Slashdot Mirror
OSI Starts Selling Preleveled UO characters
NinjaPablo writes "OSI has started a new service, detailed here which allows you to pay $29.95 to get a decent character premade for you, and bypass the hours of working skills at lower levels. Most of the player community is in an uproar about the whole thing, since it basically means a newbie can pay a little extra and be as good as an average player right off the bat."
...buy a pre-karma'd Slashdot account with a +1 posting bonus?
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
These people should be required to go play Ultima, or Dragon Warrior, where you can't go anywhere without leveling up. Kids these days.. they have pointy clicky things all over the place and don't know what command lines are, and now they don't even need to level up.
That seems fine by me. I mean, seriously, how much different is this than auctioning/selling off your own character? Anyway, I don't see what the fuss is about; a newbie is a newbie, and this isn't going to make the newbie a better player. But what do I know? I haven't played the game much at all... I thought it was a bit boring.
Danish != nationality
Face it. UO is slowly fading into irrelivance. Everquest seems to be the "standard" mmorpg-- i don't know anyone who plays uo anymore-- and with the upcoming, mindblowing Star Wars Galaxies, soon UO will be attracting no new customers, only the diehards. UO could try to keep people with really good plots and stuff, but that would likely only retain old customers, and attract few new ones.
So, instead, they're trying desperation tactics like this one. Think about it. This is not a decision that even a company as stupid as the one that bought and ruined Origin would make about a product they wanted to keep viable. This is a product that is near the end of its lifespan, the parent company knows it, and so they are trying to squeeze out the last couple pennies from it before it fades into complete obscurity.
Origin's parent company doomed UO to stagnation, irrelivance, and eventual death the day they killed Ultima Online 2. The product is no longer maturing, and so it will be replaced by services that do. Plain and simple. Welcome to the gaming world, where the only law is that stasis is death.
So what's Lord British been up to lately?
--super ugly ultraman
Perhaps they would be discouraged from starting late and not having a chance against the people who've been there longer.
But why only have the option to pay over the phone for this service? Why not online billing?
Character selling has become a common occurance on many of the larger MMORPGs/MUDs, but I think the way OSI is going about it isn't too wise.
Back when I used to play MUDs quite a bit, I sold a max-leveled character I was -given- on a pretty popular MUD for US$200 (no equipment, just the character). I always thought that if I ran the game, I would create souped up characters and sell them on the side anonymously or disguised as other players. This would prevent the uproar that OSI is experiencing (since it would appear to be regular character selling), and it would allow me to make some quick cash off my game.
Players of Ultima Online are outraged to discover a service called eBay.
Really, though - who didn't see this coming? "end-of-ultima-online" seems inappropriate here; the end's been coming for a while now.
- At least four (five?) expansion packs
- The canning of UO2
- Premium services offered by Verant for their Everquest
Obviously, they're just running out of ideas, and at the same time, trying to milk every last drop from the cash cow that is Ultima Online.
and when will we be able to buy moderator points on slashdot?
Origin, Inc. screwing over it's user base? That would simply never happen. I mean, just look at Ultima IX!
Besides, what's the further insult? Anyone still there shouldn't care too much about stats any longer. Plus, you can always just start up or join a player-made shard. This would make a very expensive strategy for "grief" players to try and just get a boost with a new character - so you can laugh if anyone uses such a stategy.
Ryan Fenton
Oh, it isn't *that* OSI? Never mind, then.
This is going to create such a stir, that it won't last even a week.
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
So.. Basically OSI is trying to cut in on the After Market selling of property and accounds, and try to take in some of the profit themselves.
That's no such a bad idea. People on Slashdot always say- Don't attack a new technology or development, find a way to adapt to make it work for you.
That seems to be exactly what they are doing here.
Colin Davis
Isn't it amazing that these two games are still up and running? I can't possibly imagine how both Electronis Arts and Codemasters still get subscribers.
Loomis
"The television is the retina of the mind's eye" - Videodrome
Now they just give a very cheap price tag on this and what more, you have complete newbies who you cannot rely on to do their part of job in group right and no way to distinguish them.
Its like if they would be selling Masters Diplomas for few bucks and they would be as good as these you earned. Wouldn't you think it devaluates your efforts throughout the school?
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
if you look at the page for the character templates you can use its pritty lame, Ive played UO and its very very easy to get those stats only a few days of playing a few hours a day will get you that high, Its not like they are setting you up with GM status, the stats they give you is about min for what it takes to fully explore the world, sure its cheating a little bit, but its not so much to give someone an advantage
Let me say first off I support gaming and roleplaying and all that, but to the people who are freaking out about this I say so what?
Now a bunch of UO geeks are mad because they just realized that they have wasted hours and hours of their life that could of been spent otherwise.
If anything this should be a wakeup call that spending hundreds of hours "developing" a computer character may not lead to the payoff you think it did.
To the people who feel they have been cheated, your the ones who are cheating yourselves by investing way too much time in a game.
Life is too short, time to unplug.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
I used to play Ultima Online, however, I stopped a while ago. These prepaid characters are clearly an outrage. The hours it would take to build a magery with the skills mentioned on the page are many, and selling these characters GREATLY undermines the efforts people like myself have made in the past to build characters. Personally, I think OSI is trying to make the game much more newbie-friendly than it once was. They're making certain stats lockable that haven't been before, and certain skills easier to gain in and others less effective. They've also made many 'rare' or unique items in the game worth far less than they used to be due to their horribly thought out rewards system. Instead of introducing new items, they change the hue of a once VERY rare and VERY old item that no longer spawns and then the value for said items plummet to zero. In the process of making Ultima Online more new player friendly, they're just going to make the Ultima Online environment less friendly and less desirable to new and veteran rpg'ers alike.
death is eternity
after death is eternity
there is no death there is only eternity.
I have a pair of 3+ year accounts, with characters and housing active on 3 shards. There is *no* uproar that I can see amongst experienced players! This article is sensationalistic at best and a troll at worst!
/yawn/
If you look carefully at the templates, they are only selling characters with up to 85 skill points in any given attribute (presently the maximums are up to 125 in some skills and 100 in others). Any player with even modest experience can get up to 85 skill points in desired categories in *DAYS*.
