I have heard that the new invasion artifacts are not effected by Powder of Fortification.

I haven't tested this myself, so forgive me if this is incorrect.

Assuming it is true:

Jeremy, in a Five on Friday that dates to the introduction of the Virtue Artifacts, stated that their not being PoF-able was not a precursor to the elimination of Powder of Fortification from the game.

Ok, fine....However, the Redeemer, the Virtue Artifacts, and now the Invasion Artifacts are not PoF-able. In other words, every major new item introduced into the game recently.

Did you perchance mean "we are not eliminating PoF, but we are going to gradually reduce its usefulness by making it non-usable on every new item?"

If so, well the dev team has often suffered from us players feeling that we have to parse and dissect everything you all say. I had been trying to get away from that. It wasn't pleasant to look at every statement made and try to figure out what it literally meant on a word by word basis.

So....What's up?


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If an item that is not sold on NPC vendors can be lost through normal use, it is of no use to me. No item that disallows PoF shall ever be touched by my hands.

~~~~

It's a design decision made on a case-by-case basis, that is a method of controlling the overall value and rarity of a given item. That's all.

(All the artifacts you've listed have been event-specific - it would probably be a reasonable deduction that the designers tend to prefer to limit the durability of event items. It's still case-by-case, though.)

E. Jeremy Dalberg
UO Community Coordinator
EA Mythic

~~~~

Translation: Event specific items are for decorating your house with. If it's neither ever-lasting nor replaceable, who is going to use it?

~~~~

Well, if the value of having it as a decoration (or simply *having it*, as a collectors' item) is greater to you than the value of getting the use of it for a period of time, then of course you won't use it. But that's still an individual value judgement, not an inherent property of the item.

E. Jeremy Dalberg
UO Community Coordinator
EA Mythic

~~~~

I have never seen a Redeemer used in combat, ever. The only virtue items I see used in combat are the aforementioned suits with massive self-repair. It's clear that your playerbase isn't going to use unpowderable items, but you keep giving them items they aren't going to use.

The cursed doom arties nobody uses are lame too.

~~~~

And yet still people collect them

E. Jeremy Dalberg
UO Community Coordinator
EA Mythic

~~~~

Translation: Event specific items are for decorating your house with. If it's neither ever-lasting nor replaceable, who is going to use it?


~~~~


I agree.

It's a pain enough already to get equipped enough to fight...let alone having stuff go poof on you.

~~~~

Quote:

It's a design decision made on a case-by-case basis

It's a bad one.

~~~~

You are assuming the items were intended to be incredibly valuable, and therefore have failed in that. I am honestly not sure one way or the other - it's a design decision, and I leave those to the designers. But there are certainly reasons to create less-than-uber items, or items with substantial tradeoffs.

E. Jeremy Dalberg
UO Community Coordinator
EA Mythic

~~~~

...

Personally, I don't believe the devs should set out with the intention of making something incredibly valuable. Sure they should always do limited time event items every now and then, but based on the event itself.

Any "value" should remain a function of the secondary market IMO.

That's probably the best way, that way the official statement can always be "We do not create items to be rare or collectible. The collectibleness of an item is determined by the players"

Just IMO.

~~~~



That's all they do. Why even waste time giving these items combat properties when, as non-replaceable, non-POFable items, no one ever does anything but collect them?
This is not the same as GM-crafted armor of pre-AOS: that stuff could be replaced easily: it could be CRAFTED.


~~~~

Lots of possibilities:

- to make a unique item type for the heck of it (two-handed sword)
- to try out some different special effects (vorpal blade, staff of pyros)
- to provide "I was there!"-type collectible items (how many times have I seen people talk about Ranger Armor?)
- to give relatively casual players some decent-but-not-overwhelming gear (Virtue Armor and the other dungeon drops, cursed Doom arties)

I know I've been wanting a classic Britannian Two-Hander for YEARS, strictly to satisfy my sense of continuity. (Of course, I tend to play in cheap, easily-replaceable, and solidly midrange gear, and don't see a problem in using and repairing an item until it's too low to be reliable, at which point it goes on the wall. Why not?)

