Ryandor.com

http://www.project-soulfly.co.uk/

Just started it, going to be building it in RunUO (Buildings etc).

Im doing this map to the most detail , im giving myself a month per town

and im doing 8 towns.

Giving oneself enough time to do things properly is important, but too much time may result in procrastination and loosing sight of the goal. Often, when I start a project, I make the mistake of assuming that I will stay at a consistent interest level in regards to that project, or that I can somehow muster the willpower to work on it even when my interest wanes.

My most successful projects (finished) are the ones that I was able to start and reach a reasonable level of completion of within my estimated interest retention timeline, which is not long. Once a project is in a working state that is at least the core of my original goal, it becomes much more practical for me to take my time to iron out bugs and add features at a slower pace.

This same trend seems prevalent in most hobby-made projects. Commercial ones have the luxury of the wonderful immediate incentive of a paycheck to entice programmers to fake interest until things can be designed and implemented via the rigorous processes that modern million-dollar undertakings demand. The only reward you will receive as a hobbyist is the act of creation and the large but far off reward of a job well done. Remember, immediate small rewards of saying ?I got something done? can mean a lot more towards the health of a project than ?I will get something done The Right Way ???

On a side note, this post would find a better home in the ?submissions? forum, perhaps.

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Blog: http://www.sydius.org
Web: http://www.sydius.net

Not to be a party pooper but 8 "towns" are way to many for a private shard (Or even an OSI shard) since the average player base seems to be less than 30 people...what are the other 7 towns going to be used for? Rabbit breeding?

Start with one town and expand it as the player base grows would be my advice. Its ok to add a "village" or "Hamlet" but not an actual town or city since it will be empty 99.999999999% of the time and you will burn out long before that.

Keep it simple...make it interesting...and they will come...and you can keep your sanity...and actually finish what you start.

Dev

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"So...if crazy people don't know their crazy...does that mean your only sane if your know your crazy?"

I disagree. If you can fit the number of towns you want then do it, provided you can keep yourself interested in building them. We have.. well let's say far more than eight towns. We scrapped a few and left them for later use, but for one thing we don't intend to do it like OSI clones did and host everything out of the capital.

If you put enough reasons to visit each town, people will check them out. Remember, if you have 30 players, that's up to 150 different characters. Host different events in different towns and there's every reason to have people wanting to use different characters suited to different locations and events. In our case it's different continents with different races that don't always love eachother, *g*

Just think of this inherent problem with one town and a couple interesting spots: No matter how interesting they might be, if you only have a few locations they will inevitabely become the same old thing to regular players much faster than three times the locations would. Expanding after the fact isn't as easy as it might appear either, as post-opening you have to cope with running a live shard, running quests/events and dealing with greedy players.

Not that I'm saying Dev is wrong or anything, taking on more than you expect can leave one brain dead, and expecting everything to fill up immedately also leads to dissapointment. Keep this in mind, take your time and it should run smoothly enough.

By city I mean "Britain" sized or "Trinsic" sized towns. Something like Skara or Yew is a Hamlet or village.

8 Britain or Trinsic sized towns would be the most retarded thing a person could do considering not even OSI can fill the towns they have even with EM's and GM's doing new events every month.

UOA helps prevent insanity over the long haul but I fail to see the point of creating an "Empty" city (Ever). I have always found it annoying in the real UO and find it very annoying in private shards. Being "alone" is never fun for a player unless their mining.

Private shards are ran by private individuals who all have different ideas of fun so they can each do what ever they want, that is what we are all here for after all.

Personally I prefer "Quality" over "Quantity", my forest contain many hidden points of interest, my hoard of dungeons are more interesting than any empty city could ever be and the cities and hamlets are more than enough in size for what we like.

In the real UO most people have moved to "Luna" in Malas where there are only 2 cities. They only care about showing off and bank access so all the other cities in all the other maps are pretty much vacant, even during events.

This is the "E-Bay" generation. Playing is not important, only how much you can make from doing it.

Dev

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"So...if crazy people don't know their crazy...does that mean your only sane if your know your crazy?"

I agree with both of you on some points. Firstly, I agree that having just a few interesting points is bound to get old, but then, I also agree that empty cities are never a good thing (unless they are filled with skeletons and ghosts).