As it turns out, *MOST* of the hard work is spent getting your character up over 85 skill anyway!
So, this is not really disruptive to the game at all. Read that again, its not disruptive *AT ALL*
MUCH more disliked by most long-time gamers is the noobs who buy an account on EBAY and wander around like complete a$ses... and these accounts can be at max cap (7x100 skill, 5x125, etc).
The only templates that are even moderately interesting that are offered are the tamer and the alchemist because taming and poisoning presently take *Forever* to get up to really high stat levels.
-The Glorious Lord AK Wallace
GM Mage/Eval/Med/Scribe/Alchemy/Wrestle
This acknowledges that UO wants to cater more to the casual gamer.
Who is the casual gamer? The casual gamer is someone who just does not have time to spend levelnig mindlessly like some 13-year-olds do, nor do they wish to have UO be their only non-work related fun. They still want to participate in the fun quests, and other great parts of UO, without having to deal with month after month of macroing, doing repetitive tasks, and being PKed by the aftermentioned 13-year-olds who do nothing but school and UO.
Naturally there will be an uproar by players who are jealous they didn't buy a preleveled character, and by other people who feel "leet" because they've spent 3 weeks fishing they skills up, but they're not the intended audience of this.
I stopped playing UO a long, long time ago. Why? Because after a summer of playing UO, I was still PKed a lot. Often times losing some cool stuff. You see people outside of the banks all the time giving stuff away because they don't want to play anymore, and don't want the items to go to waste.
The folks behind UO are trying to strike a balance between casual gamers, and people who like to do this sort of thing every day, for years on end. I'm not sure if they can ever make it close to perfect, but I applaud the choice they are offering to the gaming population at large.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Sounds Familiar
Which means I have no idea what UO is actually like, but onlike multiplayer RPG type games can't be all that different...but anyway...
I've played Muds for awhile, more than I'd like to admit. And I've come to realize something. The least productive period on a game is the first few levels, where you can't do much of anything, explore anywhere, or look at all respected. And when you have multiple characters in the same system, you tend to sit around doing pointless stuff you've done before with another character just to become halfway decent.
The way this story looks is that they're selling what amounts to mid-level characters. Something that can at least walk around the world and kill a few of the really weak things. At the same time, there is still a lot of upward mobility to be attained. Thus, you still really have to work for your character to make it exceptional. Buying a character off Ebay usually entails starting at the very top and blowing it all away. This is something of a compramise.
Also note, I'd never sell characters on my mud, nor would I ever buy one for Ultima Online. Quite frankly, I'm too poor to buy them, and not poor enough to need the money that badly. However, I do make it a point to try and design my mud so that a starting player doesn't feel completely useless.
Hey. I certainly don't have the 8 months it takes to get a character up to snuff in some massive multiverse. Especially when I'm competing against the people (read 'kids who have 12 hours a day to devote to the game and learn all the hacks and exploits that are needed to get the good stuff') for access to all the silly quests needed. I know the first fifteen levels of Evercrack got boring fast.
Pay a little extra to play with the people who know what they're doing and avoid the tedious little stuff? Sure! Of course this means more weanies that don't know what they are about clogging up the servers, but you can't have everything.
I forgot... So, there are "games" you can play, where you accomplish nothing, learn nothing and do nothing... and now you don't even have to play?!? You can just BUY your way into a powerful character without having to go through the annoying trouble of GAINING EXPERIENCE? Why not just masturbate? Sounds too much like real life. The people who engage in such practices need not share our oxygen. *off to gain some REAL LIFE levels*
Someone who was never had an interest in electronics plops down some money to get a bachelor's degree so he can leapfrog over the guy with 19 years life experience, I get called a troll.
Some kid pays money to play a stupid game, it's an outrage!
The thing is, the newbie that bought the character would most likely just mess it up quite anyways, wasting them $30.
Yes, I'm posting anon as I don't like the smell of burning karma in the morning.
Did you ever stop and think that this is just like any other service people pay for? People pay for services like getting their lawn cut, oil changed, food cooked for them, etc. because their time is worth more than they'd save by doing it themselves. If you have all day to play a video game, fine... If you have hours of free time to bake a home made loaf of bread, fine.
Most people; however, have a job they have to be at and would rather maximize their free time by using money instead of more free time. Hell, if I had all the free time in the world, I wouldn't need cable modem.
It was inevitable. With many GUI bugs and just bad management UO started to decline a long time ago. This is just a last attempt at keeping UO and Origin afloat. By next year we should be seeing EA trying to sell off OSI or cannibalizing it till just the name is left.
What a rip off, especially when you can do the same thing in under an hour with the Guaranteed Gain System.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
For $30 you can change a characters name!!
EA really is trying to milk every last penny out of UO while they still can.
The $30 pre-leveled characters though, are hardly worth it, and are in no way "average". They're characters which are just out of the newbie stage. Anyone willing to spend $30 on it is a dolt.
In UO can't you play as a theif, and player killing isn't impossible right? So let the newbies start off as higher levels, while they are figuring out keyboard commands and where to click, they'll make great targets for new guilds of theives/pkers.
As someone who once played UO for 5+ hours a day for 3 months (and then sold my character), I think the whole idea is terrible. But not because it means people can't sell their characters for inflated prices, but because it destroys the very thing that makes UO such a powerful game.
... if they are beginner characters. But looking at the UO page, the pre-fab characters aren't beginners - they have stats in the 80s ... it takes weeks to get to that level through normal play. Why is this bad? Well because the game becomes to easy ... and why is this bad? Well if you think that Pking is a problem now, imagine how bad it will be when anyone can instantly get an advanced character to play ... and not worry about putting in the time or effort to get a character to that level. Which leads to my second point.
In any game, people need to strive towards a goal for the game to be interesting. Getting a balance between striving for a goal which is impossible and a goal which is too easy is the essence of game design. Sure pre-fab characters are okay
Community. It is UOs primary strength. Any policy which destroys the community, destroys the game. Pre-fab characters will only encourage an 'easy comes, easy goes' attitude to people's characters. They won't have any attachment to them nor care about the consequences of their actions. Basically, it encourages anti-social behaviour online which will destroy the community.
And if the game was actually fairly well-designed, one's skill would be determined by one's ability to play, rather than one's ability to pay OSI money.
