What a waste of time

I think woblinthegoblin is shadow jack. If not they're future best friends

Personally, I hate the IDOC system here, have from the start, and hopefully someday it will be changed to disallow complete automation.

But until then, you can definitely IDOC solo, but you need to be clever about it and you have to become such a pain in the ass to your competition that you force them to exert more effort than its worth, and it doesn't hurt to be a little bit lucky. I did this for a short period of time and reaped a fair amount of reward, but no longer engage in it at all. It is an aspect of the game I simply cannot enjoy regardless of winning or losing.


The typical method, as outline by Blackeye above, is for the dominant group to automate the sign checking aspect of the process. Recall bots will pop in every x minutes and instantly invis, then ten seconds will go by, they will Item ID the sign and snap a picture and recall out. Alternate methods include parking a character nearby who is constantly IDing the sign (this is more rare) and if all else fails they will come manually check the sign once every hour or more.

The key concept to keep in mind here is that whoever has the most accurate timer is basically going to have the biggest advantage and first choice of loot. The goal is to get your own accurate timer while denying an accurate timer for your competition. It doesn't matter if your competition has 10 people and you are solo. If they have a timer window that is 4 hours long and you have it down to within 2 minutes, you are most likely going to clean house all by yourself.



So how do you do this? You have three accounts, and all three should be in use. On two of the accounts, you will want "troll" characters. I found the following skills very useful: hiding, item ID, tracking, detect hidden, and the rest is up to you, though carpentry and lumberjacking are good choices:

*Hiding is essential to prevent monsters from killing you and gives you a bit of protection. It wont outright protect you if another player shows up and reveals you, of course.
*Item ID is absolutely essential, since you can run a UO razor macro to ID the sign every so often (I did one minute intervals).
*Tracking is not essential but very helpful and highly recommended. You can use this to find competition if they have hidden chars parked nearby, or you can use it to keep tabs on where wandering healers and such are.
*Detect hidden is also not essential but highly recommended as it helps improve your tracking but also allows you to reveal hidden competition without needing to use reagents.
*Lumberjacking and Carpentry are good (make sure to have newbied tools and hatchet) because this allows you to churn out recall blocking items like tables at pretty much little to no cost or effort.

These characters carry literally nothing that is not newbied.

On the third account you should have a PvP char who is not in stat-loss. A stun mage is always good. This is if you feel like engaging your competition when they show up to attack your troll characters. You should also have a melee character that can go into stat loss. He only needs a melee skill, tactics/anatomy, and detect hidden/tracking (these are optional) and magery (enough to recall). This is NOT a PvP character, this is just a character that can take an infinite number of murder counts without repercussions because you can train back the skills very, very fast if he dies and can still operate at sub-GM levels of skill. This character is who you bring in to directly kill their bots (again, this character is NOT meant to fight off their PvP characters!)


What you want to do is park the troll characters near the greatly worn house and run their razor macros to ID the sign. Now, when you are parked there long enough, taking pictures, you will start to see where the competition recalls in and out from and how often. Move your characters to these spots to prevent them from recalling in. Sometimes you can block them from showing up at all for hours at a time if they are not paying attention. Eventually they will come to do one of several things:

*They will come with a blue mage character to reveal you and they will then go find monsters to lure to you to avoid taking a kill count.
*They will come with a red character and do the same or alternatively they will just kill you themselves.
*They will not kill you but instead mark new runes.

Now, the key to success here is being able to keep an eye out for when the competition brings in characters to remove you. This is not something everyone can do due to work and family and what not. I am fortunate enough to work for myself, so I usually had UO up and running in the background so I would be alerted if anyone popped in, otherwise I was doing something else and not paying any attention and just letting the macros run (you will accrue free platinum all the while you are doing this, so bonus!) If you can't keep an eye out, then your success will greatly diminish.

If your competition brings in a blue character to reveal you and lure monsters to you, just move away when they have the monsters and let the monsters keep chasing them. If they invis, use detect hidden to keep the monsters coming after them. In my experience, the competition will stop using this tactic very quickly because it is far more effort for them to do it than it is for you to just walk and re-hide or reveal. When they leave, move back to the recall blocking spot and hide and continue your razor macro.

If your competition brings a red character, let them kill you (I liked to hide multiple times to keep them wasting time/mana/reags, but that was just me) and keep feeding them murder counts (you can only give one murder count per character every 5 minutes, keep that in mind). For some reason every time the competition did this to me they said it didn't matter because the character was a stat-loss character, and every time I checked the character on the website, it definitely was not, so... I don't know what they aimed to accomplish with that, except they were definitely in stat loss afterwards with zero gain for their troubles, since these characters have nothing and can rez freely and resume their duties very fast. Now, you could bring your own PvP character in if you feel confident you can beat them. I never took this route because to me it is more effort than it is worth, not to mention the objective here is to deny accurate timers to your competition, not potentially pull more of them into the area for a big PvP fight. Sometimes your competition will lure away the wandering healers to try and deny you the ability to easily resurrect. This could go either way for them - wandering healers are tough and on one occasion the healer even killed the red (who went into stat loss killing my troll characters), so this is a method that takes a lot more effort than it is worth since healers just respawn within a few minutes if killed, and usually wander back to their spawn origin otherwise (unless they get stuck on something). In this event, just be sure to have your 3rd character on standby to rez, with a few extra runes to the surrounding area (somewhere a screen or two away from the house). Only rez your characters when the competition leaves (they don't hang around long with their reds usually). If they do hang around, you can just gate your troll characters to safety, rez, and gate them back in. A bit more effort, but still pretty simple (and not something I ever had to actually do).

