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

Lets get back to the purpose of this thread
I feel a lot of the discussion so far has been based on someone reading the patch notes and then making an assumption, and then stating that assumption here as fact. If you want to make a claim that "your play style has been removed, affected, nerfed etc" I would appreciate it if you detailed said situation explicitly. Fearmongering has no place in this post, as our goal is to improve the experience for all our crafters and miners. Not cause players to see a thread about how terrible you think it is going to be and be discouraged from playing here because you were asked to mark new runes for your recall mining operation.

Be detailed...
If you want to have an open and honest discussion on the economy as it relates to bulk order deeds, mining and the recent patches then provide details of your experience. And back the details up with evidence, results, yields, rpv's etc.

Some theoretical examples..
"I am unhappy that I can no longer mine in a cave using the system message there is "no metal to mine here" to detect when I need to switch to the next relative location which previously allowed me to mine 64 times in a single recall spot. I now have to adjust my macro to mine 1 spot 16 times and then move onto another spot. I also have to mark new runes as I can no longer recall into the caves I used to use."

"I am unhappy that I can no longer fill more than 1 bulk order deed at a time with an automated macro system while being at/away from the computer"

"I used to get 2000 ingots worth of ore per account per hour before the patch, now because I have to mine slower in town regions or due to the tool delay I can only get 1350 ingots per hour per account"

Should you want to help make your argument even more clear then post the explicit reason that you need the additional ingots or why only 1350 ingots/hour/account during an attended mining session is not enough.

An Example
This is an example of the yield I was able to generate using a macro I downloaded from the forums after mining for 3 hours in the Buc's den tunnels on the development server.
- 1 Piece of Ore every 4 seconds, 2 Second per mining attempt, 2 seconds allotted for crafting, restocking and organizing items to the bank.
- Mining roughly 900 times in a 60 minute period using a 4 seconds per mining attempt estimation.
- The ore pile ratio would result in 1350 ingots (1.5 ingots per ore pile, Ore Piles are large 75% of the time).
- A reasonable player might run two characters running macros at the same time.
- This would provide 2700 ingots/hour.
- And a reasonable gameplay session would be 8 hours.
- This would be 21,600 ingots every 8 hours.

At a low market value of 7 gold per ingot this would provide the player with 151,200 gold value of ingots they could either sell or use to complete bulk order deeds. A more effective macro expanded to 3 accounts could provide a yield of nearly 5000 ingots/hour, or 40,000 ingots per 8 hour session.

This is currently easily accomplished under our current mechanics by an attended player. If you want to help the staff understand why we should allow players more ingot yield than that example. Please explain why 21,600 ingots per 8 hour gaming session is not enough to satiate a players needs.

Some players have taken the time to clearly explain why they were resulting to certain activities and have worked with the staff to find a better way to address them, ergo the primary topic in this thread. No one player should be required to result to a 65 part macro to fill bulk order deeds. That is a clear sign that the system is tedious, and that it can provide a disproportionate benefit to a player who seeks to accomplish such a complex goal. Systems like that have a tendency to balloon out of control, similar to how recall mining has via posted macros on the forums. If the system encourages abuse, then it will be abused.

A decent amount of the frustration I am detecting has nothing to do with the changes added in the patch, rather players are simply upset they have to adjust a macro they downloaded from the forums, mark new runes, or have no easy way to fill and flip the 800 bulk order deeds they stockpiled.

The staff is always willing to listen to, and take into account valid concerns about the economy, player activities and player goals. However allowing the economy to be abused because players "dont want to have to re-mark a rune, or adjust my macro" is not a valid reason to allow an imbalance to continue.

A Balanced Approach to the Economy
Some players went out of their way to demonstrate how the current system was inadequate for providing all our players a fair playing field. This has happened 20 times since the server has begun and 20 times we have made an adjustment to keep the playing field fair for our players. Unlike all other servers the staff on Renaissance always work to find balance in the design of things. We never mindlessly remove a complete aspect of the game in search of the greater good. And generally our solutions take drastically more time to code, design and implement than anything another free server (or OSI) bothered to attempt.

For example two popular servers solution to player selling a ton of items to vendors.
Server A's Solution: Provide vendors with a small purse of gold, dont allow players to sell items once the purse is exhausted.
Server B's Solution: Disallow vendors from buying items completely.
Renaissance Solution: Allow vendors to carry a stock of no more than 50 items, and the more inventory on hand, the less they pay for said item.

Another example unattended gathering
Server A's Solution: 1st Offense: 20 day ban. 2nd Offense Lifetime Ban. This could be because you were watching youtube on another computer, or pvping on another account. If you did not respond in 1-2 minutes to a GM popping up, you were unattended.
Server B's Solution: 1st Offense:Character and Items in question are deleted, or given to other players. If accounts is not a donor, possible ban. 2nd Offense: Account/IP Ban. Chance to be banned for a minimal failure of being attended apparently is directly related to how much you donate to the server in question.
Renaissance Solution: 1st Offense: 5 Minutes in Jail, Forced Linking to the AFK system information. 2nd Offense: 1 Hour In jail. Players have 2 minutes in which to respond to a attended verification prompt, which decreases by 10 seconds for each failure.

