WP

After about 3 enjoyable months there, some ideas/feedback come to mind.

1. Additional end game quests/crafting recipes.
Something similar to the 3 set essence of evil/spirit bloodmoon. These took quite a while to complete between khaldun/peerless farming and provided a challenge with a nice reward (though I don't use the set or think it is particularly great). this is a lofty request for admins, but if there is a way to minimize the time it takes to develop yet provide a challenging/time consuming/rewarding result to players it could be great. i'd be happy to help design/test. this could even be expanded to subcategories like archer/tamer/sampire/crafter/deco.
1.a)possible rewards
spellcrafting recipe/jewel. stat/skill cap increase potion (str/dex/int or +damage, dci, hci, +1 archery for 121 cap, etc), powerful custom items with 3-4 stats (leaving room for spellcrafting thus customization and boom boom chance).

2. Add birthday talisman, irish charm, etc to gold/token vendor/quest, etc. these items represent a significant power/utility boost and are not available for up to 1 year+. could rename/change graphic to differentiate from veteran player items.

3. spellcrafting availability.
imbuing and spellcrafting elsewhere seem to be much more accessible based on some reading. the recipe drop rate seems good - appropriately rare.
however, as the drops rate currently stand, there are not enough magic jewels to supply one single person with enough attempts to progress at a slow but steady rate. farming all champ bosses all day yields the equivalent of 1, maybe 2 spellcrafting attempts. it could take double digit attempts to get the desired result for a single item (assuming it is not destroyed along the way). if the server population grows(as it has lately and ebbs and flows in general I suppose) it will so severely limit access to this great end game system that it will be discouraging rather than an incentive to keep playing and progress... for those who like character progression.
3.a) game/power balance argument
Frankly, it is possible to kill any content available with 0 spellcrafting. potter cloak + Twyrm/crafted yumi + crusader set and some decent dropped/crafted jewelry is "end game" in that sense. Some encounters like Lord oaks are very difficult and time consuming namely due to the reflect/leech on angels but doable nevertheless. spellcrafting makes it easier, but does not trivialize encounters that are not easy already. if I kill fire boss in 5 double strikes instead of 6, or I die on the 6th succubus flamestrike instead of the 5th - does that really matter compared to the huge time investment to make that incremental bump?
3.b) time investment
spellcrafting should be a large time investment, but right now it is excessive. the jewels are so rare it is not even possible to experiment and create a variety of gear sets/playstyles or even minmax a single spec. id like to have a maxxed stat/skill combo set for mace/parry/swords/magery/archery for example with custom crafted weaps like a 50 tri-leech 50 lightning 30 ssi yumi. after 800+ runic yumis, ive had 2 that are close and blown them both up with spellcrafting (eating days worth of jewels). my point here is there is that even if jewels dropped like candy, it would still take a huge time investment to craft something even approaching "best of the best".
3.c) imbalance of boss spawns vs jewel drop rate
hythloth and despite have much longer spawn rates, and are higher in the difficult spectrum, but despise drops jewels far less: about equal with the faster spawning easier bosses. why dont scorp king, misfit, peerless,etc drop spellcrafting items?
3.d) de-couple crusader/tainted gear from spellcrafting recipe/jewels
this will not only provide more content, but it will make it easier for newer people to actually gear themselves (instead of going without or buying it from someone feverishly pursuing spellcrafting)
3.e) more item flexibility
the item/slot restrictions for spellcrafting seem arbitrary and again limit flexibility (thus time investment)

4. evasion
this skill doesn't seem to work. tested on magic twiggy and didn't see a single parry out of 10+ casts (with 146 parry/120 bushido and a 2h weap on), in addition to a ton of champ kills getting murdered by succubus with evasion on.

5. make twyrm quest repeatable.
why not since the bow now binds? i'd like to try the mace and/or spellcraft bow.

6. swing speed
overall there are too few gear options for this stat (especially since it isn't on golden twiggy). it is not spellcraftable other than weapons despite the spellcrafting post in the new player forum stating jewelry is possible.

7. chuck norris is great (+ or - that Z axis business). steven seagal, bruce lee, van damme anyone?

8. crusty treasure chest
I understand the rarity in the context of some of the uncommon and powerful items the crusty can have, but the chests themselves are sooo rare. after spending a huge amount of time running every dungeon multiple times ive found 0 new locations (the 4 I know are right next to other valuable targets). the combination of chest rarity + placeholders basically means not only can you not hunt for these, which is a shame, but you cant even discover where they might exist. removing placeholders, increasing spawn rate/#locations, and decreasing item drop chance for the best crusty rewards would be neat while maintaining a similar balance. this is highly related to lack of magic jewel topic, but also represents a lost opportunity to add a feasible rogueish/treasure hunter way to progress.

9. vendor fees
this has been listed on the forums before, but I think it merits further discussion. given the player base, the in game economy is not exactly bustling. the people who have vendors up seem to really enjoy that style of play, and generally underprice wares in the context of gold availability on the server. power scrolls for example - a standard rate seems to be 25/50/100/200k for 5/10/15/20. if I were to actually stock a vendor with a full set of power scrolls for 50 skills that would be 18.75 million gold worth of items on the vendor. not exactly sure what the formula is here -if its price/500*3 then that's over 112k per day. given the low population, and lack of available vendors shifting to a commission on sale or removing/nerfing fees significantly would help newer players on the shard and let economics dictate pricing in a more natural way. the time it takes to list and restock a vendor is already an opportunity cost vs simply murdering champs or otherwise hauling in gold. right now if making gold is the objective, vendors simply aren't viable for the seller from a pure time input vs gold output perspective.

There is always more content coming. It starts with a major update and tons of extras that will follow. It's a tough job - in fact, it was said to be impossible to do without restarting the shard from scratch. I've been working on it for quite a while, when I'm not at my "real" work or staffing in-game. It's nowhere near ready yet but I make progress every day.

The yearly gift items are just that. If we made them available year-round, what is there to look forward to later? People always sell items so they're not impossible to find. The birthday talisman is special. It was given out on the shard's first anniversary and 5 years later for its 6th. Some things really are rare!

I will eventually address combat and item balance. It's silly to see people spam level 8 spells in less than a second, without a chance of interruption, or drop a boss with impunity because of a super weapon that also can't be interrupted. The thunder wyrm bow became a tourist attraction, with guided groups showing up to get one for their 2-week old character. Crusty treasure chests were farmed daily instead of being a truly rare sighting. People had stables full of steel steeds. I've got a new spawn system in development that will fix that too. You won't be able to camp or farm a drop yet everyone will have a fair chance to find the items. That will also allow us to put these items in more areas without risk of them all going to one person.

Spellcrafting was designed to augment items. Limits are there to keep any one item from being too uber. That may get tweaked later too. Some aspects are left left out of the system because we've got to have something unique to true rares.

Evasion may not work - I'm not sure. We're on a very old version of RunUO that didn't originally support any of those skills. Major miracles first, then I'll look into this more.

The richest players in the game never lifted a weapon. When I say rich, I mean in the billions. I've seen vendors that did cost 100k a day but they were holding over a hundred million gold. Gold is simply too plentiful for us to look at lowering the cost of anything at this time.

thanks for the response. good insight that there are some big things in the pipeline. still of the opinion that a nearer term, low effort adjustment or few would be pretty nice (at least for my personal play style), but regardless appreciate the effort youll put in to the shard.