theworldofdreams.com

On another shard I have frequented you only get one character slot. Your choice of tradeskill is most crucial. I went so far as to ask my fellow players on that shard what was needed, and chose accordingly.

So, the shard wipe idea got the most poo-pooed, which is what I figured would happen. What about the other ideas?

no one liked my idea?

Liselle wrote:no one liked my idea?

*scrolls back to see what the idea was*

It's an intresting idea.

You do get into the problem of determining exactly what a "Warrior" is, *ponders* I suppose there could be a weapon skill check, ie. if anyweaponskill > 90 then magery/neccro/druidry capped at 70.

On the other hand, if a person wanted to, they could probably get a fairly decent mage-warrior by doing something like

Magery Weapon Tactics
Lore Meditation Resist

You would wind up with pretty strong mage buffs, including a +9 druid bless to your weapon skills.

lol
i just dont find it fair that if a mage wants to be good in hand to hand combat it is hard and they have to work really hard and long at it.
but all a swordsman has to do is train magery up a bit and then try over and over and it will work.

Atei wrote:1.) Shard wipe. One day Drocket posts that on a future date, he will wipe the shard of everything. That means gear, gold, houses--everything. The biggest positive I see out of this is allowing everyone to start on "equal footing." We will all be newbies, again. We will have to work together, again. I see this as a major way of "shaking up the status quo," getting the Oldbies re-interested and making us all one big happy family, again.

The main problem here is that any positive effects from a shard-wipe would only be temporary. Within a couple of months, I suspect that we'd simply wind up right back where we are.

A shard-wipe is highly unlikely.

By making player-made BETTER than monster-dropped, and then significantly reduce the number of monster-dropped magics.

If player-made items are better than even bte best magic armor, what would be the point of magic items even existing?

3.) Make dungeon spawn dynamic.

I agree with you with this one: the world does need to be more dynamic. Of course, every time we do something like this, it seems like everyone complains and wants us to change it back...

Of course, I don't think it would be an improvement to have random spawns occuring willy-nilly: a lot of the spawns are where they are for a very good reason. Wind, in particular, has a history that makes makes its current spawn make sense (so, does anyone know it? Its come up in a number of old quests? Remember what I've said about the importance of posting information about quests? *hint hint*)

4.) Regarding treasure maps: Drocket's changes were cool, but they didn't go far enough.

You may be right. I generally prefer not going overboard when I make changes, though. When something needs to be pushed in a certain direction, I usually think its better to do it in a few pushes instead of one huge shove.

5.) Finally, magery should be intelligence-based. Just because you can throw 120k into training shouldn't allow you to cast circle 8 spells.

Heheh - this one always ignites some interesting discussion I tend to like the idea because I think it creates an interesting symetry with the strength requirements of armor, and I'm a sucker for symetry

Joram Lionheart wrote:

Eldric wrote:I would not go quite so far as to call the shard broken, but when you have a multi player game where for the most part nobody actually needs anyone else, I do think its possible that something might be wrong.

And there IS something inherently wrong about not wanting to depend on anyone else in a multiplayer game. This is going to sound harsh to some but you cannot have it both ways. You either have a community of people who actually need each other, or you don't have a real community at all. Right now, the latter seems to be mostly the case.

[I would even go as far as to say that every single player should be forced to be interested in what is going on in world RPing-wise. In other words, if there is a world-wide invasion of killer-bunnies, you should be REALLY concerned about that even if you are a solo'er. It makes no sense that the world is about to end and you can find yourself at home going about your business like nothing's going on. World-shaking events should be just that--affecting the entire world (and everyone in it) one way or another.]

But I *do* depend on others ingame. When I am in trouble. I don't like to bother people for small stuff (armor/hats whatever), but I may bother someone to help out if I died in the depths of Deceit.

Atei wrote:Preface: I recognize that these changes are pretty radical. I respect everyone's right to disagree, but please do so in the same fair and balanced way I am attempting to make this post. Also, if you are going to disagree, please explain why you disagree.

