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OSI Starts Selling Preleveled UO characters

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the end-of-ultima-online dept.

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."

6 of 302 comments (clear)

  1. Re:So when can I.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    A few years ago a few high-karma slashdot users attempted to auction off their accounts on ebay. I can't remember, i think the perpetrators included enoch root and signal 11 though. Please correct me if i'm wrong. The slashdot adminigensia did not take kindly to this. They noticed the auctions and did something rather nasty to shut them down, i can't remember what-- either they locked the accounts so they couldn't be signed in anymore, or they bitchslapped them, either way leaving an account no one would want to buy..

    There's a lot of not-so-nice things to be said about the slashdot admins, but i have to give them this: they try as hard as they can to keep people looking at slashdot as a discussion site, not a game.

    Incidentally, kuro5hin, slashdot's kid sister, has been selling pbs-style "subscriptions" recently. You get some random extra bonuses on your accout-- can't remember clearly, you can check it out yourself but it is interesting in that you don't get more visibility, or any other posting advantage-- near as i can tell, you just get an integrated spell checker for all your posts :)

  2. Sensationalized, not strictly true! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!

    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). /yawn/

    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

    1. Re:Sensationalized, not strictly true! by smcn · · Score: 5, Informative
      There is *no* uproar that I can see amongst experienced players!


      Yes there is.

      Seems OSI really had a genius plan with GGS... Wonder why I didn't think of it.
  3. Re:Why it is bad ... by ShaunC · · Score: 3, Informative
    Sure pre-fab characters are okay ... 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.
    When I sold off my accounts in May, it was possible to get a brand new character to 80 Magery/80 Meditation/80 Eval Int in less than 5 days. A GM Miner/Smith with Tinkering in the 90s if not GM took a week to make. And that's taking into account the time I spent playing all the other characters. Granted, I wouldn't have fallen into the category of "normal play" - I played at least 8 hours a day, sometimes closer to 16 hours - but that time was spread among 3 shards and probably 15 different characters. In any case, a character at 80 isn't really too much of a gimme, but along with other changes implemented over the past couple of years it's clear that they're catering to newer players.

    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.
    That happened long ago. I'm not going to launch into a huge Trammel flame, since I spent most of my time there post-Renaissance, but IMO the community started going downhill at about the point when newly created characters started out with 1000 gold instead of 100. It was a half-fix to an obvious problem (inflation due to months of rampant duping).

    If I had to come up with a single root cause for my leaving UO, it would be that the economy was fucked up beyond repair. That took a lot of the community down with it. It's tough to be nice to the 20 other people in the reagent shop competing for resources, or the group of folks hoarding those resources and selling them at 10x markup on their vendors. It's hard to be nice to the guy who follows you around a dungeon kill-stealing because he has to save up 6 million gold for a small wooden house in the middle of nowhere.

    Contrary to what I'd see daily on the UO boards, I never ran into many "grief players" who were out to ruin others' gameplay for the sake of doing it. Most of the problems I ran into were with folks who wanted gold, or real money from eBay. The aforementioned reagent hoarding and kill-stealing, as well as looting, spawn camping, tamers with 3 dragons in tow, rogue bards hogging an entire dungeon, exploiting, account hacks, and just about everything else annoying was being done for in-game or real life financial gain.

    Money is the root of all evil, and in UO, it shows. Seems rather ironic that money, or EA/OSI's need for it, is causing this "divide" in the community. I'm glad I managed to permanently break the addiction, else I'd probably have wasted 6 hours on the boards today. Now if I can just get rid of the slight DT's induced by this article :)

    Shaun, aka

    Frigax
    Lake Superior
    --
    Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
  4. Re:Sign of a dying service by sahrss · · Score: 4, Informative

    UO is the only popular but unique MMOG out there! EQ, DAoC, AO, blah blah etc. are all clones of the same "leveling" concept, while UO has a sweet usage-based skill / stat gain system. UO is a game where a "perfect" char with top skills can only beat a medium char if he knows what he's doing. A medium char can destroy a weak / unprepared / stupid perfect char.

    Unlike the EQs where anyone one level above you is completely unharmed by anything you do to them, and they can kill you in one hit. Bah! UO rocks compared to that BS.

  5. Re:Experienced players should be HAPPY! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative
    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.
    Not quite! New characters start in the Trammel facet, where player-vs-player combat is not allowed. Most of them stay there and will never be PK'd or even attacked by another player as long as they play. If they want to be PK'd, they have to explicitly consent to it by going to a PVP+ area.