Going to try a poll here and see if anyone who isn't currently active on Siege wants to check off a few boxes to indicate which of the aspects of Siege that make it different from most other shards holds them back from playing on Siege. It's a multiple choice poll, so feel free to check more than one reason if more than one listed item really holds you back from playing on Siege.
Please select the "Other" option and make a post if one of your reasons doesn't fit one of the poll choices or needs further explanation. (Examples: You wish you could use an Advanced Character token or be able to buy skill training from NPCs. Or you'd like to have a house on Siege without it affecting your house elsewhere.)
Thanks in advance to everyone who answers the poll!
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Below are excerpts of the explanations people gave for selecting "Other" and other comments made by people who didn't vote but took the time to make a post: (Trying to edit carefully to save space but accurately retain the flavor of the comments.)
Please select the "Other" option and make a post if one of your reasons doesn't fit one of the poll choices or needs further explanation. (Examples: You wish you could use an Advanced Character token or be able to buy skill training from NPCs. Or you'd like to have a house on Siege without it affecting your house elsewhere.)
Thanks in advance to everyone who answers the poll!
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Below are excerpts of the explanations people gave for selecting "Other" and other comments made by people who didn't vote but took the time to make a post: (Trying to edit carefully to save space but accurately retain the flavor of the comments.)
- "I have not logged into a prodo shard in over a month. If this is any indication, I would not be able to dedicate the time needed for a decent SP character."
- "I have to either activate a 2nd account (or my old one) to place a house on Siege or do without."
- "Cant get a house without losing one elsewhere."
- "If I could place a second house on Siege or Mugen I'd play there a lot more. Well, and the ping's rather horrible from Germany..."
- "No idea which skills to play with."
- "Can't use Adv Character Tokens."
- "I left the server after AoS launched for one reason. It was DEAD. After years of large battles and finding people wherever you went I couldn't find anyone and playing siege alone isn't any fun. A hardcore PVP server like Siege needs a certain amount of players for it to work and it hasn't had them in a long time."
- "The ping is high for me and i cant have a house there.. id play there more if i had a house."
- "The Seige thing is not my cup of tea. If UO hadn't come up with the Trammel concept I wouldn't have started playing 12 years ago."
- "'All of the above'... I just don't get why people want to PvP all the time. I guess the same way PvP ppl don't understand why I like to enjoy having fun without some jerk having the potential to grief me. "
- "Definitely the fact that if I have a house in the prod shards I can't have another house here. No house, 1 character and limited space = no thanks."
- "I agree with the house issue (although I have staff members that have shared with me there houses)."
- "All of the above, the cons outweight the pro's. you guys are selling something that comes with no better options or bells and whistles."
- "I do not play Siege for one reason: Time. My gametime is too valuable to me to be spent doing all the little things that I have already done & mastered years ago on my prodo shards.... The level of pvp [on Siege] is no better then anywhere else. In fact it is worse IMO because almost every pvp template is defensive because nobody wants to lose their gear. ....damn near every pvp template has Ninja and/or Hiding to combat the rampant Dismount ganking. If I get ganked on a prodo shard I just go get rezzed and I am rigth back in the game. Not on Siege though."
- "Aside from the fact that I have no interest in PVP, all of the above."
- "Pretty mutch only think keeping me from really playing over there even tho i have a character is no house."
- "One word: Housing. I have not tried Seige because I don't have a house and would loose one elsewhere. I wish I could have one 7x7 on Seige that had no impact on the other shards."
- "The main problem I have there, is the lack of community feel. You may have a fair number of players there, but you never see them unless you are in a guild with them. You rarely, actually see other players around. Most players on Siege are stealther thieves, looking for a quick score, or just want to PvP. I got tired of those being the only two activities on the shard. The house thing is pretty annoying, as you need the extra storage to hold all the replacement crap you are going to need to function there."
- "Lack of population/community and losing my house on atlantic."
- "Heres my issue and i play siege. You make it sound like show up ask around and join a guild well i here to tell you it isnt that easy. I have asked I have pvped and spawned and crafted with people. I have posted request for help and for guilds to join. I have a house and plenty of gold and i am not a newb or drama queen i also am not an expert PVP but do to the anit-social nature of people and the fact that people play so rarely i am forced to travel alone."
