These are just suggestions so please don't flame me folks! I have recently started playing here, I came from a different server that is considerably more populated than this one and wanted to offer some suggestions that I think might help boost the population here.

I am always glad to see constructive suggestions, so ty for taking the time to write this and included some solutions - Dante

1. Lower the cost of donation items - my account is actually over 400 days old - which means I came here to play and then I left. Just being completely honest here - the main reason I didn't stick around was because the donation items were so costly.

We have adjusted items for ED based on supply and demand.  If I make it too low or too high the market suffers.  I try to be lower than other custom shards, so I do price checks.  Also 99% of the items can be obtained in game from quests, treasure chests, loot drops, auctions, buying from players etc.  The reason I make this hard is to encourage players to enjoy the long game rather than play for a month and quit because they conquered the shard...Also donations are for  busy people who don't mind paying a few bucks to skip the grind.  Many players have limited time and this works for them and the shard, they get to play and the shard is supported.

 I do understand that you can get ed's here without donating but they are difficult to get. I am a professional adult - I earn a decent living and I can afford to drop some $$ on my entertainment - I actually really enjoy doing so. However, I am also female and therefore I do love a bargain
     
We do try to have Holiday specials, double ED days and lots of free bonus gifts that rotate each month to give players more value for their generosity and support.  We also inject ED into the market during events and holidays so non-donors can get some ED.  We also have double ED over $75 all the time which is essentually half-price

Since the donations are for packages of "evo dollars" I think the actual costs of some of the items in evo dollars could stand to be reduced. Not the price of the evolution dollars themselves. I think the price packages are very fair and appeal to those of us who are a bit more financially able as well as those of us who are not. Some of the item costs do not translate in value when compared to real $$ though. For example, an item bless deed and the layer ID deeds - they both equal out to $10/each. That's pretty expensive. I love to change my item ID's frequently but would never even consider doing that here because of the expense. That means basically that rather than me donating $$$ to be able to play dress up (lets face it - that is what it is) perhaps I don't donate at all because that's what I feel like doing this week and it isn't an option. Do you get what  I am trying to say? Personally myself, you would get more $$ out of me if I was getting more for my $$. The amount that you receive to help keep the server going wouldn't change, just the amount of things that people could get for their money. I think this would make donations more enticing and honestly, I believe it would help entice people to stay as well. Trust me on this - the price of donation items ARE taken into consideration when new people come to check out a server.

I like this idea and will revisit the pricing for many of the deco items and smalls that do not really effect game play.  Ill add some 1ed-10ed items this week and see how they sell, ty for this suggestion

2. Add some of the static plants to a stone for sale like the small lily pads, clusters of lily pads, mushrooms, flower dust, etc... they would be nice gold sinks for players who like to decorate and would keep decorating fun (ok maybe this one is super bias because I miss all my greenery lol)

Yes we have a huge deco room on the moongate, just hard to tell what players really want.  Send me a list of 10 deco items you really like and ill make them rotate on a vendor stone each month for ED and tokens.  FYI you can buy almost any deco you see in game, even if its not on display


3. Offer +20 to an already Gm'd skill for evo dollars. I work - A LOT - and honestly, I don't want to spend my fun time having to grind skills. It would be worth the $$ to me to be able to have the skills I want/need on my girl so I am ready to play when I have free time.

We have skillballs and powerskulls available to skip the grind.  There is a new player package on the wiki available for 200ed and is worth $70 to help get new players started fast.

Yes, I know many skills can be taken to legendary rather easily with EUO but maybe some of us are lazy and would rather just shell out the bucks and not have to worry about it. Not to mention other skills are NOT easy - such as animal taming. I acquired an Evo dragon today (made a donation specifically to purchase the dragon) just to discover that I really need 120 taming to keep her happy for long.  This information is on the wiki


4. Update the interior decorating tool to move objects east and west!!!!! I think this is the only thing about the shard that I have to say I honestly HATE    I feel so restricted when decorating, having to remove walls, etc to place items (and then other items go into the moving crate - grrr)  PRETTY PLEASE!!!!  I will see what I can do with this request


Like I said, just making some suggestions. Please don't flame me! I love a lot of things about the shard too! 

