Vet rewards

.

.

Just some thoughts:

OSI rewarded veterans who paid a monthly fee to play. It did not continue counting time if you stopped paying them. An account that could ride an ethereal horse had to be 36 months old (>$500 monthly fees over 3 years).

Tpain mentioned creating an account 1300 days ago but only playing four months. Should he be rewarded the same veteran rewards as folks who have actively played since that time? He does not think so, and neither do I.

I think if any reward was to be given to veteran players, it should be for the time spent in-game, which is what platinum does. Any other nod or perk for veterans with high account ages should be something that cannot be traded.

Just my opinion!

IMO, vet rewards are things like those stupid dyed sandals that Blaise and Deacon have, or the special named/hued swords from Halloween 2013, or placing a house with a deed. There are many ways in which a server like this favors veterans and the more you add, the more discouraging and uninteresting the shard looks to prospective new players.

This is a good point I didn't think of.

The point is to have a wider variety of items to choose from without having to play the game insane hours a week and that aren't subject to massive inflation. I don't triple box tamers, powergame with guilds, and the rest, so a million is a lot of gold to players like me. Watching plat hit 9k and it will only go up not down unless something is done, is discouraging. Now the items like ethys and runebooks that are play useful have gone up, forts are insane, keeps cost well over the deed (this makes no sense with our population, only from a greed perspective) Calling the plat system a vet system is wrong, it's nothing to do with account age.

I've always maintained that a vendor should be put in that converts gold to plat at 5-7k per, there's your sink. And it's not that big of a deal considering people will be buying crap like carpet and potted plants and the rest.


But back to the original point, the plat system is called the vet reward system, but it's not really, I was attempting to create a dialog to come up with ideas for a real vet reward system, but you guys are so anal about EVERYTHING, forget it and enjoy wasting your life to earn imaginary bullcrap. Personally I'd like to deco my house and have a few items without it taking hundreds of hours. I imagine if you lower the bar a little and relax more people would enjoy playing here. We don't even get xmas gifts for free, think about that for a minute (it's christmas) You guys are far too serious over pixels, if you spent as much time earning real money, a lot of you would be millionaires.

Correct. Ill take free plat because I think im helping the server being 'online' 500 hours a month. In a way i am, I like many others look at that number of clients online daily, and for whatever the real reason, it has an affect on my enjoyment / dedication to a server.

I think its also important to talk about the affect is has on new players. As said above, I dont want to come in to a server, anymore behind the curve than I already have to at 4 years in. So anything that cannot be traded would not bother me, but rewards you cant trade are tricky, especially for housing addons.

The world is exploding with money, the internet is the worst place in said world to be making sweeping statements about peoples income.
Lots of ppl have already retired, been there, done that, and are living on money that makes more money than they can spend. Which leaves you free to do whatever you want, endlessly. If, you want.

I play here for the pixels, im not ''rich'', but I dont need to work anymore. lol

nobody ever comes with a rebuttal to statements i ,others and now rezon have made.
A reward that cannot be traded outside of your account and does not offer an advantage.
And for the love of god not sandals.

A counselor shroud/Death shroud? for 2000 or 3000 or 5000 ingame hours tied to the Account ID,so account wide non tradeable? Will no one elaborate on this great compromise?

that doesn't happen often lol,


I am stoked about my 2 hcoin buys, I'd rather farm for those types of rewards and have the plat rewards be more common.


A good vet reward system would be something like


1 year - one account extra char slot (no housing)
2 year - same as above, random plat reward anything from the lowest to the highest with lotto odds
some other blah

who knows, there's always something that can add benefit to the game, that's why these systems are fun to have




*edit, and that was when an ethy cost 2.5 - 3 mil, not 5 in plat*

UOR already handsomely rewards veteran players, just through its normal mechanics. So many rare desirable items are only available for a short period of time, and then never re-appear. Their cost SOARS over time. Copy and paste for housing.

As Dalavar pointed out, I think we're better off not widening the already huge gap between vets and new players. At some point, the gap becomes so big that it turns off would-be new players. We 100% do not want that.



That said, I think the 'Player Achievements' portion of the website profiles is EXTREMELY under-used. Handing out annual badges, or time played badges there would be a cool thing to do for vets without having any monetary impact on the game.

If this has already been said I apologize. I haven't had the time to read through all the essays in this thread.

I'm sure there's a way to tie in 'online time' and vet rewards to ensure people like Tpain aren't rewarded for merely creating accounts at birth but never actually playing.

I.e. (Each month that reaches the online time threshold of X goes toward account age.)

LOL Jack I hope they're few and far between! I swear I didn't stalk your posts either, I just remember that post because it was shortly after I started and introduced me to the rares economy here. And rumor had it you swiped it from a chest, so it led to a 3-month saga of me trying to learn RunUO so I could figure out how to GM Remove Traps and snag one of those the next time Telamon put one in a chest.

I still look at these sometimes. *shakes fist at Radagast* It's a very cool feature of this shard and something I've not seen elsewhere.

My vet rewards come in the form of ShadowJack's stuff most times he quits.

I've earned it, because I've been here a long time.

Plat will never go to 50k per you can easily get 100 plat a day with a good champ farm group

Several times, Chris has indicated that "we felt rewarding the players who played rather than people who simply created accounts was the right way to go".
Otherwise, some inactive players could log in, get their vet reward, give it to a friend or whatever, then wait until next year to log in for their next vet reward.

Perhaps a limited vet reward (not a complex system) based on acct age and gametime could be implemented.
For example, when the vet logs in a deed is found in their bank. The deed could be for a plaque, char transfer coupon, 4th account, etc. The older the account, the better the reward. Or perhaps the reward could be a personalized trophy/plaque to keep it simple.


However, I would rather see Carp BODs and Moats implemented. Plus there are probably 10 other things on Chris' list I would rather see implemented rather than vet rewards... let alone the bug fixes he needs to work on when they pop up.

I have to agree with Dalavar, being part of the server in its early days meant that finding/crafting any trash item could mean being absurdly rich when the item was patched out/grandfathered. I have dozens of items I saved during the early days which are no longer available, at the time I kept them mostly out of intrigue, now I love the fact they are a piece of UOR history - and to me that's far more meaningful than logging in one day and receiving a neon-metallic-llama-dye-tub for free.
From my own perspective, the majority of the vets that play are incredibly rich or willfully poor (Jack I'm looking at you!) so veteran rewards won't do much but feed wealth inequality that already exists.

The OSI method of vet rewards "worked" because players were required to pay a monthly subscription, someone paying $500 over three years for UO was likely to have been active the whole time. Currently there are dozens of accounts which haven't been logged in the last few years which would be eligible for more rewards than players that have logged in consistently for the last 1-2 years. It's important to note that we've seen on OSI servers that vet rewards discourage some newer players and create a *black* market for older accounts (i.e. account selling/trading), from my perspective, adding this to UOR would only be a detriment to the shard.

Any vet that played in the early days has gotten their fair share of rewards, asking for more rewards by virtue of doing nothing but being there seems inherently absurd.

OSI and other shards I've played on were the same way.
The more and longer you play on a shard, the more cool things you will have attained, crafted, found, etc...

My issue with account age rewards systems is that younger players can never catch up, by design. That leads to account sales, pissy players, etc. If the system were capped at say 3 years, that would be ok. That way, it's a thank you for sticking around, but isn't unobtainable by someone who heard about the shard a year or two after it opened

Shit
You are a smart man
I hope I don't hate you in game after admitting that