Excelsior

Warning: This is a long post about something pretty minor for most of the player base, but something that almost every player should have seen at least once.
I fully understand that the coding crew is swamped at the moment, I just felt like posting this to get it off my chest and to have it seen.



I was a bit torn where to put this, as it is something both fairly trivial in the grand scale of things but, in my opinion, quite important at the same time.
This quest is the first custom quest that a player will run into on this shard, and for a player new to UO, it is quite likely to be their first quest overall, as well. It's a custom quest, very simple, very quick. That's fine.
The problem is that the quest text given by the Apprentice is, well, a little sloppily typed to put it nicely. He uses stuff like "u" and terrible grammar and not just in that "uneducated country bumpkin" style. I'm not a grammar-nazi at all, but it was so horrible that it made me gag (apologies to whoever really wrote it, but it was really bad).
It'd also help if the setting for the quest was slightly more believable, even if it is a somewhat fourth-wall-breaking training dungeon. Banish evil? They're just giant rats!
The net effect is that it feels like the new player dungeon was just something quickly cobbled together out of loose tiles and spit, rather than an honest, warm, and informative introduction to the game for a newbie. Which is a shame because this is a really nice server with a very helpful and welcoming community, so the "face" that the server shows to the new players (the new player facilities) should be very polished and professional.


For those people who don't remember it or think I am overreacting, here is a transcript of what the apprentice actually says, word for word. The lines of dashes split up the various portions. Anything in red is a comment from me.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The tired apprentice starts to speak.
Could you help a poor apprentice?
I need you to banish those monsters out of my house. - Well, so far, so good.
--------Accept Quest------------------------------------------------------------
The apprentice looks very pleased - For some reason his action emotes are now italic from here on.

Ok great! This morning I wen't to buy some flour in the nearby bakery, but when i come back, those horrible monsters invaded my house and workshop. - Urgh, and so it begins.

Many warriors have tried to defeat them, but all failed and died in the arms of those devils. - Yeah. Those devilish giant rats. Also, it seems the warriors went in naked and unarmed because there is no armor and weaponry scattered around, just stripped bare bones. The rats also appeared to have chained some of the warriors to the walls and tortured them. Or maybe that was just how the apprentice harvested some... special ingredients for his craft.

If you kill them in my house I'll give u a nice reward, but be very carefull. - u b carefull 2 m8!
-------Objective gump---------------------------------------------------------
Giant Rats You will have to kill [I don't know how this is generated but I've seen between 16 and 20] giant rats, to banish evil out of apprentices house.
---------Talk with incomplete quest------------------------------------------
The apprentice turns around as you tap his shoulder

Hey! your back so soon, Great great! Did u killed them??? huh? You didn't. Bah your worthless go kill them! - SWEET. BABY. JESUS. WHAT.
-------Quest completed wrongly (killed rats in Master Chef's house)-----
The apprentice looks at you. - Because normal conversations are held facing away from one another. I guess this part was meant to be him giving you an exasperated look or something.

Doh! Can't you read the signs! U didn't kill those beasts in my house, you foul! That was my masters house. - I'm a foul. Unrelated comment: this apprentice is also one hell of a sod towards his master. HAHAHA NO, YOU MUST CLEAR OUT MY HOUSE BUT LEAVE MY MASTER'S HOUSE INFESTED!

Bah your worthless, go kill them in MY house. - A worthless foul
-------Quest completed normally----------------------------------------------
The apprentice runs towards his house. - No, no, he really doesn't. He stays right there.

They're gone, wohoo! - wohoo to you, too

Thank yout very much, here's the reward I promised! - What's that you say? Your bags were too full? You worthless foul, no replacement reward for you, you'll take your quest cooldown and you'll LIKE it!
------Quest is on cooldown-----------------------------------------------------
I am busy at the moment. Could you come back later? - [speech_variable>>generic_vague_npc_response#29874][execute]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
END OF TRANSCRIPT

So as you can see, it is pretty darned bad. With the huge backlog of changes I don't expect anything to be done about this any time soon, but assuming something happens, it's pretty much fine if the only thing that's corrected are the typos and ridiculous grammar. It won't be exactly a memorable quest but at least it won't be memorable for the wrong reasons...

If for some reason more effort can be directed toward this, here are two suggestions on how to make the quest a little more sane and in-character.

