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Draconi_EA UO Lead Designer


Hello everyone!

The design team has recently been provided with better tools to identify paying accounts versus free trial accounts once a player has logged in. Up until now content and systems within UO have not been designed in a way that discourages exploitative behavior, treating both types equally.

As you can imagine, this has led some very negative consequences. Resource farming, scripting, house placement exploits – these are all things taken advantage of by unscrupulous individuals abusing trial accounts. In turn, we’ve had to put hard caps on usage of various game features; for instance, having to wait an artificial thirty days after making a character before you can do certain things.

We now have the tools in place to accomplish two major things: restrict usage of some features to paying subscribers, and release the “character age” restrictions in others.

Some examples would include:
Only letting paying subscribers create/trade houses
Make BODs only available to paying subscribers
Remove character age requirements for placing houses
Those aren’t the only things we’re looking at, but before we get too ahead of ourselves, I’d like to solicit your feedback.

I strongly believe this new ability will make the game healthier, and reward loyal players while removing the ease with which our systems are exploited. I should reiterate that this is only an effort to fix a gaping hole in the way we design our systems. This isn’t a change to the way UO’s subscription model works in any way.

Our definition of trial accounts does *not* include the free game time associated with buying an actual release of the game. That first month of paid subscription entitles you to *all* the benefits of a regular subscriber. These restrictions will only be applied to the free trial accounts.

We’re currently targeting these changes for Publish 58.

I’m opening this thread to discuss:
Discussion on the impact of being able to restrict trial users from some systems
What systems you feel are meant for paying subscribers
What current “age related” restrictions you’d like to see removed
Thank you,

Tim "Draconi" Cotten