So before you accuse the staff of being intolerant or inflexible possibly consider the method in which you are attempting to make your point and take a minute to review the changes made to Renaissance in its 2 year history to maintain a stable economy coupled with the growth the server has enjoyed over those two years.

Only one server in the history of free servers saw an increase in its playerbase after the first year. And even that server saw a massive decline in its playerbase once they lacked the staff to properly police these issues. A recent server, without a stable system to provide a balanced economy saw a rise to 1200 players, to a level of 80 players online in 3 months. Next to staff corruption, nothing can destroy a free server quicker than a pointless economy.

A new player started here last week and explained to me that he has 50 million gold and 500 million in assets on a previous server, yet he switched to Renaissance because "He was bored and there was nothing to buy, or the things he wanted to buy cost 100 million gold". A large part of the reason groups of players select the Renaissance server is because we have the best free shard economy. They start here knowing the world is fair, and their potential for success is limitless. And we know this because the Renaissance staff and volunteers take the time to greet almost every single new player and ask them what led to their decision to play here.

Renaissance was opened with the goal of providing our players with a thriving and balanced economy free from corruption, cheating and unattended profit macros. Our very first designed patch was the attended verification system. Over time we will have to adjust what OSI created in order to avoid the result in which OSI achieved so that Renaissance can thrive as it hits 2,3,5 and 10 years old.

Regarding Cave Trolls
Situations like the cave trolls, once the system was refined, adjusted and tweaked players began to enjoy the added excitement and reward. While it took a few patches we eventually worked the bugs out and they provide a bonus to players who are actively attending their mining operations. While a classic player mining with a pack horse will only ever see a troll if they are outside of town and a travel miner failed to kill one they spawned.

Regarding Caves
The recall restriction into caves is something we are experimenting with temporarily to provide new purpose to those areas. There are only 20 small caves in the world and with the combined efforts of 5-10 recall miners they were ending up mined out a great deal of the time.

A very common new player complaint was "Why is there no ore here to mine" and even some veteran players attempting to use a gargoyles pickaxe experienced the same annoyance.

Players can still recall mine in areas such as the Buc's tunnels, Delucia Pass, Minoc Mining area without any restriction. The Buc's tunnels for instance is almost larger than all of the caves in the world combined.

This change, like all others will be reviewed over time and adjusted to achieve balance. Ergo: Some caves will not have any spawn as they are popular classic mining locations, and some caves that are extremely remote will be toggled to allow recalling.

Classical Mining
A variety of changes have gone into recent patches to reward this play style. The most recent of which is the ability for pack horses to carry additional weight and the implementation of the ore golems into the world. Additionally with the changes to town and and cave recall mining players can now find less competition from automated miners when mining in these areas.

Players with a combat miner can now find ore golems/ore golem lords spawning in remote caves around the worlds and rather than resulting to a macro to mine the caves, they can hunt these new monsters and generate profitable amount of ore. Due to the design of the spawning golems 89% of the time on spawns it will be of a colored variety allowing this type of farming to provide a decent amount of colored ingots. Each golem can provide anywhere from 15-70 ingots.

In addition the new gargoyle shovels, provided as a low level bulk order reward provide players with yet another method to mine, with more excitement and template variety than the standard method. And like any new system we are still tweaking the new monsters, recall settings to provide the best experience for our players.

In Closing
The change to crafting exceptional items, and allowing players to fill bulk order deeds with a single click will balance the playing field for all players. Razor novice, and Razor master alike.

These changes will go into the next patch and players starting on Renaissance will do their first bulk order deed and be amazed at how much more enjoyable it was to craft and fill BOD's on Renaissance vs their previous server and never feel the need to search out 3rd party applications or complex razor macros in order to accomplish their goals.

Going forward if you want to be critical of the patch, and make a post that can be considered "fearmongering" or "skyisfallingism" I expect you to provide details, not assumptions, on why some treasured part of your gameplay experience was affected.

The Razor message visibility will be adjusted to target just 1-2 messages we are concerned with. This will be resolved in the next patch. The primary messages of concern were the ore depleted and log depleted messages. This will restore expected fishing macro system message detection.

As for the razor issues, I believe that was related to stacking ore at the players feet, which was addressed in this patch and should no longer be an issue. Should this not be the case make sure to forward any issue like that to the staff for review.

As for the recall changes, that is valid, until a player wants to escape a player killer or monster. While being a more effective change, we considered it too drastic. The goal of the recall change was to make mining in Serpents Hold, Cove, Britain with a recall miner less productive than mining outside of town in a location a normal player would most likely avoid. Thus encouraging players who macro mine, to move to more profitable (non town locations) leaving the towns for players who packhorses and classic mining techniques.