Firstly, I do want to thank the developers for not only keeping UO alive but also adding a lot of great content over their tenure. Personally, I believe the pet revamp was one of the best editions to the game all time. It allowed a tamer to basically customize their weapons so to speak.
Accolades aside, there are areas that are... lacking. This forum for example. It's an unmitigated disaster. The overall design of uo.com is dated both in optical and technically speaking. The site looks like it's from the early days of the internet and is not even mobil friendly.
The forums themselves are OK, however all the nonsense posts from certain malcontents dominate the posts. I have little to no doubt that UO has lost subscribers because of this. Why they are allowed to post nonsense for days with not much more than post lock. Kick their ***** out. There are only a few reasons I can think of as to why it's next to impossible to get banned here:
1. Mods just don't care - It's not this reason. I know enough about the mods in here that I am confident they are incredibly passionate about this game.
2. Overzealous management - This has been batted around for years as the reason. If it is then said management figure needs to become a lot more involved in these forums or they have to allow their mods to make decisions.
3. Technical reason - These forums use our game login as login credentials here. This leads me to wonder if it is tough or requires additional effort to ban someone here without banning their UO account. Also by having our logins associated with game logins is not really a great idea. At least with the EA login system there is adequate security measures. These forums... well less certainly isn't more in this case.
Other areas of improvement include both communication and NL. I won't beat a dead horse here but there are a lot of valid complaints and I just hope they are not falling on deaf ears.
Again, I do appreciate everything the current development team has done over the years but all those great things are being overshadowed but just silly crap!
In general UO needs to be more empathetic to the legitimate needs of players. This is just a game not life or death. But it is a game that is more than just a game to many of the players. To often see strings of angry discussions generated simply because of an arbitrary decision made by someone working for UO without regarding the legitimate need of a player and no explanation as to why this need was ignored if the decision was justified. Simple examples I have seen are $10 creatures from bought from the Ultima store being deleted and players being told sorry about that just buy another, players with houses that were stupidly, or intentionally, placed so they interfered with game play, being threatened with the house being condemned when a simple move of the house appeared available, and, requiring players making an honest mistake, like giving characters on the same account the same name, to pay $10 per character to correct the situation. When I had a problem, EM came out timely and told me what a needed to know and then, without any provocation, told me he would not answer any game related questions??? Last I looked this is a game. Had to deal with people a long time ago and learned that learning empathy was an important problem solving skill and that the same solution did not apply to everyone. A certain amount of understanding was required. Starting to see a little of this from UO like in the response above to this thread. I did not always find solutions acceptable to every one in real life, but using empathy and judgement found them much more often.
Soon the apologetics will come singing the developers praises and that no communication is perfectly acceptable
Why doesn't anyone ever tell Saul to kick rocks? That kid is obnoxious here and in gen chat...
Anyways, I agree with most of Red's post and I really do stand behind the whole communication thing. Like I said on stream last night, at this point, the silence is just unprofessional and is worrying the player base.
Many weeds have medicinal properties. But when a weed proves to have no medicinal properties and only thrives to poison everything around it there's no benefit to keeping it in the garden.