Please give a busy dad who hasn't played UO since 2000 some advice on getting started

Hi,

I just discovered the existence of this community. I played on the Chesapeake shard from about 1998-2000 or so. Back then I was a teenager with lots of free time and so I got a few characters maxed out with plenty of gold and even a nice house in Buc's Den (a small stone house/tower looking thing in the SW corner) I had a maxed-out mage and swordsman.

I'd like to be able to play again just for nostalgia of it, but I have 4 kids and very demanding job. I likely don't have the time to get anywhere near back to where I was. I'd just like to occasionally show up and re-live some of the fun of my teenage years. For those who have played both "then" and "now", what do you think are my options?

I considered going the "start your own UO server" route and calling up a few of my old friends from the 90s to see if they wanted to play occasionally, but I'm not sure that's so straightforward. Any advice here?

I have another question - some of you may recall that sometime around the time that they added Trammel, they creature spawn got all messed up. It destroyed the Bone Knight wall, Deceit Dungeon and other dungeons, plus some of the popular 2nd age areas. It made it too difficult to go alone without being overrun by creatures and some areas that were once a lot of fun and full of players became ghost towns. It also took away some of the techniques used to get 100% magic resistance (i.e. the demon tower) If you know what I am talking about, is this the case on this server?

Thanks,

"Schvidah" and "Autofish" from Chessy shard many years ago.

Your options = Endless.
Create a character, come have fun. Personally I always go for a provoker mage as my first character. Provoking and music can be trained to gm for essentially free and AFK. With those 2 skills alone, you can fund training magery up beyond the 50 you start with. This character is versatile and easy to play. Also get your kids in on the action once they are of age.

Welcome!
I'm in a similar situation, also played Chesapeake way back when. 'Lummy' was my main char.
A Provo mage, as mentioned above, is your best bet as a first char. Check out the guides section for help on this template as well as how to afk macro any other skill. Most skills can train to gm in a few days, so if you run macros on 3 accounts you can have a few chars built up quickly, so you don't have to spend your play time building skill.

Have fun

Edit* Be sure to check out the young program, it will help you remember how to play, I didn't and I wish I did.

Always a pleasure to read such stories reminiscent of how I myself have played in the past and that's priceless!

Welcome, we have waited a long time for you, a good game and see you!

Regards,
Kir

1. log in
2. make a character that sounds "fun"
3. play
   1. don't think past tomorrow for now

at the moment, it's my best advice to any new player

Welcome back to Sosaria.

I'm likely a couple years older than you, but in the exact same situation with life, and with my past UO experience (Sonoma from launch to 99). I gave up online gaming 10 years ago after I burned out on WoW. After years of listening to UO music on Youtube, and googling images of UO, I missed Britannia so much and just broke down and started playing here last year. Sometimes, I just get on and wander around. This place is so magical even after all these years. I love everything about it. Chris is a rock star for letting me play. I appreciate that every time I log in.

Although I completely agree with El Horno about mage/bard as a very efficient beginning character, I might be in the minority of the people who just keep right on playing that character. I find provocation makes wandering around much easier. I've followed a guide (Valricks?... meh, I've forgotten...) for a Ironman MIB build and find that bard/mage/swords is the sweet spot for character build for me.

But, honestly, Wylwrk probably has the best advice. Have fun.

PM me if you need help with anything that isn't available on the forums. I've got a bit of gold I'd be willing to prop you up with at first if needed.

I'd recommend a peace dexxer for your first char. Mages are expensive - takes about 50k of reagents and your time to kill will be slow relying on monsters just hitting each other. On the other hand, weapon skill, tactics, anatomy, healing, music AND peacemaking can all be trained at the same time without having to spend barely anything.

A few hours on that char you'll nearly be GM in all those skills and then can fund a mage.

^^^ I just really like this statement. ^^^


Welcome to UOR. The best free shard there is. Hands down.

All of us here came where you came from and we have found our home here; a testament to the wonderful pre-Tram days of ye olde Ultima.

Listen to Wylwrk. Log in, play, have fun and make SURE to get into IRC so you can chat with all of us in real time. Everyone here will help you out and wants you to join the community.

~Krake

Welcome buddy!

If all you want to do is jump in and have some fun then honestly the quickest way to do that is to make a provocation bard. I'll explain why in a minute.

