(I was unable to complete my guide due to the thread being locked. I have since reworked it offline so that all the essential information is in the front and my blathering/opinions are in the back, where one can easily read or ignore it. More content and graphics was added and more will be coming as time allows.) What is an IDOC? The acronymn stands for "In danger of collapsing", which is the last state that a player house will be in before it decays after not being refreshed for two weeks, leaving all of its contents out in the open for anyone to scoop up. An IDOC guild is a well-organized group that works together to find and get timers for these house decays. The first part of this guide will be devoted to the fundamental information: IDOC processes, tools, and macros. The tail-end has more advanced stuff, the strategies and concepts and systems that sets one group apart from its competition. There is an estimated 400 million gold worth of IDOC spoils to be won every year (what my group pulled in). The better organized and deadly your group, the greater will be your slice of that pie. "Managing a large army is the same as managing a small one: the secret is organization" -Sun Tzu. 1. THE PROCESS a. IDOC Bible: the Holy Holy Almighty Telamonic Google Spreadsheet b. Making timers great again c. Organizing, distributing and fencing your loot 2. THE LOOTHOUSE 3. Concepts and Systems that WIN. a. THE MERITOCRACY: FOOLPROOF IDOCing b. WHAT YOUR TEAM SHOULD LOOK LIKE c. where we succeeded, where others failed, and thoughts on improvements 4. ALTERNATIVE SYSTEMS 5. FAQ: all the kids are doing it. 1. THE PROCESS As a quick overview, let's look at the world map in our spreadsheet (provided below in section A, see scouting tab) and see that it is divided into zones. Every guild member will be assigned a few zones, and every 6 days will be tasked to check every house sign in their zone for house decay. If the house's status is 'fairly worn' or greater, runes are marked and then added to the guild's master runebooks. These decays are checked daily or as often as possible if the status is 'greatly worn', the stage before a house turns IDOC. By logging the date and time of the various changes of status of decay into the spreadsheet, it will provided an estimated time window of when the house will decay and all its hidden goodies will be available to be picked up or gated out. An an aside here is our gate macro: GATE HOPPING MACRO NAMED "gate" (double click gate, if too far, keeping trying until it succeeds) Code: Assistant.Macros.DoubleClickTypeAction|3948|True Assistant.Macros.PauseAction|00:00:00.2220000 Assistant.Macros.IfAction|4|0|too far Assistant.Macros.PauseAction|00:00:00.2220000 Assistant.Macros.HotKeyAction|0|Play: gate Let's look at things more closely, using the spreadsheet as a guide through the process. A. IDOC Bible: the Holy Holy Almighty Telamonic Google Spreadsheet An IDOCer's life is all about the spreadsheet. In the game of IDOCing, they who are best organized conquer... and the spreadsheet is the cornerstone of that organization. In it you will input some key sets of data and in return, it will be the crystal ball that tells you when and where free stuff will be laying on the ground. It will tell you who has been doing work and who has not and reveal holes in your game. I will go into the most important tabs one by one. Note, this spreadsheet is accurate and up-to-date and was used by my guild up until I literally closed shop. While some data was removed for reasons of privacy, much of it is still populated with actual data to show you what your spreadsheet needs to look like once it's up and running. Our spreadsheet was built off of one shared by a bloke named Telamon. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MpKlap8gF6eJ6qTXOlVnmzVCglcC0AS1AzUhDRetHas/edit?usp=sharing (to save a copy for yourself, File -> Make a Copy...) TAB1: Current IDOCs. To find decaying houses, we use the Scouting tab. Once we find the houses, we track them in the Rune Check Log tab. This tab, Current IDOCS, is where you enter the final times when a house you were tracking had its status turned from "Greatly Worn" to "In Danger of Collapsing". In the first cell, you enter the name of the rune to the house you located. There should be an established naming convention. We used ZONE/HOUSETYPE, and sometimes had a brief couple words of description. We choose that particular convention because sometimes a rune would become blocked for various reasons, and it would allow us to easily re-find and re-mark a rune if needed. The next cell going left to right "GW" is the LAST time that the house was logged in Greatly Worn status and the cell after that, "IDOC" is the FIRST time the house was logged (all in the Rune Check Log tab) in IDOC state. That is all the data you need to input on this tab! The spreadsheet will spit out a time window in all of the US time zones and the house will decay somewhere in that time window. The shorter the logged time between Greatly and IDOC, the smaller that window and your wait will be. If you camped the house to get an exact timer (more on that later), you