Patch 52: May 8th 2014 - Bonding Expansion & Much More

A big part of this was because of the guild sunshine and I created. We packed up with most of the active bards and tamers on this shard and pretty much ran non stop champs all day long. I dont feel as if there was any exploitation happening, just simply everyone working together, being extreamly active and working hard. These graphs basically show how active this shards been over the past few weeks. What is wrong with putting in the work to get the rewards?

If you were doing the champs for fun, you'd have done them all equally. Chris' shot of the # of skulls pretty clearly shows this was just grinding Barracoon. Nothing wrong with doing what has the best return, but it's simply my opinion that the return on that particular activity was out of whack with any other thing that could be done on the shard.

Yes.

The fact that people don't see the combination of the quite literal platinum faucet that has been turned on since around February (with significant spending in between, no less!), and the number of Barracoon skulls on the shard as a problem, is somewhat flooring to me. The notion that you've put in the hard work for that amount of platinum is equally absurd.

Barracoon has been killed 314 times: http://www.uorenaissance.com/info/?page=g_info_t5&id=1256

Rikktor (30 kills), Neira (29 kills), Mephitis (25 kills), Semidar (24 kills), Lord Oaks (23 kills) COMBINED equals 131 total kills. Less than half ACROSS ALL 5 CHAMPS, than the number of times Barracoon has been killed.

The Harrower -- the entire goal of the champ spawn system -- has only been killed 21 times.

The fact that people see this as perfectly balanced, is simply unfathomable to me. The vector for exploitation of the platinum pump was discovered, and pumped to its fullest for almost half a year. This in turn created more than 30k in platinum that is currently sitting on the server -- AND THIS COMPLETELY DISCOUNTS THE PLATINUM THAT YOU PEOPLE HAVE ALREADY SPENT -- which is 150% of the total that sat on the server in a year and a half prior of the shards existence. This isn't putting in the hard work. This is finding the easy way and pumping it for all its worth.

Yeah but my ethy looks nice!


Haha kidding of course (well, not about how nice it looks but ya know...).

We have seen the same players farming plat for hours a day, every day, for months on end. I can see a newer player whining that this change was made, but the older greedy players complaining are also those who typically complain each time they are PK'd and not looted lol..

All of that plat flooded the market and it's value never dipped below 6k each? What a scam

Buying platinum: 3k each.

Frankly I don't care because I always thought platinum was over-valued. Having to pay that much for a simple ass bookcase with books... madness. A bookcase with books should be what a bookcase that has book inside of it should look like.

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It was the same way on the EA shards - Barracoon was easier and guilds searched out his spawns to work unless they were specifically planning for a harrower. I don't know why everyone is assuming this is a broken concept.

Using Telamon's own words, it created a hot spot in Despise which is a 'good' thing if you ask me. It was a place of activity (group activity) outside of town. How much of what we've seen in this shard's past has simply been solo farming? You see people come together for events and often not much else. Now the need for guilds and organization and politics became more important. I think this was an interesting chapter in the shard's history, really.

Now...were they fat cats, rolling in platinum, coming unwound at any contact with pks? Maybe so. I can think of some people that had ethereals within weeks of being on the shard and that doesn't seem right either. Lining up 3 accounts each and pulling 100+ platinum a day for many people (that's not an exaggeration) - it's clear something had to happen.

But if a change is so heavy handed that we go from an active scene to an inactive scene was it really beneficial for the shard? Many of the people commenting on this are not people that get on and play every night like those spawners were. Those spawners are the active heart of the shard right now. They're running around every evening while some of you guys just clock in to grab BOD's and check the trade forum occasionally. It's easy for you to support changes that slow their progress down relative to yours. You weren't interested in spawns anyways.

There's a major difference between this and recall mining, sheep farming, 10tailor bods, and fishing. Spawns were done by the active players on the shard - and this week they're not sure if the end game content is worth logging in for anymore. And worth, in this context, is both in its reward and its potential for an enjoyable evening of UO.