Seriously, though, I don't see how this is a problem; folks who have spent that time to gain levels have an understanding of what's involved, and have generally had to work hard to get there and therefore know what to do and what to avoid. A newbie wouldn't know. It's the same kind of difference between an experienced sysadmin and an MSCE.
--
viqsi - See "vixen"
If we do not change our direction we are likely to end up where we are headed.
But with how well their ad displays are going, I'm sure that is on the list.
Cheers,
Backov
In the law there is no overlap between theft and copyright infringement whatsoever.
Because it only takes days to get to level 50 also... That's a bit absurd if you ask me!
You gamers have no life. ;-)
Who's got time to waste breathing on this sort of thing. Real Life is a game that never stops.
i recently started playing neverwinter nights. it's a great game. i've never played any sort of structured roleplaying game before -- either live or computerized.
frankly, all of the points / character levels / blah blah blah are stupid.
i see what they're getting at -- a fictitous character develops gradually and along chosen axes, the way a real-life person does.
but there is no real-life skill associated with becoming a more experienced character. i have as much fun with a souped-up "unnaturally" powerful character as i do with a weak one.
i don't see anything inherently fun about having to die and re-spawn 15 times versus 2 against a particular Big Baddy. IT doesn't make me a better person and it doesn't make my gameplay more enjoyable. trust me -- i hit a bug in NWN that gave me about 5 extra levels of points. the fun part of the game for me was solving puzzles and running around in the world as the story unfolded around me, not having to compare my combat points plus shield points minus encumbrance points blah blah blah BARF against the bad guy waiting around the corner for me. i just want to whack him out of my way and find the next clue.
y'all have been playing so long that you can't think outside of the box. i'm not saying RPGs suck -- just that the overly-deliberate rules were functions of insufficient technology, and there's no reason to hold on to that unnatural deliberation when we have computers, services, etc. to deal with it for us. Let people have their souped up characters -- the fun is the storytelling and the interaction, not the number of times you have to die in order to kill the bad guy at hand.
These idiots are gonna pay $30 to get a sweet character ripe for the picking when he walks outside the city gates not knowing how to defend himself from getting assraped by everyone. Then he'll sue OSI for his $30 back. :)
ProgressQuest
Quoth the Info page:
Clearly you don't have to pay to get a leveled character here. All you do is wait, while dedicated 1% of your CPU resources to the PQ Daemon.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
If people are willing to pay to skip the first part of a game isn't that an indicator there's something wrong with that part?
Just an observation.
I am selling Ultima II and Ultima V floppies for the Apple //e. The floppies have the :-D
original labels, and vintage drawings on them with Lord British's name on it
If you wanna buy all six floppies for $60 plus S/H, send an e-mail to jazzy_merchant@yahoo.com
I can negotiate the price for hardcore Ultima fans and collectors.
I can understand where you are coming from ... but let me use another example to explain the outrage that some UO players would be feeling:
... how would you feel then? Come on, surely you can't be upset ... it's only a concert, a form of entertainment .....
Imagine you lined up to buy tickets to your favourite band. You have been in the line for an hour waiting patiently and you are near the front of the queue now. All of sudden, the concert promoter says that for people willing to pay an extra $X bucks, they can jump to the head of the queue
Not a perfect analogy I admit, but perhaps you might understand why some people would be getting upset about it.
> Five digit slashdot account number maxed out on karma!
:)
Five-digit punk.
The problem ultimately is that all these games have you doing BORING ass exp and skill grinding for literally DAYS, all to get to the point to explore the really high end content with your friends. You have to wade through so much non-fun (You find me a SINGLE person who thought levelling 1-50 in EQ or any other game "fun" and i've got some nice oceanfront land for sale in Ohio for ya..) .. People want to just doodle around and kill big monsters with 30-60 of their buds.. It's more of a chat medium with the "game" as a nice incentive to have fun while you're talking. People like questing, they like gaining items.. They like working their skills up, but at the SLOW rates all these games have it's just absurd. SURE the entire point is to keep people PAYING and PLAYING, but if these companies had FUN stuff to do regardless, people would stay .. The grinding is just the suck! Games like Earth & Beyond are quickly becoming the new trend where you get exp for nearly EVERYTHING you do, and you can literally gain tons of levels in just a few casual hours of FLYING AROUND .. They have push aside the mundane treadmills and just added tons and tons of quests that are FUN and NOT repetive. They have an engaging storyline that people can follow and while you're reading it, you notice yourself levelling. It's SO QUICK. Sure, you are bound to have the minority of players who have too much free time and want to build something no one else can, and they'll complain that everyone can be just as good.. But does that really make it fun for anyone? No..
Cause if you is, us crackas can sa-bo-tage your sweet raaahd with a gastank full o' sugar!!! Yee haw!
When UO first came out, I saw my roommate spending hours fishing, making fishcakes, and selling them. Day after day. What kind of fantasy game is that? Why, I asked? "So I can make some money so I can get some decent equipment so I can do stuff," was his response. It sounded like a rip off then, and still sounds like a rip off now. You pay a monthly fee to spend all your time building your character up enough to actually play the damn thing, and some punk kid with an uber character pks your ass and steals your gear the first time you go out.
I'll stick to my private diablo 2 xpac realm running under bnetd, thank you.
-- Will program for bandwidth
I don't see why something like this would have people in such an uproar. I've played a few of these games and it seems like the whole fun in them is starting from scratch and building your character up, making all the decisions that go into it. If someone wants to pay a premium to skip that whole aspect of the game, which to me skips a big chunk of the fun in having the game, they're more than welcome to do it. They'll hear no complaints from me.
They're paying to lose out on fun. I think the uproar begs the bigger question, though. If the process of leveling up and getting to that stage is so un-fun that people are willing to pay a premium for it, and people who don't pay for it consider themselves cheated for having to make their characters from scratch, why the hell are we doing it? It's a game. It's supposed to be recreation, not a chore.
Of course, I think the real objection is the competitive aspect of the game. A lot of gamers get off on how many people they're better than on the server, and the sense of accomplishment in being better. Well, where does that line get drawn? I can start off by saying if I had my hand-crafted character trashed by someone fresh out of the box, I'd be a little miffed. However, I know that when I have characters on these games, sometimes I get help from others either via getting cash donations, spell buffs, power leveling, and so on. This is "cheating" too, and it seems like it would diminish that sense of accomplishment in the same way, but I don't hear many people crying foul over that. The people who do, are hardcore gamers who are likely to be much stronger than these pre-packaged "powerful" characters anyway.
