theworldofdreams.com

I don't remember everything, and I don't want to go back through the posts and quote stuff.

A shard wipe is a good idea for some reasons, bad for others. Good idea for clensing the world. The amount of gold and magics in the world is incredibly small and I don't see how gold and magics can play a big role in the decision of shard wipe.

Mining needed for Cartography. I don't see why. I was at work using a shovel today, and when I got home I took a nap, but then I read this, and I got to thinking.. I don't have any mining skill, but I used that shovel well enough.. huh.. OSI uses mining to determine how close you have to be to the actual tile to dig it up.. At 80 it's six tiles, 100 is 8 tiles, I think.. But if you had no mining, you could still dig it up. As far as locked and trapped goes.. I've never understood why they aren't.

Buffing. I don't see how this is still an issue. Buffing needs reduced. Not just on an individual level. Because one person buffing only makes one person less able to go to places that every other buffed player can go to... solo.

Why is polymorph a buff here?

Dynamic/harder/easier stuff... I don't want to be able to solo every dungeon and every land mass in the game, that is incredibly boring.. and aside from Ophidians, I'm starting to get slightly bored.
Why are all dungeons soloable? You would think that they should be hard. That only groups should be able to make it through all the way to the bottom, and that with deaths and junk along the way.

No more pay for skills. Paying for skills all the way to GM is a bit excessive. On OSI you can pay a warrior guild guy some gold and he'd train you up to 30 or so. Then you'd have to get the rest yourself, which is fine for me. Because the road to GM should be difficult, and should not be easy, because a GM should be something special, something for others to look up to. Should skill gain by usage be as slow with some skills as it is on OSI? No.. I fought liches, liches lords, deamons and dragons on OSI religiously. Yet my magic resist got only as high as 85, when I had GMed swords in a month, and I played on OSI for years.

GM should be a thing that has to be worked for. Play Diablo 2 with a hacked character, someone you didn't build up from the bottom, then see how fulfilled you are when you beat hell and you're done. Not very. Then play from level 1 all the way through, it's fun, it's challenging, and the ancients kick your butt so much you run out of gold.
That doesn't turn me off of a game. That makes me want to play it more. If there's no challenge, why play? Hell, if you want no challenge games, maybe you'll like something along the lines of neopets.com.

I think I'm starting to ramble, so I'll start wrapping it up.

As far as the economy thing goes.. Why not add some skills to the tradeskills so that you can't 'mule' characters?

I don't want to get in depth because I'm looking to go to bed soon.. But, an example..

Blacksmithy skills
Blacksmith (Already have this one)
Arms Lore (This shard killed it for some reason)
-and some new ideas
Metallurgy (sp)
Smelting (I never understood why this was built into mining.. Shouldn't be, in my opinion)


This is just a small idea. But clearly, there are better ways to reduce tradeskill characters and mule types that would clog the economy then to reduce the number of characters that we are allowed to play. Like some people wouldn't return after a shard wipe, I'd have to consider whether I'd want to be limited like that. I like the various skillsets my characters have, and being limited down to 2 or 3 characters? Nah, I don't think so..

I think that's it from my end of the pool for now. I don't feel like scrolling and looking for more to comment on just now.. very tired.

Now here's a thought. Since this is a major changes thread, I thought of a "major change":

Get rid of miscellaneous skills.

What's the reasoning? Well, basically in WoD *all* skills start at 60. Anything below 60 really doesn't cut it. That means there's a 50-point field to work with, ESPECIALLY with tradeskills (all the way up to 110) for crafting and the like. Now if that was removed, then players would still be self-sufficient, players would still be able to do all the things they wanted to, but it'd be slightly more difficult to do all the things we take for granted.

For one thing, there'd be a whole lot less campfires.

I really think that tweaking monsters and players isn't the way to solve a shard's problems though, because these things are superficial. It doesn't matter if we have the most amazing dynamic shard engine in history that allows players to do *Whatever*, it may still suck. What WoD needs, in my opinion in regards to a "major change" is a major change in attitude and outlook. I for one most certainly recognise that now.

Seriously, it doesn't matter if Mages can cast scrolls better than tanks and if an indy sword of destruction is better than an axe of magic reflection (whatever).. what matters if is there's a world out there called WoD with a past, a present and a future, and every day things that are exciting are happening because players are making them happen.

What would I like to see? Player events that were based on *fun*, not objective goals. Though I can understand the reasoning behind "treasure map parties" and "mining parties" but really, aren't they just organised events of what players do normally?

What about plays? What about cake stalls? What about weddings?

I think WoD needs player-run events that are exciting and not neccessarily glorified chores.

Certainly, I'm going to give it a go in planning and carrying some out (I'm in my evil lab, cooking up some nice surprises) but I can't do it alone. You want "Major Changes", I say? Well then I ask you to join me and not just 'play' WoD, but start getting involved in it.

- Marius the Upright
Recently Buyer of a New Soapbox

Some ramblings on the subject of skill gain through use.

