Tales From Britannia #1

My recent diatribe has caused me to reminisce about the past. I thought it would be nice to post some old UO stories.

This is a story of a pre-Trammel event that my good friend Danelle D'babrak had setup. She owned a nice Two-Story Wood and Plaster house near the entrance of Ice Dungeon. It was a very popular PVP spot in those days.



She had decided this week to allow the house to decay. The day it had turned to the "In Danger of Collapsing" stage there was quite a crowd. I think there were between 10 to 20 people there.

Now lets take a moment to explain an old game mechanic. Back then you could declare your house as public or private, but it worked differently. Public houses simply left the front door unlocked and let you place vendors. A private house still let people inside but they were flagged attackable to the owner and friends.

So the crowd had gathered and made their way all through the house due to the doors being left unlocked. A couple hours before the collapse was due to happen a situation presented itself where a person we didn't like very much was almost trapped between some furniture. We prepared to attack and waited for the perfect moment.

When the time looked right I shut the front door and we struck. I can't remember whether we killed him or not. We probably did. The funny thing is my closing the door refreshed the house. The jig was up and everyone went home.

But they came back the next time =]

I will post more stories in the future.

I am not dead yet

I realize I should post an update here. I am side tracked by real life stuff. My work on UOGuide has ground to a halt. This blog is also suffering. I still want to get to the series on how I would revamp UO.

I hope to have more time to spend on UO related stuff in the near future. If I don't manage to post again, have some good holidays.

Making the Big Screen

After watching the boat PVP video to make sure it uploaded without any issues, I saw a curious related video. It was by IGN and it was talking about the Stygian Abyss expansion. I decided to check it out.



To my surprise the game footage they showed looked very familiar.



Our Guild has made the big screen! Well internet screen. A screen is a screen. At least one person likely watched it on their television. Maybe.

Copy Don't Create

Someone has put together a slideshow explaining where Zynga got all their game ideas. It is being discussed a lot on Slashdot. There is also a mention at the end of the Slashdot summary about the story I talked about yesterday. They called it an "underground platinum purchase program". Sounds catchy.

The how I would resurrect UO articles are still in the works. I have got some of the next one done and have plenty of ideas for all of them. UOGuide has just been taking up all my UO time lately with the new Event Calendar. I did a few fixes today and will likely work on some more improvements tomorrow.

One startling figure I stumbled upon today was UOGuide's database query count has increased 4x since the Mediawiki update. I suspect it has something to do with the search suggest. The site appears to be holding up, but I may disable it for a day or two to see if it drops the query number back to normal.

$500 Buy-in on your MMO

It has been pointed out that there is a top-teir purchasing service for Zynga's games (creator of Farmville). If you want the most bang for your buck you need to spend $500. Oh wait, that is actually $500 or more.

How can such a thing be anything but completely irresponsible of a game company. These points you buy get you absolutely nothing but virtual goods. If someone wants to spend $500 on these points then go ahead. But you don't encourage that type of behavior by giving a bonus for spending so much.

When someone is addicted to a video game, perhaps Everquest, at least they are not spending all their money on nothing (unless they are buying swords and stuff). Casual games are going to end up getting regulated similar to the gambling industry if this keeps up.

The worst part about the whole thing is you have to pay by wire transfer. They don't take credit cards at this level. Obviously because buyer's remorse is big factor. Oh you bought 1,000,000 pounds of feed for your cows, but realize it will take 200 real life years to use it all up? Boo hoo.

New Event Calendar on UOGuide

I made a calendar from scratch to keep track of UO events on UOGuide. Head to any page on the site to see it. Major development headaches include:

• Working with Mediawiki in general
• 1/3 of the development time was spent dealing with time zone conversions
• Figuring out how to do the popup when hovering over a day on the calendar
• Thinking I was near completion until I remember 2 more things that I couldn't launch without doing..................a couple times

I hope it becomes popular and useful for the UO community.