But, back to my first point. Buying a pre-made powerful character, to me, takes away the whole point of the game. However, if people want to pay to do that, more power to them. There's always going to be someone more powerful than you on the game - the fun is found in the journey, not the destination. But, that's just my opinion. I feel the same way about people who use hacks or exploits.
As both a gamer and someone who runs a business in the online gaming space, I can see both sides of the coin here.
Personally I see this as a great first step for massively multiplayer gaming. Not necessarily a great first step, but a move forward nonetheless.
I used to play EQ for 10 hours a day. Then I met the right woman, got married, and had a baby. When Dark Age of Camelot came out, I managed to play 4-5 hours a handful of nights a week (at the expense of sleep). Luckily my wife loves gaming too, but she was in the same boat.
I really enjoyed both games, but in both situations I could not compete with teenagers and college students who could throw 12-14 hours a day at the game. It really ruins the fun if you can no longer group with your friends because your character has fallen behind.
So, yes, I think it's great that I can get the +10 Not-so-rusty sword for $9.95 or whatever... Otherwise I would just be camping some spawn mindlessly wasting time to get it in the game. That makes me get bored and want to quit the game, taking my subscription revenue with it.
Gaming companies and the games themselves are better off long term if they can keep people attracted to the game. For those of us who love the games, but simply don't have the time, this is a good thing.
I think a better (even more powerful idea) would be to create servers/shards/realms with a MAXIMUM amount of hours played per account per week. This would be great for people like me who can only play so many hours a day -- basically you're keeping the power gamers out of one or two servers to allow casual players a chance.
Especially in newer games like DAOC where realm vs realm is so important, there is no way someone who can only play 10 hours per week has a chance. I applaud the companies for realizing this and starting to take baby steps towards addressing it.
Case
Four-digit punk. :)
(who's next!?)
I'd love to see it! Imagine a world where employers were forced to evaluate employees based on actual ability rather than a little piece of paper! Hey... I might even be able to compete in the job market again.
Get a grip. The skills you developed through shool should give you an advantage over someone who purchased a metiphorical diploma-in-a-box(tm.) If you really didn't learn anything from those years then you probably don't deserve the preferental treatment.
UO is a game, and I personally applaud this decision... Others have already said why.
But why the hell is the Open Source Inititive spending all this time making UO characters? Are they really short on money? Is Bruce Perens having trouble finding things to do with his time? Or should the article poster have made it a bit clearer what he was talking about?
Maybe one of the OSIs should sue the other OSI for trademark infringement or something. I mean, talk about "confusingly similar." If there's no legal conundrum here, be on the lookout for my upcoming "MS Linux 2002," to be released early in 2003!
- SMJ - (It's not just a name: it's a bad aftertaste.)
As a player of UO, I can confirm the above posts stating that any newbie who buys one of these premade characters is going to be decimated if he tries to play with the big boys.
:)
In fact, a newbie using such an account will probably be at a disadvantage - for never learning how to gain skills, and never experiencing the improvement of his UO gaming skills over time. And UO remains more awesome than EQ etc. *because* character skill only counts for half of your ability...the other part is your personal experience with the world and its quirks.
Veterans like me on the other hand can buy an account to skip over all the boring newbie skill-gaining stuff that we've done a million times. These chars for sale would save me ~10 gametime hours, and 10 hours of my life is worth a lot more than $30 to me.
I initially misread the article title as "ISO selling characters" which made me think that for $30 I could get my own special character added to Unicode. Damn! That would actually have been useful to me.
Its like if they would be selling Masters Diplomas for few bucks and they would be as good as these you earned. Wouldn't you think it devaluates your efforts throughout the school?
Yes that would, but this is a game. Paying a little more to get ahead might mean that people would enjoy the damned game. As a rule I don't play RPGs, because you suck for hours before you can do anything cool. I don't have that kind of attention span, and I refuse to play through hours of digital hell just to get some nugget of actual fun.
Oh yeah, lest we forget: THIS IS A GAME. A masters will give you money, respect, and women (real women) in the real world, and that's worth a slight fuckton more. At any rate, judging by the spam I get daily, you CAN just buy a masters. Not that anyone in their right mind would accept that masters.
SetupWeasel
-- M.A. Universe
Take a look at UOP
the older text based MUDs often had a "wish system" where you would send in money for "wishes" that you could use to up stats, or get items, or what have you.
It was an accepted practice then, and it should be now. For christ sakes this is a business, not some utopian ideal we should all be striving for.
Interesting to see them offer a service that cuts down on the return they get from "leveling addiction" though.
In Beijing, you can buy an RTR Korean identity for $1,000.00. In Mexico, you can get a SSN for much less. When virtual identities trade on parody w/actual, I'll switch.
Maybe now some of us who don't have hours a day to waste levelling-up can begin to enjoy MMORPG's.
Those who are complaining should really think about why they're upset, and realise that it's because they have an elitist attitude.
I think that if you are going to go buy a game like this then it is up to YOU to level that character. The only thing that I believe is good about it is that it deflates the character economy selling on eBay and such. I think this is just as bad. Nothing makes me more angry than someone thinking their characters are worth money. They shouldn't be worth anything except to the player. This takes the wind out of the whole thing.
"Laugh, and the whole world laughs with you. Cry, and they still think its funny." - Mr. Boffo
1: Play UO.
2: Buy preleveled character.
3: Success!
See: http://www.shadowbane.com Kinda like UO with full pvp, but with guild vs guild seiges and warfare, build player run cities. With no level treadmill like in Evercrap it might be right up your alley.
- This and all my posts are public domain. I am a Physicist. I am not your Physicist. This is not Physically advice
frankly i think this is the worst thing UO could possibly have done. i'm cancelling my account right now.
This is the same marketing plan as collectable card games. The more you pay, the stronger your play level regardless of skill.
