Get your own Free Home PageOne of the most exciting parts of Ultima Online is the potential for the formation of virtual communities. This does already happen, but I see many ways that Origin could improve and promote a sense of community for the players. Some of these ideas do require minor changes to the game itself, but none of the changes require any significant changes to game play.
The most important part of any community is familiar faces. Obviously, a good way to improve the sense of community would be for Origin to encourage people to identify with a particular town, and to somewhat discourage characters from treating any city as home. One way to accomplish this is through the banking system. Banks are the most heavily trafficked areas of any UO city, and for good reason – the services they provide are invaluable to nearly all adventurers. Unfortunately, the gathering of adventurers at a bank is rarely a social occasion. Almost without exception, visits to the bank are limited to a quick appearance, the word bank, a wordless transaction, and an equally fast and silent departure. Because of the demand for banks, it’s not even desirable to make banks into gathering-places, because people would only get annoyed at the additional unproductive traffic. I have seen my local community on Ocllo severely damaged by the addition of the bank to our quiet town; especially with the well-stocked Mage’s Guild nearby, the town now hosts a good deal of "through traffic" of unfriendly, unfamiliar visitors. In order to ease this situation (and promote realism) I propose that safety deposit boxes be branch-specific, and each character be limited to one safety deposit box in the world. Monetary transactions (deposit, withdraw, and balance) could be performed at any branch, but items would have to be deposited and retrieved from the "home" branch for every character (much the same as is done in the real world). The bank keyword would be implemented as follows:
This encourages people to identify with a hometown (assuming their town has a bank) and reduces "foreigner" traffic. I do not foresee any negative side effects, although because monetary transactions account for the majority of banking (it seems) this may not have as much positive effect as would be desired.
The Recall spell is a wonderful thing, allowing fast transit from place to place as well as quick escapes from potentially nasty situations. It allows us to visit our friends, attack our enemies, and…destroy the economy and virtual community. Fortunately, there is an easy change that will allow all the legitimate benefits of Recall while preventing some of the popular exploits: Recall should do a stamina check, just like normal movement (i.e. check if you could walk there, which would be untrue if you were overweight). The role-playing justification is simple: for those who are so heavy they can’t take a step, how can they perform the complex hand and body motions required in order to cast this spell? (This could, by extension, apply to all spells and even other motions such as swinging a sword: I’m all in favor of that extension!) This would prevent the destructive effects of Recall on the economy: no more jumping from shop to shop with a massive overload of goods, selling out all the shopkeepers. Of course, the bug that allows overloading beyond the container limit should also be addressed. This would also promote the use of boats and pack horses. The benefit to the communities is clear: no more transient salesmen! Local buyers and sellers would get to know one another, and local economies would develop (independent of the world economies). Goods arriving at the docks would be a notable event. I am not under the illusion that this will completely fix the problem; for one thing, Gate Travel with packhorses would achieve the same goal. But the amount of time, trouble, and expense involved would be raised, much to the benefit of the economy and community.
I am also working on another page with even harsher measures against Recall, based on discussions with Reductionist, Sherry, and others which have convinced me that Recall really does need even more restrictions than I originally proposed.
Boats are a feature with great potential, but most players who can cast Mark and Recall have long since put their trusty tiller men on the unemployment rolls. Giving players a reason to use boats would improve the sense of community (as explained in the Fix Recall section) by making the docks a more eventful locale, and by making the arrival of a shipment of goods a cause for excitement. In particular, if using the docks were (a) easier, and (b) required, the community would benefit significantly. To that end, I have proposed several ideas which encourage docking and use of boats in general. I have moved these into a separate document due to the growing length of this essay and the indirect nature of the connection between boats and the community.
In my opinion, any or all of these suggestions would be welcome additions to UO, and would benefit the virtual communities in many ways, both direct and indirect.
