Month: August 2011

A Survey of the UO Internet Community

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So what is a survey of the UO internet community? It’s exactly what it sounds like – a survey of the various websites that comprise the UO internet community as well as the community itself. Eventually, I plan on moving parts of it over to UO Guide, although UO Guide has most of the links covered.

What I’m focusing on is activity for the most part and how easy it is to find useful information and websites. I’m not looking for some obscure site that hasn’t been updated in 10 years, I’m looking for people who are actively contributing in some way. I am not categorizing every single UO website that has ever been created – that’s something I’ll help UO Guide with, but not here.

Now why am I doing this? I’m curious about the state of the UO community. I like to read and follow UO websites. I’m partly doing it to provide a bit of a benefit to the community, and to finally start contributing more to UO Guide and possibly other websites. Finally, I’m doing it to prove a point about new players. That point is that for a new player, it would be hard for them to discover quite a few of the websites below, even though those websites might contribute to that player sticking around. A few hours of work on UOHerald.com would rectify the situation.

I know there are many websites that I’m missing, and I’m hoping people will use the simple contact form with those links, send an email to uojournal at gmail.com, or contact me through the UO Guide forums.

I’d like to hear what people think the community is missing, if they think it’s missing anything. I feel that it is missing a lot, but I’ll post about that later. For now, I want to help get the ball rolling.

Two quick notes:
* The links below are mostly in alphabetical order – there is no preference shown. Where they are not in alphabetical order, they are grouped in some other way.
* Only active links are shown, except for exceptions that I feel still provide some value.
* Yes, many of these are at the UO Guide Portal, however I’m only trying to cover active websites.
* I’m not making a distinction between official fansites and unofficial fansites. There are plenty of listed fansites that are no longer active, and there are fansites that are not officially recognized (UOJournal.com is not an official website – I have not tried to apply for that designation yet).

Official Websites
* Origin.com – Purchase Stygian Abyss,
* Account Management
* UOEM.net UO Event Moderator website (see UO Guide for an index)
* UO Facebook
* UO Game Codes Store
* UO Herald – Main UO Website
* UO Japan
* UO Twitter

Forums
* UO Forums
* UO Stratics Forums
* The Lost Lands
* Forums at MMORPG.com

General News and Guides
* UO Guide
* UO Journal
* UO Stratics

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The Sounds of Virtual Silence (Updates)

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Update #2: Account Center Maintenance has been announced.

Update: Maybe this post should be called “My God, it’s full of Accounts!”

I’ve received a couple of emails pointing out to me that we are not alone, and that many EA customers have had their accounts migrated to the Origin.com system, including those customers with accounts or pre-orders on SWTOR.com, which is the main website for Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Much of what I stated below, I still stand by, however now that it’s apparent that this problem is bigger than I imagined, I’ll add a bit to the end.

First of all, if you are still having problems, see this tutorial about account management at the Dark Age of Camelot wikia page or see previous post about contacting EA.

So here we are, just 12 or so hours shy of a full week since the new account management system went live. It’s been roughly five days since I asked why BioWare or EA can’t put out a tutorial. Now technically, a tutorial of sorts was put out, possibly by a BioWare employee. The Dark Age of Camelot tutorial above was put together by somebody referring to themselves as “BioWare Linda” and Linda has been busy, making over a thousand edits since the DAoC Wikia page went live. My hat’s off to you BioWare Linda. I also want to give credit to the countless folks who have been trying to help their fellow DAoC, UO, and Warhammer online players.

The problem is that you have to have received a link to that tutorial in an email I like I did, or saw it posted somewhere on a fansite. That tutorial is nowhere to be seen on Accounts.EAMythic.com. It’s also nowhere to be seen on the DAoC website, the UO website, or the Warhammer Online website. It’s also not on the Facebook pages.

A typical UO, DAoC, or Warhammer player is also not going to know that the Master Mythic Account is also their game account, or that an extension such as “_uo” needs to be added.

So where are we at? Some bad decisions were made, but I don’t really care who made them or why they made them. I see a lot of speculation and I have some ideas of my own, but the time for arguing about those decisions is in the future.

What I care about is that we’re a week into this, and things seem worse because more and more confusion is popping up.

I see a hard limit of 9 linked accounts, which is quite ridiculous when you stop and consider that we are talking about three MMOs, at least one of which has a history of players having many accounts. I hear tales of players being told by customer service they will be banned if they do this or that with additional accounts and yet because they have a certain amount of accounts, they are having to do that which is rumored to get them banned. I see DAoC players and UO players having connection problems that seem to parallel each other. I see UO players who wonder if they are going to lose their houses. I see Warhammer players who think they wasted their money on pre-paid gametime codes. I see people who are concerned that they may no longer be able to transfer their accounts to fellow player or family members. I see people who are wasting hours upon hours with customer service, going in circles. I see players who receive conflicting information from EA’s customer service.