E. Jeremy Dalberg
UO Community Coordinator
EA Mythic

~~~~

Quote:

And yet still people collect them

Look people please get a clue and see what the Dev team is doing.

They are creating as much JUNK as possible to collect. Things that are hard enough to obtain that you keep them, but not things you will use up.

Holiday gifts - Instead of one or two items - here is a bag of 7 items for xmass last year. Shove those 7 x 6 chars in your house somewhere
Ophidian Invasion stuff - Yeah, we will make those useful one day 'wink'.
Blackrock - Here save all this blackrock - you'll find it usefull, really.
Virtue Armor - Here is some armor you'll want to pack rat away
Cursed Arties - Pretty to look at but unusable. Too pretty to throw out. Store those...
Halloween Items - Lanterns, pumpkins with names, ghoul statues, arty 11 pieces of junk, Power weapons etc....

THEN they sell you extra storage for $20.

Don't you see? They have given up on new players. They have given up on new content. They have decided - give people pixel crack and charge them more $$ to store it.

That is the best idea our development team can muster for increasing their revenue.

Fight the power - do NOT purchase the extra storage. Toss some of this junk out instead.

~~~~

u are right,

i dont buy ANYTHING from ea, since they trashed ML,
ML was a good expansion and then after we all had boght it, they trashed it.
basta,no more extra mo´from me , till they fixed the game.

but as far as i can see, they do not fix anything, more thrash then ever bevore in uo.

they dont see what 8 million player like in wow, they do the total opposite of that LOL


(example: items cant break in wow, if dura 0 then it is not usable but after repairing it works again)
so what??

~~~~

WoW takes a different tack with limiting items - "soulbinding" or "no-drop/no-trade." Similar end result - the items don't circulate endlessly through the economy, and are useful to any given person for a limited amount of time - different way of going about it.


~~~~

Lots of possibilities:

- to give relatively casual players some decent-but-not-overwhelming gear (Virtue Armor and the other dungeon drops, cursed Doom arties)

so what your saying here is that a casual or new player has no shot at competing in the higher levels of the game, unless willing to go into the secondary market and equiping himself properly if he wants to pvp or have any shot at surviving a raid at a champ spawn.

why not have this event drop non cursed arties to give all a chance to obtain some gear that allows them to compete. why is the game so intent on protecting the secondary market where prices run close to 100 dollars or more for some of the most sought after articles?

~~~~

A few points, if I may:

Skrag, you could theoretically keep items in WoW forever (and I still have my Ebon Mask from level 50, because it looks supafly) but you outlevel them pretty quickly, and they become functionally useless. The only partial exception is raiding gear - the very top end stays relevant until then next level-cap-raising expansion pack comes out.

Onthefifty, if a casual player wants to equip him or herself for high level play, what would he or she do if no event was currently running? Are you saying that right now there's a gap in gear progression, in the current regular content? (I'm asking honestly, as I've never tried to get top-end gear. I will say, though, that that would be an issue we'd want to solve with permanent content, not event content.)

The dungeon drops are really aimed at the finished-New-Haven-what-next? crowd, in terms of power. This is... not the Stratics community, for the most part.

My specific playstyle, since people seem to care, is pretty RP-heavy. I build my templates based on character concept, gear up with whatever requires the least amount of thought to maintain (an all-70s blessed self repair suit is PERFECT for me, and I'd feel guilty if I'd had anything at all to do with its creation Plus, it suits my Paladin perfectly, RP-wise.) I also do a fair bit of crafting, more for my own satisfaction than any sort of profit. I'm currently working on splitting my crafting skills between several chars so I can take advantage of Arms Lore and still make every single craftable in the game Only thing I still want is a tamer, and as soon as I remember to get myself a 7th char slot code, that's next.

E. Jeremy Dalberg
UO Community Coordinator
EA Mythic

~~~~