Unhelpful

Just thought I’d cap “The UO Weekend from Hell” by letting you know that Asheron’s Call is still running.

Normally.

Hence, no news - though if it were UO and it were working, maybe that would be news.

No scandals, torrid tales of thousands of customers simultaneously being yanked around by the shorts, and since it doesn’t have a bunch of power-addled GMs running around enforcing play style like EQ, there’s no individual tales of woe of note lately, either.

Anyway, back to UO.

For me, the question wasn’t why I quit UO. The question was why did I stick with it for so long? During the entire time I played, from release in late ‘97 to late ‘99, I was waiting.

And that’s the key.

It’s why a lot of you are still playing, too. Let me describe my situation in particular.

In my case, I began by waiting to develop my character, which was entirely my affair. This was followed by waiting for OSI to code in half of the features they had planned in the game. After all, they couldn’t possibly call it a finished Ultima product until there was a virtue system, right?

What we were given instead of a complex inter-related system of virtue scales was a good/evil teeter-totter. So with that “wait” over, though I wasn’t much happy with the result, the next thing to wait for was the plot. Realizing that this was pretty slow in coming, several of us decided to make our own plots, with real Britannian characters with real Britannian backgrounds. We forged along, and one of us apparently had some GM connections. Then we waited for some support we were implied might be possible for our events. We didn’t just wait, though, as we valued our independence.

Then, after finishing the first cycle of our events, several of us were invited to apply for the Seer program. Some of us had no idea we’d been put in for it, including myself. So then we waited with anticipation of what could come of our humble beginnings. Eventually, the e-mail I was waiting for arrived, and several of my friends and I were officially accepted.

So then we wait some more. We get introduced to the system. The system involves a lot of … you guessed it … waiting. Submit an RPC proposal, wait for it to go through the official channels. Submit a quest event, wait for the pitifully understaffed IGM department to respond. Eventually, you get sick of waiting impatiently. Waiting patiently sure is easier. The next thing I know, a year’s gone by and it occurs to me that our independent role-play group accomplished more in three months than we had as Seers in nine months… a lot more.

The IGM staff fluctuates but never gets substantially bigger. The “solution” to this - in other words, the solution to letting us actually do what we were invited to do in the first place - is to give us tools to do things without having to beg an IGM for attention. So then we wait for powers. And wait and wait and wait. It’s audacious, we spent much of our time waiting for the program to become a priority for OSI. Clearly, it never quite got to that point. Everything’s always coming “Real Soon now” ™.

Eventually, you stop “waiting”, as such, because that gets really old. After a while, I’m just in it because I’ve bought the ticket, and by god no matter how bad the movie is, I’m going to see how it ends. The longer I watched it dispassionately, the more I started agreeing with Lum’s proposal that maybe the entire system needs to be dismantled.

It gets to the point where you’re waiting for something to wait for. The last straw that made me quit was a small enough incident, but representative of that which was causing me dissatisfaction.

And that’s just one person’s experience. I’ve heard countless others who were waiting for good/evil, waiting for necromancy, waiting for advanced alchemy, waiting for T2A housing, waiting for factions, waiting for UO:R housing.

If you’re still having fun in the game you’re playing, more power to you. But if you’re “waiting” for something, I whole-heartedly encourage you to re-examine your relationship with the MRPG of your choice, whatever it is.

After all, it’s a game - should you have to wait to have fun?

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