Capture the Flag Discussion Thread

Oh, and before you all place Mes up on your shoulders and think he's a hero for taking your side in things I do want you to take a look at this:



One of the biggest examples of teaming in CTF history, they sill lost, and have yet to return to CTF in this capacity because they just can't fit 7+ people on a team anymore. Instead they resort to joining CTF and cast walls in their own teams base for the sole purpose to grief the players on that team.

Abyss test was the best thing ever!


Cynic,

You are just proving my point every time you open your mouth. The rewards are team based btw. which means that teaming up with another will benefit both teams.

you are trammelizing this and it's disgusting. By saying purple pots shouldn't harm your teammates is ridiculous. It does it in the world why not here? Because you guys just spam a macro to throw them everywhere? Where is the fun in that? Go back and play WoW.

I agree with a vote kick. But I AGREE more with removing 4 man CTF

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If you want rewards fine.. Then remove the plat value of the rewards. Or change the rewards to be turned in for event USE items only. Nothing that comes out of the events should be able to be applied to the world.

I condemn you because you have been caught in the past for doing stupid shit. This is nothing different.

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I'm really proud of you that you made it a whole day before you started those personal attacks. But rather than make this about me, you should really just respond to the points people are making about the topic at hand.

We lost that game and there's no real excuse. We had a poor strategy (my fault) and we played poorly and we fought all three teams. I mean, it's not like anyone ever attacked your team or made an attempt on your flag except for us. Yes there were 7 people on my team, but there were 12 on yours. But I still think we could have played much better.

Also, I think events should be ONCE a week. Until rewards for plat are removed.

Elaborate how I'm proving your point? The rewards are not team based in the least, I've been out healed before, Pax has been out capped and bart has been outkilled by players on our team. If I team up with Player X on the other team it doesn't help me increase my heals on my team, unless that is I ask player X to exclusively attack my own team mates which is contrary to the accusations you guys made that we don't attack each other.

The CTF event is already Trammel, hence no loot, hence no counts, hence reds can participate, hence runics, the list goes on.. This is CTF, it's not regular PvP, I don't really see you out there much taking sigils from SL? That's the CTF you want, why aren't you doing that? Afterall, sigils=flag, amirite?

In regards to purples, this is why I said just take them out completely. You should not be able to harm your own team, this opens up a can of worms that I'm sure Telamon does not want to have to deal with, and quite honestly I don't either. I don't need people who don't like me joining my team at every CTF to just kill me at my spawn point, grow some balls, hop on a pvper, and kill me from an enemy team. For as much as I dislike Balla he at least has the intestinal fortitude to fight me the way CTF was intended.

Oh please elaborate on what I've been caught doing in the past.. Please DO explain. I welcome you to start another thread an item all my wrong doings out.

I used to side with the logic that there shouldn't be scheduled "trammelized" events because I believed in the idea that it wasn't accurate to how UO was back on osi. And I found it counter productive to promoting actual in game action. But there's a few reasons I personally have changed my stance. For one, it is true, we no longer live in a period of time where this game is new and our populations are dwarfed in comparison to that of osi. As it is, you simply do not see the level of pvp a lot of us desire as there once was, and that's just a sad reality I've come to accept as a natural migration of players to newer games, and a lost mentality and motivation for what remains of us. The same arguments were made about the automated events on uosa, but anyone who played there knows that the moment the events were removed, in game action did not increase. In fact, we started losing monumental amounts of activity. It literally crushed the pvp environment and that server has never been the same. I'm not saying that's the sole reason for the overall decline, but it most certainly played a large part. I wish I could say that by getting rid of ctf that it would somehow cause players to start hitting the field, but I would bet large value that that would not happen. Personally, i do not care one way or another whether I win a match or not, nor do I care about the trophies. For me, I see these events as a very small instance that I'm able to get a small pvp fix because I thoroughly enjoy fighting and competing in a fighting sense. You could remove the reward system entirely and I wouldn't care at all. I just wish everyone shared that same mentality and would participate in these events without getting bent out of shape over who's winning or who's teaming up with who. To me, it's just a fun way to get some action in. I'm sorry, but I don't have the time to go sit at a bank for 30 mins to a few hours and hope to find a group of factioners. I occasionally make several rounds to dungeons looking for reds and make rounds to faction bases and towns, but it is seriously rare to find anything. Maybe I just don't have the right timing. Another thing is, the whole argument saying "well that isn't era accurate!" doesnt hold much weight for me considering we play a server that coins the phrase "history perfected." So while we aim to be as close to era as possible, there are differences that are in place that staff and players aim to view as "better." So implementing ctf, or any event, is something I suppose the staff and players have to agree is for the better discretion of the server, and I truly believe these events can be healthy, but it's an adopted mentality of not viewing them in such a negative manner when things don't go your way. I'm all up for constructive ideas to make it better and more balanced for entertainments sake, but I don't think removing it altogether will help anything whatsoever. Oh well..