A well thought out post that I totally agree with. I simply don't have the time to devote to playing a single game for hours upon hours to raise a character to a level I can enjoy. That said, I did play Diablo II from the beginning, but my highest characters were only around level 40 or so. I didn't have the patience to just go and "kill more stuff" to get into the 80+ range. Got bored.
The obvious solution would be to make two seperate game communities - if you buy a pre-made character, you are restricted to only play with other pre-mades. If you start from scratch, you have to stay with other players from scratch.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
over #500 punk :)
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Apparently my UID is 597, not 497. So make that "over #600 punk". =P
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
umm... you mean over #600, right?
I am Nakombo Aragumba, secretary of the recently deceased President Sani Abacha of Nigeria, who was avidly an expert player of the American computer game, "Ultima Online," amassing the sum of 26.3 million gold pieces. Before his untimely death the President entrusted to me control of these sums of gold, in the fear that our new and corrupt government would want to seeking control of this fortune.
My character is constant watched under by Government spies searching for this moneys who have infiltrated the game. It is the asking of your help for the transfer of this gold from my personal Ultima Online character to yours, in exchange you will receive a consideration of 2.3 million gold pieces.
Please contact me immediately to arrange for the transfer of this important fortune, as will be to our mutual benefit.
Respectful of yours sincerely
Nakombo Aragumba,
"Brentley of the Shire"
woah, a race condition. far out.
more seriously:
- damn 20 second reply wait.
- damned 1 minute since last post timeout!
grr...
Gee, that shits all over their network protocol stack :)
i played ultima online for 3.5 years, from 1998 to 2001. for my first 7x GM i needed 2 years. i left the game after it had become really really lame (power hour, trammel etc.) - i made a 7x gm in less than 3 weeks.
i havn't played in 1.5 years now, but i can say i could make these $30 characters in 2 days. trash. i make 85 magery on the first day, plus gm swords, tactics, anatomy. why spend $30 for this?
This is just like governments printing toy money.
There is an after market in game profiles
with a limited supply and balanced economics.
But this is an attempt to cash in on that
and it will backfire.
Whatever worth UO still had is put into doubt
and any investment people have made in the game
is devalued by this.
It's poor practice in any economy and stupid here.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
Building a character is the enjoyable part. Buying a pre-made character is like buying a pre-read book.
If a game isn't entertaining with the option of character progression, particularly at the start of the development cycle when progression is fast and easy, how can it possibly be fun at the end?
An article like this certainly lets you know who the no-lifers are. I tired of 1st Level characters back in 1992, that was when RPG were pencil and paper.
No the company is saying, "Give us money and you don't have to start at 1st Level". at least they're honest.
I really get annoyed at the little wankers selling virtual equipment on ebay, their daytime job? Play online games all day. I hope this puts the little shits out of business, and forces them to get a real job.
The people who get your entire high level group wiped out resulting in hours of lost work are the assholes who bought their chars on Ebay. They have no idea how to play their class and very limited knowledge of the game mechanics. The have no knowledge of the game lore or customs or geography. They have no skill whatsoever.
I hate these people.
Erm, I thought this was an article about a standards office allowing people to have their own unicode character. I had my credit card out ready to buy one...then the site appeared.
Powered by onion juice.
If you had not stated you stopped playing UO 'a long, long time ago' I'd of guessed you had either never played or you had only briefly played over 2 years ago.
There are no such things as levels in UO.
There is a non-PvP land to all servers.
And the real give-away.. 'Fun-quests'.. Arf.. good one.
Its just a game. Ok just a game. Comapring it with a diploma is.. well follishness!
This gives the guys oppertunity to earn some after market money, so whats wrong.
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
The game lost its appeal 3 months after it came out. Was a cool beta test though.
10x worse than me. You must've regged 10 minutes later >:(
Lets see how far we can take this:
How about an Ultima On-line VISA card - where every purchase you make gets you valuable experience points in the game?
Double points if you buy Electronic Arts merchandise - and every $10,000 will get you a free magic item of your choice!
I sig, therefore I am.
I've played UO for around, oh, nearly 5 years now. So I feel I'm justified to "speak on this".
The characters these people are buying....are crap. I'm sorry, but give someone who read UO Stratics under a week and their characters will be up to that par. However, recent modifications to the stat" system (strength/dexterity/intelligence) make it so you can gain a maximum of 6 points a day. So, to theoretically reach your maximum of 225, you would have to play for over 30 days, while spending 2-3 hours of those days working on your statistics. That's what players will be paying for.
Of more interest to me is that name changes, which players have begged for throughout UO's entire existance, are now being offered at a pay cost.
Furthermore, in response to your "UO is dying" tirade. Please, save it. UO2's development was ceased because it would have resulted in the desertion of the original Ultima's servers, which Origin would no doubt continue paying for until the numbers had dwindled enough. Take one look at Meridian 59 and realise that for the entire crowd to dissipate, it may take awhile.
What's been happening to UO recently is the idea of changing the game to a stage where it can become a new game entirely. The extremely flawed 3D adaption of the game was first, that failed due to the fact it was buggy, slow and ugly. Rumoured on the horizon is a first person (ala EverQuest) 3D adaption of Ultima with a new landmass designed especially for it. Currently there have been 2 expansion landmasses, with a third on it's way around Christmas. UO isn't going down anytime soon.
Oh, and Lord British is working on that horrible "Lineage" game with the girl who made the female "UNGH" noises in Quake 2 (Who is also responsible for many of the problems UO has today, as the former head of design).
s200.org - visit it (me), love it (me).
Actually no, that's a lie. And level 50 isn't even the endgame, it's level 60 in EverQuest. It takes a month or so to do that. In UO, there's minimal risk for time wasted (No skill loss upon death unless you're a PK, walking back to corpses isn't as much of a bother due to instant teleportation spells, horses and a small landmass). UO is probably the least time consuming of MMORPGs available at the moment.
s200.org - visit it (me), love it (me).
...Enyego Montoya. I purchased my character. Prepare to die.
FLR
I suppose this is a good thing because people keep complaining that the essential idea of most MMORPGs on lower XP levels is hunting every damn rat in the world... and paying for that. Not exactly my idea of fun, though =)
Personally, I'm currently playing smaller-scale CRPGs. My favorite has much better and free character adjustment in case the adventure in question needs a high-level character: DebugMode 1, GiveLevel 10 (or whatever), DebugMode 0 =)
All these on-line games show off spectacular screen shots of high-level characters killing dragons and doing heroic things, but when you actually start you're mucking about in the weeds killing vermin.
