How to make UWO thrive again: a suggestion for Papaya

rivea1 · October 2017

First off, I'm excited and thankful to Papaya that UWO didn't get dropped entirely. It is after all an almost decade old game that very much shows its age. Importantly though, the dedicated players among us don't care about that; for us, it's the people that play UWO that breathe life into it, despite the dated graphics and slow gameplay, and kept many of us playing for 100s if not 1000s of hours.

That's why I'm super disappointed in Papaya for not keeping our characters alive and instead opting for a server wipe. Like many friends, I'm now struggling with whether I'll put any more time into the game :(.

I honestly think Papaya has the best of intentions: they want UWO to succeed and thrive (!). However they just didn't have a good understanding of what's involved in the game, particularly all the leveling and grinding and questing and company building that dedicated players have put in. Papaya's perspective is that they are inheriting a game from OGP with a badly broken economy that was losing players and declining rapidly.

So if *you* were Papaya, what else would you do with a game that with so many layers of intricacies--that you've got 3 weeks to try to understand and fix--and not to mention a game that has been in decline for months and months and may not have much life left?

Given all those constraints, of course "Start from scratch" is probably the easiest and most tractable solution that Papaya saw. There's just too much that needs fixed, and not much time to do all that fixing! We can't fault Papaya for that... it might be the only solution that made sense to them because, at the end of the day, in just a few weeks, they need to relaunch a game that will be profitable and sustanable.

Okay, so I can't fault them, but I will propose an alternative: let everyone keep their characters, including those hard-earned levels, skill ranks+refinements, titles, and quest discoveries, but delete *all* items from every player's inventory. Ships, checks, consumables, rare items, etc... get rid of it all.

By resetting items and checks, this will let the economy rebalance itself in a more manageable way. The last thing we need on relaunch is a server populated by billionaires--the last thing we need is the severely broken economy that OGP had fostered. Instead, restart everyone on a more level playing field, but let them keep their characters!

This will let the people who love and who built Uncharted Waters Online keep developing the characters they love, continue developing the world which they've built over the past 7 years and don't want to see go away, and build a more balanced world that hopefully begins to draw in new players again!

Rivea