Thanks again for the suggestions

1. I understand where you are coming from on the high price of donation items since I am a frequent donator. I am the same way I don't like to grind much and I enjoy my spare time getting right into the action. That being said. If you lower the price of donation items they will start to flood the server. These aren't really meant to be purchased like a common commodity. Donations are meant to go towards keeping your server running nice and strong. Allowing Dante to spend money updating out hard/software to continue to handle the massive load of players we are continually gaining. So the items are really kind of there as a extended thank you from the staff for your donation. I wouldn't look at the donation page as a market. The server does very very well donation wise as far as I can see so there doesn't seem to be a problem with price of things ; ). Also with large servers its very important to keep a healthy economy. With the drop of ED prices it could lead to a major inflation which is potentially fatal to servers given that ED is purchased player to player using gold and tokens it would then effect all markets.

2. I am with you on the deco. I have a 6 plot house that is still in need of deco and I don't like growing plants because I can sometimes not log on for a few days and that would kill my plants. But that being said there are tonnnnssss of vendors that sell plants. I go looking for them all the time. I would check the KOT vendors, KOT-Pirate Market, Luna vendors by the bank (not the vendor gate Luna but the city), and Trinsic market 1. I've found loads of plants at all of those places. Also join a guild, there are plenty of new players that I am sure you can get to grow you plants in trade for decent gear or gold.

3. Now I don't know what you mean by +20 to a already GM'd skill but ill touch on both of my theories. You can buy 120 power scrolls from just about every person in the game. Also 120 power skulls can be purchased for ED and these can be turned into ANY SKILL of your choice. Then to solve the problem of filling the needed 20.0 skill points I would buy a +700 skill ball (like I did) for ED just to keep in your bag so that you can use it for the remaining points on difficult skills. That solves the +20 skill to already GM skill problem I believe with things that already exist . Also if you have any questions on how things work just PM Blackbeard in-game and I will fill you in on how to gain skills easily. Ex. Animal Taming is extremely easy to GM on this server using animal taming brushes purchased from the NPCs.

4. Decorating a house can be very frustrating but all it takes is practice. There are many many tricks to doing it the easy way (using Gozas and such). Also the only items that should return to your moving crate after customizing are deeded items such as forges or stone tables. This can be prevented by planning ahead. I would never remove a wall to decorate. All you need is a lil extra patience and circle of transparency.

PS. I hope you didn't look at my response as a flame, I was only trying to point out simple solutions to your problems and give you another way to look at some of your ideas incase the admins are a little bit too busy to look into your suggestions and I don't want you to feel abandoned or get frustrated if no one addressed your post. I hope I helped you some

Thank you for the detailed response - Dante
 

I appreciate your responses but I think you misunderstood a couple of my points    I know they CAN be done, I just think they could be done more efficiently is all!


Just to clarify - on the house deco tool - placing gozas and teleporters to place things in tricky spots is old school. It is in no way "the easy way" I know HOW to do it, I just find it a PITA tbh when it could easily be fixed by adding east/west onto the ID tool (this is one of the few servers that I have played on that doesn't have this, I guess is why I was like, umm.. why not? lol) I am assuming this simply means that you have never played somewhere with the east/west ID tool. Trust me, if it was implemented, you would LOVE it.
I love to deco/customize things. It is actually how I spend the majority of my game time - if you ever want some assistance with your huge plots, I'd be happy to help!


Plants - I don't mind growing them. I think the sprinkler system is AWESOME. Maybe I wasn't clear but I meant creating a plant vendor that sells plants that are not growable here - such as the big lily pads, cocoa trees, vanilla plants, etc....


