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Where is the goal in Vice vs Virtue?

JC the Builder

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The goal of factions was clear: capture towns and control them.

What is the goal in Vice vs Virtue? There isn't one. You can't organize players without a goal.

Our guild was doing a champion spawn last night and someone actually crashed us. We were in a sort of shock so they pick us all off. We had to leave.

Within 10 minutes we were back and absolutely crushed them. We had a plan to block off their escape. Our main group came in and steam rolled them. This is how group PVP used to be and it was fun. Having no goal is not fun.

Vice vs Virtue is fundemantaly flawed in that there is no goal to rally behind. This should have been decided at the start. How can a whole system have made it off the drawing board without an end goal? What did the focus group do exactly?
 

PaithanTheElf

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Please. Capturing towns was really only about getting a faction war horse because that was all that mattered. Other than that it was pvp as usual- with the flawed system of reds not being able to be healed in towns and getting guard whacked into stat for 20 minutes at a time while letting blues attack them as well. Also, it let guilds follow other guilds into the same faction, so you would avoid pvping them. This system is about PVPing. If you PvP- you joing VvV. There are few reasons to go red anymore with all the bonuses you get for being blue and the only blues not in VvV sit at the gate and would either only try to gank or call guards. The only people who would not like this system are people who do not enjoy PvP. They created a whole facet for those people. When people fight in guardless town zones, it is a lot of fun. They should remove guards in all PvP cities if you ask me.

ps when you are talking about "people" crashing your spawn did you mean me and that random guy danger ranger? ha.
 

JC the Builder

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Please. Capturing towns was really only about getting a faction war horse because that was all that mattered.
Maybe that is why you played factions. When I played factions people were not capturing towns to get war horses. We took towns just to own them and prevent other people from doing so.

ps when you are talking about "people" crashing your spawn did you mean me and that random guy danger ranger? ha.
No, what inspired me to make this topic was this fight:

 

OREOGL

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Maybe that is why you played factions. When I played factions people were not capturing towns to get war horses. We took towns just to own them and prevent other people from doing so.


No, what inspired me to make this topic was this fight:

Nice video, and some good points.

When they introduced VVV it was introduced as a two "faction" system with similar systems as the existing system.

This couldn't have been more of a bait and switch, though I'm not sure who to blame more, the focus group of the Devs (or both).
 

JC the Builder

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This couldn't have been more of a bait and switch, though I'm not sure who to blame more, the focus group of the Devs (or both).
It wasn't really a bait and switch because it was never advertised as anything else.

As for who is at fault for this situation, the true answer is no one. Most people who care about this type of PVP stopped playing a long time ago. So the feedback the developers get now is heavily skewed by people who like the way things are. Someone told me they enjoy Vice vs Virtue because it is like Yew Gate in towns.

Yeah, that is what we needed. More Yew gate PVP.
 

OREOGL

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It wasn't really a bait and switch because it was never advertised as anything else.

As for who is at fault for this situation, the true answer is no one. Most people who care about this type of PVP stopped playing a long time ago. So the feedback the developers get now is heavily skewed by people who like the way things are. Someone told me they enjoy Vice vs Virtue because it is like Yew Gate in towns.

Yeah, that is what we needed. More Yew gate PVP.
This isn't accurate at all.

Please search for Mesannas post for the concept for Vice vs Virtue. It plainly states:

"How will Virtue & Vice work?

1.) There are two opposing sides, one representing "Virtue", and one representing "Vice". "

Given this, I'm not sure if you were around since the beginning of the change, but the outcome did not at all turn out to what it was intended to be.


As far as caring, I was against the removal of factions, and started playing it since it came out.
 

JC the Builder

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Given this, I'm not sure if you were around since the beginning of the change, but the outcome did not at all turn out to what it was intended to be.
I was not playing or following UO during that time period, you are correct.

But I don't understand how you can say this system did not turn out as intended. The developers have said they are happy and it is working as intended.
 

OREOGL

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I was not playing or following UO during that time period, you are correct.

But I don't understand how you can say this system did not turn out as intended. The developers have said they are happy and it is working as intended.
There was a long distance between point A and B, or arguably A,B,C,D,E...etc.
 

Scribbles

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VvV = a huge fail. @Mesanna and the devs just dont get pvp... and they really dont know how to listen to its customer base.

here are some ideas to help it. @JC the Builder number 24 is for you... I posted this list a while back.

