I find it interesting that an uo-style reputation system with innocents, criminals and murderers (amongst some other pvp changes) is coming to Age of Conan in one of the coming patches:
Notoriety System
A player is flagged in three different ways using this system: innocent, criminal, and murderer.
* Criminals and Murderers will have an icon showing their status.
* Innocent : No one can perform hostile actions on you without being flagged as a Criminal.
* Criminal : Performing a hostile action on an Innocent player will flag you as a Criminal for 5 minutes. Any further Criminal acts during the 5 minute time will refresh your Criminal Status.
* Attacking Criminal players and/or killing them will not flag you as Criminal.
* Killing Criminal Players will not cause you to gain murder points.
* Murderer : Players who have attacked and killed innocent players enough times to generate 100 or more points will be flagged as Murderers. Killing lower level players (outside your XP range) will result in a larger penalty towards the murderer limit.
* Murder score is capped at 1750 points.
* For every other real time hour that passes, your murder score is reduced by 1 point.
* If you die in PvP and lose PvP XP, you will receive a 3 point reduction to your total murder score.
* Killing mobs which yield XP will reduce your murder score at a rate of 1 point per 1% of a level worth of XP. Completing quests for XP will NOT contribute.
* Murderers and Criminals cannot access traders or vendors.
* Guard NPCs will attack murderers on sight.
* Dying while flagged as a murderer results in the following: a. 100% increased loss of PvP XP for the murder b. 100% increased gain of PvP XP for the person killing the murderer c. 100% increased chance of dropping an item.
* Any players interacting with a Criminal or Murderer (that includes grouping with them or trading with them) will be flagged as a Criminal.
* If you group with a Criminal or Murderer, you will be flagged as a Criminal for as long as you are in the team, and 5 minutes after the team disbands (or the Criminal/Murderer leaves the team).
* Any team member performing a criminal act will flag the entire team in the vicinity as a criminal.
The way combat was setup has nothing to do with client crashes in AoC. Memoryleaks, on the other hand...
Anyway, one of the problems with UO is that it's hard to get an influx of new players because of the graphics. You could build the best shard ever, and the players joining it would still mainly come from within the "scene" - either from other player-run shards or from the official servers. As it is right now the various player-run servers are basically feeding on eachother.
Why pay for newer games? hmm. Let's see... setting, graphics, sound, new gameplay features/new takes on old gameplay features, lured by the hype-machine, friends/guildmembers playing, etc.
I still love UO, the client is very versatile and still has a lot of unused potential nearly 11 years after it was released - but to blatantly dismiss all other games by claiming UO is perfect? Now that just doesn't work. =P
