VvV and non VvV.
You just described how Factions worked.

This way we won't see Trammel players being VvV just to get a few VvV artifacts and use them in Trammel. Yes I know, some players would hate to see VvV in Trammel zone, but I see no reason, that VvV can't fight on all facets. I believe we will see a lot more VvV as it will be less boring to hunt on other facets and it will join the community again. It may also make Felucca less scare for non VvV.
The reason not to do so is very few people will like it. Besides just knowing this to be the case, there is a perfect example of the sharp decline in Order/Choas. After Trammel and Factions came out virtually no one took part in Order/Choas anymore.

The whole argument on why Trammel was a good idea is players want a choice on consensual vs nonconsentual combat. You can't put in a group PVP system with the big drawback of that character never being used except for PVP again.
 

FrejaSP

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You just described how Factions worked.
Faction was not active in Trammel zone and in faction, there was some bugs with not being able to res or heal Faction and other warring players, even when they was not fighting enemies.

The whole argument on why Trammel was a good idea is players want a choice on consensual vs nonconsentual combat. You can't put in a group PVP system with the big drawback of that character never being used except for PVP again.
I do believe a lot would choose VvV, but you may need to give them some bonus for it, like being in VvV = Fel bonus on all facets and maybe some changes to item Insurance, so you could disable getting Insurance money for killing.
Lets say players are doing some training fights, I guess it must be annoying to pay item Insurance each time you die in a friendly fight. I know the system was made because someone wanted it when they could not loot the insured items, but I would believe it stop a lot for even try to PvP. Maybe some other reward for killing in VvV than Insurance money.
Now I may be wrong as I never played with Item Insurance as I play Siege and rarely get looted at all.
 

JC the Builder

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I do believe a lot would choose VvV, but you may need to give them some bonus for it
That bonus would have to be so absurdly good it would never work. To this day a size-able group of people want power scrolls to drop at Trammel Champion Spawns. This is an item which you can literaly obtain within 20 minutes on a solo character. You get 6 scrolls or even 12 if you have a second account doing protection.

You can also look at how nerfed VvV is compared to the Faction system. There is no way letting your character be attackable everywhere would work out.
 

FrejaSP

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You can also look at how nerfed VvV is compared to the Faction system. There is no way letting your character be attackable everywhere would work out.
They would only be attackable to other VvV not to everyone. On Siege, we are attackable everywhere, even in guarded towns but the attacker will be orange for a while.
 

JC the Builder

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On Siege, we are attackable everywhere, even in guarded towns but the attacker will be orange for a while.
I think you are mixing together what would be good on Siege and what the average player wants to see on normal shards. If players wanted nonconsentual combat then Trammel would not have happened. Other games that have different ruleset servers usually have few PVP compared to other types.

Felucca is supposed to be the PVP facet. There is no point in making Trammel a battleground.
 

FrejaSP

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Felucca is supposed to be the PVP facet. There is no point in making Trammel a battleground.
I always disagreed with the Fel/Tram split, I had rather seen a PvP switch, VvV can be that if done right. You can still keep Felucca non con and the rest consent, only diff is, you choose to be open for PvP or not. The one who do not choose VvV will still be 100% safe for PvP risk and I can't see why the true PvP'er would want to hide behind Trammel ruleset when not enough get a group together in Fel. In old days, before stat loss, reds was not afraid to run a lone, nor was the anti PK's.

To safe UO, we need the fun back, and PvP'er have no fun hunt in Trammel zone, it way to safe and boring, at least I have no joy playing in Trammel and Fel feels wrong to me too as community and player towns are long gone.

Other games that have different ruleset servers usually have few PVP compared to other types.
Last I played WOW, there was as many if not more PvP servers as non PvP servers, at least in EU, and there was a few PvPRP servers too.
 

Lord Gandalf

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I want to PVP, not RP.
Trust me, no one gives a dang about what you want since you included those three words in ur phrase "PVP".

As it was mentioned by several players: "none of the current devs actually pvp"

I just dont bother posting about this whole trammy wave, because i know exactly where its taking us...

RIP fel - only a few inches separate me from leaving this game

Fel REVIVE
 
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