- "One reason is that I simply don't like non-consentual PvP, especially when most of the time it is griefing. Also, the population is so small that I will not enjoy PvM since I won't be able to handle spawn all by myself."
- "What keeps me from playing Siege is the inability to transfer my character there. I say this because I just simply don't have the time to train a brand-new character from scratch anymore. At least not on Siege. If I could just transfer my character alone, naked, with no items/gold/etc except for my personal bless deed I'd be happy."
- "...game crashes rather often on me.... On prodo shards this is annoying but on siege it could be frustrating I guess. I don´t mind losing my things as a result of a lost fight or my own stupidity but not due to a crash or a lost con.... Second reason would also be that I can't have a house there (only one account here). If they would allow us to have a house on siege as well, I would prolly give it a try."
- "...because I spend most all my time on 'my shard'... GL's. I honestly wouldn't have the time to invest in another shard or more characters. I don't relish making characters over there and working 10X as hard to make a workable character there. And I would prefer to have a house there if I was going to play there. Also my ...[connection] speed though I pay for the "High Speed" is anything but high."
- "No reasons that were covered on this poll; nothing that will matter to anyone."
- "The main reason I went back to another shard is that on siege, I could develop only one type of character. On other shards it was easier to make support characters for my main. If the economy at siege was such that it was easier to purchase the items you need, I would have stayed there."
- "What keeps me from playing Siege is simply the non-existent player population. It is like playing a single player game."
- "I started a character on Siege and ran up to the graveyard in Brit to start training him. High level characters hanging around a beginner training ground just to kill and grief new characters? This seemed so childish to me after being res killed 17 times I just gave up. I'm not gonna waste my time walking around in guard zones because I can't get a start."
- "It's always been the single character slot that has kept me away from making it my main shard."
- "I would/might try siege, if it wasnt for all those siegeplayers who keeps whining about how empty it is there, kinda puts me off it."
- "Time (I barely get what I want to do completed on other shards), lack of housing, and something harder to quantify - 'loyalty' to, and involvement in, my main shard, it's events, people and history... if I were ever to move fully to Siege, I'd have to let that go, and I don't want to, but a half-hearted 'move' to Siege seems in some way dishonest."
- "I made two serious attempts to play Siege.... Both times I gave up due to the high ping."
- "High latency"
- "I voted for one char per acct, but it is pretty evenly matched with the inability to own a home. The thing that makes a shard feel like home is having one...to hold our things and express ourselves and even sell our junk. ...if i could plunk down a little house without destroying my castle or keep or luna house I would have a character or two that calls siege home."
- "I guess I don' t play siege because I'd rather play my fully trained chars than deal with training."
- "I tried Siege for a while but the difficulty in generating gold got tiresome. You can't sell anything to NPCs and there is little to hunt on the surface that carries gold. Then when you do find something to hunt on the main facet, you promptly get picked off from behind by a Dark Wisp... I spent the weeks I played Siege trying to generate enough gold to buy a LRC armor set and never made it between the difficulty of getting gold and getting dirtnapped by the wisps and being unable to reach the body as a routine experience."
- "Other is really a mix of several things: ...in the past the problem of entering a ship.... I spend most of my time gathering resources. Starting over on a new shard is really a pain.... Everything has charges on Siege.... While that wouldnt be a problem after beeing settled, it is while training up a char. (Not to speak of the limit to one char, which would make it nearly impossible to supply myself with all tools and have a character to play.) I dont like soulstones ,the idea behind them and how often they are used nowadays to change character abilities....Not to mention that soulstones are even more powerfull, when you have limited number of chars. I dont like the idea of playing a game, where someone can buy massive advantages with rl money (legacy tokens in that case.)"
- "1. Only one house per account. 2. SLOW skill gain; I don't have years available to train a character. It's bad enough on prodo shards; why make something monotonous and tedious even worse? 3. Only one character. I would need support characters."
- "Been on Atlantic since 1997 and really don't want to start all over on another shard."
- "I started a char on Siege soon after AOS, and he is still mid-level because I gave up on him. TOO TEDIOUS."
- "I play 2 shards now don't need a 3rd."
- "i tried it out in 2006 when i returned to uo and what i found out about siege it was an empty shard (in 2006 already, dunno how empty it is now ...) so i moved to a more populated shard."
- "...for me capping skill gains draws a line."