Don't get me wrong - I get the value of reward for hard work. If I was in college or simply lacked a life and could spend 4-8 hours/day in the game cranking out the XPs I could put up with several weeks of toil before some kind of payoff. But months? Or Years? I guess I just don't have the patience (not to mention the money - it really started to irk me that I was PAYING for the priveledge of wandering around killing rats).
I've often mentioned to my friends that I'd give online games another shot if I could buy my way past the drudgery and actually have some fun right away. I'd pay real money for xps, weapons, equipment - you name it (assuming the prices were reasonable and reflected that fact that it was a game).
One way to control that spinning out of control would be to just have a subset of equipment/weapons available (perhaps just good quality, yet non-magic), and only allow a certain max number of xps to be bought, thus limiting the "buy-in" potential of new players. Then the uber-characters of 50+ level can still feel like they "put in their time" while we "casual gamers" (or is it "life-balanced gamers") could at least enjoy some aspect of the game besides killing bats and rats.
Anyway, the bottom line for me is I'll not play another online game until some sort of system like this exists in a game I care about. For instance, I'd love to try out Star Wars Galaxies when it comes out, but if I'm going to have to spend a year of real time wandering around killing insects and small rodents because I can't put in more than 1/2 hour a day towards the game then I'm out. Life's too short to screw with that kind of boring, arbitrary beginning play (and to pay for it as well!)
Please Rate my comment (and help support Fre
Ever since EA killed off most of the OSI crew (Richard Garrott included) UO has been going slowly down hill...i remember that alot of players left after player consellors were axed, basiclly killing all what was left of player RP.
Thank god i left soon as they axed OSI...but i have to say i do miss old OSI UO, i spent a good year and a bit of my life on there.
"What do you mean you have no ice? Do you expect me to drink this coffee hot?" - Random Customer, Clerks
I think the community is in uproar because -they-used to make money selling characters to newbies...(and for a lot more than 29$) it happens in any multi player RPG. So i wouldnt blame Origin at all... They are just trying to make more money.
It made it easy for kids to cheat on games, avoid levelling up, etc. Now they expect to be able to use a GameShark wherever they want to play -- even on MMORPGs!
What they are actually mad about is that OSI has finally beaten the people who ebay their accounts? Oh my. :P
Someone who can beat my #701. :(
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
All this service from OSI is really doing is allowing people to not spend hours upon hours unattendedly macroing, also known as the sea trance Arrr.
With the introduction of the Publish 16 patch to the UO servers, gaining skills is a fair bit slower and based on actual game time; the old power hour is gone. For example, I have a character that has 98% Lumberjacking skill and it will take me another 20 hours of gameplay to get that skill to 100%! That is a bit excessive considering that there are another 6 skills on this character that also can be raised to 100% status. For a newbie getting a skill from 10% to 100% would be a rediculous investment of time. To go from 85% in a skill or 70% in a skill, like the characters being offered for sale by OSI, to Grand Master (100%) will still take a significant investment of time.
Besides, A lot of the characters that OSI is offering are set up to be mules or PvM players, not PvP characters. They will still take a lot of work to hone their PvP skills.
-Runz
While I don't like the fact that it's for-pay in a game where killing other players is a part of the game, it allows UO to reach new crowds that would never have played the game before. As someone mentioned, these templates are for "basic" accounts that are considered "bare minimum low level" for actually having some fun in the game.
DAoC has done some similar things, although not for pay. They analyzed the leveling patterns of players to find out when people were most likely to get frustrated/quit/stop, and discovered that from 41-50 people quite like flies because Lv40 was like some kind of brick wall after which XPing went MUCH slower. In the next patch, they're reducing leveling time from 41-45 to alleviate this. In addition, they're planning allowing Level 50 (highest there is) characters to start new characters at somewhere between 20-24. Some are annoyed, but most are happy because:
It gives more incentive to level to 50 initially rather than giving up and moving to an alt, resulting in more 50s for RvR.
Once at 50, it gives more variety to actually try out a new class. If they start at 20, they can go to the first RvR battleground immediately.
Early starts aren't that much of an individual advantage in a game where you can only kill players from other realms (and you really can't RvR before 40 anywhere other than the BGs). The two PvP servers are a different story, but I believe they only plan this on the main servers.
I wouldn't mind even if they implemented something like this in DAoC - As long as they kept it off of the 'dreds (PvP servers)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Didn't the OSI take $6M and build a Bionic Man to aid the country's intelligence departments?
I'd like to argue that in DAoC where RvR is the focus is the game where someone with only 10 hours/week to play is most likely to have a chance.
Why?
Because you can level at your leisure, without worried that the people you formerly grouped with will turn on you. Take your time. You'll hit 40 eventually. In the meantime, you've got the BGs from 20-24 and 30-35. (Theoretically 25-29 too, but Mythic has to give people more incentive to go to Murd since no one goes there on any server... Fortunately 25-29 is pretty easy.)
The worst in DAoC is from 41-50, and 1.53 is going to fix that.
Still, it would be nice to have some sort of "quickstart" in DAoC. 50s will get that soon, and I wouldn't care if Mythic gave a pay option since it just means more people to RvR in my realm. (ofc, it means more Hibs/Mids too).
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I've been playing uo, for a very, very long time... And I still play it a lot... No serious player would care.
85 in any skill is jack shit. I could hit 85 in any of those skills in a couple hours at most... Only one that would be hard at all is taming, 85 taming might take 10 hours now. Before publish 16, I could make a 7x(maxed out) char in a week, and 80% of that time spent I could do unattneded macroing. I personally couldn't give a shit what any carebears waste their money on. 95% of the people that do this will spend most of their time in trammel(land w/o pvp)
And don't say that UO does not require any skill... To become a good PvPer in UO is just as difficult as to become good at Counter-Strike.
UO may be shit now, but it is still fun, and is FAR from dying.
And yes, Shadowbane = win
Apparently, he sat there and did it for several hours while my pal went to a movie and got some grub. Came back, little brother handed the controller to him, and my friend started playing.
