What would you guys/girls prefer? The next expansion have new lands with new content, or add advancements to previous lands (including ocean) and new content.

There is just so much things in Ultima that could use some advancements. Instead of wasting the money adding a new land for the expansion, why not use that money to revamp old lands?

What are your thoughts?

I think we should improve upon the vast continents of deserted lands we've got now, many of which serve only as housing lots.

I think peerless-level monsters should be put in an instance in the bottom of each anti-virtue dungeon, as a perfect way to co-mingle new with old.

I think fighting a Lich King in Deceit would be far more interesting than fighting some odd named creature in a new land. Plus there'd be incentive to actually go to the old dungeons.

Honestly, I could fill pages with the ideas I've suggested and ideas that I want to suggest, but the fact they get good momentum by the players and none by the devs is enough to discourage me from churning them out like I used to.

Regarding new lands:

It's something that only appeals to us because we think the content will be interesting. As it stands, Peerlesses were the only thing added that we still have that holds a huge incentive for people to go do. I say fill every land with such challenges that it will push our characters to their very limits.

What I think:

We've paid for enough broken and lackluster expansions. We need the things that have been broken for years fixed, and improved upon, before we go looking down the 'build another land and introduce bugs' road.

I think we should get the next one on the house...but I'd be more than happy to pay for it after they fix all of the outstanding bugs and issues that plague our game currently.

The economy needs fixed, the trade-in systems require too much clicking, and everything....well...let's face it...everything requires too much clicking.

Click this BoD, click to make this item, click make last, click the other BoD, click the one you just filled, repeat all that nine more times, drop BoD on vendor...click vendor again...rinse and repeat.

I don't even want to know how tamers feel about clicking. That would drive me psychotic.

We need to streamline skillgain, re-do the gump systems entirely, and make it easier for those who play to actually play. We are not robots, and our fingers were not meant to click upteenth million times without something going wrong.

I do computer work for a living, and the last thing I want to do is get home and click my fingers off some more; Repeated Stress Syndrome sucks.

After GMing lockpick 3 years ago, my hand was burning and sore for weeks afterwards. Having to take aspirin repeatedly because I trained a skill infuriates me to no end.

I have no problems with clicking in KR...... My main is a tamer, and I don't click ever with him... well, unless I am using animal lore, but even then I wouldn't have to click if I didn't want to...

Sorry, but I fail to see where anything you listed is EA's fault. KR must have reduced clicking a ton but you obviously chose not to bother with it. Where is that EAs fault? Please dont say bugs, because there are plenty of people who play KR and they don't have any game stopping bugs. Irritating, inconvenient bugs, sure, but not game stopping.

Honestly, I haven't felt let down by any of the expansions that UO has. All of them have had their ups and their downs, but none of them imho have been horrible.

As for a new expansion or update, I wouldn't mind a revamp of the old dungeons, as long as they look and feel a bit different, and maybe have some newer monsters.

The thing that keeps me interested in UO is the ability to explore and see new places and find new monsters to kill.

Water expansion would be nice.

Add seahorses:
And a special underwater dungeon which you can only get to by riding your seahorse.

Add some kind of ship battles where you can destroy your opponents boats(along with them)

Maybe an NPC Ghost ship that a fleet of ships can help take down with their on board cannons! [Water peerless]

Please Be Advised, the following may or may not be opinionated but is based upon fact, so therefore extrapolate upon it with an objective view.

The following may or may not be filled with nonsense; reader discretion is advised.

Insinuating that I'm going to say it's all bugs...well..that's plain wrong...I deal with bugs...but...as you'll see, my difference in opinion is quite more drastic than you would have expected...

Firstly, to say I didn't bother with KR or clicking is a biased assumption. Just because you play KR, doesn't mean I didn't bother with it.

I gave KR months of chances to work correctly, and after that I gave up on something that hadn't achieved Gold status before going Live.

KR won't even run correctly on my system, it crashes, gets me killed, and lags horribly in PvP.

I ran it previously on an XPS 400, with 2GB of ram, 250GB SATAII HDD with NCQ, a geforce 7300LE, 7.1 audio system, and lo and behold, with all of my system optimizations (which do work, mind you), it still ran horribly.

I don't feel the need to re-learn the entire game and deal with a client that runs slower than the old 3d did, because it touts it's the new UO. This is a choice. Choosing not to bother with it?

I clicked from 97 to UOPro, when UOA was put into the 'legal program' status.

How many clicks does it take to get to the center of GM taming?

Your computer will run KR?

Honestly, I can't. So, that's another qualm. My current PC is technically two years newer than UO itself.

Now, I don't feel at liberty to explain the circumstances behind this to you, but suffice it to say that it is the way it is.

KR wasn't as much of an 'expansion' as a replacement for the 3d client.

Keep in mind UXO was cancelled by EA to focus on what ended up being Samurai Empire.

I think most of us would readily take UO:2 or UXO over KR any day of the week.

Now hold your horses here, I'm not blaming the dev team, especially not our current one.

When you add any content to something with existing bugs and known issues, the cardinal rule is to expect those to compound. How is there no fault here?

You can't be a programmer and not expect this to occur, especially when you build on top of old code that another entirely different team of programmers coded.

EA released the expansions, and all of the content and lands included in them, correct?

Then additionally, after this point, many things that were put in were changed, broken, and/or neglected?

Do you see how neglected our original land of Britannia is, now, much focus there is on the expansion-added things, how hard it is for a casual player to gain skill, powerscrolls that really hurt the 7x GM players, and especially those 5x gm characters of old (put any skill on a 120 sliding scale versus 100, where 100 is 100% maximum potential, and you'll see what I mean).

