I will trade you a black dye, a dragon statue and a Keep in Moonglow for it.

Nice, but watch out for the falling gold plaque in the courtyard. It's a doozy.

I guess taste is just a fantasy as well.

redmid17: [img87.imageshack.us image 448x336]

OMG That shiat still cracks me up! Can't believe you have that screenshot still.

I just looked at his house and the decor is as garish as anything you'd find in Britannia. Not surprisingly.

EvilEgg: Speaker2Animals: Am I getting blind in my old age or does that story fail to note WHERE THE F*CKING PLACE IS?

Britannia. At the northeast corner of the bay if I recall correctly. Watch out for whirlpools.

That's Lord Blackthorn's castle IIRC. Lord British's castle was more or less in the middle of the city.

I have meditated on all 8 of the virtues.

I can has mansion now?

Pretty damn tacky.

Did one of his fans kill him again?

Richard's always been big on the cool houses, I wanted to see this one but never got the chance.

/IUsed to be his neighbor when he was a student at UT Austin
//I'm a character in Ultima I
///Really

Site is WebSensed so I can't read it. Does it say why he's selling it? I assume it isn't bankruptcy no matter how much I wish it was.

/You made some great games, Garriot
//Too bad you royally farked up NCSoft
///not just talking about Tabula Rasa either

dprathbun: Pretty damn tacky.

When the nouveau riche turn away and bury their face in their appletinis you know you've done something egregious.

I am playing UO right now, so I am really....

I miss Ultima Online. The beautiful thing about it was it was all there was. It forced all the different playstyles to interact with each other and made for a really interesting, dynamic world. Then they introduced Trammel and ruined the whole thing. Trammel/Felucca is a pretty good metaphor for the state of MMOs as a whole right now. They're either entirely carebear with maybe some no-consequences 'consensual' PvP, or they are just an unplayable gankfest.

I realize this has nothing to do with LBs castle... I just miss Ultima. Maybe someday the consumer base for MMOs will grow big enough for something other than EQ/WoW clones, but until then I'll keep playing Elder Scrolls and pining for Ultima.

JesusJuice: I miss Ultima Online. The beautiful thing about it was it was all there was. It forced all the different playstyles to interact with each other and made for a really interesting, dynamic world. Then they introduced Trammel and ruined the whole thing. Trammel/Felucca is a pretty good metaphor for the state of MMOs as a whole right now. They're either entirely carebear with maybe some no-consequences 'consensual' PvP, or they are just an unplayable gankfest.

I realize this has nothing to do with LBs castle... I just miss Ultima. Maybe someday the consumer base for MMOs will grow big enough for something other than EQ/WoW clones, but until then I'll keep playing Elder Scrolls and pining for Ultima.


I really miss those days in UO. Why make a miner when you can just kill miners on there way back to the bank?
farkyeah.jpg

Are there any means of playing UO in it's non-neutered state? I'm thinking along the lines of the pirate WoW servers still rocking vanilla. I never got to experience it back in the day. I was too young and there was no way my parents were going to let me play a game with a monthly fee.

Need a Dispenser Here: Are there any means of playing UO in it's non-neutered state? I'm thinking along the lines of the pirate WoW servers still rocking vanilla. I never got to experience it back in the day. I was too young and there was no way my parents were going to let me play a game with a monthly fee.

yes easily

Google Freeshard UO T2A

JesusJuice: I miss Ultima Online. The beautiful thing about it was it was all there was. It forced all the different playstyles to interact with each other and made for a really interesting, dynamic world. Then they introduced Trammel and ruined the whole thing. Trammel/Felucca is a pretty good metaphor for the state of MMOs as a whole right now. They're either entirely carebear with maybe some no-consequences 'consensual' PvP, or they are just an unplayable gankfest.

I realize this has nothing to do with LBs castle... I just miss Ultima. Maybe someday the consumer base for MMOs will grow big enough for something other than EQ/WoW clones, but until then I'll keep playing Elder Scrolls and pining for Ultima.

EVE Online is all I have to say about that.

redmid17: [img87.imageshack.us image 448x336]

Oh man that brings back memories. Last MMORPG I ever played.

that's not a farking castle, that's a mcmansion. (or at least as tacky)

usch.... just no class whatsoever in the decor. ugly.ugly.ugly

I just remembered the first trolls I ever encountered. The infamous bank thief, which followed the previous version of the house thief. Of course trapped boxes were always a big hit.