1. get rid of the big bulky window. No PvPer has room for that on the screen.
2. Make the usable rewards... crimson for example more expensive to get. After someone joins and gets the free 500 and buys a crimmy there is no reason to continue.
3. make it harder to stealth in these towns. put a timer on it.
4. put the alters in a place where choke points can be built.
5. give a monthly or quarterly special reward to the player with best kd ratio or most kills for that quater or most alters won... etc...
6. Put red healers in fel towns...
7. Get rid of towns with out moongates close by
8. make traps last until they are broken.
9. make the turn in for sigils stolen a timer like alters. probably not as long but they should have to wait making it possible to catch thieves.
10. get rid of all the junk arti rewards... They are useless no one uses them, especially since the new loot system has been in place.
11. make rewards harder to achieve. let us store more points past 10k.
12. add clean up dyes to rewards, or new pvp specific dyes. PvPers love their colors... :)
13. spawn monsters at each stage of an alter being held.
14. give a scroll if an alter has been fought for. If possession changes once, give a 105, twice 110, 3 times 115, 4 times 120. Make it unscriptable. Good luck with that part... :)
15. perhaps tie in vvv with champ spawns... bring both back into popularity...
16. spawn a harby if 5 alters are won in a row.
17. If towns are won by a certain guild over and over make a public gen chat announcement to everyone on how bad ass they are...
18. If someone enters a vvv area their bar gets put up to everyone else in the area... and vice versa
19. make a high end reward that gives a random legendary item.
20. try to get more non vvv players into those area for more killing. Risk reward scenarios.... fel thunts, champs, harbys... anything to make it worth it for pvmers to try and compete
21. make a reward a runebook to all vvv towns thats blessed in the name of the toon that receives it. let it gain a charge every 6 hours.
22. Dont ever stop changing or updating the system. As soon as you stop it gets un popular.
23. Take advice from actual pvpers... These are the people you weeded out because they had reports on their accounts. These are the people you constantly disregard even though they pay the same subs. wipe all reports and start clean for everyone. I guarantee the reports are from a time when you actually enforced the rules.
24. Do something with the name VvV... what is the point of vice vs virtue.... from what i can tell there is none.
 

JC the Builder

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If the developers won't even fix the runebook change, I doubt anything will be done to fix VvV.

I guess we just have to make our own fun.
 

FrejaSP

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What is the goal in Vice vs Virtue? There isn't one. You can't organize players without a goal.
I believe the goal is to give an alternative to be red and it works well on Siege, we only have a few reds left.

What I do not understand is, on Prodo shards, VvV don't work on Trammel rule land like it do on Siege.

I would like to see rewards for kills outside the battle towns, maybe some dungeons or everywhere outside guard zone. It's would be find for no reward for kills in non Virtue (VvV) towns to keep them a little more safe.

In old Order/Chaos system, where you had to get and use the shield to fight without getting flaged and you could not attack non Order/Chaos with the shield in your hand, that would get you insta killed and make you lose skills and stats as far I remember.

Maybe make it a bad thing to attack blue if you are in VvV, maybe make you lose a kill or some point. Just an idea.

I guess we just have to make our own fun.
It is a RP game, you get a system, where you can PvP without being red, now it's up to you to put some RP in it :p

I do believe they want to improve VvV but wanted to see how it worked out before they add more.

Instead of complain it is not what you expected, lets have some brain storming about what could improve it.
 

FrejaSP

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here are some ideas to help it. @JC the Builder number 24 is for you... I posted this list a while back.
Good to see someone post ideas. It does not mean I agree with them, but at least it's way better than just complain
 
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FrejaSP

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When they introduced VVV it was introduced as a two "faction" system with similar systems as the existing system.
One thing I really love with VvV is, it work together with Guild and alliances.

In Faction, we often saw players try to join the most powerful faction with the players who use to kill them. VvV may have 2 factions, but it's more RP vice, good or evil. The alliances are much better as you can't join an alliance, if they don't want you.

On Siege we have one large Virtue alliance and several Vice alliances. Some will join up vs the large Virtue alliance, others will stay on their own and fight both Vice and Virtue.

