This thread will serve as a discussion of Heat of Battle in factions. I propose changes that include adding a 2 min. heat of battle flag on ALL faction encounters (both the aggressor and defender, recall/moongate/player-gate restriction). Factions is all about consensual PVP and when you go out on oranges you need to be prepared to fight or to run (overland). Allowing players to just mash a recall hotkey when the going gets rough is not ideal. To those who would propose only putting a heat of battle restriction on the aggressors, this leads to issues with sigils in that players who attack a sigil holding factioner as he runs to the moongates will get restricted from chasing whilst the sigil holder is free to run off. Discuss how you think heat of battle could be better designed.
As I've said in the past, and really on speculation as I've never discussed the reasoning for the removal with Telamon, I believe this will go back to normal once moongate travel is restricted for sigil carriers. The issue of sigil thieves running through gates while being engaged by the enemy, was a problem. The fix will involve teleporters to the island Faction towns and until that happens, we can expect this to stay as is. I do look forward to not only HoB returning to Factions but Moongate restrictions most especially (including the arena gates). I will never support HoB on the defender, if they do not engage. Factions is not ONLY a pvp system, considering the various crafting systems incorporated. I'm not ever going to get behind having my crafter ganked because one player/bot spammed harm/target nearest orange. I absolutely agree that if you engage in the fight when attacked, you should get 2 minute HoB. Not only that, but HoB should be reset to 2 minutes with every subsequent aggression. ie: every spell targeted, every weapon hit, punch or purple potion landed, should reset the timer. Sigil carriers should not be able to Recall or Gate Travel (casted or otherwise), at all. Problem solved.
I would agree with defenders only being flagged IF returning offensive spells after being attacked, (engage in the fight when attacked). So if at any point you cast an offensive spell on an orange you are flagged, regardless of whether or not they flagged "first".
i would like all the stuff you said except player gate restriction. i'm not really the type to have a character gate me out of fights or anything, but i do think it feels a little wonky to have the factions system work differently than the criminal system in only one regard. as for defenders not being flagged: it's kind of a no-go. both parties have to be flagged or you will have situations where B steals sigil A attacks B B uses moongate A can't use moongate moongate travel should never be restricted for sigil carriers simply on the grounds that they have a sigil. we don't need any bad blaise ideas making it into factions.
From Stratics: A player with a town sigil cannot: Teleport Gate Recall Cast Polymorph Cast Incognito Use a disguise kit Use moonstone (lol) Place sigil in a container on the ground "Give" the sigil to an enemy faction player "Give" the sigil to someone not in their own faction Sigil runs should be sigil runs, not sigil gates. With proper provisions in place to get to the islands, moongates would not be needed for sigil runs at all. If we didn't have Trammel moongate gumps where you can select a town, I'd not have any issue with it because a chase could ensue through said gate accordingly instead of it being an easy escape mechanism where the only way you'd have no chance of escape is if you had 8-9 people on your tail.
if you think blue scouting is bad now, impose a restriction on recalling when attacked, no one will ever go out for fear of not being able to avoid a gank
Fight or flight is absolutely a freedom that should remain for all. If you choose to fight back, you should have own up to that. Glad we agree.
I have personally never seen you roll without a squad so I guess I'll just have to take your word. And even that is beside the point, not everyone finds honor in death, I don't see why if I get blind sided by 5 guys I should be doomed to lose my loot
Your hours are a bit far from his normal hours. I'm happy to say Gideon is holding my candle as the newbiest TB but I'm afraid he'll surpass me shortly if he sticks to it.
