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."
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
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