A little brother will work for many games where repetition is necessary. You might also want to try this with other small children. Neighbor children can be used in a pinch, under the guise of babysitting, or collect your own!
...since you can whip open the toolkit and give yourself +1 Uber Glowing Longsword of l33tness and 20 levels of XP, it makes the whole collecting-stuff-and-points issue moot. Once that's shoved out of the way the only fun you'll have with the game is with the genuine roleplaying experience -- what do you DO with your glowing sword, once you've got it? Granted, not many NWN modules have gotten to the point where the roleplaying is emphasized over the Monty Haul, but they're definitely getting there and it's an eventuality.
I don't mean to do a 'nwn r0xx0rz uo suxx0rz' post, but really, this is really the problem with any persistent world MMORPG -- yes, they have roleplaying elements, but the core of the game basically Progress Quest. How much l3wt can you acquire? How uber can you get? How many days will it take you to get there, and if there is no limit, how many days until you get bored? It's less a roleplaying game and more a game, if that makes sense.
Once you realize that, paying more and more money just for more points makes perfect sense -- and is nonsense at the same time.
All these posts about, "Now I don't have to waste X hours getting a character I can enjoy," have missed the fact that now you can waste infinite hours doing precisely what you paid to avoid. Except now, you have cooler make-believe internet fantasy computer game magic spells. Enjoy your escapism...
So few people have questioned why games are designed like this. Why can't I have a role playing game that I can enjoy from the very first minute? Why must I always begin the game with $0.32 and a dagger? Why must I spend an exorbitant amount of hours to progress in the game's single rewarding advancement system (combat ability)?
Think about it. If it were a roleplaying game, you would play a role believably. You would not devote all of your time to honing your combat skills. You would have a hobby that you would advance for your amusement and the admiration of others in your hobby. You would participate in politics at some level, be it state, community, or personal. You would spend time seeking out entertainment. Oh, and you would want to practice with your sword, too.
The problem, as I see it, is that D&D was a genre defining game, but being a human-driven engine, it could not feasibly make a real role playing game. It was a great fantasy medieval combat game. When people starting taking the D&D idea and moving it into computer games, they failed to identify that that the computer driven game had the capacity to fully simulate a medieval fantasy world in which a player can truly assume a complete role.
The result? Being level 1 sucks. The coolness of the game is oriented linearly along your combat skills. For the first 20% or 40% of the game, your level sucks, your character sucks, and the game isn't much fun. The half-witted solution? Sell characters that are past this point on the crippled game's linear scale of entertainment.
The industry changing solution? Develop a role playing game that does not have a single linear advancement system. Sell me game that is fun to play, not just fun to dominate. Sell me a game where you can have 100 more levels of combat ability than me, but I can have 100 more levels of musicianship than you, and if we're hanging out in the bar singing songs, I'm going to score women and you aren't. The RPG industry is hobbled by this belief that a game that focuses strictly on combat is a role playing game, and that is why they will all ultimately fail.
Why is it that all the online games start you out as a character so weak it isn't any fun to play anyway? Does anyone enjoy the first three to five levels of killing rats and waiting for your skills to come up higher? Does anyone love being a mage so low level you get tired after lighting a candle?
It wouldn't weaken the role-playing experience any to start a character at competent instead of at ultra-wuss. Many pen-and-paper RPGs do this. Of course, all MMORPGs seem to be modeled off D&D, which is famous for its useless first level characters.
I understand there's the whole hero's path up from being a complete dweeb thing going on, but since MMORPGs have this world full of other characters, it's damn obvious your hobbit crotch-scratcher (or elven wand-fiddler, or whatever) isn't the hero of the story.
I find it funny if people are actually 'outraged' by this. Why? because it is so relativilty easy to max out your characters in UO, for an expierenced player, this is maybe, 2-3 days worth of work for them at tops, that character level/skill means two things in terms of "status" in the game - Jack All. It doesnt mean a single thing. Things like - Rares - Houses - Gold are the "status" symbols in this game. You could have a total n00b character, but if you had like, 50 mill gold, a large tower and a full set of rares, you have more "status" then the 7X GM mage/bard. For newbies, it lets them get into the game with a little bit of extra ease for 29 bucks. For expierenced gamers, it saves them a day or two of work if they want to roll op a new toon. I honestly dont see any problem here. Its not like they are bypassing MONTHS and MONTHS of work to get to that skill level.
a newbie can pay a little extra and be as good as an average player right off the bat.
Um that seems to imply that there is an actual "skill" of leveling up a MMORPG... well other than resting a stapler on the left button on your mouse.
Compare that to something like Quake where, no matter how much you spend, the only real factors are skill and talent.
I'd rather play BF1942 where I can observe my ability improving instead of just saying "wow, I just spent the last 20 hours making shields". Oh and I also don't get screwed out of 20 bucks a month.
What is music when you despise all sound?
A while ago /. linked to an interview with the author of The Sims (and a lot of the earlier Sim titles). He talked all over this subject. The newer games are trying conceptual stuff to address this, but at some point in a competitive game, especially a leveling one, you get monster players nobody new can come near. UO is a little older, so they didn't build their game around some larger concept that'd constrain the problem or player behavior.
The ebay option was already there. The only difference here is that UO is offering the cheap catch-ups officially. It's an unimaginative approach, sure, and you wish they could think of a way to address the problem systemically... but when they can sell quick fixes for $30 a pop, do you expect them to think abstractly and long-term? (Do you expect your LAN team to think that way, when just fixing the latest problem makes them heroes and gives them job security?)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Clearly, the people pissed about this are the powergamers that feel their "Eliteness" is being tread upon..
You see, powergamers have unlimited TIME, they have no lives, they sit infront of their computers for 12 hours a day. Ignoring the world, ignoring everyone around them, and getting fat and lazy, all to build up a stack of useless pixels.
Now, Casual gamers, usually have alot of money, but time is limited, and valuable for them.
So by virtue of this, shouldn't they BOTH be allowed to have what they want in a game? The no-lifer can work his way up, the lifer can buy his way up. How is that bad?
Seems to me some people need to get a life, and stop taking this so seriously, and understand some people have more money than time... Like me, money isn't a concern, at all, but my time is worth a ton. Therefore, I buy anything I want or need, including in some games.. Oh, and I learn fast too, and most likely, in a week or two, i'm out PKing your ass over and over with my store bought characters in most games.
