Ya this is how I feel. ATM the only way to check for a ghost is to bring your own ghost. Then its the old chicken or the egg conundrum.
I am a Felucian myself but i also believe some level of fairness should be involved when people can work hard to do a champ and but have an unseen eye waiting for the perfect time to come in and take away your hard work.
They could also do this with a stealther, and if ghosts were always visible they probably would stick to stealthers. This champ boss issue is fortunately easily solved by not leaving champ bosses unguarded. You gotta protect your hard work right?!
Get good and learn to defend yourself, I'm sorry if you suck and I'm better then you so I can steal it from you. That's life, you can work hard and have people take the credit. Once again this is a sandbox, only bannable/jailable offense should be using bugs/exploits.
Dude's using ghosts to monitor areas... talking about how easy it is to monitor every "farming spot" and be there "in a second" and it's not being managed. It is happening. It doesn't take a pantywaist milkdrinker to see living in AMIBs, 7maps, or xmas scrolls is ideal and hunting in open field where you may potentially be monitored by ghostbots is a sucker's choice. Attack the argument, not the person... you're better than that. These areas are not going away. Their methods of entrance/exit/loot collection will not be altered. Hell, they recently got an upgrade with 100% safety and there will be no going back. My only objective right now (for fun too: go figure) is putting asses in seats in dungeons out hunting and yeah experiencing and hopefully one day participating in surprise pvp. That is when a UO universe is at it's best and I'll be damned if it's going to be ruined by a bunch of bong ripping dur-hurs running ghost accounts to help them pk better. (cwatidid?) The issue is not being managed well. PLEASE give the players tools to deal with this in game and treat the incidents as content. PLEASE prioritize player tracking skill mechanics to level of appeal. I feel like a dirtbag recruiting new players and sending them to a slaughter by detection angles they aren't prepared to deal with.
In other words return a reasonably balanced version of tracking that returns its appeal for investment.... for player tracking, that is. Regarding actual ghost count, yeah I think so too but one small guild of six with two accounts free each is a lot of coverage potential... if used sparingly.
Dungeons are a "region", right? I wouldn't think it would be too hard to code in a difference between being "outside" and being in a dungeon. A little trickier is preventing people in say Covetous floor 1 from seeing people in Covetous floor 2, or Destard 1 seeing people in Shame 4 (if they happen to be near each other on the UO worldmap). But even then, one could make a separate region for each dungeon's floor (there's maybe 30 total?) and then at some point in the script have Tracking remove from consideration anyone who is not in the same region as the tracker. This is all a guess from quickly looking at RunUO code, and having no coding experience myself whatsoever, so I may be grossly simplifying things or just be flat out wrong.
Angel Island had the perfect fix for ghosting. You were unable to see any mobiles(PCs and NPCs) except wandering healers after you were dead for more than 5 minutes. People could still see you if you went into war mode if you needed a buddy to rez you.
I too wish they would fix tracking. I'd rather it revert to its prior level even with the flaws than what it is now... @Chris, will we see a tracking change soon?
seems to me that the people wanting to be able to "Ghost" PVM hotspots are the ones who would gain from not having to Risk their PK toons being killed by a few blue players or a bit of spawn. you speak about risk in a one sided way, where is your risk when knowing how many people are farming a spawn, what sort of template they are using and rolling in with 8 PK's for 2 guys killing some mobs? I would vote No for Ghosting, set some form of timer on being dead before being teleported to Chaos / Bucs and an ecstatic band type restriction on the ghost, so it cant go too far... also remove any game detail when dead (no spawn, mob, player or item) only show a limited area around the corpse in the same way other games do (WoW for example) you want to spy on someone... thats fine, you will need to stealth in.. or the scary PK guy will have to recall in blind and see if he can take on the surprise. a shame to level the playing field aye?
All i know is if ghosting is allowed i wont need my blessed runebooks anymore to pk. Large guilds will be able to have 1 member each park a ghost somewhere and bam thats game.