How I Would Resurrect Ultima Online

This is part of a series of articles on how I would update Ultima Online to be a game new people would want to play in 2010 and bring old players back.

If you go to any UO forum, you will find topic after topic of how someone would improve the game. Some ideas seem to be common sense, others are shot down for being too like another game. Stratics used to have a forum called the Ideas Den in which players would vote on what people came up with. Some of those ideas translated into real additions to UO, the most notable being house customization.

When I am playing a game, I will often think of how the experience could be improved or added to. This is likely why I took up programming. On the websites I manage, I carefully consider each addition and constantly look for ways to improve what already exists. This is why I have a major issue with how the current UO website is constructed. But we can go into that later.

Since I have been playing UO the longest, it is no wonder I have had so many ideas. One of my most cohesive and extensive idea was for a faction overhaul (I will try and find a link later). Just a day ago I had a new idea how to fix the vendor system and make it not a tedious click fest. About 10 years ago I even had an idea which World of Warcraft eventually implemented, the talent system. I don't believe I had ever posted this anywhere. Basically, once you reached 100 skill you could opt to spend skill points in a variety of abilities/spells. For example a Mage could spend 5 skill points to learn a new spell. Maybe I could go into more detail later.

When am I going to get to the fixing UO part? It is coming up. This is meant to be a series of several articles broken up into sections. There is a lot needing to be done and I don't want to write an entire book in one sitting. Here are some of the topics I am thinking of:

• Introduction - You are reading this now
  
• Problematic Game Additions - Changes added to the game which are bringing the game down or drove people away
  
• A New Client - Yes, another brand new client is needed unfortunately
  
• Core Game Changes - What needs to be done on the server side
• Reaching a New Audience - New features which will draw people to the game
• Don't Forget Current Players - Making sure not to cause another wave of people to leave
• Conclusion - Pulling everything together

These are just a rough outline. Articles may be combined, added or removed depending on what I write about. I think it is time to start getting to the fun stuff, fantasizing about UO.

Since I am just tossing ideas out there, I could assume there is an unlimited amount of money available to make this happen. But that would not be fun in my opinion. The idea that this could actually happen is why I want to write this. So this is not going to be an off the walls illusion where there is a 100 million dollar World of Warcraft budget.

In my opinion, I estimate it would cost 10 million dollars of investment to bring UO to look and act like a game put out in 2010. Over UO's lifetime, EA has easily made over 100 million dollars on this game. Lets assume an average of 100,000 subscribers (UO peaked at 250,000 and it is estimated there are currently 50,000) paying $10 per month for 14 years. That comes out to $168,000,000. Of course you need to add in development costs and server upkeep. But then there is other revenue such as character transfer and everything they are selling in their store. It is safe to say EA has made a lot of money which is why UO is still around.

So I think a 10 million dollar investment is a bargain considering the money to be made in a MMO. The next question is where does that money go? Well the bulk is to paying developers. Estimating a $50,000 salary per developer, you could hire 20 for one year at $1,000,000. This means a team of 100 could be added for 5 million. I think 100-150 people would be the team size, so there goes 1/2 to 3/4 of the budget!

Most of the team would consist of artists. The new client will be by far the most labor intensive part of the revitalization process. There are thousands of pieces of art which need to be redone. Lets assume there are 2,000 item graphics that need to be created (I will try to get a more accurate count later when we discuss the new client). Lets assume, on average, 1 artist takes 1 day to recreate one item. How many artists will be needed to to make all those items in one year? WikiAnswers says there are 260 work days in a year. So it will take 8 people making about 250 pieces each to redo all that art.

Isn't math fun? If you are making something brand new, we couldn't have such exact numbers. Since UO already has a set number of systems, items, creatures, etc. it is a lot easier to get numbers on how much it will cost in a certain time period. Of course these are my own estimates, only EA could figure out the exact costs.

I think that is about it for the introduction. Next article will be identifying the additions which drove people from the game and why people leave in general.

If you wish to submit feedback about this or any other blog post, my email is available in the right column of this page.