the votes are in...

Miracle · August 2018

I agree with Mene_Drachenfels. My 2 Castles will keep as they are.

Thanks to those people who voted for their Guildmates without checking the designs...

I think the winning Castles / Keeps will keep mostly unused. There a lots of better designs! Please give us 32x32 Custom plots! Or give the Designers the chance to use their own Contest Castle!

It's a shame what people do! I've spend a lot of time to design a complex and fantasyfull Elven Castle. How can it be that an empty plot is on the 4th place and my Castle that nearly everybody I spoke to liked, is not even in the top 40??? That smells like Guildvoting!

Another point is the stupid voting system. 300 Castles / Keeps in a list. We need to click a button behind every entry to gate to the location of it?! Is there no way to put all designs in a row where we all could walk throu and see them all togerther befor we make our vote?

Sorry for my harsh words, but this is crap!

jaytin · August 2018

I agree with you, I just feel so angry and upset at how this went, the Devs should know that in UO human nature spoils everything. Sad.

Captain_Lucky · August 2018

It's just human nature. No one can design your perfect home. It's a very personal issue. It just can't be done. At the very least it would need to be something I could build up like the masonry on the current castles. That's where most designs have a real deal breaker. I pretty much resigned myself when they first announced this whole thing and built up my castle as best I could adding complete floors to the second and third story, I can live with that. But I'm VERY disappointed with the approach they took with this. I can appreciate the work that went into some of these and find them beautiful but it would never work for me. Well the open plot would be cool

I'd be behind that 100%. They'd rather let the game die than listen to us though. I still don't believe they addressed the issue of terrain blocking items. That issue alone will knock half the people outta using new designs even if they wanted to. If one can place the current design there they should have a system to allow the new design to go there. I don't think a newly placed castle should be allowed to go where a castle wouldn't go before but they need to do something. The poll I saw it was like 80%+ weren't interested in the new designs so it's probably beating a dead horse anyway. Then knock off another percentage for not being able to replace and old design with a new one because of terrain. I can't even talk about this lol. I get so upset over how this was handled lol

Cetric · August 2018

I know without a doubt someone utilized many, many active accounts to move theirs to the top of the list. I dunno how you combat that. Devs should just take note of the nice designs and make their own. Something that fits with the spirit of up and the classic houses of expectation.

jaytin · August 2018

What? UO and cheating in the same sentence? I thought the point was to make a new layout that people would want, not to make your own vision and then vote for yourself multiple times.

Miracle · August 2018

It would be also a good idea to have 5-10 new designs with different Styles after the Contest. Something Like Elves, Gargoles, Water Castles a.s.o. So we all would have a real choice what kind of Castle we would like to have... But now we can choose the flavor of the ****...

Skett · August 2018

Not sure how that **** got through the filter @Miracle ;
but ya I agree add more prebuilts but better yet just give customizable 32x32 lots

Lady_Storm · August 2018

In hind site..it would have been better had a set land with plots already assigned spots been offered for sight seeing after completion and a gate system to see ...

I only was able to see a few castle and keep renderings and none were worth the second look. I saw personally made.. meaning what would be good for them alone,,,,

I have great respect for architecture persons who take a shell and mold it to fit many peoples taste..

Bravo to those who choose different stone and were colorful...

Many tried A symmetry, great idea but we sometimes forget the west/north side is not easy to be seen and would be best to not fit this method of building.

Many of you put in tons of tiny rooms...and others tossed in huge large 1 room floors...many put in stairs....these are the bane of every players existence! Don't get me wrong a set of them do wonders in deco...but the placement on many was the major drawback to the house.

I also want a rooftop... this has always been a big plus even when it took me a rune to get up there! (yes 97 you needed a rune up as the top floor back then was not a written no no but GMS were not happy about it.) I did find the east side door and planting/portch a great idea Real castles had sally ports at ground lvl as a sneaky escape point....

No this idea was not well thought out on the Dev side... but then again they do have tons of work on their hands..

