I second this!

I guess what we are all saying is...

- give us an interactive UO that changes daily... not a 23h45m loop.

how to do this?

Lets look closely to Ilshenar then...

Ilshenar races should be in perpetual war and expanding from their towns... Up to the players to balance it and/or attack one race... this could lead to the meers ruling Ilshenar or a large part of it... or the blackthorn servants...

Like ripples in a pool... the towns should try to expand... and fight the opposing factions.

why would this be fun?
Because each shard would have unique Ilshenars, there would be daily changes... maybe no programmers found out how to create a wave pattern for spawning new monsters instead of anchoring it to an area...

(could be done using a simple progression that would extend the radius of the spawning from point A plus a variable multiplied by time and modified by the location of the spawned creatures... giving it multiple birth locations)

This was done at the terathan keep... with the exception of having the mobs grow... so maybe what we need are... clans able to rally other members and waves of chaos knights, meers, ... raging all across Ilshenar.

Would it be hard for newcomers and new characters?... yes.

Shouldnt Ilshenar be tough and wild?... yes.


SAFE GAMING!

Prefer, hmm

Giving parts of the lands more meaning?

Might start with Felucca where faction crafters can craft magic weapons and armor with felucca/faction specific resources. I guess factioneers with mining could find magic ore on creatures special resources. Some towns could produce resources with which you can enhance weapons/armors with the attributes you want. That armor and weapons are not repairable or insurable.

Also let factions rent town buildings and use it for housing if they control the city.

Would probably appeal to the pvp crowd.

Trammel could surely do with a better storyline where powers struggle for the lands too and either have events to throw them back or even chose sides. Some towns could get some special champion spawn/invasion spawn where you can free a town by defeating it and get some special reward out of it. (Could be from townspecific items to titles)

You know, that's a great idea. We should get some momentum going behind this.

For example, we're sitting in Britain one day, and mobs from Covetous randomly decide they're fed up with us attacking them, and the entire dungeon's spawn goes to invade britain. I personally think the guards should run when they see this going on and seek out players, asking for their help in repelling the spawn.

They'd make much better guards if they did that, and the randomness of the whole thing would add an unpredictable challenge to the game that it's been missing for a while..

Remember when Terathans invaded Delucia after T2A first came out? We didn't get any advance warning, we died a lot, but it was the most fun I ever remember having in UO asides from the Seer's 'Tour of Britannia'.

Letting us know this stuff is going to attack by putting it on external test shards sorta takes the surprise out of it, and random groups of mobs banding together (could be used with the 'commanding officer monster' concept they're putting in as we speak) so a Gazer General may very well be leading Elder Gazers to attack us and directing forces, for instance.

Anything that attacks one of these generals ought to be very concerned, because the nearest Elder Gazers should go help defend it. Intelligent and dynamic AI opens up a whole new world of possibilities.

Personally, I'm sick of Luna bank, and nobody goes to Brit bank anymore....perhaps an invasion is in order?

Good idea. Put those stealables in the crates in towns. Consumable-stealables might be a good thing to put in as well, as in something you can only acquire with a thief, that others would use on a regular basis and need to go to thieves to get more of.

Also, bring back eating food to UO. As it stands now, nobody really eats that much food anymore, and our poor chefs want to sell some goodies!

Perhaps bring a way to make unique recipes for foods, unique potions, and the like. Unique potions (as well as Necromancy Potions) were already tested on Abyss shard way back, but they sort of lost momentum once Designer Dragon left.

Necromancy in it's very first inception, was supposed to be 'an evil version of magery' with spells that were the exact opposite of magery spells. Essentially, you didn't need to add magery on to the necromancer character. Somewhere along the line this was changed.

I'd rather be able to summon a 'death vortex' like they said we'd be able to, than cast a pain spike .

Sounds like I'm throwing a pointy shard of metal at someone when I cast that spell.

