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Sharing this here in light of recent Discord discussion on skill gap, PvP, what people feel needs to exist for people to continue playing.
I was pleasantly surprised coming across this article this morning:
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/06/30/ultima-online-retrospective/
Having played Ultima Online, I'm well familiar with the fact that it has a tremendously low skill cap (700 pts across any number of skills each capped at 100) that one could probably reach under a week if they wanted to without a robust magical item system, and was pleased to find out that it was still the case after 2 decades (http://www.uoguide.com/Skill_Cap)
The article didn't touch on the community but I have my own speculation that the player interaction and community is a big part of it, but I think Ultima Online would be a great model for the staff and those who tend to get heated opinions about the direction of DR and DR skill cap (gap) as a reference.
I wanted to take this opportunity to also point out that development need not be centered around skill ranks which endlessly promote training training and more training.
DR has a lot of fun things i personally like to see more development on instead of skill ranks - i was pretty excited it went out of my way to train and learn all the smoke images for example, I literally stopped training ranks for a week or more for that.
Hunting down an IG olvi smoking teacher who bothered to train smoking, that was pretty neat and engaging with another player.
That's an example of IG tools to promote reasoning for player interaction. The Olvi smoking system served as an icebreaker to facilitate RP and player engagement.
SLIP is also in a similar sphere though many learn those for mechanical benefits. THROW VOICE is another fun one.
I wanted to offer these existing examples as counterarguments to those who felt there's nothing to focus GM efforts on if not combat mechanics.
DR has a lot of fun things i personally like to see more development on instead of skill ranks - i was pretty excited it went out of my way to train and learn all the smoke images for example, I literally stopped training ranks for a week or more for that.
Hunting down an IG olvi smoking teacher who bothered to train smoking, that was pretty neat and engaging with another player.
That's an example of IG tools to promote reasoning for player interaction. The Olvi smoking system served as an icebreaker to facilitate RP and player engagement.
SLIP is also in a similar sphere though many learn those for mechanical benefits. THROW VOICE is another fun one.
I wanted to offer these existing examples as counterarguments to those who felt there's nothing to focus GM efforts on if not combat mechanics.
> The article didn't touch on the community but I have my own speculation that the player interaction and community is a big part of it, but I think Ultima Online would be a great model for the staff and those who tend to get heated opinions about the direction of DR and DR skill cap (gap) as a reference.
I'm not in any way well-versed on the modern UO, but this would seem to me to be an argument that staff development doesn't matter as much as what the community decides to do. The last release I can see on Wikipedia came in 2010, and it looks like the game is largely the same as when I played it in it's heyday. Which, by the way, was like covering myself in chum and jumping in a shark tank. IIRC, I dumped it after about a month because I couldn't actually get to play the game without being relentlessly murdered.
- Saragos
I'm not in any way well-versed on the modern UO, but this would seem to me to be an argument that staff development doesn't matter as much as what the community decides to do. The last release I can see on Wikipedia came in 2010, and it looks like the game is largely the same as when I played it in it's heyday. Which, by the way, was like covering myself in chum and jumping in a shark tank. IIRC, I dumped it after about a month because I couldn't actually get to play the game without being relentlessly murdered.
- Saragos
I'm huge fun of UO and play it from 1999. What could I say.. I won't agree with the title ofo this topic:
"UO - An 20 year old game without skill grind or robust item system"
In UO there are a lot of skill grind. Thats why one of the most big problems there - afk-macroing, which is EVERYWHERE and ruining gaming experience as it was put top the game by developers. My article about this problem: http://tangar.info/en/analitycs/ultima-online-server-without-macroses/
"UO - An 20 year old game without skill grind or robust item system"
In UO there are a lot of skill grind. Thats why one of the most big problems there - afk-macroing, which is EVERYWHERE and ruining gaming experience as it was put top the game by developers. My article about this problem: http://tangar.info/en/analitycs/ultima-online-server-without-macroses/
