Please, PLEASE, for the future, never again design content like the Invasions....

@Kyronix ; , @Bleak

This thing that the good stuff (the Mages' books) get gone in 5-10 minutes (and mostly to the uber existing and older Templates who can do uber damage and thus get them) and then it is only a tedious trash spawn clean up is really annoying....

Not to mention, when one spends countless time to clean up the trash spawn left over by the uber Templates who get their books and leave and then something happens, a phone call, an urgent need to get to the bathroom, someone ringing at the door, whatever, and they miss those 5-10 initial minutes of the following Town invasion and thus have worked all for nothing for countless time to clean up the trash spawn at the previous one.

Drops, especially the more wanted ones, have to be awarded over the ENTIRE TIME that a player participate to a spawn and not for a quick show up and leave, do a ton of damage in a handfull of seconds or minutes and then leave the real and time consuming work to the other players.

Please, PLEASE, for whatever future content you might be working on do not any longer Design the drops mechanics to work as it is with the town invasions.

Thanks.

Yes a game is terrible when the best players are rewarded for being good.  😂

Also a Ancient Wyrm killed me today while I was fighting a Mage General so I had to go heal and my pet died and I did not get a book.  I should get a reward for trying....

I have a lot of fun focusing on the RP aspect of this. If all you are in for is the loot, well I can see how dissatisfying this must be for you. 

What about the people! The population of Sosaria! They need our help!  To Arms, To Arms! 

I say unbless the books and turn on fel rules ☺️

Xris said:

I say unbless the books and turn on fel rules ☺️

And where would that get ultima Online to ?

Even less players for Ultima Online as there are now....

At the 2018 Game Developers Conference (https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024930/Classic-Game-Postmortem-Ultima-Online),I understand, ALL Developers agreed that non-consensual PvP was a mistake (https://massivelyop.com/2018/03/28/gd-2018-ultima-online-post-mortem-with-richard-garriott-starr-long-raph-koster-and-rich-vogel/).

Furthermore, Raph Koster in this live forum https://www.raphkoster.com/games/interviews-and-panels/live-forum-qa-with-raph-koster-1016/ says....

I do believe in a crime/punishment system. But everything we tried did fall prey to new accounts and killers who just didn’t care. If they have no emotional attachment to losing (e.g., don’t give a shit) then there isn’t any in-game punishment you can offer up. I don’t know if you were around for it, but I tried for a LONG time to get that balance right in SWG. Bounty systems became high score tables. Rewards were claimed by dummy accounts. Most everything we tried became a tool for the bad guys. And the good guys literally had no way to win, because the bad guys could just come back the next day, over and over, and just wear your spirit down.

And also...

I do think a modern UO would not succeed with freeform PvP. It might well have PvP in it, but the whole gankfest thing is definitely a thing of the past. I never got to try the Outcasting concept that was proposed for SWG and never implemented, and would still love to see it tried (if you PK someone, they can report you to fellow players, along with a log of the event. If you are convicted, your right to PvP is permanently revoked). But even that, in these days of easy account creation on F2P games, maybe wouldn’t work. Bad guys would just make new accounts.
To me the essence of sandboxiness that was in UO and SWG is not about the PKing. It is about a simulated world, a functioning economy, a low power difference between high and low level players, and a system that doesn’t push you into combat as the only way to play the game (or even classes).

Personally, that is a point of view which I agree with.

It is poor design, but to make the best of things I take my best pet for the initial rush, then trade out for a pet in skill training after the mages are gone. Great for folks like me who train pets via hunting compared to the watching paint dry way of training skills on pets.

If you don't have a tamer, you can do the same thing with other fighter temps. Train away on high hit point mobs.  Now would be a good time to train an archer/thrower with all the tamers and sampires tanking.

The gold they drop is nicer then normal mobs and plenty corpses don't get looted. So good time to train hiding/stealth if you want and loot corpses even. This event is great for training imbuing via unraveling.

Unless i recall in and a mage is right there, it is game over no book on Atlantic, for me anyway.

Anyhoo, not focused on the books anymore anyway as all I get is Fey slayers to the point of comical when I do get lucky.

It is something to amuse ourselves with now I guess.

Plus, like Lord Nabin says, we must save the town!

Looking forward to the Big Announcement!

Pawain said:

Yes a game is terrible when the best players are rewarded for being good.  😂

Also a Ancient Wyrm killed me today while I was fighting a Mage General so I had to go heal and my pet died and I did not get a book.  I should get a reward for trying....

The problem is, that Ultima Online, which is a game that started on having skills as mattering most in game play, at some point shifted to have "items" become increasingly more important in fights outcomes.... Masteries have made an attempt to tone this down, especially where they required "real" skill to weight more in the Masteries bonuses, but while certainly a step in the right direction, they were not enough to bring back to skills the weight and importance that they should have, at least to my opinion, as compared to items.

Now, when damage dealt depends so heavily in items which then cost so much, of course that this creates a Gap in between those players who have been playing for long and thus have either these items or the gold to buy them, same thing is with pets, where scrolling a pet up can be extremely expensive since often Powerscrolls are held under a Monopoly of a handfull of players or Guilds who can set the prices they want because the getting of Powerscrolls is under Felucca ruleset rules...

So, what happens in such a scenario ?

That only or mostly those players with already the best gear, powerscrolls, scrolled up pets have the means and wealth to be the top damagers and thus also get, on top of the already high end items that they have, the "new" good items to furher enhance and boost their damaging abilities and gameplay success...

New or returning players have not a chance to compete and what do they do ?

