Been out of pocket for a few days and catching up.
There is no defense of what they gave us after 5yrs of fulltime paid development.
I feel the same way but look at it from a different lens. There is no defense for the complete lack of Prod content over the past 5 years given what NL was launched as.
Did the New Legacy development hurt production, yes to an extent, but the small team did their best to give us content (that you seemingly have forgotten about). Do you need it all listed out here? Since NL has been released we got 5+ continious months of content on production that was actually well received by the majority of players.
The Production content only concluded at the end of March. And there will be 120 on TC1 beginning of June and it sounds like it's going to be some fun new stuff in that publish. Then we have pub 121 with all the October/November/December stuff coming up.
Honestly, what are you expecting here that you feel you aren't getting?
I agree with you quite a bit; I just think we see the result in a different light.
I agree that the NL development hurt production, but I'd probably go further and say NL has been a detriment to Prod for the last 5 years. While yes they did technically give us content, it was the same cookie cutter dynamic events AND they were at a trickle. They told us before NL was started that they were developing the dynamic "engine" (which took an entire year) to make it easier to implement the events....I have no problem with that, but if that's the case we should of had at least 3 dynamic events (all 3 parts for each event) each year. We barely got 2. Before all the NL stuff started I had 3-4 active subscriptions...by last summer I had 0 active subscriptions (I currently have 1 active sub).
I think you are confusing length of the events with the number of events. Just because an event that was running almost 2 months just ended, it doesn't mean we get tons of content. No argument about how the last event was great (specifically the items), but the team has a tendency to drag them out to the point that majority of people stop doing by the end. Perfect example of this is the dynamic champ spawn that just ended.... packed when it kicked off and basically dead on every shard besides ATL about 10 days into it. Even ATL fell way off by the last week.
That said, if we are getting at least 3 (different) events a year (one the start the year / one in the middle / one to end the year) on PROD shards then I wouldn't be too mad... that just hasn't been the case in MANY years.
The first content patch of NL was actually less than what was to be expected due to them focusing on Production, particularly Atlantic, with a bunch of hotfixes.
So NL actually got the short end of the stick there.
Again I agree here... NL was pretty lackluster when it started. But again, we see this from a different lens because the way I see it is they had 5 years to dedicate and plan resources for the NL launch. Veldrane and I have beat the horse dead on the poor project management that led to this and that's exactly what it was; I don't think the Dev team (ie Mesanna) gets a pass on this so saying "...but the Prod hotfixes is what led to NL being less than expected". My personal opinion is that they were premature on the announcement 5 years ago and were in way over their head but they decided to dig in with NL because they wanted to prove people wrong.
Another personal opinion of mine is that NL, even to this day, has never really been defined in any concrete way by the Dev team of what their thought on it is. Outside of "building your legacy" which is basically as ambiguous as it gets, but no real purpose. It's been said to be a shard to "bring the biggest audience to UO" but then relabeled (mostly by players) to be a handful of other things like "vintage shard" (ie pre AOS style) / "training shard" (ie new players can learn UO and build chars) / "staging shard" (ie where new things are tested and brought to Prod) / etc. None of these have proven to be the case though because it's not truly a vintage shard (pre-AOS), the way people train skills and play there is very different than Prod, and we haven't seen anything be ported over yet. In reality, to me the best way to describe NL at this point is just simply "an experimental shard" which is fine, BUT that should not take priority over their flagship Prod shards.
