One Year Later: It’s Time to Revist New Magincia
I just want to get this out of the way – how to fix New Magincia
– Move the bank closer to the town center
– Move the Moongate closer to the town center
– Add in some small NPC shops around the town center, include forges/anvils/looms
– Drop the theme pack restrictions for the bazaar
– Revisit the bazaar vendor fees
– Add a true town hall for player-run meetings and events.
– Treat New Magincia as a hub for new or returning players
I also want to get this out of the way – who is to blame?
We, the players, are to blame for the state of New Magincia. Cal Crowner, the producer of UO at the time, said that the UO team had listened to the player base, and to quote Cal: “what you do not want is….a Luna 2. So that is our goal…” That was entirely accurate – many players did not want a Luna 2. I was among them. We were very loud on UO Forums, on Stratics, on the UO Facebook page. The amount of hatred for Luna probably surprised some. There was just one problem: we still wanted something to bring players together, and ultimately some of the things that were done to prevent it from becoming another Luna also prevented it from living up to its full potential of bringing players together.
Can New Magincia be salvaged?
Absolutely. A lot of UO development and design resources went into New Magincia. The fact that it didn’t fulfill the goals that the UO team had for it, and that it’s very underutilized, doesn’t mean New Magincia should be written off. Quite the opposite – it wouldn’t take much to revitalize New Magincia, and lest we forget, New Magincia’s rebuilding wasn’t exactly finished as far as many of us were concerned.
The hardest work has already been done by the UO team – house placement, the lottery system, the bazaar system, the gardening, and some of the other minor things. Even just a few things, such as moving the bank and Moongate closer to the town center would be a huge start towards the next phase in rebuilding New Magincia.
Enter Tina Small and her Census
Tina Small, in a thread over at Stratics, has carried out a census of New Magincia (New Magincia at UO Guide) across all of the shards for the Trammel facet, and also for Siege Perilous.
New Magincia is one of the topics I have wanted to talk about, and her census led me into finishing this article. As Tina noted, it has been just over a year since the New Magincia lottery happened, with Publish 70 (Publish 70 at UO Guide). For a little background, you can take a look at the UO Team’s analysis of lottery sales.
The census included the following information:
– Which lots had shops
– Out of those, which shops had stocked vendors
– Privacy status of Non-shop lots – public or private
– Lots that were bare foundations with no walls
– Lots that were vacant
A survey was also done of all of the bazaar stalls, to determine how many were occupied and actually selling or buying items.
She then placed the results in a Google Spreadsheet.
You can find the legend in the second sheet (look for the tab at the bottom).
My observations on her census is that it mostly mirrored my impressions of activity on other shards – which were the most populous, least populous, etc. and it also tells you just how active the Japanese shards are.
So what went wrong?
The UO team listened to the players for starters. I’m not joking. The UO team listened to us, and deliberately built in restrictions that kept Luna 2 from happening. The UO designers and developers had very solid and very logical goals for New Magincia, and UO players were to play an integral part. They left certain gaps and needs for us to fill in, namely the shops, such as a blacksmith’s shop, weavers/tailors, gathering areas or town halls. The problem is that most players on most shards didn’t care to fill in those needs – they wanted a house within a guardzone or within New Magincia.
There were design problems – very few houses were close to the town center, meaning that even if players tried to fill in the gaps, with the location of most houses, they might as well have been located on the other side of the island.
The restrictions, the lack of players wanting or being able to fill in the gaps, and the lack of players in general, limited New Magincia’s usefulness before a single house was placed or a single vendor stall was rented. Parts of this can be remedied.
First, we need to look at what worked.
Guardzone Housing: It allowed a lot of players to have houses in a guardzone. Outside of grandfathered houses, or Luna, either of which cost more than most players can afford, New Magincia was the first chance for players to obtain guardzone housing at a reasonable cost, especially if you won the lottery. It’s changed things for Siege and Mugen in a large way as well.
New Magincia Bazaar: It made it easy for people to buy and sell certain resources, and most notably, it made it much easier for tamers to sell pets to players. Tamers have been yearning for something like this for years, because it can be difficult to sell pets, especially when your online hours are restricted or if you play opposite of a shard’s primetime.
Fishing: It is indeed a fishing area, with deep water accessible from the docks.
Gardening: It offered something for the gardeners, the ability to decorate the island. It’s not as important as the first two, but it was a unique test.
What Didn’t Work?
Now it’s time to address what didn’t work, but which can still be fixed. For the amount of developer resources that went into it, it is very underutilized, and I think it should be salvaged. I’m not going to address the things that can’t be fixed – unified architectural style, the virtue of “Humility”, the Council of Mages. Yes, the Council of Mages could be moved back, maybe even into the current bank, but they chose to move it elsewhere. What I want to address are the things that can be fixed.
