UOAlive Day 217: What Kind(s) of Gamer Are You?

 

Don't groan at me. You know this is exhiliratingly exciting behind-the-scenes content for any hardcore gamer. Deep down in your heart, you have to admit a horrible truth: using spreadsheets and tables to assist in enhancing the gaming experience is an integral part of gaming - and it can be fun. *maniacal cackle as I continue my descent into madness*

The data collection and processing that goes into a guide (such as the informational page for Tailoring BODs) has to be compiled by somebody. Whether the compiler is a developer who has access to back-end information and statistics, a dedicated group of players who band together to combine their data, or a script is irrelevant. Somebody has to parse through the information before presenting the information relevant to the topic at hand in a table (or spreadsheet) for maximum reading comprehension.

For many games I can think of off the top of my head - including Ultima Online - the vast majority of the information players use has been built on the efforts of a very dedicated group of players who have banded together and shared their resources, time, and data through websites like UOGuide and UO Stratics. 

What kinds of gamers fill that niche? More importantly for this blog's context, what kinds of gamers dedicated a great deal of their time to fill that niche in the heyday of Ultima Online, before technology had reached the incredible heights it has soared to today (i.e. AI and program/script assisted data collation)?

I present to you my theory: I am a spreadsheet nerd.

A lot of what I choose to do in many open world games I play has led me to believe I am, perhaps, maybe, possibly, just a teeny tiny bit of a spreadsheet nerd in every way.

This is just a theory, though. I'm absolutely, supremely, positively certain that if I were to do a deep dive into my own gaming patterns, I could completely disprove this theory!

What's that? "Normal people don't document their gaming life in detail?" I can't hear you over the sounds of me running away, spreadsheets in hand, without a care in the world. :)

I spent my morning doing normal logistical work for my vendors. Some day I'll compile all this information in some meaningful way, but first I must collect all the information, buahahaha! Then I can make the numbers sing and tell me their stories! 

I checked the Housing Assessor/IDOC Checker/Traffic Light Color Changing Statue/Magincia Thingy. I need to figure out how frequently is best for checking this. I haven't come across any IDOCs for a couple of months.

 I'm trying to keep up with my hiryu hunting fame farming, but I don't currently have high hopes about reaching Knight any time soon. I'm getting burned out on my overall virtue grind and there are other things I want to do with my time. Maybe I can muster up a big, inspirational push into Knighthood without crashing and burning in the fires of shattered hopes and dreams.

I managed to get a decent chunk of cut leather to transfer into the main castle's tailoring resource box. This was about an hour's worth of farming.

I used the Dojo to sacrifice my fame. I'm only a few more fame farming sessions away from Knighthood! Assuming I stay on top of hiryu hunting :)

Can you imagine my absolute horror at the discovery of this outrageous spot thievery! How dare you! I was forced to sit on the bench instead of in between my other characters!

:P

UOAlive Day 214: Creature of Habit

 

This morning I could be found hunting hiryus for the first time in a while. My Sacrifice had nearly decayed into 'Seeker' status, so I figured I should take some time to give that virtue some love.

I went from 20%-40% after my sacrifice, so I think I have a buffer to ease myself back into Sacrifice grinding for that elusive Knight status.

I have nobody to blame but myself. Nearly two months ago, I got to the point where I needed one more fame farming session. It would've taken me anywhere from 1-3 hours depending on other players, the real world pulling me away every so often, and how my internet connection was handling the day. I just never took the time to do so, much less maintain that virtue, and now it's decayed to a point where I will probably end up in the same exact predicament. 

I'm really, really bad at doing dailies, regardless of the game I'm playing (the only exception to this is plant growing, and even then I sometimes miss a day because I'm human LOL). It took me entirely too long to complete the twenty day questline for the Winterspring Frostsaber mount in World of Warcraft. The quest took less than 20 minutes to do. It still took nearly four years between 2013 and 2017 for me to remember to find the twenty minutes to do it on twenty separate days. I still never ride that damn saber out of spite at the space its prerequisite questline took in my quest log and inventory.

The way one builds their Sacrifice virtue is essentially a daily quest. One that needs to be done at least weekly or you lose progress. Most virtues behave like this. They'll decay, generally on a weekly basis, and need work to maintain. I'm able to maintain my other virtues through my normal gameplay or in between my preferred gaming activities with little to no fuss. The long-term, sustained, albeit easy way Sacrifice grinding works makes it inherently difficult for me personally to grind to Knight. Especially since fame isn't easy for me to farm as a bard with a rural internet connection on the other side of the globe. :) Some part of me wonders if I'm a masochist because I always find myself gravitating towards non-meta 'classes' or 'builds'... like Ret Pallys in WoW.... 

