IT'S AMAZING!! BUY IT NOW!!

[kyra]

I sometimes wish we spent as much time enjoying the game we play, as is spent complaining about it ... or pointing out what's wrong with it.

As for blues & reds together? I've heard this so many times. One of the things I've loved most about UO is that I have options. I can go to fel and play with the reds when I want to. Or I can stay in tram and putz around doing whatever I want, without being attacked by the bands of people who will decide that just going around killing anything in sight is a great way to have fun.

Weapon skill alone can't determine who's a target and who's not. Many mages have no weapon skill. Tamers ... usually don't.

I've been personally smacked by some of UO's bugs ... but usually I see them fixed in a short time (the ones that can be easily fixed anyway). Others are more complicated ... and I expect they'll take longer. I woke up one morning to discover that every item in my house had "poofed" ... did I forget to secure everything? No ... it was a UO bug when ML first came in. And yep ... it was devastating. But KD reminded me that all of that is just 'stuff' ... it's not why I'm here ... and it's not why I love uo. Did that ruin the game for me? Surprisingly not. I showed up for the event the next night ... went out with my friends ... and laughed just like always.

Do I care if Joe-the-Joke has 80mil in his bank? Nah. I can earn money too. Does it matter if Jake-Snake sells his gold on ebay? Not to me. But it might matter to someone who can't afford to invest the time in gold-farming ingame and decides to spend their ingame time with friends instead. So they buy ... they play ... they're happy. And Jake gets money in the bank. Maybe Jake wouldn't be able to play UO without it. Is all of this good for UO? I don't know ... I'm sure that will be debated for years to come.

Fixing everything that's wrong in any Company takes a lot of time and money. That's what priorities are about. I like to think that UO does what they can ... with what they have ... and they still keep it affordable for me and many others to be able to play the game. So I figure it's all good.

I'm not saying you're wrong to feel the way you do ... we all have a right to feel the way we do. Just expressing how I try to look at it.

[PrinceCaspian]

and yet no comment what so ever on what i wrote so there fore omg i must be right...lol

LOL I'm sorry. I'll get on that.

[PrinceCaspian]

now PC here goes on you after you get done doing all of that and making the game uber awesome im still gonna be complaining about the graphics and the fact that i lag everyday all day what are you gonna do about that then we wont even discuss how much your gonna raise the amount to play cause though your ideas are awesome at this point i pay 12.99 per an account and lets count them up i have o wait 7 accounts so this translates to $90.93 per a month that i play and i have quite a few friends who have even more accounts than that so the more i play the more i pay just dont cut it i can go play wow for 19.99 a month and have as many characters as i want and on as many shards/servers as i want(or so im told) so lets discuss how much your gonna raise the amount that i have to play cause if its more than o say 13.00 an account honey you just lost my business and more than likely alot of other people will also quit playing

Well, there will always be items to complain about. And yes, these changes will probably raise your monthly fees.

But I am sorry, the bottom line is simply this:
People are getting away with blatant cheating in this game and very little seems to be being done about it.
Why should I play legit when people cheat? And I must say it DOES affect me, because upper end item's I would like to buy are so far out of my price range it's not even funny. Why? Because 5% of people in this game have hundreds of millions, most of it probably from duping. And that 5% affects all of us profoundly.

You see, this is my point. Kyra, you say that Joe Cheater's gold duping doesn't affect you. Counterfeiting money ALWAYS affects you if you are using gold for currency. Every time someone successfully counterfeits money, be it in a game or reality, it's the rest of the consumers who end up paying for the shortfall.

[Sir William]

Well said Kyra. I fully agree with you.

PC....one website I browsed said this "EA is not going to do anything because over 75% of there subscriptions are cheaters.......In the end EA is a company and profits come before customer service." Unfortunatly this is the way the world works (Money rules all). We pay a cheap price compared to other online games hence we get cheap service. "Ya get what you pay for."

I can see were your coming from PC but another way to look at it is ......How can you really prove that someone is duping.....they could have just been lucky and found a really easy way to get the particular item.......Example of this would be Tokuno arties - Most people did not get more than 10 or so......but a few got 100s of them.....Yes that looks like a possible dupe going on but the problem is some people have nothing better to do then play UO all day. I'm not saying the cloaks are not dupes and I'm not saying they are....I'm just saying that they may have found a monster that drops them often and they just happen to be able to kill that monster very quickly so they decided heck I'm gonna stay home for a few days and farm these guys.

In short there is no way to prove someone is dupeing otherwise it would have been taken care of(like the 100mil gold checks). And inorder to fix the problem it would require a ton of money hence raising monthly rates NOT AN OPTION.