Genju: Site is WebSensed so I can't read it. Does it say why he's selling it? I assume it isn't bankruptcy no matter how much I wish it was.

Quite the opposite, apparently. The article notes he's in the middle of building Britannia Manor version 3.0.

Genju: Site is WebSensed so I can't read it. Does it say why he's selling it? I assume it isn't bankruptcy no matter how much I wish it was.

/You made some great games, Garriot
//Too bad you royally farked up NCSoft
///not just talking about Tabula Rasa either

IIRC, I read in a related article that it's because he's building a third Castle.

Also, his house is unique enough to warrant its own wiki entry:
Britannia_Manor

(favorite entry: "In 1997 the house was broken into by a deranged fan. Garriott held him off with an Uzi, firing a warning shot while waiting for police to arrive")

Gunderson: (favorite entry: "In 1997 the house was broken into by a deranged fan. Garriott held him off with an Uzi, firing a warning shot while waiting for police to arrive")

and Russian nightvision goggles


/he was my former boss

UO was awesome. I still don't have the heart to cancel my accounts, even though I don't play it anymore.

Played the shiat out of Ultima 9 Ascension... awesome reference subby

bhcompy: JesusJuice: I miss Ultima Online. The beautiful thing about it was it was all there was. It forced all the different playstyles to interact with each other and made for a really interesting, dynamic world. Then they introduced Trammel and ruined the whole thing. Trammel/Felucca is a pretty good metaphor for the state of MMOs as a whole right now. They're either entirely carebear with maybe some no-consequences 'consensual' PvP, or they are just an unplayable gankfest.

I realize this has nothing to do with LBs castle... I just miss Ultima. Maybe someday the consumer base for MMOs will grow big enough for something other than EQ/WoW clones, but until then I'll keep playing Elder Scrolls and pining for Ultima.

EVE Online is all I have to say about that.

Eve is nothing but a Gankfest really. Anytime you have a system with zero consequences (and suicide-ganking is a big business in Eve) you pretty much are reduced to it. I know, I know, HTFU right? That's what I said to the gankers. They just didn't want their "I win all loots for freez" button to go away. They are just as bad as the care bears that wanted Trammel.

UO was the first and only MMO I played.

/Learned I have a thin skin for other humans messing about in my RPGs

Hey, a piano!

dink dink dink, dink dink dink, dink dink dink dink dink dink dink

RUMBLE RUMBLE

inglixthemad: bhcompy: JesusJuice: I miss Ultima Online. The beautiful thing about it was it was all there was. It forced all the different playstyles to interact with each other and made for a really interesting, dynamic world. Then they introduced Trammel and ruined the whole thing. Trammel/Felucca is a pretty good metaphor for the state of MMOs as a whole right now. They're either entirely carebear with maybe some no-consequences 'consensual' PvP, or they are just an unplayable gankfest.

I realize this has nothing to do with LBs castle... I just miss Ultima. Maybe someday the consumer base for MMOs will grow big enough for something other than EQ/WoW clones, but until then I'll keep playing Elder Scrolls and pining for Ultima.

EVE Online is all I have to say about that.

Eve is nothing but a Gankfest really. Anytime you have a system with zero consequences (and suicide-ganking is a big business in Eve) you pretty much are reduced to it. I know, I know, HTFU right? That's what I said to the gankers. They just didn't want their "I win all loots for freez" button to go away. They are just as bad as the care bears that wanted Trammel.

There are consequences. The problem is that if you run solo, you do risk being killed by something that is relatively inexpensive(and thus, lower consequences monetarily, same consequences in sec status hit). If you fly something worthwhile through highsec, you should have an escort. Particularly when you're transporting something like tens of thousands of US dollars worth of plex and monocles.

Never forgave LB for Ultima IX. Reading the development history of that game is like reading a case study in dysfunctionality from the top down. The game reflected that.

I still consider Ultima VII and especially Ultima VII Part 2 to be amongst the best RPG's ever made, though.

bhcompy: inglixthemad: bhcompy: JesusJuice: I miss Ultima Online. The beautiful thing about it was it was all there was. It forced all the different playstyles to interact with each other and made for a really interesting, dynamic world. Then they introduced Trammel and ruined the whole thing. Trammel/Felucca is a pretty good metaphor for the state of MMOs as a whole right now. They're either entirely carebear with maybe some no-consequences 'consensual' PvP, or they are just an unplayable gankfest.