would enter the exact time in both the GW and IDOC cells and it should give you the smallest window possible under UOR mechanics, about a 10 to 15 minute window. Beneath the IDOC log, we attempted to keep track of our enemies and their alts but were pretty half-assed about it. TAB2: Scouting Every member was responsible for running certain zones. In this tab, you can see how each zone is divided on the map to the far right, who "owns" what zones and who ran them last, when they last ran them, and how many points each is worth. The "Check" row is pretty much superfluous. In our guild, if a member's zone hit day 7 (and the cell would highlight red) they would lose all of their activity points for running zones, which could potentially mean they would not make active status that week and get paid. The consequence was put in place after a pretty bad month where people were ignoring their zones left and right and it put an end to that toute de suite. The IDOC search begins with this tab. You will use it in conjunction with the UOR World Map zoomed all the way in until houses appear and mark every non-empty house with a status of Fairly Worn (when you click on the house sign), which will later go into a set of Fairly Worn runebooks for later checking. TAB3: Point Check Log, Rules, Charter First, the charter and rules you'll want to adapt to fit your team. We started the guild in the mindset that it would be as thin as possible; that is, only enough systems, rules, and consequences that are absolutely necessary. The majority of the rules and such you see on this page were put in to address actual problems we encountered. I'd recommend keeping them. Some personality types tend to resist new, even common sense rules, but find comfort in them when they are in place (if actually beneficial). The main panel of this tab is where activity points are tracked for every member. Some of its data is fed to it from other sources. The greatly check number is based on how many checks you did on the Rune Check Log tab. If you are late running your zones, using data from the Scouting tab, a warning will appear over your name. And the last auto-magical bit would just be the final point tally, which will change your bar from red and inactive to green and active should you accrue the needed total - congratulations, you are getting paid this week! UR REECH! In this tab, you will also find lots of information you may want to remember every once in a while: what activities are worth what points and loothouse etiquette. TAB4: Rune Check Log In the top panel we would keep track of our characters (a.k.a bots) camping promising Greatly Worn decays running an Item Identification macro loop (see section on timers for a copy) and the enemy bots doing the same. The main panel now you will be using the most and come to hate if you do it long enough. It is divided into two sections, one for tracking Fairly Worn checks and the other for tracking Greatly Worn checks. All those Fairly Worn runes you marked in the scouting process should be checked once a day. If their status changes to Greatly Worn, plop they go into the Greatly Worn runebook. I highly, highly recommend blessing your guild's greatly worn book. The thing gets a lot of use. If you are running checks with an un-blessed book and get surprised by an enemy, it could make for a very rough day. We put all the platinum aside we found in IDOCs until we had enough to bless ours. Back to the main panel. You'll want to run greatly checks every 30 minutes to an hour manually. You'll be tempted to be lazy and depend on your recall bot. Don't. Recall bots are very squishy. Spiders love to eat them and your enemies love to ambush them. Select your name from the drop down and enter the date and time before you start your round of checks to prevent multiple members recalling in to do a check at the same time. Happens more than you might think. If any Greatly Worn decay changed to IDOC, you will enter the times into the Current IDOC tab. If a decay is refreshed, you removed it from the Greatly runebook. List the results of your Greatly run in the "Any New IDOCS?" column and see you again soon. (to modify the members in the dropdown menu, right click on the column with the drop downs, go to Data Validation, and then look for the "Criteria" tab.) I believe the remaining tabs are self-explanatory. Shoot me a PM if something doesn't make sense! B. Making Timers Great Again If you've absorbed all of the above, you now know how to go about finding house decays, how to mark them and the general process for using those runes to get the narrowest possible window. Here are some specifics on getting timers: We used three methods to get our timers. I'll start with the most effective and work my way down. This guide assumes you know if I reference any skill, it needs to be GM. A. Camping - camping is placing a toon near the Greatly Worn decay's house sign and running an Item Identification macro until it changes to IDOC. You loop it to run every minute or so and use a Razor conditional to check for the status "This house is in danger" - if detected, have the macro take a screenshot which