We do have the blue and red war horse, robe and hair dry to show if you are Vice or Virtue. I do believe it is fine, that the players have some freedom to add their own RP

1. get rid of the big bulky window. No PvPer has room for that on the screen.
I agree it is to big, maybe let the messages show up like other system messages on your screen and make it so you can minimize the popup, so it only show a small statusbar with the bar for the 3 top guilds and status button for the sigel

2. Make the usable rewards... crimson for example more expensive to get. After someone joins and gets the free 500 and buys a crimmy there is no reason to continue.
Or keep the low price and make them cursed and make VvV active on all facets, that way, non PvP'ers would not run around with them in Trammel. Also if a VvV players attack a non VvV'er but die, he risk to lose it and the non VvV'er can sell it or trash it.

3. make it harder to stealth in these towns. put a timer on it.
They did :p "The mana spike will reveal all hidden players inside the battle region & do energy damage."

6. Put red healers in fel towns...
Agree with this one

7. Get rid of towns with out moongates close by
No need, normal shards do have recall without any magery needed if they recall from book, Siege can gate to a ship without magery, and we do have a public teleporter in a house in Ocllo

9. make the turn in for sigils stolen a timer like alters. probably not as long but they should have to wait making it possible to catch thieves.
Poison fields around the 2 npc's for turnin ot poison fields at the doors, where sigel is in a house, just be a little creative and use the mana spike.

11. make rewards harder to achieve. let us store more points past 10k.
Just make them easier to lose :p

13. spawn monsters at each stage of an alter being held.
Why, PvP is not about monster killing, just lets see more reasons for players to spawn :p

14. give a scroll if an alter has been fought for. If possession changes once, give a 105, twice 110, 3 times 115, 4 times 120. Make it unscriptable. Good luck with that part... :)
15. perhaps tie in vvv with champ spawns... bring both back into popularity...
16. spawn a harby if 5 alters are won in a row.
Or just increase the chance for drop for players in VvV, both at champ spawn and spawn. Could be the point we get for guarding a town. 10.000 point gained last month = +10 luck, so winning 100 towns this month will give you +1000 luck next month and here hidding have a price, you can't win a town hidden if someone else is there not hidden.

The rest on your list won't really help in my opinion
 

JC the Builder

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Instead of complain it is not what you expected, lets have some brain storming about what could improve it.
There have been ideas put forth for factions/VvV for 15 years now. A ton of stuff got posted when VvV came out over a year ago. I have heard there were a lot of good ideas put forth in the focus group before that.

When changing the color of runebooks back to what most people want is nearly impossible, it is futile to keep trying to improve something such as this.

The VvV system is not promoting PVP. I was at a Felucca IDOC last night with dozens of people which should have been a blood bath. Instead everyone was standing around on newbie characters trying to place a house.
 

FrejaSP

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Now I don't play Prodo shards. On Siege, VvV work on all facets and you can attack VvV in any town. I was fighting one who attacked me in Umbra last week.

I like VvV being a way to show, you are willing to fight or accept the risk for attack and I can see it help PvP in UO, if VvV could fight each others on all prodo shards too.

I would like to make something for the old unused forests on the Felucca facet and Malas sure could use some actions too.

Like the towns, I would make some zones where increased spawn or resources would draw more players.
Maybe take a mining cave, if only blue mining there, it act like normal, but if a VvV'er start to mine, there is a chance it will go battle zone and a message will be send to all VvV'ers about the mining cave being battle zone. All who mine there, will get 5x the resources for a short time, maybe until silver a vein is found and the ore smelted to silver on a temp forge in the mine or time run out. The alliance who get most points for guarding the mine, for killing and for turn in silver will win the mining battle and get the points.
Anyone blue who entre the mini or is in it will be offered to tele out or go orange.

Could also be a monster spawn with increased drop, where a special item need to be found on a monster and then turned in somewhere for silver. Killing others would help your alliance get the points and the silver.

Or it could be a dungeon level that turn battle zone with increased deop. Players like doing different stuff ingame, so there should be something for anyone to fight over.
 

Cutter

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I would like to see rewards for kills outside the battle towns, maybe some dungeons or everywhere outside guard zone. It's would be find for no reward for kills in non Virtue (VvV) towns to keep them a little more safe.
This would be fantastic. In factions a huge part of it TBH was bragging rights for your kill-points, and trying to get to the top of the leaderboard which everyone viewed on myuo.

Saying "Showscore" or "punkte" also displayed your point total above your head in game for other players to see. This may sound silly but people loved it, and it helped keep factions active.


