Just thought I'd give a perspective here. Never played UO before, wanted to see what it was about, saw lots of recommendations for this server as a place to start.
Ok, installer worked great. Some technical glitches with the client, wasn't too hard to get things working well enough. I get in, fumble around enough to be able to follow the guide to the young player dungeon, so good so far.
I realize that I probably have to study up on some of the basics of UO before I start fighting things. so for most of the day I read guides of various types. The page at http://uoforever.com/guides.php seems broken but I find a couple others, notably http://www.uoguide.com/New_Player_Guide and http://www.uo.com/Players-Guide ... yeah they're for the commercial game but should cover the basics I figure. For good measure I also watch all the videos on http://www.youtube.com/user/UOForeverGuides .. I figure at this point I got a pretty good handle on starting out.
I spend most of my "young player" hours in the young player dungeon. After I got some basic healing & casting macros set up grinding that lich at the end becomes a piece of cake. I'm getting a good stock of gold, starting to add some spells to my book, I buy what I think is decent armor, I'm feeling pretty good.
Time to go out into the "real world" I think. The graveyard is pretty easy, even though around here my young status wore off as I noticed monsters auto-aggro at me. Also around here I had my first "PK" attempt against me, though I think the guy was pretty low level as I was able to run away easily and I think someone else killed him. No biggie.
I'm looking for a bigger challenge, and remember seeing in one of the guides a dungeon called "Despise" north of Britain. So I start wandering up there, admiring the player houses, killing some random monsters and occasionally seeing another player run by. I get a little lost, so I consult a map online, and then re-direct myself toward Despise. On the way there someone starts attacking me. I immediately turn to run, but suddenly I'm stuck and can't move, and I die.
Ok, I know PKing is part of the game. But what bugs me is why did I get stuck? I search around and the best I can come up with is that I accidentally hit a spell cast key and it had me stand still while I was casting. So I head back up there, this time planning to be careful not to hit any keys in case I need to run away again. I make it to the mouth of Despise, and there's a "blue" there who strikes me up in conversation. I mention I'm new, and he says this is a good noob dungeon but warns me about PKers hanging around. Just then a red runs in off the screen, I run away, again I get stuck and basically instantly die.
Long story short I eventually searched for the right terms and learned about the "paralyze" spell. And something about trapped pouches. So I spend a couple hours now digging into the "how to survive PK" realm of UO forums. I find lots of very detailed and arcane advice, but one major thing that seems like a good idea is to get a safe rune that I can recall away if I get into trouble.
Ok so back in Britain I'm staring at the glut of auto-moongate vendors near the bank seeing if anyone seems to be advertising a rune book. At this point I'm getting short on resources that I had gotten from new player bonus/young dungeon grinding, so I want to be careful about how I spend my money. (I actually got PK'ed a couple more times that aren't in this story, losing some resources each time). But a runebook seems crucial, so I'm willing to shell out for it. I step into one vendor's moongate, start looking through their vendors, and.... get PK'd at their shop.
This is quickly becoming Not Fun.
Back to forum reading. I get more detailed guides. I learn that sometimes rune books aren't enough, and if I really want to survive I should have a whole loadout of potions, spells and other tricks all key-bound in the helper program. I should stay away from high-traffic areas and dungeons (and *especially* the noob dungeons) and try hunting in lone desolate areas until I've got everything put together. I've put over a dozen hours in-game and probably as much time researching out-of-game just trying to figure out how to start, and now I'm looking at dozens more hours of play time grinding my way in boring desolate areas to build some pre-specified load out (plus required razor/hotkey setup) that I read about in some forum just so I can Not Die Long Enough to see some interesting parts of the game world.
It was around here that I uninstalled the client. Honestly I have better things to do with my time.
Don't get me wrong. I get it. Once you get past all this, and get your setups all right and are used to the arcane intricacies of the game world, I can see how high-level play could be an exhilarating experience. But this learning curve is bullshit. It's basically easy noob cheesecake dungeon to extreme high-level PvP with nothing in-between. And what's worse, *none* of the guides I referred to above even came *close* to preparing me for this stuff. I know the commercial game has the non-pvp facet so it makes sense for those guides. But the in-game guides? The youtube channel? Nothing was mentioned about surviving pvp at *all*, and yet that appears to be the major driving force of gameplay on this server.
You want new players? You need to provide a sane learning curve. This "just search forums and put in your hours and figure it out like the rest of us" attitude that I see on the forums is just lazy. High-level PvP and a reasonable learning curve are *not* mutually exclusive and if any server can pull it off, I think this one can. But if basically *all* of the interesting gameplay is locked away until you spend a huge chunk of time studying arcane meta-game logic and setups and slowly grinding in intentionally boring areas, well I can't really see how reasonable people would have the patience for that.
