What was worst change to UO ?

Tim

Most threads at one point or the other have the "it was better before they made XXXX change" line. 
That got me thinking what was the worst change the developers ever made to the game?

My vote goes to 100% LRC 

• It did away with regs for 99% of the game (I went for years without even any regs in my house)
• Allowed magic users to go on forever (do you remember times thinking "OH S**** out of regs I'm Dead"?)
• Made scripting easer
• Killed a big chunk of the game like collecting and/or selling regs (anyone else remember what    "Arcane Clothing" was for?)

What are your thoughts?

PS
 I've been playing continuously for  18 years and just got a new computer for no other reason but to keep playing.
(I know its not happing but God I want a mac client)

Garth_Grey

Item localization.

Merus

It’s a toss up for me...

Fel/Tram Split or Itemization of Properties 

Pinkerton

100% LRC is a good choice.  It was a quality of life issue and I can see why they did it.  LRC should have been capped at something like 75%  But in the early days (not so much now) it was a good limiter on mages because it did limit what else could be on their suits.  I remember for a long while100% LRC, 40%LMC was not attainable with all 70 resists or bucket loads of MR.  So much so that I didnt PvP with 100% LRC often as I just carried around regs like I was used to doing, in order to prioritize other properties.

InLor

Trammel. I don't like mirrored worlds. I would have preferred other mechanisms.

Minerva_Foxglove

I like most things but new Despice was a blow to new players and characters.

KiMarhi_Scrible

I joined UO in 1999, I loved playing then.  New player exploring without a clue as to where I was going.  Only direction was that from people at Brit bank saying "run N NW until you hit a mountain pass.  Despise is that way.  So off I headed.  Training in the Bone Knight room with about 50 people, I did however like the addition of Age of Shadows.  Suits weren't terribly complicated with attributes like LRC, LMC, etc.  there were items tailored to both mages and dexxers.  Now if you don't live UO, you have mediocre items, cant afford anything, have to listen to General chat and all the people thinking they own UO. (you don't). Its taken a turn for the worse for a long time, yet I still play.  

Pawain

Not making Trammel the ONLY place to play. They should have made the original world have Tram rules when they saw things imploding.

PapaSmurf

Pub 16 

Dean478

Trammel, Pub 16, itemisation in Age of Shadows and the easy mode that followed. Not to mention the centralisation of cities like Luna and Britain making everything else redundant.

Margrette

I didn't start playing until late 2004, so I can't speak to any changes made before then.  However, these are the changes since then that I think did a lot of damage to UO, more or less in order from worst to less worse:

• Dropping the community coordinator position and things like "Five on Friday."
• Adding shard shields.
• Bringing back EMs and EM events instead of having more global events on all shards.
• Dev Meet and Greets versus some other format that is more professional and that is archived for players to view later.
• The account management system rollout.
• The MyUO "revamp" (no more "top 10" guilds or warring guilds per shard and in the game overall, no ability to look at your own characters' skills/stats while offline, no looking at guild alliances/enemies or overall skills) and apparently now not even making it accessible via the uo.com website.
  
• The introduction of General Chat.
• Replacing factions with the Virtue vs. Vice system.
• Adding armor and consumables to the faction system and allowing them to be used in Trammel.
  
• Revamping Despise dungeon and levels 2 and 3 of Covetous dungeon (I don't mind what they did to Shame and Wrong and level 1 of Covetous) and sticking ogre lords in the Haven dungeon.
• The extended invasion of Britain.
• Incompletely revamping Haven (no trainers/quests/info for over half of the existing skills).
• Forcing players who used the Third Dawn client to switch to the Classic Client within a short time and before the new KR client was ready.
  
• The rushed rollout of the KR client and not fixing the male paperdoll and then later dropping most of the KR client's unique/beautiful artwork.

Magnus

See, I am going to go with something outside of the usual "I hate Tram, AoS, etc" and say the removal of Kingdom Reborn.

I personally believe that it was one of the most short sighted decisions in the history of the game, a new client with updated art that could appeal to the a new generation of players. It had the potential of pushing the game in a whole new direction, removing tile based movement and giving the developers the ability to create art/content for (what at the time was a decade old client).

While not all the art was the best, nor was it completely bug free at launch (I remember guys, I was there, I get it), if they had continued to work on it - it would have aged well and to this day the art looks still pretty ok (over a decade later). It would be much easier to get people into the game with it, than the Enhanced Client (which looks awful and follows no actual UI conventions at all) or the Classic Client which is basically worthless unless you've spent the last two decades running in it.

Ultima Online isn't a game that lacks content or potential and could definitely appeal to a wide audiance today, but its presentation is trash now thanks to decisions to either stay two decades in the past or clobber together 'something that works'. 

Longtooths

1) Not allowing HTML Rune Books/Runes
2) Vendor fees
3) Imbuing 

Feigr

Why stop at LRC? All the special properties are bad.  Should have just stuck with slayers, exceptional, and Vanquishing.  The armor should still be better as you use higher end ingredients.