I'm of a mixed mind on this one, on the one hand something I always rather liked on WoD was the ability to respec my characters by dumping some gold on them and waiting a couple days for the training to finish, made for an easy way to test out different skill sets. On the other hand, when I recently started looking for shards to try out, one of the things on my list of criteria was finding one where skill gain wasn't so absurdly fast that you could GM skills in only a couple hours of play (not something easy to do btw, going down the gateway lists its all fast skill gain this, start with 3 GM skills that, blech).

My first UO experience is similar to but slightly different from Joram's.

As he did I spent 3 months or so 6+ hours a day chained to my computer mining up, or purchasing ingots to train up smithing, it was hell.

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.

This is where our stories diverge, in my case "after I became a GM smith" was not really to go do something else, but rather to run a blacksmith shop. For a long, long, time I was one of about 3 GM smiths on the shard, GM'ing smithing was something hard and not a lot of people were willing to go through the amount of effort it was to do it, so my shop became my main source of income. While I did start hunting a little bit toward the end for the better part of the year and a half or so I played there (the shard died) my shop was my main activity. Had it just been possible to drop 110k on smithing and go from 0->GM running a shop would have still been a theoretical possibility I doubt it would have been very satisfying.

Marius the Black wrote:What would I like to see? Player events that were based on *fun*, not objective goals. Though I can understand the reasoning behind "treasure map parties" and "mining parties" but really, aren't they just organised events of what players do normally?

I know you provided a couple examples, but was wondering if you could expand on this a bit.

Eldric wrote:This is where our stories diverge, in my case "after I became a GM smith" was not really to go do something else, but rather to run a blacksmith shop.

Actually, that's what I meant. What I was going to do AFTER I reached GM smith, because a 99.9 smith wasn't quite as hip as the 100.0 smith I really enjoyed playing a Blacksmith character on OSI. I had customers all over the world, and friends of all kinds. People literally begged me to join their guilds because, at the time, everyone wanted a GM blacksmith working for them full time. As a respected members of the UBB (United Blacksmiths of Brittania), I always got the "oooohs" and "ahhhhs" when people saw my title ("Illustrious Lord Joram Lionheart, Grandmaster Blacksmith").
I never had a building close enough to town to run a shop. I mostly did all dealings in person. I moved from overpopulated Trinsic to Skara Brae where my RPer friends lived (The Coven of the Rose). They had a player-run town on the SE farmlands on chesapeake.
Before I left Trinsic I had belonged to a certain "Knights of the Watch" guild (later renamed "Champions of Virtue"). It was a warrior's guild but I never really got the hang of going places to hunt for magics/gold. After all, I was making all the money I needed via armor/wpn crafting. Hunting was not really my thing on OSI, even though I occassionally ventured to the nearest dungeon to keep my skills sharp (I rode to shame, sometimes ran).

Coming back to the original question, I suppose making skill-gain a bit more dynamic (that's the word nowadays isn't it ) couldn't possibly hurt. I'd definitely hate it if it just becomes like OSI, though. Skill usage for fighting skills shouldn't make that much of a difference because warriors are always going to be using their skills when hunting anyway. For craftings skills, perhaps performing a minimun number of "special order" jobs should be required before they can 'graduate' and become Master of the craft (that'd make perfect sense). For other skills similar quests should be expected before a character becomes masters of his/her skill. I'm thinking we are going to need craft/skill guildmasters to guide the apprentices in the right path (some NPC to tell the journeyman herald/wizard/ranger/etc what is the next step in their educational process).

Joram Lionheart wrote:Actually, that's what I meant. What I was going to do AFTER I reached GM smith, because a 99.9 smith wasn't quite as hip as the 100.0 smith I really enjoyed playing a Blacksmith character on OSI. I had customers all over the world, and friends of all kinds. People literally begged me to join their guilds because, at the time, everyone wanted a GM blacksmith working for them full time. As a respected members of the UBB (United Blacksmiths of Brittania), I always got the "oooohs" and "ahhhhs" when people saw my title ("Illustrious Lord Joram Lionheart, Grandmaster Blacksmith").

Sorry, I must have misread the intent of your post, I thought you were saying that that sort of long hard path toward achiving GMhood was a bad thing.

At least in regards to the crafting skills, if it is easy to do, lots of people will do it, the market becomes saturated and oversupply makes the skill effectivly less valuable.

I keep thinking about the suggestion of capping the character slots at 2 or 3 per account instead of the current 5, this is an idea I have disliked greatly in the past, but really it might make for the best thing. If nothing else it should cut down on the oversupply of crafters we currently have and perhaps make it possible for someone to make an ingame living off just running a shop. While running a shop is not something I currently want to do, it was a hugely rewarding experince early on in my UO career.

Eldric wrote:Sorry, I must have misread the intent of your post, I thought you were saying that that sort of long hard path toward achiving GMhood was a bad thing.