Ok, installer worked great. Some technical glitches with the client, wasn't too hard to get things working well enough. I get in, fumble around enough to be able to follow the guide to the young player dungeon, so good so far.
I realize that I probably have to study up on some of the basics of UO before I start fighting things. so for most of the day I read guides of various types. The page at http://uoforever.com/guides.php seems broken but I find a couple others, notably http://www.uoguide.com/New_Player_Guide and http://www.uo.com/Players-Guide ... yeah they're for the commercial game but should cover the basics I figure. For good measure I also watch all the videos on http://www.youtube.com/user/UOForeverGuides .. I figure at this point I got a pretty good handle on starting out.
I spend most of my "young player" hours in the young player dungeon. After I got some basic healing & casting macros set up grinding that lich at the end becomes a piece of cake. I'm getting a good stock of gold, starting to add some spells to my book, I buy what I think is decent armor, I'm feeling pretty good.
Time to go out into the "real world" I think. The graveyard is pretty easy, even though around here my young status wore off as I noticed monsters auto-aggro at me. Also around here I had my first "PK" attempt against me, though I think the guy was pretty low level as I was able to run away easily and I think someone else killed him. No biggie.
I'm looking for a bigger challenge, and remember seeing in one of the guides a dungeon called "Despise" north of Britain. So I start wandering up there, admiring the player houses, killing some random monsters and occasionally seeing another player run by. I get a little lost, so I consult a map online, and then re-direct myself toward Despise. On the way there someone starts attacking me. I immediately turn to run, but suddenly I'm stuck and can't move, and I die.
Ok, I know PKing is part of the game. But what bugs me is why did I get stuck? I search around and the best I can come up with is that I accidentally hit a spell cast key and it had me stand still while I was casting. So I head back up there, this time planning to be careful not to hit any keys in case I need to run away again. I make it to the mouth of Despise, and there's a "blue" there who strikes me up in conversation. I mention I'm new, and he says this is a good noob dungeon but warns me about PKers hanging around. Just then a red runs in off the screen, I run away, again I get stuck and basically instantly die.
Long story short I eventually searched for the right terms and learned about the "paralyze" spell. And something about trapped pouches. So I spend a couple hours now digging into the "how to survive PK" realm of UO forums. I find lots of very detailed and arcane advice, but one major thing that seems like a good idea is to get a safe rune that I can recall away if I get into trouble.
Ok so back in Britain I'm staring at the glut of auto-moongate vendors near the bank seeing if anyone seems to be advertising a rune book. At this point I'm getting short on resources that I had gotten from new player bonus/young dungeon grinding, so I want to be careful about how I spend my money. (I actually got PK'ed a couple more times that aren't in this story, losing some resources each time). But a runebook seems crucial, so I'm willing to shell out for it. I step into one vendor's moongate, start looking through their vendors, and.... get PK'd at their shop.
This is quickly becoming Not Fun.
Back to forum reading. I get more detailed guides. I learn that sometimes rune books aren't enough, and if I really want to survive I should have a whole loadout of potions, spells and other tricks all key-bound in the helper program. I should stay away from high-traffic areas and dungeons (and *especially* the noob dungeons) and try hunting in lone desolate areas until I've got everything put together. I've put over a dozen hours in-game and probably as much time researching out-of-game just trying to figure out how to start, and now I'm looking at dozens more hours of play time grinding my way in boring desolate areas to build some pre-specified load out (plus required razor/hotkey setup) that I read about in some forum just so I can Not Die Long Enough to see some interesting parts of the game world.
It was around here that I uninstalled the client. Honestly I have better things to do with my time.
Don't get me wrong. I get it. Once you get past all this, and get your setups all right and are used to the arcane intricacies of the game world, I can see how high-level play could be an exhilarating experience. But this learning curve is bullshit. It's basically easy noob cheesecake dungeon to extreme high-level PvP with nothing in-between. And what's worse, *none* of the guides I referred to above even came *close* to preparing me for this stuff. I know the commercial game has the non-pvp facet so it makes sense for those guides. But the in-game guides? The youtube channel? Nothing was mentioned about surviving pvp at *all*, and yet that appears to be the major driving force of gameplay on this server.
You want new players? You need to provide a sane learning curve. This "just search forums and put in your hours and figure it out like the rest of us" attitude that I see on the forums is just lazy. High-level PvP and a reasonable learning curve are *not* mutually exclusive and if any server can pull it off, I think this one can. But if basically *all* of the interesting gameplay is locked away until you spend a huge chunk of time studying arcane meta-game logic and setups and slowly grinding in intentionally boring areas, well I can't really see how reasonable people would have the patience for that.
