End game content

Versales
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Re: End game content

Post by Versales »

Cornbread wrote:
What I proposed was an idea to get something awesome after putting in some long term work. Now if you took your idea and tied it with the achievement system, or something similar, I could see you getting 1 pt per kill for easy and up for difficulty. You could then either earn an achievement reward or a currency or something that could get you something cool. This would not alienate new players or older players. It would provide you with an incentive to get more awesome gear to get the cool stuff easier but not make it mandatory.

This is really what I think we should be doing in this thread. Everyone throw ideas out and bounce them off each other. The GM's can read and if we do a good job implement a system that we all have thrown our 2 cents in and take all the fleshing out of the idea off them.
I am waffling on the idea that getting something awesome should or should not be tied to an idea like this. My thoughts are, everyone has a different idea of what awesome is- someone might think awesome is a titan type weapon, where others might find that next to useless and would rather have a super hard to get but, in their opinion, awesome looking deco. Awesome is subjective in nature because the nature of the game is that people can find different things awesome. Additionally, there comes the scale of difficulty, if its made too difficult then only those who are already fully relayered can take advantage. However, if you make the reward that someone with 220 dex and some GoC gear can get, then it becomes too easy.

Jus tossing thoughts around with your idea Cornbread. What would you think of several quest series (lets keep it simple and go with two "paths" we will call one "warrior" and the other "deco") If you chose the warrior path quest, your reward can be working to a weapon that is like an ancient yumi (to keep it simple) and if you finish the base quest you get the reward, a yumi. Then you repeat the quest with my toggle idea on for tier one- and you turn in your old yumi, and get a slightly better one (lets say it has the benefit of +1 str) that you free up points to make your bow a little more god like. Then you repeat the quest getting into higher and higher levels of difficulty until you achieve the max +20 str to the yumi. And you could do something similar for deco (no idea how that'd work)
My only problems are -
Weps and gear are already overpowered and I think that an idea like this would only contribute to the problem by giving people an even more god like set of gear.
This has the hallmark of making something excessively grindy. Farm monsters, turn in, start over farm mobs etc.

I agree we should be tossing around ideas and bouncing them around and critiquing and refining and really trying to spots where our holes are maybe we will come up with something that amounts serviceable and workable idea that thee +'s can take use as something that enough people have added their 2 cents too that its a good barometer for the type of things the player base is looking to get into.
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+Requiem
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Re: End game content

Post by +Requiem »

Instead of asking us to provide challenge for you, challenge yourself.

Collect 1 billion gold in your bank.
fill up a set of keys.
Level 1 of every kind of weapon to 100 without type changing it, and display them in your house.
Fill up a runic house with runic uses.
Collect 60k of every ore/wood/leather.
Collect a full set of completed large bods without turning any in.
Equip a set of relayers on your bio pet.

If these goals become too small, set bigger ones.

That's what keeps sandbox games interesting. It's not ever increasing power as it is with modern day MMORPGs. As other's have suggested turn off your scripts. Lower your gear level on purpose. If you want god-mode again, it's sitting in your bank.

This game wasn't designed with an "end-game" in mind as people think of it today. We have to realize this, and we also have to realize that people have come to enjoy the un-balancedness of Excelsior. If that were to change, I think we'd lose people.

That being said, I think we still need a few tweaks to get us back on track and slow down overall progression. Not to the point where it becomes overly tedious, but at least to the point where there is a meaningful distinction between a 2 year vet and a 6 year vet. Assuming same time put in (excluding RL money spent). I personally think it should take a few years to go from newbie to 12+ relayers. I think it should take more than a week to level a weapon 1-100. Maybe people disagree with me, I dunno.

I don't think adding a new power-level to the game will do more than further set the haves and have-nots apart. The only way to counter that, that I can see is to make all the new stuff account-bound, which I also think goes against the spirit of the game.
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+Requiem
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Re: End game content

Post by +Requiem »

One of the other issues that always comes up at least a couple times a year, that directly ties into this, is the difference between the "haves" and "have nots".

The dedicated people who put in the time, will always have more than the people who can only devote an hour a day to play. There's nothing we can do about that.

If we start increasing loot based on difficulty, that gap between the groups widens considerably quicker. Unless we start making everything account bound, and making everyone earn it for themselves, which in my opinion goes against the spirit of UO.

So another question to ask yourself is, are we trying to fundamentally trying to make the game more modern style, instead of its original sandbox style? This answer is important for many reasons.

In a sandbox, one person can do most/all of the things they want solo, and only engage with others when they want to. In a modern day MMO, there's classes, and you require groups to do most of the harder content. So, are you asking us to re-design a sandbox into an MMO, for MMO style progression to make it more challenging? If so, we would be killing the game as many people know and love it. While UO has a party system, the game isn't really balanced around that, especially here with 220 dex.