I disagree with some of the conspiracy theories floating around as well as other things I’ve seen or heard. I will say this: I can understand why members of all three teams are shying away from posting on forums, official or third-party. I don’t know if they are being prevented from doing so, but I think that they know they have to be extremely cautious about what they say at this point, because players are latching on to every little thing that’s been said and passing it around. Of course, because so little is being said, that makes every word said take on greater importance.

Somebody emailed me with some links discussing BioWare Mythic employees being busy in Cologne, Germany at the Game Developers Conference and Gamescom. This is something they’ve been planning for months, so they aren’t going to cancel at the last minute, and it’s not the entirety of BioWare Mythic that flew to Germany. Besides, they have the internet, they have email, they are in fact posting from Germany, they just aren’t discussing the problems that DAoC, UO, and Warhammer players are experiencing. Update: I’m now aware that this problem is bigger than BioWare.

As a matter of fact, I think it’s great they are trying to generate some new interest in Warhammer Online with the free multiplayer arena-style Warhammer game. But guess what? You have existing Warhammer players who want to give you money, but they can’t do so, or are confused about how to do so! Little ironic, don’t you think?

I want to make three points very clear.

Point #1
People who may have been contemplating leaving any of the three BioWare Mythic MMORPgs, which happens naturally in the life cycles of MMOs, well they’ve just been given something that could nudge them into leaving, especially if that something is a loss of items or housing.

Point #2
This account system migration took place at a higher level at any individual team. Whether the teams and their producers had much say in how or when this migration occurred, I don’t know. I don’t expect the EA employees involved to talk to us because that’s not their job. They aren’t responsible for the three MMOs, they are responsible for making sure that Origin.com runs smoothly and that EA can collect money, which isn’t running so smoothly. They aren’t going to take ownership of this mess. Somebody needs to take ownership of this mess though. That means that somebody within BioWare management needs to say something.

If you an executive or say the community manager for BioWare Mythic say a few glowing words to the media in Germany about a new, free, unreleased Warhammer game, or talk about meeting up at a brewery, surely somebody can say a few words to the existing customers who are actually giving you money (or trying to), some of whom go back 10, maybe even 14 years, who are having serious problems with your existing games.

Point #3
This last point flows directly out of point #2, and that is that the longer the silence goes on, the more harm is being done to all three communities. The three communities are not in the best of shape as it is – communication has not been very good for a long time, and while some joke that it’s the Mythic way to not communicate with players, given that all three games have much lower numbers than at their peaks, communications and community are more vital than ever. Distrust of the DAoC, UO, and Warhammer teams is rising, distrust of BioWare is rising. There is confusion, there is anger among the communities, some more than others, and nobody is talking to them except for EA customer service, who seems to be giving them misleading or conflicting information.

All three games have efforts underway to attract new players, but maybe they should spend a few minutes talking to their existing players.

Update: In light of the fact that this migration is affecting Star Wars: The Old Republic customers, and possibly other games at a later date, including games within BioWare such as Crysis and Dragon Age II, I think some of the above is even more important. In addition to the individual team producers possibly commenting, I think it’s probably important for the top brass within BioWare to comment as well, because some are claiming that the teams themselves are being silenced by somebody within EA. Given the deafening silence from the three teams, unless I hear otherwise, I’m inclined to agree that the teams are being silenced.

This migration has probably caught up many people who don’t yet realize it because they don’t check emails all that often, they don’t read fansites, and they don’t post or read in forums. It was kicked off with an incredibly short and all-too-brief notice that was posted on the game websites and on Facebook.

People are posting on Stratics or on UO Forums, but many do not read either of those forums or other websites, and a false sense of many players being informed has arisen. This needs to be addressed now, because the longer we go with this without any official communication from the people managing the games and BioWare, the worse it’s going to get.

Put aside the confusion and issues that came up with the migration and linking process itself. If something happens and people start losing castles or keeps or houses full of keepsakes and mementos from friends over the years, all of the sudden you’ve got a group of people who are just going to walk.

Right now, the only official communication that UO, DAoC, and Warhammer players are receiving is from tech support, and the messages are all over the place and contradictory at times.

Richard Garriott Talks a Lot About Ultima Online and Crafting

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Richard Garriott gave a keynote this week at the GDC Europe conference, where he touched on the Ultima and Ultima Online series as well as what he’s learned.

While I don’t have a transcript of the keynote, He gave a really in-depth interview that was published on the Soulrift blog.