Hopefully ill be able to do a set of keep and castle to give it a try...

GucciCoochie · August 2018

lol... just as I expected, the most unusable designs made their way to the top.

Andrasta · August 2018

I think we should just be allowed to customize our own castles & keeps. I don't really see any reason that this couldn't be implemented.

Bilbo · August 2018

At this point I am all for allowing Castles and Keeps to be customized as IMHO we will never get an open floor Castle/Keep like we have been asking for all these years.

Kronal · August 2018

Cetric said:

I know without a doubt someone utilized many, many active accounts to move theirs to the top of the list. I dunno how you combat that. Devs should just take note of the nice designs and make their own. Something that fits with the spirit of up and the classic houses of expectation.

Let me start off by saying I'm not a fan of someone being able to use 60 accounts to get their design selected. With that said it is NOT cheating. The devs put forth the rules. The devs created a system that would dilute the votes (300 choices is foolish and alllowed this to occur). All this person did (if in fact they did) was use his/hers resources to accomplish a goal. Good for them. I'm also glad they are keeping 60 accounts active and doing more than their share to keep UO funded!

Bilbo · August 2018

And all 60 of those accounts were paid for, they were not free accounts so where the hell is the "cheating" people. Stop with the damn cheating bull crap.

Tim · August 2018

After reading this thread I can see why the developers didn't really want to touch castle/keep designs.
Yes as in the real world democracy sucks, they let the wrong people vote and they voted the wrong way. So unless you can make constructive suggestions on how to make the process better for everyone calm down. If you don't like the winners no one is forcing you to use one.

If you haven't written me off as a troll (I'm not) I would like to make some points

First to all the entrants thanks for your effort and I hope you had fun.
If you insist on a European castle look first tell me why in a world of mages, dragons etc anyone would bother building easily destroyed walls. Half the monsters in the game could go over or though any castle wall ever built.
I believe the developers have indicated that customization of a lot the size of a keep is beyond the capabilities of the existing core program and I believe them. I sometimes get lag going by a 18X18 let alone even a modestly decked out castle.
UO is a game who's only purpose is to have fun. I had fun helping with the wife's entry (292) and looking forward to doing my own next time. I just wish there had been a way to get some feed back.
I really enjoyed seeing what other players could come up with and will be stealing some of their ideas next time.
If 4 & 5 do not apply to you sorry please go back to what you were doing before the contest.
Just to be clear none of the winners rock my boat but congrats to them anyway. My taste in buildings like my sense of humour is not for everyone.

MissE · August 2018

If they can put customizable castles/keeps on test center then there is absolutely NO reason they can't let us do em on regular shards. There were a LOT More castles place on TC then there ever would be on live shards as they opened up a lot of areas on TC that wont take castles on live.

The result was seriously disappointing.

Soldahouse · August 2018

Tim said:

UO is a game who's only purpose is to have fun.

I had a blast running around looking at every house, taking notes, screen shots, making my own house. There was like 30 different plots that blew my mind and it was really hard to narrow it down to just 3. I did go back and revisit the top 20. that gave me an idea of what uo players want and it broke my heart. it made me realize that what I like isn't anything that others might like, but that is ok. I really hope that some of you great amazing builders will continue to make your awesome houses. I know that im discouraged and don't want to make something that I could never have. I really hope others don't feel the same. What Tim said is something I think we all need to remember. "UO is a game who's only purpose is to have fun" enjoy all

Shelly · August 2018

Re-posting this from the other forum because it's spot on.

I will preface this post with this: I didn't submit a design and I barely use my castle (since I primarily play on a different shard now than it is located) and don't have a keep, so I don't have much of a dog in this race. I started to build something, but between the crashing and the other demands on my time, it just wasn't worth it. Building a custom castle for a contest caught my interest and attention from the very first announcement (a year and a half ago...), but I wasn't able to give it my best effort and that's my problem and no one else's.

