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

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I'm having a hard time figuring out what the problem with mining was in the pre-54 world.

- Did the fast tool usage put create too much server load ?
- Did excessive guard zone mining make other players complain about the dry-mining of ore spots ?
- Was there a hidden flood of ingots on the market ?

I really want to understand ...

At the time the troll-patch came in, I could clearly see that recall mining was getting out of hand and normal players were having a hard time finding a place to mine that wasn't farmed dry by a robot.

That patch had a massive impact on the ingot and BOD market as I did experience myself when I started recall mining after the troll patch. I actually did it for the trolls which spawned much less than I was expecting heh. But I still got some insights into the recall mining business but kept most of the ingots for my personal use (skill training). I didn't experience recall mining as a very profitable business, the ingot yield was worse than I expected and the market rates for ingots were barely moving more than 1-2 gp despite the colored ingot drought.

We are now all talking about how to handle the result of this patch while I do not see what those changes were done in the first place. We're creating so many new problems with those changes and already talk about fundamental changes to the BOD system. The economy of UO:R has been running for almost two years now and from my impressions it's been very smooth so far. The mechanics of a long running economy should be tinkered with very carefully keeping an eye on the consequences. Looking at the way the ingot market developed after the troll-patch, I was convinced mining needs a buff more than this nerf. Seeing the proper tool delays implemented didn't bother me too much since I can see this could reduce server load. But this change alone is already a very powerful parameter for the ingot-industry.

Adding new special items like those shovels and adding more special mobs permanently to the game just makes Dalavar's list of server specialties a bit longer. Mining is at a point where you can screw anything you can find on old Stratics pages and gotta read 3-5 patch notes to understand the oddities we have here. Now I'm not preaching era accuracy but adding 100% custom systems to core components of the economy are a huge gamble. And mixing this with a ton of other changes to economy creates one big confusion. It took weeks or months for players to get accustomed to the trolls, now we're throwing the next thing at miners when they just got comfortable with trolls.

Removing resource gathering messages from SysMsg is just the worst thing that could happen and basically breaks all macro-supported resource gathering. Even my packhorse Lumberjack was working with those messages. I don't understand this change at all, are we all supposed to even do the clicking manually for less than 15gp per doubleclick-click ?

As a passionate guard zone miner, I still gotta admit I like the "skill delay" after recalling. This is something I can totally see as a great parameter for balancing out guard zone mining.

TL,DR Version :

Instead of fixing BODs we should reconsider why all those mining changes were made. While I do embrace the proper tool delays and the guard zone penalty as great parameters for tinkering with the ingot economy, I dislike the big stack of new content brought in with the shovels+golems and am convinced the removal of resource gathering messages from razor will actually break this servers economy.

Unfortunately it seems these have already been nixxed with no community discussion with the following blanket statement:

I don't know how effective it was but it was definitely pretty fun back on Angel Island was a system that would flag recall miners as criminal and post their coordinates via the town crier. It certainly made recall mining a lil more exciting and risky yet left it as an option for those that liked to roll the dice, and it gave those that hate recall miners some fun. If your beef is with recall mining, keep focusing on that, this patch screws with normal miners that use macros to mine and move things to pack horses because of the stupid sysmessage changes. Total kneejerk because Mutumbo/Bart are dedicating a lot of time to mining isn't a good reason to tweak something that affects every miner in game.

I realize this post is disjointed much like this "patch". Address one thing at a time unless something is on fire. Mixing new ways to get ingots with a huge nerf to how you can get ingots/fill BODs currently is a dual attack that isn't necessary.

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Point three in a post-trollpatch world ?

I just don't see that. Yes Bart and Mut have been mining like maniacs and they made a lot of ingots in that time. But we have to put this into proportion - many things in game can create incredible amounts of stuff when done excessively for weeks. Using this as an excuse to change the mechanics doesn't sound right to me. I can't shake the impressions they were trying to prove a point or provoke a reaction and it looks like they succeeded.

Leaving Bart & Mut out of the equation clearly shows that we were running into a colored ingot drought before they started smelting their ore. The players left mining couldn't keep up with demand, that's what I was experiencing.

If you look at the total gold graph for this server and compare it to the ingot graphs you can tell they were both moving in the same direction until that troll patch hit this server. I'm not even challenging that troll patch - it's cool. But if you claim there's been a healthy or even a flooded ingot market after that patch, I have to object. Even with the crazy mining Bart and Mut did, the ingot graphs can barely keep up with the gold graph trend ...

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Gideon, by your very definitions, then tamer farming and grinding out the same mob endlessly for millions should likewise be removed from the game.

I'm sorry, but this entire argument is just stupid. These problems don't ACTUALLY exist; they exist as a function of people being able to read numbers and figures, and trying to extrapolate what this data means in a broader picture -- and making assumptions in the process.