Here are some excerpts. In regards to in-game economies and trying to control how much players have at what levels:

Well, when you generate a massively multiplayer game, the ability to tightly control and constrain things goes out the window. Even if you start with a basis of saying at level 1 you get 1s of gold and level 2 you get 10s and level 3 you get 100s, etc., the problem then becomes that anyone of high level can basically hand that value to a person of low level.

In regards to non-combat roles and real estate and housing in UO:

We had the circumstance where, I think one of the most interesting emergent value assets that came up in Ultima Online was how quickly and how valuable virtual real-estate became. I think that the reason why they became so valuable and the impact on the economy kinda goes like this: Ultima Online, to this day I think, is the only MMO that did such a good job of giving players non-combat roles that were so thoroughly simulated that people had entire lives that they would live out in the virtual world that had little or nothing to do with adventuring. The classical case is the blacksmith. There were people who would literally spend their entire virtual life online buying ore that would be brought by adventurers in dungeons, smelting it down into ingots, taking those ingots and forging weapons, and selling those weapons back to the adventurers who would go back into the dungeon and get more ore. Well, if your joy in this game was to be a blacksmith and make weapons, well your blacksmith shop sorta needed to be somewhere on the beaten path between the dungeon and the city centre where the players usually had their caravans of player groups going for safety. And that real-estate, of course, was almost immediately bought up by players early in the game, so late in the game the only place to build a new blacksmith shop was way out in the woods somewhere, which was, frankly, no amount of advertising would bring people to you. So the real-estate suddenly became the thing of value.

Right after this part, he went on to discuss how officially Origin/EA had no stance on Real Money Transactions (RMTs) and then once they saw what started to happen – scams, third world labor, etc., they began to shift their official stance against RMT

In regards to crafting in other games and UO, Garriott mentioned that it should be as powerful in other MMOs as it was in UO, and that he had no idea early on just how powerful it would be in UO:

but I had no idea of the power of these levels of activity that were not combat within Ultima Online until I was a game master within the game itself and I would do things like… I remember a day that I was running around in the Help Queue and just responding to complaints, people getting stuck somewhere or whatever their problem might be, and I would teleport in as Lord British and help them out and feel very proud of myself.

I remember one time I was invisible and just walking around the coast line and there was this man standing along the shore and he had decorated and adorned his character very carefully, he was wearing cut-off short and a holey shirt and a big straw hat and he was standing on the beach with a fishing pole catching fish and laying the fish out beside him on the dirt. At that time, this was very early in Ultima Online, the simulation for fishing was precisely this: use fishpole on water, 50/50 chance to generate a fish. End of simulation. So there really was no simulation. I did not think of fishing as a profession, I did not think of fishing as something we were simulating, I just thought everything you can see that is a decoration in Ultima Online, it should work. So if you saw a typewriter – not that we ever had one – but if we did, it should work. If there’s a telephone, it should work.

He described how important it, when discussing the fisherman mentioned above, and how it changed his perception and reinforced certain beliefs:

That was a very important lesson for me, when I saw that. It really taught me that people were already playing Ultima Online for reasons that I had never in my wildest imagination have thought that people would desire, much less pull off an entire existing around fishing. But because we were devoted to “everything works” and you really could fish and you really could sell that fish in the market and you really could go into the pub and not only, of course, buy drinks but there was also a board game, you could sit down and play

The whole thing is very much worth a read with a huge emphasis on in-game economies and crafting, and Garriott goes on to talk about Tabula Rasa, some of the other games he’s worked on, and the next Lord British game.

So what are you waiting for, head over to Soulrift to read the full interview.

Gordon Walton Talks About Community Management

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Remember Gordon Walton? He gave a keynote earlier today at the Game Developers Conference Europe’s Community Management Summit, where he talked about how gaming communities have evolved.

If you don’t remember Gordon Walton, he’s worked on Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, and until recently, on Star Wars: The Old Republic for BioWare, before he went to work for Playdom. During his UO days, he was Vice President of Online Operations during The Second Age, Renaissance, and Third Dawn.

His nickname was “Tyrant” and having interacted with him on the old UO.com forums, it was a well-deserved moniker.

It sounds like he learned a lot from working on UO and SWG:

“Communities are smarter than us. They will figure stuff out, they will figure out what is really going on,” said Walton, stressing that a community manager should never lie, because they are “not politicians.”

As the designated voice of the entire company, everything a community manager says will be dissected and taken apart by a community, so Walton stressed the importance of working closely with both PR and marketing to make sure messaging is concise and on message. A good community manager must resist the urge to “feed the trolls,” he says, acknowledging that it’s sometimes difficult to ignore situations that strike an emotional chord.

