5YearAnniversaryBritishBlackthorn - Revision history

Parsnip: /* Cheers */

2018-02-06T13:58:10Z

Cheers

← Older revision		Revision as of 08:58, 6 February 2018
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	==Cheers==		==Cheers & Farewells==

Parsnip at 13:57, 6 February 2018

2018-02-06T13:57:56Z

← Older revision		Revision as of 08:57, 6 February 2018
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	[Lord British turns grey looting a blue corpse, much to the delight of the staff]		[Lord British turns grey looting a blue corpse, much to the delight of the staff]


			==Cheers==

Parsnip: /* Description */

2018-02-06T13:57:15Z

Description

← Older revision		Revision as of 08:57, 6 February 2018
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	For Ultima Online Forever's 5th Year Anniversary, we hosted Richard Garriott and Starr Long in the Ultima Online Forever game. As Lord British and Lord Blackthorn they were in game with the Ultima Online Forever staff and community. A video of the event can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-hSkPvNtrg		For Ultima Online Forever's 5th Year Anniversary, we hosted Richard Garriott and Starr Long in the Ultima Online Forever game. As Lord British and Lord Blackthorn they were in game with the Ultima Online Forever staff and community. A video of the event can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-hSkPvNtrg

			On this page you will find a rough transcription of the event. Where possible it was transcribed word for word but some wording was re-ordered or skipped entirely if it was repetitive.

	==Who's Who==		==Who's Who==

Parsnip: /* Invasion */ Le Fin

2018-02-06T13:56:10Z

Invasion: Le Fin

← Older revision		Revision as of 08:56, 6 February 2018
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	[Lord British turns grey looting a blue corpse, much to the delight of the staff]		[Lord British turns grey looting a blue corpse, much to the delight of the staff]


			S: We're going to leave the stream shortly. Richard, you are welcome to keep killing the monsters here. I'd like again to thank my staff, without you guys none of this would be possible. Richard Garriot, having you and Starr here was absolutely incredible - We can't thank you enough! Perhaps we will be able to return the favour to Shroud of the Avatar some day. And thanks to all our viewers and players, the community here is absolutely amazing. Some of them really go above and beyond. Thank you all so much.


			RG: If I may throw in a parting comment here too. Thanks for having me and Starr. We were excited when you all emerged on the scene 5 years ago. Its very obvious how much its grown. I'm thrilled to be here with you today, thrilled to meet the rest of you on the team, thrilled to be here again with the community. I too look forward to future collaborations, where perhaps we can show up in each others games or switch roles, whatever it takes. We're all in this together, celebrating this unique style of gameplay. Congrats on 5 years and here...


			[Richard raises his brandy milk punch, Ultima Online Forever raise their drinks]

			RG: Here's to the next 5 years and the 5 after that and on to forever. Cheers!

			S: Salute!

			[Drinks are quaffed and the event ends]

Parsnip: /* 5 Year Beacon */

2018-02-06T12:38:44Z

5 Year Beacon

← Older revision		Revision as of 07:38, 6 February 2018
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	SL: Thanks, its been great!		SL: Thanks, its been great!

	==5 Year Beacon==		==Five Year Beacon==

	[Event returns with the unveiling of a beacon outside of Lord British's castle]		[Event returns with the unveiling of a beacon outside of Lord British's castle]
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	''[Richard nods]''		''[Richard nods]''


	==Invasion==		==Invasion==

Parsnip: Added beacon and invasion

2018-02-06T12:38:26Z

Added beacon and invasion

← Older revision		Revision as of 07:38, 6 February 2018
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	SL: Thanks, its been great!		SL: Thanks, its been great!

			==5 Year Beacon==

			[Event returns with the unveiling of a beacon outside of Lord British's castle]


			S: Outside here we have a beacon - a 5th year beacon which we'd like you to light. If you double click the blaze torch in your backpack and then target one of the braziers.


			RG: Let me just offer a congratulations and off we go...