Solution one:
1. Clean up the apprentice's speech entries.
2. Change the setting to ridding him of a rat infestation so that he can resume business.
3. Remove the skulls and bones and torture implements, add broken flour sacks, busted food crates, so on.
4. Make the rats smaller, make the giant rats spawn as mini-bosses every now and then.
5. Bonus - during the quest cooldown time the apprentice could sell you cheap food that fills you up better than what you could buy in cities, until the next infestation at least, and train you in cooking to a moderate level. Up to 50 or so sounds good, since nobody would start with any starter points in cooking but the vendor trained amount still causes huge failure chances when cooking yourself some raw ribs. It's a pure quality of life change, nothing more.

Solution two:
1. Clean up the apprentice's speech entries.
2. Keep the setting as banishing evil from his house.
3. Change his and his master's occupation to some kind of mage or alchemist - it would explain why they are down in the dungeon after all. Say they're there to collect rare reagents or something of the like.
4. Remove a lot of the cooking tools, add arcane chicanery all over the place. Crystal balls, vials, that sort of thing.
5. Change the rats to scaled down versions of various demons. The imps are good but change their AI to prevent them healing so much, so less experienced players (read: those who have not spent an hour afk macroing up magic/weaponry in the training dummy room) won't take minutes to finish them off.
6. Occasionally a rare demon with one of several exotic but not TOO exotic models can spawn, gargoyle/gazer/succubus perhaps. This demon should drop something that would be good for a newbie fairly often - perhaps a mage or necro book with several of the harder spells already included, or a weapon around valorite quality.
7. Bonus - after completing the quest, the apprentice will give you the Spell Caster's Keys if you don't have them already. It makes much more sense if he gives you them, rather than having to find Debra and then travel to Minoc Moongate to find a random ground spawn. It also ensures that every newbie will have them, unless they skipped the training dungeon, which serves them right. If they don't do this quest even once during the whole 21 days then chances are they are the type of player who blindly stumbles their way through everything and doesn't deserve them.

Misc changes for both variants:
1. Make the organics a quest reward only. Increase the count awarded per completion (currently 20-30, the bulk is obtained from kills). I would suggest to a few hundred, given the current quest cooldown timer. The existing system makes it feel that you "must" grind rats endlessly in order to accrue a nest egg of cash, until you can no longer enter the dungeon at 21 days. While the idea of needing to work for your money sounds good, when all you have to do is beat up rats in one tiny room which don't even fight back, it's not really fun. Especially when you run into other newbies farming or trying to do the quest. You have a great world and a great community, you want new players to learn the ropes and then go do their thing in the wide wide world, not spend the first 21 days farming organics.
2. Stop the rats (or whatever they are) being able to open doors.
3. Relocate the reaper spawn which is down the tunnel past the house, move it around the corner. It occasionally wreaks havoc with Pet AI, new tamers with weak and very likely un-bonded pets may find that it charges out into the tunnel and dies to multiple reaper spell nukes. Even moderately advanced pets like Frenzied Ostards can die if one of them breaks off the pack and takes a trip down Reaper lane.
4. Less druid scrolls. Introduce them at a slightly later stage because they are a luxury item, and the book is out of reach of many players (200 ED is no big deal for someone who donated, but for others it's 6 million gold, and even then once you have a filled book the scrolls become trash - they are heavy, clunky in your bags, and cannot be vendored).

Bug:
There is also a bug if you talk to the apprentice for quest completion but have your bags too full to accept the reward, the quest will complete and you will not obtain your reward and be put on quest-cooldown. I assume this is the case with all UO quests, I'm not sure personally.
This quest is more problematic than most since it awards items which are very heavy for a new player, with a high multiple-item count to boot. (On a semi-related note it would be awesome if the caster keys would function like the 25k token Gem Pouch, allowing drag and drop to deposit items within).

The Apprentice's house design:
Bear in mind that this section revolves around the fact that any new player who knows what is good for them will spend a LOT of time here, due to the way obtaining organics on the shard was designed.
The little house is very badly designed. First off, there is a main yard with a staircase leading to a smaller upper tier, under which is a small bedroom. The staircase is positioned such that there is one portion of the yard which can hold a character, but you cannot see him or any corpses on that tile even with circle of transparency on and at maximum. Only ctrl-shift or the allnames command can help you loot a corpse in there, and it happens more than you'd think.
While entering the room below, you cannot see the "doorway" that you must go into from the yard. It's effectively completely hidden, and if you don't look closely it can even appear that the upper level is the one which has the doorway leading to the tunnel!
There is also the aforementioned issue with pet AI and the mobs in the tunnel, which is quite annoying especially with the seemingly high focus on pet use that this shard has.


Anyhow that is all I can think of for now. If you're reading this far you should get a medal or something, your resistance to my rambling is formidable indeed. Thanks.