So do I think something needed to change? Yes, I do. But if a week from now these players still think there's no point in doing champ spawns then I think the shard is worse off for it. Do you think they're all going to spread their efforts over other aspects of the game? They aren't...they'll play less, they'll log in for bods and events like you.

Anyways - I don't think the sky is falling by any means. But I do think it's a shame if the very active interest of many in champ spawns died with this patch. I think we could have aimed for something that reduced incoming plat but kept the players playing. Something that reduced the ways you could cash in with no effort but left players still feeling like completing spawns was worthwhile. There were a lot of good ideas out there to accomplish these goals...seems like all of them went in at once.

I don't disagree with any of your points personally, Mes, but I also feel that an influx of 150% of the entire volume of platinum that had been generated in the shards history, in a 3 month span, is equally bad for the shard.

Personally, my opinion is that Barracoon should have his reward reduced, but the teleporting not introduced. Likewise, I'm not sure that Barracoon should have as high of a benefit when doing the lesser spawn -- not because there isn't effort going into earning it, but because it absolutely shouldn't be as or more rewarding to entirely focus on Barracoon. I also think theres something to be said for the lesser skill requirement of the standard Barracoon spawn, because it allows people who aren't used to spawning to get some experience doing so against lesser difficulty mobs -- versus Ki-rins and Serpentine Dragons.

All that said, the massacre that Barracoon 2.0 produced on his first spawning post-patch, was pretty brutal.

Aside from everything else that's been said, whether it be good, bad, for, or against... hearing this made me wanna puke!

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My only complaint at this time is there is still no archery repair deeds! Tela you continue to deny me easy repairs for my bows!!

Well, there's always fortification powder.

Agreed. It's way too early to try and determine the impact of this, as everyone is going bonkers over the Zookeeper quest right now.

But yea, Baracoon absolutely needed to change. I say that as someone that got a lot of easy plat from that spawn. It wasn't a path of least resistance, it was a path of no resistance.

I personally remember people hearing about this change pending and immediately changing all of their focus on it in lieu of anything else in game. Sure it was great that people got out there in groups but it's because there was a friggen garden hose of platinum. You'd be an idiot or stubborn and opposed to it, to NOT get involved.

If we lose the big groups that were farming massive amounts of platinum, they are bitches. I'm sorry for being a dick about it, but not really. Stop being fucking spoiled ass kids expecting easy street. The tenets of the shard dictate work for reward. The amount of reward for the work previously, once account stacking came into play heavily especially, was wildly out of balance.



I don't feel like I'm crazy when I say that 10 platinum scored in a single day of game play is a very very good day. In the very least, it should be. That would still pan out to 300 platinum a month, which is not right. The intention was to be about a 500 plat per year for your average player (unless I'm mistaken) so a 1st year 'veteran reward' level item like the ethereal mounts would take a long time to get. I guess I'm repeating myself again but whatever. Once kids get spoiled, it's painful to turn off the tap. It's going to hurt and if it hurts the shard's player count because people feel slighted by it, I don't want to play with those people anyway.

Do these new boss monsters all spawn in T2A only? Or are the only part of the new tamer quest line? I have been trying to get the ophidian queen to spawn from some time now, and nothing. It was the only one I had a general idea of where is could spawn since they have a lair.

Champion's are end game content, we must work roughly 45-90 minutes per champion, while as well some champion's are very hard, I agree barracoon was too easy, but you must take into account it was to easy because all you did was wait for others to spawn the boss then come. Now you must actually work it. The individual's you all appear to think exploited a system actually worked at times all day doing a champion that all of us became very good at getting to spawn quickly. We can make the same profit we have before by simply, Not doing barracoon. The only problem now is that if you do not have pet's then you are at a disadvantage. The champion's move around the room very quickly if you cast on them and if you are only a caster or bard, even dexxer that is a death wish on many champion's if they teleport to you.

Whole world for all boss variants to spawn from their lesser base spawns!

Spread the love and put the trackers to work!