“What you should do is ignore things you don’t want and reward what you do; it’s a well-understood way of training mammals,” he said.

Full article: Gamasutra

Richard Garriott Discusses Ultima, Ultima Online at GDC Europe

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Richard Garriott gave the final keynote at this week’s Game Developers Conference in Europe, using the Ultima series, Ultima Online, and his upcoming Lord British game as examples for the three phases, aka the “Three Grand Eras of Game Development” as he calls them. They move from single-player to MMORPGs to social gaming.

He discussed a bit of what helped him succeed, while making it clear that he felt it was time to move on.

“One thing that I really lucked into was creating storylines with what I will call ‘social relevance’,” he said, pointing to the moral choices inherent in the Ultima games.

The “save the kingdom” story of the original games in the series is no longer enough, though it still has traction in the industry, he said. “The first Ultimas were very simple stories… And if you look at most games today they still are. Personally, I don’t know about you, after I told that story a few times I was done with it.”

He also discussed the very early days of UO when it wasn’t always a sure thing, and he even discussed that the graphics were outdated in the 1990s:

When he launched the Ultima Online project, EA’s “faith in the team and faith in the project was so low,” he said, that “projected sales were 30k lifetime.”

“Sales and marketing were not in favor of us working with the game,” he said. “It wasn’t until we put up a prototype and put up a web page… 50,000 people signed up to be beta testers in the first couple of weeks. When it finally did ship it was the fastest selling PC game in origin and EA history at the time. Within about two years had outsold all of the other previous Ultimas combined.”

Even so, he said, “Despite the success, lots of people were not convinced that this was a good future for gaming in general.”

This is because the game had dated graphics and a lack of story — putting it behind the current state of the art of single player games. “When a new era starts with graphics that are five or 10 years behind the state of the art, very quickly that changes.”

One thing I found very interesting and agreed with, is Garriott’s take on mobile gaming:

“I am now much more of a gamer than I ever been been in my whole life, but the vast majority of the gaming I have played has been on this machine,” Garriott said, while holding up an iPhone.

“I’m a devout believer that this is the current and near-term future of games.”

I agree with that – I’ve played far more games on my iPhone and have been impressed by how far it’s come in such a short time. I’m playing the Ultima IV beta on the iPad as well and it’s very impressive and makes for a good platform for older games.

This is just a general comment, but I wonder at times if he’s got a case of sour grapes when it comes to certain things. He’s had some really bad experiences that weren’t his fault, especially with MMOs – Ultima Online 2, Tabula Rasa, but also with Ultima 8, which he mentioned:

“There are only two games I look back with some sense of regret… They happened under similar conditions and I made the same mistake twice,” said Garriott.

They were both the first games he worked on after selling his company to a new publisher. Ultima 8 was rushed to hit a holiday release window, and it’s his biggest regret.

“Tabula Rasa — the original vision we had for the game, I wish we had stuck by… The vision was seen as too strange and far out by sales, marketing, and international concerns… It put us further and further behind before we even really got started.”

He had very little to say about Lord British’s New Britannia, other than it wasn’t ready, but he did mention that MMOs are changing to suit the many playstyles out there and used UO as an example:

One important problem with today’s MMOs is that “every player is a combatant”, he said. “In Ultima Online, that was not true.”

It is easy for me to say that you should judge his comments in light of the bad experiences he’s had with some large companies when it came to both his Ultima and Ultima Online games and other properties later on, but some of those experiences ended in court. I think it’s especially telling that more and more MMORPGs are being released all the time – when you visit sites like Massively.joystiq.com or MMORPG.com, the selection of MMOs now versus even just five years ago is staggering. Some of the largest and most anticipated games in the next two years are MMORPGs – Star Wars: The Old Republic, BioWare’s Titan, just to name two.

On the other hand, he always had a thing for trying to be cutting edge, whether it was pushing the boundaries of computer hardware with games coming out of Origin, or helping take the MMORPG genre into the mainstream when companies and players weren’t sure what they were or what they were capable of. And let’s face it, some of the social games he talks about have 5-6 times the players that games like World of Warcraft have. Just because those social or Facebook games may appeal to a broader audience than MMORPGs doesn’t make them any less of a game and they are still making their developers 100s of millions, even billions of dollars.

I’ll still take single-player games and MMORPGs over 95% of the social games out there though. And the games I play most on my iPhone – mostly single-player, especially “retro” games that just aren’t being made on the Mac or PC platform. I’m still not sure why EA hasn’t started releasing Origin’s back catalog of Ultima and Wing Commander games on the iPhone. That’s a lot of money just waiting to be made.

It’s a very entertaining read, and while Gamasutra has highlights, I will try to find a transcript or video.

Source: Gamasutra