Planned ED price increases and changes in 2023

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Jebidia
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Re: Planned ED price increases and changes in 2023

Post by Jebidia »

If someone starts and within a year can have the same level of equipment and wealth as someone who has been playing for 4, 7 or13 years... then there's something wrong with the system.

You are right. If they spend a ton of money they can get there in a year. But, how many actually spend any money? With a discount on the first relayer they are at least some what vested in the server.
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Cerrera
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Re: Planned ED price increases and changes in 2023

Post by Cerrera »

No need to run untill you cannot take a breath, no need for every cost get setup, like on15 year veteran in one year, needs/wishes wouldn't go away (and if will, than sadly it will be true endgame), they will simply be much more expensive or will require more effort. You cannot pass this game, it goes forever.
Last edited by Cerrera on Wed Jan 25, 2023 12:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Geriatric
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Re: Planned ED price increases and changes in 2023

Post by Geriatric »

one item id really love to see is simply a gold bag, doesnt hold anything except gold and removes the weight
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Wil
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Re: Planned ED price increases and changes in 2023

Post by Wil »

A long time ago I remember a "power hour" type even where everyone temporarily got a personal bank stone. That was kinda cool.
beanerman
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Re: Planned ED price increases and changes in 2023

Post by beanerman »

I totally agree with turnabout. With the lack of auctions there needs to be an overhaul of items in the ed room. I DONATE and farm gold but not as much as I was a year ago. If there was say totems, titans hammers, and more end game items. Also make a way to track how many of said items sold that way you know what items need to be removed. If adding high end items like totems and such sounds bad make it so they come on the stones every few months.

Also take in consideration of getting new and improved gear slots so that everyone does not have to run around in the same look as everyone else.

We need more mounts added to the stones and take all the ones you can get from vet rewards off
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Eremite
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Re: Planned ED price increases and changes in 2023

Post by Eremite »

As a new player, (48 days account age), getting started is pretty brutal. The skill-gain is blessedly easy, but that's where it ends.

A friend of mine once tried to get me to play Eve Online - I logged in and did the tutorial, did some grinding for a few hours, and let him know my opinion - this is just grindy and boring. His response was "Yeah, you have to grind for a year or two before it gets fun."

I immediately closed the game, uninstalled, and have never been back.

I think there's a lesson to be learned here - making it easier for players to get up and running sooner helps with player retention. I work from home and can grind away on my 2nd monitor - no fancy scripts, etc. 48 days later, I've still got no re-layers because of all the other things that are more useful locked behind exorbitant ED prices.

It gets a bit better in Mistvale when you get the armor there, but you're locked from getting into there for 3 weeks where you're forced to just get *stomped* by mobs that can't touch you after the set.

Bag upgrades for one - why are we limited on bag weight? This seems like a problem that was engineered to sell a solution to.
Same goes for max bag items. Same for items in bank box.

I've heard "pay to win" come up in previous comments and tactics like this give credence to those claims. Create problems, sell solutions. Sure you can grind for 48 days to get a half-decent carrying capacity... or you can whip out the credit card.

It doesn't cost a lot to run a UO server. I've had a 200+ player server running on a free server, then we upgraded to one that cost $20/month to get in in a better location. There are a lot of incidental costs like paying for banners and vote bumps in the topsites though - these are probably the bulk of expenses.

That being said, I've enjoyed the time I've had so far mostly because of nostalgia for the game coming back after 10 years - though the frustration of unbearably slow progress is making me lose interest a bit.

My suggestion would be to *lower* the prices of ED rewards for things that a new player would need to get up and running. Leave vanity items alone (appearance change, ethereals, etc).

Also *drastically* drop the price of things like backpack and bank upgrades, druid spellbook (this shouldn't even be an ED reward IMO), etc that a new player would need to be invested more quickly.

If you're looking to garner more donations and cause more ED to be spent, wouldn't it make more sense to add *new* rewards that are more geared toward the veteran players who have the most gold? Some ideas off the top of my head:

* More ethereal options
* Item Rename Deed
* Deco Items
* Unlimited hitching post (must be locked down)
* Some auction items like Unlimited Bandage, etc. (This would suck so much ED out)
* Slayer Deeds (for spellbooks or weapons)
* Gold Bag (Holds gold but removes weight) - Can sell a more expensive blessed one also.