I'm also sorry, but get over mut and bart. Their ore DOES NOT MATTER. I don't give a shit what you think, but their ingots are COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT. I already pointed this out, and I'll point it out again: THESE INGOTS WILL NEVER SEE MARKET. THEY WERE MINED FOR BART AND MUT TO BE ABLE TO COMPLETE BODS, AND WILL NOT BE SOLD -- NOT A SINGLE ONE OF THEM. Based on that -- all those big scary inflation numbers? They mean about as much as my useless fucking legs.

The fact that this knee-jerk reaction bullshit has been the direction of the last few patches really leaves me wondering where its all going to end. This isn't the game I signed up for, and it makes me disappointed to have invested so much time in it, when things are just yanked away without real reason or explanation.

The only point that is relevant in this entire discussion is that the profitability of mining -- even automated mining -- is VASTLY overexaggerated by people, and if any of these changes are going to matter at all output from mining needs to increase and consumption of ingots for typical use needs to decrease. Otherwise, this is all just pissing in the wind and driving away your long steady player base.

So basically you're not going to actually address any of the actual issues brought up-- just provide your programmatic 'solutions to gameplay choices' and continue blanket assumptions of how damaging this is vs the actual end result. Got it. Pointless conversation then.

*bows out*

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Blanket assumptions about peoples gameplay choices.

This is a sandbox, is it not? Or at least, it once was...


Edited to add: We have AFK checks. We have mining trolls. If you're truly AFK mining, programmatic solutions to these things ALREADY EXIST AND WERE IMPLEMENTED AGES AGO. You're no more afk and not paying attention to the going-on's than someone who's farming ice fiends while watching tv. Your comparison is invalid.

Argh - as I feared as well, a long reply ignoring the fact that the majority of this patch was a knee-jerk response to the actions of (2) people that really aren't harming anything. If stacking ingots in your CY floats your boat and its not against the rules, then so be it. If stacking heads on your castle walls floats your boat and its not against the rules, then so be it. If buying a buncha castles and sheering hundreds and hundreds of sheep every 8 hours and then automating converting it to product floats your boat and its not against the rules then so be it.


The fact that this "discussion" if it can be called that happened AFTER the changes, rather than polling the community on how to address the broader issues OR a potential issue makes it quite obvious that its a fools game to bother contributing ideas here. Good luck convincing a very proud owner that their already executed idea may not have been the right one.

lol, what harm? you keep making these blanket assumptions based of your own metadata.

You created your own catch 22 here by creating a unique offering that sets this shard apart in giving us the ability to track metadata like ingot quantities, gold levels, etc -- but in turn it has led to you trying to boil down the gameplay of an open world sandbox to numbers and statistics. This in turn has led to you making these extremely arbitrary and mechanical decisions based on nothing more than statistical trivialities and anomalies.

This is exhausting.

Like:

• Ore golems and gargoyle shovels. This looks like a solid supplementary system to get colored ore with chances for nice rares along the way.
• Tool delay. Makes sense and helps levels the playing field.

Don't Like:

• Ore golems completely immune to everything not melee. I would much prefer they be flagged like pirates and bosses, so that they just take reduced damage from non-melee. Maybe I want to build a mage-miner, or even a tamer-miner. Let us have that freedom to build or roleplay.
  
• Razor unable to see harvesting system messages. This has a spill-over effect onto non-recall miners as described already. It is also probably frustrating for players not up-to-speed on patch notes to try and write a script and not have Razor behave as expected.

Not sure:

• Razor unable to see BOD system messages. I don't flip BODs. If someone creates an elaborate macro to fill a bunch of BODs, I say more power to them. Can someone explain the ill effects on the economy of this? Even with this, the upper end of the smith BOD chart is still just being scratched almost 2 years into it.

Chris, can you elaborate on what the final vision for recall mining is? Do you want it totally gone, or just restricted? If the goal is to get rid of it, I say let's just put the axe in it and be done. If the goal is to just restrict it, then let's figure out the best way to do this. It's starting to get crazy - there's the AFK checks, there's a delay in guardzones, there's mining trolls outside of guardzones, Razor isn't reading system messages anymore... Let's stick to one method and tweak as necessary, IMO.

For what it's worth, I personally really enjoy Razor scripting. It's one of the things that I really like about 'modern-era-freeshard' UO. Even if it becomes the most profitable action on UOR, I am not going to manually mine. I just don't find it fun.

The razor thing is just beyond mindblowing. If you want to neuter razor, require negotiations to disable features. Otherwise, you're just creating more administrative work for yourself having to explain these stupid changes on a frequent basis to people who otherwise are expecting an unfettered experience as advertised.

The fact that Chris is marginalizing all responses down to simple trivialities that aren't even the points anyone was making, tells me that this entire conversation is a placation, not a desire for open discourse.

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I need ingots so I work on my smith, and a tinker. My character is not your typical miner/crafter. It is a gukka (orcish crafter) I do not have magery. It was going to be your basic mule. I hardly have any ingots to get the skills up high. With the changes,... then more changes,... then new changes with added stuff... gives the lack of motivation to go out and do it when I simply just want to mine, have my gukka and not have to add other skills I do not want on that template,