I’ve written a separate short essay on the conceptual problems with vendors as they are currently designed. Vendors, in their current implementation, encourage "trailer park" conglomerations of tents and small buildings that are not at all conducive to community. I do believe, however, that correctly implemented vendors could be a boon to the community, as buyers and sellers get familiar with each other and the goods available. I hope to see changes made to vendors to make them viable and important parts of UO, instead of the economy and resource drains that they are now.
They say that the only sureties are death and taxes, and the first part is certainly true in UO. Naturally, people object to paying taxes in real life and won’t be too happy about the idea in UO, but I believe there are many possible benefits (and many other players agree with me). In particular, charging taxes for buildings could help prevent house proliferation, especially if taxes for people who own multiple buildings are very high. This would require an in-game way to identify the true owner of a house; refer to my comments on houses for more on that idea. The game would have to use some metric other than guard range to determine locale: any building on the islands of Moonglow, Magincia, Ocllo, Jhelom, or Nujel’m should be eligible for taxes and citizenship, although not all parts of those islands are in guard range, for example. Any reasonable measure would probably require new code, but would not be excessively difficult to arrange in consultation with current town residents. Of course, although town regions would cover vast areas of the map, there would still be wilderness. Some players may wish not to be associated with any particular town. They can achieve this (and the tax-free status it implies) by restricting their houses and buildings to the wilderness areas. Discouraging building there should be part of the pro-community stance: decay rate should be significantly higher (on the order of a few real-time days – remember, the benefit is that there are no taxes!) for buildings outside of town regions unless they are near other PC-made buildings. Proximity to other buildings in the wilderness increases the number of days before decay by one day per nearby building, up to the current maximum for normal buildings. Note: even in towns, decay rate should depend on proximity to roads, NPC buildings, and other PC buildings.
Any taxes collected could be used in a variety of ways; my default assumption was that the money would essentially disappear, used to maintain the roads and buildings. Or, Origin could opt to support the idea of elected officials for the towns (see my comments on the proposed feudal system, below, for how this might work). Taxpayers (citizens) could get benefits such as discounts in shops to further encourage the sense of community; it would be neat to see guard protection (even out of guard range, but within the town region) for taxpayers, but there are too many complicating factors and this is probably not a good idea in practice. Also, taxes could be arranged to encourage role-playing by identifying players by the town of which they are a citizen: The Great Lord Faramir of Ocllo, Master Archer. This would also require (or, at least, benefit from) a way to pay taxes and become a citizen of your town without owning buildings there; this would happen if the suggestions for the feudal system were implemented and the Mayor could tax all citizens.
Along with the property tax and citizenship tax, it would be nice to see an income tax on vendors. These taxes could be set and altered by the Mayor, if such a position were implemented as described in the details of the feudal system. The Mayor would then be able to encourage or discourage vendors, buildings, and/or residents.
The only truly permanent residents of any UO town are the NPCs who wander the streets and shops. Unfortunately, they are without exception complete morons (Eliza, the computer psychiatrist, gave more helpful responses) and currently only five commands are commonly used: buy, sell, bank, train, and move. In my opinion, improving NPCs should be a priority for Origin.
First, the dialog (especially for NPC quests) must be fixed. This has gradually been improving, but still has many typos and syntax/grammar errors. The most obvious problems are related to the names of places and items: some names are prefixed by an article ("a" or "the") while others are not. Spacing and sentence structure also need work.
Second, it would be beneficial to the community if the "Where is so-and-so" query elicited a more helpful response. The NPCs should have some memory (perhaps lasting one UO day) of whoever has spoken to them or given them items, especially if the person asked about someone else: I would love to someday have this conversation with an NPC:
Faramir: "Hail, Lynette. Have ye seen Dominio?"
Lynette: "Aye! Dominio was here asking about Lord Xavori only a few hours ago."
This could be extended to allow for NPCs to take messages for adventurers. For example, I could pre-arrange with a friend to leave a message with the innkeeper, who would respond to the keyword message for and track the name of the recipient for, say, one UO day. I could say, "I have a message for Dominio," and the innkeeper would say, "What is the message?" and I could say "Dominio, you will not find Xavori today, as I killed him just now." The recipient could use the message for keyword with "me" as the recipient to claim messages. The NPCs could also be somewhat intelligent about relaying the message even if the person doesn’t inquire: "Dominio! Faramir left a message for ye."