I remember talking about this a while back and these ideas came up. Looking back on my earlier stance, I'm not sure it would be a good idea to take things in that direction.

I personally think (at this point in time), the answer is more content available at the current level so there's more to do, is a better answer than harder content, with a new power level for everyone.
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Re: End game content

Post by Versales »

+Requiem wrote:If we start increasing loot based on difficulty, that gap between the groups widens considerably quicker. Unless we start making everything account bound, and making everyone earn it for themselves, which in my opinion goes against the spirit of UO.
That is a very good and valid point +R. I didn't consider that those that play more would be able to open a substantial earning gap via an increasing difficulty loot table. I was more focused on an increase in difficulty because it seems that what a lot of people are complaining about is the they are "all dressed up with no place to go." What if the idea for an increasing loot table were nixed and and instead just kept a difficulty counter. It could even be a public counter (maybe a running page, again, I don't know how any of this works :) ) Where everyone could see who the "top dog" is.
Instead of all monsters, it could be a weekly/bi-weekly/monthly rotating list with one or two monsters that people can push the difficulty up on. (maybe instancing + an arena type place where they spawn stronger and stronger) There would be no reward (make them lootless) just bragging rights for being the guy/gal that can go furthest.
Sure the "haves" might have the gear and/or time but outside of being #1 skeleton crusher for the week there is no advantage. it might also increase the market for things like weapons, and wep leveling (People will want to get some top notch slayers to keep pushing higher)

I understand that we are in a sandbox game (and I am perfectly content to build my own sand castle with the provided sand) However, I think modernization of some small scale might be needed because relayers already modernized characters outside of the norm. So giving people a reason to put on their Sunday best and find a challenge might give people a reason to play a little more. I am against giving people even higher tiered gear and weapons. And I am also against opening a further gap between the rich and poor and the unlimited timers and the limited timers.

In short, I don't know what the answer is. I am happy with the way things are now, but then again, I don't particularly play a ton anymore. I'd just like to see something that would give people who do seem to be at the end of playing being pleasurable a reason to stick around.
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Versales
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Re: End game content

Post by Versales »

+Requiem wrote:Instead of asking us to provide challenge for you, challenge yourself.

Collect 1 billion gold in your bank.
fill up a set of keys.
Level 1 of every kind of weapon to 100 without type changing it, and display them in your house.
Fill up a runic house with runic uses.
Collect 60k of every ore/wood/leather.
Collect a full set of completed large bods without turning any in.
Equip a set of relayers on your bio pet.

If these goals become too small, set bigger ones.
I like the idea of these goals. However, I think for some people things like this lay outside of their interests. I think these ideas, while worthwhile, and quite difficult, are not what some would traditionally consider challenging. Everyone is different, but speaking for myself, I would not even attempt to gather the stuff for this. I'd buy it off exex and call it a day. Then I'd be looking for other challenges. Then again, I don't like gathering things or collecting things. Again, everyone is different and I am sure some people would find these to be their brand of challenge. Others would think of challenge to mean a test of brawn or might or brains.
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Johnny Warren
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Re: End game content

Post by Johnny Warren »

Cornbread wrote:I have the feeling most of you have never played while have well over 600HP. When you're at that level mortal strike is as useless as poison. Even now that I only have 500HP and fall way short of where I used to be I can still stand in the middle of basically any stack and WW and still be unkillable. Certain mobs that can kill you require you to slowly walk away WW until the big mob is the only one standing then switch to bow and kill him, too. As I stated previously it's all in tactics and practice.
Hey dude, nice way to slip in some sly brags. I rock similar HP to that and mortal does (as you state) require you to take some backwards steps. You even mention the words tactics and practice in there. That was kinda the point I was making.... you can't JUST WW through there. Any time the game requires you to "think, practice, or use tactics" is good right? at least you can't just click play on your macro for those areas.

Either way, I was offering a suggestion for how to increase difficulty without having to nerf anything, or resort to 1-shot mobs.
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[Glyph]
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Re: End game content

Post by [Glyph] »

What if we made champs target the players with the high level gear? Some already target pets I believe. Or as I said earlier, make some that are invulnerable to weapon damage and only take damage from hand to hand attacks. They could be as fast as Abcesses and as strong as Paroxymus but have 50 hp. Sprinkle them in every where so you never know when you will have to disarm to stop them. Hopefully not in the middle of a champ spawn or while fighting 5 balrons but those are the lumps. Also, if they had the "targeting" script, they could ignore the lower level chars.
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Re: End game content

Post by Yoda »

I don't know what to say about that at all... I just don't...

down with us terrible vets????
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+Requiem
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Re: End game content

Post by +Requiem »

Not at all Yoda...

