So Filling Bulk Order Deeds is Tedious - Lets talk changes.

Discussion in 'Renaissance Discussion' started by Chris, Jul 9, 2014.

  1. Mutombo

    Mutombo Active Member
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    (1) Most people didn't even see that there was a problem
    (2) Why are people who do not mine and do not fill bods offering ideas on how to fix a system they do not understand? You don't see me offering my opinions on matters of this server that I do not partake in or understand.

    At work. I don't tell the engineers how to do their job. I don't tell commercial how to do their job. And I tell them to bug off when they try and tell me how to do mine.

    But here on UOR....

    Whatever. Sorry to single you out Jupiter. You know I love you. Lets play CHESS. Theres a game in which the rules don't and havnt changed every week. I can at least wrap my head around that game.
    Jupiter likes this.
  2. Mutombo

    Mutombo Active Member
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    This has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
    Last edited by a moderator: Jul 15, 2014
  3. Nelvin_Skjordal

    Nelvin_Skjordal Member

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    Interesting topic, for certain. I was very outspoken against automated (more specifically: semi/remote/unattended) mining during my active times here on UO:Ren, I chortled when I read about the Troll introduction awhile back. With that stated, without having actually played within the systems, I've got to say that the changes that have taken place over the last ~6 months seem a little over top in the opposite direction.

    Good luck to all the miners & smiths out there! Good luck to staff & idea contributors on trying to come up with fair, balanced, and fun systems! Good luck UO:Ren!
  4. Blaise

    Blaise Well-Known Member
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    You haven't been in IRC for me to reply but I don't hate you either. Just returning the ball busting as we've always done.

    That image is definitely 'Merica, not UOR. This is a monarchy, where there is only one voice of rule. The fact that he's asking for discussion about the topic is a show that he is a man of the people. You can jump up and down and say 'nothing will change' and 'things change every week', all you like. It doesn't change the fact that community feedback and discourse are what is driving this shard forward. The voices of the people aren't forcing any hands, but they are heard and the less rant-ish, the louder they are heard.
    Last edited: Jul 13, 2014
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  5. Jupiter

    Jupiter Well-Known Member

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    Lets definitely set up a match. I haven't been schooled by you in chess for a long time!

    As for why I am chiming in, while I don't necessarily play this style, You cannot argue that the topics you are all talking about here don't impact me. This matter touches the economy directly, and therefore I am impacted. Further, this discussion is not about 'how' to do your job, but how what we creates a byproduct effects the entire shard.

    As a hypothetical tangent, If I were to begin a thread discussing whether or not "RP guildmasters" should be able to spawn monsters to help move along story lines, I would DEFINITELY expect ALL members of the shard to chime in, regardless of whether or not they are playing my 'same' style of game.

    So to you sir I give the next move, but please understand I'll stay in this game for now :)

    *Jupiter moves King pawn to e4*
  6. illbottleya

    illbottleya Member

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    Making AFK gump penalties harsher to ease our need for the more extreme nerfs sounds like a good idea to me. If the AFK gump is correctly constructed, then let the offenders really suffer. Keeping first offence as just a few minutes in jail makes sense. But repeat offenders? No way. Hell, we could even have fun with this. After an offense you're grey for a certain amount of play time? Maybe torture - as in an invincible NPC beats you with a club during your jail time and you receive statloss from it? Gold/platinum fines? How about a public jails in Britain or dungeon Wrong where people can torment and attack criminals? Put their names on public notice boards?

    I'd only have one reservation though. My warrior and tamer will occasionally collect cotton -- always in the good old fashioned double-click-drag-to-pack method. Once already in a couple short months of gameplay I got falsely jailed because the AFK gump came up so fast (while game lagged slightly) that I clicked the wrong result. In this situation, Tela was available to un-jail me and clean up my record so I was lucky. If jail penalties were harsh, this kind of help would need to be available or maybe the AFK gump would need to become a two-click system. By two-click system I mean you'd have to select a response, then click "OK" to confirm your selection. The OK button wouldn't appear till after you made a selection and it'd be far away from the selection boxes. Then you seriously can't accidentally fail an AFK gump.
  7. Mutombo

    Mutombo Active Member
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    I'm fine with harsher AFK penalties. BUT I think one OR BOTH things should happen.