GM skill ball - Ok I had NO idea that these could be used to "finish out points" - does this count for legendary? Say I have 101 magery and used a gm skill ball for magery, would it bump me to 120 (since I already ate the 120 scroll)  If that is the case, scratch the +20 suggestion 


I also understand where you are coming from about the donation items but I still maintain my position that some of them are just too high and it can have a negative impact on player retention. I donated $50 in the short time I have been here because I appreciate the server and the work that goes into it. Sure, I would continue to donate small amounts from time to time just for that but personally, I would donate MORE often to purchase things I want. I wouldn't suggest lowering the prices of the really sought after items because they do give people incentive to donate - just the smaller items. Just keeping it real here - yes, the donation items are technically an extended thank you but they also serve a bigger purpose - to encourage folks to donate!


Also, as far as the economy - when a bottle of POF is selling in the millions, I'm sorry but inflation has already arrived    This has proven to be my biggest obstacle in making this server my permanent home. Point blank - it is expensive for people trying to get established. Fortunately, I was able to sell some ED's to start myself off with a nice ledger full of gold but it didn't take me near as far as I expected it to. I am also having difficulty figuring out what I can do to MAKE gold with the amount of play time I can reasonably log. This week has been an exception because I am on vacation! Typically, I don't have as much time to play. This basically wipes out anything crafter based because I can not log in every 6 hours to pick up bods and I don't have hours to spend gathering the resources needed to fill the bods (ok, well I could probably roll out some tailor bods  )


I definitely appreciate your feedback - I do however hope that every suggestion isn't explained away with a "well..this, this, this" because I think player suggestions really should be considered - particularly new player suggestions because new blood is also what gives life to a server   


I like a lot of things about the server but I do also see some things that I dislike enough to make me teeter on whether or not I will stay permanently. I think if players would offer suggestions instead of just leaving, it would help the shard grow. I don't consider this a large server. It is clogged up with houses, yes. Maybe even accounts but active players, not as much. The community is why we love to play MMOS right?


I like you Blackbeard! We should be friends! My offer always stands if you need some deco/design assistance. Also, not sure if you are the same person from the other post - but if so - Congrats Daddy!!    (see, I trolled the forums too! lol)


Honestly, I only posted all of this because I DO like the server! lol

Just a few answers:

-The cocoa tree looks like the o'hii tree I believe, which is available on the Doom Scrolls stone in the hidden room in the Doom Gauntlet. Some other different plants/items are there also.

-The skill balls will add whole points (1.0) to any skill that is not capped. So that includes skills with a cap of 120.

-Making quick gold can be done through champs. It takes a little while to make tens of millions, but a couple hundred thousand is short work. Pumping your spell damage increase and using area spells can be done by anyone.

Just a few answers:

-The cocoa tree looks like the o'hii tree I believe, which is available on the Doom Scrolls stone in the hidden room in the Doom Gauntlet. Some other different plants/items are there also.

-The skill balls will add whole points (1.0) to any skill that is not capped. So that includes skills with a cap of 120.

-Making quick gold can be done through champs. It takes a little while to make tens of millions, but a couple hundred thousand is short work. Pumping your spell damage increase and using area spells can be done by anyone.

