In Mani Ylem
Why bother removing their reflect when you can summon a ham Inspired by the late In Por Ylem, In Mani Ylem is the latest and greatest reincarnation of classic Ultima Online. IMY appeals to PKs and role-players alike. [ Felucca Only T2A Ruleset ]
I, like so many others, really fell in love with Ultima Online during the 03997 beta test - and beyond. It was a completely unique gaming experience. Sure, there had been other online games before it, but nothing that gave you such an unscripted story, such an open book. You had the freedom to do literally anything you wanted As most of you know, gradually, this feeling diminished more and more each update. Many of the old timers that I know were scared away well before the 03999 and 03900 updates. I lasted until not long after the release of Trammel. It was all undone by the release of AoS. The game no longer even remotely resembled the game we used to play all day (and night) Sure, it is easy to criticize someone else039s work when you aren039t constrained by their managers and budget. We probably will never really know why things went down the drain the way they did. I had tried earlier UO server emulators over the years, and disliked them all across the board. The first time I tried RunUO (one of the beta builds) I was in awe. Now this was a powerful tool I ran around my own single player world and examined all of the code. I couldn039t believe how fantastic a job this 039krrios039 guy had done. I quickly learned how to connect to other player-created servers and see what people had used this amazing tool for...Trash Everywhere I looked were neon katanas, magic purple horses, incredibly easy skill gain, administrators killing people at the bank, people cheating around town at blinding speed, monster spawns and custom housing that looked like a drunken monkey had made them. I gave up on it for a year or so, then tried again. Same thing, everywhere I looked By this time there were larger servers with hundreds of players, but they still didn039t seem anything like what UO quotshouldquot have been in my opinion. I tried several of them for short periods of time, saw enough speed hackers and blessed true black clothes to last a lifetime, and threw in the towel once again. I tried some of the other MMO039s over the years : EQ, AC, WOW, but all of them felt very structured. Like I wasn039t in control of my own destiny - quotI had better head to waypoint C and get back to work before someone spots me not grindingquotI tried IPY for a time as well. It came really close (at first) to the original idea of UO. I think this project was on the right track initially, but went downhill soon after. (Sound familiar OSI) One of the many problems here was that they only seemed to attract the quothardcore PKerquot crowd. This left a huge void in most of the world and economy. There was no effort whatsoever put into many of the skills that made the original game so robust. Their designer talked about how they needed to quotstay truequot to original OSI values, but they constantly tweaked with spell damages, weapon damages, and added lots of content specifically for PvP only. No to mention the crashes, unbelievable corruption (don039t get me started, on this one), serialization problems, and 45 second saves. Yes, 45 seconds This attention to only one facet of the game made the server boring, unattractive (or downright scary) for 9/10ths of the UO playing population. Ah, but they tried. By this time RunUO 1.0 RC1 had been released, and I started tinkering with it again. I started to realize several things immediately. First, most of the people running/creating these shards didn039t know the first thing about C programming, and were all copy/pasting each others code into various places and hoping for the best. Second, you realize what a terrible time the OSI guys must have had, originally, trying to keep everything balanced in a game world where you should be able to do anything you wish. I started out just seeing how hard it would have been to make a UO server like it quotshouldquot have been (how many people have tried this). I named the server 039In Mani Ylem039 after the quotsummon hamquot spell in early UO where create food made only hams. It was also a tribute to the noble effort of the folks at In Por Ylem who focused only on combat (thus the name of their server). I initially thought it would take two or three days, I could shake my fists at OSI and player-server designers for being inept, then close the book for good. But it wasn039t easy at all. I wrote up a 039to do039 list, pages long, of all the things that needed to happen for my server to be the way I had always wanted UO to be. As I worked on each one, and got more feedback from other early UO players, the list got longer instead of shorter. Problems upon problems upon problemsAnother tough job was spawning all of the monsters. I tried a few available monster spawning quotpacksquot written by other people, but each one was more useless than the last. I couldn039t believe that somewhere players were having to deal with this. Terathan keep had insane things like nightmares, balrons, dragons, poison elementals, ophidians and silver serpents all standing on the same square Clearly the servers this was intended for had no skill caps or something. I decided that monsters shouldn039t be the clueless creature standing next to 5 EV039s until it dies. Monsters needed to be harder, smarter. I remember in beta, for several days straight, just one troll wiped out everyone who ventured north of Minoc. It felt exciting to always be on the lookout for danger. I enlisted the help of several friends of mine (mostly ex-OSI seers) who had really explored the world in the old days. We walked around discussing each area, and what spawned where. I ended up wiping all spawns (including NPCs) and taking months to spawn the world by hand based on our memories of OSI. I039ve been on several servers where they claimed to do this, but clearly none actually have.I took a hard look at all of the non-combat skills and made myself answer the question quotHow did this originally work, and if it was originally useless, how would I like it to be useful while still staying true to the originalquot. With this method I made only minor changes to some skills, but major changes to a few. But the important thing is that it still has the feel of OSI. Remember, my original concept was quotWhat should OSI have donequot. I added things you could craft, animals you could tame, or ways to make money with the skill. Making money was a tough subject. One of the problems with virtually all player-run servers, and OSI after several rounds of duping bugs, was the economy was pretty wacky. The quotaverage wagequot of a player increased, without the price of goods. In the span of a few years, the amount of money an average player earned per hour was probably