A Comment on Grinding and City Loyalty

What Are We Talking About?
The decay of city loyalty ratings and how you maintain them by logging in every day.

What Prompted This?
There was a thread on Stratics, since locked, about grinding in UO and how unhappy some players are with it, with an emphasis on the city loyalty points. Actually there were/are several threads, but one in particular discussed the grinding aspect and the city loyalty ratings/points decay if you don’t login every day. Somebody emailed me the thread this morning and asked me for a comment. My comment was that it would be locked, and it was at some point this afternoon.

The UO team has made it clear that they are keeping this around – rather than removing the daily login requirement, they reduced the decay. Yes, they listened to the players and reduced the decay, but ultimately the decay and login requirements are still there.

The person who emailed me also asked what I thought. Even though I’ve been busy for the past week or two with a couple of things, in light of recent events and the last publish (UO Guide), it does bear discussing a bit more.

The Short Version of This Article
I think it’s not a very good design. I have yet to encounter anybody or read one post that can logically defend why one person who spends a few minutes logging in every day is somehow more loyal to a city than a person who doesn’t. All it proves is that somebody can login every day. It doesn’t take into account people who may concentrate or confined their playing to a few days a week.

Background
I covered grinding quite a bit back in April and early this month, especially in my “Embrace the Ultima” article:
– Reflections on Ultima VII and UO: Embrace the Ultima
– Ultima Online: The Awakening (Are We The Rioters?)

Is it Even Grinding?
While I think that the city loyalty issues and grinding are two different issues, at least in the case of the daily login requirements, for the sake of argument, I’ll keep them together. After all, if you DON’T login daily, you will find yourself grinding through the rioters part of the story arc to again raise that rating.

What About the Old Housing System?
Yes, you could lose a house if you didn’t refresh it every so often. I didn’t think much of that mechanism back then, but at least if you logged in every so often and refreshed your house, everything stayed the same. Under this loyalty decay system, you’re required to login every single day or you lose something.

High Seas, Resource Gathering
High Seas and the randomized resource gathering also come up in discussions of grinding, and I’ve already addressed those – Let’s Revisit High Seas, Mining, and Lumberjacking . It is a problem, and I think in the case of High Seas, it turns people off to participating in a key aspect of it.

UO Has (Almost) Always Had a Grind
I’ve also said in the past that in some ways, grinding has always been present in UO – we grind our way to GM or above in certain areas – nobody can forget burning through however many potions or tinkering through lockpicks, etc. to get to GM status. It’s not nearly as interesting or productive as say GMing a fighting skill or healing or lumberjacking or mining, where it can at least be enjoyable and very productive along the way. For the most part, they are one-time grinds with rewards along the way and so we don’t mind them.

Because a lot of people GMed a lot of their skills in the past they have forgotten that UO has plenty of grind-like areas, and therefore anything new that is introduced and feels like grinding immediately gets a lot of attention.

City Loyalty and Logging In
This topic is on a lot of peoples’ minds lately because one of a new mechanism, city loyalty rating, that has been introduced into The Awakening, the current story arc. You gain loyalty by performing positive or negative actions that benefit or harm a city.

You can benefit from this by acquiring/buying city banners as well as city titles. The loyalty rating decays though, and that’s the issue that people have with this. You won’t lose your banners or titles, but you can lose the loyalty rating you worked for, and you have to do everything all over again if you want to get your loyalty rating back up.

You are supposed to be able to maintain this loyalty rating (or loyalty points), along with your faction and virtue points, by logging in daily.

Yes, you heard right.

Logging in keeps your loyalty rating intact. Now there is a bug that keeps people from maintaining their rating just by logging in, and it is being investigated by the UO team, but my question is not about the current bug, it’s about why we have to login daily in the first place.

I could understand keeping your loyalty rating the same by engaging in certain in-game activities on a weekly or monthly basis. Along the lines of doing 5-10 things every so often to show you still care about the city. Makes for good roleplaying.

But simply logging in?

BUT I WANT TO GO ON A VACATION!!!
At some point the rioters, raiders, what have you, will be permanently dealt with and they won’t be a part of the game anymore. If there is nothing to replace them as far as manipulating your loyalty rating, what happens if you go on vacation or take a weekend trip somewhere, or you just are unable or unwilling to login every day?

How to Fix This?
#1 Communicate with the players about this. The players have spoken, let’s hear your side.
#2 Remove the login requirement.
#3 Make the system permanent, and create other aspects that allow players to gain or keep loyalty ratings long after the rioters/protestors are gone.

#3 is I think is almost as important as #1 and #2. When this story arc ends, people need a way to obtain these ratings in the future, or regain them if they lose them. Just as Clean-Up Britannia is now a welcome and permanent addition, this could be a welcome and permanent addition to UO. UO has a relatively small team and a relatively small playerbase. It’s not a good use of development resources to create a system that will be off limits to future players or players who are unable to participate now, but maybe able to do so in the future. You also don’t want a system that is setup in such a way that players who participate now may lose the work they’ve put in because they went out of town or their computer crashed or they have other obligations.

Let me end this by saying I don’t want the players to dictate UO’s direction, because in some ways UO is where it’s at because of the players – a couple of failed new clients and a company too skittish to advance UO technically to a point where it can be drawing in a lot of new players. Sound contradictory? Yes it is, but there are always exceptions.

When you have something that most everybody concerned agrees is annoying, and where its defenders cannot make a valid argument in its defense, it’s time to reconsider. You’re creating a situation where 3 months or 6 months down the road somebody is going to lose their loyalty rating and will not be able to get it back. That means they are going to get pissed, and they are not going to be too thrilled to participate in future story arcs.

There’s nothing wrong with giving people good reasons to login. It’s what helps keep the game healthy. Logging in a character for a few seconds just to refresh a rating they’ve already earned is not a good reason to login.