This is all simple math, but putting on a suit to go fight something has become spreadsheet material and perfectionism....multi-million gold piece perfectionism.

Now, I don't want to rant here, but when you make such a huge gap, and force folks to become super-rich to afford items that should be basic necessities, and on top of this, leave the skill-cap as is, you're going to have problems.

You were there for T2A, LBR, Third Dawn, UO: Renaissance, UO: Gold, 7AE, AoS, SE, ML, 9AE, 8th Age correct?

AoS (My pet name for this one, I'll call it Age of Stuff on here to avoid profanity) was most certainly horrible in my opinion, it changed the entire skill-based game we all knew and loved into an item-based game that had to be re-learned entirely.

Thank you, Age of Stuff, now begone!

Many quit because of this fact, and when items allowed players to exceed limits they never should have neared to begin with, those same items were a balance issue and had to be nerfed. New skills were introduced, and became balance issues, and had to be nerfed.

New skills then coupled with items, and those had to be capped even after they were nerfed because they were just too powerful.

Old skills were again nerfed, Thieving died almost entirely except for the brave and the few.

GM-crafter armor and items became junk in and of their own, but of course, runic items became super-powerful and wanted greatly.

It now takes items to get items to make items to have the right stuff to play the game, and only after you're done fiddling around with the skills you now have to rework because of an onslaught of changes.

I'll note preemptively, that I do know that Powerscrolls were a result of Evil-In-A-Can, AkA champion spawns.

AoS did not bring about this change, but publish 16 did.

(Avoids touching publish 16 with a 9-foot halberd)

Good luck provoking/peacing/discording lots of mobs without +20 skill scrolls...ah yes, it's just skills...but who can find, let alone afford a +20 musicianship scroll?

An item, for an item...we have traded our skills and their sufficiency for a system that requires items to make our skills sufficient.

Armslore and itemid became useless, hundreds of items we had been using and stockpiled for use also became useless simultaneously.

And that the supposedly 'exclusive pre-order' and launch gifts they're now selling on their site....urgh.



I rest my case....

But be advised....that's just my opinion...

I could be wrong....and we all know what opinions are like, and why everyone's got one!

Moving on, then!

Corpse, I'm all for this. Pirates have been requesting a water expansion for years.

Hmm....maybe a pirate expansion would be a good idea? I think I could get into the idea of ship battles again.

Seahorses- This is a prime example of something that was promised at the launch of Third Dawn and never implemented.

I think the seahorses are long overdue, and they used to spawn in ilshenar quite frequently back in the day.

We were supposed to be able to ride those things!

Honestly, if it were up to me, I'd see tokuno islands merged into the same sea as britannia (obviously the facet would have to be bigger), T2A expanded (the Lost Lost lands?), and Malas enriched with overland spawn and ongoing content. Plus, add sailing in the sea of stars in...and make that sea of stars even bigger.

Undead coming from the water to invade...directly out of the water....*shudders*

House-boats would be a nice change, too. Who cares about housing spots when you can just float off and find a new place to call home?

Bring it all on!

I think we will get a bit of both. The 'Stygian Abyss' will be a new area *wonders if they still plan for it to be KR only*, and there will probably be some upgrades to older content as well.

I would love to see more done with UO's vast oceans (in Fel/Tram/Tokuno), I always thought they could of taken Buccs Den further and added Pirate NPCs (similar to brigands) that inhabit the Buccs island and launch raids against the mainland cities (mainly the close coastal towns of Brit/Trin/Vesper/Cove).

Maybe the Pirates could be like normal brigands except a little stronger and they would not attack murderers in Fel (so Buccs can stay the Reds town). I dunno, but it would be awesome to see a band of NPC setting sail for Brit with a massive cannon on their boat, with the Britannian guards on the shoreline waiting to meet them.

Imho the last thing we need is more area/land. I would much rather see the old dungeons revamped with new content or perhaps brand new dungeons/ruins/monsters/"insert your interesting idea here". There are vast areas of UO where people simply don't go because there's nothing there! Build on what we have!

I'll be happy with more content, be it new lands, new races, new skills or whatever. I just want something new to explore.

But I'd prefer to not leave more land wasted or used only for housing. That's just wasteful.

UO got waaay to low pop to add more landmass and UO still got bugs from years back that needs fixing.. maybe they just cant reach these? Id rather see a expansion with 5-10 big patches in it. Than new landmass.. Redo all dungons and deserts as someone mentioned.. Maybe remove some creatures and add new instead. New abilities from monsters since the old are to "readable" The AI kinda blow.

I dont want to see new monsters added with only higher hp and higher mana.. what the hell is the fun in that? just takes little longer to kill than before.

Soo..

Redo what we got.. Make it more intressting for the players.. and imo.. make the landmass smaller. I dont play a mmo to run around solo all days.

So far, I've liked the changes they've made that are focusing players in one or two spots at a time (right now, ophidians and the invasions). It brings a lot of people together somewhere besides the bank (which also sucks now, no one talks to people t hey don't know anymore).

I just hope and pray that the gargoyles are going to be the answer to the itemization trend that has been going on. I completely agree that this game should be about skill, but I can't even go out on my tamer, read that, TAMER who hides behind a pet, without being itemed out.

And, it still takes me an hour to make 100k. At the current cost of items, it takes 40mil to make a "decent" character, after you've invested the time to skill them up. That's 400 hours of playing sub par while you grind money.