Dev Team Recommendations : Low Hanging Fruit
Our dev team has limited time. They need to continue to make an impact on the game to keep people engaged.
The lowest hanging fruit is to 'update' existing systems. There are any number of things people just don't do because the rewards are not worth it.
Lets take a quick example. Doom.
Here is a reward from doom :
This can literally be crafted and imbued. Its only 4 mods and none are over cap. In fact I can make one better because I could craft it with 100% damage type.
If you change this axe to look like this <:
People will come back to doom to try to get one. THis can't be that hard of an effort to make some simple mods to the item. Its got to be nothing but a couple of fields in a table.
There are hundreds of rewards that have fallen behind in today's loot that are near total wothlessness. Just update these and people will be back doing doom, back doing collections, back hunting marties. You name it.
The loot change put in a few years back basically killed 80% of the content and thus 80% of the people doing PvM. IT all gravitated to the roof.
I'd be more than happy to provide advice on these items and objects one by one if I knew the dev team would take the effort up to enhance. They don't need to be godly weapons - just something someone might use. The current axe of the heavens is pure junk.
Feel free to look at the list of doom arties. Which one would you ever use? Brace of health? Kights Breastplate?
https://uo.com/wiki/ultima-online-wiki/items/artifact-collections/artifacts-doom-gauntlet/
The lowest hanging fruit is to 'update' existing systems. There are any number of things people just don't do because the rewards are not worth it.
- Doom (Rewards are weak)
- Collections (Scripters paradise with 800k rewards and turns at like 8-15pts each requiring 60,000 shields to get a mace and shields glasses)
- Peerless (rewards are generally junk besides crimson)
- Marties (old and junk - armor sets aren't worth collecting)
- Bods (rewards in some areas tired and runics have decreased value)
- Imbuing (intensity limit keeps armor from rivaling loot)
- Quests (Low reward quests not worth the effort)
- Heartwood quests (way too grindy only good for recipes and tali's)
- Void Pool (rewards weak for effort required)
- Clean up program (some rewards are old and tired and bad point values like 10k for 'random' SOA)
Lets take a quick example. Doom.
Here is a reward from doom :
Axe of the Heavens | Artifact Rarity 11 Hit Lightning 50% Hit Chance Increase 15% Defense Chance Increase 15% Damage Increase 50% Physical Damage 100% Weapon Damage 15-18 Weapon Speed 3.25 Strength Requirement 45 Two-Handed Weapon Weapon Skill: Swordsmanship Durability 255 |
This can literally be crafted and imbued. Its only 4 mods and none are over cap. In fact I can make one better because I could craft it with 100% damage type.
If you change this axe to look like this <:
| Axe of the Heavens | Artifact Rarity 11 Hit Lightning 50% <Random Slayer> Hit Mana Leech 50% Hit Stamina Leech 50% SSI 20% Damage Increase 50% (Random Dmg Type) 100% Weapon Damage 15-18 Weapon Speed 3.25 Strength Requirement 45 Two-Handed Weapon Weapon Skill: Swordsmanship Durability 255 |
People will come back to doom to try to get one. THis can't be that hard of an effort to make some simple mods to the item. Its got to be nothing but a couple of fields in a table.
There are hundreds of rewards that have fallen behind in today's loot that are near total wothlessness. Just update these and people will be back doing doom, back doing collections, back hunting marties. You name it.
The loot change put in a few years back basically killed 80% of the content and thus 80% of the people doing PvM. IT all gravitated to the roof.
I'd be more than happy to provide advice on these items and objects one by one if I knew the dev team would take the effort up to enhance. They don't need to be godly weapons - just something someone might use. The current axe of the heavens is pure junk.
Feel free to look at the list of doom arties. Which one would you ever use? Brace of health? Kights Breastplate?
https://uo.com/wiki/ultima-online-wiki/items/artifact-collections/artifacts-doom-gauntlet/
Comments
1. The word "just" does not ever mean that.
2. Updating some of these systems would require an effort putting it closer to high-hanging fruit.
That being said, we do have have greater ability to create dynamic rewards on the fly thanks to last year's updates. Feel free to post suggestions. I'm not guaranteeing that we will implement them, but it's a nice starting point.
To give an idea, from the Dynamic Event/ToT Reward thread we had a while back around half of the ~30 equipment suggestions were a no-go. That's still pretty good!
Example : This is completely worthless by any player at any level so its a non reward.
Hit Point Increase 5
Hit Point Regeneration 10
So can you not easily change the mods that drop on it or is it because ones already exist with these mods it cant change?
