is it good?

... been fishing for 3 hours.

I got a rope.

Keep your harrowers... I got a rope damn it! A ROPE!

*throws noose over mast*
*dangles*

I l-love... f-f-fishing...

I'll play some devil's advocate for everyone here. To everybody who does or doesn't know me or my play style PvM, mainly champ farming/harrowers, rares collecter, dabbled in pvp not very productive or skilled due to no voice or great connection.

-Telamon desired to patch it out, due to strain on the server, with 100+ people putting 3 accounts in one space. I'm not a computer guy, but Telamon is obviously, so if he said it would help I'd go for it. So to say he did it "to remove a community event" is way out of context.

-Means to prevent pvp? I'd like an elaboration on that, because I'm not sure what that is and would like to know. Because of the overwhelming size of the events before pvp was nearly impossible, due to if you flagged, you died. In that sentence it shows that this is promoting people to protect themselves, and their goods via pvp by killing incoming people.

-3 boxing 100 people getting 60 plat = 6000plat entering the server, with no cap, if the server grew to 200 people 3 boxing that number is endless. Capping it 1000 is literally just that, a hard cap on production.

-This is true. And is a form of min/maxing game play. Maximize results while limiting characters for the reason of tight spaces, lack of knowledge, speed.

To put a harrower in prospective in time played vs. gain. This is for those who don't do it often, or who have done it tons and lost desire to do it anymore. If people were really truely doing this with 4 people like that screen shot shows from beginning to end.
Gathering all 6 skulls with 4 people (3 boxing tamers) even very skilled 3 boxers like Vella takes huge amounts of time.
Baracoon with 4 people could be done in 45min
Rikktor with 4 could be done in 45-1hr
Meph with 4 about 1 hr
Oaks with 4 maybe 1 1/2 - 2 hrs
Neira with 4 about 1 - 1 1/2 hrs
Semider with 4 about 1 1/2 - 2 hrs
So even on the low end that is 6 1/2 hours (which is incredibly fast with 4 people imo) of active game play out in the world with no interruption which can and should happen.

Then you have the process of spawning the harrower, placement, and killing which can urn you if your luck 30min -1hr.
This not information so people can say "omg if I fished for 7 1/2 hours I should make 240plat" OR "I can only farm 80k per hour * 7 1/2 hours that only = 600k" thats not fair"

If it was being done afk, and it was that easy, why doesn't everyone do it? There are risks and its not that easy. It takes time, and people playing and working together to achieve a goal for an extended period of time, just as it would to dominate a pvp situation.
To say the harrower is easy and done afk is untrue, just because you witness it happen done quick with a minimalist approach doesn't mean that it did not require timing, skill or active open world game play.

-1000plat hard cap being to high/low!?! Maybe, I couldn't really tell you one way or another, but that is a different conversation. This thread was more of a "this is flawed because they do something that I can't do." Again, if it was that simple to be done afk, make it happen if platinum is your goal. Anyone can do this, it is not secret knowledge or skills, anyone with a few friends can do this too.

Working the spawns is profitable already, @Arnold Lutz . Even if you only hit bosses on your accounts you're likely to always earn over 100k gold value in platinum from that 1-2 hours. But more than likely always closer to 200k even if you don't loot corpses and only help yourself to a split of gold explosion from the boss and work the spawn along the way.

I don't think that 100 people in one spot was genuinely harming the server. You don't have to be a computer guy to know that.

Smaller groups at harrowers still aren't genuinely attackable because of tamer and stat loss mechanics on the server. This system was designed with no stat loss in mind. While staff said this system needed to be competed for, their actions have been to the contrary. Players have been jailed and banned for attacking or announcing spawns/harrowers in progress in the last few months. And there are some other pretty big problems. For instance, you can receive your cut of platinum without being present at the harrower. Simply put your pets on the harrower and recall home and go AFK. You will receive your cut at home when the boss dies.



If we are being serious about what really changed:

• Long time players without jobs so they can pop harrowers at 8am on a weekday benefited and are getting two or three times as much platinum out of the system as they used to
• The casual players have even less access to harrowers as they are no longer popped at primetime and inviting strangers takes platinum out of the pockets of the big guilds

I don't believe that a second. It's only a VERY small part in his explanation of the change and never mentioned again. Plus, there have been events like the Fall of Wormwood (public harrower), the Night of Horrors and others invasions and stuff where this never is or was a problem.

Shutting of the gate in the star room or making it dispellable. Absolutely unnecessary.