    1) everyone needs to be reset at 0 offenses
    2) afk checks against your account have to be able to be worked off somehow

    The reason I say this is I have one account with 11 marks against him. I have never been afk though. I HAVE had other windows up surfing the web in the past. That is a practice I no longer do. Clearly because I cannot afford to lose one of my accounts for 21 days because I wanted to read something on Wikipedia. I do however actually have brain farts sometime. I know it seems impossible but if you click like 1,000 afk gumps, even you will screw up 1/1000. And thats where I am now. Very rarely on occasion, WHILE sitting at the keys, hit the wrong AFK gump. That sort of careless stupidity shouldn't have permanent effects is all maybe every 60 days one of your marks wares off?
  8. Mutombo

    Mutombo Active Member
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    Jupiter was there a flood of ingots into the marketplace or is there a lack of ingots in the marketplace?

    This has no impact on you. This change has simply further strangled an already chocked economy.

    checkmate
  9. Gideon Jura

    Gideon Jura Well-Known Member
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  10. illbottleya

    illbottleya Member

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    Resetting to 0 sounds totally reasonable. Retroactively punishing people isn't all that helpful.

    Working off violations is debatable though. There are a lot of directions you can go on that with varying consequences. In order to come up with this figure, you'd have to imagine what the most devious violator of your rule set would try to get away with. Sixty days sounds like a long time, but if you can work off one every two months, that would be 18 violations burned per year across three accounts. I don't do a ton of resource gathering - maybe an hour or so a week. So I don't know how quickly a rule-obeying-but-occasionally-neglectful macro'er gains counts. So the question would be, is 18 counts a year tolerable behavior?

    If the goal is to eliminate AFK resource gathering, then I believe the logical solution is to make the gump very hard to accidentally fail but have very harsh and unavoidable consequences (save for 1 or 2 warnings). With this in mind, the way to control how attentive a macro'er can be is to alter how frequently the gump pops up, how much time you are given to respond to it, and how hard it is to accidentally fail while still attending the keyboard.
  11. Chris

    Chris Renaissance Staff
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    Lets get back to the purpose of this thread
    I feel a lot of the discussion so far has been based on someone reading the patch notes and then making an assumption, and then stating that assumption here as fact. If you want to make a claim that "your play style has been removed, affected, nerfed etc" I would appreciate it if you detailed said situation explicitly. Fearmongering has no place in this post, as our goal is to improve the experience for all our crafters and miners. Not cause players to see a thread about how terrible you think it is going to be and be discouraged from playing here because you were asked to mark new runes for your recall mining operation.

    Be detailed...
    If you want to have an open and honest discussion on the economy as it relates to bulk order deeds, mining and the recent patches then provide details of your experience. And back the details up with evidence, results, yields, rpv's etc.

    Some theoretical examples..
    "I am unhappy that I can no longer mine in a cave using the system message there is "no metal to mine here" to detect when I need to switch to the next relative location which previously allowed me to mine 64 times in a single recall spot. I now have to adjust my macro to mine 1 spot 16 times and then move onto another spot. I also have to mark new runes as I can no longer recall into the caves I used to use."

    "I am unhappy that I can no longer fill more than 1 bulk order deed at a time with an automated macro system while being at/away from the computer"

    "I used to get 2000 ingots worth of ore per account per hour before the patch, now because I have to mine slower in town regions or due to the tool delay I can only get 1350 ingots per hour per account"

    Should you want to help make your argument even more clear then post the explicit reason that you need the additional ingots or why only 1350 ingots/hour/account during an attended mining session is not enough.

    An Example
    This is an example of the yield I was able to generate using a macro I downloaded from the forums after mining for 3 hours in the Buc's den tunnels on the development server.
    - 1 Piece of Ore every 4 seconds, 2 Second per mining attempt, 2 seconds allotted for crafting, restocking and organizing items to the bank.
    - Mining roughly 900 times in a 60 minute period using a 4 seconds per mining attempt estimation.
    - The ore pile ratio would result in 1350 ingots (1.5 ingots per ore pile, Ore Piles are large 75% of the time).
    - A reasonable player might run two characters running macros at the same time.
    - This would provide 2700 ingots/hour.
    - And a reasonable gameplay session would be 8 hours.
    - This would be 21,600 ingots every 8 hours.

    At a low market value of 7 gold per ingot this would provide the player with 151,200 gold value of ingots they could either sell or use to complete bulk order deeds. A more effective macro expanded to 3 accounts could provide a yield of nearly 5000 ingots/hour, or 40,000 ingots per 8 hour session.