In any case, I took some time to sit at the new polar bear spawns and see what I could find. This was the first time I'd had a chance to take a more thorough look at the new mobs since they were implemented.

I had a grizzly bear spawn, so I brought my tamer over and tamed him. After that, I had other things call me away from the game so I hopped off for the day.

UOAlive Day 213: Vendor Stocking

 

I've already had to restock my Alacrity Scrolls vendor. I'm glad these seem to be selling well. I don't need them and I know there are plenty of players who would enjoy even faster skill gains at what I hope are reasonable prices.

One of my clothing bless deeds sold. Yay! I think that's the most expensive thing I've ever sold on this server, at 165,000 gold. It's too early to tell if I need to adjust any other prices around on my T-BOD reward vendor, so I'm going to keep stocking everything at the prices I started out at.

I checked for IDOCs after I finished restocking. Unfortunately, neither of these two were ones Snow or I knew the location of. I didn't care to scour the entire lands for their whereabouts and contents, as I had different plans for the day. Namely, some back end work for a suggestion post I'm working on.

I love seeing how busy Britain is! It reminds me of some of my fondest childhood memories of UO in all the best ways.

UOAlive Day 212: House Organizing & Decorating

 

This morning I managed to catch Tr1age's stream while he worked on the second floor of the New Player Dungeon and hung out with a few members of the community. I really like that he offered that option to anybody who wanted to hang out with him in voice chat. It's my understanding that the goal of this dungeon is to help new players train their skills as well as teach them a few mechanics in a safe-ish environment. The dungeon has some vendors and a healer as well to assist in that endeavor. 

I spent most of today sorting through the castle and setting up the permanent guild gear/loot area. While sorting, I finally found a wheelbarrow I had managed to misplace a couple of months ago while moving the wheelbarrows to a different location. At the time, I couldn't figure out which container I had accidentally dropped the wheelbarrow into. Through various adventures, backpack unloading, and unsorted loot drop-offs, the chest that contained the wheelbarrow got lost in the various containers strewn around the castle.

I'm usually much better at keeping my stuff organized, but between real life pulling me away at a moment's notice and more exciting ways to spend my time in game, my house organization has left a lot to be desired. 

Here is a perfect example of why relogging is one of the first things you should do if you encounter any weird issues in Ultima Online.

On the left side is my main account. While putting some stuff in the storage room, I noticed a chest appeared to be missing. Looking on my crafter account (on the right), however, showed me that the chest was still there. A quick relog fixed everything, and I was back to my exciting house sorting adventures! :)

Since my crafter was in the area, I decided to test out what this month's monthly colors look like in bed and carpet form. I shared my findings in Discord before continuing on with my day. I think I'll continue to do this with the monthly colors. It'll help serve as a reminder of some of the ways players can personalize their houses and showcase the monthly hues.

I had a bunch of alacrity and powerscrolls spread out across containers and storage books, so I took some time to sort those. My mad treasure hunting adventures have brought in more scrolls than I could ever hope to use.

I set up an alacrity scroll vendor - and promptly found out that I need even more space to sell everything. LOL. I tried stocking four of every skill I had, but I ran out of space on the vendor. I didn't have another employment contract on me, so I decided to hold off on stocking the rest of the skills until I know how the skills I've already stocked sell.

I'm not particularly interested in making a profit off of these, so I priced every single scroll at 500 gold pieces. 

My compassion and justice virtues had decayed to follower, so I took ten minutes to kill a few murderers and escort some NPCs.

This is what I've come up with for the guild loot area so far. It's not completely finished, and I may end up moving stuff around, but I'm moderately satisfied with how it turned out.

UOAlive Day 211: New Monthly Hues & Davies' Locker

 

This morning, I noticed a conspicuous new box at the bank. A server repair kit, you say? I am a stickybeak, so of course I had to investigate. 

I was amused to find baling wire, duct tape, super glue, and... bug spray? Oh, I get it. Bug spray. LOL I love easter eggs like this.

I pulled the pavers out of that bag I had issues with yesterday and wouldn't you know it, the bag released.

The stone building pieces are incredibly fun to work with, but some of the quirkiness with how they function in bags or boxes can be a hassle. 

The monthly hues were updated. The colors are inspired by the new murder bears and one of UOAlive's colors to celebrate the New Player Dungeon the admins have been working on.

