Excelsior

Not sure if it's the right spot for tossing around ideas, but why not...

I've seen lots of talk about quests, and what people like about quests and all that fun stuff... What I'd like to see is a quest with some serious consequences. World altering consequences, if you will. Or barring that, something that really shakes things up.

An invasion of daemons and balrons pouring through a mysterious red gate that has appeared near Yew, the clock is ticking, can the shard come together to repel this invasion and kill an absurd amount of hellspawn or will Yew be sacrificed and leveled?

A mysterious island has appeared off the coast of Minoc, it is full of sentient chickens who want to buy Moonglow. Will Moonglow be resettled by chickens or will the shard come together and outbid them?

Something happened in Britain and all the NPCs have vanished, are you a bad enough dude to figure out where they went?

I know that something like this would be difficult to do, but still, I think it'd be neat to really upend the applecart for a while.

WOW Hyper cool ideas

Dont know if u just got them of the top of ur head but all of those seem like excellent ideas for quests

However, its probable that staff has more than enough on their plates right now... and for the forseeable future.

Maybe the solution would be to get more staff? someone inside our player base who is actually a scripting virtuoso?

Or maybe divide the tasks among many people. (isnt that the hype thing now on the internet? xD)

I think a good idea would be to open a forum section where all players that wished so could list their computer/art/linguistic/other abilities and availability and slowly trying to figure out a way to create an ongoing collaboration between players and the staff and +C.

I got all excited didnt i?

thanks alph! u're the man!

Some recent history.
There are two new facets being constructed, with new quests and some nasty monsters etc. Due pretty much as soon as +C does the scripting. (and some testing and final touches etc)
Of course he is also working on stability and on speeding up the saves.

Some past history.

+C is very careful with his scripts etc, since so much of it is custom. A few years ago someone who was working as a coder stole it and set up their own shard. So far he's tried a couple of times to recruit coders, generally with little success.

Then there's a whole batch of other work that he's doing, or recently done, that makes little difference to us the players but have hugely helped +N, and +V, etc in their regular quests. (Regular quest, there's a nice phrase) The event facet springs to mind.

yeah, i dont think we're by any means short of contents right now, and the new facets and patch... well that is a HUGE game changer. That's why i said they have enough on their plate for now, and for now i mean the next year(s).

I dont think we are talking about short or mid term stuff here. But doesnt hurt to throw ideas out there that could eventually develop into something tangible in.... 2? 3 years? (won't hurt as long as people realize this is not Blizzard or EA Sports and they dont start demanding stuff thats is just not doable xD)

Actually.. its not that hard what alpha suggested

Few spawn points

put an uber rare item with an insane drop rate.


We did this on an old server.

We turned Cove into a place in which was invaded by pirates... and you had to kill thousands of pirates.. it had a rare quest item you could turn in for a reward (I dont remember what it was) but you couldnt just sit there with 5 mules killing.. you had to have team work..... brought the server together with a common goal.

I miss world events like that

I always love when someone throws out the "actually, it's not that hard"... lol.

This shard isn't the same as other shards, and most of the time the 'it's not that hard' statements take nothing else into account except the actual creation of a spawner. Approval from/convincing the boss, game balance, custom quirks on uoex, additional page workload due to the new addition, etc all add work that isn't accounted for in these sorta statements.


Anyway. +C isn't going to approve any event/quest that actually changes one of the base towns. We could hold an event like this on the event map, a temporary thing, but it wouldn't be something we could do in trammel. Reason being, a lot of folks come to play here who remember UO from osi and we try to keep the trammel towns as much in line with that as possible to help prevent alienating new players who expect to be able to go to, say, magincia to sell their gems. If suddenly they get stomped going into a place they've expected was a regular ol' safe town, it's going to turn a lot of folks off of uoex early on and changing up the regular towns is just not something the staff are interested in doing.

On top of that, he's also not going to approve (at least not without a ton of work and campaigning/cajoling by the rest of the staff) of any easy-access (IE: the events I usually hold where a player just walks up to) quest/event that has 'serious consequences' for an individual player, let alone all of them. +C does not generally believe in consequences in quests - I remember it being a 'thing' when +V and I made the hard winter quest the first year - a quest that a player can fail and have to wait until next year to try again - that was a bit of a discussion that took a lot of convincing to get approved. It worked out, and now we're allowed to make quests that a player can fail, but anything with a bigger/heavier malus than that would not just be something we could implement without approval, and I'm not sure we would get approval on something like that. Touria's quests will have consequences, but nothing super heavy for the player, and that will be happening in a facet a player has to work to enter - meaning they're already going to essentially have agreed to that facet's 'terms of service' by the time they get to those quests


Re: hiring new staff - well, +C is generally always looking at folks who apply in case they're a good match. When he finds one, he hires them. What we currently have is what we have, so that's a bit of an answer right there. Further, it's not really the solution some folks seem to think it is - it gets suggested as "well just hire more staff" as an answer to 'have more events' 'add more content' and so on. Except, stop and think - Who has to train that new person? That takes an immense amount of time away from the facets/our own projects for me and V and from the coding needs for C. Further, not all new staff will be interested in, active enough, motivated enough, or necessarily 'creative' enough to make new content/quests. It takes a lot more than just 'get hired, start making events'. We've got 3 lower ranking staff members, and right now +M is the only one who has any content of her own out there, though they've all been here off and on for years. I personally ended up mostly teaching myself via internet research and occasionally pestering +V before we were a couple, but most people are not that self-starting. Heck, I spent 2 hours last night doing research on new ideas for interesting/different quest requirements/steps and rewards on my ipad while I watched Arrow episodes. Not everyone is going to be that dedicated to uoex. Let alone the whole trustworthiness issue - many, many folks aren't, and it comes out after they've been staff awhile, and then we're starting all over because they had to be let go. Or they won't like that their desire to have their own content comes behind the facets and +C's shard tweaks...there's just so, so many more aspects than is ever considered when someone spouts 'just hire more staff'.

Re: coding group idea - well we already tried that. I had one opened and chugging along; +C ended up taking charge of that once some scripts were produced and I've not really heard anything about it since then. I am guessing he got distracted and it hasn't been maintained. So that's not really a solution, either.

Re: suggesting ideas for 2-3 years from now...well, in essence okay yeah no harm done. Except 2-3 years from now, the facets will have been done (good god in heaven I hope so anyway...), +C's personal project will have been done, and we'll have moved on to other things. These ideas won't even be a blip on the radar because 1. The thread will be ancient and buried behind years of threads. 2. We will all have our own new, fresh ideas and 3. The shard will be in a very, very, very different place once all the new content from the facets and +C's projects come out, it's likely these ideas will no longer be interesting or desirable. So if you're going to try to make suggestions, make them with "right now" in mind, because "in a few years" just isn't going to to be viable.


In general, we don't mind reading polite and well-thought-out suggestions. But please, everyone, try not to justify why an idea should be implemented immediately using these arguments, it just doesn't help anything

In regards to where to post suggestions - the Development section of the forums is where you'd wanna do that in the future (and where this is getting moved to).

+Nyx wrote:I always love when someone throws out the "actually, it's not that hard"... lol.

This shard isn't the same as other shards, and most of the time the 'it's not that hard' statements take nothing else into account except the actual creation of a spawner.

Yep.. must be complicated then.. I had no issues in the past, .. but like you said. must be the custom scripts and timing as well as the OSI feel.
Its all good.
Thanks for the reply