Kirthag

My top 3

1. Pub 16
2. The death of Role Playing (Spirit of Sosaria)
3. The end of the Seer program 

Freelsy

Imbuing... If anything, imbuing should have been limited to one or two properties per item.

Captain_Lucky

Neon

MaRlboRo78rus

Dropping KR client!

Skett

Letting Draconi go ... 

Butcher

I loved the look of KR client, so yeah...

Skett

Some of KR was awesome the monsters etc but most of the terrain and stone walls were ugly most oooked washed out and all pink and baby blue pastel colors just horrific looking

Jassi_Cowin32

I would say bringing back starting location by choice. New Haven at one point in the game was a recruitment ground for all guilds and especially on Europa where we had a lot of roleplaying guilds hurt the flow of our memberships. The game was too spread out as it was and New Haven should have remained the starting point..

Making dungeons harder. I could see re-vamping the spawn, but making them more difficult? No, there isn't enough players and it will be extremely hard for new players in all the difficult dungeons they have now.. At one point on Europa, the RP community would only wear crafted non-magical armor and weapons only and we had to change this when going into dungeons (and it was a very large community) 

These two changes made all the roleplayers on Europa quit for the most part when it was an extremely busy RP community. It wasn't long after that everyone just stopped playing, because the RP community  couldn't get around its own rules and restrictions we made for ourselves and we did it to balance PVP since we was a RP-PVP community and based entirely on making it as realistic as possible.

Feigr

Jassi_Cowin32 said:

I would say bringing back starting location by choice. New Haven at one point in the game was a recruitment ground for all guilds and especially on Europa where we had a lot of roleplaying guilds hurt the flow of our memberships. The game was too spread out as it was and New Haven should have remained the starting point..

Making dungeons harder. I could see re-vamping the spawn, but making them more difficult? No, there isn't enough players and it will be extremely hard for new players in all the difficult dungeons they have now.. At one point on Europa, the RP community would only wear crafted non-magical armor and weapons only and we had to change this when going into dungeons (and it was a very large community) 

These two changes made all the roleplayers on Europa quit for the most part when it was an extremely busy RP community. It wasn't long after that everyone just stopped playing, because the RP community  couldn't get around its own rules and restrictions we made for ourselves and we did it to balance PVP since we was a RP-PVP community and based entirely on making it as realistic as possible.

Characters still start in New Haven though.

Cookie

1. Dismount. (It was ok at bola stage pub 16 only - not beyond). Should be removed from game.

2. EC. Should never have happened. Should still be reversed.

3. Trammel. Should never have happened. Should still be reversed.

Lex

1. Trammel
2. Resists and item stats beyond vanquishing , power, silver etc. (it really made no sense in Ultima lore, this was basically to try to attract the Diablo crowd.. then it turns out Diablo did away with resists and made it easier for players to understand, surprise surprise - player quality of life went up! ) . These days you got to know exactly what is good or bad, or you risk throwing away a 200m item among all the "crap" loot you get.
3. Thoughtless neon deco and items. Ultima series wasnt a neon-fest, but these days it is.
4. Killing volunteer program in 2001. Global events etc.
5. Malas. Yeah, sorry houseowners but Malas is greenacres with some mountains strewn in between. It's flat and pretty ugly and was a quickfix to housing problem.
6. Deciding to never consolidate shards. Too many shards split the remaining playerbase.
I'd propagate for a shard consolidation program. Offer new house plots to people based on two values: a) how long the house has stood. b) size of house lockdowns . Create a new landmass only open to the consolidated shard, with these plots that are smilar to star-room / abyss plots.
Use best fit algorithm to find new places for peoples house plots and to allow people to keep their house / guilds together. Eventually these areas can also be consolidated and people can choose to move to normal landmass if they wish.

Syncros

I recently came back and I would have to agree the Tram/ Fel split was among the worst thing done but something had to be done to curb what the majority of players disliked.

I like the EC client but would be nicer to be able to use the 2d models.  Going back to the classic client just doesn't have the "fluidness" EC has. It's like playing with frame stutter.  Ew

Oh also a huge mistake was not going with a anti cheat system which I'm surprised it still doesn't have.  Yes they aren't prefect but better then nothing.

The_Higgs_1

Removal of factions for the lousy VvV system was a terrible change.

The recent taming publish that was allowed through without proper testing, full of bugs and issues.

Splintering weapons was a horrid idea.

LMC bonus from non medable gear was not needed and led to massive power creep.

Global loot change that was way overboard also causing massive power creep, 210 stamina should not be possible.

Focus spec anything was a bad idea and also led to balancing issues.

Cartoon dinosaurs in UO was laughable.

Governor's in UO might be the worst decision ever, politics and gaming should never be mixed for any reason.  Town bonus for all players should not be tied to one persons decision.

Not enough gold sinks in the game to remove all the duped gold.

I could keep going but whats the point.

Fat

They made this game too easy.....and yet people still stick their hands out asking for more, more, more!

Bilbo

PS and AoS

PapaSmurf

Fat said:

They made this game too easy.....and yet people still stick their hands out asking for more, more, more!

Give someone an inch, they will want a mile.

MissE

Transfer tokens and shard shields.