These numbers are too high! Way too high. It were rather 40 players, and less than the half of them was 3 clienting.

I strongly disagree here, but hope someone else can elaborate. But to make it short: 90 plats from champs, ~180k from champs, ~200+ plat from harrower. All within a playtime of ~7-10 hours. That's roughly 300k-400k per hour.

It's highly exclusive. Members of the group in the OP also raid champs, loot the players and join them with their tamers afterwards to finish the champ. It all happens regularly.

This whole harrower/champ option is in principle only available to dominating pvp groups. Or groups that are medium skilled pvp'ers but chose the right playtimes without opposition to do the harrower etc.

That is exactly the situation, Blackeye.

It's like finding out Finkle is Einhorn

The reality here is that nothing will change. As we speak this group is trying to get a thread bumped over this one shouting "long live uor" and "hype train" to distract the populous from this conversation.

-This is a different topic, the post was, is it right that 4 players can kill a harrower and earn 1000plat split 4 ways for doing nothing.
Earning to much from champion farming, is a different argument. It can be the most profitable ways to earn yes. But all end game content means you earn along the way. If you kill bosses solo for plat, you kill and loot all the kills along the way. If you fish for AMIBs to solo, you loot and sell all the nets, tmaps and sos along the way.

-I honestly don't. Maybe I'm a moron, but I have no idea how servers and the like work.

-I agree having multi client tamers at event makes situation hard, and stat loss was not in effect on OSI (I'm not sure of a solution for this one). I have always been a fan of tethering accounts together, so it doesn't matter which one of your 3 you go on, but it limits you to only earning on one account, even if they all dmg'd.
-I've never seen or heard of a player jailed for announcing or attacking a harrower.
- As far as recalling and getting your cut, I was under the impression this was removed, has it been tested recently? Because it must be removed.
@BlackEye
- As for shutting the gate in the star room, my guess is it has to do with ghosting, which seems reasonable. Just make the room not recallable or gate-able, and make it a task to get to, where u have to manually click the brazier to enter like the old days.
- When the chain harrowers were happening from Vella, the information out was UOR was averaging 90-110 unique IPS, so i dont think the 100 people is to far off, maybe over estimating 3 clients yes, but even reducing that to 1.5 make the amount of plat at each extremely high.
-Again arguing that champions are a far to easy way to make money is a different topic. Yes it is hugely profitable, but it is in the open world, and it does require players to play. IMO the amount of money dropped could be decreased on the gold explosions, and a little more focus on killing in looting would be cool, instead of burn through as quick as possible to yield the best results.

Guilty as charged, I do take advantage of whats in front of me. I earn a ton from it, and I actually enjoy it, more of a PVM leaderboard lover, watching kills add up. a few things should change, but the blatant, its broken i do not feel is true, some aspects do work, and some need adjusted.

Was that the official confession that client numbers are rigged? Just a side joke. But really, who cares how much plat was generated. I don't, because it was distributed evenly among players. New players loved it, and sold them for a good start here. People bonded together and got a community feeling. Thieves were happy too. Everybody loved it as far as I can remember. And the earned plat was well enough, to motivate peple to collect skulls.

Now, it's small elite groups that earn it all. How fitting that Bart posts just right now, that he finished his ingame goals by obtaining 13 ethys and 15 blessed RBs, because that is exactly the effect the changes have to this shard. 1%ers become 0.1%ers. But only theoretically, because we dont have that much genuine players, and it's not really motivating to do ANYTHING traditional (e.g. farm 60k per hour on a dexxer or even tamer) while some people earn 10x more.

I'm well aways from even going near a champ spawn, but between the comments here and about CTF on that other thread, it seems like whatever the reasoning for the systems in place originally were (I'm gonna assume the best intentions because that's how I roll) the results need to be examined if there's this much controversy over it. Especially when the people speaking up the loudest about the problems are the same people I see in IRC helping new players every day.

Caska, the controversy is that some people win/do better than others and those who don't, are salty. I'm sure there's more room for balancing out champions and the harrower (in fact, I've seen the discussion about it), but all this hemming and whoring really isn't going to do much other than make it obvious who's bitter and wasting time complaining instead of building a team to do something about it.

This is NOT a single player game. If you can't do it, get help. If your help can't help, get better some how. There's literally nothing stopping anyone from doing the exact same thing and/or killing all these guys, other than apathy or lack of free time.