New Magincia as the Heart of a Shard
New Magincia obviously never turned into the Luna 2.0 that many predicted (and I was one of those). Yes, I understand that the size of the UO playerbase directly impacts this, but there are major things that make New Magincia inconvenient, and those decisions were out of the hands of players.
New Magincia was never going to be Luna II anyways
New Magincia was never going to be Luna II regardless of where the bank or Moongate was placed. The layout, the spacing between houses prevented it. The New Magincia Bazaar vendor stalls. The gardening, the access to deep water and a dock, and access to water in general. Being a part of the original facet(s). All things that Luna does not possess. We as players didn’t realize that, both because we didn’t have the whole picture, and because our anger at the thought of a once great Ultima city being reduced to another Luna eyesore blinded us.
New Magincia – Bank, Moongate, Townhall
They need to be moved towards the center of town. The Moongate is so far away as to be useless, as is the bank. Bring them in closer to attract players. Turn the existing bank into a town hall of sorts. While there are places for players to gather, they are either too small (the gazebo), or they are in the middle of NPC vendors (too annoying). The current bank would make for a nice setting for a town hall or other gathering place for players.
New Magincia Bazaar – Drop the Theme Requirements
To place a stall in the New Magincia Bazaar (UO Guide), you need to purchase Gothic or Rustic Theme Packs. Like it or not, that was the decision. UO doesn’t operate at EA’s leisure – it must bring in revenue. However, it’s a year on, and the bazaars in the majority of shards outside of Japan are not even half full. In North America – only Atlantic, Lake Superior, Legends, Pacific, Chesapeake, and Great Lakes are at half full (or more). At this point, I doubt very many people are buying the theme packs with an eye towards placing vendors in the bazaar. If there were people doing that, we would have seen the results long before now.
It’s time to lift the restrictions on who can place vendors in the Bazaar and open it up to everybody.
New Magincia Bazaar – Revisit the Fees
For some it’s proving to be too expensive to maintain long-term stalls, or its discouraging the sales of certain items. Regardless of the impact of the low game population in general and the effect it has on sales, let’s revist the fees. Right now you are almost better off setting up your vendors at your house outside of New Magincia and just wander around New Magincia dropping runes.
Fill in the Missing NPC Shops
Part of the goal of New Magincia being a “player-built” or “player-run” town is that people would fill in the missing gaps, such as providing a blacksmith shop with anvils and forges, weaver/tailor areas, etc. Either it didn’t pan out as expected, or those areas are scattered away from the town center. It didn’t work as planned, so it’s time for the designers to step in and remedy the situation. NPC shops close to a town center are gathering places for players.
New Magincia as a hub for new or returning players
This might be the most controversial or resource-intensive thing I propose, but I believe it had been tossed around by some on the UO team. Had New Magincia lived up to the goals of its designers, it would have made for a great hub for new and returning players. I think it can still be a solid starting place for new and returning players. There is plenty of land available, and plenty of areas of New Magincia that are undeveloped.
New Magincia Can Be Saved
While the amount of resources that went into designing and developing New Magincia was large, that doesn’t mean those resources were wasted. As I said, most of the work has been done. Now it’s just a matter of the developers and designers tweaking things.
I do not believe that New Magincia should be written off by players, by UO designers or UO developers. It had the chance to be something really special, to present a unique gathering place for UO players. As I said, after all was said and done, it would never have been Luna 2.0, and so some of the things designed to prevent that need to be corrected, starting with the the bank, the Moongate, and adding in some needed NPC shops.
Thanks to Tina Small, Nimuaq, Martyna Zmuir, Petra Fyde for the things they mentioned.
Interesting article. Forgive me as I haven’t played UO, but from my examination of the map a big problem is that things are too spread out. Medieval cities and towns (on Earth, 14th century) were very compact. Functionality and practicality ruled every aspect of their surface coverage, organization and construction. Each street (including its breadth) had a purpose and there were few to no open areas other than intersections of large streets. Alleys between derelict merchant housing could be as narrow as four feet if even that.
The cities and towns were surrounded by a wall with one or more heavily fortified gates (one near the dock would suffice for New Magincia were it reined in). The width of the streets and the size and nature of the establishments which adorned them were generally arranged from the gate to the least-accessible areas by order of importance and status. The first thing travellers would see would be the most in-demand of establishments. Merchants typically lived in the upper level while selling from the lower.
There was a separate section of town for the homes of the wealthiest of merchants, the government and any other officials or highly-esteemed citizens. The poorest of laborers and merchants lived segregated in extremely small houses, sometimes shared by more than one family. They would work in the shops in a more prominent part of town and only eat and sleep in their homes.
Housing outside the wall was certainly more picturesque, though only within the confines of necessity. They’d usually have a small garden, outhouse, chicken coop, etc. While they could produce or sell whatever they liked, they didn’t have the benefit of the traffic of the city streets and as such were not so frequently visited.