    This is currently easily accomplished under our current mechanics by an attended player. If you want to help the staff understand why we should allow players more ingot yield than that example. Please explain why 21,600 ingots per 8 hour gaming session is not enough to satiate a players needs.

    Some players have taken the time to clearly explain why they were resulting to certain activities and have worked with the staff to find a better way to address them, ergo the primary topic in this thread. No one player should be required to result to a 65 part macro to fill bulk order deeds. That is a clear sign that the system is tedious, and that it can provide a disproportionate benefit to a player who seeks to accomplish such a complex goal. Systems like that have a tendency to balloon out of control, similar to how recall mining has via posted macros on the forums. If the system encourages abuse, then it will be abused.

    A decent amount of the frustration I am detecting has nothing to do with the changes added in the patch, rather players are simply upset they have to adjust a macro they downloaded from the forums, mark new runes, or have no easy way to fill and flip the 800 bulk order deeds they stockpiled.

    The staff is always willing to listen to, and take into account valid concerns about the economy, player activities and player goals. However allowing the economy to be abused because players "dont want to have to re-mark a rune, or adjust my macro" is not a valid reason to allow an imbalance to continue.

    A Balanced Approach to the Economy
    Some players went out of their way to demonstrate how the current system was inadequate for providing all our players a fair playing field. This has happened 20 times since the server has begun and 20 times we have made an adjustment to keep the playing field fair for our players. Unlike all other servers the staff on Renaissance always work to find balance in the design of things. We never mindlessly remove a complete aspect of the game in search of the greater good. And generally our solutions take drastically more time to code, design and implement than anything another free server (or OSI) bothered to attempt.

    For example two popular servers solution to player selling a ton of items to vendors.
    Server A's Solution: Provide vendors with a small purse of gold, dont allow players to sell items once the purse is exhausted.
    Server B's Solution: Disallow vendors from buying items completely.
    Renaissance Solution: Allow vendors to carry a stock of no more than 50 items, and the more inventory on hand, the less they pay for said item.

    Another example unattended gathering
    Server A's Solution: 1st Offense: 20 day ban. 2nd Offense Lifetime Ban. This could be because you were watching youtube on another computer, or pvping on another account. If you did not respond in 1-2 minutes to a GM popping up, you were unattended.
    Server B's Solution: 1st Offense:Character and Items in question are deleted, or given to other players. If accounts is not a donor, possible ban. 2nd Offense: Account/IP Ban. Chance to be banned for a minimal failure of being attended apparently is directly related to how much you donate to the server in question.
    Renaissance Solution: 1st Offense: 5 Minutes in Jail, Forced Linking to the AFK system information. 2nd Offense: 1 Hour In jail. Players have 2 minutes in which to respond to a attended verification prompt, which decreases by 10 seconds for each failure.

    So before you accuse the staff of being intolerant or inflexible possibly consider the method in which you are attempting to make your point and take a minute to review the changes made to Renaissance in its 2 year history to maintain a stable economy coupled with the growth the server has enjoyed over those two years.

    Only one server in the history of free servers saw an increase in its playerbase after the first year. And even that server saw a massive decline in its playerbase once they lacked the staff to properly police these issues. A recent server, without a stable system to provide a balanced economy saw a rise to 1200 players, to a level of 80 players online in 3 months. Next to staff corruption, nothing can destroy a free server quicker than a pointless economy.

    A new player started here last week and explained to me that he has 50 million gold and 500 million in assets on a previous server, yet he switched to Renaissance because "He was bored and there was nothing to buy, or the things he wanted to buy cost 100 million gold". A large part of the reason groups of players select the Renaissance server is because we have the best free shard economy. They start here knowing the world is fair, and their potential for success is limitless. And we know this because the Renaissance staff and volunteers take the time to greet almost every single new player and ask them what led to their decision to play here.

    Renaissance was opened with the goal of providing our players with a thriving and balanced economy free from corruption, cheating and unattended profit macros. Our very first designed patch was the attended verification system. Over time we will have to adjust what OSI created in order to avoid the result in which OSI achieved so that Renaissance can thrive as it hits 2,3,5 and 10 years old.