I realize this has nothing to do with LBs castle... I just miss Ultima. Maybe someday the consumer base for MMOs will grow big enough for something other than EQ/WoW clones, but until then I'll keep playing Elder Scrolls and pining for Ultima.

EVE Online is all I have to say about that.

Eve is nothing but a Gankfest really. Anytime you have a system with zero consequences (and suicide-ganking is a big business in Eve) you pretty much are reduced to it. I know, I know, HTFU right? That's what I said to the gankers. They just didn't want their "I win all loots for freez" button to go away. They are just as bad as the care bears that wanted Trammel.

There are consequences. The problem is that if you run solo, you do risk being killed by something that is relatively inexpensive(and thus, lower consequences monetarily, same consequences in sec status hit). If you fly something worthwhile through highsec, you should have an escort. Particularly when you're transporting something like tens of thousands of US dollars worth of plex and monocles.

Escorts aren't much use when you're ganked by hundreds of Goons flying shiatty BCs fitted with unnamed mods. Even if they all get CONCORDed, chances are good they'll still kill you and take your loots.

/misses the good old days of Jihadswarm

Drunken_Polar_Bear: rev. dave: I just remembered the first trolls I ever encountered. The infamous bank thief, which followed the previous version of the house thief. Of course trapped boxes were always a big hit.

I was such an ass when it came to trapped boxes. I could always tell when someone had put out a trapped box to lure some unsuspecting fool. What I would do is, I'd walk up like I was going to open it, but instead, assuming they didn't overweight it with ore or somethign, I would just pick it up and haul ass back into town (usually with a PK or two on my heels). Once there, I'd go find some NPC healers, open the box and let it kill me. I'd then get a rez from the healer, then hide. And sure enough, 9 times out of 10, some poor unsuspecting idiot would come along, see my body and start looting it. Only thing is, since I was carebear blue when I died, they would get flagged as doing something bad in town. I'd then pop out and yell for the guards who would pop in, one shot the idiot, and then I'd get to loot THEM.

Second favorite thing I remember doing was this one time when I was standing outside a dungeon. One of the more notorious PKs on the shard ported in and froze. Well, being the good citizen I was, I ganked him while he was disconnected. Upon looting his corpse, I found he had the deeds to a couple of small houses and a keep on him. His buddies ported in, and he got rezed just in time to see me take off with the deeds. They gave chase and there was going to be no way I could get away, so I opened my inventory, used one of the house deeds and placed one of their houses on some open ground. Ran in, then shut and locked the door. Talk about a bunch of POed PKs. They stood around threatening me, etc etc from outside for over an hour before I logged out. I had to give up that character because from then on, that entire PK guild actively hunted me. But that was ok as I just made an alt and transferred the houses and all my other stuff to him.

Good times.

That insta-house story made me laugh out loud - oh the nerd rage it must have caused.

Andromeda: Speaker2Animals: Am I getting blind in my old age or does that story fail to note WHERE THE F*CKING PLACE IS?

It's just outside Austin, Texas. I know this because apparently one of the sweetest geocaches in existence is there- http://coord.info/GC2B034

Hope he doesn't sell the place before early January as I'll be in Austin for a conference and have been looking forward to doing it...

Actually, it appears from that link that that is at Britannia Manor III, the one he's selling is the 2nd one.

Fat-D:
I really miss those days in UO. Why make a miner when you can just kill miners on there way back to the bank?
farkyeah.jpg

Why make a miner killer when you can just pose as a miner and kill the miner killers? My miner used to carry around a deadly poisoned scimitar (someone sold them near Mt. Kendall outside of Minoc on Great Lakes at the time) where ever he went and he was Grandmaster Swordsman, so miner killers would come around while he was mining and when they would I'd just switch weapons and kill them easily instead since miner killers tend to be on the lower end of the player skill spectrum.

bhcompy: JesusJuice: I miss Ultima Online. The beautiful thing about it was it was all there was. It forced all the different playstyles to interact with each other and made for a really interesting, dynamic world. Then they introduced Trammel and ruined the whole thing. Trammel/Felucca is a pretty good metaphor for the state of MMOs as a whole right now. They're either entirely carebear with maybe some no-consequences 'consensual' PvP, or they are just an unplayable gankfest.