- "I have a character on SP and my character has never been attacked by another player.... I did run into a red [in Delucia] and talked to him/her in town for a while. Prior I had thought that the one benefit of SP was that a player has to live up to the reputation of his single character. So you can't have one character who pretends to be nice just to get information to be used by your bad character. Well anyway the red had more than one account so he/she did just that sort of thing. That is what put me off."
- "I've spent a lot of time developing characters on the Atlantic Shard. When I make a new character, it's usually to test a certain template and I want to be able to share armor, weapons and gold from my fully developed characters. So, nothing against Siege, I just wouldn't start over on ANY other shard."
- "I prefer to play an only PvE server."
- "I liked SP but it feels cut off from the rest of Ultima Online plus I only have enough room in my brain for one set of UO rules."
- "I was one of those who played Siege when it was first created...and it was one of my favorite memories. Everything was so new and people worked together as newbies and good guilds were formed and friendships made. It was the best UO had ever been, IMHO.... After a while, though, things started changing to where every login I was attacked, sometime I couldn't even make it out of my house.... While I don't mind a good scrape now and then, when every hunt, every trip to town, every trip to mine or to harvest wool resulted in another battle I just got sick of it. Most of my guildmates got tired and left.... As more and more people left and the population dropped it seemed to just get worse.... I just became another one of those "if you don't live to pvp - stay off our shard, we don't want you here" types. If there was a way to bring back the early days of Siege, I'd be there in a second though."
- "I have three accounts with all three houses on Pacific. I still can not give one up so that I can play on Siege also.... I also don't like the skill gains on Siege. I thought this shard was supposed to be tougher not easier."
- "#1 rate over time and stat cap per day just plain suck, I rarely train skills and when I do I powergame them. #2 can't have a house because I have one on another shard."
- ..."I chose Other because I can never find anyone when I'm on - presumably because of timezone differences."
- "I started on Pacific and though I might visit other shards, I have no intention of leaving. Too much personal history there."
- "I'd give Siege a shot for sure, the only problem for me is with my house on a diff server, I would have to bank everything n store everything in the bank. Let me place a house on Siege that wont make my other house fall n I'm there."
- "Mostly other, too low population and the style of play lends itself to have a ton of stealthers, which I don't care for. I've heard the skill-gain is kinda iffy too.. It's mostly the first one though. The idea of siege never seemed to really fit after the game became item based in AOS. Once it did, the game in large part became trying to get the very best you could, and when you lose that in one death, kinda defeated a lot of the point."
- "I would like to see [Recall/SJ] restricted as it is in Felucca Lost Lands, Dungeons, and Ilshenar.... I would like to see its casting time increased on SP though (~10 seconds perhaps), so it can be used only for conveience travels and not escape. The only other two things I would address on the list is secondary housing (small to medium, not just 7x7s) and having a fair shake at the EM program."
- "The only thing preventing me from resubscribing and jumping back on Siege is the lack of a good client, I had played Siege for about a week back when KR was still around but once they got rid of that client I closed my accounts and will not resub again until something like KR (EC art update?) comes back. ...if the art update looks good I will come back and jump on Siege, because to be honest while Siege is not and never will be a classic shard it is the closest thing that we will ever see on EA servers."
- "What I don't love is how Siege is just as item-based as the other shards. If it had a pre-AOS equipment system I would resubscribe just to play there."
- "simple... because there is no Siege Europe shard"
- "My big issue with Siege is that it did not evolve properly. New land masses, monsters, skills and weaps etc were fine except Siege was never adjusted accordingly. ...the item property system on Siege was very counter productive. Characters with hiding benefited the most from the whole non insurance thing. ...I would get rid of fc, fcr as well as hci dci and make a default of 2/6 and 45/45. Losing items is fine but there is just too big a difference between different templates under those rules. Siege should appeal to those that wanted a classic shard but it is simply too ignored by EA to properly balance it. ...I stole a nice weapon from a tamer but got rocked by his pet. No big deal, as a thief, the chase is a good chunk of the fun. The problem is, when I ressed the item stayed with me. It made no sense at all. Basicly its alot of little things like this that add up in a big way that plague Siege. If EA put some real effort into Siege and actually balanced it for Siege insted of production rules i would certainly play it."
- "No trammel. I can't imagine playing an mmorpg where i can get killed by other players without my consent."