My main account is finally old enough to claim my own Davies' Locker, so I grabbed that to replace the one I lost. I know there are some unsorted IDOC treasure maps hiding in some chests, so at some point I need to go through all of our IDOC loot and put those maps into the locker.

UOAlive Day 210: Murder Bear Patch & Emporium Tending

 

Early this morning, Tr1age restarted the server for patch day and to implement the ridable polar/grizzly/black/murder bears Snow suggested a few months back. After reading the patch notes to get an idea of where these new and exciting bears would be, I decided to quickly run around Deceit to see if I could catch any early spawns of these exciting new creatures.

I didn't see any of the new bears, but I did run into a bunch of other players who had the same hopes as me. It was quite enjoyable seeing how talkative everybody on the server was, sharing their insights as they slaughtered their way through hordes of polar bears.

My scribe vendor needed restocking, so I took a moment to do that. I still haven't gone through and adjusted some of the prices I think may need adjusting. Sometimes it feels like a price adjustment isn't necessary, as everything still sells. I'll have to keep an eye on things.

Snow hopped on for a while to search for her own polar bears. I decided against searching for any bears for the rest of the day. The spawns were already packed with other players who wanted to try out the new tame and I had other things I knew needed to get done.

Since I've been neglecting plant growing in favor of the Artisan Festival, I finally grabbed all of the plants that have been ready to harvest for a couple of weeks.

If I knew that tree was going to be such a pain to see behind, I would've placed this castle plot a couple more tiles to the west. It's impossible to see the garden plots behind the top of the tree. I usually have to resort to holding control+shift and sifting though the item handles.

I restocked the plant vendors as well. I still haven't decided whether I'm going to put up a natural dye vendor. I have no idea what I would price each dye at, and I would need to go grind out some of the materials needed for the dyes. Not to mention more Naturalist quest runs for the more desirable dye colors. Hmmm... decisions, decisions.

 While I was stocking the Emporium, Snow let me know that she left a present for me in my mailbox - a new ridable black bear! I've decided to sit on this bear when I'm letting my tamer AFK at Brit bank for Britcoin.

While in the process of planting a bunch of seeds, I bought 18 more garden beds. Unfortunately, I discovered that the same add-on proximity to door annoyance I had to deal with in one of the bathrooms at my main castle is an issue here. I think I can get away with placing two 2x3s here, but this quirk of add-ons is a little frustrating. I don't want to have to make my rooms bigger to fit in certain add-on based decorative (and functional) elements. Sigh. I'm spoiled by some older decorating rules and mechanics. Don't mind me. LOL.

That about sums up my time in UO today. I did take a bit of time to further declutter my main castle, but I ran into some issues with a decorative kitchen set bag telling me I can't release it. I think it may be tied to the stone pavers inside, but I didn't want to go through the trouble of testing it out when I wasn't too fussed on moving that bag anyway.

UOAlive Day 205: Oops And New Years Resolutions

 

I got some bad news yesterday and didn't get a chance to grab my goodies from the artisan tree before it disappeared. Oops. That was my fault for miscounting how much time I had left to grab those rewards.

Since the last big project I began last year has ended, it's time to look forward at what I hope to accomplish this year:

• Become the ultimate virtuous person. I've always wanted to max out all my virtues, and this is the closest I have ever come to achieving that goal. I'm not entirely sure how I'll farm honor on a bard, but I look forward to the challenge whenever that day comes!
• Finally finish decorating my main castle. I think I'm at a comfortable place gold and resource-wise where I can knock out the majority of decorating in a couple of sessions. It's just a matter of not getting distracted by other things!
• Fill the rest of The Emporium with Raised Garden Beds. Now that my BOD addiction has been sated, it's time to return to my one true love: plants.
• Train my own pet. I still haven't touched animal training beyond the cu training I did during our Travesty adventures. This is a problem, and I need to fix that!
• Write a silly series of stories to tell the story of my main castle decorations. I have some pun-tastic ideas in my brain that are related to a real world passion of mine, but I'm not sure I can successfully translate that into some short stories. I'm out of practice in creative writing.
• Submit a suggestion or bug report on the plant growing system to the admins. If I go the simple bug route, I just need to let them know that ServUO doesn't have the colored peculiar plants that OSI UO has and explain that realistically, it can never be implemented in the same exact way as OSI's implementation. If I go the full suggestion route, I want to take the time to mess around with various additional plant types and colors in a private server to demonstrate why we need even more plants.
  