I realize this has nothing to do with LBs castle... I just miss Ultima. Maybe someday the consumer base for MMOs will grow big enough for something other than EQ/WoW clones, but until then I'll keep playing Elder Scrolls and pining for Ultima.

EVE Online is all I have to say about that.

Meh, EVE is definitely in the same vein as UO in the spirit of player freedom, and is one of the few games to follow the UO paradigm over the EQ one, but it's a far cry from UO.

Crafting/resource gathering in EVE is long and tedious and hard to get into without a lot of time and money invested in it. A player in UO could go out mining for 10 minutes and have enough ore to make full suits of armor and weaponry (which would take 5 minutes tops) that any player, from one that had been playing for a day to one that was a 7x GM that had been playing for 5 years, would be able to afford and would gladly purchase for their use. The universe in EVE is incredibly homogenous to the point of being uninteresting, you could get dropped off in some random location and have no idea where you are without using the user interface. With UO, you could show me a screenshot of a rather nondescript forest with nothing else in it and I could tell you where it was taken merely by the arrangement of the trees. etc. etc. etc.

Really, I suppose the main difference is that EVE is for group play, you likely won't get far without a corporation backing you up, while with UO you could do pretty much everything by yourself if you really wanted to, kill anything you wanted to, and become just as powerful and rich as anyone else, even those with a large guild backing them up. Hell, I used to regularly take out ambushing groups of PKs of equal character skill and gear (though gear was pretty much homogenous) compared to my character 6+ on 1 through the use of good strategy and player skill (divide them up, misdirect them so they think you will be where you will not, confuse them by striking at them when they do not expect it, and conquer them) while barely breaking a sweat. That would be like coming through a gate in EVE to be confronted with 6 players camping in ships equal to your own with the same number of skill points and beating them all without your shields going down.

For instance, let's say you were ambushed by a group of PKs while running to town from the moongate. What I'd do is duck down an alleyway between two houses and continue on in a relatively straight line down more alleys til out of sight. The majority of them will follow you down the narrow alleyways and will be slowed down since they will more than likely trip over each other and have to push past each other and they can only do that so often as their stamina drops. Once out of sight, you circle back around while the rest of them follow the direction you were going in and then you hit the stragglers from behind. You take out what you can of the stragglers and by that time the main force has been alerted to the rear attack and are probably heading back, but since they have to come back through the alleys they will be slow in doing so, and will most likely fan out or leave their own stragglers behind for easy pickings rather than remain in a single group. Then you break off your attack and run off and circle back around and start hit and run attacks on the now ungrouped main force, using the houses in the area for cover and to prevent easy approach of your position. Oh, and if they figure out your tactics (a rarity indeed), then you just start doing the opposite, actually continue going in the direction you appear to be going in, then when they turn around figuring that you'll try to hit them from behind, you fall back in on them and hit them in the front. Rinse, repeat, victory.

The most dangerous and interesting ones to go up against were the lone wolf PKs, the ones who out of their own sense of honor (or pride I suppose) would not group up to gank others or kill weak players. They were also the ones who if you gave them a good fight they'd usually leave your stuff alone and resurrect you for another little romp. However, they were somewhat rare to find. I was kind of their opposite, the lone wolf anti-PK, only would fight while outnumbered or with equal numbers.

/Lord Phoenix Dragon -=*UDIC*=-
//formerly the Noble Lord Phoenix, High Priest of the Temple of Paladine, Councilor of Balance on the High Council of Britannia, Great Lakes Shard
///Ahm Mu Ra Beh Cah Summ Om Lum, Ver Amo Cor
////Yes, I can read runic

Only three bedrooms? My current house has four, why would I downgrade just to live in someone else's house?

Does it only appear when the moons are in 0,0?

Fat-D: Maybe someday the consumer base for MMOs will grow big enough for something other than EQ/WoW clones, but until then I'll keep playing Elder Scrolls and pining for Ultima.


I am afraid the corporate drones designing games wont allow for break through designs being implemented now

Started with UO then EQ, EQ2 and Wow. Games have gotten stupider and grindier as time goes on. No longer play MMORGS as they are all time sink and no imagination.

ScotterOtter: Does it only appear when the moons are in 0,0?

Bah! He doesn't live in Dawn, knave.

/I sing Ho Eyo He Hum
//and yell 'Evocare'