With the recent changes to mining, it's got me thinking. Did we just punish people for having more skills? Did we just punish people for working smarter? Did we just punish people who spent a lot of time writing macros? It got me thinking because I don't believe that we addressed the actual issue. Right now I see us playing Whack-a-Mole with the issue of people not actively and immersively playing the game. All the while we continue to enable them to keep doing it in other ways. Punishing miners for having Magery may, possibly, be the first time in UO that I've seen players punished instead of being rewarded for GMing a skill. It's not right. Make the trolls spawn for everyone who mines, regardless of Magery, and address the real problem.... RAZOR. Otherwise we'll be"fixing" the next "recall miner" or whatever new automaton people come up with next....then the next one....then the next one....etc... Require Negotiate features with server. Disable organize/restock/drag'n'drop functionality...or whatever it takes to make people actually play the game. The alternative seems to be a waste of efforts that could be directed towards content changes and such. Just my .02
I think Chris has said he doesn't want to do this. But for the sake of discussion... This came up on a former shard. My suggestion, which I am still partial to, is to disallow movement while unattended. That is, disallow Teleport, Recall, Gate, and walking, in Razor macros. I have no idea if this is possible or not. It's movement that is at the core of the issue though, in terms of "playing without playing". Recall is what allows you to macro-mine. Walking/Teleporting is what allows one to scavenge rares when they appear (though this is less of an issue here due to this being gump-able). On the other hand, movement is not needed for most activities which are macroed "harmlessly". That is, training Magery or Animal Lore, IDing and sorting your loot, etc.
I've gotten a lot of enjoyment out of creating little Razor scripts/macros. It's the game within the game. I'd be quite sad to see it go.
Howdy, I wouldn't play that game. That game would suck. I'd play a game that disabled razor's target-blue/red/gray and last target hot keys so that reds had to actually target their actions with the, you know, mouse. How would that sit with you? Razor adds just enough automation to make UO playable and generally fun for a broad range of play styles. Leave it alone. Regards, Wil
I would support it if restrictions weren't too overboard and actually encouraged play. I think if there is ever an SP variant of this shard, Razor Feature Negotiation would be mandatory for a successful implementation of such a strict ruleset. All it would do here is kill the playerbase, which has been discussed ad nauseum on other shard forums, etc.
Lightshade hit the nail on the head.. this fix feels like a US Gov PR move. "See we fixed it!" Meanwhile I spend three weeks crafting a work around and get right back to work. My nonsensical favorite idea so far: Use two accounts, one account gates the mining spots, the miner has zero magery.
The problem is that this is an awesome flashy answer to the bad behavior of like... 2-3 people. The timing issue would have fixed enough and if its that bad, delete the ingots now that the guy is banned. Cynic had the idea of just adding 'guards' and mining in Cove/Brit areas. Others will just leave the trolls in caves. Others will stay and kill them. I am working on a private idea, but I haven't decided if its worth the time. Maybe none of this would have been an issue if people hadn't fought and argued for 3 accounts. What if everyone only had one?
I wouldn't mind this - the only problem is that there's so much UO to see out there, and you will be missing out on a lot of it with only five 700-skill-cap characters available. Either way, not something that can be gone back on now.
We looked into doing this, but in doing so we discovered it requires that you only allow players to play on the server that use razor or applications that support negotiation with the server. Anyone playing without razor, such as the naturalists or someone on Linux/Mac that cannot get razor working would no longer be able to stay connected to the server. I was unable to find a way around this so we scrapped the idea.
I play on another shard which permits only one account. A lot of things get messy when you can't have two characters in at once. Like transferring mounts from your tamer to your alts. Nothing unsolvable. On the shard I'm talking about you "shrink" tames into objects and then drop/relog/pickup the object. But it's a lot of reprogramming effort with a lot of potentially unforeseen consequences just so you can reasonably limit players to one account. I'd rather not see that here. Regards, Wil
You can transfer tames to a friend in order to supply your alts. Single accounts promote interaction and force decisions about what characters you really want. It'll never happen here, but I'll still dream of a day when Tel makes an SP variant with forced Razor neg and strict rule set.
I remember the days of dropping stuff behind walls with circle of trans in a remote town's inn. Then quick logging to transfer to my other characters.
Everyone's entitled to their wrong opinion. The fact that everyone can have every character type, or damn close, explicitly removes the necessity to cooperate and socialize to meet common goals or accomplish things you otherwise would not be able to. That challenge is actually a good thing, in my opinion, and really the lack of it is one of the only things I'm not happy with here.
Yeah, limiting the accounts here to 1 will never happen, but it does change the dynamics. The fewer the characters allowed, the more of a "world" is created. The more characters allowed, the more of a "game" is created. It all hinges on the forced interaction that arises from fewer alts. It makes for a more realistic multi-player game with limited characters. The whole multi-account thing makes UO a 'solo' game and less of an MMORPG in my opinion. I, for example, need no one's help to play this game...which seems ironic with it supposedly being a MMORPG...?
Yes!!! Except it wasn't remote... because the starting inn in Britain was the only one I knew, as I did not have a lot of runes, nor did I know of any other log points in Britain. No joke, I also hid stuff behind trees in the forest and used camping to log out and then log in and go get it. Ahhh memories.
I do that with things in my house actually. I have a pouch of dyed runebooks that is tucked into a spot where even CTRL+Shift won't reveal it. You have to walk a number of tiles away and CTRL+Shift to get the name bar up....then walk over and dclick that to open it.