EDIT: and the BoD timer thing, also a good idea. Why the heck do we get BoDs with worthless rewards anyhow? Who else wants more stretched hides?

And honestly, I'm getting a lot of non-exceptional stuff that has no use. The best reward from some of this stuff is a prospector's tool or gargoyle pick-axe...or +3 gloves....

Or one of the many hues of BoD cloth that very, very few people use, let alone want to buy.

Unique colors in BoDs that are difficult to obtain would be a very good thing to add, as incentive to do these BoDs again.

Also, we need BoD's for Carpentry and Fletching.

As it stands, we've only got the heartwood quests. Expand the horizons and add more ways to get these runics in than just one.

I saw a Valorite Hammer on a vendor for around 45,000,000 gold. That's a 15-use item.

As has been stated, we don't need any new landmass, we just need to improve the content of what we can do in the ones we've got. I'd enjoy seeing the Pirate as a viable playstyle again, and many people would enjoy playing Orcs instead of Elves.

While we're at it, give Dragon Scale Armor a boost, this stuff ought to be the best metal-based armor, but it sure isn't.

As far as the bod thing goes - I'd like to see a point based system implemented. I tend to have VERY bad luck with the random number generators, and I'd REALLY like a runic sewing kit. So make it where you earn points as you turn in BODs. The points would be based on the difficulty and amount and quality of the bod. Once you've accumulated an unseemly amount of points and have NOT received a BOD for the higher end award, you would be automatically awarded (or choose from a selection of) that large BOD(s) OR awarded the item outright (make the point requirement even higher). Similar to the way I understand the Doom artifact system to work. I mean, really, since GMing tailoring several days ago, I've received a 20 normal cloak BOD about 15 times when I turn in a BOD completed by my GM tailor.

EDIT (again) I know this was a litte off topic, so...

For the next expansion - a Dwarf city in the mountains, sort of like the Dwarves in the Stygian Abyss. Perhaps not the ability to BE a dwarf, but quests that would allow for additional recipes or items. For example, kill 10 dragons and bring me all the loot (dwarves were greedy about their gold, as I remember) and receive a recipe for I dunno, something cool.

I noticed a player on LS, who had a really nice suit of dragon scale with actual desirable mods and properties on it. I don't remember the exact details of the suit, but it was as good if not better than hand picked suits.

I questioned him about it and he said he burnt a high level runic hammer to get the pieces.

Just thought you all may like to know.

I am returning from EverQuest.

New expansions .....

Everquest, were you can go and no one is there. Were there may be more zones that players at any given moment.

The watch word is "Groups? You must be kidding, were is everyone?" Yet its population exceeds Ultima Online.

New expansions? All it does is spreads people ever thinner.

I vote my Subscription dollars to FIXING the long time bugs/problems.

Why does a current game, when started FullScreen require so many device resets? The net effect is to terminate any number of existing programs running on my computer, because UO doesn't have a clue on how to play nice.

Client Crash's.

The need to use Tricks, Macro's, Scripts to GM skills.

Every time they increase the Power of something, they must also increase the opposite of that something. In short all that happened was to scale things up, NOTHING changes and in a month or two that Bright New Shiny Toy will be tossed into the corner with all the other obsoleted toys.

I vote FIX the game far more than spread us all so thin we cant find each other.

Do you really think they will even release another expansion? I wonder if it will happen because 2008 is supposed to be all about "live content" and it has me believing they may just do away with expansions and begin just adding things in as they go.

But as far as a new expansion I really don't care what goes in at this point if there was something to do at all I would probably play uo again but as it stands I have been playing other games because uo has gotten stale.

I dunno, as far as another expansion release date, holiday season is usually suspect for that to happen. If not, well....we'll see how the events pan out...perhaps Draconi is leading up to Stygian Abyss with these new event arcs, in much the same way T2A was introduced with an event arc?
(FoA or 'Followers of Armageddon' storyline for those not in the know)