I'd love to find ways to engage players with 600+ hp with good, meaningful, fun content. I just haven't thought of any way to really do that other than mortal strike, and 1-hit kills, or forcing people to use a bow and run around in a circle to not get hit.

I know that's what people say they want, but I don't see tons of competition over the Spectre Queen, which is exactly that.

So, back to the drawing board.
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Re: End game content

Post by Yoda »

I think my previous comment was more directed at the "aim ait the big guy ignore the newb" notion before but yeah.

Fantastic, I am glad you pointed out that angle +R. I poked fun at this in wc the other morning, although people SAY they want this endgame challenge once constructed you will see what an utter complete wasted effort it was you will get only one of 2 possible outcomes.

1. Whinging and lots of it
2. No one using the content

it sounds like you are going to lose no matter what right?

thing is this, there is elements that don't depend on gear you and +N have touched on it and I think it truly is the key to making this work.. mental puzzles.. you can't really overgear for a mental puzzle. perhaps a room has a multi-stage combination lock or if you don't beat monsters in the right order the boss doesn't summon his proper form, mess with our brains, thing about it is this YES some of these puzzles will get out and the solves but there is ways around that, different ways to make it randomize etc.

Its not that mortal strike etc won't work, it just won't have staying power and strangely you not getting by a room because of a lack of figuring it out like a real life escape room, it is self motivating, people don't like to end the day as a dummy Ya dig
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brhanson2
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Re: End game content

Post by brhanson2 »

+Requiem wrote:Instead of asking us to provide challenge for you, challenge yourself.

Collect 1 billion gold in your bank.
fill up a set of keys.
Level 1 of every kind of weapon to 100 without type changing it, and display them in your house.
Fill up a runic house with runic uses.
Collect 60k of every ore/wood/leather.
Collect a full set of completed large bods without turning any in.
Equip a set of relayers on your bio pet.
Funny you mentioned these. This is exactly what brought me back and keeps me playing every day. I completed the wood gathering achievement now I am working on the ore one. When I finish that I will work on filling the wood and metalworkers keys. :)
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Re: End game content

Post by Cornbread »

+Requiem wrote:Not at all Yoda...

I'd love to find ways to engage players with 600+ hp with good, meaningful, fun content. I just haven't thought of any way to really do that other than mortal strike, and 1-hit kills, or forcing people to use a bow and run around in a circle to not get hit.

I know that's what people say they want, but I don't see tons of competition over the Spectre Queen, which is exactly that.

So, back to the drawing board.
This is exactly what I was referring to. I did the Spectre Queen a few days ago and here are my findings. Took me 2 days to get the summoning pieces. Realized I didn't have to use a bow to kill the Spectre Queen. Killed it and got absolutely nothing worth looting. Will not be doing again. I know it can drop some cool stuff, but I have the feeling I can make 10x's the gold it would cost to buy all the stuff from someone else. I do not want you to feel that I don't appreciate the effort because I appreciate every single thing all of you +'s do. What I'm saying is the summoning, to me, was inconvenient and not worth the effort, for ME. That's why I threw out the idea of using the achievement system to get rewards that I might actually use. I don't want you guys to do an insane amount of work to give us a chance at a reward that we may or may not use. Or on something that we don't feel was worth our time to repeat. I like the achievement system as it is, but honeslty it's just a novelty at this point. If you said hey, Cornbread, kill 50k mobs in this combination and I'll let you pick out a piece of deco from this table or a cool item I'd be more willing to aim for that. Then you take that item and say, "Hey you can put that in your house or wear it....OR you can go kill another 50k assorted mobs and combine those two items to get something shiny off this table. Rinse and repeat. I certainly don't want something for free, I just like a goal of some sort to strive for.

As for your list earlier I actually like that idea a lot of filling keys and collecting stuff. I've done ALL of it. So I'd like a new "challenge". I wish I had the perfect answer for a long term challenge. I love when you guys do stuff to dungeons and rework things but when the newness wears off we generally revert to the same old stuff. I'm sure there will never be a perfect answer to any of this and that's why this shard after 12 years is still evolving. As long as the shard does keep evolving and discussions like this remain I believe this shard will continue for quite some time as after 20+ years there is nothing else out there like this game.
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Re: End game content

Post by Cygnus »