Having 150 characters is not what matters; what matters is how many you can get online at any one point in time. With 30 players, you will be lucky to get 20 of them online at the same time. It is pointless to say there are 150 characters if you can only ever see 20 of them in one place at most. Then there is the fact that, when there is not an event attracting all 20, they will likely be dispersed amongst the different cities since no one city has all resources.

Let us do some math? 20 people / 8 cities = 2.5 people per city. Even if we round up to 3, that is no where near enough for a town the size of Yew, let alone Trinsic or Britain!

To feel like an actually inhabited city, a town like Trinsic would need about 300 active players in it at any given time ? not just during quests, and not just at the bank. As far as I know, that has only ever been the case one time in history ? shortly after UO was released. You see, back then, you had a huge influx of players who did not know enough about traveling, started in random cities, were not yet ?powergaming?, and were all confined to one shard (and then three). It was the most awesome feeling in the world!

Now, even on servers with over 50,000 players, you are lucky to see more than 10 in any given city, and none of those places remotely seem like cities at all?

Therefore, in my opinion, you should not have more than one city and a few VERY small hamlets on a player-run server with less than 2,000 ACTIVE accounts.

?

Long story short, I think you can make much more interesting locations for your players to visit than ghost cities filled with mindless zombie-like NPCs.

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Blog: http://www.sydius.org
Web: http://www.sydius.net

But what is bad about a city being empty? Even with one city, if you have three people on there's a good chance they're off hunting, mining or doing whatever else crosses their mind. Might as well make a shard of forests and dungeons if we all start worrying about cities being empty. I have cities larger than the likes of Britain or Trinisc as capitals in a few regions.

It's all about the story and backhistory. If people spend most of their time on one continent, in one town, so be it. The entire world is still rich with history for different people. Items have a place in their region so you're not getting everything everywhere.

The difference here is that I have the patience to build this kind of a world. I don't personally think the problem is worlds being too large, I think the issue is that people have grandiose plans, get half way through them and get bored. Or they only work on a town or two after the server is live and everything else stagnates.

So you can imagine I don't particularly like you saying it's "retarded". I got bored on OSI map shards. I explored most of it and it just wasn't enough after a few months. In my world if people want to stay in one town they can, if they want to explore then there's a huge map to explore. Something for everyone. It isn't retarded to make sure you offer as much as you can or want to make. I don't like choosing either quality or quantity over the other. I prefer trying to make a high quanitity of high quality items. I started working on my ideas back in August 2002 so this isn't exactly a rush job as I run around throwing up half-assed buildings overnight and expect it all to fill up tomorrow.

At any rate I'm not trying to argue that we are right or wrong, I'm just putting a different perspective out there. Today there seems to be nothing but a generally disillusioned attitude of "dream small" when it comes to UO. I've seen so many people show up and vanish in no more than two days because of people saying "that's too much, do less" "there are so many shards out there! Why make one when you can just join one?". For all we know somebody with the ideas to make the best shard "ever" has come and gone because of a negative reception. I'm simply trying to put a highly positive, "dream big, dream often, and do as much as you think you can" spin out there. I need to balance out all the admins that have grown tired of the bs.

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Darien Dragon
"There is no good or evil, only fun and boring."

Sydius I'm not talking about characters on at a time. I'm saying you have different people, on as different characters, at different times, for different events.

If they spend 90% of their time on as character A in city B that's fine. But when it comes time to run major quest C in city D then they can use character E and have a fun, interesting time in city D before going back to Character A in city B, completely avoiding city D until something interesting happens there again.

Just because you have empty cities doesn't mean players have to hang around them doing nothing. They're available for use when one needs them. I guess I wasn't clear on that. I don't mean to say 30 people with 150 characters will fill a world. It just means they have options for variety outside of the everyday life of mine, lumberjack, dungeon crawl and drink at the pub. =)

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Darien Dragon
"There is no good or evil, only fun and boring."

While I agree that providing as much quality content as possible can rarely be a bad thing, I still stick by my previous opinion that the number of cities should be limited ? and not just for the sake of finishing them and making them quality, but also for the sake of atmosphere.