Maybe Kyronix we could look at a system at a time and talk about a revitalization. Maybe we start with Doom because so many on that list are not useable in todays game and half of them are less than what someone could imbue.
Thanks for the feedback @kyronix.
In general, I completely agree with Theo's thoughts, and I've probably said the same thing forever, and your feedback is interesting, because it's the first time I've seen that.
What would actually be interesting, would be to know some of your parameters?
For example, you say about half of the equipment ideas were a no-go, I'd be interested to know what makes them fail - so we can do better at suggestions. Often when I'm making suggestions, I know what I want, and I can honestly go on forever, but I'm never quite sure where your parameters are - so I don't know if I'm over-requesting or under-requesting, or why it would or would not work.
Thanks.
Ever seen the kind of items that are on a Peerless Boss ? Hardly any artifact (most are magic items) and even if there happens to be one or 2 artifacts pieces, they are likely Lesser...
Not to mention the fact that pretty much most of the weapons found within Peerless loot are just junk, unusable, to my viewing...
Another Boss with really underwhelming Loot quality (and quantity I should also say) on the corpse, especially considering the toughness of the fight as well as the time consuming that it is and the number of players it takes to kill it, is Charybdis....
While the rarer drops on Charybdis might be OK, the loot items on the corpse are really pretty much useless, and even low in quantity.... this loot could really get some love, to my opinion...
Another things that I would like to see more often as available, is "imbuable" items BUT, with 1 or 2 overcapped or expensive properties already present on them as they spawn as loot...
For example, I would love to see rings and bracelets with Faster Casting 1 and Faster Cast Recovery 3 (or even 4) and NOTHING ELSE, be a possible spawn as loot... or rings and bracelets with Swing Speed Increase 10 and another related property like Hit Chance Increase or Dfenze Chance Increase, maybe overcapped, but with nothing else so that players could imbue whatever they liked on them....
The reason for this ? To save up on the imbuing materials needed to imbue those properties thus reducing the overall cost of making these imbued items.....
@Kyronix , can we hope to see some love towards bettering the loot generated by these Bosses ?
Thanks !
There is no one collection 1/4 million books to get this reward. Yes you can donate gold as a shortcut but then its not really a 'collection' is it?
Add some things that give way more points that can't be easily farmed. Like champ spawn skulls at 5k points each. Or turn in loot like you do for clean up (1 point to 100 points depending on intensity). Etc. You still have to gather those things and can't necessarliy script them.
As it stands today - the only people to get these without a script are paying gold. The scripters turn in 89k shields from NPC's. The rest of us have no hope of legitimately collecting 88k shields from monster loot. It would take 5 lifetimes.
There is no one at the library doing these turn ins. An entire system abandoned besides a random gold dump. Make it playable and give people something to do. If I could hunt and obtain say ophid rations and get 5000 points each( need 160) - I might spend the next week trying to earn a new set. It gives people something to do to gain a reward in a reasonable amount of time.
The Paladin takes Chiv books at 12 points each. 67k books to get a top reward. If you could get 80 books an hour - that's 833 hours to get the reward. For reference a full year of working 2000 hours. Thats almost a half a year working 8 hours a day 5 days a week to get this reward. It is simply not worth the effort. Just adding something else you can turn in for more points at a time or upping the points makes it useful.
The other problem is most of the things you have for points can be bought from NPC's. Whats the point of collecting then? Have the turn ins be something you can't buy from NPC's but actually have to collect.
For Marties and Armor sets, that let's be honest, are basically useless for 99,9% of players it would be a nice touch to make them imbuable if modding all of them is impossible or overkill ... Eventually not by default but after completing some kind of quest or paying a NPC to make them moddable (like removing the mage armor from items) ... I think that this will make those items desirable again and will open alot of rooms in suit building, strategy and fun.
Especially making it some quest to be able to modify a piece.
Maybe a balm you can apply to the piece itself or you can sell
the balm so another can use it. I would rather leave NPC's out
of it. The gold sinks should be deco only imo.
*forum explodes*
And....dvvid said: @Kyronix - I think the easiest way to make older items relevant again would be to make a recipe for an "upgrade" by which I mean you take the desirable traits from the old item and pass along to the new item with additional desirable traits. Example here would be something like "recipe for tunic of auspicious bones" that takes the Tunic of Fortune (40LRC/200 luck/15DCI/mage armor) along with some Dark Father blood and 10 gems and turns it into bone chest with 250 luck/40 LRC/8LMC/10mana/15DCI/Mage Amor/15 of each resist. This would be an item that wouldn't be super OP but still be an upgrade to almost anyone that has a luck suit.