I can keep going if interested.
Geriatric
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Re: Planned ED price increases and changes in 2023

Post by Geriatric »

here here eremite

some of the first things i noticed that threw me off were backpack weight limits, i can understand if its inside your own backpack
but once its a secure container in your house or in the bank there shouldnt be a limit

im at 95 days now, still havent got a single relayer or even a bag of holding

i have no idea what the hell im gonna do when i hit 180 days if i still dont have relayers and i have to give up my mistvale armour
that age limit should be removed
Alibaster
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Re: Planned ED price increases and changes in 2023

Post by Alibaster »

I agree as well. I'm not a new player but I was inactive for a long time and came back about 8 month ago with nothing to my name. Mistvale wasn't an option so I had to donate to get back to a playable level. Grinding out for gold would have taken months if not years to get there.

I don't think making certain items more expensive in the ED room is the answer. Changing the items in the ED room would be a better option. If it's needed for game play then make it more accessible not less. Have unique vanity items for sale instead. Rotate them in and out for certain periods of time like the donation bonuses. For example, the Stronger Box could be an ED item for a few months in the middle of the year for those that didn't get one through donations around Christmas. Or make some of the auction items available for 60 days in the ED room. Instead of selling one item for a crazy amount of gold and draining one person's account, make it so dozens of people can but the item for a little less which pulls more overall gold out of the economy. You could also have a cap on the number that can be sold, like a limited edition version of something with a slight color variation. Limit the purchase to 1 or 2 per account so they don't get grabbed by one player and now you have a gold sink and potential for a secondary market sale. Provided the items are deco or other vanity items, it will not hurt the game play power balance.

Bottom line there are other things that can be done without just changing the value of ED in game.

I'm happy to donate my time to help come up with unique items to sell each month if +C just doesn't have the time to do it. :D
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Wil
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Re: Planned ED price increases and changes in 2023

Post by Wil »

There are games like Chess where the game doesn't change, only the skill of the player. Ultima Online is not one of those games. UO is a grinder. You progressively improve your character and resources making it possible to pursue more and more challenging parts of the game. Since the game has to last for years, the overwhelming majority of the results of grinding aren't going to be available to you in the first weeks of play.

UOEX especially tilts this way since it isn't a PvP shard. Because you aren't challenging yourself against other players, the core fun concludes a few hours after you've built everything you care to build. After that it's just a social network: a place to chat with like-minded souls.

Like it or lump it, that's what UOEX is. If you'd rather be playing chess, where there's nothing to build and no grind save personal practice, you should do that.
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Johnny Warren
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Re: Planned ED price increases and changes in 2023

Post by Johnny Warren »

A PvM Ultima Online server with unlimited skill cap is going to be a grind-fest. It's what we signed up for. You can "pay to win" here all you want, although I am not sure how one determines the "winner" on here, but at the end of the day we signed up for this glacially slow gameplay with almost endless things to do and achieve. I think Wil actually nailed it on the head with his analogy. There are many more games out there where you can increase in skill level to be better. UO is not that game. Imagine we logged in and started with an "infininite bank cheque, infinite iitem weight, full ancient TH relayers and everyone had a custom green acres land to build houses in" what would we do? The game would be ended, finished. I was recently having a discussion with a guildy about not helping the newer members too much (giving them end game equipment) because it would ruin their fun. The grind and milestones you achieve along the way ARE the game, not a hindrance to the game. To be "better" in UO you set your own personal goals - building that nice house, saving up for that HBoH, getting all TH relayers, etc and grind towards those goals. I have been grinding away slowly for 13+ years here, meeting new people. Forming in game friendships and nemeses. Forming some RL friendships too. That's UOEX. To change the recipe too much would be to change what has made this shard have such longevity.

Just to touch on the item/weight limits. These were always a part of UO, having a way to circumvent them is cool, and should be expensive. If everyone had unlimited items in bank, backpack and house the server would lag (I think, correct me if I am wrong lol, coding is not my thing).
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Zalia
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Re: Planned ED price increases and changes in 2023

Post by Zalia »

It took me years to get a relayer - enjoy the journey.
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Eremite
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Re: Planned ED price increases and changes in 2023

Post by Eremite »

Johnny Warren wrote:
Tue Mar 14, 2023 2:04 am
Just to touch on the item/weight limits. These were always a part of UO, having a way to circumvent them is cool, and should be expensive. If everyone had unlimited items in bank, backpack and house the server would lag (I think, correct me if I am wrong lol, coding is not my thing).
IIRC, the item limit was higher than 125 base, though I might be wrong. And the weight was tied to your strength. I have a theoretical max of 719 weight, but I get overweight and start dropping things long before then. That may be either old-school UO talking or other servers I've been on like a decade ago tainting my memory though.