One of the many amazing things about this shard is that it's ok to AFK macro (unless your gathering resources) - when I first started I found that hard to quantify the limits of AFK macroing, having caught a ban back on Europa back in the day for AFK macroing hiding in my house, I was skeptical.

But to put it simply, you can record a macro of you hitting a tambourine in a bag of tambourines once, hit loop, then go to bed, wake up in the morning, see you're at 70 musicianship and go to work, come back and see you're at 90 musicianship, cook dinner, watch a movie, go to bed wake up and you're a GM bard.

Provo requires a little bit more set up but you can AFK the fuck out of that too.

Then (permitting you can are smart and stay in the young program and Occlo) you jump on a horse and go to the Mage tower and make mages and NPC reds beat the shit out of each other for a couple of hours one evening and have 20-30k in the bank after you've sold all that loot.

That's just two skills.

Monsters won't attack you if your young and you can re familiarise yourself with the game before deciding what other skills your character will have.

I have two kids, my own business and a lot of work happening on my house right now, I've been here less than a month and I've GM'd about 20 skills across 8 characters - mostly while watching terrible TV, reading as much as I can on the forums or on dad duty or working.

This shard is fucking amazing and lots of people will bend over backwards to get you going, check out Project Sanctuary guild - they are rad dudes who help out new players.

Good luck and welcome!

Well I think there are two two important things to know.

1.) UO just is not the same anymore. This server (and a few others) might seek to capture the rules and style of the pre-trammel era OSI UO servers, but the players have changed. What made UO so fun is the variety of people, not everyone was a min-max templated pvper or had 2 other accounts they can use to come back and avenge their death on. It had plenty of normal people who just wanted to go out and have an adventure, maybe act as a victim for PKs, or a friend for a weary traveler. But I think you will find that nearly all of those players were happy with trammel and moved on.

What we have here is more like how felucca was a while AFTER trammel was added. Most people, whether they are blue or red, will not immediately be your friend. A blue player is just as likely to call in some red friends to murder you, or murder you themselves, as a red player. The common thing to do is leave whenever you see anyone you don't know. This will make it hard to approach people outside of towns. With legal macroing, community things like the bone wall are dead. UOR has an interesting problem where crafting and fishing and other "safe" things to do can be so profitable, the dungeons are fairly empty, and this makes PK desperate to kill you. Although I must admit, there aren't very many PKs here compared to other shards (unless you go to the hotspots like Ice Dungeon). You need a network of friends to make this long-term enjoyable, unless you like grinding mongbats for gold in a land where 100% of other players want to kill you and travel in packs of 5.

There's still plenty of room to meet people and figure out your place among everyone else, but much of it comes from the forums and IRC first, or meeting friends of friends. If a PK is chasing you and you run into town seeking help, nobody will help you for the most part.


2.) Figure out your expetations from the start and set reasonable goals to accomplish. With any online game really, those that have been around the longest have the most "stuff". Much of it can be rare and otherwise unobtainable, or was earned when there was a bug allowing some people to exploit it that you missed out on, etc. On OSI with thousands upon thousands of players, the super rich were less pronounced. There are not thousands and thousands of players here, so the inequality will be much more obvious. Fortunately, if you don't want to collect neon pink unique rares and whatnot, it's not a problem at all! Set obtainable goals that are suitable for the time you have to invest and know that sometimes you might fail at them. I think it's important in these types of games to just say "ok im going to get a keep by the end of this month" and "I have 2 hours a day to do it", then figure out the best approach to accomplish that (it's very doable). Don't obsess over what other people have, or what you don't have, or whether someone else is always at your favorite farming spot, or some jerk purchased that item from the auction for 10 mil and it was only worth 1 mil so you missed out on it. It's not worth it. One day all this junk here will be deleted when the server closes. Maybe 10 years from now, maybe next year, who knows. So don't worry about it. Figure out some goals so you have something to work towards, then do what you think is fun and also helps you obtain them and meet similar minded people along the way.

