Edited because I didn't read patch notes regarding character's hunger levels recently........ This brings us right along to pets. It is utterly stupid that you can increase a pet's loyalty by saying 'All Guard Me'. This completely removes the need to ever feed your pet, thus keeping tamers more overpowered than they already should be. Yes, they are a powerful class but there should be actual risks and work that suits. Such as actually feeding your pets. Even insofar as non-tamers feeding their horses. Horses should go wild if you do not feed them, as with all animals. If you do not care for your pets accordingly, they will go wild and eat/attack you or go find food on their own. Please fix this terrible 'All Guard Me' mechanic in lieu of actually feeding pets to keep them loyal. This makes sense and whether or not it was this way on OSI is utterly pointless. The fact that no one needs to eat in a world full of food, is asinine. Many thanks for any consideration of these obvious bugs.
On the contrary, many role players would argue that the various types of food and drink helps to increase our Ultima Online imagination. Not to mention the various uses in decoration in our homes, on our tables, and at our events. I do agree that a minor increase to HP regeneration would be nice, but not to the point of using eating as a viable way to heal ourselves in duels or in a PvP situation. I have also played around with the idea that with the cooking skill, maybe our regeneration rates would increase? Not sure how this would work in a non-PvP scenario. Further, the All Guard Me scenario is absolutely ludicrous. These pets should be going wild or losing stats without being fed. It keeps items sinking and it helps to nerf our over abused class. I do not even have a lamer, but this is just wrong.
There is an entire thread on possible options for making Cooking really useful in the game. I edited the first part of my post because the last patch (53) in fact resolved the HP regeneration effects of satiation.
As far as I can tell, you increase pets loyalty by them succeeding at a command. So, every time you issue a command, a skill check is made against their current happiness level and you succeed (and they gain happiness) or they fail and lose a bunch of happiness. When I was around 98.5 Taming / 100 lore, I was always feeding my pets. I actually had to figure out which one was failing them when I heard the fail noise, Animal Lore them to check happiness, etc. I always ran with a red and a brown dragon because it made applying the meat to them much easier. If you get a couple fails in a row, the pets happiness gets low and your odds of failing a command keep increasing. It's a positive feedback cycle. At 100/100, I don't have to do this with my dragons, though I occasionally do with my nightmare. All of this is exactly how the game worked in 2000-2001. I think part of the reason people don't worry about feeding their pets on this shard is because (a) most of us are GM Tamers thanks to Razor, the increased difficulty of pre-tames that came with the UOR era, and allowable macroing on a small shard in which you can kinda macro taming in peace sometimes. The other reason is that stabling a pet will reset its happiness to wonderfully happy. That, I don't recall from the era. So I think it would be a reasonable thing to remove here.
And? It's still retarded to allow such a function or rather, allow such a silly bypass of a logical function like feeding your pets. If you don't feed your pets they should kill you to eat, the end.
The stablemaster feeds them. That's what I'm paying him for: room AND BOARD. Dragons can't eat while they're hunting anyways; they'll cramp up. Realism 4tw.