    Regarding Cave Trolls
    Situations like the cave trolls, once the system was refined, adjusted and tweaked players began to enjoy the added excitement and reward. While it took a few patches we eventually worked the bugs out and they provide a bonus to players who are actively attending their mining operations. While a classic player mining with a pack horse will only ever see a troll if they are outside of town and a travel miner failed to kill one they spawned.

    Regarding Caves
    The recall restriction into caves is something we are experimenting with temporarily to provide new purpose to those areas. There are only 20 small caves in the world and with the combined efforts of 5-10 recall miners they were ending up mined out a great deal of the time.

    A very common new player complaint was "Why is there no ore here to mine" and even some veteran players attempting to use a gargoyles pickaxe experienced the same annoyance.

    Players can still recall mine in areas such as the Buc's tunnels, Delucia Pass, Minoc Mining area without any restriction. The Buc's tunnels for instance is almost larger than all of the caves in the world combined.

    This change, like all others will be reviewed over time and adjusted to achieve balance. Ergo: Some caves will not have any spawn as they are popular classic mining locations, and some caves that are extremely remote will be toggled to allow recalling.

    Classical Mining
    A variety of changes have gone into recent patches to reward this play style. The most recent of which is the ability for pack horses to carry additional weight and the implementation of the ore golems into the world. Additionally with the changes to town and and cave recall mining players can now find less competition from automated miners when mining in these areas.

    Players with a combat miner can now find ore golems/ore golem lords spawning in remote caves around the worlds and rather than resulting to a macro to mine the caves, they can hunt these new monsters and generate profitable amount of ore. Due to the design of the spawning golems 89% of the time on spawns it will be of a colored variety allowing this type of farming to provide a decent amount of colored ingots. Each golem can provide anywhere from 15-70 ingots.

    In addition the new gargoyle shovels, provided as a low level bulk order reward provide players with yet another method to mine, with more excitement and template variety than the standard method. And like any new system we are still tweaking the new monsters, recall settings to provide the best experience for our players.

    In Closing
    The change to crafting exceptional items, and allowing players to fill bulk order deeds with a single click will balance the playing field for all players. Razor novice, and Razor master alike.

    These changes will go into the next patch and players starting on Renaissance will do their first bulk order deed and be amazed at how much more enjoyable it was to craft and fill BOD's on Renaissance vs their previous server and never feel the need to search out 3rd party applications or complex razor macros in order to accomplish their goals.

    Going forward if you want to be critical of the patch, and make a post that can be considered "fearmongering" or "skyisfallingism" I expect you to provide details, not assumptions, on why some treasured part of your gameplay experience was affected.
    Last edited: Jul 15, 2014
  12. Basoosh

    Basoosh Well-Known Member
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    I would say 18 counts a year is not tolerable.

    I recall mine on two accounts, for about 2 hours a night on average. That's about 1400 hours worth of gathering in a year. I do this while actively playing my main account or working on something unrelated to UO altogether. In this 1400 hours, I've picked up 4 marks altogether between those two accounts.

    #1: The baby woke up and I forgot to turn the macro off.
    #2: Went and got a beer. Got distracted by an NHL playoff game on my way to the fridge.
    #3: Hershey squirts. Nuff said.
    #4: My neighbor is an idiot.


    Clicking the wrong response in a GUMP doesn't necessarily result in a mark. If you notify staff as soon as it happens, they'll likely free you from jail and erase your count. Just don't wait 10 minutes and then notify them, as they will have no way of verifying that you are in fact the dumbass, and not a third party program.


    (For the sake of full disclosure: My accounts have a couple additional marks from when I was new to the shard and was hardcore into fishing. I didn't even know about the anti-afk system at the time. It also has a mark from when I answered a GUMP incorrectly and couldn't be bothered to message staff. I think my grand total is 7 marks across my three accounts. Something like 0, 3, 4.)

    I am unhappy that Razor can no longer see system messages related to gathering. I feel this has a lot of bleed-over and impacts people that don't recall mine just as much. For example, people fishing on a boat.

    I am unhappy that I can no longer recall into caves. My recall miner only has 1 or 2 cave locations on his route, so this change has near-zero effect on my recall mining operation, I just don't like this as a game restriction.

    If you want to stop or slow recall gathering, I'm actually OK with that, even though I stand to make loads of profit off of it. I just don't think the above two ways are good methods of going about it. There's too much impact to other players. I've seen quite a few non-recall-miners in IRC over the last week befuddled over why they can't get Razor to work like they expect after this change. This, I feel, is bad.