Hehe thank you for the congrats my lil boy is awesome... I am loving it so far but of course I learn a lot of new things every day. I definitely don't think your suggestions will be tossed aside by the staff, after all they put this section on the forums for a reason. Even if they do not post a reply to a lot of these suggestions I know they do read them. Which is a good thing because once they get some free time to play around with a few things they may suddenly have a splendid "original" idea and will add some of the things that were in the suggestion box forgetting where they heard it from haha. The server is rather large for the amount of staff we have in my opinion. And consistently having 100 players+ on at a time is pretty good (I haven't seen another custom server in a long long time so I am not sure about their traffic). But one thing I would like to add is as I am starting to learn a little bit of Python, C++, and C#... I can see how adding certain things can ultimately throw other scripts off. I know we had a few long standing scripts that ended up going corrupt over new additions such as the fallout of the Townhome script that messed us up for a while. So I can start to understand why sometimes Dante or Kyn say "no can do" to a lot of things we might suggest even though it seems like such a easy addition/fix in our eyes. I personally spent a lot of their time asking/poking them with difficult questions and sending them on wild goose chases to find things for me so now I am starting to feel like a @$$ lol. I know you don't have a lot of time on your hands but if you have a break at work or some extra time that your out of the house and not able to get on the game I would look into the RUNUO forums or Google different scripts, maybe search other custom server forums to see if they have any scripts going that interest you. Then maybe PM Kyn over the forums with a package of what the script is, where you found it, why you like it/would suggest adding it. This might put you ahead of the long list of things they are working on if he sees you did a lot of work trying to get it together for them. I know there are a few other players that are familiar with C#(C sharp, which is the language most of the custom UO scripts are written with) that have been able to push a little harder then some other players with their suggestions because they saved the staff a ton of time by doing some of the research into the things they want to add. Again, I know you don't have a lot of time on your hands to play so when you log on you want to gogogo just like me. But this is something you can do on your phone or tablet so just a lil idea I wanted to pass to you
PS I like you too! I am down for being friends, just PM me in game when you get on and we can see if we can catch eachother haha.

Yes we have a huge deco room on the moongate, just hard to tell what players really want.  Send me a list of 10 deco items you really like and ill make them rotate on a vendor stone each month for ED and tokens.  FYI you can buy almost any deco you see in game, even if its not on display

Animated water tiles and fire - forgot to put them on the list 

I can't find an email or a private message option here so I am attaching the script for the updated house deco tool! Hope it helps to get it implemented 

Have you tested this particular script? I know some of the directional house decorator scripts allow you to move items through walls and out of your house.

Not everyone has a test shard to try out a script on.  I believe she was just putting out some ideas that many may like.  Evo would need to see if it compiles on their test server or if they need to make adjustments to the script by setting limits within the file.  Hat's off Symphony for putting some fresh ideas out there for deco.

There's quite a few out-out-the-box servers for anyone interested in testing out scripts, but that's just a side note. Glancing over the script, it looks to have checks to keep items inside of houses. Though if someone is making the effort to search for scripts, it's hardly a stretch to ask if they tested what they're submitting.

Have you tested this particular script? I know some of the directional house decorator scripts allow you to move items through walls and out of your house.

Not everyone has a test shard to try out a script on.  I believe she was just putting out some ideas that many may like.  Evo would need to see if it compiles on their test server or if they need to make adjustments to the script by setting limits within the file.  Hat's off Symphony for putting some fresh ideas out there for deco.

This is so true, as you can test a number of scripts and they may work perfect, but on another shard there could be a conflict with items in the game, which would cause errors. These errors are hard to see if you do not have access.  This is from personal experiences.  In general they are normally pretty easy to fix to accommodate the shard.  But like you said, it is up to staff on what they want to bring in. 
Additionally, I have not seen a whole lot added in regards to deco on the shard over the last 9 months that I have been here, and would love to see some available to purchase with gold or Tokens not just ED's.
Would still love to see the items on a stone, that can be purchased in a deed form by players.  Seems like such a waist of time for the staff to have to place items, and then come back later to move them around, and frustrating when the players are trying to decorate their houses but have to wait on staff to be online to help.  Whereas if they where in deed form, then the payers could do it.   I know Dante and I talked about this just after Christmas.  Just my two cents. 

I have attached a picture that shows one of the general problems with these deco tools.  Yes I love the functionality of it.  The issue is when people start to move multi tile items around (like this large forge).  People will end up with all kinds of things sticking out of their house because the "home tile" is all that is checked when the tool is determining what is inside and what is not inside.


*edit*
I did quickly test this tool and it does prevent you from moving items all the way outside of your house like some tools allow.

That's awesome hon, makes us happy when at least we see that you guys look at our ideas.  =) even if in the end they don't work.