Why have skills been allowed to become 'Useless"?

crunchnasty

All skills should have some utility and usefulness in the game, otherwise its just allowing the game to partially die. Can anything be done?

http://www.uoguide.com/Useless_Skill ;

Thanks @InLor for the link.

I originally brought up Item ID as a partially useless skill, although it has been brought to my attention that u can use it to find out if u can unravel certain items. It would be so cool if some of the useless skills could be revamped in order to help create new templates.

Bilbo

Begging is used at Halloween events so it is not usless
Camping is used to insta log out in the wild and could prove to be more useful in Fel than Tram
Taste ID IDs potions.Not sure if it is still useful
Forensic Eval  Never used it so cant say

Ivenor

I believe there isn't an omnicomprensive answer to the OP question. UO is one of the most complex gameworld ever created. Maybe some skill simply got "forgotten" in the succession of dev teams that worked on UO in 20 years form its launch; maybe in the real world of limited resources there are priorities; maybe some skills are planned to be made useful but they haven't had their "occasion" yet; maybe some skill (e.g., Begging at Halloween) are best suited to be useful only in some particular setting; maybe UO (being a sandbox game) has been consciously thinked ab initio with some "slack" in its structure to allow for future possibilities that has not been yet thinked (the "unknown unknown" ); maybe the players themselves destroyed the possibilities of make some skill useful (this interview by Richard Garriott on "Players - VS - UO Ecology" is still a must see).
I.
BTW: Let's see how much it will take to some of the Forum "Resident Griefers" to post that "it is all to blame to Devs laziness/incompetence/death wish" und so weiter... )

Cookie

Forensic Evaluation is used for the Honesty Virtue.

Taste ID, is useful for looted potions in Felucca when they fail to stack, you can ID them to get them to stack. Actually the most used skill on my crafter, who is max in all crafting skills. (This sort of points to how useless the rest of crafting has become).

I do agree there should be more content for some of these skills - especially pvm rogue styles - and crafters (v legendary equipment) - and spell-casters in pvm (v sampires and tamers).

I think useless templates bug me more than useless skills as such, it's a whole level up.

Mervyn

There are also useless spells,

Arch protection, does nothing that protection doesn't do as far as I can tell.

Mass curse (doesn't drop the resists of players)

Exorcism.