If your competition shows up and marks new runes, block those new spots right after they leave. If they are using more than two recall spots to check (this is rare) then use that carpentry and lumberjacking to build some tables and place them on the additional recall spots. You can put something in your razor macro to automatically pick up and replace the tables so that way they don't decay within an hour.

The competition will eventually probably show up to remove the tables and/or kill you. Just keep repeating the above steps, replace the tables if you need to. Always feed murder counts.

If the competition has a character parked at the house, or you just can't/don't want to block all the recall spots, then bring in your Statloss PK and kill them. The recall bots usually have a locked box with a bunch of reagents on them (I usually found 100+ each recall reagent), the parked characters usually have nothing, though sometimes they will have energy bolt reagents or something if they mean to attempt to defend themselves against monsters. You can use your troll characters to lure monsters to the parked characters and use detect hidden to reveal them. Then, just let the monsters do the work. This is more effort than I cared for. The Statloss PK is much simpler and faster. IF the competition brings in PvP characters when you have your Statloss PK there, just get out of there. Wait for them to leave, and then come back and resume killing.



All that said, there really isn't much point to IDOCing I found. I gathered a lot of resources and made some money and platinum off of it, but in the end I never used any of the resources or spent any of the money or platinum (giving it all away now in a contest), so it was all just a misuse of time for me. Also, keep in mind, that far more often than you would expect, the houses end up getting refreshed at the 11th hour, making the whole ordeal a wasted effort regardless, and sometimes the ones that do fall, even if full of bags of goodies, it can just all be junk that is worthless. I had two big houses side-by-side with about 30+ containers each of all sorts and in the end it was almost all CuB junk. On the other hand, I had a small house that, on the surface, didn't look promising and it ended up containing thousands of ingots, thousands and thousands of reagents, and some other goodies.



At the end of the day though, you should just aim to have fun. If you can't have fun without IDOCing, then you need to engage in that activity in a way that allows you to enjoy it. If you are trying to IDOC for pretty much any other reason, it just isn't worth it.

The people from the IDOC crew I have talked to are all pretty good people who simply enjoy doing it - to them, that is what this game is. Blackeye and others have pointed out who the main folk are in the IDOC guild, and I have not found any of them to be unreasonable, just don't expect them to hold back if you show up at an IDOC half-cocked when they have the timer and you don't.

ain't nobody got time fo dat

I should stop fishing for a few weeks and play the idoc game! I have no life

I don't get it. You like to IDOC and so do the people you ran into. They just happen to love IDOC and made it efficient. They brought it down to a science because they've done it for so long.

No body starts at the top. Get back on your horse and do it again.

The automation is the primary rub for me. If @Chris removed that and randomized the timer, it would go a long way.

I wouldn't mind this, but doesn't it punish the home owner? I've already seen a few IDOCS get refreshed in the last month or two. Rather than being fair to the people there to loot all the pixels, isn't it fair to the home owner to not randomize their house decay?

Keep the current timer as the minimum, then random fall after that time has passed. No harm, no foul to the home owner....

There should be an anti-afk gump if there already isn't for clicking house signs and using item id on house signs.

It's the same thing as automated resource gathering.

Did it continue? We stopped doing idocs do to a lack of interest and that is a fail to me

I believe there is already but, this is bypassed with the skill item id. Imo it needs to be changed

I swear you guys just go back to old threads and regurgitate the same shit spewed years ago. @The Cigarette Smoking Man, lock this shit up!

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So this thread is about a new-ish player wanting to place a small house after an IDOC near Moonglow? A premier spot? And they are upset when a veteran and well-organized IDOC crew arrives and does what they do well?

Are you serious? If you are new and want to place a small house, there are TONS of free spots. Let me know if you need help, I'm more than willing to lend a hand! But why do you need one next to a town? That's like me who has been here two months, wants to walk over to an IDOC Fortress and then proceed to get upset when a group of IDOC'ers arrive to kick my, ahem, butt.

Please don't let this ruin your experience on UO:R. There are tons of us players who love helping others. Play with us and get situated on this shard. Then think about doing things like premier IDOC's.

If you had read the whole thread you'd realize he was maybe initially upset about that, but his biggest hangup is how the idocs can be timed to within a couple minutes of falling via a mostly afk system abusing the fact that no afk gumps are delivered while checking the status of signs using the item ID skill.

It probably didn't help that he was then trolled by the same group after making this thread with at least one being on an alternate forum acct no less lol, and now you have one of the members of said group, Larloch, calling for the thread to just be closed.

Haha, I love idoc threads.

I read the whole thread unfortunately. I saw his concern over the set timers, but that's just how it is here. *shrug* You got to adapt. That's how UO is. If you get PKed you have to adapt! Run, fight back, or stop going to dungeons/wherever you were killed. Don't complain about it. That's how Trammel happened.

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@BlackEye : Excellent post. Agree with everything you said, except this:

I think petitioning staff on UOR has worked and can still work. Here are some changes that have been made to the system, over the years:

• Added AFK check to sign-clicking
• Added AFK check to house placement
• Removed ability of dead bonded pets to block house placement.
• Removed ability of young players to block house placement.

Has that been enough? I would say no. I completely agree that there should be a more randomized fall timer, and if not that, then I agree that Item ID on house signs should trigger the AFK check.