I'm probably going to take a break from Ultima Online for a few days and take care of some things in other realms before jumping back into Britannia. I've been spending all of my free time on UO over the past month and I need a tiny palate cleanser. :)

UOAlive Day 203: Tailor Bulk Order Deed Reward Vendor

 

This morning I took some time to turn in small BODs on all my characters before the timer on the Artisan tree ran out.

I finally took the time to set up a Tailor BOD rewards vendor. I don't know how or if anything will sell, and I haven't decided whether I'm going to advertise my goods in Discord, but I know a few things have gone onto that vendor at a much cheaper rate than elsewhere :)

UOAlive Day 201: Meeting the Neighbors!

 

Early this morning I happened to catch somebody asking for my tamer by name in general chat. They turned out to be my neighbor and needed some seeds for their own plant growing projects. We exchanged pleasantries, I got them set up, and we wished each other well on our journeys before returning to our own adventures. :)

My adventures, of course, took me back to Yew to continue working to advance the tree.

In the end, I contributed 5,557 banked points' worth of large BODs to the Yew tree. I fear I'm going to dream about BOD filling for the foreseeable future.

I decided to check the Magincia IDOC stone (I don't know what it's officially called but that's what it's called in my head) while I was in the area converting Britcoin. I still haven't attended any of the IDOCs since this has been implemented. The houses... they call...

I turned in a few small BODs to build up a stock of large BODs in preparation for future BOD-ventures, but my adventuring time in Britannia was limited today and I didn't end up filling the large BODs.

UOAlive Day 200: Yew Artisan Festival

 

This morning I decided to do some experimentation with the bribing system. I never really had a reason to use it on OSI, as by the time the bribery system was implemented I well and truly had a BOD collection beyond anything I could ever hope to fully complete (not without trying, let me tell you!).

Unfortunately, the tailor I chose to try some testing on immediately gave me a ridiculous high cost to grease his palms. I ended up finding alternative tailors across Britannia who were a bit more reasonable in their demands.

I'm trying to find a good way to build up a supply of higher value BODs so I can fill out my future T-BOD reward vendor's higher value offerings. It seems that since the bribing system was implemented, the only way to get most of the highest value BODs is through bribing.

All of my mad thread spinning last night resulted in 6000 spools of thread, so I spent my morning throwing that on the loom to turn into bolts of cloth.

While taking a break in between mass "last object" then "last target" sessions, I looked at vendor search to see if other players had began undercutting my prices. To my dismay, they not only had, they had the audacity to label their stuff using the same wording as me! This shall not stand!

Just kidding. I think it's cool that others find the information helpful enough that they decided to use it themselves. Or perhaps they decided to do this all on themselves? Who knows? All I know is I'm going to have to keep an eye on what sells on my vendor to see if prices need to be adjusted. I've been meaning to do that for a while. When I initially set up most of my vendors, a lot of what I was offering either wasn't already on vendor search or was priced for a different market than the server has now. In my experience, there are plenty of players who need a lot of the basics on a consistent basis and there are plenty of niches just begging to be filled on vendor search. The players are there, the vendors just need to catch up!

Those 6000 spools of thread ended up converting into an entire stack of cloth. Woot! I think I can safely say I won't have to look at spinning wheels or looms for at least a few months. LOL!

 This is usually my screen on my bard in between large BOD filling. Since my bard has magery, I save the bulk of the BOD turn-ins for that character to easily get to and from the current Artisan tree. I also track how many banked points' worth of BODs I intend to give to the tree. If I had thought to do more work leading up to the Artisan Festival, I'm sure I could have figured out a way to document each and every single BOD's contents that I donated, but I didn't think to do that and so I was stuck with a much more rudimentary method of data collation. 

Though, that does give me an idea for a project for next year... Yay, speadsheets!

A fellow player was forced to bear witness to my BOD filling addiction. The fool made the mistake of showing up to the new location in Yew at the same time as me!

They were forced to watch as I threw BOD after BOD in the elf's face, forcing the tree to grow at unimaginable speeds.

They couldn't bear the mess of fireworks, screaming elves, and groaning tree branches. They decided to retreat to a safe distance and continue their gazing from afar.

In reality, they were just marking their rune, much like I had just done, and they promptly recalled away, presumably to fill BODs just like me. :)

I finished throwing the large BODs on the elf, 59 in total, and promptly recalled away to fill more BODs.

This is usually my screen after I've organized the T-BOD rewards I've accrued after turning in a bunch of small BODs. Some day I'll fully organize everything... but that day is not today!

I've been spending so much time away from Brit Bank on two of my accounts that a couple of people have moved into my AFK spot. How. Dare. They. :P

I had to park my crafter and bard on the benches overnight instead.