Because this real-life arrangement evolved of necessity, it should suit UO for the same reasons. You traverse the gates, your every desire beckons for satisfaction as you walk down the main street, and your progression deeper into the city reveals the true character of its people, for better or worse. Just a theory, so let me know if any of this jives with your analysis.
@Sanctimonia
It is spread out, but part of that is due to the fact that people didn’t want another Luna. Luna is a wall-to-wall stripmall with just about every house or every other house full of vendors, and there is very little space between houses. It’s annoying, it’s an eyesore, every house has a different design. You lose the immersion completely. Luna also reminds me of those huge shopping areas in Second Life.
At the time when we first heard they were going to finally get New Magincia populated, I had hoped that they would have close houses, but would restrict the housing tiles that could be used, as well as the number of NPC vendors, just for the immersion factor. My view was, as a bit of a role-player, that the houses should use the materials available to them, and not imported from all parts of the game world.
Somebody on UO Forums or Stratics mentioned that they should have a fully built village in New Magincia, and have instanced housing so that a lot of people could live there. I can see reasons why they wouldn’t but, the thought was very interesting.
The spreading out is not the biggest problem as far as the houses, it’s the lack of a true town center. You have the moongate on the other side of the island, and you have the bank on the eastern edge of the island. While a major part of the appeal of Luna is having all of those houses next to each other with vendors, the bigger part is that the moongate, banks, and NPC shops are all very close to one another. It’s a hub of sorts.
When UO was designed, there wasn’t really prior knowledge on what makes for good player hubs. Luna as a means to bring players together works well. Whether it was based on other MMORPGs (EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot), I don’t know.
Personally I would like to see some of the older cities in UO redesigned to become player hubs. I don’t like Luna because it’s too much of an eyesore. Skara Brae maybe the best candidate outside of New Magincia. Skara’s moongate is a few screens over from the bank, the stables are near the bank, if the Inn were a little closer, it’d be just about perfect.
It’s ironic that they are redesigning the dungeons and some of the spawns in UO – I think they ought to redesign some of the towns as well. Those towns were really designed from the perspective of the single-player Ultimas. Even Britain, which was the main hub for UO for a long time, still had a lot of scattered “critical” locations. Whether we like it or not, Luna proved that players will put up with an eyesore when it comes to hubs.
Though I haven’t seen it, Luna sounds somewhat like what a medieval town might actually look like. Prior to laws being passed about leaving entrails and feces in the streets and keeping the tanneries and butchers all in one location, calling it an eyesore would be a compliment, haha.
You mentioned that in Luna every house had a different design. In general structures were build from whatever was available in the area (which you also wisely suggested be implemented). The more wealth/status the building owner had, the better the construction, materials and maintenance. How “visible” the structure was also affected its quality of maintenance, as officials wouldn’t bother with out-of-site structures like the poorest of housing.
New Magincia had both mountains and forest in Ultima IV and V, but in VI and VII it had neither to speak of and appeared to be agricultural/grasslands. Buccaneers Den is extremely close and has always had mountains, but little to no forests. Both are islands and port cities, so stone construction in New Magincia is entirely possible for the more expensive buildings. Timber a little more so as it would have to be shipped in from the mainland.
Poor houses would probably be constructed with cob and cheap timber walls with thatch or wooden shingle roofs. Nicer ones with cob or stone and tiled roofs. The best would be all stone walls, oak timber framing with stone footings and tiled roofs. Vaulted stone ceilings would probably be the apex of construction and non-existent in New Magincia.
I’m not too keen on the idea of instancing things. It’s a technical cop-out in my book, a convenience that breaks immersion as violently as it can be. While it would solve some problems, it comes at a cost.
I’m not sure where the moongate is positioned relative to the docks, but a moongate effectively is a port and would be given much importance as a point of entry into town (though less than the docks for sheer volume and size of what it permits entry). If the docks and moongate were on opposite ends, there would be two gates in the wall. And any town worth saving -always- has a wall, to be clear.
Player housing would either be outside the wall and sparse or inside the wall, densely packed, small, and in a less-visible, segregated area of town. It’s either the country or the ghetto, basically. The exception are the homes of wealthy merchants/officials/etc. which would have their own area away from the markets and the poor housing. In any case, housing would be nowhere near the merchants except for those who lived in the second story of their shops. It’s much like a modern city, but on a much smaller, more compact scale.
I don’t know if this is outside the scope of the UO engine, but a neat solution would be to require the vote of a “town council” to approve new construction, publicly-funded renovation or re-purposing of a structure. You could reorganize the town as deemed logical and tasteful by the players who have council membership (local governance).
Anyway, I think this is such a cool subject, not just for UO but for myself and others trying to “create worlds”. 🙂
I’ll try and get some screenshots posted of Luna and New Magincia to show you better what I mean.