This is the line of thinking I take issue with. You think that your side is somehow different. Set your pride aside and be honest with yourself for a moment if you want to have a rational discussion. If you think your side doesn't ghost - or pick the same name - or loot - or res kill - or gank - well you're a delusional person. I apologize for the rude way that comes off. Reconciling groups is a two way street and if you can't be honest about your shortcomings and make genuine concessions then you are incapable of fixing anything. I want to reply to you as peacefully as I can because I don't think every thread needs to become a pissing match. So let's both try to be productive. Currently the way 'heat of battle' works is it's been removed for things most players agree it should be there for: you attack a player, you can't recall or use a moongate for 30 seconds Now I have advocated for a return to this policy for some time. Currently when I think about how this will change things, I'm not sure it matters. Factioners no longer scout with their oranges anyways, for the most part. Now they use their extra accounts to place both live and ghost scouts in pvp hot spots. I'm not saying whether this is good or bad, just that this kind of change to heat of battle may not make a big difference anymore, in my opinion. I think it's too late to reduce people to 1 account each obviously. So maybe we just need to play the hand we're dealt. How doesn't the removal of heat of battle work like you and I would both like? If you attack a sigil carrier he can walk through a town moongate and you can't follow for 30 seconds. This is annoying. If there was going to be some change to heat of battle - I think we both would have hoped it would have helped in this situation. But this isn't as large a problem as it has been made out to be in my opinion. Because a sigil carrier is always only headed to one place. You know the player's destination. There should be no trouble getting their ahead of him with the ability to recall. Now, about this idea that at some point in the shard's future sigil carriers won't be able to use town moongates: I think this is an unreasonable request. The implication is that anyone taking sigils to or away from CoM base would be forced to boat. I can almost certainly assure you the first thing players would do is use known sigil exploits to move them (up until that would be fixed), then whichever players would be in CoM would probably stop participating in the sigil side of factions and everyone would find it tedious to access the magincia sigil. I don't think there's any real call to stop sigil carriers from using town moongates, personally. Again, the player's destination is easily known.
I'm not looking to fight about it either. There is a 30 minute window where the sigil runner absolutely does not have to go to that one place. This is where the issue lies, with a foot chase. We chase 50 screens, the runner hits a gate and we get to play guessing games on where they might have gone, how long until they show up at their base (if they do at all because it could just be a ruse to distract us from our base or another runner, what have you). Sure we can go sit at their base and wait, but they could also suicide, and go re-steal it from our base to reset the timer. As we all know, people do a lot of things in UO simply to be annoying regardless of how contrary to the objectives it may be. Providing a medium for them to facilitate such shenanigans isn't doing any justice to the system. As has been discussed more than once in the past, forcing boat travel to the islands would not only be terrible but terribly imbalanced. The solution is to get an idea of foot travel distance between the town sigil monoliths and faction bases and put specifically placed teleporters on the mainland and the two islands, that work like teleporters, not moongates. One way, no options, no gumps, step on tile and you are there. For example, the Moonglow teleporter could actually just drop you on one of the teleporters already on the island, or one just like them. Place the one on the mainland somewhere distant like Cove (example, I haven't run the distances to make good suggestions for teleporter locations on all bases yet, but I did start logging the data). The baseline is to time a run from each faction stronghold to each town sigil monolith and place teleporters accordingly to give fair distance to all factions. Yes, Shadowlords are a lot closer to Yew and TB is a lot closer to Britain and Minax to Trinsic, etc. Point being, it would never be perfectly balanced travel distance but we could certainly put in the time to figure out the best place for two teleporters to get really close to matched travel time for all 8 towns from each of the four bases. After that, moongates would be entirely moot for sigil movement. This is research we would have to take upon ourselves because I daresay Telamon doesn't have the time to be running around and timing the distances as readily as we all do. I'm absolutely in favor of HoB returning for anyone engaging in battle.
bliase: doesn't putting both players in HoB when one attacks another address your concern without creating wacky system of teleporters?
You couldn't use player made gates with sigils. You could use the public gates. Disallowing public gate use would make sigil runs even more of a pain in the ass, and it's not the way it was on OSI. I'm strongly opposed to it. The way to "fix" the heat of battle issue you have with public gates is simple - if the person you're in heat of battle with isn't within a certain number of tiles (for example, he used a public gate to go to the other side of the continent) - heat of battle no longer applies. This will also ease the inconvenience factor that comes with not being able to recall due to heat of battle even though there are no targets around because they fled/died.
No, because then crafters will be getting trap-ganked regularly along with everyone else. As soon as an orange shows, the bot stops them from recalling and the squad is clear to come clean them up. Talk about wacky. If HoB was immediately negated upon use of a moongate, sure no problem. That might be a nice fix. However, I'm still partial to actually making the run to the towns through the lands. The lack of need to travel the lands in this game, these days, is greatly disheartening. I don't see the problem with not having moongate travel at all considering I still do run to the towns directly because I enjoy it. The moongates only reduce the amount of potential interaction one might have with the rest of the game and give sigil carriers an easy street. If we had to go out in the wilds and make a path, Tracking would come into play heavily and no one would be making b-lines for easy-out gates with 9 options to choose from. Perhaps remove the Trammel gate menu and put in moon phase gating when you're in factions. That would solve for most of it and encourage players to not use the gates for factions.