Having a huge world is perfectly reasonable, since you would not expect the countryside to be teaming with other humans, anyway. Having a back-story is also a great thing; it is one of the things that have made the Ultima series so nice. Having a dozen empty cities, on the other hand, is doing a disservice to your players, I believe, because of they will never feel like cities to your players, and walking into a capital filled with nothing but mindless NPCs will throw any chance of loosing oneself in the game right out the window. After all, the whole point of back-story and elaborate content is to create atmosphere, but how will you ever prevent people from ?waking up? when they walk into an empty city, unless it is inhabited by reasonable (even if self-sufficient and solitary) number of people?

Empty cities were the first and one of the primary reasons why I could never ?get into? the official servers, and is why I eventually moved out to the wilderness and stopped going to them altogether. On the other hand, when a believably practical number of real people inhabited the cities, it created a euphoria of depth and emersion that has rarely, if ever, been matched.

I remember strolling through Trinsic, passing fishermen fishing in the streams, blacksmiths in the smithy, would-be tradesmen wandering about town trying to sell any manner of things (before people congregated at the bank), tamers herding animals, people training in the barracks, tailors sewing in the tailor shop, fletchers fletching, carpenters making furniture, thieves scurrying about in alleyways? it was all so, so wonderful! Then banks were made better, people began congregating around them. Travel became easier, and then people moved to Britain. Then cities were added, and no more euphoria forever.

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Blog: http://www.sydius.org
Web: http://www.sydius.net

Having options is great, but if you can provide the same amount of high-quality content without destroying the potential of atmosphere in the cities, why not do so? You can certainly create just as interesting of places without making them into cities or even towns, and doing this would result in more people in fewer towns, and more atmosphere, more depth, more connections, and more emersion.

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Blog: http://www.sydius.org
Web: http://www.sydius.net

But if I have one city what's to stop everybody from branching off and going on hunts leaving the city empty when a new player comes online?
What about people that actually want to live in a distant city, away from all the other players so they can go home to some alone time if they feel that way? It does happen.

If I have many cities, people don't get a vague empty feeling if they stick to the populated town. When they do go to another big city, it'll likely be due to an event, when everybody else will be there. Suddenly it's not an empty city.

I only think an empty city takes away from a world when people start spending time there, but at that point it isn't as empty any more. It isn't as if I'll have people wandering into an empty city while out on the hunt, there's enough space between them for that.

I don't know, I don't feel a loss of atmosphere, unless a player goes to an empty town and stands around feeling lonely waiting for some action. If they're feeling that alone they can simply go to a popular location. If a person checks out the ancient library of one city, or the military headquarters of another, or they venture off to a mining city to get work done, and so on, they aren't in an empty town doing nothing. They're checking out all of the amazing sites without having to be in the same town all the time, and without having to wander off into the great outdoors ever distancing themselves from "the" city without a chance of finding another town unless they turn back.

Now, anyway, I'll stop before I feel like I'm arguing or trying to sway people to my own belief. I think anything can work if you make it work. It's just a matter of how much of a challenge one wants, and what world they want to work in. I want a big world, with cities, dungeons, forests, ruins, tons of hunting grounds, unexplored locations, stories, etc. etc. etc. I don't think that's wrong, and I don't think I'm going about things in the wrong way. I just managed to get tired of everybody saying "you should do it this way". I'm just saying hey, you -can- do it this way, if you want to.

I don't think this particular thread has gone that way, but I do know I've seen people in general go from "that might not work" to "that will not work" and instead of "here's my idea, you may want to try it" to "hey here's what you should be doing, I know it's better". This is one of the last best communities around and I don't particularly want to see it go that way. If people want to go with what you think is best, that's cool. If they like what I'm saying, equally cool. If they want to tell us all to go stick it so they can go they're own way, that's honestly the best thing they can probably do. But I always believe having every option and opinion is best, so I back mine up with a few teeth, so to speak, to make sure people don't think I've been completely invalidated. *g*

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Darien Dragon
"There is no good or evil, only fun and boring."

I am going to reply to your post in chunks, so please do not be offended ? I am simply trying to organize my thoughts based on yours.



It is very likely that, a large portion of the time, any given player is going to spend their time outside city limits hunting, pillaging, role-playing, etc. This is regardless of how many cities you have, unless you provide the things that drive people away from cities (hunting, dungeons, etc.) inside the cities as well. This I do not deny, and will even admit that having only one (or very few) cities would give more reason to seek solitude outside of guard protection, but when there are fewer cities, it is obvious that, proportionately, a larger number of people will be in the available cities than otherwise.