    As an alternative, I would rather see larger time restrictions on how soon you can mine after recalling. Basically, more application of the 'spirit is tired' change you added in this most recent patch. This hits the problem directly without much (or any) impact to others. It can also be adjusted. Recall miners making too much bank? Then extend the delay. I think this is the perfect solution to recall mining all in one nice little package.

    For what it's worth, I've calculated and tested my recall mining profit to be roughly 11,500 gold profit per hour, when selling the ingots @ 8g each. (though my macro is probably not as efficient as yours)
    Last edited: Jul 15, 2014
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  13. Chris

    Chris Renaissance Staff
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    The Razor message visibility will be adjusted to target just 1-2 messages we are concerned with. This will be resolved in the next patch. The primary messages of concern were the ore depleted and log depleted messages. This will restore expected fishing macro system message detection.

    As for the razor issues, I believe that was related to stacking ore at the players feet, which was addressed in this patch and should no longer be an issue. Should this not be the case make sure to forward any issue like that to the staff for review.

    As for the recall changes, that is valid, until a player wants to escape a player killer or monster. While being a more effective change, we considered it too drastic. The goal of the recall change was to make mining in Serpents Hold, Cove, Britain with a recall miner less productive than mining outside of town in a location a normal player would most likely avoid. Thus encouraging players who macro mine, to move to more profitable (non town locations) leaving the towns for players who packhorses and classic mining techniques.
    Last edited: Jul 15, 2014
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  14. Mutombo

    Mutombo Active Member
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    I can tell you that with my macro and the troll patch rules, I was pulling in about 3k an hour each. That is like 48k Gold. That is not a economy threatening yield imo. I would like to get see the mining changes reverted back to the troll patch rules. BoD system requires a lot of ingots to play.

    I would support restricting mining in brit and other spots where new players would mine frequently. (I would argue that serpents hold never sees anyone mining by hand but that is your call) Take away town mining. Make some caves unrecallable to. Just please revert back to the troll patch rules/item delay/system messages.
  15. Stranger

    Stranger Active Member

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    I like the re turn in and more so the multi fill option. The most tedious part is clicking on 20 little bandanas.
  16. Blaise

    Blaise Well-Known Member
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    It also generates a lot of desirable items which have value. You have no shortage of wealth based on the last time I saw the roof of your keep.

    Put up a thread BUYING ingots to fill all those BoDs and I assure you, if the price is right, new players will come in droves.



    But oh, as the established miners and BoD flippers we should all do our very best to keep prices low to make sure there is no market and keep driving the machine to suit our ingot faucets.
  17. Friar Jocham

    Friar Jocham New Member

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    I'm not sure if you are still collecting data but I would like to provide the following:

    - Newbie mining at Ocllo mining caves (always within 3 screens of a forge), not targeting specific ores (mine everything)
    - 100 str, empty pack (except for spellbook, scissors, and dagger), robe & boots
    - Bought 10 pickaxes from blacksmith. No packhorse. No drag & drop (mine until 390 stones +- 3 & forge)
    - Duration 8:05 - 9:38 pm, 90% attention (wife needed a few things), plenty of ore (empty areas were rare).
    - No Razor scripts. Only thing used was UO LastObject macro used manually (alt-z). Skill increased from 85.2 to 89.2. Smelting failed occasionally on copper, bronze, and gold ore
    - Ingots: 1428 iron, 97 dull copper, 97 shadow, 53 copper, 3 bronze, 11 golden

    Based on this inefficient method, I obtained 1089 ingots per hour.

    One session in this manner is all I could handle in a day. Ingot objective: leveling blacksmith (not selling).

    Hope this helps!
    Last edited: Jul 18, 2014
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  18. Marbles

    Marbles Member

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    I thought BODs were meant to be tedious.

    Craft only exceptional items button in craft menu would be heavenly. Every crafter who ever crafted wants this.

    Turning in 2 bods for a timer reset doesn't seem right to me. 3 or 4 bods for a timer reset would be better. Or force people to fill them and flip.

    Flipping is wonderful. Great change, please keep that. Flipping BODs for a chance at a good BOD is a fun system of gambling for players who are at end game and bored.
  19. Wodan

    Wodan Well-Known Member
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    Only 43 more hours for a GM smith ! WHOHOOOO
  20. Gideon Jura

    Gideon Jura Well-Known Member
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