I highly doubt I will be converting my castle to either of the winning castle designs (assuming these are the final winners). They just aren't to my taste as is, and I will leave my criticisms of the designs at that.

However, I'm not disappointed in the results of this contest--because my expectations were set by everything that led up to this. This contest has been consistently unthought and ill-communicated from the very beginning, and every step has been painful and wasteful of player and dev time. No part of this contest seems to have been operated with any kind of forward planning, critical thought, or quality control. It's been so consistently poorly executed that I have actually wondered if it was being deliberately mishandled for some reason.

And so I reiterate:

I used to be against castle customization, but this contest has changed my mind.

I'd rather walk past the odd crystal Borg cube or lava/swamp/waterfall monstrosity than watch this train keep wrecking and players continuing to be disappointed over and over again.

I got genuinely excited for this contest when it was first announced, and that is really the worst part of all of this for me because ultimately it has done more to erode my faith in UO than just about anything else I can think of (and I can think of some doozies)... the sheer mundanity and obviousness of failure of vision and logical planning is deeply discouraging and bodes poorly for the game's future. This contest should have been an easy slam dunk, not a painful exercise in confusion and time-wasting. It could have been done.

Rather than recount an exhaustive breakdown of everything that went wrong, let's posit what SHOULD have happened:

Some kind of castle/keep customization tool should have been available BEFORE the contest was announced. That could have been what we had on Test Center. It could have been a standalone utility or even an emulator given provisional approval for this purpose. It should NOT have been guesswork, photoshop, or graph paper and happy thoughts.
Only AFTER the tool was ready and tested (or at least CLOSE to ready) should there have been an official announcement. This announcement needed to include, FROM THE BEGINNING:
- A clear deadline for entry.
- Clear and reasonable criteria and rules. For example:
  - A theme: for the first contest, for example, only actual castles/keeps of classic UO building materials would be permitted. Future contests could include Tokuno, gargoyle, or other materials, but an initial narrow focus would simplify selection and probably result in higher quality comparablestructures. If possible, adjust the aforementioned tool to only include permissible materials each time the contest is run to eliminate any doubt.
  - All floors and rooms must be accessible by foot. Teleporter tiles allowed, but not as the only means to reach a given area.
  - Building must be structurally sound and complete. No missing corners or dangling floor tiles or stairways to nowhere, etc.
  - No unwalkable flooring tiles (water, swamp, lava).
  - No non-housing tool pieces should be visible in the final design. No furniture, no deco, no ladders, no crafted stone addons, etc.
  - At least 75% of the plot must contain structure. Lawn or empty plot may make up no more than 25% of the ground level of the plot.
  - Materials used together should be complimentary in the vein of classic UO art and buildings.
  - Entries should be designed with general use in mind to offer players the most versatility if the design is chosen.
  - Entries must be in good taste and conform to the TOS. I think this is the only rule they actually had. It's good, but insufficient.
- Clear standards for what buildings would or would not be eligible for conversion upon contest completion. Some people waited a year and a half in anticipation only to find out at the last minute that the rock in their courtyard would keep them from being able to convert anyway.
Entries should be as anonymous as possible, but possible for anyone to view in full.
A panel of judges would choose three castles and three keeps.
- Devs would be best, and (hopefully) the most impartial.
- Alternatively, I would suggest EMs, imperfect though that may be. They should, ideally, not know whose entry was whose. They should definitely not be judges if they or anyone in their family or closest circle of fellow players made the cut.
- Alternatively, if player voting is considered a must (which I could understand from the perspective of players wanting to participate in the selection):
  - All invalid and low-quality entries should be eliminated, leaving only high-quality valid ones for perusal. Around 10 or so would be pretty good, unless there was just an incredible output of amazing work.
  - There should be one stone for castles and one for keeps, and each account gets one vote on each one. With a strong purge of invalid entries, what is left should be high enough quality that even if voting shenanigans occur, which they will (please see the endless drama from governor system for more details), at least we'd end up with something decent.
  - The best way to vote for this, actually, would probably be for the voting to take place within the house sign of an actual prodo castle or keep. If you have a castle, you can vote, one time, for a castle design. If you have twenty castles, you can vote twenty times for a castle design. This would ensure that the people most invested in an alternative design would be the ones choosing rather than people voting for their friends or whoever paid them the most, or a pack of trolls picking the worst thing they could (which could easily happen, and I'm surprised didn't). I don't know how feasible that is programming-wise but it would surely cut down the vast majority of the voting problems.

