Life after the orc quest

[Martok]

Calandryll brings this to us from the uo.com boards.  Here is what he has to say:

Will they continue the weekly updates in the form of another ongoing 'quest' (I use the term loosley)?

--I wouldn't use the term "quest" at all actually. But yes, we're planning on doing another one after this one conclues.

If so, what type of 'quest' will it be?

--Different than this one based on the learning we have gotten from this one. Beyond that, no comment as I will not give anything away.

What would everyone like to see? What were the major problems with the current one (besides the obvious!)?

--Good questions. I actually think it might be better to wait until this one concludes though. I plan on writing a post about the current scenario after this one concludes and gathering feedback from that as well.

To answer your questions about dynamic changes to the world such as destroying a city. Doing something like that, while it may sound cool on paper, so may not be appropriate for UO. Let's forget about the programming issues with this (of which there are many) and discuss the design/community issues. If you have been reading the posts about this scenario since it's beginning, there have been more than a few posts of complaint towards the town attacks. They were (are) angry about not being able to bank/hang-out in their favorite town. Imgaine, if you will, if we not only attacked a town, but actually destroyed it! People have become very attached to the cities in UO. Another example, I had an idea a long time ago to make a scenario where reagents became scarce and players had to solve a scenario to solve the problem. Imagine the howls of anger from the mages should the players lose that scenario and regs remained harder to get than they already are?

While you may not agree with that mentality, as a developer, I am beholden to all players and must take it into account.

The problem with win/lose outcomes is that as a general rule, people don't like to lose. A lose scenario such as the ones you describe are not fun if the players' lose. Losing isn't fun. Rather than have a win/lose outcome, I'd prefer to have different outcomes, neither necessarily worse, just different, and all interesting and fun. But that sort of thing is far more difficult to design (again, not talking programming issues here) than a simple win/lose scenario. In truth, in my opinion, lose/win scenarios are rather uncreative as anyone can come up with "if the players lose, Minoc blows up, if they win it doesn't". It takes far more creativity to come up with two outcomes that are meaningful, but also equally fun.

Truth is we are not at that point yet. We need to move these along gradually. The biggest mistake developers make in my opinion with MMORPGs is we try to run before we learn to walk. We have so many cool ideas we just want to get them started right away. But, in the long-run (and with these games, the long-run must be considered) moving slowly, learning from the feedback, and expandind as we go along, is the far better course.

Oh and just a sidenote, you made an excellent post with some really well thought out ideas. Lose the profanity (and yes, even using "*"s can be considered a ToS violation on the boards) next time as I would hate to see a good post get locked (as this one would be justifably locked if it was) because of unneeded curse words that didn't add to your post anyway.

-Jonathan "Calandryll" Hanna

Designer, Ongoing Content

[Lan]

Maybe we could all do something to help "speed" up this little quest.  I was thinking of maybe putting a romp togther with K*J as well as the Britons and anyone else available that we're friended with to make a MASS strike on Cove to take all the orcs out.  Maybe this will spawn something new to us or make OSI pull something out of their bag of tricks to deal with us:idea: