New player ventures forth into Sosaria...some feedback
So a couple days ago a friend agreed to create an account (EJ) and try UO. Let's call him Roger.
Roger played Ultima 5 about 30 years ago. In 2001 or 2002 he played UO for an hour or so on my account. That was the summation of his experience with Ultima.
Yesterday evening we set up a voice chat and decided to give UO a try. I planned to start a new EJ account just to go through with him and see what he was seeing.
Here is some feedback from the experience of seeing UO through the eyes of a truly new player.
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1. When we started the chat I asked him if he was ready to set up an EA master account and he said he had already setup an account and was at the shard selection screen.
I *boggled*. He is not the most techy person. I asked him if he was sure he had setup an EA master account and a UO account.
He said yes, it was "easy". (At this point I wasn't sure if he had actually setup an account, or was just messing with me.)
Then he said, "well, the EA account was kind of a pain, but it wasn't hard."
He had setup his accounts while UO was downloading in the background. (We went with the EC.)
Whatever you all have done with the account management system, it is better.
I rushed off to setup an EJ account while he started character creation.
2. Roger likes to read the stories of the games he plays. He plays a lot of Baldur's Gate, tabletop D&D, etc. So during character creation he was reading the info about races, skills, the towns he could start in, etc.
He lost connection twice (for being idle - while he was reading background info) and had to restart the character creation process. (As an aside, I didn't realize you all had put so much info into the character creation system. It's nice to see it fleshed out.)
Having to restart his character was frustrating for him and lead to some big sighs and him asking me why they bothered to write all these things down if they weren't going to give him time to read them.
At the end of character creation when you choose a name, there is no warning that you can't use certain text characters in the name. If you do use invalid text characters, you are kicked all the way back to the beginning of character creation, rather than just having the name rejected. Not a fun process.
3. Roger has been playing a lot of Diablo 3. The customizability of almost everything in UO's UI, the ability to move everything where you want it, the hotbar system, the sheer volume of user options, he was pretty blown away. We didn't spend a lot of time with the UI, just basically explained the gumps that show up on the screen when the EC starts, arranged them, and that was it. I had never thought about how overwhelming UO could be to someone who's never seen it before. We veterans are just conditioned to it.
4. Roger decided to play a mage. We started in New Haven and walked up to the magery vendor so he could fill out his spellbook. He started with ~15 spells in the book? He opened his spellbook to see the spells he didn't have and opened the vendor menu to select those he wanted. Then he pushed accept on the bottom of the vendor menu. He did not get any of the spells he had selected and did not spend any of this gold.
So, he reopened the vendor menu and chose all his spells again. The gold total at the bottom of his vendor menu said something like 550/1000 gold. He pushed accept and again did not get any spells nor spend any gold.
This was frustrating for him. It lead to more sighs and "what am I doing wrong" questions.
Then I remembered something about having to have the gold in your bank account.
5. The banking gump has a lot of options. Transfer account, secure account, currency account. It is evidently very confusing to someone who hasn't played UO before. Everything else in game works on drag & drop, but you cannot just drag & drop a pile of gold into your EJ bank box? Not a big deal, but it is discontinuous with the way the rest of the game works. (And one more "special instance" thing a new player has to remember.)
6. The new player tickets are a nice touch. The ticket says not to give it to someone else so Roger did not want to take it out of his bank box. You cannot click your ticket from your bank box or backpack and target someone else's ticket in the trade window. How exactly are you supposed to target another players ticket, without losing your own? (This was Roger's question, not mine.) Eventually, I just put my ticket on the ground and had Roger target it. The wearables dyeing system in UO is much more robust that D3's.
7. For Roger, coming from games like D3 and Path of Exile, having a character that can carry 125 items is a godsend. Creating a second character for additional storage was a familiar and easily executed concept. The fact he could have 9 additional accounts under his master, all of which could have 2 characters that could hold 125 items (plus bank boxes) was just nuts.
I didn't mention the Vault, but nobody really wants to play a "game" consisting of keeping track of characters and what they are carrying (at least not me, and neither does Roger really), so hopefully some type of additional storage for EJ players is still in the works.
Honestly, I thought with only 20 items in the bank box, storage would be a real problem, but it turned out to be a complete non-issue.
8. I left Roger with 6 accelerated gain quests going and killing things in Old Haven. Haven't talked to him yet today. Don't know if he'll ever subscribe, but you may have just picked up at least one new player.
Comments
Cheers MissE
#1 He is playing a prodo shard because he says he can have 2 chars and
#2 We are talking a new player trying out UO and not some old vet and what you going to use EJ as a main char on SP or are you going to use it as a support to your active account that has plenty of storage. Good try at trying to slam a new player though.
Cheers MissE
UO has always been a bit hard to learn from a purely new player perspective, which is why new player guilds are so useful in UO. UO takes some persistence and determination lol - even as a subscriber. Looks like you have a friend who is aware he is playing the game for free and does not mind some extra work to do so. I hope he enjoys Sosaria, it is a wonderful world!
(On a side note, Siege Perilous is the HARD SHARD. It is already a challenge as a subscriber, but even more so as EJ. Not impossible, they just need to make friends. You know... like the days before Soul Stones.)
Cheers MissE
I do think EJ needs work to be an effective trial period, or an effective F2P model that relies on store purchases instead of the rather antiquated notion of subscription fees from our current ADHD generation. As I said, concerns need to be voiced and suggestions and changes need to be made. However, I also think some people have very high expectations and demands for zero payment. And since many people cling to their cherished ''legal'' 3rd party programs in a vulnerable client, no effective measures can be taken to stop the illegal ones.
This means that some changes to EJ simply cannot ever be made.
Or let them share their feedback here on the forums. Too tricky again?
Baby steps, you know. Doesn't take much to see it. But some tend to have no faith in people and only see bad people everywhere. May god bless their hearts.
I hope EA puts some pressure on when they see UO F2P isnt bringing in much new revenue. I really hope...
I don't buy that personally, but well, that's what they said...
As for the party, they didn't even care to stream it for the 99% of their customers not being able to go there. But that's Bonnie's style. As long as there are 10 people kissing her rear end, she is fine with it.
Another person made a good suggestion, why can't people assign a chest in their home to help an EJ friend, just put a reasonable weight limit on it to discourage script miners filling it with ore.
I'm pretty sure some basement kid could come up with ten ways to fix this storage problem.
I am sure the devs are aware of these issues, and I am also sure some sort of fix is in the works.