There you have it, my fellow WoDians.

1) well we lose the historical items and even places like Freedom Hall and yet the item count stuff comes back in a few months at most. gold requires about a month to accumulate a comfy pile of a million or so. in 3 or 4 months everything looks the same pretty much as before the wipe. some people have mountains of goodies and some don't. i am not seeing anything gained and the distinct chance of loosing historically significant items. throw in the very possible loss of some established players who don't want to character build all over again and this point doesn't fly.

2) the hard fact is that we don't have enough players to make an economy work other than for a very limited amount of supplies. making anything player craftable simply leads to vast quantities of it no matter how difficult it is to make. remember when i suggested obsidian llamas be created? those suckers are not exactly easy to make and yet how long did it take before someone was selling them on every corner in britain?

3) cannot really cry about this one. would be fun to have invasion spawners from time to time or even as a permanent part of our world. i always thought it would be interesting to have two invasion spawners that were hostile to each other and sometimes friendly to the players sometimes hostile. put one on each side of britain and lo you have two hostile tribes who threaten us and even sometimes ally with britain against their foe. could add a bit of complexity to life if you don't know whether the road to trinsic is hostile this week or not.

4) perhaps a way to merga maps so you could get higher level ones or if not higher level ones multiple spawns at intervals with correspondingly better loots possible. something like this merge 4 ragged maps together and you get a ragged spawn with another after say 45 seconds and the next at 40 seconds and the last at 35 seconds just to keep you hopping with 4 x the normal loot of a ragged and an improved chance of getting better magics out of it. one shot for magic but it's nicer than ragged normally gives. this cuts down the specialist carto and definitely increases the value of grouping up for doing maps. unless anyone thinks he is the reincarnation of Sir Mego and can solo multiple raggeds.

5) casting spells already is int based in a very practical way. unless you are a real mage you simply don't have the mana available to use battle magics with any real effect. go forth with your buffed up tank mage and try the death via magic. it just doesn't work well enough to get excited about with magic 80 and invocation of 60. your buff spells well they are helpful but hardly over powered when you look at what a mage gets out of the same spells. it's all about compromise in character design after all. give up a bit of fighting effectiveness to get the ability to use some magic or vice versa.
in my own case i really need the ability to do some magic in order to stay true to character. Having a raw int requirement for higher level spell circles is kinda moot because the only people who would wind up able to cast higher circle spells are the ones already doing it and the tweeners would be largely hooped.

Ehran wrote:2) the hard fact is that we don't have enough players to make an economy work other than for a very limited amount of supplies.

It might be intresting if some of your friends who also play on Ackadia could tell us how well, or not, the player economy system works over there. Is it reasonably robust, is it impossible to find what you want, how much trouble is it to get your armour repaired, ect.

Adroi Andune wrote:Ok Im a sucker. How about this for a change of pace?

Inert all the current magic items in the world. They still exist, just no longer have a usable magical power, they would be for all pratical purposes regular weapons.

Then from that point forward require certain skills sets to unlock the magic power. Maybe even requiring up to 3 different characters.

For instance say you find an Indestructable Silver bow of destruction and achery. Make it so you need a woodcrafting archer to release the Indestructable and archery. A Woodcrafting Tactition to release the Destruction. And a Necromancer to release the power of the silver.

Heh, but I'm sure this might not be possilbe under POL, but what the heck, there is an idea to be beat up and tossed around

Scratch the making all previous items inert. But require skill set combinations ( hopefully, crafting ) to release the full potenetial; and/or drop items that can imbibe a player crafted item with magical properties. IE you still would need to hunt to get the weapons, but the skill set required to release or imbibe the magic would be large enough no one could mule them all...

Atei wrote:1.) Shard wipe. One day Drocket posts that on a future date, he will wipe the shard of everything. That means gear, gold, houses--everything. The biggest positive I see out of this is allowing everyone to start on "equal footing." We will all be newbies, again. We will have to work together, again. I see this as a major way of "shaking up the status quo," getting the Oldbies re-interested and making us all one big happy family, again.

