Bring back skill loss on bonded pets

The reason lies in the main element what makes this game popular and it's called risk. With no risk, you can fight back more or take them into large spawns and in case it rewards you it is highly unfair, because you're earning something without the backlash. This is not the case for other players. This is why other players want #nerftamers.

I can't believe after all these people posting 235432 times, this is still not obvious.

UO is the best MMORPG because it is risky. UOR is not risky at the moment for tamers, therefore people are saying tamers should be brought to risk as well.

And as a dexxer, no to weapon bonding. I don't want a risk-free environment to make up for someone else being OP'd. I want them to experience the same risk as I.

Simple as that.

I get the sense you're a particularly risk averse individual, which is fine. There's logic to leaving the maserati in the garage when the weather is forecasting hail. But open loot, open pvp, risk/reward sandbox games like this give us an opportunity to enjoy the feeling of a little danger without real consequences--and I maintain that temporarily 2.5% weaker pets is not a real consequence.

As someone who is risk inclined, particularly in game, stat loss doesn't discourage the things you listed, it makes them more thrilling. In UO:R the weather forecast is always PKs but those dragons aren't making you money if they're parked in the garage.

LOL

You're over-stating the benefit that tamers currently enjoy. There isn't "no risk" for tamers. A tamer can still be PKd, have its armor, regs, runes, and whatever else is on its corpse dry looted. Particularly vicious PKs can also kill the tamer's pets, which at the moment is more of an inconvenience than a cost. All in all, recovering from a successful murder will typically costs several thousand gold and take a good 10-15 minutes to recover from.

That is approximately the same risk and cost that bards and mages are exposed to. It is far less than the risk and cost that a warrior that carries a valuable weapon is exposed to, because the tamer's primary "weapon" (the dragons) are recoverable (currently at no cost), whereas a warrior enjoys no such insurance.

Dragon stat loss isn't responsible for this imbalance. It exacerbates it to a degree, but at the expense of discouraging tamers from subjecting dragons to very risky situations. My point is that the latter may not be something we want to discourage, but I accept that this is a debatable point.

Nail: meet head.

Agree with all of this (including my personal risk aversion). My point is just to question whether dragon stat loss achieves something laudable. Adding risk solely for the purpose of adding risk doesn't make sense to me — if that's the goal, why not add some sort of natural disaster mechanic where everyone in a particular radius immediately dies at random intervals? We could also add some sort of lock decay feature that randomly results in house doors being unlocked.

These examples are, of course, ridiculous. I'm just trying to illustrate the point that striking the right degree of risk involves a balance, and that this matter is something that people can reasonably disagree about. But making being a tamer more risky because being a warrior is arguably too risky is not in and of itself a convincing argument.

Similar to warriors, bards need special/slayer instruments to be able to farm high end monsters (additional cost, I am unsure how much a balron slaying instrument costs, if anyone posts here we have a figure on how much they're risking), and a bard has a skill check that works every 10 seconds. If he fails to incite, he is at risk. And a bard always needs another NPC to provoke to the monster being farmed. If I face a single elder gazer, most I can do is peacemake, but to kill I still need another creature.

Tamers can spam "all kill" or "all guard me" without waiting.

I don't know how a pure mage can farm, BS until mana is depleted? That would take 10 minutes to kill a balron, where as a bard needs few other creatures and a good slayer insturment to kill that balron and a tamer just needs to say all kill while spamming bandies to his/her dragons + the nice mare he/she's riding.

Bards are exposed to a bit more risk, but their rewards take longer time than a tamer to reclaim. Pure Mages (is there anyone PvMing with Pure mages?) are exposed to even more risk, but their rewards take even longer time to reclaim. A tamer loses exactly the same as bards & mages but their rewards are far faster.

Pork, in my experience, you are one of the few regular PKs that has a significant short-term murder count. That's in part because you happily target newbs that are AFK, but that's a separate point.

You said it best yourself....

We are trying to encourage making the game more challenging/risky.

It's not that champ spawns (and other aspects of the game) should be discouraged.... it's that they shouldn't be roll your face across the keyboard and collect plats easy mode.

All true. But that's a complaint that tamers as a class are too powerful. If you see dragon stat loss as a justified penalty that helps to balance things out from a fairness standpoint, that's fair enough. I'd personal prefer to see other protections added to classes that are particularly disadvantaged, but that's just my opinion, which people can reasonably disagree about.

Precisely.

Tamers are meant to be more powerful than other classes in PvM (I have no objection to this, it is the rule of Ultima Online, and it should remain that way) but they should also be exposed to even more risk (becuase they're more powerful). That's why I propose a 2.5% times slot stat&skill loss. A dragon in this instance will only lose 7.5% but that will probably happen (as an expected value on probability) after gaining few hundred K's.

As a player who has a eval dexxer, a pure crafts, a fisher (all role players) and a bard t-hunter (just for some PvM fun), I don't want to see these classes being protected.

To clarify, that risk you speak of would be the elimination of pet bonding... no?


Edit: Disregard, your post above was made at the same time as mine. Clarification achieved.

Fair enough. I tend to disagree, because before dragon stat loss was removed, I would see almost no active champ spawns, whereas they seem to be far more common recently.

I'm actually not arguing that there should be no dragon stat loss. I just think 2.5% is a fair amount.

You are right: You saw less active champ spawns because of said risk.

But it's not because they weren't happening... it's because of said risk that when they were activated, they were finished quietly. (Or raided by some horrible people!)

Is that good for the shard as a whole, or just for populous guilds that can quietly farm champ spawns in privacy?

Tell me more about how players who willingly go AFK outside of town deserve some type of protection from PKs. My kill list is public and you will find a majority of my kills are not AFK tamers or homebound macroers.

DDOS protection for one specific type of player template, that already has a safety net (bonding) is total crap. I don't really want PK stat loss removed for DDOS protection, I want people who choose to leave town to take the risk that is involved with it. It's no secret UOR is getting slapped with random DDOS so there's no reason for some tamer with pets to avoid the penalties of death due to DDOS meanwhile bards lose instruments, dexers lose weapons, PKs lose stats due to the very same DDOS.


..and I thank Chris for his active effort to fix, monitor and improve the situation

It's certainly debatable...

That risk is the only reason I can even justify getting out there and PVMing well over a decade after starting this game.

You're right, players who are AFK outside of town accept the risk that they will get PKd. I also concede that the decision to remove dragon stat loss was surprisingly generous.

But while I am apparently in the minority in terms of the degree of risk that I think is preferable, the point I am making in this thread is just this: don't nerf tamers just because you think it's unfair that they are disproportionately advantaged in PvM without considering the effect that will have on other aspects of the game that depend on tamer participation.

One other thought: how did we make it all the way to page 3 without Blaise chiming in?

EDIT: I see he made a surprisingly "tame" () post on page 1.

This issue is it's unfair that Chris has granted a bonus DDOS protection to one specific type of player. It's hardly a nerf to remove DDOS protection.