			[Lord British lights the 5 year beacon]


			RG: As Starr was saying, the fact that you've made it past the 5 year mark is not only an amazing feat which you deserve much praise for but its also means that as long as all your hearts stay in it, at least it implies to me, that there is no expiration date on your future. As shown by many MMOs, once you've reach a critical mass of players and the community stays committed to the team and the team stay committed to the community, then you can probably sustain it literally forever, as your name suggests...


			S: Ultima Online Forever, thank you very much. We can't thank you and Starr enough, this is incredible. We grew up playing your games so having you here is amazing and I can't show my appreciation enough here. And I can't thank our players and foremost our team enough. The team I have is absolutely incredible. There no way I could do this myself. It takes a team and everyone on this team brings something to the table. And every piece of that is very valuable and I appreciate that a lot.


			RG: Reflecting again something that Starr was saying about how its as much governance as it is development... One of the early lessons of Ultima Online was, the 30 or so people we had in the core development team or the 5 of you here, compared to the hundreds we have here on screen, it becomes difficult to respond to every message you receive. It becomes easy for the community to think you aren't listening or don't care. For us in the early days, we found everyone to be complaining about basically the same thing, the server instability, the lack of balance, etc. There definitely a clear list of complaints but we didn't have any way to communicate with everybody. We couldn't really go to each person and say I hear you. We had to instead deal with all the guild leaders and town leaders, in the same way that real world communication works - No that many people speak directly with their president, or their senator or their congressman. But everyone can talk to the PT at their school and their community organisations and then all that data feeds up and down in both directions. So the fact that you've done so well here already for 5 years implies that you have also learned those lessons and its obvious you have a healthy community here. Its a pleasure to see and be a part of.


			S: Some day soon we hope to return the favour to Shroud of the Avatar. I knew there were some similarities but hearing you talk tonight about dealing with the community and game, it literally felt like it was the staff talking amongst ourselves.


			RG: I don't know if you can see this behind me. This computer right there is the original Apple II.


			''[Staff nerdgasm]''


			RG: And it is actually running Akalabeth. And there's an older teletype machine that is currently in a museum that I wrote my first game for which I called D&D1, obviously as an homage to Dungeons and Dragons. And we've actually built into Shroud of the Avatar a teletype and we gave that code to the community and they ported it into Unity to put it in Shroud of the Avatar. So the point is, we already have one historic game playing in Shroud of the Avatar... You never know, we might find a way to shell out from Shroud of the Avatar into Ultima Online Forever.


			S: When I first tried Shroud of the Avatar a year ago, I was kind of shrugging it off but when I tried it again recently I was really impressed and it has already come a long way. Do you think you jumped the gun with the release or do you think the alpha stage release worked out?


			RG: We've been live for 50 months.


			S: Wow, has it been that long?


			RG: Yea so let me describe why we released so early. We were very pleased to be the second largest crowd funded game in history. Kickstarted brought in 2 million dollars. In theory, if people chose not to continue giving money after Kickstarter, we would have to deliver a game like we had promised for 2 million dollars which is going to be hard! And we knew it would be hard and that our ability to bring in money from other users was unknown at that time. So there was some chance that we would fail to deliver that product at all. There are plenty of Kickstarters that don't ultimately deliver because they run out of money or bite off more than they can chew.

			For us, the worst thing we could imagine would be to take money from our hardcore fanbase and not only fail to deliver them a game but if they thought that we were paying ourselves sweet salaries, occupying really nice offices or not creating the features they thought we were creating with their money - any thing like that - we thought would be worse than an embarrassment. So we made sure at every standup - we're an agile team that does a stand up meeting - as soon as we had that standup, we'd publish the notes to all of our backers.

			Starr writes up a plan from these standups of all the features that we are planning to release. He also writes up a post mortem every month to show the tasks that were completed. He adds in italics the things that were emergent that we didn't think of and did them anyway. And he leaves on there the tasks that got pushed and didn't actually make the delivery. And everyone can see that - We're very transparent about every penny and how it is being spent. Then we also decided that from the first day we could, we'd release it to the players so that they were at least having some fun with us along this ride, to give them as much entertainment as we could even if the project failed after 10 months.

