HONESTY Virtue, does anyone know the Developers views on it ?

poppspopps Posts: 3,904
edited July 2020 in General Discussions
This Virtue, all it does is giving a discount when purchasing from NPCs which, in an inflated Ultima Online economy where everything goes for tens if not hundreds of millions of gold points and hardly anything is purchased from NPCs, seems to be a laughable advantage to want to achieve....

YET, and this is my point, for those very few players who might still want to gain this Virtue as it has been designed to gain, it is extremely hard and time consuming to raise....

Not only one has to take up skill points in an otherwise useless skill, Forensic Evaluation, but the items which one is supposed to gather are extremely hard to find (and thus time consuming), to my understanding only spawn once in a day (i.e., if they are picked it is necessary to wait for the next Server up from Maintainance to see them as respawned....), and the time it is needed to find the owner (assuming one has invested enough Forensic Evaluation skills on the template) is ridicolous especially with Towns very spread out like Yew, Trinsic, Moonglow, Vesper etc. etc.

And, as if it was not enough, the points gained with so much hardship and with a ridicolously high investment of time, can be drained (MANY dots !!!) in a single purchase from a NPC even for a low price item, say a rune or a few reagents or whatever since it is NOT possible to first invoke the Honesty Virtue for that one purchase that one wants to apply the special discount on, but it uses the Honest Virtue, automatically, on whatever purchase that character who built the Virtue does from a NPC....

And, at that point, one has to start it all over again to regain the Honesty Virtue which is a tedious and extremely time consuming process....

This basically means, that the character on which a player has built with harship and time the Honesty Virtue, need to NOT be used for any NPC purchase other then the one for which the player may want to get the special discount from... of course, over time one may forget, use that one character for a cheap item purchase and thus loose a lot of Honesty Virtue dots in the process.....

What was the point of the Developers, if I may ask, to make the particular mechanics for this one Virtue?

Because I fail to grasp it....

To me, as it is, it is useless, it is pointless to spend so much time to gain it, to have such a small advantage in comparison to the time invested, and, furthermore, when all that time investment can be lost in no time on a mistake, when that character does a little purchase for something cheap...

The Virtue dots are still taken away, destroying all the work done to raise it up....

Perhaps, just perhaps it would need a rework to something more advantageous to players ?

Comments

  • dvviddvvid Posts: 849
    Yeah sounds like it needs to be rethought.  Maybe just simply not losing dots on purchase would be enough. Dots would only go down over time or something. 
  • poppspopps Posts: 3,904
    edited July 2020
    Well, the changes I would like to see are : 

    1) - Substaintial increase of the spawn rate for the items to be returned ;

    2) - Whenever purchasing anything from a NPC, a question Gump (only for those characters having dots in this Virtue) asking whether they want to use their Virtue for that purchase. This way, only when wanted the dots would be lost;

    3) - Much reduced as what it is now the loss of the Virtue upon purchasing something from NPCs;

    4) - Possibly, some additional advantage as to only getting a reduction in purchasing price "one time" from NPCs.... something along the line of perhaps being able to get cheaper bribes (depending on the Virtue level) with Bulk Order Deeds bribing (this should be a permanent advantage though, not causing the loss of Virtue dots or causing only a very tiny, marginal loss of Virtue, or it would not be worth the time it takes to build the Virtue back up if for 1 BOD bribing one would loose too much Virtue...), being able to purchase some items from NPCs which normally are not up for sale, I do not know, something more that would justify more the expenditure of time a player would need to put into raising this Virtue....
  • poppspopps Posts: 3,904
    I mean, as it is now, it take hours of gameplay to gain the Virtue up/back for only a really marginal saving when shopping from a NPC.... in the hours (yes, and many hours too !!) that it takes to gain this Virtue up or back after losing dots from a purchase, one is way, but way much better off doing anything else in the game but working this Virtue up to get in that same time way more gold then the little saving a NPC would give for having this Virtue.... 
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