Another idea would be taking the Mage orny (2/3casting / 10 LMC / 20LRC / 15 energy) and making a recipe for "Houdini's bracelet" that has 2/3 casting / 18 SDI / 15 DCI / 25 EP (maybe +8 int too).
I'm all for having them be dynamic event rewards but I do think they should be attainable after events are over so maybe have them as black market rewards after the fact.
Existing content is already so much, that any improvements would be immediately felt by existing player base!
ESRB warning: Some Blood. LOTS of Alcohol. Some Violence. LOTS of Bugs
And this, inevitably, ends up with these recipes being then priced ridicolusly high, so high, that then to a Crafter thinking to buy one (if they do not have a Fighter capable of hunting for that Recipe since, hey, they enjoy playing a Crafter, not a Fighter....), it no longer becomes economically viable as hardly what they could make with it would fetch sufficient gold to make it back for the recipe purchase... especially, when most players interested in whatever such a Recipe could make, having both a Fighter and a Crafter, might have already gotten self-sufficient because of getting the Recipe with their Fighter...
This wide spread self-sufficiency of players having both Crafters and Fighters, just drastically reduces the business opportunities for those players who, instead, are mainly and mostly interested in Crafting and not so much in Fighting.....
It just kills Crafting being used as a main playing activity (whereas the player mainly plays a Crafter and marginally a Fighter or none at all), to my opinion.
ESRB warning: Some Blood. LOTS of Alcohol. Some Violence. LOTS of Bugs
Even in the situation you are trying to claim (someone ONLY has a crafter) what you are saying doesn't hold weight.
Let's take feudal grips recipe as an example. I'm only a crafter and cannot go into Doom to get the recipe. Your argument is that "it's not fair that a crafter has to pay for the recipe and can't get it by crafting".
WHY would someone want the recipe to make the gloves in the first place? It can't be because they are going to use them because you said they didn't have a fighter, right? They want to sell them, but why do they want to sell them? Perhaps because they sell for a pretty penny? **More on this later. But ok make sense and brings up the next question.
HOW is this person, without a fighter, going to get the gloves of nobility AND Dark Father blood? They can't obtain them as a crafter by making them because they don't have a fighter, right? I guess they have to buy them at market price?
Which brings up the crux of the entire argument.
Surely you understand that as a fighter, they have an opportunity cost to get those items for others that want what they can get... It's not worth it to the average person to spend days/weeks working Doom so that they can get the materials to sell to some crafter for pennies on the dollar when they could do something else instead (for more money or pleasure).
I'm assuming you understand that. So.... circling back to making that pretty penny... this crafter cannot expect to buy these materials which only come from fighting (doesn't include the recipe) for chump change only to turn around and sell the final product for 100000% markup. This might happen once or twice if they get lucky but that is not how the market works; it will quickly normalize when others see the opportunity.
My own personal experience, last year while waiting for new content I decided to revamp my warriors suit and I wanted the feudal grips (I had a pair of gauntlets sitting in a chest), so I bought the recipe off a vendor. After i saw how much the grips were actually selling for I decided to sell those grips I made instead for a profit. At that point I saw the opportunity and I just started buying the gloves of nobility (since I had the recipe now) and just making the grips and marking them 20-30m over what I paid for the gloves of nobility. I made a good amount doing this and it required 10x less time than ever going to Doom. Even though I hadn't step foot into Doom for a split second (ie didn't use a fighter), I was able to buy the recipe & the materials and still came out on top after making a handful of sets AND was able to keep a pair myself for essentially no cost at that point.
To bring this thing full circle, the entire point here is that when we are talking about recipes that require materials acquired from fighting, I don't think you have a valid argument whining about obtaining the recipes from fighting by saying "not all people have fighters" (aside from the fact that your claim is pretty inaccurate) because crafters will still have the ability to buy the recipes for X price and make back that money by doing what a pure crafter does... making gear to sell. You don't have a leg to stand on trying to claim crafters are some type of victim by making the recipes (to create artifacts using artifacts) attainable by fighting. So please just stop already.
###Sorry all for the novel but to break it down I think it was needed.
The problem is, though, that as often it happens between what the game's Designes think as mechanics and what players actually do in their games, players, at least to my viewing, ended up behaving quite differently thus screwing up the attempt to promote players to players interactions with those mechanics....
While initially, for some time, it might have happened that Fighters were to sell those Recipes and materials needed to Crafters, and viceversa that Crafters where to sell to Fighters the items crafted, eventually, players came up with the thought that they could bypass all that buying by developing for Crafters a Fighter, and for Fighters a Crafter, and thus become self sufficient in their respective needs....