I don't actually believe that removal of ctf would boost world pvp on this server, for the record. It's just not uo to me and to each his own as far as I'm concerned. I don't think it's removal would hurt world pvp either. The people that commit heavily to ctf and those that commit heavily to world pvp are nearly mutually exclusive.

Most of us are adults these days and will never have era-accurate copious spare time to do things. I like CTF for the same reasons I like CoD, because it is action you can count on, when it's available on a schedule.

I've been busy a lot and not really putting time into the game as much as I used to. I, and many others, came here on good faith that the commitment by staff to provide events such as CTF, Tourneys, etc was solid. I figured, hey, take your time because I'd love to build up and try out the myriad other things available on the shard too. Well, I still enjoy a great many things here but consistent events are the one thing that will actually keep me playing in the long run. I don't need/want more pixels, but I'm sure I'll get them. I don't need platinum trophies, but non-redeemable trophies is a terrible idea, unless it's like end of the year top score trophies (think item counts).

What I, and many others, want is to have some fun playing UO and whether you feel that sanctioned games are true to UO or not, means nothing to me. It's fun we can count on and it doesn't remove anything at all from the fun of the gamble of field play. Chipping in a platinum or two for playing is more of a "hey, thanks for playing" than any level of profit. The more people spin it like it's profitable or there's even room to collude FOR profit, the less faith I have in humanity's ability to understand simple math.

*sighs*

You were defending yourself against my supposed attacks long before I ever called you out namelessly and generically. Even then, I never named you or your friends specifically, yet you were instantly defensive and jumping all over me. An inquisitive mind might take note of that.

In the end, though, your group has been definitively caught cheating in other aspects of CTF and been reprimanded for their actions. This just makes your word....nothing. I simply will not believe you on anything. Perhaps that's not fair, but that is the bed your group made when they started putting healer-bots on the other teams to farm more trophies. Maybe you were just trying to prove a point, maybe you weren't. You clearly knew you were screwing with Telamon's system. Regardless, I never called any of you out for it publicly because it served no purpose. I just quietly PM'd Telamon and told him what "Character X" was doing this. I did not even know that it was your group of players at that time. I only found that out much later.

If it had only happened once, perhaps i'd agree that there was no malicious intent, but that simply was not the case. It happened multiple times with multiple players. This just underscores the need for an IP restriction and I thank you for making such a definitive argument for me.

Anywho, like i've stated now....multiple times....none of this blaming this person or that person serves to help out this server or this thread. Its derailing and that was why I completely ignored you up until this point.

So....re-focusing on constructive talk...

We completely disagree on these points. I am sure that you don't want the status quo to change, as it would mean that you couldn't just spam purple pots in every direction for an entire match and might have to actually use them more surgically in order to avoid killing yourself.

Realistically, though, there is a complete lack of balance there and that is why Purple Pots should damage EVERYONE regardless of the team they are on. I understand that there is a certain aspect of Trammel with CTF's, but that doesn't mean we should go full-bore Trammel either.

Purple pots should damage everyone. Period.

The vote kick option isn't fair either as a group of people could just maliciously kick the player for giggles. It would be a system primed for exploitation and would only help larger groups that split up between two teams go and game the system.

Again, you should be able to target your own team for damaging spells.

Sure, only if you get kicked from the match for team-killing. Players would abuse casting offensively on their team just as much as they would a vote-kick option. You think Kane is gonna play nice if he's randomly put on a team with Bart and has the ability to fuck his game up?

I do agree purple potions should damage everyone but I don't think that would be as easy of a change as just disallowing them altogether, so I'll side with the latter unless the former is found to be easy to code.

If magic weapons are disallowed, you can bet your ass the best teams will be mages in synch.


Cynic said that he could pull trophies on two characters and Telamon mockingly doubted him. As I understand it, he proved Telamon wrong and has not done so since. He would do much better farming for platinum with alt-bots in the game world, than he would in CTF. If you've got some evidence of him abusing the lack of IP restriction beyond that, by all means, pony it up.
IP restriction isn't even worth having the conversation about considering it can be enabled on a case-by-case basis and is just as easily identified when being abused.