I'm sure that could be elaborated upon for further clarity or adjusted for practical behind-the-scenes considerations I am unfamiliar with, but you get the idea. Preparation before launch and clarity throughout. Yes, there would still be complaints. There will always be complaints. But with enough clarity up front there is less room for them, and probably less validity unless something truly messed up is happening.

This could have been done so much better. But I'm not disappointed, because that implies I expected better than was delivered. At this point and on this topic, I didn't.

So I say yes, customization for all, because this contest as executed has been a huge expenditure of both player and dev time for a highly debatable result and a lot of disappointment and anger. To be done well, something like this requires a lot of thought and effort and coordination and dev time, and frankly I think that time is better spent elsewhere given the small minority of players affected by alternate castle/keep design possibilities.

jaytin · August 2018

Kyronix replied already to a request for customisable castle plots in the test centre forum...

Kyronix said:
Skett said:
Can we please get customizable castle and keep lots on all shards
There's an enormous performance tradeoff when the server has to stream every object in a house multi (which is what happens in a custom house) as opposed to loading it from the client that you already have downloaded (which is what happens in the pre-fab houses). Because of this custom castle and keep plots are not likely to be seen outside of TC.

Lady_Storm · August 2018

Wait a damn second..... reread the post by Kyronix.

Might I point out every shard with the exception of Atlantic is now near empty but for the few places you can put one of these buildings Keeps and Castles are the majority of the dwellings there! How in the world can the loading of custom built anything drain on servers when there is little but those Castles and Keeps???

And you cant tell me if every square inch on shard was custom houses of any size wouldn't put the same load on the same servers.

Wake up and smell the coffee Kyronix. Some of us know the limits of servers and the equipment. We are not dumb or so lite in the noodle to not know when smoke is blowing up our skirts.

I know for a fact after listening to Mesanna at many of the MEET &GREETS the major down side to allowing a custom Castle or Keep is the threat of a "BORG CUBE" and the pain in the neck complaints that will follow. I cant blame her or any of you for not wanting this. I have seen a few of these cubes and the hideous sight they make along with the troubles it makes for neighbors

Let's face it... a plot will never be granted so this voting bit on someone's pet building is the point of fact here. When I think of a castle or keep I imagine something close to the original but with a few changes to room placement, doors, use of teleporter's and stairs in the right place.

On keeps the unused area's should be dolled out to enlarge the back rooms get rid of the stairs and add in doors... the top rooms to the tower points without the stairs can be nice size work rooms or what ever you like... See small changes make it a new place.

Mesanna pointed out this is 1 of many design opportunity's to get a chance at adding your design to the tool for the rest of us. I'd like to see a gate to a designated area for viewing and voting.

Shelly · August 2018

jaytin said:

Kyronix replied already to a request for customisable castle plots in the test centre forum...

Kyronix said:
Skett said:
Can we please get customizable castle and keep lots on all shards
There's an enormous performance tradeoff when the server has to stream every object in a house multi (which is what happens in a custom house) as opposed to loading it from the client that you already have downloaded (which is what happens in the pre-fab houses). Because of this custom castle and keep plots are not likely to be seen outside of TC.

That makes sense...though I wish it weren't true!

Still, what Ry posted holds true...I am usually the one waving her pom-poms but this contest has really disappointed me from the very beginning. I have so much faith in our team but after this it's wavering just a little bit....I hope they learn from this and make things different for the next one.

~Larisa
(sorry my main acct is down right now!)

Lady_Storm · August 2018

By the way............

