battlewraith

The unhinged ones often talk as if they are the community (everyone, we, etc.). And they compare forum tiffs to actual violence, torture, whatever lol. Good riddance.

It's not about bank. It's about wasting time.

I believe in you!

Art, creativity, journey progression--yup that's all great for a while. Eventually, it gets old. The game is close to 20 years old. Telling a veteran who started this game in 2004 that farming is an exploit to circumvent this core gameplay in order to auto-win is utterly silly. How many times do I need to repeat a mission or TF in order to establish that I "won" it. The very fact that people are still hanging around pursuing their obsession with different facets of the game is a major win. Let people have fun the way they want.

Yes, but you're missing the point. I want to achieve some objective--say creating a new build that I have planned out and want to use to run certain TFs with my friends. I have to level that character to 50 and then do all the slotting and accolades, etc. Getting that character to 50 involves running repetitive content that I have done for years. Do I want to spend a long tedious slog going through regular content, or get on a fire farm and grind out those levels I need in a few hours? NEITHER of these option is fun. One is just a much better way of getting that initial phase out of the way so I can use the character in the way that I enjoy. Cmon, you know this.

Which is indicative of what? Isn't the underlying problem the fact that a lot of the ordinary content just isn't appealing for these players? Nerfing AE fire farms doesn't suddenly make the content people are skipping any funner.

The site mmo-population.com says that UO has about 463k players or subscriptions, with roughly 4.4 k daily players. It puts coh at about 1 million, with 9.6k daily players. No idea of the veracity of the numbers, it was the thing that came up when I did the search.

A quick google search indicated that Ultima Online has less than half the player base of Homecoming. Maybe if the devs take a more hardline approach to advancement, we can successfully reach those numbers as well.

Honestly not trying to be insulting, but your use of English here is so tortured that I wonder if you just don't understand the gist of what I've been saying. My motive is to comment on this discussion. I just think the proposed changes won't bring any real benefit and will piss people off. My farmers are built and I spend more time running Itrials than farms anyway. It doesn't matter whether you think it should have been allowed or not. It WAS allowed. And changing things now, if that actually happens, will have consequences for this gradually dwindling population. Your personal GAME BALANCE PHILOSOPHY disagrees with what I said. Fine, whatever. You think my opinion is immaterial and I think you're analysis is irrelevant to the actual situation at hand. *shudders*

This is nonsensical. Do I feel that a healthy system should have one dramatically skewed aspect, naturally? You're asking inherently subjective questions while issuing weird, ill-defined platitudes about the survival of systems. It's not that complicated. The game is not a biological organism. It will survive as long as people keep the servers running and people keep playing it. There is no reason to believe that significant balance changes are necessary to keep people on board for these things. Likewise there's no reason to believe that significant balance changes, if that is even possible given the circumstances, will bring in a swath of new players to a 2 decade old MMO. There is reason to suspect that certain changes will prompt people to stop playing--mainly because people are signaling strong dissatisfaction with those changes in their feedback. I think an obsession with abstract ideas of balance and game health is a great way to kill this patient on the operating table.

Yes, but I think the general idea is that it's more efficient so that you spend less time and effort doing it. Apart from something like AFK farming.

Even if the rate or return were the same, I'm guessing most people would prefer to sell the contraband. Or simply move on to another activity. In game terms, the toilet cleaning would be being forced to endlessly repeat the same content you prefer to avoid by farming. This game came out in 2004, was shut down, pirated, and is now being run by a volunteer development team. What does "healthy" look like for this game? Particularly for this playerbase, who are predominantly middle-aged veterans. I think an insanely skewed rate of return for effort invested is a selling point for a lot of people who no longer can afford to spend a lot of time grinding for the things they want. There are people that constantly complain on the forums about the game being too easy or some aspect of it being broken and they push the devs to enact changes to "fix" these things. This fix will somehow recalibrate things so that the game will be.....fun again? Challenging? More engaging for the flood of new players who come in and love this new balance? That is a pipe dream. If the majority of people are farming and outfitting new characters, that means that those activities are the ones that have the most appeal for the current playerbase. Tampering with that dynamic in order to funnel players back into the other content is insane. It's literally inviting players, who are probably doing a lot of game things as part of a routine, to rethink how they are spending their time.

Like clockwork.

Welcome to the suggestions forum! I think the idea would be reasonable if you were buying a one time use power. Stuckmobs happen occasionally. If you have one on hand, you can fix the problem without waiting on GMs. Maybe there's a cooldown on how often you can purchase them as Aida mentioned above. Works for me.