In the worst case, the people who would have otherwise spent their time in practically empty (by this, I mean less than 10 to 20 players) cities would spend their time in the wilderness instead, and you have lost nothing. One could easily argue that providing cities for content rather than wilderness just shows you put more thought into your world, but this is another topic. What is much more likely, though, is that, proportionately, more people will be in each city if there are fewer of them at any given time, than if there are many of them.

When I was speaking to the idea of emersion and depth, I was not thinking of the new player at the time, so my above comments are geared towards anyone, not just new players. Often, it is the first impression that counts, though, and in the unlikely event that everybody is out hunting at the same time, then yes, the new player is going to feel alone. That is no different than if he were born into one of many empty cities, though, so you have still lost nothing, but have gained the more likely occurrence of a populated city.



While I am not denying that this does happen, the concept of going to what is supposed to be a city to be alone seems contradictory to the notion of what the word ?city? conjures up in my mind. Being inside a home within the city, on the other hand, should provide as much solitude as it does in the real world. If they wish more solitude, they can choose to live outside a city, like in the real world. Realism, after all, is a huge part of emersion. Having many cities accomplishes the same thing, except that it gives players the option of living in what seem like ghost towns.



This still kills the emersion and wakes the player up (whether they realize it or not) whenever they either need to or happen to pass through one of the non-populated cities. This is the exactly what Dev and I were speaking to on the official servers ? empty ghost towns that scream ?this world is not alive!? whenever you left Britain. Having fewer cities satisfies the expectation for every town to have at least some life to it. While players will likely stick to the capitals in a world with many cities, they will still need, want, or accidentally end up in another, empty town, and that is when it hits you the hardest that the world is not real.



Yes, but what about the rest of the time? You said yourself that players will have need of each city, and therefore require visiting them when they are not populated. This, again, leads to the rude awakening that it is not as real as it could be.



It is very hard to immerse oneself in the depth of a world if it requires that you ignore the presence of empty cities except during events. People are natural explorers, and cities are obvious places for people to seek out and explore. Even after having explored them (and suffering the initial empty-shock), people will often return for resources or just ?for fun?, and every time they do so, they will have the thought of it all being fake creeping up through the back of their mind.

Assuming that, just because people spend time there, it becomes less empty is assuming that enough people spend time there at the same time to make it seem like a city ? which is unlikely, unless you have few cities or many players. Sure, some cities will have more players than others, but until they reach a threshold that our minds can reasonably accept as being plausible for a city, it still takes away from the depth considerably.



Being in an empty town doing nothing is something that nobody will do unless forced to. In that scenario, the creeping feeling of loss of emersion would be so intense that they would likely get up and get a snack while they wait for whatever it is they expect to happen, maybe even go watch TV. That is not the scenario I am referring to ? the scenario I am referring to is when a player, for whatever reason, enters a city that is not populated enough to satisfy what your mind would believe is plausible for a city of that size ? and this is usually a high number of players; much more than a half-dozen miners and a dozen carpenters that you might find in Minoc.

While having additional points of interest other than ?the? city is certainly an appreciable goal, I fully believe such a goal may easily be fulfilled by other methods than providing additional cities. Mining camps, for example, lumber camps, or very small villages would suffice for most situations, even ruins.



I fully agree with you, more ideas are always welcome, which is the motivation behind my participation in this discussion. I am not attempting to say that you are wrong or that I am right, but merely discussing the drawbacks and benefits behind what I believe is the better option, as you are doing as well. Nothing but constructive debate is my goal. Arguing for or against something is one of the best ways to gain insight into aspects that might have gone unnoticed, so long as you remain open-minded throughout the process.

No offense intended by anything I have said; constructive debate is all I intend!

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Blog: http://www.sydius.org
Web: http://www.sydius.net

I can't believe neither of you haven't mentioned how player-characters actually living in the cities (as opposed to only visiting when they need to buy/sell/craft/bank) would affect things.

How many empty buildings (or filled with useless, meaningless NPCs) are there in the OSI towns? UO is weird in that it literally forces it's inhabitants to live AWAY from the cities/towns, often on the far reaches of the map surrounded by jungle/mountains/monsters of any kind. They recall to the bank from there, recall to the dungeons from the bank, recall back to the bank/back home.

