Worried about the future

Lumpy Pickle · Post by **Lumpy Pickle** » Thu Mar 10, 2016 4:34 am

I'm concerned about the future of the shard. Alot of shards that had populations are gone now. I don't wanna loose this one.
Only thing keeping it from the best one I've played is tamers are treated the worst here.
An idea to help people come here is a starter kit when someone makes a account 1 per person or account up to you. Have some gold in it a spellbook runebook lrc newbie set blessed with god awful stats or something.
Also until the population comes back to play here maybe reduce the power of mobs make it easier to solo everything (swoop travesty the citidal for example) the drops are great but doing stuff alone isnt always fun esp when you love playing a tamer and everything agros the hell out of you and not your pet.
Also voting for the realm rewards system stuff you can only get for voting for the shard. Say you get 3 tokens a day for voting and you can buy a speacial color ethy or just a pigment with say 50 tokens.

This is the best uofreeshard we just need to show everyone else.

Archived topic from AOV, old topic ID:6638, old post ID:38749

Lumpy Pickle · Post by **Lumpy Pickle** » Thu Mar 10, 2016 4:42 am

Taming bods and pet leashes to shrink the pets are something i really enjoy also if you put say 50 charges on a pet leash and make them only obtainable from voting for the realm thats an idea also

Maybe limit the # of luna houses per person to 1 I would have to remove one but it would be something that new people would enjoy.

Archived topic from AOV, old topic ID:6638, old post ID:38750

Death · Post by **Death** » Thu Mar 10, 2016 6:13 pm

Lumpy Pickle wrote:I'm concerned about the future of the shard. Alot of shards that had populations are gone now. I don't wanna loose this one.
Only thing keeping it from the best one I've played is tamers are treated the worst here.
An idea to help people come here is a starter kit when someone makes a account 1 per person or account up to you. Have some gold in it a spellbook runebook lrc newbie set blessed with god awful stats or something.
Also until the population comes back to play here maybe reduce the power of mobs make it easier to solo everything (swoop travesty the citidal for example) the drops are great but doing stuff alone isnt always fun esp when you love playing a tamer and everything agros the hell out of you and not your pet.
Also voting for the realm rewards system stuff you can only get for voting for the shard. Say you get 3 tokens a day for voting and you can buy a speacial color ethy or just a pigment with say 50 tokens.

This is the best uofreeshard we just need to show everyone else.

I cannot recall what we give players just starting out but it's more than likely paltry and could use a bump. Another thing that might help is getting the new haven player quests out as they are simple to complete for new players, allows you to skill up quicker and gives you blessed and decent newbie items to start out, such as a full spellbook with a slayer property on it. Nothing fancy, but certainly great to start with.

Efforts are being made to make things do-able with a lower shard population, such as revising boss abilities and scaling up based on player count (peerless). Champion spawns are also being tweaked to be less strict on time and providing better incentive and variety. You're already working to spawn the boss in the first place so there's no need to add more penalties.

ML mobs and dungeons are going through a refactoring as they were implemented at a time when information wasn't readily available on stats, abilities and layouts.

Some modifications were done in the past to give more incentive to doing each ML named creature (special chests unique to each named monster for example). A lot of them are a lot more hardcore than they are supposed to be (citadel black order is entirely psychotic) but we'll eventually bring all the mobs to their intended stats.

Most ML dungeons in particular need to be revised to bring them to a reasonable level. Some are also very crammed with mobs that spawn too often or not enough (key mobs).

We have made some changes to reduce target switching in the AI, particularly with pets and summons but we'll have another look. The best thing you can do is post which monsters you are finding are being particularly aggressive towards you instead of your pet. There are many mobs in the game and not all of them are created equal. Some monsters, such as dragons and paragons, have reacquire on movement built into their AI so they will re-target when somebody moves in line of sight. Other monsters, such as lava serpents, have aura attacks which will retarget on hit. It's important to know which monster is causing the most issues as it could be an ability specific to that monster.

Red can probably speak more on the voting incentives.

Can you provide more information on the taming bods? I'm guessing a system similar to tailoring and blacksmith where you bring in X amount of pets and get a reward? That can probably be done through the quest system with some modifications.

Archived topic from AOV, old topic ID:6638, old post ID:38751

Lumpy Pickle · Post by **Lumpy Pickle** » Thu Mar 10, 2016 8:19 pm

Yes the taming bods are like tailoring and bs. On many other realms you are able to shrink pets with pots and leashes which makes it targetable so you can add it to the bod. runuo has drag and drop files for it. Been a long time but if you need i can find it for you.
Yes dragons are one of my main complaints if you get a dragon and a greater dragon on your pet as a tamer its guarenteed death. Balrons have been an issue and the swoop also fan dancers. Since I have lag issues on this laptop I dont try hunting as much.