Here's a couple variations to consider: 1 is a small amount. The devs, in the course of a couple years, enact five changes. So: 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 5. Five is.....probably still a small amount. 1 is a small amount. 0 is a smaller amount. The devs do zero. No innovation. Loses interest. Goes to play another game.

It's hard to tell whether you just don't get it or are lousy at explaining yourself. Take a certain context, like a farming brute. Obviously certain sets and builds are clearly better for this task than others. So what then does balance mean in this situation? All the brute builds should be equally good at farming? The builds that are good at farming should also be on par doing things like AVs? What? This is a contradiction. If they truly have different characteristics, performance should vary depending on the situation. Otherwise those different effects and whatnot are just superficial surface details. And if those differences in characteristics are actually significant, certain sets and builds might become standard picks for players, not because of imbalance, but because they are most suited to the content that players enjoy running. Or they're just more fun for some reason. "Let's provide everyone with rigorous, standardized mediocrity so that I don't have to worry about another set outperforming mine."

I don't think anybody is arguing that this change couldn't lead to a DPS increase. Obviously if that's your thing, knock yourself out. The question that the naysayers continue to duck is whether that added damage, for those that seek to pursue it, is actually significant. The examples here are silly. Another LotG slot. Oh the humanity. Adding assault on a blaster--with no trade off! Except the added end cost of running assault. Which is probably overkill on a decently built blaster and redundant on a team with buffs that is probably at damage cap already.

Outperforms in what way? Farming? Pvp? Pylon tests? Specific enemy groups? You complain about cookie cutter builds and min maxing, and then turn around and advocate a one size fits all mentality on game balance. Moreover, what he's talking about here isn't nerfing for balance. He wants to roll back global changes to revisit a previous era of development for which he has nostalgia. I didn't say I hate nerfs in general. I said I hate the notion he's pushing. I believe most people still playing the game would.

LOL. Ok Miss Manners lemme address both your original post and the BIG EDIT post: 1. It appears to me that you have an unprecedented level of butthurt over a simple pithy statement. I suspect that this is a distraction from the subjective nature of your statements upon which I and other people have remarked. I do find it amusing. 2. I hate your bad ideas about nerfing. I think that other people, probably most of the player base, would hate them too. I think you should stop hiding in someone else's suggestion thread and post your own thread calling for these broad nerfs and see what kind of response they actually garner. Not that you care what other people think, but there are objective assessments that could be made from the responses. 3. The new tagline is fucking hilarious. Chef's kiss.

Maybe you should stop being so emotionally invested in this exchange, it seems to be hampering your ability to reason. What I wrote is my assessment of your stances on this issue. The fact that you don't like it doesn't make it a lie. It's an opinion. But again, this is consistent with how you've been throughout this discussion. You lack the ability to relate to people that think differently about an issue. As in: Simple answer: Not everyone thinks the same way you do.

Dude, do you know what lying actually means? I think your argument is bad and self-serving. I explained why. And I'm not the only one in this thread that disagrees with you. It all boils down to opinion and you're not handling it well for some reason. The actually lying is here: If you actually took that to heart, you wouldn't be agitating for nerfs and complaining about changes that other people want. This change would only affect you if you decided to change your build. But ya think you know better and you gotta have people do it your way.

Ok so it's power creep when it's something you don't want. Gotcha. Quit being a baby about it. You baby. lol.

FFS, just stop. You're smarter than that. Everyone one of my characters could be doing more damage right now if I wanted to skip on something else that I think is important--like buffing teammates or something. You want nerfs. Overall. And you don't care what other people think is fun or what motivates them to play--you've made that clear in this thread. The devs would be foolish at this stage of the game to follow your lead. They should be offering things to different types of players and those things don't have to follow this hardline ethic you got going which isn't the case and wouldn't add anything to the experience if you had your way.

Well put. The power creep crowd in this thread is fixated on a general view of balance that ignores variations in player knowledge, interests, and the long and varied history of the development of this game. Bill's big rebuttal here is a presumed increase of dps on a specific character's pylon performance. A very niche (vague) example extrapolated to address the entire breadth of the issue. The objection is that power creep makes things too easy. People who feel this way are a subset of the population. The devs are introducing content for them. Easing off on the mandates that result in wasted power picks is likely to be a plus for more casual players for a variety of reasons.