After checking out UO for some time, usually a few weeks, they get intimidated by that huge Gap and, to my perception, many just quit playing.

Sure, some may stay and endure through all of the grinding and time investment to catch up with those players who do so much damage and get all of the goodies but most, at least to my perception, just do not bother with it and move on to other games....

I think that the Drop mechanics for high end items should be much different and such that also players with a much lower abilty to deliver such huge damage can get their drops for high end items just as well.

I think that the Design should shift away from this "top damagers" concept which, in the end, hurts Ultima Online and looses players base to it, to my opinion, and make available to players "various" ways to get those high end items, both to those who have advanced characters/pets and to those players who instead cannot compete in doing that much damage so that, in the end, all players can get access to those items regardless how advanced or wealthy their templates might be.

That is at least how I see it.

Grace said:

It is poor design, but to make the best of things I take my best pet for the initial rush, then trade out for a pet in skill training after the mages are gone. Great for folks like me who train pets via hunting compared to the watching paint dry way of training skills on pets.

If you don't have a tamer, you can do the same thing with other fighter temps. Train away on high hit point mobs.  Now would be a good time to train an archer/thrower with all the tamers and sampires tanking.

The gold they drop is nicer then normal mobs and plenty corpses don't get looted. So good time to train hiding/stealth if you want and loot corpses even. This event is great for training imbuing via unraveling.

Unless i recall in and a mage is right there, it is game over no book on Atlantic, for me anyway.

Anyhoo, not focused on the books anymore anyway as all I get is Fey slayers to the point of comical when I do get lucky.

It is something to amuse ourselves with now I guess.

Plus, like Lord Nabin says, we must save the town!

Looking forward to the Big Announcement!

Looking forward to the Big Announcement!

Me too, and I SOOOO much hope that I will not be disappointed....

I'm just thankful I got another chance for a 50 sdi book, before they announced turning it back on I almost paid out the ying yang for it. So I say thank you UO team. 

All they had to do was randomize the drop regardless of which type of human you were fighting. 

Literally.... 

Again, Popps may have a good idea but quit reading after about two lines and scrolled on. KISS. (google it Popps). 
How long have you actually PLAYED Popps? You don't have one character that can get a drop in all these years? We have newbies a month old that get them. *shrugs*

I agree with Grace.  Generals give greatly gains and do very little damage.  Take untrained pets to the middle and end of the cycle when everyone is fighting spread out generals.

A lot more fun that standing at the Crazy mage.

I agree it's hard to get a nice book, but that's ok. The first invasion gave everyone a blueprint on how to get one. Now you get a second chance at them, and everyone's mad. I'm sure they learned what they needed from it for whatever big announcement is coming, but I'm happy they saved me hundreds of mils on spellbook. 

Remember this is turned on just like ToT was so we can get these rewards.  There are plenty of times when LS has few players doing the invasions.  We are already back to doing the Roof and other stuff.

When this first came out we were rewarded in part five.  We knew in advance that each player who got loot rights on a Titan would get an unknown reward.  So, we all cooperated for the whole cycle so we could get to the Titan.  We used any toon that could do damage to get as many of the part five rewards.  That incentive is gone this round.

In a week, the ones who are greedy now will have their books and Popps will complain that it takes him too long to kill a Mage General by himself.  Then he will complain because he gets 40, 45, 47 books instead of 50%.

There will be a core of players like me, who like to kill stuff or like the RP story line, that will continue to mop up the mess.  With no reward attached.

@Rock I am not disagreeing with you or really Popps. See how you made your point in two paragraphs? I actually trying to help him in a round about way.

jelinidas said:

Again, Popps may have a good idea but quit reading after about two lines and scrolled on. KISS. (google it Popps). 
How long have you actually PLAYED Popps? You don't have one character that can get a drop in all these years? We have newbies a month old that get them. *shrugs*

I am not talking about me, I got my books.

I care about UO and just happen to think that, the way the Drops are Designed, is not a good one for Ultima Online as a whole.

Any drops mechanics which gives best items only or mostly to those items who already have it all, to further boost their Templates thus further increasing the Gap which new or returning players have to cover thus deterring them from wanting to keep playing (and paying for their subscription), is a bad mechanics for Ultima Online.

Not to mention, that having the best items go away in 5-10 minutes and then leaving the rest of the spawn be left to languish until some other players (often these uber damaging Templates come, get their books and then leave...) is also something absurd as a Design since it leave players who actually took the investment of their time to clean up the trash, useless spawn for countless time to be subject to then have to be able to be at the keyboard over those initial 5-10 minutes of the new town invasion during which everything finished about that given spawn....

And what if one happens to have a urgent need to go to the bathroom, have to answer a phone call, the door bell rings, whatever ? They spent countless time to clean up the useless trash spawn of the previous Town and have a new one start BUT, since the Design was conceived to have the real good items drop in just 5-10 minutes they might be at a high risk of having done all of that work all for nothing....

Personally, I think that the current Design for drops with the Town invasion is wrong and does not help Ultima Online and should be changed, quite drastically, to a different one which awards drops over TIME that players invest working a given spawn content (and not promotes quick show up for 5 minutes and then leave the trash spawn to others) and most importantly, that does not tie up drops to "top damagers" where New or Returning players can be extremely disadvantaged when having to compete against existing, older Templates which user suits, all scrolled up and with pets all in their 120s doing tons and tons of damage in no time and so forth....

The invasion, while active, is NOT current design. More recent content has been designed differently. Finding fault with it is pointless, unproductive and constitutes nothing more than a very large troll. For this reason this topic is closed. Please do not re-open it.