Suggestions for Season 2
- Congiarium is brilliant–it gives a flavor of the very early days of UO when players were underpowered
- Alternative currencies are great (legendary foe points in particular were a stroke of genius)
- Blackthorn’s gameplay loop is really fun (if maybe a little too easy at the end of the season)
- Treasure hunting is fun–antiquities and heirlooms are great rewards
- Inflation is relatively under control (although many items are bartered)
- House upkeep requires players to actually play the game
Suggestions for Season Two
More Housing Options
Housing is core to UO. The 25 tiles inside a small house are not enough to express your vision for a home. I suggest allowing individuals to own small stone workshops and small marble workshops (70 tiles if I’m counting correctly). I think it’s reasonable to also allow individuals to own small stone towers. There’s plenty of space left for housing, those extra 7 tiles in the footprint won’t be missed. Add some other houses to the guild system if needed.
To help the economy, you could require a gold upkeep payment to the city for the privilege. Alternatively, if you have the dev effort, you could add a new item created by crafters with high board / ingot cost that is consumed for upkeep. A home repair kit that requires 2500 ingots and boards. Maybe you could buy this for an exorbitant amount from NPC architects as a gold sink.
Maker’s Mark on Exceptional Items
I’m surprised this one isn’t fixed by now because I think it was mentioned very early on in the development of NL. It’s so painful to identify exceptionally crafted items. Exceptional items aren’t particularly useful at non-zero levels of the Congiarium, but during the first month they are. Now’s the time to fix it: allow GM crafters to mark exceptional items.
Scale Pet Base Damage with Congiarium Level
Warrior, archer and mage DPS scales with Congiarium level, but pets provide full damage. The only thing that prevents a tamer from doing Dragon Wolf level DPS at the zeroth Congiarium level is access to 100 legendary foe points. To fix this mismatch, I recommend scaling pet base damage with Congiarium level. Admittedly, this might be a tricky dev lift, but 50-75% at level zero sounds reasonable.
Improve Crafted Gear
The quality of exceptional gear should scale with Congiarium level. With how plentiful magic items are and how hard it is to craft exceptional armor, I’m not convinced exceptional gear should be worse. At the very least, exceptional gear should be one level behind the Congiarium. Ideally, it should be the same (with invulnerability / vanquishing gear only from legendary foes). Maybe there could a very rare chance to create exceptional gear with +1 resist cap -1 DCI to differentiate crafted gear. This might create demand for skilled crafters to make specific suits for specific fights. If you tie the resist to the ingot, then there’s also a reason for the mining gameplay loop.
Slow Congiarium Progression?
Personally, I think the game is most fun at the earlier Congiarium levels. You could consider slowing the progression to 45 days per level.
Staged Addition of Legendary Foes with Congiarium Level?
One of the best parts about early NL development was constant addition of new cool bosses. You could sort of re-create that feeling by tying some bosses to Congiarium level. For example, you could re-use Oaks, Mephitis, and Semidar and add them to overland T2A. I have a sneaking suspicion someone was planning Abyssal Infernal and Primeval Lich too. Add one per Congiarium level automatically so people have something to look forward to.
Comments
I started NL when it launched and quickly lost interest when the best item I could get was X of might/ruin or Y of guarding because everything is that much more of a grind. Especially when we are talking for magery and there isn't any LRC so reags become costly very quickly... needing to cast 5x more spells quickly starts to cut into the reagent supply. Knowing that I'd have to wait however long for things to level made it an easy choice to just sit on the sidelines not playing NL until the highest levels were available.
I picked NL back up in the past week and am having much more fun being able to do more stuff without a large party (ie treasure chests) given there is now Vanq level items.
Until there are enough crafters to repair items, we don't need to wait on someone to make items for us every other day.I
Or you want to go prodo method and everyone have a crafter and we don't interact.
l will get a line of people.
Are they calling out cities and bosses while I'm on vacation? I see few, other than I that will do it.
Thanks for repairing my guys once! They are returning in need of repairs.
Yea people are still giving the cities when asked in GenChat. I usually answer when I'm doing the cities but others do the same. It's the same for doing other bosses like CD/Ice/Vey/etc.
I think one improvement that should be implemented next season @Community Manager is there be some sort of location that gives status on world bosses...especially when we have to run to those locations. Perfect place would be BT Dungeon where all those orbs are now...have the orb lit when the boss is active and dark when it's not. Same thing with BT itself; give like a "60min until this begins" timer.... can't tell you how many times I log in and have no idea how long since Victor or BT was done and need to rely on people in chat (some guessing the time lol).
I'm not sure if the fractured veil event would be done again but if it is, same thing applies here... would be nice to now when I log in if we are on city 2 of 4 OR 4 of 4 OR Victor Blackthorn is up OR he was just killed 20min again and that won't happen for another 40min so find something else to do. This is probably the most common question I see in GenChat; "what town # was that" OR "how long ago was VB done?". The next one is probably "how long ago was BT done?" OR "anyone doing BT?". I think BT is the most tricky because people try to cherry pick (ie sneak) the Blizzard and General before anyone else gets there so they improve their chances at getting a desired drop.
Needs changed to the mechanics that the ones in prodo use. They say that no city is being invaded when there is no active invasion.
Spending time running to the Victor area is a cop out. Sorry. Put a rune obelisk in the sand if that is how you expect us to check the status.
Or put the braziers in Moonglow. That is cool how they light.
It would be handy if the town crier stopped calling us to a city once the gate to the harbinger from that city had closed.
While I appreciate the tip about the brazier lighting (very cool idea and I did NOT know that); I'd agree with Pawain and Petra that placing that in T2A where we need to run 5min to get there and run 5min to get back isn't a great design IMO... having it in a easy to recall spot just to check would be my preference because if I log in and want to "check the status" by running 5min to see the braziers; I might actually miss the Harry that might just have started before I logged in.
I can see your perspective for not adding something like "Crimson Dragon restarts in 23 min"; fair enough, but I do think for something like BT where it's 2hrs and change there should be some sort of status to when it will start given it's longer than an hour.... or going back to my original request, give us a quick/easy to see status of what is currently up. I've run through BT over a dozen times looking to see what Dreadguards are up... only for nothing to be up OR the PODs be the only thing up. Again, it becomes a waste of 10min in the case where BT is completely done.
Thanks again for the dialogue!