Just so it's clear that I really never intended to cheat the system, this was a main channel IRC conversation regarding the idea of using a heal bot. I even made it known in main chat what I was doing. (Does it make it right? Nope. However, it wasn't a secret and I was very upfront with what I was doing):

[22:47] <`Liberation> i would bring in two exxtra accounts to loop purples on my team's doorway
[22:48] <Cynic> I assumed that CTF was limited by IP
[22:48] <`Liberation> i don't think anything's limited by IP on UOR
[22:48] <~Telamon> it can be, but is not at the moment
[22:48] <fwerp> no i just have 2 afkers on the team i'm not playing on
[22:48] <fwerp> jk!!
[22:48] <Cynic> shoot I'm sticking a healbot on the other team now
[22:48] <Cynic> two trophies
[22:49] <~Telamon> If you idle a guy in ctf, you account can lose access to the events however
[22:49] <Cynic> sonofa
[22:49] <Cynic> but he wont idle, he'll be healing
[22:49] <`Liberation> healbot isn't idle!
[22:49] <~Telamon> idle heh
[22:49] <~Telamon> if you pull that off, im sure youll earn a trophy
[22:49] <Cynic> you don't think I could? challenge accepted
[22:49] <`Liberation> does it count overheals?
[22:49] <~Telamon> It does not
[22:50] <~Telamon> only available HP
[22:50] <`Liberation> yeah that's tough without 3rd party progs
[22:50] <~Telamon> free use regs, cant lose really
[22:50] <~Telamon> i get the feeling perseus would be right there chopping him into tiny bits
[22:50] <Cynic> perseus is on my team >.<
[22:50] <~Telamon> he passed 800 ctf kills recently
[22:50] <~Telamon> Yea but your healbot wont be


Once Telamon PM'd me and asked me to stop, I did. I was never jailed, yelled at, scolded at, nor lectured that what I did was cheating/exploiting/blah blah. By using the same logic some "bug testers" use on this server, I was simply testing a bug then reporting my findings to Telamon immediately before/after.
So get over it, I've been upfront with this since post #1. I took it as a challenge, I accepted, I succeeded.

And yes we completely disagree on all those points. I don't understand how you can shoot down the vote kick option because of malicious intent but in the same breath really believe that players damaging their own team mates will be super fine.

Doesn't this speak to some points I made earlier?
I know it's an attempt at a personal attack, but it kind of shows that the system encourages collusion and team stacking, and even people like us who are half-heartedly into CTF feel the need to do it.
If everyone is doing it, there's obviously a problem with the system.

I also find it amusing that you've claimed in another post that you've never done anything to game the system. Aren't you the guy who was running all three accounts in CTF and dumping AFK characters on the other teams to weigh them down?

Well, let's take a minute to think about the math here.
My numbers may be fuzzy so feel free to correct me (I'm sure you would anyway)

A winner's statue from CTF is what, four plat?
A baracoon kill is what, three plat?
CTF takes around 30 minutes? Less? I'm not really sure, I don't participate in it.
A champ spawn takes between 45 minutes and 2 hours. If you work hard, you'll probably make slightly more overall (I usually get about 6 plat per rat spawn) than CTF from random plat drops by the end, but it's a larger time investment.

It seems to me that CTF for plat if you arrange the teams such that the PCPs of your team all take heal/kill/cap statues for four plat a pop are actually making platinum more efficiently than they would be doing champ spawns. It might not be as efficient for all of the satellite bitches, but I think as long as you were one of the ones organizing it all you could over time make a decent chunk of plat. The only real difference is that you can chain spawns, where CTF is a one a day kind of thing.

I thought they were 2 plat trophies, but I could be mistaken. I've only cashed in a handful of trophies over time and never really consider them a huge boon of profit. That's why I was saying a single coin (not indexed/named) for all players would be a great motivator and consolation prize even if you took your licks fighting a capable team. If you did well for your team, you can cop a 1p bonus over the standard.
For those players actually working entire champ spawns from start to finish, the take is more in line with 10-12 platinum for an hour spent. That's per person if I'm not mistaken, if not more. It's been a while since I've run one so I'm sure someone else could clarify what kind of take they're getting on an average champ spawn.

I don't mind if people think this is a bad thing, to reward players for playing, but I don't and won't. If it's abundantly more than can be had in the open world, sure, it's a problem. If it's less, it's not even on the radar of things to be concerned about, in regards to rewards available.