And this, eventually, killed the market, Crafters no longer had buyers for the items that they could make, and Fighters no longer needed Crafters to make them items as they had their own....
Eventually, also newcomers to the game not having a Fighter (if Crafters) or a Crafter (if Fighters) would have problems because the Veteran players who already had self sufficiency, would see little reasons to farm those spawns for Recipes or materials to sell to the few newcomers' Crafters (low chances at a sale given the decrease of the players' base) besides the fact that prices, due to the rampant inflation notorious in UO, where sky high thus not making it much viable nor economically logical for new coming Crafters to want to buy those few Recipes that occasionally could show up for sale...
So, at least as I see it, while the goal might have been a good one for these mechanics, that of promoting players to players interactions in between Crafters and Fighters, it ended up clashing against players' behaviour which was aimed at cutting out the need to purchase from others and obtain respective self sufficiency for Crafters and Fighters alike, but losing the broader picture that, in doing so, basically Crafting, intended as a Service to fellow players, would die out....
Add to that, the fact that not only, at least to my opinion, not really effective changes to the "status quo" of these mechanics where put in over the Years to counter the Crafting downwarding trend, and the fact that, to keep players' interest focused in the game, better and stronger items where increasingly introduced over the Years as loot (the so-called itemization of Ultima Online...), and this pretty much killed Crafting as a Service to others in Ultima Online by good....
Those players who played the early Years of Ultima Online, if they compare what Crafting was back then, how thriving and lively it was, and what it now is, might understand better what I am trying to point out......
Aside from the fact you obviously didn't read my own personal experience that is the exact opposite of what you are claiming; you are just wrong because if you were right there wouldn't be vendor search which I've used on several shards and will find what I need at varying times.
Your argument is all over the place and although each post is always 4-5 paragraphs it's usually lacking in any actual point except for "that's how you see it" which is typically incorrect. Your perception isn't reality sorry.
"At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."
@Kyronix returning to your last message, could you maybe give us a better idea of systems which are high intensity to alter and low intensity? All of us keep saying “just change some numbers in a table” but the gist I’m seeing is that’s obviously more complex somehow?
Weapon arties need to have special functions that cannot be found in normal weapons, e.g. Glenda type. Otherwise, the above standard weapon would serve most warriors well.
The above are just some quick Sunday morning thoughts.
ESRB warning: Some Blood. LOTS of Alcohol. Some Violence. LOTS of Bugs
Bane would be nice.
Come up with other propertys in potion form that would make our crafted weapon a little better.
Make them only work against Mobs, or also on Reds hehe
ESRB warning: Some Blood. LOTS of Alcohol. Some Violence. LOTS of Bugs
I do like the idea of reducing/removing the less desirable mods of weapons like lower req / durability / regens but it seems like it might also be pretty difficult but these mods all fall under a certain prefix/suffix which means it's not as easy to simply remove Fortified/Defense (which they could remove this since it only gives weapons resists). They would have to do some sort of calculation within "of quality" because that's the property that would have a slayer (so you can't just remove it) where the non-desirable mods like durability are lessened within the property itself. That might not currently exist so then it becomes higher hanging fruit and more along the lines of adding a brand new potion to add a property.
My suggestion on a possible low hanging fruit that may or may not fix weapons (perhaps a step in the right direction) is to undo whatever piece of coding that stopped the no-named legendary armor/weapons. If you were to get an unnamed weapon then it's not bound by just those properties anymore; this is also how non-legendary weapons work today as well (see example). By allowing legendary weapons with no names it would give everyone 8 maxed out properties that aren't bound by a name so you might get a 100% weapon with slayer/ ML / stam leech / hit spell
That said, I wish they would allow magic items to have more than 8 mods again too. That would further help because you could have some junk mods like reflect phys damage on the weap but also be usable with the other properties you outlined.
Role players have had many items placed into the game. There are many decorative items and decorative furnishings to build a place to role play many different themes. All of the new items in the Black Market are decorative. They have been putting out items for role play in every event.
The EM events have role play and the drops are not weapons or armor. In the last few years we have had only a few items that are for fighting. The Khal mask, spellbooks, SSI epaulettes, Tritons ,some jewelry. The rest is decorative that can be used with role play if you have an imagination.
I do not know about other Governor meetings but ours has is pretty much story time.
Just like we have to gather a group to fight stuff, yall have to gather a group to role play. We have had scavenger hunts and races recently on LS.
There are hundreds of story lines in UO. There are players who never fight mobs.