K?
Great... child labor! Have you no sense of decency?!
Then again... get a bunch of blank accounts, have a bunch of kiddies train up the characters on those accounts, and pay them "a few pennies". Then sell the accounts on eBay. Heh, you may be on to something here.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Paul of Tarsus has just made a very Politically Incorrect speech to some Jewish Rabbis in Jerusalem, (Paul is himself Jewish), and his listeners become enraged:
Acts 22:22
And they gave him audience unto this word, and then lifted up their voices, and said, "Away with such a fellow from the earth: for it is not fit that he should live." And as they cried out, and cast off their clothes, and threw dust into the air, the chief captain commanded him to be brought into the castle, and bade that he should be examined by scourging; that he might know wherefore they cried so against him.
And as they bound him with thongs, Paul said unto the centurion that stood by, "Is it lawful for you to scourge a man that is a Roman, and uncondemned?"
When the centurion heard that , he went and told the chief captain, saying, "Take heed what thou doest: for this man is a Roman." Then the chief captain came, and said unto him, "Tell me, art thou a Roman?" He said, "Yea." And the chief captain answered, "With a great sum obtained I this freedom." And Paul said, "But I was free born."
Then straightway they departed from him which should have examined him: and the chief captain also was afraid, after he knew that he was a Roman, and because he had bound him.
I admit I'm not at all (even a little bit) into gaming. still, this is the slashdot crowd. we're technical folks here. was I the only one who saw OSI and thought 'seven layer model' ?
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
How does the fact that EQ will do the same thing have anything to do with the original posters point? He already acknowledged that software has a lifecycle (duh) and that UO is nearing the end of the road. Of course EQ will repeat the pattern and so will the next MMORPG after it. What's your point?
- Toby
If only these people buying these accounts used the free way to gain 30 levels:
S tart
Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right-B-A-Select-
BUT, it IS okay for the company to simply whip up characters out of a random generator (see "Nothing", with no development at all, and sell them?
Yeah. I can see it. ***wait for it*** I can see how a company would be stupid and greedy enough to stick their heads up the output oriface for this.
And idiocies like this are why I don't play games like UO or Evercrack.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Was in 1999. It was fairly slow on my K6-III 400, which didn't help matters much.
:) Nintendo is starting to kick ass on the Gamecube.
The game would probably be fairly compatible with the VMWare I use for Windows stuff, but I lost my taste for it so completely that I just don't enjoy it. I even participated in the Anarchy Online beta when they gave a key to *EVERYONE* who asked for one. It sucked. Slow, buggy, and really boring.
I'm happy with Animal Crossing, though
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
"OSI has started a new service, detailed here which allows you to pay $29.95 to get a decent character premade for you, and bypass the hours of working skills at lower levels."
*what* did the Open Source Initiative start doing now???
Just raise the taxes on crack.
if these whiners where walking down the street and some guy pulled up and tossed them a million bucks, they wouldn't touch it becase it would be unfair to all those people that work hard for money.
I'm sure the fact that it pretty much made it impossible to sell a character for any real money had nothing to do with all the complaining.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I realize mage and warrior were offered, and I've never played an MMORPG so, maybe this won't make sense, but it seems to me that this is a way
for there to be some tradesmen in the game that are being played by real people instead of by the AI. I mean who really wants to start an account and work their way up to a master blacksmith. Sitting in front of your computer 20 hours a week for a couple months making virtual weapons and armor, how many people in the game really do that?
But, it could be fun to play a blacksmith that was already powerful. I imagine you could make really high quality, or maybe even magical or artistic items. That could be fun, but working your way up to that point by churning out 100 two-handed swords sounds more like work.
Computers don't make mistakes. What they do, they do on purpose.
Are you talking about Super Mario World here? It's so easy to get lives in that game, no need to bother with coins. Your friend is pretty dumb.
I have a dream that someday the slashdot editors will provide a little more understandable content in the blurbs... especially if the topic is gaming and the gaming icon isn't used.
___
Cognitive Overflow
more than yo
I did. I even had to read the article before I figured out that they were talking about Ultima Online, it'd really be nice to see that information in the post itself.
The most important ramification of this move is that it decreases the need for people to role-play and meet others online to enjoy UO. People who make bows for catch fish for hours on hours in the early years of UO (and I was one) simply don't make [purely online-fantasy] friends easily! And that's what you have to do to really get ahead in UO, and is something that so many gripers here who played UO years ago haven't quite gotten. (That said, it took me money months and hours than I care to admit to figure it out myself.)
:^D].
Once you partner up with a guild or just an experienced player, believe me, your scores will shoot up to what these folk are paying an extra $30 for in no time flat. Rich (in the virtual sense) UO characters/players abound, and freely give out the kinds of equipment and experience a newbie needs to get the kinds of scores you pay for now. A little online searching, emailing, and ICQ'n used the be the prerequisite for a good UO character, now $30 is -- but they won't have as much fun playing by themselves as old timers do adventuring with the people who gave them their start.
And heck, remember how long it takes you to get from an 85 skill to an 100 skill. I haven't played for about a year, but that's where you really put in your time. I'm not too worried about these people buying their way to 85.
Quick last point -- This kind of social gaming (Multi-User Shared Hallucination or MUSH) isn't for everyone. Obviously EA is trying to get make money than MUSH with this and other recent moves. The proverbial "casual gamer" isn't a MUSHer, but maybe some casual gamers will pay their $30 and get hooked. And that's a good thing [if they don't have gpa's or jobs to worry about
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
I may have a five-digit ID, but it's a palindrome, so that makes it ok.
-l
People would sell their characters online on ebay.
So.. they banned the practice, and are now doing it themselves. Great.
Come'on, it sparks some humorous creativity
That only hurts everyone, though.
I've heard this theorem a lot in P2P discussions; it applies here too: The network's utility is proportional to the square of the number of users.
The more, the merrier.
To create a new, separate network for "premade users"... it'd never take off. It needs a lot more critical mass than it could ever have.
I still log in ocassionally to my old MUD, though I don't play anymore. Luckily they keep chars based on a x months per level.. so I got a few years or so : )
laugh
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling