Experience vs Balancing posted by Sakkarah on Feb 27, 2006 17:32

This has been, is, and continues to be a hot topic. Should veteran players be more powerful than newer players? Should items level the playing field vs experience/skills? I have mixed issues on the topic. I do believe that a better trained char, a more experienced players and especially an older char should have an edge over a newbie char. It always blows my mind to see a 1 month old character owning people that have been playing over 3 years. But at the same time, new players should have a chance to compete without getting obliterated. At the same time, there is the issue of bringing the game back to a more healthy state. There are a lot of things that are wrong with UO. Most of them, we all agree came from AoS. AoS however is already a few years old now. And more damage has been added since its implementation. Years during which more players have developped and adapted their chars. In the latest attempt to fix the design flaws of AoS and bringing the game back to the healthier state it was in before, a lot of this hard work is going to get the shaft. Unhappy players? Yes, understandably. But as the saying goes, you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs. quote: Thread: WHAT IN GOD'S NAME IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE!!!! Post Date/Time: 02/25/06 06:08 AM (GMT –6) Comment: Think of things in these terms.......just like in real life. You went to college for 8 years to become a doctor. You spend 12 years building up your practice working 12-16 hours a day. You've paid off the thousands upon thousands of dollars in student loans and now your hard work has finally paid off. Your family has a beautiful home, you have a nice car, and all the other stuff that comes with working your butt off and dedicating 20 years of your life to obtain. Suddenly all of the voters that didnt do this complain to congress that it's not fair for you to have more stuff than them......it should be BALANCED. So along comes congress and decrees that everyone must live in a house of limited size, must drive a car of limited value, must have televisions of limited size, must limit all their possessions. So you've worked hard all of this time for what? To be no better or worse than anyone else in the US. At this point what do you do with all of your accumulate wealth? You simply retire since you dont have anything to spend it on. That's what the most loyal group of players, the veterans that have played for so many years, in UO would have done in this situation.......retired. Wilki: Flawed analogy. For one, UO isn't "just like real life". Second, nobody said everyone had to be equal. No one is forced to have the same sized housing plot as the next guy, or the same amount of gold stashed away as everyone else. However, in the interest of keeping the game fun for the greatest amount of people, there does have to be a limit on player power. Items will still very much play a role in combat, but instead of having the high-end player being 300% as potent as the average player, she'll be knocked down comparatively so that she'll now have perhaps a 50% advantadge. i.e. a surmountable difference using pure player skill (not skills, but ability to play the game well). UO isn't a giant collection activity, where the player with the most stuff or the most time spent in game automatically wins. While stuff and time spent can still be important to you depending on how you play, it shouldn't automatically hand you a large competitive edge over players who actually have a much greater ability at playing the gam. As it is now, we're in a cycle of giving more power to players, making monsters with bigger numbers, giving more power to players, making monsters with bigger numbers... meanwhile, all the existing content is being left behind as it was never intended to exist in a world where players can do this much damage so quickly. On top of that, PvP battles are often over in only a few seconds, also because the PvP system wasn't designed to exist in a world where players could do this much damage so quickly. There many things that have added up since AoS to contribute to this: the original flaws in the AoS design, the bump in random loot generation that occured several times, the adding of ever more powerful artifacts to the game, and some honest mistakes like the ML bow dps issue and the broken bottle quest. It's time to remedy this problem, as we need a solid gameplay foundation on which to grow UO in the future. What we have now is slowly crumbling under the accumulated weight of these issues, and continuing on the path we were on would be the surest way to strangle UO into insignificance. I'd really rather that not happen. Wilki UO Online Community Rep Read more or discuss this topic here send to friend