Drocket wrote:The main problem here is that any positive effects from a shard-wipe would only be temporary. Within a couple of months, I suspect that we'd simply wind up right back where we are.

A shard-wipe is highly unlikely.

A couple of folks have brought this up, and I admit I hadn't considered that the problem would be right back where we started, item-count wise.

By making player-made BETTER than monster-dropped, and then significantly reduce the number of monster-dropped magics.

Drocket wrote:

If player-made items are better than even bte best magic armor, what would be the point of magic items even existing?

Well, as I responded to Tamla and others, there are still some items that can't be made, like exceptional clothes and footwear.

What about this idea: the magics don't reduce in number but they do reduce in durability? Shouldn't an item that has been through a "magical transformation" be less sturdy than one made by the hands of a master craftsman (or craftswoman)? Then if player-made armor is equal to or slightly better than middle-ground magics, say maiming in weapons and protect in armor, I think a lot of people wouldn't want to use their invul armor and desty weapons to whack rats. They would want player-made. I could be wrong, however.

3.) Make dungeon spawn dynamic.

Drocket wrote:
I agree with you with this one: the world does need to be more dynamic. Of course, every time we do something like this, it seems like everyone complains and wants us to change it back...

Of course, I don't think it would be an improvement to have random spawns occuring willy-nilly: a lot of the spawns are where they are for a very good reason. Wind, in particular, has a history that makes makes its current spawn make sense (so, does anyone know it? Its come up in a number of old quests? Remember what I've said about the importance of posting information about quests? *hint hint*)

I remember the quest, Drocket. They were trapped there by Connor and other mages after crossing over from another dimension, if I recall. What do I win? Speaking of history, haven't the Ophidians been in Cove long enough?

My idea for dynamic spawn could even be restricted to a single dungeon as a test, right? Take Destard or Wrong and try it out there. Now, if certain places need to keep their spawn as is, like Wind, that's okay. And let's face it, what would Famine be without Vampires?

4.) Regarding treasure maps: Drocket's changes were cool, but they didn't go far enough.

Drocket wrote:You may be right. I generally prefer not going overboard when I make changes, though. When something needs to be pushed in a certain direction, I usually think its better to do it in a few pushes instead of one huge shove.

Excellent!

5.) Finally, magery should be intelligence-based. Just because you can throw 120k into training shouldn't allow you to cast circle 8 spells.

Drocket wrote:Heheh - this one always ignites some interesting discussion I tend to like the idea because I think it creates an interesting symetry with the strength requirements of armor, and I'm a sucker for symetry

1)Well the fact that 95% didn't go for this was hardly a surprise I must say.From my point of view,I wouldn't mind a wipe one bit.It is afterall just gold and magics.
To me a shard wipe would give a chance for more changes to occur,to make some of the changes Drocket has so long wanted to implement.As well as remove the overload of magics there is right now(when a desty axe sells for 500 gold then there is WAY too many magics floating around).

2)Economy is based on supply and demand.To create a demand,shorten the supply.Perhaps if magics were in shorter supply and less durable there would be more of a demand for crafters,either to make an exceptional set or to reinforce the magic to make it a bit more durable.Of course clothing and footwear would be the exception since they aren't player made.

3)This would be great to see.The excitement of going to say Hythloth or Fire and never knowing what you will face.Exception of course,would be places like Despise which would still remain newer player based dungeons.

4)I wasn't happy at first with changes to carto,but in hindsight I guess it does make sense.If you were to bury a treasure you would lock it(unless the lock rusted....oh that would be cool to add to script...make it so it either pops open due to lock being so rusty or other times you fail several times due to the rusty nature of the lock etc)And yes you would most likely trap the chest.But I think the way a trapped should work is either by having fairly high detect to remove the trap or by having fairly high magery to be able to reveal to remove the trap.

5)hehe I will admit I'm sorta neutral on this one,though it does sound cool.

Since the topic of this thread is "major changes," I thought I'd throw this major change idea out into the fray to see what happens.