And the reason they do not talk about the problems publicly is because it gives thier compition an opening to steal thier buisnes......"Come play our game we don't have a problem with dupeing"....Ya get my point....

Another reason they keep silent could be ....would you telll the public that you are having a problem or would you keep it silent untill you fixed the problem. If you keep it silent then it is limited to a few people doing it. If you make it public all of a sudden you have a ton of people trying to figure out how to do it before it gets fixed so they can cash in on the mistake.

Thats my two cents on the subject.

EDIT:

As far as the millions of gold that a few people have.....try this on for size....a while back I discovered a way to get 100k-150k and hour....10hr day = 1 mil.....ok I'm stupid and I figured this out imagine what the smart people have figured they could probably pull in 300-400k an hour......Now add this to someone who has nothing better to do but sit around and play UO 14hrs a day.......In one year they could easily have 509million. And yes there are people like this I know a guy that all he does is play video games 14hrs a day 7 days a week 365 days a year.

[Tracy]

Reminds me of the South Park episode "Make Love, Not Warcraft."

Anyway, the colored unblessed shrouds ARE dupes. Period. There is no legitimate way to get them in game, and never has been. The legit ones are blessed. And I've never heard of a colored blessed shroud either. I'm pretty sure the only legit ones are black and blessed.

[kyra]

Prince,

I would never say it doesn't affect me. What I said, was that it doesn't matter to me. It doesn't change my experience with UO. I play for the fun I have with friends ... and I'd expect you'd find quite a few who play for that same reason.

I'm sorry it's been so frustrating for you. But I guess it's a choice ... I can let all that make me crazy and angry ... or I can play, have fun, and do the best I can with what I have. For me, that's enough : )

I hope you can find a peace with all of this.

[KDSonoma]

Brianna beat me to most of the logical stuff, but basically, your tenure at the top lasted about 2 weeks ... forcing those changes on players lost u 80% of your fans ... so before u took over UO was making the shareholders a nice profit, maybe 10% on their investment ... now revenue is down 80%, and costs are up 30% before the shard reduction, so that prob breaks even with the 30% rise in costs.

And if u think Im joking about losing 80% of the fan base .... realize I was the leader of the Sonoma Alliance, 23 guilds strong, all of the top 10 guilds in Sonoma, representing about 2,000 players or more among those guilds.

And the month before tram was born .... we took a vote, each of us polled our members, and asked them how much longer they anticipated playing UO under the current forced pvp rules of fel. Now realize too that MOST of the SA were the antipks, way more active in pvp than PAS.

The result: 100% of those guilds replied that anywhere from 70-100% of their members were ready to quit ASAP unless UO did something about forced pvp.

Now this is beyond other issues like room for housing and other issues.

UO was about to end .... and then tram was born ... and all those guilds stayed active in fel and then also in tram.

If UO had waited two more months, I know I was going to quit, it was ridiculous to force pvp on someone if the game involved so mnay other aspects to enjoy.

I didnt want them to remove pvp, just give us other options.

And guess what? UO gms confirmed to me that the first yr of tram, 80% of the players online each night were on tram ... only 20% were in fel.

So that backed up the SA gms statements in my book.

And the players in UO are still an 80/20 split. If you forced all the players to vote pvm or pvp, not either, 80% would vote pvm.

So it prob would take 3-4 weeks for the u know what to hit the fan and have corporate EA realize that they lost 80% of their customers.

And u know whos head rolls first? Yours, and u would go down as the biggest goober in online gaming ... they would have your name in the history books ... dont pull a "Prince Caspian"! they will say. *grins*

There is no way the majority of players would put up with the changes u recommend, even if they were done fairly slowly.

Forcing blues and reds together (forced pvp) was tried by UO, and it worked for awhile, but then it crashed and burned. Neither UO, not EA, would be crazy enough to even let anyone try it, under any circumstances.

And that was my point, u would be gone, whoever followed u would be told to make a profit, so the first things to go would be all the staff u hired ... then more of the staff ... then more ... because after all, UO is prob 90% salaries, 10% hardware etc.

Thats if they didnt just pull the plug and say "ok lets move on to other projects".

My two cents anyways, and sorry to come across so negative ... but Ive heard these things since year two in UO, and while they seem logical on the surface, they dont stand a chance to be successful due to past history.

We should learn from history and then try new approaches that havent been tried and failed before.

KD

[PrinceCaspian]

Brianna beat me to most of the logical stuff, but basically, your tenure at the top lasted about 2 weeks ... forcing those changes on players lost u 80% of your fans ... so before u took over UO was making the shareholders a nice profit, maybe 10% on their investment ... now revenue is down 80%, and costs are up 30% before the shard reduction, so that prob breaks even with the 30% rise in costs.