As for more items = more lag, kindof. Items in bank boxes, backpacks, containers in houses, etc don't really cause client lag, but they can inflate save times as it's reading all that info and writing it to the disk. The save time is like 3 seconds though.

Things that will cause client side lag are usually things that require network (I doubt anyone's PC struggles on the resources side with UO). Items on the ground, NPCs on the screen, houses, locked down items, non-static decoration, etc.

On a side note, I've noticed a *lot* of non-static decoration that doesn't really need to be dynamic. It pollutes the Ctrl+Shift plates and causes network lag when recalling into certain areas (TC, Mistvale, etc). For a layman - anything that you can highlight or doesn't show up on the mini-map at a distance or doesn't show up in UOAM after refreshing from the .mul files is non-static. You need to download all this information from the server when you run into that area.

There's a .tostatic and .fromstatic command IIRC that will let Admins convert non-static deco items to static but this has its own problems - once it's a static, it writes that data to the client's .mul files (map/world data) and disappears to everyone else without those files. You'd need a patching system that saves those updates to a patching server that people download from when launching if there are any changes. I wrote a system that did this ages ago and went on a bit of a streak of converting everything that could be static'd over and the network usage (and thus lag) dropped pretty significantly - server-side network usage dropped to like 1/5 of what it was before converting.

I've gone off on a tangent - point being, visible lag is mostly from stuff you see in-world, not stuff in containers. The stuff in the containers/bank boxes can contribute to world save time, but not really that much.
Zalia wrote:
Tue Mar 14, 2023 3:11 am
It took me years to get a relayer - enjoy the journey.
If years is the expected time to get 1 re-layer, why do MV items have a 6-month account age limit on them? Seems pretty cruel to give people a taste of not being roflstomped by mobs, then take that away once they hit a certain time limit.

My idea is that it should be faster than this - get up and running so that the game feels good to play, then you grind for better stuff. You never really run out of stuff to grind for - once you get a set of re-layers, there's always upgrades you can do like converting them to Bone Crushers, etc. Or build a second set of re-layers to try different playstyles (like Magery builds, etc). Gives people more freedom to experiment with playstyles.

---

At any rate, look at other MMOs - every one that I can think of that's been around a while has catchup mechanics to help newer players. It's fun to grind years for the upgrades when noone else has them, but later you're just looking at a mountain that seems un-climbable. I especially know of no other successful games that actively make things *harder* for newer players years after the fact like an ED increase would. This seems counterintuitive and a recipe for failure.
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Re: Planned ED price increases and changes in 2023

Post by Zalia »

I never got to do Mistvale - I hear it's good. It's also an avenue to younger players to get some good gear. Do the sash and cloak have a time-limit?
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Eremite
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Re: Planned ED price increases and changes in 2023

Post by Eremite »

Zalia wrote:
Tue Mar 14, 2023 5:44 am
I never got to do Mistvale - I hear it's good. It's also an avenue to younger players to get some good gear. Do the sash and cloak have a time-limit?
It's pretty neat - mostly the double XP for leveling weapons and the starter gear. The Sash/Cloak/Sword don't seem to have a time limit at least.

I've been spending time leveling Swords of Prosperity since they seem to be horrible to level so the double-XP helps. The problem is being able to spend the 25 mil or so to turn one into a relayer. Maybe I'm under the wrong impression that you're supposed to use the MistVale starting gear as a ramping off point until you can get some starting re-layers going? If so, not sure what the next step would be.

Only downside I've seen to MV so far is the monotony of grinding the same dungeons for hours - same with just sitting around farming the rat quest in the newbie dungeon. I'd much prefer to be out exploring the world personally, but the double XP tends to keep me killing the same daemons and liches, etc. I can deal with that though and still take a few excursions to go explore more.
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Wil
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Re: Planned ED price increases and changes in 2023

Post by Wil »

Zalia wrote:
Tue Mar 14, 2023 5:44 am
I never got to do Mistvale - I hear it's good. It's also an avenue to younger players to get some good gear. Do the sash and cloak have a time-limit?
The good news is that if you missed the cloak you can get another just like it from the Christmas quest. It's a -lot- harder to get via the Christmas quest, but it's still a darn good piece of equipment.
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