The change to the tool or the house menu wont happen for a long time.... so this argument is rather early in the process..

cobb · September 2018

lot of salty ppl here because their designs didnt win

Bilbo · September 2018

It is not because their design didn't win but more to the fact that the designs that did win are worse floor plans than what we already have.

ZekeTerra · September 2018

No winners yet. Field is down to 40 and the winners are yet to be selected.

Miracle · September 2018

If server lag is the problem, they should do a better caching and pre buffering in the client. We already have a lot of trouble with items placed in the 18x18 houses combined with the custom designs and vendors working in the house (Go to Atlantic, Malas-Luna to see what I mean). It puts a high load to the servers and a lot of lag to the clients by passing by these houses. Houses will not be redesigned every 5 minutes. So it would be easy to re-cache them on server down and send a package to the client on 1st start after server down (only for shards with charakters on checked by client config directory).

I had the chance to talk to Mesanna as she checked every top 40 Castle. And she was telling me nearly the same as Kyronix told us in the forums. So we will never get this on the live servers.

But here is what I think a live customization tool should look like (for all custom design houses):

1st: A limit should be applied with some kind of theme pre selection before start designing

(Elven, Gargoyle, Old Style a.s.o. So the designer can only use this parts...)

2nd: There should be also a limit what kind of parts can be used

(Example: 15 Moving parts like doors, waterfalls ...)

3rd: They should limit the tiles count a bit more then done on the TC

(It was possible to nearly fill the Castle to the top with walls)

4th: There sould be a static calculation. Every 5 floor parts needs an wall below.

(More realistic designs!)

5th: A button for reporting a troll house to the GMs should be placed in the house sign

(After 3 Reports from different players a GM will check if it is against the rules and the owner gets a time to change it before it will be cleaned up to an empty plot with a filled moving create.)
6th: Houses need a better limit for Lockdowns and Vendors.
(Maybe the vendor system should be changed to the same style as the npc vendor system?! So we just need 1 up to 4 vendors to get all in! And not 20 in a row!) Btw. change the vendor costs to the eBay style. They cost more than we earn with on DF!

Any more ideas, to help creating a better customization system that would make 32x32 plots possible without killing the servers??

@cobb : No it's not. Sure I had a nice design I would like to see on the live shards. But there were other design, better than mine... I have 2 Castles and want a cool new style for that! Because the old castle design has a lot of sharp edges that has to be smoothened. I think everybody here will agree, that we need more cool designes for castles and keeps. And if I take a look of the top 3... This will not help to change anything. I think most people that placed a vote for the winners, will not use this design for their castles or don't have an castle and so they don't care about what is winning in the end.

MissE · September 2018

ZekeTerra said:

No winners yet. Field is down to 40 and the winners are yet to be selected.

???? explain .... thought the voting was finished.

JollyJade · September 2018

MissE said:

ZekeTerra said:

No winners yet. Field is down to 40 and the winners are yet to be selected.

???? explain .... thought the voting was finished.

They added new rules after they did not like the outcome of the voting...

It's hidden somewhere deep in the wiki and was never announced. BS will just pick some winners from top 40 as they see fit.

At least that's the rules we got today.. could change tomorrow of course..

Minerva_Foxglove · September 2018

I went back and looked at the list of 40.. and not sure how I missed it but there is one that I actually could live in! Classic stone, good space for craftin gand garden beds as well as storage and deco. Congrats Gucci for your TMC castle, I guess my three votes hadnt made much difference anyways

jaytin · September 2018

I liked the Gucci one too, fingers-crossed for that....

ZekeTerra · September 2018

Thanks for liking my castle. The original version had a water moat but I was given some feedback that since you can't put anything on water tiles it was wasted space so I changed it to grass instead (though I really liked the water). I wish there had been a way to give castle builders feedback before the voting process because some of the designs just had some small issues that could have been remedied easy. Maybe they should let us put up a bulletin board or something during the next contest.

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Cheers MissE

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