Sorry if this has been said in the thread already. Having a free shard these days with both Trammel and Felucca is unrealistic and will split up already much smaller player bases. There are simply not enough people that populate free servers. Even with over 1000 clients it just wouldn't work.
Because the raggedy old folks who still play this outmoded dinosaur of a game, got our chops before Trammel, or any other graphic MMO ever existed. We played when it was brutal and shamefully delightful and painful all in one jam packed little world. What's going on now, are those people playing legos with the fragments of bygone eras and seeing what they can make of their little shard of the Gem of Immortality. As has been said, if you want safety, there's plenty of other places to be. If PKs can gang up and kill people, so can the people gang up and fight back, if they put in the time.
Problem is that most people I talk to in-game are casual players that either don't want to commit a great deal of time to gameplay or due to their RL obligations can't be online as much as they would like to be. So as much as the idea of creating a PK hunter might appeal to alot of them the practicality of it is simply a matter of time constraints. Many are simply trying to reach that "I have to get enough gold to buy a house or GM Magery" goal, let alone create and equip a PK hunter, form enough social connections in-game to foster an interest in creating a PK hunting group or guild and finally investing precious game-time into the labor intensive task of actually hunting PK's down simply for the sake of "hunting" them down, as there really is no other incentive to do so. If the bounty system were to be revamped to make the idea of PK hunting a worthwhile one then we might actually see the formation of guilds or groups committed to hunting them. Joining a guild to watch your back might be an option but when you actually look at the number of people "logged in" even in the largest guilds at any single moment on the server, it's pretty small. Many guilds with 100+ members are showing anywhere from 2-10 at different times of the day. Now take into account how many of those toons are simply "logged in" and not actively playing and the task of finding a guildmate to watch your back becomes more difficult than most might think.
You pretty much couldn't be more wrong about the tracking skill fyi. Everyone in my guild has it on their pk and a lot of us run it on non pks as well. It's an exceptionally useful skill. It sounds like this just isn't the server for you unfortunately. I would suggest you just go find a trammel server and stop clogging our forum up with your tears.
Koncept, it appears as though you don't quite understand that old school UO is in severe decline and I'm sure their are those that could give a shit less if the server numbers go up or down as long as they can get their UO fix for the moment. Wouldn't it be better to bring more people in and try to make a server in which the old school spirit of UO is preserved but at the same time promotes expansion and offers the greatness of UO to a new generation of players? Stoned is simply an angry player who hasn't had things go his way and posted a rage post, but the PK issue goes beyond his post. On a server in which most people are either in their house, in a dungeon farming gold or hanging out at a town bank I feel that we all could be doing more to promote the community aspect of this server. Don't get me wrong there are those that have done a GREAT job in doing just that by hosting events and for those that have put on the resist training sessions, thank you, you are stepping up in an awesome fashion. To the vets who have helped out new players, kudos and a huge thanks goes out to you. I feel this server is a great one, but it could do better and with a few creative tweaks I know the greater good of the server's future could be served. We were all newbs at one time, we know what it was like, I may be alone in this but I feel it's the vets that now have the opportunity to forge the future of UO and the gatekeepers in ushering in a new generation of players, every player on this server has at least one great idea as to how this server could be better, maybe we can realize some of those ideas, look how far this server has come already.
I agree there should be better incentives for vets to protect the new players and/or PvMers out there. The problem is that it only takes a small pack of coordinated blues to make almost every pack of PKs just go log off. Which in turn, creates a pack of bored blues.....who in turn....just go PK because now it's the only way to satisfy the urge to PvP. It's a shitty cycle and I'm not sure how to A) provide incentive to good people without making a loophole for scumbags to exploit it to their advantage (see also: Reds turning in their own heads for the bounty) and B) how to keep murderers from just running away constantly. Perhaps removing statloss all together while putting a platinum reward on the bounty collection...I just don't know. PKs run because of statloss, not 50/each reg and some pots in their pack. Blues don't really enjoy hunting them because the chump change bounties and bag of crap they drop is not worth the effort of chasing them for an hour just to get a kill or two.
I'm in total agreement with you Blaise. Maybe removing stat loss would be the answer but a system would have to be worked out that rewards people for killing reds but at the same time prevents exploitation. It's a hard situation to solve but I know we have enough veteran gamers on this shard that maybe the age old issue of PK and PK hunter can be solved. Angel Island had the prison concept that served as it's main selling point and did quite well for awhile, so there are novel ideas out there.
I'd be in favor of better bounties. I'd love to see a system in which a player being killed had half their gold removed from their corpse and applied to the murderer's bounty.
I agree Dalavar better bounties is the way to go IMO, however, how do we stop people from killing their own red and turning in the bounty themselves?
The factions thing didn't pan out for one reason or another so the consensual PvP thing never truly took flight. In regards to PK's people PK for the easy kill and the thrill of the "action". Most PKers are not interested in consensual PvP, it's simply get in, get out. PK's may have alt's that PvP but they use their red toons as a means to just get that quick kill fix so I feel there needs to be a system in place that encourages people to actively seek them out and get rewarded for it without having a PK alt being able to profit from their own murderous ways, lol. It comes down to checks and balances, there are murderers in the real world but you can bet there are people dedicated to hunting them down and delivering justice. I realize this is an entirely fantasy based game but the rule of law applies in any medium or forum of human interaction, if there are murderers there should be those that hunt them down, problem is that in a "game" no one really dies and death serves as a mere inconvenience so the effort of dealing justice to a PK is simply not worth it. Apply ample incentive and you will see an exponential rise in motivation to get out there and find a PK.
For the record, I only play Pork Fried Rice. Some people have told me to get on my blue ALT to fight them, but my blue "ALT" is simply a character I use to run a vendor and to make trades with players. I don't know how true this statement really is. I run when I'm outmatched (I don't play a true PVP character and I don't have backup I can call in over voice chat), beyond a certain weight with loot (if weaken will overload my backpack I'm going to bounce), after looting a certain number of organs from players, or if I got a decent grab off a corpse. Dying in stat loss is a joke. I can have my character back on the field in under 15 hours, and back to where I was in under 24 hours (tracking and hiding take a bit longer to re-Grandmaster), all while earning platinum! I would actually encourage game admins to remove the platinum ticker for characters logged in whom have short term murder counts (why reward someone for burning off murder counts?) - but that's a discussion for another time.
I agree Pork, statloss on a freeshard that allows you two to three accounts is a joke. Back in the pay to play era it was a PITA until the price of accounts went down then people were running gold production bots and at the same time PKing their collective a$$e$ off with no repercussions because they had two or three other toons they could play while the others burned counts off. PK's really have no repercussions other than possibly facing a downtime of maybe 48 hours (conservative estimate) then back up and running. You're absolutely right Pork, PK's don't play for reasons involving the lack of consensual PvP.
Reflect, recall button, and all othet solutions here are useless when your bonded pet you trained for a week is locked onto high end mobs when gank squad rolls in. Sure u can roll out but its automatic death for your pets. So either your pets are going to die, or you and your pets are going to die while you try and save them. This bonded statloss shit is the real problem. It simply promotes griefing.
That's why my escape macro on my tamer is: Say: All follow me Dclick Gate Scroll Say: All follow me Target Rune Say: All follow me Dclick Moongate Unless they are super stuck on something, or not at a high state of happiness, it works well enough. All Guard Me is terrible if you want to escape.