Let me start by saying, I love coming back to old school UO. I'll follow up with I "like" the server. The economy is solid and players pull their weight to keep the gears turning. I have a keg order guy. This other dude sold me his first pair of blessed black sandals for a super discounted price. I've placed both my houses and sold 1 of them(villa) for 200k to a first time home buyer. If I'm farming a spawn often times a blue will say np he'll leave, or a red will PK me invis my horse, rez me, and only take my gold. Jimmy the Hand stole a X-mas book from me and got away, but I could have gotten a cool prize! So this shard is filled with very classy folks and I'd like to give you all a shout out in that respect. What troubles me about the server, and I mean this with all sincerity is again the community itself. I remember choosing this server because its true UO, the economy is good, and the population averaged ~600 online players. Little did I know at that time 600 really meant 200. But you know what 200 can work, right? Unless they are afk at bank or in their house just to earn plantinum for days on end. So is this server already dead? The nostalgia is destroyed because for those who are active, they are actively solo. Wether it's the Blue who says he'll farm elsewhere, the Red who rez's me after PKing me, the mules making the gears turn, or even me the new guy trying to hit 2.5 mil so I can hopefully buy an ethy. We all play by ourselves and choose to. Our greed grants us our cages and our reward is solitude. This isn't a forum flame, far from it. I'd like to open a renaissance discussion on solutions. I'm not interested in what Chris can do... or blaming the server rules like 1 house per toon. I'm interested in ideas we as players not only can generate but execute ourselves to stimulate this server. I only have 1 broad suggestion and I'd love to hear others: PvM, PvP, RP are the three main branches of the sand box we call Ultima Online. All three exist here on UO:R. If we could unite PvM and RP together into hunting parties at designated times and locations to seek out treasure and dungeon delving with promises of split loot afterwards. Maybe we wouldnt have to apologize and say dont worry ill farm else where. Everytime we run into eachother. Those new players who just want to be dexxers could earn some good money while the veteran tamers take out the really tough spawn and we could all give younger players something to look forward to. This behavior of course with bring out who? Groups of Murderers! But don't fret there are plenty of Blue PvPers who can support cuz you know theyre bored as shit too. But fair warning, PvMing will net significantly less gold than usual, and some of those magic weapons you'd sell on ur vendors, maybe you'd just give to a new dexxer player but imagine the night? Do any of you want that again? Anyway like the title, these are just my thoughts.
Here are some great long term goals to set. Battle Miner Bod Rewards Bosses Blessed Runebook Champs Colored AMIBs Climb the Leaderboard CTF & PVP Tournaments Decorate Home Ethereal Mount Get fit with the latest nutrition and health Hair & Beard Dye Ironman Challenges Level 7 Treasure Maps Organize a player event Player Vendor Shop Rune Library Start a guild The Naturalist Trammel Outfit Train a Dragon to 7x Xmas Scrolls Zookeeper Quest
The elephant in the room is that there is a new shard around. Alot of people are really excited about it. UOR has been around for a long time and has had a stable population for a long time, from what ive heard from older players, a new shard opening can actually be really good for older shards, as it breaks up alot of the set in stone older groups. This makes it possible for new groups to rise up and take over. One of the best things you can do is to run public events. My group, PwN, has put on 2 or 3 public harrys in the last year, the turnout for some of those were about 150 clients, including the two major pk groups, SOF and Anarchy. We managed to sucessfully beat them off and finish all our public harrys. I know there has to be at least 10 groups sitting on skulls that could run these public harrowers at any time. SoF, MiD, TnT, PS, OS, Plat Train are all sitting on skulls, some of which i helped collect. Some of my best memories on this shard are with Alex Caember back in the day when the RP scene was strong and there were events weekly.
I can't promise anything, but after the holidays this is my goal. Nothing extreme at first but at least weekly hunts/events, and hopefully evolving into a continuous storyline. Let's hope all works out, life always getting in the way!
