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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.
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
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.
Yeah! Good thinking. I think this should be applied elsewhere. Maybe I can pay $29.95 and play against Tiger Woods in the US Open.
My guess is a newbie who pays $29.95 to get ahead, will just get their ass spanked when they get there.
blog
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
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.
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. :)
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.
> Five digit slashdot account number maxed out on karma!
:)
Five-digit punk.
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
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!?)
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!
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
Apparently my UID is 597, not 497. So make that "over #600 punk". =P
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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"
10x worse than me. You must've regged 10 minutes later >:(
> Maybe now some of us who don't have hours a day
> to waste levelling-up can begin to enjoy MMORPG's.
I accept that this is a problem, but I don't think this is the solution. Perhaps seperating "bought character" servers from the "spent time" ones might.
> Those who are complaining should really think
> about why they're upset, and realise that it's
>because they have an elitist attitude.
It's not that at all, at least for me.
I just got sick of wasting many more hours of
gametime because the n'th level experienced
tough adventury type I met deep in the dangerous
parts of the world turned out to be someone
who'd bought his character on eBay and got me killed over and over because he had no idea how to play the game.
In a game world, I expect a character with level n to have experience and abilities appropriate to the level. When they don't because it's a new player who's bought their way in, that breaks the
world, and the game, for me. And it's not fun.
I do agree that casual gamers should be able to
play these games too, but I think that mixing "bought" characters with "earned" characters destroys the game for the "earned" characters.
- MugginsM
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!)
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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.