It was. But you made it sound like I didn't care about BEING a GM smith. The problem was that the journey was not nearly as satisfying as the destination. A game should provide enjoyment throughout the entire process and not only after the task is completed (i.e. the task of becoming a GM smith should not have been such a burden). The OSI system is fundamentally flawed in that the character creation process is dreaded instead of looked forward to. People perform mindless, repetitive tasks because they want to be GM whatever, not because the tasks themselves are enjoyable. That's why so many people opt for macroing.

At least in regards to the crafting skills, if it is easy to do, lots of people will do it, the market becomes saturated and oversupply makes the skill effectivly less valuable.

That's why you need to limit people's options. As it is right now, you can cover ALL tradeskils there are and still have all classes of characters you want to play.

I keep thinking about the suggestion of capping the character slots at 2 or 3 per account instead of the current 5, this is an idea I have disliked greatly in the past, but really it might make for the best thing.

If the purpose is to limit the number of tradeskills each player can personally benefit from, wouldn't it make more sense to do just that? to limit the tradeskill options instead of limit the character-class options? If there is a way to cap tradeskills and not cap character slots below 3, I think we should be exploring that option more carefully. Worse comes to worse, we cap character slots at 2 per account but it'd be so much better if we can avoid doing that.

While running a shop is not something I currently want to do, it was a hugely rewarding experince early on in my UO career.

That makes two of us. I think we're missing a HUGE part of the UO experience by denying players the opportunity to successfully run their own self-sustaining player market.

Just to add in my 2 cents worth...

While I can see the point about limiting trade skills, I would be heartbroken to give up even one of my characters, let alone 2 or 3. One of the things I love best about WoD is being able to explore lots of different skills and playing strategies. Right now, I have a mage, a mage-hybrid, a fighter, a fighter-hybrid, and a crafter. I would be absolutely devastated to lose even one of them. I could live with limiting trade skills per account if it's possibe (and would probably even admit that's a good idea), but would rather leave things as they are then lose characters, if it's not possible. I'd like the idea of adding more trade skills better.

Please... *begs shamelessly* Please do not limit the character slots...

Eldric wrote:

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 .

never set foot in ackadia so it seems unlikely i would have friends there other than felix and a few other old time wodders that is.

I just thought of something along the lines of a "non-soloable" dungeon. There is only one way that a dungeon will be "unsoloable" and that's if every monster in there dishes out one-hit kills. If this is not the case, someone will FIND a way to solo it.

If this dungeon was made, you would need AT LEAST 10 people to go through it and VERY slow at that. Death cries would ring out left and right yet there would always be someone left to res the rest of the group.

Add some really nifty rewards, (like a serpent pilar deed or something for beating the spawn boss,) and this almost sounds like fun, as long as you don't mind dying reapeatedly and death taxes.

Ehran wrote:

Eldric wrote:

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 .

never set foot in ackadia so it seems unlikely i would have friends there other than felix and a few other old time wodders that is.

Heh, I see I had a not so small typo in there, what I was trying to say was:

It might be intresting if some of our 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.

I am fairly sure there are at least a few people who play on both shards, I think ackadia has a smaller player base than us (could easily be wrong), if they have a well running player economy we probably should be able to as well.

On Ackadia, there are two major items which I believe make a big difference in the "player" economy. Now granted I wasn't there very long, so if what my memory has recorded is wrong, please let me know.

1) Each account is limited to only one character. That is it. It doesn't take long to see how that would affect the player economy. You have to pick your skills very carefully based on what you want to be. Because you aren't gonna have other characters to spread the skills over.


2) They have what they call "glowies". Glowies are magical tools targeted for each individual crafting skill. There is one type of glowy for each skill. Once you have created an "exceptional" item, you can use a "glowie" to make it "magical". The magical properties transferred to the "exceptional" item are random, sort of like Benson. However, there are several levels of glowies. For example, "a lesser tinker tools" all the way to "a apocalyptic tinker tools" with several levels in between. The higher the glowie, the better the item has a chance to be. However, you can fail using the glowie, and if you do, it kills you. The higher your skill level is, the higher level of glowie you can do successfully. Most times. But there is always a chance you can die. hehe

Thanks for that information Tristian.

If you can remember, on a day to day type basis how well, or not, did it work out.

IE, you just looked at your equipment and its about to fall apart, is it a simple matter of going to a well known smith shop and getting it fixed, or does it take 5 message board posts over 3 days to get the job done. Yes, both those alternatives are probably extreem, hehe.

Eldric,
It, in my memory, seemed to work rather well. Although they do have a smaller player base, players tended to specialize in tradeskills different from what others had, simply so they could help if someone had a need for that particular skill. Now they do have some issues with this setup. Just like here with our magical items, you still have players who keep a horde of items stored. It overall seemed to work well though. Mostly because it is a lot harder to be self-sufficient. You had to use other players for help.

Oh, almost forgot your first question, It did not seem to take very long to have someone around to help. On rare occasions, it would be a couple of days, but I really didn't have any trouble getting help.

only one i agree with is .


a totaly shard wipe all items and charecters ,nake everone start fresh with just there account.