Having played quite a few freeshards over the years, I will say UO Renn is refreshingly "active". I like all the afk activity in town... It keeps the server from appearing dead. I have yet to fail to find someone who is not watching screen or running errands at all hours (and in most cities) when I need something answered. We will never see the volume from the earlier days of UO (unless you want to leave the blessed realm of pre-trammy) and I can live with it. I personally like to play UO solo with other people... I will share a story from last night: My escort mage decided to mark a rune in Despise Ogre Lord lair so my bard could continue advancing provocation. Recalling off one of the handy runes in the massive rune museum (man is that thing beautiful) she popped into the lair to discover it carpeted with rats and slimes (spoiler alert), boy do they reproduce here... since she was marking only, she just had 5 of each reg. She aborted the mission and ran across room past two-three other characters blading Ogre Lords and hid. At this time I realized I had put all my books in bank and only had a blank rune! Deciding to make matters worse she hit the sparkly gate forgetting it goes to the Terathan keep... now I was trapped in T2A Terrathan keep surrounded by 1000 angry mobs just knowing this character was a wash, no way to rescue her if she died until I ground a second mage up. Thankfully she has GM Hiding. Using Wiki I was able to run/hide her to more sparkly gates and get her to Deceit fire room... not much of an improvement I thought. However, within minutes two murderers ran by my hiding spot and were soon followed by a tamer with 3-4 dragons. I risked asking for help and was rewarded with a gate to Skara Brae bank. Not since UO paid servers have I played a freeshard where others players were that abundant at once in as many areas.
The next few weeks will be pretty busy for me, but if you want to try and do some bosses/champ spawns after the new year, hit me up! I'm just getting my feet under me here and wouldn't mind getting into some group PvM. I did the last public harrower (super noob at the time) and it was crazy fun.
I will get a post up after I hit Key West this weekend. I hope for a good turn out for an event I want host next month.
Thanks for posting this, refreshing to see a new player's perspective. Keep at it and hoping for the best!!
I am also new here and started trialling both shards at around the same time. Whilst I liked the slower skill increase of the other (reminding me of back in the day, took a long time to get my multi GM dexxer), I am now solely playing here. I've had a number of friendly and generous interactions, and love the feel and ruleset of this place. Whilst I will probably mainly play solo due to time constraints etc, I would love it if there were some semi regular organised events. Having never had a tamer (now or 15+ yrs ago), I haven't taken on the top monsters or seen some of the areas available. I would definitely be keen for something like @trifectafunk has mentioned.
I have seen a few people make this assumption. Its actually closer to 350 or 400, yes many of those are AFK macroing, fishing, doing BODs, so you wont run into them out farming. I have never left characters in-game to farm plat but I know others do, thus the +200 or so afk accounts doing absolutely nothing. @Baler had some good suggestion for goals. There are a seemingly endless number of things to do in this game. I'v been around for years and have only touched 50% of what this game has to offer. In any case, I hope you enjoy your time on UOR
all feedback is good, but to make clarity on my point. I enjoy playing myself and assume most all UO players do. Its not the gigantic events of champ spawns or a slap in the face to all who enjoy play solo I was talking about that steals nostalgia. Where are the parties of 5 ppl farming anything together? where is the guild of mixed talents that create small dungeon parties for fun, I roll with my friend a few nights a week because we mix a peace/provo dexxer's together and go fight Balron's by ourselves and its tough but every veteran tamer who can kill a diseased blood ele solo has lost sight of the point of playing with others at least in my perspective all the veteran MvP'ers play solo and if they see you on they will recall out and solo come on their red to try and entertain themselves. So what Im pushing is people actually form guilds to play with small groups and in turn create purpose to reds to create small groups rather than solo this solo that solo this solo that. not for loss of profit but maybe u'll have more fun on ur MvP'er or on ur PK and create a realm where I participating in this goal could also in turn do the same. Perhaps asking old dogs to change even if its for a few hours a week is too much?
Honestly dude, those groups you're talking about exist. You just haven't stumbled onto them yet. You will, but I'm often out farming or doing stuff with a few different groups, we just don't tend to announce "going to ice" because we're not looking for a fight at that exact moment. Sometimes I'll stumble upon someone farming and I will always say Hi, throw a heal or a bless on them and leave them too it if they're handling business, or stick around and help out if they look like they've bitten off more than they can chew. I got absolutely merked last week in a dungeon (ran out of red pots and had a spicy threesome in a corner with some liches after missing a door) and another player rezzed me, threw me a heal, some bandies for my dead pet and we took down an elf boss together. You will just casually stumble upon those sort of scenarios the more you play, you'll get chatting, remember a name, see em in IRC and say what's up and over time find a bunch of rag tag cats to party with. There are some big guilds about that mostly communicate via discord, joining one of those will open up a lot more opportunities, you'll see people banding up to go party somewhere or maybe someone's got a bunch of T Maps they're gonna go run and send out an open invite to anyone in the group to join. Don't be disheartened my dude! Keep on trucking!
Oh im not disheartened and Im glad those things do exist. Im excited to play with my friend tomorrow. Im just in a super rush cuz i gotta go to work so my post seems agitated but really just trying to get more of these things going. Like x mas event = solo tamers farming for scrolls this Im sure everyone agrees with. I think its an example of what we could all change if we played together as much as we talked with eachother on this forum. Anyways PEACE!@