Edit:
Just to make things clear, I'm only posting this because I read that this shard was a really good one before joining it, so I had really high expectations for the first dungeon, and the first quest, and all of a sudden out of the left field comes the abomination you see above. I wouldn't say it ruined the experience for me, since the people I met were amazing, and the options available to me were countless for developing my character, and all in all I love it here.
It's just that maybe other new players wouldn't see it the same way.
Once more, I understand how busy the staff are, with the suggestions forum being closed and all due to overload, but I felt I should just raise this so it was at least brought to someone's attention.

I laughed so hard, I fell off my chair. Thank you so much for this amusing tale of newb woes. It is certainly refreshing to hear from a new perspective. By no means am I trying to diminish your request. On the contrary, you've come up with some wonderful and delightful suggestions that I hope will be implemented.

*waits patiently for next installment of your adventures*

I think you are a little harsh, I think you will find this is what was put in place when the server was lower in population, so yeah it might not be as updated and put together with as much thought as it could have.

If I understand correctly Colibri's mother tongue is slovenian, so some spelling from time to time isn't correct as it should be.

I honestly dont have a problem with the giant rats, the quest is for new players to collect the organic mat more than anything to sell to the older players of the shard for good money.

Maybe the deco could be touched up, but I didn't think it was bad.

I personaly think just get the text rewrote it does sound a bit wrong in places.

But I think you were being very dramatic about the typing "it was so horrible that it made me gag" It made me very uncomfortable how you spoke about the writing to be honest.

His point is, this is the face of the shard, more or less. This is a place only new players can go to, and this was the first thing he saw there.

I personally haven't seen the newbie dungeon in almost 3 years and when I was there the quest wasn't even in place. I wouldn't even begin to know the specifics of it without this post. To a certain degree I would guess it was intended to be campy, but he makes a good point.

Thank you for your views on the quest, it's nice to get some input from these minor things as well.

The quest was made by +Morpheus around 3 years ago from now. And he hasn't dropped by in over 2 years so I doubt he'll do any changes, but I will go through the speech entries, correct language mistakes and things that don't seem logical. Will also ask if anyone from the staff is interested in making a new house, which would show the lower and upper floor better.

Btw, i dont think my english was ever that bad

i'd do it for ya but dun think i can =D

What's funny to me is that I did this quest several times when I started and never noticed the bad grammar and spelling. I do however have a huge tendency to skim quests lol. But I found something that many of you may have seen before and for those that haven't seen it, you might find interesting. It might explain why we haven't seen anyone complain of this before.

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.



I also nominate Kaervas to do the rewording of the quest

It would be my pleasure to update the New Player areas.

+Rayne

its odd, Ive never had him tell me I cleared rats from the wrong place, no matter where I killed them from.

Attention:

The Apprentice Quest buiding has been relocated to a newly constructed home. +Colibri has been or will be adjusting the conversation text as well. Enjoy!

+Rayne

It would be fun if players older than 21 days could be let in for a "tour." Well, I guess a screenshot would do the same. I'd like to see it, at any rate

Natilla wrote: Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

You are so HOT (intellectually of course)! I am going to go to bed a little bit less clueless tonight;-)

Once it's updated yes it will probably be for some time to everyone, though you will be requested only to take a look at the dungeon and do the quest once, then leave it for others.

I have to say, I'm really impressed that something was done about this and the speed of the response. I honestly wasn't expecting it to happen at all but my expectations were exceeded on two counts, both the cleaning up of the dialog and the restructuring of the troublesomely built rat room.
Well, on the other hand I guess I'm too used to a few commercial MMORPGs (if that would be the right way to categorize pay-per-month games) and the rate at which those games get fixes to issues that aren't outright game-breaking...

Kudos to the staff regarding this, and I'm eagerly waiting to try the new incarnation of the newbie quest.


I have a question concerning the rats though, will they still drop 1-8 (or around that number) organics per kill like they do now?
I think it's one feature of the place that should be done away with (and if not permanently, at least definitely for the period where established players are allowed in to the newbie dungeon to test the redone quest).
There are a handful of ways for a new player to obtain gold just as fast or even faster, which require exploration of the actual game world or interaction with the player base. I'd say giving them directions and hints to those locations/techniques would be better than basically packing 100-800 gold into a bunch of non-hostile rats and setting them loose

I dont personaly think that removeing organics from the young dungeon is a great idea. Alot of the organics used to make bios come from the young. It creates alot of interaction between the young and more established population, leading to extra help and just generaly creating ways for them to quickly meet people, make friends, join guilds ect. I think the organics make a great catalyst for getting the young and established palyers togeather.