If the houses in the towns are actually populated by player-characters, then all of a sudden 8 towns don't look like that much any more, since with even 1000 active accounts you could end up with 6000 player characters - and there's not room for that many houses in those towns.

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-= Ho Eyo He Hum =-

I'm sharing an opinion that differs from yours, I think it would be hypocritical of me to take offense to your replies.

All this has actually sparked an idea or two for me. I don't really want to give up my cities, but I'm splitting up the continents across the maps. The main one will have more land, but you won't see a world of empty cities. I could create ten times the special locations leaving damn near endless variety of things to do, and still have access to the other cities/maps for quests/events or loner players that want to live out in the middle of nowhere without much of a chance of anybody wandering by. Maybe some rampant looting of a desolate town.

If the other cities are primarily on maps you don't see unless you go there (I won't be marking any obvious routes ) it should alleviate that sense of global emptiness.

Capital for race one, capital for race two (history purposes), a mining town and well spawned undead ghost town. Then oodles of fun little things to do. All this and I lose minimal work with minimal effort and technically get to keep all the parts of my world. *g*

I think it should create a happy medium for the general players who feel anywhere between the way you guys seem to and the way I do *g* Appeal to the masses. I have to hack this out with my staff tonight.. they'll hate the thought of "restarting" anything, but it's a few days work with my free time. lol. I need a life.

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Darien Dragon
"There is no good or evil, only fun and boring."

Well mine is a pretty strict RP shard. If I get 1000 active accounts I'll have to be hospitalized for shock.

But yeah, if you had 40 active accounts, each full of characters and each owning a house then you'd need a few towns for them. I think my preference is a mix of ~20% NPC inhabitants and the rest is left up to players. Then again I also like the idea of just letting players build their towns. Hell with the nice patchers they can be allowed to design whatever home they like, have it placed and frozen and updated in the next patch that night.

That's my primary idea to address potential overcrowding or players that just don't want to be in the city. =)

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Darien Dragon
"There is no good or evil, only fun and boring."

Now Xuri really hit it on the head.
More than anything on OSI, I got sick of the suburban sprawl.
Wilderness? Where? It was all covered by subdivisions.

Whether it is static housing in town players can acquire or just leaving plenty of empty building lots in your towns for players would go a lot more to the feel of a real city.

The player base is always going to be a problem, but that shouldn't stop you from putting in more than 1 city. I would rather see a bunch of smaller citys with different styles than 1 big city with a mishmash of all the different architecture thrown in it.

Now what I want to know is where is the guys project? It's a dead link. Did Syd run him off right away?

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This space for rent.

Having players build cities completely from the ground up is exactly what I do ? I do not even provide them with a starting ?capital? ? they decide where to lay the foundations for civilization; I just help them carry out those decisions. This idea works particularly well for small servers, since it is easy to cope with a few dozen people, and it creates a much more dynamic world in the process.

Many of you do not realize this, but I sustained a server for approximately 6 months straight, with only a few players. I made a map of a large island with no dungeons, no cities, nothing but nature ? took all of 10 minutes to make with my tools (approximately the same with Dragon). Then, when they logged in, I plopped them down randomly throughout the island, and let the chaos ensue.

I explained to them that I would build anything they want so long as they provide a reasonable amount of resources or the equivalent amount of gold (I had a price list for different tiles, square feet, etc.). I tried to make it fair but flexible, charging by the square-tile of housing (per level), with extras like frozen chests or candles costing more. Upon hearing this, they quickly began running throughout the island (which had few monsters at the time), and decided where they wanted to live. Two groups formed, one far inland against a river (water/food is required to survive) and a forest, and another down against the same river closer to the sea.

The town nearer the sea had no name (that I knew of, I will call it Village), but the other was called Luna. Village was the smaller of the two, and survived mostly on fishing, but was frequently bothered by a drake that lived in the area ? bothered so much that a few weeks later; they abandoned their homes and moved into Luna as well.