NPCs talking about people in general should also be more intelligent about responding if that person isn’t right nearby. Even if the name isn’t recognized, the NPC should indicate that the question was understood (instead of saying, "I have no idea what thou’rt talking about") when asked, "Where is…?"
Synsear suggested that NPCs should also have the idea of "home," such that NPC merchants would "remember" their most frequent ("regular") customers. In real life, the person behind the counter often starts to recognize "regulars" and knows in advance about what they want, and will often provide better service as well. In UO, it would be interesting to implement this idea for NPCs: have them remember your business, and, if you are a regular customer for a very long time, start giving you perks like discounts, put you first on their answer protocol (if this has any effect), and maybe (and this would be especially cool for mages and warriors), keeping a little something for you "behind the counter" ("Oh, Faramir! I thought you might be interested in this Magic Halberd of Extreme Violence, so I put it in the back for you...").
Taverns are a traditional gathering place in societies like the one depicted in UO, but they are rarely used in the game. The addition of game boards is an improvement, but is obviously insufficient. What is needed is a way to make taverns more interesting – some reason to visit there.
One way to achieve this would be for taverns to provide newspapers. It would be best if PCs could write these, but it would be difficult to choose an editor (since there would be a limited number of newspapers). One easier idea would be for the newspapers to automatically report certain interesting events: declarations of war (see my comments on the feudal system, below); peace treaties; anyone becoming Great Lord or Dread Lord; anyone becoming a Virtue Guard; the construction of towers, castles, and keeps; and other noteworthy events.
Another interesting idea for taverns would be to allow duels – notoriety free combat unhindered by guards. The two combatants would double-click a special item in the tavern (perhaps a permanent sword decoration), which would provide a targeting cursor to select the opponent. If they both agreed, "duel" mode would be enabled, as is done for Virtue Guards, as long as they remained in the tavern. This would naturally attract a great deal of attention and tavern business, and promote a sense of allegiance and community. Of course, the results of a duel would be reported in the tavern newspapers!
Rumors have started about the idea of a feudal system in UO, and I am strongly in favor. This would have many benefits for all players, role-players or otherwise, and would be very beneficial towards the overall sense of community. The idea of feudalism is simple: each man gives allegiance to his feudal lord, who in turn may give allegiance to a higher lord. The system could also involve land and other holdings including NPC animals and humans. If a guild (we will refer to these feudal structures as guilds for simplicity) leader declares war on another guild, all of his subjects (and their subjects, etc.) are at war with all of the enemy’s subjects. In UO, of course, "war" would mean notoriety-free combat. Guild leaders would also have the option to tax their subjects, along with other benefits that could make the guild structure very appealing. Of course, all guilds would be different, with varying philosophies and rules.
In order to implement this (especially notoriety-free combat) in a fair way, guilds would have to be somewhat formalized with in-game support. The details of my proposal are now elaborated in a separate document focusing on the guild system to make this page a little easier to get around.
I hope to see more signs of the feudal system in the near future, and I hope these ideas can help Origin decide how best to implement it. I eagerly await reader comments.
Of course, one area where Origin can help improve the sense of community is by encouraging better role-playing in general. Don’t allow "Hey!" as a way to address NPCs, for example. Enforce some reasonable restrictions on player names (get rid of the losers named "Your best friend" who are amused by the idea of causing the message "Your best friend is attacking you!"). Clamp down on mule characters (best idea so far: prevent a player from logging two different characters onto the same server within a specified time period) and those who are obviously abusing external macro programs. Support Dominio’s Virtue Councils. Support Enshu Dragon’s Yew Town Council. Of course, "support" is a tricky thing – even the appearance of favoritism would be a terrible thing. But publicly and privately backing these and other role-playing enterprises (and the Events Calendar is a great step in this direction) would go a long way towards improving UO.
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