multiplied by 30 or 50, while the price of goods stayed at 0 (or almost 2x in some cases - like houses). Things aren039t going to stay sane for very long with this going on. The same rings true on most player servers no one bothers to examine how much a katana costs at the blacksmith, how many ingots one takes to create, and how long it might take to get those ingots. I039m not saying I have the perfect answer to all of this, but at least I tried It039s a complicated problem based on peoples perceptions of what they are quotused toquot things costing on OSI or another server. In my spirit of quotWhat should OSI have donequot, for starters, they wouldn039t respond to duping bugs by a select few by allowing everyone to get tons of money. I always liked the original (alpha amp beta) idea of a finite amount of gold on the server. It039s a real pipe dream but I039d like to try that some day and see how supply/demand really works in a game.So it isn039t a bad thing that houses are harder to come by. If anyone remembers later (and probably still) on OSI, all of the land for placing houses was used, but with the economy how it was, everyone could afford castle deeds. What a let-down But this was partially due to the fact that the money for a house deed could be earned in hours or days. (or eBayed for 5 bucks) You can039t just give people money and houses, they will play your game for only a few hours. If someone enjoys the environment, and invests the time to earn some money and a house, they will keep coming back indefinitely. If they don039t - well that039s OK too I have the house decay timer set to 6 months, so there is no worries if you feel like taking an extended break from the game. Anyone remember having to log in once a week to refresh their houses when you were sick of playing but didn039t want your hard earned stuff to just disappear It makes you less likely to want to come backTo me, it seemed, one of the major problems why everyone had gotten so disillusioned with UO was a simple matter of risk and reward, not just supply and demand. When you are absolutely sure no monster in a dungeon is going to kill you, and you know beforehand what kind of loot they have, what fun is that It turns into one of the most boring jobs in all of gaming, the EQ-style equipment camping.I tried my best to resolve a lof of predictability problems with tons and tons of randomization. I carefully randomized many of the smaller details most people will never notice. How often something spawns, how many spawn, how far away, how strong it is, etc. With items I very slightly randomized all aspects of their creation, so you never really know how good something is unless you try it. I randomized skill gain patterns, all sorts of loot functions. I even randomized the buying and selling of goods between NPCs so players can shop around for the best deals when buying reagents, or selling their crafted items. I even randomized the random things For example, a shopkeeper with a great deal on mandrake root might have a higher price the next day. Exciting exploration involves never really knowing what is lurking behind each corner, or what kind of items a monster will drop for you. Yes, I randomized that, too You may get a great magic weapon from an orc, or an even more unlikely source like a banker Uncertainty and danger makes things interesting. This includes dangers posed by other players, as well.Now we get on to the really touchy subject of player vs player affairs. I remember before, during, and after the murderous rampage days of 03998 on OSI. They responded by making life incredibly tough for murderers, and it did succeed in bringing some semblance of a peace to the land. But this caused a real problem, one of the largest there ever was in my opinion. They didn039t solve the problem by rewarding the opposite behavior, they tried to solve it by extremely harsh penalties if someone chose this particular playing style. This made it no fun for the people who enjoyed being red, and made the rest of the game no fun (or at least much less fun) for the people it was trying to protect. I realize hardcore Trammel-type players will never admit this, but when the risk was largely gone, the reward was largely gone as well. How fun is it really to stand in one place for an hour watching daemons die in the same spot How fun is it really to instantly travel to the bottom level of a dungeon, kill the one monster you knew had your item, then instantly leave. If that is fun for you, great, it will be even more fun here If that sounds boring and scripted, there are only two ways to solve it. You can bring some friends along Teamwork and group oriented activities are what make this game really fantastic. If you are really going to stand around and kill liches all day in complete safety, even that is made much more enjoyable with some friends around. You add some risk to the equation. If you don039t know how hard the monster is, or where another may come from, or if there is another player right around the corner, there is an increased element of risk. It makes you pay more attention, and it makes the reward, when you get it, that much sweeter.I have planned most of my work along a combination of both of these lines. quotBring some friends along, because you never know what is about to happenquot In this spirit, I would like to try and form player run towns (and/or guilds) based on home country. There is still great multilanguage support in the UO client for different languages, and I would really like to see groups banding together based on this. It would be, literally, like different races. War or Peace, Ally or Enemy, I would love to see what happens. If enough of your countrymen are around to get a good sized guild going, I will provide some sort of public group housing.Now ponder, for a moment, what would happen if OSI hadn039t been so murderers and forced the shard into two vastly disproportionate groups. What if they had rewarded killing the murderers even more than the murderers were rewarded for killing average Joe Someone with the skill to fight the fair fight against people who notoriously fight unfairly That person would would be held in awe by the common players who would one day hope to emulate him. You would find many of the quotmurdererquot type of players turning their ways around and hunting down their own kind for a serious challenge. They would be worthy of everyone039s high esteem. They would be worthy of ... fame.I hope you enjoy playing on my server. It has been a very difficult two year journey. I have resisted making the shard public for so many months, even as all of my friends thought I was crazy for working on this for such a long time. I promise to do my best to keep it balanced, and keep it available for years to come. If you choose to invest your hard work in my vision, I will do my best to keep your investment safe.-Admin