Also, we need to make town buffs available to reds. VVV was never (to my knowledge) intended to make all reds disappear. Let reds get the FC bonus for instance and we will see a lot of red mages again, which IMO would be nice.
 
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FrejaSP

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Also, we need to make town buffs available to reds. VVV was never (to my knowledge) intended to make all reds disappear. Let reds get the FC bonus for instance and we will see a lot of red mages again, which IMO would be nice.
On Siege town buff are available to reds as reds can go everywhere. Maybe make a copy of the Trammel town stone in the Felucca towns.

Yes I do believe people like the bragging right
 

JC the Builder

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This would be fantastic. In factions a huge part of it TBH was bragging rights for your kill-points, and trying to get to the top of the leaderboard which everyone viewed on myuo.

Saying "Showscore" or "punkte" also displayed your point total above your head in game for other players to see. This may sound silly but people loved it, and it helped keep factions active
It was certainly a part of the system and some people worked hard to be on the leaderboard.

But it was not a huge part of the system. The majority did not care whether you had 0 or 5+ kill points. If a lot of people get caught up in worrying about their score it would hurt things. People will shy away from fights if they think they will lose score.
 

JC the Builder

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Link you only say that because you never had any punkte! ;)
I say that as someone who played with dozens if not hundreds of people who never let showscore get in the way of fighting.

If the enemy has twice or more the number of people you have then you will stay home rather then fight. I can't recall a single time when the odds were bad that a person bailed to protect their score. If a system comes about that makes killscore important than it will negatively impact fighting.
 

Cutter

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I say that as someone who played with dozens if not hundreds of people who never let showscore get in the way of fighting.

If the enemy has twice or more the number of people you have then you will stay home rather then fight. I can't recall a single time when the odds were bad that a person bailed to protect their score. If a system comes about that makes killscore important than it will negatively impact fighting.
I didn't mean to imply that it got in the way of fighting, nor do I think it did. Those who cared that much used point-holders. I myself NEVER used pointholders and always pvp'd regardless of the numbers, as did the majority I think.

It was just another now-missing thing that many pvpers enjoyed. Killing an orange and getting tons of points to show off was simply fun, and more satisfying than a normal kill.
 

Lord Arm

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we don't need vvv, its just a way for people to exploit and get free stuff. I never needed free stuff to fight. it was always red vs blue, blue vs red for me, friends vs enemies ect... so much time and resources used on this. the best pvp ive had in last 10 years was when there was no factions/gear, there was no advantage
over non faction people, no wonder some don't fight/go to fel. havent we learned yet. no reds because of royal pardons does not make sense to me. its not vice vs virtue, its u/guild vs everyone else. there is no vice/virtue. ive seen big drop in pvp since vvv. these are just my opinions.
 

Cutter

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we don't need vvv, its just a way for people to exploit and get free stuff. I never needed free stuff to fight. it was always red vs blue, blue vs red for me, friends vs enemies ect... so much time and resources used on this. the best pvp ive had in last 10 years was when there was no factions/gear, there was no advantage
over non faction people, no wonder some don't fight/go to fel. havent we learned yet. no reds because of royal pardons does not make sense to me. its not vice vs virtue, its u/guild vs everyone else. there is no vice/virtue. ive seen big drop in pvp since vvv. these are just my opinions.
Good points, and bringing back an incentive to play on a red would go a long way toward bringing more people to fel.

Do away with royal forged pardons...or perhaps make them a 1-time use only item. A char can only use the VvV one that removes all counts once...period. This would be for an old-timer with too many counts to work off who wants to go blue, and plans to stay blue. It's too easy to take counts at whim and go from red back to blue over and over ATM.

Regular pardons that only remove 1 count perhaps make it so a char. can only use one every so often...maybe 1 time per week or something.

Making town buffs available to reds as already stated by many is a must, otherwise nobody is going to play a red, especially with the other reasons factored in. There should also be a bounty board system like we had in the dread-lord days. PKs will want their bragging rights just like factioneers wanted their 'showscore' as I mentioned earlier, as will the noto-PKs want theirs (dreadlord heads to lock down or something new).


It all comes down to this. Reds in fel = blues wanting to come kill them = more people for reds to kill = more PVP, aka more fun for everybody. Some of the ideas I've read on these boards about fel-based EM events I also like, as well as adding back at least SOME RP elements to VvV the way factions (and Chaos/Order) always had.
 
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