The new anti zerg laws!

[halygon]

As progressive as UOF is, any fundamental changes to the game, such as PvP mechanics are going to be widely unpopular. Even if the changes were for the better overall, it is taking too large of a step away from the realm of the old school UO that we all know and love.

Ultima Online is a very old game, and we are playing a very old publish. Things were far from balanced in many aspects then and still are, but that's what makes it so great. This separates UO from so many other games that are trying to balance and fine tune every detail so that everyone has a good time (e.g. PvP-oriented MMOs with no looting). It's an open world for us to make of it what we want. For every shitty feature or imbalance, there's an opportunity to overcome it.

If you are looking for "field"-style PvP without the numbers games, I would suggest searching for other people with the same interest and try to start player-held "field"-PvP duels, tournaments, or maybe something like a sparring league. I imagine players would be much more accepting and supportive of something like that, rather than a server-wide revamping of the core PvP mechanics.

Heres the thing. Within the UO Freeshard community, there are not a ton of players. I would not be surprised if the total number of unique players for all freeshards is less than 2000. Out of that group, only about 20% or so are PvPers with enough experience and know how to run pvp guilds,do faction events, and run IDOCs, etc... all the things that build up PvP hype on a shard.

This shard has very few of those players as they were not paid attention to over the past year+. Most have dropped off to go to other shards. This leaves a huge PvP hole on this shard and also a lack of hype towards that aspect of game play. UOF has done a great job of pulling in PvM folks and players that have never played UO before. Carl had said before that this last group makes up about 90% of the shard. These people do not know what UO means to us veterans nor understand how much fun PvP can be... there just isn't a structure in place to build up PvP and the players that might want to do that. It is no surprise that any trammy changes proposed are immediately adopted as the players do not understand what "trammel" really means to veteran players.

For veteran players, "Trammel" is the concept of UO moving away from an open-choice environment to a more structured one. The idea of honor and gentlemen's agreement goes out the window because it is not required because hard coded rules are in place to prevent "unwanted" gameplay mechanics.