Citations about who can make more because of how much free time they have, is stupid. This has and always will be the case with UO unless you want to implement logon hours so people only play X amount of hours in any 24 hour period. In other words, the jobless will always have more time to make profits in game.

Can you do it without tamers?

I think the discussion goes beyond having more time/effort/people to play. The question, I guess, is that 4 people made 250 platinum each now, whereas they would make 60.

Before:
90 people (~108 toons, giving an optimistic 10% people 3 boxing) were making 60 platinum each - 6.480 platinum entering the server (seems huge) but divided to 90 people (72 average each person).

Now:
4 people (12 toons) are making 1000 platinum, averaging 250 each person.

Let's say there are 200 unique people playing actively.

Before you would reward less platinum to more people and now you are rewarding more platinum to less people. Math guys can help my point here. As 6480 platinum entering the server could look scary, I think it's worse now, when the most important resource of richness is being given in bigger amounts to less people, so looking in long terms you will have these group of 2% of the shard thriving on mega auctions, prime spots, offering more money for things that wouldn't be that valuable making the other 98% of the shard out of the economy.

You have what it takes to farm enough champs to run a harrower 2 times a day? Congratulations!
But economically, as it is now, I don't think it's going to end well. It looks really unbalanced.

I think I'm being a bit confusing here, but hopefuly some of you will get my point and do better math on it. @Dalavar maybe.

That's the important part in my opinion:

Blaise usually was the first to oppose major game changing patches. I just have to think about all that bitching about nerfing the standard mining methods. In fact, not much was changed to recall mining (especially when outside of Guardzones, etc). What happened back then was that new, much more money yielding methods were introduced (battle mining).
And this happens very similarly right now to gold/plat farming, just much more extremely: If you farm the standard way, i.e. one client as tamer lamer with 2 dragons and one mare, you end up with 1/4 what these few people in vet groups are able to earn now per hour. This 1/4 already considers the time for farming up the skulls etc! Right now, if you calculate everything you can earn 300k-400k per hour in value for running champs/harrowers on 3 clients. Please explain, how this is balanced or an appopriate reward to the faced risk. Especially when you consider that they dont risk anything except time (Blaise's standard argument why thieves are suckers btw). Plus you cant be totally driven out of the reward a harrower gives. Even if a pvp group prevents the harrower right now, afaik, the people will get the plats eventually when the harrower dies sometime later. Plus, there have been cases, where PKing during champs/harrowers have been understood as griefing and staff clearly interfered.

To sum it up: The whole plat/gold economy here is going to the trash bin.

Heretic, I definitely get where you're going with it. It's pretty clear that there's less platinum given out at harrowers now, but it's also given to far less people in these types of situations, and the result is the plat-per-person is way higher.

To be honest, 300k per hour in gold equivalent is pretty great but it's not out of the realm of possibility for a solo player who really tries to be efficient and maximize profit. You can single-tamer elder gazers for 100k+ per hour while your other two accounts churn BODs or buy reagents or whatever. You certainly make more than 300k per hour if you participate in the annual scavenger hunt. And the holiday events like Christmas are probably worth 300k+ per hour, as is the feeding frenzy around anniversary clothing/sandals giveaway day. Coming from the perspective of a total bean counter like myself, I see this and don't really feel jealousy.

There's three groups of people on this shard. There's (a) those who never knew about or got "invited to" harrowers in the 20-plat-per-person days. This is by far the majority of the population. There's (b) those who were in the know about the 20-plat-per-person days, a small group. And there's (c) those who are able to put together a very very small group and do the new harrower system.

Really the only people who are hurt by this are (b). Speaking as someone who was in (a) like the majority of the shard, the fact that there is less platinum given out at these things altogether is more beneficial than knowing it's more concentrated in the hands of a few.

Finally, if there is one true thing you can say about UO and hourly rates it's that no one ever makes as much as they say they do, and no one's ideal hourly rate scenario ever lasts for long. Within a month or two there will either be other groups doing this or there will be new and novel ways to disrupt it.

I belong to group (d); I have the knowledge and skilled characters to accomplish such a task but I also have a real life. So go ahead, keep raking in the piles of plat, ya nerds.

Of these few posts moved I only see one person who can't seem to handle the comments without trash talking and I think we all know who that is...I haven't been to a horrower since the changes cause i liked the old way....haven't even really done champs. I did a few when Kane started his LNCs but since they stopped, there is really no point to doing a harrower so no point to doing a champ...

Yeah, but it's been a long track record of Samorite not censoring that player. There's definitely a bias.