I can think of few things that would satisfy nostalgic feelings in this game than a recreation of the Deceit bone knight wall. Other people have mentioned it, @wylwrk comes to mind. Think about the fond memories you had: - When a friend of yours first brought you there and showed you how it worked. - When you GM'd a melee skill for the first time - When someone brought a silver weapon and someone yelled "who is using silver!?" - When PKs would show up and wipe everyone out, or occasionally ppl would go after the PKs and kill them. After the drama, friendly players would resurrect you and everyone got back gaining - When some naughty player would lure the poison elemental or the bone mages up to the wall. - Aside from WBB, the BK wall was the "IRC" of UO where everyone would chat. I think this could be done one of two ways... 1. (preferable) Allow players with young status to enter a very limited portion of the real Deceit Dungeon so that they could create and use the wall. Some sort of event moongate, event gate, or sparkly gate could be used for this. Some sort of blocker could be used to prevent young players from getting to other locations in the dungeon. The advantage of having it in the real Deceit dungeon is that they may have more interaction with non-young players there. 2. Make an exact copy of the BK location within Deceit dungeon and add it onto the Ocllo newbie dungeon. It would be similar to the provo pens. I talk to a decent amount of new players and often people are wanting to macro melee skills without leaving the young program. This would be a great way to do that, plus allow others to macro healing as well. Sure there are much more efficient ways to macro melee skills, but if a BK wall existed I would certainly choose to use that rather than totally AFKing it. If I remember correctly, OSI did something a little while before Trammel came about to mess up the spawn. I think they may have made it so the BKs would spawn in the wrong place, or not often enough, or something like that. It sort of ruined the social aspects of dungeons in general and made some of them very difficult to "hang out" in. Anyway, some adjustment would likely be needed as this screwed up aspect is probably in the plain vanilla RunUO code. A couple of things about the poll: - I am not saying this is more or less important than things you feel are important (CUB, PvP enhancements, etc. or that this needs to be done RIGHT NOW! My goal is just to get the idea out there and see what other players think). - Voting yes may mean a few things - that you would personally use it, that you think young players would use it, and/or that you think it would be a good use of the limited staff resources. - I am very aware that things are not exactly the same as they were back in 1999 and so there may be reasons this wouldn't work as I wish it could.
While I miss the days of hanging out at the ol' bone knight wall, I can't help but wonder... were it replicated here via option 1 or 2, what would that do to the rest of the new player content in Ocllo. Would it be dashed aside for the convenience of a static skill gaining environment? Likely. If I had to, option 2... no loot drops.
Don't be a jabroni by breaking the wall, dudes. Wall up or you'll get a leg drop from the Hulkster, brother!
I did not visit the bone wall when I played OSI, so I don't have a memory to recall. When I was a new player I spent my time running around the woods near Britain, eventually making my way to Despise and then to the other dungeons on the main continent. I played as a swordsman back then (dexxer now adays) traveled on foot and didn't use recall until much later. Although a static area to raise skills is nice, if we are introducing people to the world of UO, part of its danger and fun is venturing out into the world with skills that are not GM. Being defeated gives us the incentive to raise our skills and return to those areas and defeat what had beaten us before. I think some players may lose the opportunity to venture out into the world and create some fun memories if too many easy access training areas are provided. It can turn into; train here > recall here > make X gp per hour here > recall to bank > repeat Leaving a large portion of the world unexplored/experienced As I mentioned earlier, I don't have a social setting/memory to recall about the bone knight wall but I imagine it would end up being similar to Ocllo bank. Streets filled with afk macro's and not much interaction between anyone. If we are looking to provide a more social way to show the world to new players I think the best way to do it would be to get off our horses, head to the provisioners, grab some gear and off into the wild we go. Fighting the wolves, bears, orcs, ratmen etc until they actually get to experience what makes UO so great.
While I agree with everything you said, the fact remains it's honestly not how the game is played anymore. Even now the majority of people just afk in their house and do this on two accounts crosshealing, this might actually bring some people out
^ yeah good point... I suppose anything that brings people out to "dungeons" from out of trouble-free-zones would be a good thing
What about an event? Something like making the bone knights in that room drop some good stuff for some made up RP reason. "The Bone Knights are being empowered by dark forces, we need brave warriors armed with steel". Make them 99% immune to magic and pet damage, and make pets take a lot of extra damage from them. Basically make it so the only thing worth bringing is a dexxer. Something cool for them to have a rare chance to drop would be a bone mask that works like an orc mask but for undead, so people can RP and hang out with in undead areas without getting attacked, the way orcs do. Or maybe just some cool dark hued clothing that we can cut up, maybe of a hue we don't have? Do it a few times a year kind of like town invasion events.
Then people are just going to farm it for the rare drop. Nobody is going to line up like it's 1999 to train fencing on some bone knights. It's just not going to happen unless the server were to make afk macroing illegal and drop the account limit to just 1. And that's not happening. But let's face it, there's nothing about the bone wall that you miss. You can stand still and macro bandaids on someone at any location. What you miss is the player interaction, both good an bad, that comes with a hotspot area on a pvp/loot enabled server with enough of a penalty or risk to murderers due to risk of losing hard earned skill points that there was at least a moderate sense of helping your fellow player instead of everyone being opportunistic killers.
@snap dragon is totally right, use Jhelom bulls as an example, that's a place where you only ever go to train taming, everyone there is also training but how many people there are working together? I've trained two Tamers and I found it the most selfish disgusting place on this server both times. All the times you've died it's to give someone else there an advantage, most people there will kill you or let you die at any given opportunity to get your silver serpent or have more bulls for themselves. If you did an event you'd just see that same attitude - unfortunately.
I don't doubt that. In the two Tamers I've GM'd there and the realistically 40+ people I encountered only one teamed up with me and I gained something like 4.0 points in an hour at the low 90's before he went AFK again. Team work!
I don't really miss the Bone Knight wall. I hadn't thought about it in a long time until I saw this thread. I just thought an event based on it would be fun.
WALL UP!!! I remember the ledge at terrathen keep where you would teleport down herd up mobs teleport back and train archery
Duuuuuuuuude... I had so much fun doing that. I remember saying, "Heh, this might just be the evolution of all chatrooms".
There was a spot in t2a desert north west of papua as well. Terathan keep has always been creepiest place to me though. A place where nightmares come from.