Since I am against NPCs of any sort, players had to make everything they needed to survive and play. Given the fact that none of them were skilled enough to do anything worthwhile, I gave them the option of building a dock, which they accepted, and upon the dock I made a chest that would be called the ?Export Chest? ? I made the server delete anything that was put into it, and give the player 1/4th of the value. Hardly fair, but then, exporting is expensive with all those taxes and such! In addition, the chest kept a ?line of credit? ? instead of getting gold coins, the value was added to your balance automatically. You could withdraw any amount of your balance (which costs 10% more!), or leave it there to accumulate. I would then import any item for double the value, and would accept the credit as payment (I had an easy interface to exchanging items/credit).

This worked unbelievably well, until someone died. I then realized that I had no healers. Instead of making a healer, though, I resurrected the person at the cost of half their credit, and told everyone the same would happen to anyone who died. I also gave them the option of contributing towards a number of ?community projects?, one of which is a temple that resurrects anyone for free. They had that built, along with a bridge to go over the river.

That is when I started shipping in orc spawns to the North, lizardmen to the West, ratmen to the South, and undead to the East. Not close to the town ? more or less on the extreme edges of the island, but it was enough to be felt back home. That is when demand for armor and weapons went sky high, and they decided they wanted to build a community fort.

The fort was very small, but included a courtyard with inner and outer locking doors (every citizen had a key), a storage room (where they kept food, water, and weapons for when there was an attack), and a tower they could shoot from. It was small, but effective, and several times, I sent invasions after them, only to be amazed at what they could do from their tower.

In the end, I did many things wrong, but many things right, and I do not think I will ever go back to pre-built NPC cities again.

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Blog: http://www.sydius.org
Web: http://www.sydius.net

So true! I completely agree!



I completely agree with all of that, but I was not talking about having one LARGE city as opposed to many small ones, I was talking about having one semi-large one (if you need large at all), with smaller hamlets and villages in the place of the other cities.


I hope not.

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Blog: http://www.sydius.org
Web: http://www.sydius.net

We're a scary bunch you know.

The player built city is something we're doing, but I'm toying with the notion of letting them build the first city. We have plans sitting around for it, but I wondered at the ability for it to succeed. It sounds like ol' one-eye had some luck with a similar venture, so dredging it up with staff has generated a popular vote... if we can work it out as we had planned. Sydius, you're an inspiration.

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Darien Dragon
"There is no good or evil, only fun and boring."

LOL! Damn this thread really took off!

My personal choice for player housing is the same as used in "Horizons" where the cities are fixed but the players can buy predefined sized "plots" around town or in the middle of no where depending on their choice.

This does give the sense of community while preventing the urban sprawl that I think "everyone" hates in the real UO.

Horizons also allow players to build community buildings that allow for businesses such as carpenters, tailors or smiths.

I agree that making players inhabit the cities does go a long way to making them into true cities it can also allow it to go to hell by destroying the overall design of the city. My recommendation of player build or inhabited cities is to restrict the design of the homes so they keep the "flavor" of the city they inhabit. A stone 3 story mansion would look sort of silly in a village of grass huts type of thing.

Empty cities have been a "proven" killer of players in the real UO. This was the case of "Haven" which was a fantastic idea but a fatal mistake.

This single "empty" starting point caused a lot of players who could of been great additions to the UO community to leave within the first few days of joining.

In many cases this is why my stay in literally dozens of player made shards was extremely short (1 hour or less) no matter how interesting I found them. Rule #1 with "any" game...No players = no fun which in turn = more... no players.

POL test shard is interesting with a pretty cool town, my reason for leaving? No npc's or players around to buy or sell goods and no players in general on average, of which most are helpful but just in far to short of supply. The "empty" feeling "does" hit home from a players point of view.

My point is that the shards are rarely designed from a players perspective. Huge vast open empty voids are never fun for players. Huge sprawling towns full of npc's are not much better. 99% of "all" towns in UO are devoid of players simply because there are far to many choices. This is why I proposed that they start small and "grow" with the player base, so the cities/towns/villages/hamlets/dungeons stay populated creating the illusion of a thriving shard which is what players really want.

If players wanted to be alone...they would do just that, start their own RUNUO/Sphere/POL/Wolfpack/UOX or what ever else server and log in...alone. They go to player ran shards for "company" not empty lonley cities devoid of excitement and adventure.