That's OK, I was hired on with a golden parachute! 10 million severence pay plus pension, and a house in the Bahamas with a bikini girl harem.

As an aside -- I used to work for Lucent, and we outside hired the new CEO, who made horrendous decisions and ran the company into the ground for a year before stepping down not making a cent out of the red, and he got a 30 million golden parachute. Way to go. It only cost 40% of the company our jobs, and he did nothing but lose money and was a failure at his job in every way. I think I chose the wrong field.

And hey, I'd say these changes are not nearly as drastic as the AOS debacle where someone decided UO should be Diabolo.

[Tracy]

I remember an expansion a couple years back that effectively turned UO into Diablo, but it wasn't AOS, it was UO:AoI (Age of Items).

[Sir William]

Ok I have no clue what AOS or AOI stand for....

But Jr. if that is true and there is no way to get those items legit...then WTF!!!!!! I'm with PC DELETE THEM!!!!!!!!!!!........hmmm had a thought, could they be trying to catch the duper in action so they can learn the way he is dupeing them and then fix the problem and ban him??(Ya know basicly they know he is dupeing but they have no clue how he is doing it? So they want to catch him in action so they can learn how he does it) Anyone have any thoughts on this?

[PrinceCaspian]

Ok I have no clue what AOS or AOI stand for....

Age of Shadows was the birth of Malas plus the introduction of Paladins and Necromancers. Much needed land was offered for housing.

Ultima Online's combat system was completely overhauled. Remember that the game was packed with people who spent months and years to build their characters suddenly found most of their hard earned skills utterly worthless. The way damage was handled was totally revamped, making the best of armor obsolete overnight. Combat now was entirely item-based, not skill-based.

This was all done WITHOUT our notification or consent, but the big F-you of all was that it was an obvious rip-off of the Diabolo combat system. In a fantasy RPG like this, Combat is the biggest core component, and they completely redid it without any regard to what we thought.

Not only that, but the AOS was so buggy and the debut was so shoddy ([to the Oscar Meyer tune:] Our rollout has a first name! It's T-E-L-E! Our rollout has a second name, it's S-T-O-R-M!) that there were many cases of servers crashing and resetting, costing folks cherry placements.

All of this was so horrible that EA actually gave us AOS Items (like the roses and named clothing) as a semi-veiled APOLOGY that they screwed this up so bad.

At least that's how I remember it. Anyone else?

[Tracy]

Sounds familiar.

I remember working a scribe up to about 60 so I could make an endless supply of fire field scrolls, then casting them with my warrior (who at that time HAD to have 50 magery to recall around) so I could walk through them for resist gains.

Once I hit about 60, I started fighting liches, I spent a year there pretty much every day, and thought I was hot stuff when my dexxer had resisting spells at 90.

I then moved on to daemons and got my resist up to GM. As a warrior, I was the shiznit, mages couldn't kill me much...

Hmmm
Resisting spells used to resist umm...spells! You'd see a flamestrike that never hit you, because you resisted it...basically it used to do what evade plus resist does now for mage spells.

Lumberjacking bonus was killed, and Jr had gm lumberjack too...

So basically his template instantly needed rethinking.

[Darsus]

Ok, 1 thing PC, well PvP is mainly based on items but, my warrior has max resists, HAD 100 magic resist, and pretty good mods, BUT i still couldnt kill anyone, so, its not ALL ITEM BASED, SOME part on PVP is SKILL, not ALL Items, and as for the price, u can get armor for free, atries for free,(except for the cost of UO per month)any thing u need for free, all u need is a crafter, which isnt that hard, and u can get gold by doing CS(200k gold per champ) if u get a rat thats like roughly 200K in bout 20 mins, if u got enough people and they know what they doing, trust me, i made bout 1 mil on the first day of spawning, and if u get a PS say a 120 anything but stealth and a few others, sell it, u will make a lot of gold off it. thats what a lot of ppl do.......not saying thats what all ppl do, or that there is no dupers but thats how ive made bout 4-5 mil in bout a week or 2........spent it all but still.

[Darsus]

1 other thing, look at the UO Auto Patch Screen Thingy, it say 400 accounts banned, over 100k items were deleted, 1 trillion gold deleted...so there goes alot of dupers

[Haarken]

I have to agree duping has caused many an issue in the game and thus ebay'rs have made a killing but still it happens although we do not wish it to. I have wondered about the razor program that some of the zogs use now if we utuilized that we would be no better then they are but that is the only way they can even equal us in battle they have to cheat but give it time it will all come out in the wash......



Haarken
"We Hold the Line" -Sniper