In the interests of balance, thought I'd add my two cents to this. Granted, I've only been playing this shard for a couple of weeks so obviously I can't refute what snap dragon said, HOWEVER I have to say I don't recognise his description of this shard at all. I've been farming in the temple on Fire Island and arctic ogre lords in Ice and not come across a single red. All blues I've met have been friendly and offered to help when I was struggling. For example when I died I asked for help on IRC and someone swooped in and saved me. Don't get me wrong, I've always got my finger hovering over my recall macro and I'm always wary of reds ambushing me but I just wanted to say that this community is the nicest online gaming community I've come across in years and I've experienced nothing but kindness since I joined.

Wow, thanks for all the replies. This is much more of a response than I expected. Even after 17 years I have felt a sadness all this time of selling my account that had a fully-GM'd mage. It was so much work to get 100% resist magic that I felt it would be impossible to ever do it again, even if I found continuation of the game like this years later. But from what I am hearing, it sounds like it is possible to get my skills up to where they were in a reasonable amount of time, earn some money and then be able to get to where I was back in the day.

So I am just dying to know - does the Deceit Dungeon Bone Knight wall still exist? If you don't remember what it was, you had at least a dozen players at any time whacking away at the BKs through a passage. It was a great way to build up skills including healing whoever was getting hit. Deceit dungeon was one of the funnest places in the game (along with the side of some mountain in Delucia where these serpent things would spawn). But once they "improved" the monster spawning all of that went away.

I am happy that it seems many of you are willing to offer advice and help to a new player. I was dreading how long it would take to get the old rune book put together. When I have more time I'll probably PM a few of you with some questions. Thanks.

@fixfrozenpipes click this link:

http://uorforum.com/threads/one-guide-to-rule-them-all-one-guide-to-find-them.682/

Absorb.

Put it this way: I've been playing two weeks and have two fully GM'd characters, one provo/peace mage and one provo/peace dexxer. And I just bought a small house deed and placed it on Fire Island today

Admittedly, I don't have kids so fewer time commitments, but with AFK macroing anything is possible! More than happy to share advice/tips and point you to the helpful resources on the forum - of which there are many!

To further chime in, just start playing and have fun. Utilize the young program we have here. Using it it is quite friendly to get a foothold. But a good money maker is indeed a Provo Bard. Start with 50/50 Mage/Provocation. Enter UO. Join the [young program. Follow my Provocation guide below (in signature). Now you will be 2X GM Music & Provo all while AFK macroing while you're playing with kids or at work. Start farming with blade spirits and macro magery with money you earn from Provocation. And yes, you can macro Magery while at work. It's that simple.

Welcome to UO:R!

"perception is reality... sometimes"

I uploaded a couple of images that show one of my proudest moments (in the game, not in real life...)- 100% magic resistance. I'm downloading the files and getting things set up. I hope to interact with a few of you soon.

I also played on Chesapeake 99-01

Darken Ruhl of Denied

Just started back up here myself

Welcome to UO:R, @Darken and @fixfrozenpipes!

I also played on Chessy from 98-01 as Cain The Elder (OiN and NfC pvp guilds). This server has tons to offer. Backed by a strong population of folks that willingly go out of their way to help new players (i.e. New Player Housing Program and awesome guides), you should be able to get caught up rather quickly. Also, you're just in time for the upcoming holiday season - 5th anniversary is just around the corner.

Just couldn't resist not adding my 6 cents to the mix.
@fixfrozenpipes First off I'll tell you everything you had build on Chessy in terms of chars
will be surpassed 10 fold here on UOR. Every char of your UO dreams can be accomplished. With 3 accts
and 15 char slots, your imagination is the only limit. You have been given great advise above, so you will be fine on that.
I have a small that you are welcome to live out of till you get on your feet, to macro chars safely and a place to feel safe other
than logging out at the inn. Being logged in has its advantages, you can earn plat for being in game. You can earn 10 plat across
3 accts for a total of 30 per month. Each is worth 10k which you can sell it to finance any char you want to build. I believe it
gives new players a huge foot forward in building a home here. In the mean time, I can throw you some gold for regs/weps etc.
PM/irc me anytime.

Reading your post brought back many old UO memories. OG char Orion was
born on Chessy back in the late winter of 1998, just before Second Age release. Cutting my teeth in Yew Cemetery
swording skellys trying to build a tank mage. Being chased & murdered by Alice Cooper/Mr Hanky and friends. Taking all
you stuff and learn to recall out on sight and the rush of a red hitting the screen. Good times!

Good luck and welcome to the fun!
Cheers