Archived topic from AOV, old topic ID:6638, old post ID:38753

Red Squirrel · Post by **Red Squirrel** » Fri Mar 11, 2016 8:39 am

I had toned down the target switching but I could revisit it. I also want to look at adding more stuff to do that is solo friendly like dungeon mini bosses or something. A lot of mobs are meant to be team based which is kinda hard now so either we can tone those down too or add something to make them easier to do when there is not lot of people. Ex: scaling hp for peerless.

Archived topic from AOV, old topic ID:6638, old post ID:38754

Ixxie · Post by **Ixxie** » Sat Mar 26, 2016 11:04 pm

i'm worried too. i really love this place. i'm working 60 hours a week right now, and i just don't have time for anything, esp not UO, but i'm always afraid AoV will just cease to exist one day because, well, no one plays. And it wouldn't be unreasonable to take it offline, since there's such a low population, but it just kills me to think that after my life stops exploding there won't be any AoV to come back to.

i have no idea where i'm going with this. i just...really hope it doesn't go away.

Also, yes, taming here is the ACTUAL WORST. you made the mobs too smart

Archived topic from AOV, old topic ID:6638, old post ID:38765

Death · Post by **Death** » Sun Mar 27, 2016 1:37 am

Ixxie wrote:i'm worried too. i really love this place. i'm working 60 hours a week right now, and i just don't have time for anything, esp not UO, but i'm always afraid AoV will just cease to exist one day because, well, no one plays. And it wouldn't be unreasonable to take it offline, since there's such a low population, but it just kills me to think that after my life stops exploding there won't be any AoV to come back to.

i have no idea where i'm going with this. i just...really hope it doesn't go away.

Also, yes, taming here is the ACTUAL WORST. you made the mobs too smart

The server was brought back based on feedback on players who made AOV their home and enjoyed the unique experience the shard provided. It's for the players that we keep the shard alive. As long as there's players playing, I don't see a reason why the shard shouldn't continue to run. Every so often the players will pop up and enjoy the shard, sometimes there's peaks and other times there are lulls. The number of players likely won't be the same, as the times have changed, but that doesn't mean the experience can't still be relived.

We continue to deliver content unique to AOV as well as build upon the new expansions that UO releases. It's a constant game of catch up with older/outdated technology. Truthfully, it becomes ever more challenging to catch up because some things don't work efficiently anymore (insideUO/UOFiddler) or support has been diminishing from the communities such as Runuo. Considering the game is almost 19 years old, it's harder to attract players to the unique experience AOV provided, but we do as best we can. Also, life priorities have changed for everyone, so the time dedicated to play or develop are not the same as they were 6+ years ago.

We appreciate the time that players have spent on the shard and the continued willingness to play the shard and provide suggestions and room for improvement. Most suggestions for improvement have been incorporated into patches and updates based on player feedback. Behind the scenes, the developers have been looking into ways of speeding up development and have been testing some new scripts for release. Testing is always the thing that kills releases, as there's so many things that could potentially go south and it takes so much time to complete. It's also not the most fun thing to do most of the time. We try as best as we can to release content for the various holidays while still keeping up with expansions and custom content. Our suggestion would be to periodically check out the forums for events/scenarios and updates as some things may be limited to a couple of weeks (such as seasonal/holiday related content). That way you don't miss out on any of the unique events.

When Red did the re-design of the AI, I was actually astounded at how smart it was. Melisande in particular used to find every single tile to teleport away to, and I had a hell of time of trying to add line of sight blockers to keep her in the arena. I've seen the AI do some pretty crafty things, but that makes things interesting during fights.

Archived topic from AOV, old topic ID:6638, old post ID:38766

Red Squirrel · Post by **Red Squirrel** » Sun Mar 27, 2016 2:55 pm

Just to reassure everyone I have zero plans to shut down the shard again even if it stays this quiet. Right now it's running from my home server room which has practically unlimited computing resources, I can just add more hardware any time I want without paying extra per month. So there is currently no cost to running it. It's pretty much just a VM running in the background with all the other VMs.

Originally when we shut down it was a combination of things, we just felt it was such a chore to code everything, but we kinda did it to ourselves by thinking we HAVE to keep up with EA and what not, and also it was a load less on my online server, which costs per month, so adding more resources costs more. But now that I have fibre internet I just run it from my house, and we also decided on a slower patching schedule.

I still want to look into making the latest client work though but the packet changes are pretty crazy, so it's low on the list.

Archived topic from AOV, old topic ID:6638, old post ID:38769

Ixxie · Post by **Ixxie** » Sun Mar 27, 2016 3:06 pm

Can i just say how much i love you guys for all the weird and crazy crap you do for us â™¥ Thank you.

Archived topic from AOV, old topic ID:6638, old post ID:38771