People who got caught by the trapped-box / poisoned-food ploy were morons, imho (saying this as someone who got hit with an exploded box in a guard tower outside Yew once. Woops!) -
If you found a bag of groceries at the side of the road, would you take them home and eat them?
If you saw an abandoned piece of luggage on the bus, would you go rooting around in it?
Think of it as karma...
Thanks for the thoughtful post.
I wonder what the game would be like if they had encoded virtues into it instead of the half-baked notoriety/honor system.
In UO, if you attacked other players needlessly you'd drop in reputation, eventually getting instakilled if you set foot in town. It also allowed other players to attack you (and gain rep for themselves) with impunity, leading to something unique to UO - Notoriety PKs; "blues" who indiscriminately attacked and hunted down every last "red" they could find
Wish I could mod you up, but I've already put my 2c in to this thread.
There were the occasional rare magic items, but they weren't
Much more lucrative were items crafted by server-famous people, or having a piece of fur (not leather).
Or the "skull of soandso" rolling around in your bankbox.
UO proved that you could build a large enough base of people around it.
Just look at the glut of houses pre-Trammel..
They just wanted it to be bigger. They didn't realize they had something niche and magical.
Then again, things like the Shadowclan Orcs don't really translate well to anything other than pre-Tramell UO
Shadowbane had the following flaws:
* You had to mercilessly camp mob spawns in order to get money for your guild/city.
* It was disasterously easy to quit your guild and join the rival so you end up on the winning side
This made things: boring.
Why did I enjoy UO in its late-beta early-release stage, then, as a complete non-griefer?
Granted, I was a lot younger back then, so this may all simply be rose-tinted goggles.
But here's what I liked about it:
Player housing that wasn't too widespread. This was before every buildable square inch of the gameworld was covered in castles and houses. The wilderness actually felt like wilderness. There were birds flitting around, and then all of a sudden you hear an ettin roar. Rut roh! (Compare to when I left it, about a year later: running between houses.. between houses.. argh what's with all the houses.. hey, a tower with "ASS" spelt out in cloth on its roof..)
First entrepreneurial act: saving up enough money to buy one of those rare dye tubs in the trinsic tailer's shop, and proceeding to sell customization to other players who missed the spawn! Then again, the guards were broken that day in beta, and a group of hoodlums had set up shop at the south entrance. (beta)
Hanging out at the Yew Trading Company; one of the first guilds on Great Lakes to get a house with a forge in it placed it in the field at the crossroads just south of Yew. They took & delivered orders through the window. Occasionally PKs would attack, so they formed an alliance with a more combat oriented guild. They'd pay guildmembers to sit around outside and protect their clientele.
A true sense of "danger;" every time a stranger came on screen I'd hit my all names hotkey. If they were red, I'd run the other direction as fast as I could. Running away from those big bad dread lords was fun! It got my blood pumping! Heck, I'd just bought some new platemail from Lilo! Compared to yawn, another instance...
Had one character who was perpetually grey. Had studded leather armor of the best magical rating, along with an imminently accurate bow of vanquishing. And he was a GM archer/tactician/hiding. PKs and NPKs alike would try to kill him. He'd either run and hide or kill 'em outright. What kept him grey was if he saw someone kill an animal (bird|rabbit|hart|bear) and not skin it, he'd run em out of "his woods." After giving them ample warning to gtfo our quit it.
The Orcs who set up base at the orc camp southwest of Yew. They were badass, and humongous. Occasionally they'd set up camp along the road and demand tribute. Occasionally they'd get attacked by people who thought they were badass PvP guilds.
They almost always lost. There were almost always ten or twenty orcs hanging out at the fort. Sometimes a lot more.
Their Drinkee fests were freakin' great.
That's the kind of content you can't get from WoW. Or any other carebare MMO. You don't even get that kind of content with Eve (though you do get truly righteous massive space battles, which are kinda cool I guess). Heck, even a primarily PvP game like DAoC didn't get content like that.
What's missing? Here's the attributes UO had that garnered more of that kind of behavior than any other MMO to date:
1) Free-range PvP outside of towns
2) easy ability to tell if a PK was a PK on first sight
3) "stuff" was relatively easy and cheap to come by. Lost a set of armor? meh, you probably have another couple sets sitting in the bank that are just as good.
4) You didn't have to go out grinding a treadmill to get to a state where you could comfortable interact with the rest of the game. It took 3-4 days of heavy playing to get a solid character up and running.
5) there were craptons of "useless" items that actually showed up when you dropped 'em on the ground. Bones, rugs, mugs, clothes, everything. Heck, even "beef jerky" (too bad they had to take that out after they released in Germany)
6) It didn't force your playing into a paradigm. Instead of being an amusement park with clearly marked lines and rides, it was an adventure.
7) At the time, it was something that was brand spankin' new. Sure, Meridian 59 and other MUDs around had done similar stuff. But none of it had the mainstream appeal that UO had.
Of course, in parting, my favorite thing that happened in UO happened before release, when things were still pretty buggy:
To set the stage: Trinsic. The guards are bugged again - none of them are around. Everybody's running around in their newbie equipment, because characters just got wiped an hour or two ago. All of a sudden, a naked guy comes running in the west entrance yelling "ETTIN! TROLL!!!!!"
The carnage was unbelievable.
The explanation even moreso:
Back then, they had an ecology system whereby creatures had to, well, eat. Cougar eats pig, orc eats cougar. Unfortunately the only mobs easy enough for the glut of newbs to kill were birds and rabbits and rats. So eventually the bigger, badder mobs got hungry. And started wandering farther and farther afield.
Until they got to Trinsic. And had their gluttony sated by the hordes of noobs.
And then there was witnessing Rainz murder Lord British. That was pretty fun, too
And has made the quality of OS and hardware better. The easier a customer can switch devices, the more you'll strive to keep that customer on your device.
Netflix membership + blueray: $6.00/mo for one disc out at a time. Average turnaround time: 3 days. That works out to
Little bit cheaper than $1 a night dvds
You mean, instead of doing manual labor or working in the service industry, they can be call center personnel or accounts receivable or receptionists or records management or middle management, at position (15,67) in cube farm D, sector 4 of floor 8 of building 2, Giraffe campus?
Unless, of course, you bought your iPhone free and clear of the subsidized contract price. Then you can switch whenever you like.. as long as you have a reason for contract termination (contract changes, etc).
3G network is fine and dandy?
Apparently you've never tried to use an ssh app over 3g in manhattan..
Reminds me of the Jaffa in SG1.
In one episode, SG1 is showing some faction the difference between the staff weapons and the assault rifles that SG1 uses. They show a Jaffa trying to hit a target perhaps 20m away - he misses several times, as you can imagine the staff weapon is rather inaccurate. One of the SG1 team then proceeds to shoot the shit out of it with their P90.
The relevancy is thus:
They explain that the staff weapon isn't made for battle - it's made for fear and intimidation. The same could probably be said for storm troopers: the blasters are loud, inaccurate, and give away your position like nobody's business. Their armor is for show, to embody intimidation and quell resistance.
It doesn't make much sense in the SG1 universe, however, as it seems like the different Goa'uld are constantly skirmishing each other. You'd think they'd use the staff weapons to intimidate their slaves, and something a little more efficient for actual battles with other Goa'uld.
In Atlantis, Ronon has a pistol that seems to shoot the same kind of energy as the staff weapons, with the caveat that it can be set to stun. Because it's a pistol, he's much more accurate than a Jaffa ever would be with his staff weapon.
Readability bookmarklet is your friend: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
Intel CPUs are not defective, they just act that way. -- Henry Spencer
