Freja’s Interview -An Open Discussion Of Siege- Part 1, The Early Years
One Player’s frank & personal perspective on Siege’s history, current circumstances and how we might improve it all. Thanks to Freja’s thoughtful and detailed responses, this is broken into three parts: The Early Years, NEW2, and the Ideal Siege.
You are invited to join in the discussion!

“it was like a second world, wild and untamed. It was a dangerous world,”

DeadBob:  You have played UO since the beginning days. When did you start? What was it like then?

Freja, a native citizen of Denmark:
 I missed the Beta, started Dec 1997 on Atlantic. My son came home with the account and Internet was on my computer, so he had to make me play to get access to it.
To me, the game was wonderful, it was like a second world, wild and untamed. It was a dangerous world, special outside towns. I started out as a miner/smith but after some deaths in the mining cave, I run out of money and a guy at bank gave me an axe and a hammer and told me to make wooden shields and sell them. I made bows too and ended up as an archer.
I don’t know why, but I never hated the reds, I more saw them as a challenge and wanted to learn to know them. Sure dying was annoying but I learned fast to have some backup gear or gold. Dying is worse as long you run around in death robe, as soon you are in a new suit and with a new weapon, everything look much better. If you was not careful, you could lose your house too. if you lost your key to a thief or a PK, that house would never be safe again. they could loot everything in there.
I still look back at year 1997-1998 as the best time I had in UO, even when I sometimes had so much lag, that it was hard to move and I lost connection a lot. I was on dial up from Denmark.
The game have changes a lot since then, not all changes was good for UO. I hated stat loss for murderers, even when it never hit me. It made a lot of my red friends give up.
I stopped playing on Atlantic, when we got Trammel and Siege become my main shard and have been it since. I did not like what Trammel did to Atlantic, it did split the community.

“I would not cry if Malas was removed from Siege, they could make a gate to Doom from somewhere else.”

DeadBob: How has Siege changed over the years?

Freja:
 Siege was born before Trammel and Item Insurance but after Stat Loss for murderers was added. If they rezzed with 5 or more counts, they would get up to 25% permanent skill lose. Siege was born without sick thing.

Siege was born with several special rules
1. No stat loss for murderers
2. No recall
3. No gating in and out of dungeon.
4. Only one char on an account
5. Red and grey can’t kick/ban from houses.
6. Red and grey will clean the ban list in houses, they are friend of, when they use the door.
7. NPC vendors take 3x the price for their wares.
8. NPC won’t buy your wares
9 Player vendors take 3x fee for working
10. The murderer title is gone for good.
11. No bounty system
12. Guards at the houses is peaceful, they do not attack reds.
13. RoT, Rate over Time skill gain for non resource using skills.
14. No Trammel and Item Insurance

Stat loss are removed from all shards now
The public houses and the lose of the key and refresh from the door removed # 5 & 6
Vendor fee should be the same as normal shards now.
The murderer title, I don’t know if it still are on normal shards.
Bounty system is gone on all shards
Think this guard at houses thing never really got patched
RoT are much faster now. We did lose RoT, when all got Power Hour, that was a pain, players could make a gm PK char in 5 days, and did not learn to understand Siege before they started killing.

Every time normal shards got a publish or a patch, we got most of it too, and not all changes was good for Siege. We did not get the Trammel code and Item Insurance but we did get the other new facets.
Special Malas was bad, to much land, Luna, very little over land spawn. I would not cry if Malas was removed from Siege, they could make a gate to Doom from somewhere else.

Then we got AoS, that was really bad as this new artifacts was very expensive and without Item Insurance, a lot could not afford good gear and did not have a chance to PvP.
Because of multi crafters on other shards, who could not fight the overland spawn, most of it was removed. That hurt Siege as we had new chars and lesser PvM chars using the overland and roaming PK’s, attacking them and the player towns.

We also got Faction, it split the community, good and evils joined same faction and Sieges native factions got destroyed. Before we had PvM and crafter guilds, roleplaying blue and roleplaying red guilds, Anti PK guilds and PK guilds, with faction, that got total messed up.

Imbuing was very expensive and not many could afford it.
It become really bad, when they added powerful factions items. I gave up PvP as I had no chance vs this overpowered chars and I did not want to be in faction. Siege almost died.

Until 2 years ago, it had been bad for Siege, then Devs changed direction and the last changes had been good for Siege. They did changes something with Factions Items and we got new loot in some of the old dungeons. That made relic much easier to get from unraw and the loot was much more powerful too. Now we can craft Suit most can afford. A upper suit is still expensive but as it become easier to make money, it works. Also the Bazaar vendors in New Magincia is a great help.

Now with the new rules for Siege houses and Mystic tokens, Siege are starting to get more players again.

Another thing with faction, that was bad for Siege was the factions taxes. Before people was loyal to the town near their house, that did help the community. With factions taxes, they had to give up their town and go to cheapest factions town. I hope the remove of faction and the new town loyalty will help the community. I know there need to be a kind of PvP system but I hope it will be more a kind of good vs evil.

Siege had been UO’s step child for many years, now it seem like Devs have seen, something is working right on Siege. The economy is healthy and the community are very strong. We have very few system rules to control our action but we rarely need help from GM’s and the hate between red and blue don’t really exist on Siege.

Even when we are enemies on the field, we can still make events like the Graduation of NEW2 members and Ladra’s BOOM party and be together in a more friendly way.

I’m sure we had a lot more changes but this was the worse and the best

Next: Part 2 of the interview continues with Freja’s memories of NEW and perspective on NEW2.

Join the Discussion at:
http://uo2.stratics.com/community/threads/frejas-interview-the-early-years.304054/