Syd is exactly right in his memories of the old UO. The cities were "alive" and no matter how much we hated getting mugged by rogues while running around it was the very reason we kept coming back...it was fun...it was home. In the begining it was impossible to find an empty store in UO, the NPC guild halls were packed with people taking turns and exchanging all sort of tales of the lands that most people had no clue about. Player trainers who enjoyed teaching new people about the world of UO and helping them train up their skills or offering advice.

Now their voices are silent, replaced by instant messenger silence or macro auction spam...silence and variety "killed" UO. Once you expand beyond your player base, there is no turning back. I miss the old UO even though I enjoy some of the new expansions and features.

Dev

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"So...if crazy people don't know their crazy...does that mean your only sane if your know your crazy?"

It seems as if we are all converging upon the same ideas.

One approach that I hate is instancing. Many games have taken the stance of selling the same buildings within towns to as many players as wish to buy/rent them. This is good in that it prevents the suburban nightmare you see in the official UO, but it, more than the suburban sprawl, shatters any hope of believability. Living with 1,000 other players in the same house, even though you never see any of them, is just? well? dumb. Fortunately (for me at least), instancing has been very minimal in UO, so nobody uses it for housing (although it could most certainly be done!)? Many people do not realize this, but Trammel and Felucca are just that ? instances ? but that is more believable since there are only two, although I do not even like that idea at all.

I agree with having city themes. If you noted, in the way my server ran, I built everything for the players as they requested it (we would set a date/time, and I would come carry out their orders). This ensured that they did nothing stupid ? I would never allow an ugly building to be built by someone who did not know the intricacies of building in UO. This also allowed me to ensure a somewhat coherent theme. The obvious downside to this is that you would need a builder for every 20 or so players.

I believe, though, that given a world with enough variation in resources by locality, so long as you limit building materials to resources on hand, the locality will determine the theme of any buildings built in the area. If you make only a certain kind of tree give dark wood, and another light wood, and put those trees in opposite sides of the continent, I think that would accomplish the goal. Same for sandstone/dark stone/marble/etc. Just make each building component require a high number of a given resource, and make that resource very heavy ? so long as you do not have insta-travel (something I also hate), it would be too much effort to haul something ?out of place? to another part of the world, and even if they did go to that amount of effort, I think they should be able to if they REALLY want to (some rich guy paying 50 newbies to haul marble across the continent for a week straight should be able to do so, in my opinion). This idea does require that only certain resources can be acquired in certain parts of the world, that those resources are very heavy, and that insta-travel does not exist.

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Well the idea behind the POL testshard (if they still do things the way I last remembered) was fantastic. It's just that it needs a large player base to work as intended. What I remember was no npc shopkeepers except banker, stable, healer. The citys were player run, but had to be taken back from the monsters first. Then if the nearby dungeon wasn't patrolled the monsters would take the town back. Etc, etc. The whole economy was to be player driven though.

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My experience with player ran economies have been very bad... They work fine in the begining since no one has anything and struggles to find the resources to make the items needed for players to advance to higher levels.

After players are maxed out it turns ugly. All four of our UO accounts are maxed out with GM pretty much everything and with all the high end magic stuff we find there is really no need for crafting anymore.

My main characters have been wearing the same armor and cloths for over 2 years. (mage/tamer)

Warriors are ok but it seems like their armors wear out way to fast. I can go through a set in less than an hour while on killing sprees.

For a player ran economy it would take a huge amount of balancing, but I feel that NPC's would be required for basic items to get players started. In POL I could'nt even buy a sewing kit...no smithing items...nothing was availible to get players going.

To provide a true player based economy you would need to restrict the amount of characters and accounts players could have thus preventing them from having a crafter in every profession thus not needing anyone else for purchasing or selling wears.

EQ was an even worse failure at player based economies than most other games. Player made items were horrible and to hard to come by and even if found costed more than items looted from monsters which gave better quality items...

In other words you lost leveling time to sit around sewing trash for the first 300 points (Which takes almost a year) till you could actually make something worth selling or keeping. Normally it was so expensive and rare that players would keep the good craft items for their self.

So the entire thing was a huge waste of time and purely designed to prevent players from leveling to fast, since after reaching 50-65 they get bored "real" fast and quit.

Dev

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"So...if crazy people don't know their crazy...does that mean your only sane if your know your crazy?"