			The first release was literally what we called the Chicken Room. It was a room with a chair in that you could sit on and stand up, a torch you could turn on and off and a chicken that if you walked into it would go cluck, cluck, cluck and then walk away from you... And that was it. That was release 1. One month later, instead of being a room, it was a town. You couldn't leave the town but it had buildings and paths, trees and NPCs. You couldn't interact with them but at least you were in a town. Month 3 you could talk to them. Month 4 you could kill them. Month 5 they had conversations. Month 6 they was a shop you could buy and sell things from. So the players who joined us from Kickstarter knew that every month there was something significantly better than there was before.

			But what you experienced is what a lot of the Steam players experienced. If you didn't know that it started with a chicken room, you'd think "Why is this game in early access, it is completely broken". But what you saw already kind of looked like a game, so you were frustrated with the game.


			S: I think that created a lot of hype. Believe me, we've been through the same thing. If I say "Kingdoms 2016", there will be a lot of chuckling. So what's the gameplan?


			RG: We're launching our first release candidate in March. We did a big fundraising push last summer and we're going to be doing a big marketing push here in a couple of months. We've had 65,000 backers who are with us. A few thousand of those players have been playing ever since the first month. There are many who are waiting until we have release one, a full release. We think that we've only tapped about 20% of our audience. That's based on going to shows where we don't pay for our booth but we piggyback on someone else's booth - Like Razer for example. And they'll have a bunch of games setup. If someone likes the look of ours and asks for an early access code, we first ask the two questions: 1) Have you heard of Ultima before - the answer is usually 50/50; 2) Before right now, have you heard of Shroud of the Avatar - And usually 80% have not heard of it before. So 80% of the people who self-select our game having not heard of it before. We're confident that we'll pick up more players with a good marketing campaign.


			S: Without good marketing, you can have the best product in the world but it won't mean anything if no one sees it!


			''[Richard nods]''


			==Invasion==

			S: So next we'll start an invasion here...

			RG: Outrageous! Who's invading? How dare they!

			S: There are some evildoers, some creatures from the shadows.

			[Invasion begins]

			[Lord British rolls back the years and lays the smack down on the invading monsters]

			[Much monster slaying]

			[Lord British turns grey looting a blue corpse, much to the delight of the staff]

Parsnip at 18:40, 5 February 2018

2018-02-05T18:40:29Z

← Older revision		Revision as of 13:40, 5 February 2018
Line 2:		Line 2:

	For Ultima Online Forever's 5th Year Anniversary, we hosted Richard Garriott and Starr Long in the Ultima Online Forever game. As Lord British and Lord Blackthorn they were in game with the Ultima Online Forever staff and community. A video of the event can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-hSkPvNtrg		For Ultima Online Forever's 5th Year Anniversary, we hosted Richard Garriott and Starr Long in the Ultima Online Forever game. As Lord British and Lord Blackthorn they were in game with the Ultima Online Forever staff and community. A video of the event can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-hSkPvNtrg


	==Who's Who==		==Who's Who==
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	J: JoeB		J: JoeB


	==Intros==		==Intros==




	''[Lord British appears!]''		''[Lord British appears!]''
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	S: We appreciate that. We honestly cant thank you two for coming and joining us here. I think I speak for every single person in the game right here when I say thank you guys for all you have done and for joining us here on something that we are all very passionate about. Over to our developer Pat for the Q&A...		S: We appreciate that. We honestly cant thank you two for coming and joining us here. I think I speak for every single person in the game right here when I say thank you guys for all you have done and for joining us here on something that we are all very passionate about. Over to our developer Pat for the Q&A...


	==Q&A==		==Q&A==

	P: First question we have for both of you...		P: First question we have for both of you...


	===What do Richard and Starr think about how there is still a lot of people that play Ultima Online.===		===What do Richard and Starr think about how there is still a lot of people that play Ultima Online.===

Parsnip: Created page with "==Description== For Ultima Online Forever's 5th Year Anniversary, we hosted Richard Garriott and Starr Long in the Ultima Online Forever game. As Lord British and Lord Blackt..."

2018-02-05T18:39:35Z

Created page with "==Description== For Ultima Online Forever's 5th Year Anniversary, we hosted Richard Garriott and Starr Long in the Ultima Online Forever game. As Lord British and Lord Blackt..."

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