Let's remove the "pay for skills" method of play and return to a "usage skill gain" method.

How's that for major?

I honestly think Dundee was wrong in deciding to setup WoD this way. He may have been reacting to the bad taste that OSI UO left in his mouth, but I think our current pay-for-skills system really hurts us in the end. (I'd be curious to hear Dundee's thoughts on the matter now that he's involved with SWG)

Anyway, I have a couple good reasons for why this change would be good for the long-term health of WoD.

1) To those who want a challenge, it would add a lot to the game. Right now, it's pathetically easy to raise all your skills up to their maximums. Gold is very easy to obtain for those willing to work. And even if you don't want to work, people are usually very generous and will give you a pile of gold to train your skills. It's even more of a joke once you are an established player, because you can have your main character earn a ton of gold, then create a new one, pay for the training and be done in no time. This is a factor in making the game very boring, very quickly.

2) There would be an added sense of accomplishment for people who "GM" their skills. As it stands now, being a "master whatever" means jack squat. Maybe you earned all your gold the hard way, or maybe someone else paid for your skills, but either way you're just one of 100 other "master whatevers." Think about it, it makes no sense that you can dump 100k on an NPCs head and come back a day later totally buff. Working for your skills by actually using them would bring a sense of pride for accomplishing a difficult goal.

Now, I'm already anticipating a few of the responses to this. Some of you may be worried about macroing. Well, macroing can be dealt with, either by scripts that prevent it, or GMs policing, or by other methods I'm not smart enough to think of. We are a small shard and I don't think it would be hard to enforce macro abusing rules.

The other thing I can see people saying is that they don't have enough time to build all their skills up in a "usage based" system. Well, what is the point of playing a game? To have fun or to "max out" your character? I'd say the point is to have fun. If you had fun whacking whatever it is you're skilled enough to whack, then the goal has been accomplished. If being maxxed out is that important to you, you'll feel all the more proud when you reach that goal. But if you aren't having fun at any step of the way, then I suggest finding a different way of spending your time.

As to how we could implement this with established players, I have no idea, but there's my major change idea to discuss. Or tear up if you so desire.

I don't mind the pay for skills style, but I wish it could be a choice. You can either pay for your skills or do "x" thing "x" amount of times for skill.

I'm certainly not advocating a change, but it would be nice to see some skill gain while I'm mining, fishing, or what have you.

Lisselle

a change i feel that could do some good is the skills.
for example...
any warrior or someone can use necromancy, so long as they train it.
but its nearly impossible for a necromancer to be come any good with a sword or in hand to hand combat.
maybe fix it so that if your a warrior, you cant use necromancy, as well as not being able to use most spells? its unbalanced the way it is, because a mage or necro cant get as strong as a warrior, but a warrior can use magic?

Me and you need to hang out more often. "^_^"
I can't STAND the fact that I am more or less 'chained' to the first level or two of a dungeon, but somehow my 'fighter' friends can solo 3 or 4 levels... how you ask...? they buff the heck outta themselves or have a mage do it before descending into the dungeon...

How can I benefit from a fighter? I can't... So why should they benefit from me? It costs me anywhere from 11 to 20 gold per spell I'm reading from a scroll... does it cost them to swing their sword? I think not... :0P

(and don't talk 'repair costs' to me... that's nothing compared to scrolls, regs, time making scrolls, and scroll failure debts...)

Atei

What if we reduced the number of character slots from 5 to 3 per account? Instead of being able to make everything you need, you would have to get it from other sources (unless everyone had a mule, yuck.) Then, if player-made goods are equal to or better than the ones you find while hunting (again remembering that we can't make exceptional clothes or shoes), that should make the crafter a very valuable asset.

Firstly, I agree... there are too many slots, and no one relies on anyone else. However if you DO ask for help EVERYONE is willing to lend a hand. This is very rare for a server, and should be cherished. "^_^"

That being said, if we had fewer characters, even the 'oldbies' would have to rely on other people... this would be a good change I think.