I should take the moment to mention El Horno is selling a single item for over 12m gold right now, that he got as a result of dedication and teamwork. Should there be a thread about shutting down any/all holiday events because they make overnight millionaires out of dedicated players?

You are missing important components here.
4 plat x 3 trophies = 12 plat
12 plat / 5 people = 2.4 plat per person
minus when we don't get the kill trophy because we are actually trying to win
2.4 - X = not very much plat for the event

and minus what our average would be on separate teams (all teams get trophies)
2.4 - X - Y = even less plat incentive for collusion (this number is negative in 2 team imo)

Anyone who thinks this is very profitable is bad at math, like Blaise said.

Also, you aren't counting wait time. You don't just show up and play and they are sometimes late. You have to wait for the gates to open, then wait again for the match to start.

The trophies are indeed 4 plat. And yes, personally it's a motivating factor for me to not only participate but to give it my all and win. Like I said before, if you remove the rewards it won't remove me but it will remove my drive to play it as hard as I do now. I won't mind getting up in the middle of a match to go make a sandwich if I were hungry. Win/lose it's all the same so why should I really go all out, it's still fun to run around and just target people that I don't like when I'm not in my kitchen making a drink. I won't be afk, I'll be back before the gump boots me.

The system encourages small team play. This is, afterall, and MMO. Grouping with others to accomplish a similar goal is always rewarded in MMOs more often than not. This isn't a broken system, imo, it's operating as intended. I'm also not arguing against a randomized CTF either, I've just pointed out some flaws.

And I've done dozens upon dozens of spawns, they are much more profitable than CTF. If you recall in to just kill the boss, then sure, CTF will win. If you champ the champ the way a champ is supposed to be champed then you'll be awarded far more plat, k champ?

A team can also be organized much like PCP to fight against PCP, I'm pretty sure we see this everyday with factions and O/C, etc.. There's nothing stopping someone like Napo, Mes, and Lib from forming MNL and fighting us every night. If you don't like CTF or don't like to form a smaller team to PvP then that's your prerogative.

Hug it fucking out guys, tired of diarrhea posts and post re-hashing every other post,

Try the big red X button in the corner then. This is a discussion forum and this thread is specifically created for discourse and conversation pertaining to Capture the Flag.

Well, it seems like we've reached the point in the thread where you guys are just going "it's fine, it needs to be profitable, all those other people just need to get good and form their own teams".

I don't really care, my thoughts on CTF are similar to Phuzzy's.
This is a problem Telamon has identified though, it's not really my axe to grind. I was just throwing my thoughts out there, I personally don't think it will be fixed until the behaviors he's worried about are no longer incentivized.
It seems like the solution that you guys have come up with is for Telamon to tell the people complaining to deal with it and get good.

I wonder if he's going to be willing to do that.
As someone with no horse in this race, I'm happy to just sit back and enjoy watching him do whatever he's going to do.

I find it comical how much agreement you are ignoring in this thread. The only pretty clear differences are that you (and perhaps others) feel this is actually profitable in a detrimental way. Getting good is the name of many games and I'm having a hard time thinking of a game I've played where getting good isn't what makes it fun. Do you tell players you just PKed to get good? You know they could get better (if they died) and I don't see you championing ways to remove the incentives to murder them.

Providing some reward for all legitimate players, with bonuses for high performers, is an appropriate system for the path the shard has been on for over two years. In learning that the reward trophies are 4p each, I feel they should only be 2p each, with a bare coin tossed to all actual players. If you don't agree with that source of reward for playing a game, that's totally fine. No one is retiring from playing CTF once a day.

So while you say you don't really care, you could at least try to care enough to pay attention to all the people agreeing on several points here.

Random teams would be great to see (also stated to be on the drawing board in a prior thread)
De-Trammelization of the events is preferred by all with only minor contention around purple potions.
Everyone understands that even a bard can do well if they play the game.
Multi-account needs to be on a case-by-case basis with punishment for abuse


I can assure you, if events weren't here in some fashion and planned for expansion, there would be fewer players here. I'm already certain several have come and gone because tournaments haven't been a priority and CTFs took a long time to get steady. We need to keep hashing out the pain points and providing fun things to do in the game without wasting administrative time complaining about losing. If you're losing and it's not a mechanical flaw being abused, that is just the nature of games. People have been upset about not winning events since the inception of events....hell probably since the inception of human competition.