Cornbread wrote:I certainly don't want something for free, I just like a goal of some sort to strive for.
This may or not may appeal to you Cornbread, or any other player in your situation, But I would love any help I can get in updating my Monster Compendium, especially in getting hard to gather data from the uber mobs. You once helped me collect info for it from the FED in Bedlam. Experienced players such as yourself can go places, do things that most can't, especially me. Plus you have a vast amount of Excelsior knowledge about drops, techniques and tactics that could be added to the Compendium. My work has always been open source and anyone wanting to take the info provided and add to it or improve it are more than welcome. I would love to see that Compendium be a one-stop info dump for all things we have to fight, tame or manipulate in one way or another. My goal was to do it myself but I have another higher priority to accomplish before I can ever get back to it full time. Prime example on how you and others can help: I made a special section for Dungeon Wrong in the Compendium. (Dungeon has been changed twice since last release) But, information for Sgail, Umbris Camp, etc. are sadly lacking. If you want a challenge, try gathering average gold and token drops, weapon experience points and special drops while being constantly barraged.
Like I said, it may not appeal to you, but it is a challenge even to gather the mundane stuff for so many critters. Anyone interested, please send me a pm.
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Re: End game content

Post by mattwaldram »

Okay, so I'm not going to pretend I have any idea whatsoever about how easy or difficult this would be, but...

On OSI/EA Ultima Online, probably around 2003 (whenever it was that Age of Shadows came out... it was definitely shortly after that release), the Devs launched a new storyline. Some Orc queen whose name escapes me right now felt like she was wronged, saw her arse, and decided to attack... pretty much everyone. Basically, there were a few towns - I know Delucia was one, and I think perhaps Yew and Trinsic may have been others - that suddenly came under attack from Orcs. Just constant orcs, of every orc archetype, streaming into the towns and causing havoc.

Back then, Fatuus and I were playing on the Europa shard and Delucia was what we saw as our home-town. So when the orcs came, we were there... and oh boy did we die. And die. And die. And die. (And die.) Luckily, there were a lot of people who saw Del as their home-town, and so after a while, we started to claw back the town, but it was a fair old battle that I remember for three things: 1) the constant dying OH GOD THE DYING, (2) The LAG OH GOD THE LAG, (3) Someone managed to get up onto one of the rooftops and they were just up there pinging arrows into the orc mob for bloody hours, and for some reason none of the orcs could attack back. In the end, the whole strategy was to lead as many orcs as possible within Rooftop Joe's range (I have no idea what his or her actual name was), and just let him arrow the orcs to death.

I think the battle was a week, maybe a couple of weeks - it certainly monopolised my every evening for a long time. Eventually we turned the tide, and re-claimed Delucia, but I *think* that one of the other towns "fell" and remained under Orc rule for a while. At the end of the battle, all those who had been sufficiently-involved received a sash that just said something like "Defender of Delucia." And that's it.

And it's still one of the greatest spells of any game I've ever played. It was incredible - the number of people that showed up to defend our towns, the way we all had to work together, form joint-strategies. It was so good. There were people who I had only ever interacted with on the forums, previously, that were now standing shoulder to shoulder with me, over the tops of our dozens of previous corpses.

SO... I suppose the question is, how hard would it be to recreate something like this? To say that every now and then - doesn't have to be too often - but a random town gets attacked by some mobs. Maybe do it so that there's a counter - and once the volume of Orcs within the town reaches a certain number, the town "falls" - and falling could simply mean something as simple as the NPCs/Bankers disappear, maybe the town comes off the world teleporter, until the orcs have gone. And the orcs go once we kill them all (and the spawner stops recreating them).

I haven't been playing anything like as much as I used to, just recently. And this is partly because things in my personal life got very, very busy, and part of it is that I hit a bit of a wall in character development/things-I-wanted-to-achieve. Whereas I know for an absolute fact that I would be online every available hour if Delucia, or some other town, was once more under attack.

As I say, I don't know how much work this would require, but it seems like it could be kept simple: You'd use existing mobs, just randomly spawn them at whichever town was under attack, and have some form of counter to decide when the town "falls". You don't need any special loot or rewards - I'm sure most people would be happy to defend towns from time to time just in the name of Saving The World.

Or if people really did want a reward - maybe the option of a title, "The Lion of Delucia" etc.
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Charon
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Re: End game content

Post by Charon »

Orc invasion was awesome!
One of the best events in UO history, if not the best.

Defending our homeland to the hordes would be epic here!

Slightly beefed up normal orcs mixed in with tougher orcs and their legions.
Dragons, Balrons, some asorted ellys. Add in some uber monsters to spawn periodically etc.
Could even have as we gain control of one town another is invaded forcing the players to defend multiple towns.
While town is under attack all NPC vendors do not work.

Players can earn titles or mid level items, deco etc.
Kill X amount of tier 1 monsters get item "Y" or kill.
X amount of tier 2 monsters to get item "Y" as well.

Cannot earn same item from both "tiers", only 1.
This gives lower/mid level players a chance to earn the same item that the vets can, they just need to slaughter far more low
tier monsters.

Thoughts?
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