Damaging field spells and summons within guard zone

I couldn't help but notice that casting & targeting firefield onto the ground works within guard zone. As this collided with my recollection from the era, I searched the patch notes / publish archives for mentions of the spell and found these two instances:

Any interest in changing this for UO:R?

Also EV's and BS's can be cast and dropped in town. People use this to townkill and kill pets. Ya I'd be interested in changing this, it serves no purpose other then to grief.

I searched the relevant patch notes for mentions of "energy vortex", it seems this was addressed in Publish 10 (dated February 1, 2001):

Later mentions (Publish 12 & 17) only discuss lowering their server side CPU usage and hit points, so there's no indication that this would have been overturned within our interested time frame.

Well this is history perfected, not a recreation of exact time frame mechanics.

Indeed, however the historical records are used as a reference, and in this case they support your notion.

Oh haha, you were AGREEING with me. well in that case!

If this does get implemented, I hope not disabling Wall Of Stone falls into the "history perfected" category as the Royal Britannia Summoner Sprints are awesome and I'd hate to see it patched away

How is town killing griefing?

Abusing shitty old mechanics to break the modicum of safety imposed by a guard zone, is griefing, in my rarely humble opinion. Players should be able to expect a level of safety in town, considering the guards, guard zones and inability to directly attack someone in town without consent. If you need to abuse a mechanic to suit that, it's pretty clearly griefing. There's no victory in the kill and you are only doing it to cause the target grief. Hence the term.

Casting a spell in town is now abusing mechanics?

Also, I can definitely think of reasons to kill people in town other than just to simply kill them for fun of it. For instance, maybe they have some plat or a nice weapon or any number of other things i would like to loot off them.

Perhaps that player was causing me grief in the past and has now stupidly gone AFK in town thinking they were safe....

Pking people isn't griefing.

You can cast any non-offensive/non-damaging spell you want in town. You can think of reasons to kill anyone. That has nothing to do with rules and where you should or should not be able to.

You also can't summon pets into CTF...for similar reasons. lol

Townkilling is griefing and so is AFK killing. Whether you want to steal their shit or have a grievance, has nothing to do with where people should feel safe (guard zone).

It's not griefing. The guards are there to provide some protection, not provide an invulnerability zone...

You can call it whatever you like. They shouldn't provide a an invulnerability zone (and they don't, again, L2English) but you should die the second you infringe upon the safety and well being of another player without consent, within the guard zone. ie: when you drop a damaging field spell or random-attacking summon, in GZ.


However, I do feel it would be more fun to have ultra-powerful guards that attack you with little chance of escape, instead of insta-kill.

I've already seen what the end result of this change entails. Adam Ant implemented this for Angel Island at one point and the end result was that you would log on in a city and literally half a dozen Bobs would be mobbing you down before the guards had a chance to kill them all. It was infuriating for newbie players and it made the shard look dead because nobody would leave their characters logged on or hanging around the bank.

That being said, I don't think there should be any changes to the way that field spells work in town. If you go away from the keyboard in town and someone kills you then that is your fault for not being at the keyboard.

That's a good point about making the shard look dead. I've heard that many times from new players. "Where are the people?" The only mass group we get is the young guys at Ocllo.

It's a very cool concept on paper. As someone who has played a thief before, there are all sorts of creative stealing ideas that you could come up with if you're given an extra couple of seconds to survive a guard attack.

In practice, it helped knock Angel Island's population down from having around an active population of 225 to 350 people to having about 80 to 190 people. People showed up, saw that there was no activity at the bank, and moved on to play on Second Age or Hybrid. I have no doubt that the same thing would happen here if Telamon considered doing something like this.

Sadly, it already has. I've been watching the "OMG this shard is dead based on numbers at the WBB" players come and go for 2.5 years now.

Well coming back and finding your dragons dead in the middle of town is frustrating.