However, as a few have suggested, 2 characters only... I think that is going too far... At least too quickly anyway. We should try 3 character max for a while, and if then we decide to go further, take it to 2 characters. This is the logical way to do it anyway. ^_^

~Cindy~

Rhys Duir wrote:We are a small shard and I don't think it would be hard to enforce macro abusing rules.

"Forgive him, father, for he knows not what he says . . ."

To have fun or to "max out" your character? I'd say the point is to have fun. If you had fun whacking whatever it is you're skilled enough to whack, then the goal has been accomplished.

Quite honestly, I've never found repetitive, monotonous tasks to be very entertaining. Somehow I fail to see how a few months of "whacking" is going to add any excitement to my playing experience. The exciting part about character creation is achieving new goals, and there are better ways to accomplish this other than turning players into automatons.

If being maxxed out is that important to you, you'll feel all the more proud when you reach that goal. But if you aren't having fun at any step of the way, then I suggest finding a different way of spending your time.

There is something inherently wrong with this way of thinking. Let's suppose skill gain through usage is instituted again. After many many months of slaving at the mines (last time I checked, resource-gathering was still the number one cause of the infamous "spontaneous psychotic breakout" disease), I finally manage to reach Master Blacksmith/Miner. Great! Awesome! Whoohoo! Ok, now what? do I delete my character and do it all over again just because I had so much fun the first time around?

When I first started on OSI, skill gain through usage was the only way to become Grandmaster anything (and it still is if I'm not mistaken). Being a brand new n00b to the game, I decided that the sky was the limit and embarked myself on a three-month-long mission to make my character GM Blacksmith. Boy, if I had only knoww what I was getting myself into. I literally SLAVE-mined the Trinsic mountains day and night for three months straight [I never macroed]. I got up at 5:00am in the morning every weekday just so that I'd have enough to time mine a few hundred ingots before school. I spent every single gold piece in purchasing more ingots just so that I could raise my smithy just a few more decimals.

It was REAL hard work, and I most definitely did NOT enjoy spending all those hours in the mines and the forge wasting away iron. Gosh, it was worse than having a rl job. I felt like a friggin robot at times, a mindless automaton programmed to perform the same boring task day and night. But I had a goal in mind, and nothing was going to deter me from reaching that goal.

As you can imagine, the sense of accomplishment I felt when I reached my goal is indescribable. To say that I was 'overjoyed' does not begin to express the way I felt at the time. But of course, the story does not end there. The whole time I had been working to become a GM smith, I had also been dreaming about what I was going to DO when I finally achieved this. It was what happened AFTER I became a GM smith that made all those months of boring labor all worth it. I definitely could have done without those months of doing something I never wanted to do in the first place.

I believe this is precisely the reason why Dundee disliked the gain-through-usage system. Games should be about having fun, not about having a second job. If there is anything unsatisfying about the way things are right now it won't be fixed by tinkering with character creation phase. The problem lies in what happens AFTER players finish creating their characters and prepare to carry on with their virtual lives.

I mean, you have to admit there's only so many times you can go through a character creation experience before you begin to feel like you've experienced all there is to about being newbie. I, for one, do not delete my characters and start anew because I know all too well what it feels like already. I've created all sorts of characters, fighters, crafters, magi, rogues, you name it. There's no way I'm going to get any more feelings of accomplishment this way. If someone offered me the chance to go back and create my original OSI smith character all over again, let me tell you, there is no way I'd put myself through thathell again. I'm sorry but that was just not fun.

UO is much more than creating characters and achieving (only) ONE type of goal. UO is much more than just killing stuff and getting magics/gold. If you find yourself unsatisfied with the game as of lately, the problem probably lays in that you've been resorting to the wrong methods to make the game exciting again. Think about it, if UO was just another action/adventure game, would you have chosen to continue playing after all these years?

There's only so much that you can do to improve the action/adventure aspect of this game before it becomes just another Unreal Tournament or Diablo II. If you want to discover new ways to make the game more interesting for everyone, think about this: What makes UO different from Diablo? What makes UO better than Quake?