will have a timestamp on it assuming it is enabled in Razor -> Screenshots -> Include timestamps. Note: it may be necessary to have your camper's window maximized at all times. Supposedly one can loose the timestamp on the screenshot if they run the macro with the UO window minimized. Myth debunking: changing your house name to "This house is in danger" or anything else does not affect these macros. IDOC CAMPING MACRO (UseSkill Item ID, target sign (must re-target every time), if sign says X, take screenshot and stop macro) Code: !Loop Assistant.Macros.UseSkillAction|3 Assistant.Macros.WaitForTargetAction|30 Assistant.Macros.AbsoluteTargetAction|0|0|1074640588|1861|3114|16|3026 Assistant.Macros.PauseAction|00:00:00.9000000 Assistant.Macros.IfAction|4|0|this house is in danger Assistant.Macros.PauseAction|00:00:01 Assistant.Macros.HotKeyAction|1107| Assistant.Macros.HotKeyAction|1107| Assistant.Macros.PauseAction|00:00:01 Assistant.Macros.HotKeyAction|1083| Assistant.Macros.EndIfAction Assistant.Macros.PauseAction|00:00:20 Your "bots" will almost always be exposed to your competition tracking you, revealing you, and luring monsters on you or just flat out dirtnapping you. Sometimes you will get lucky and be able to place a small marble workshop that will let you keep line of sight to the house sign and afford some protection, though players will still be able to drop your bot. The name of the game is patience. Expect to see ample gray screen as the price of doing business. Ress, feed counts if possible, and go back to work. Having a 5-10 minute window for a great IDOC is worth the effort and opens up the use of some annoying and/or effective tactics (more later). If your opponents keep wiping out your bot(s), don't give up. In fact, do the opposite: bring even more bots. Make it a party. Bring hotdogs and Redbull. Show them you aren't greedy and share some death with their bots too. Now you're cooking with gas! B. Manual Greatly Checks - quite simply, by checking to see if Greatly Worn house decays have changed to IDOC and marking those times and checking as often as possible, you get a window of time in which the decay will fall (roughly 17 hours after it first turns IDOC). This is one area that the "heavy" or whatever you call your leader-type will want to keep a close eye on. Greatly checks are the bread and butter of an IDOC guild. The entire guild needs to be doing their fair share of greatly checks with no exceptions. Frequent two hour+ windows and cownerds start looking at greener pastures. Bless your greatly runebook and hit that thing like it's buttocks. All day every day until your brain explodes. C. Recall Botting - the recall bot cannot be relied upon to provide consistant timers, but it does a damn fine job of reducing the windows of most of the IDOCS you find manually (through greatly checks) and bailing your asses out when for some reason your entire team goes AWOL on a Sunday afternoon (and it's not even football season gd it). If possible, run your guy(s) out of a courtyard to keep them protected from the bad guys and spiders. Obviously, you could run one non-stop but I believe there is a point of diminishing returns: at some point you burn too many regs and put yourself in too much danger for too little time reduction. I think we ran ours every 20 minutes. The macro is below. You are using one macro, "rune2" to start a chain of macros, with each macro in the chain being a recall location in your runebook, and ending the chain with the macro, "idle". It's a chain because at the end of every macro, you link to the next one until the very last one. As often as necessary, usually about every other day, the person in the Recall Bot role needs to toss out old or refreshed runes, add the latest new batch, and then update his macro-chain. At this time, they will want to recall to every new house location and manually update the absolute target for the Item Identification skill to point to the new house signs. If there are a few refreshed houses in your macro-chain, you do not have to wait until you do a full update. Just edit the macro before the refreshed house to skip over it. e.g. edit macro "rune2" to go to "rune4" instead of "rune3". Create your own folder in Razor for these macros. Your complete macro-chain should have the main macro "idle", which sends you back to home and restocks your toon and then starts the cycle over again, and a macro for every other rune in your blessed runebook, e.g. rune2 (the first rune after home), rune3, rune 4... all the way up to 16. I included two macros below, the last ("idle) and the first ("rune2"). The macros for runes 3-16 will be identical to "rune2" with two exceptions: the absolute target for the house sign will change with every update and the very last line needs to Play the next rune in line until you're back to "idle" again. STARTING MACRO NAMED IDLE (Open runebook, go to first rune (Home), restock regs twice for redundancy, hide and wait, start again by playing rune2) Code: Assistant.Macros.DoubleClickAction|1077338183|3834 Assistant.Macros.WaitForGumpAction|1431013363|False|2 Assistant.Macros.GumpResponseAction|5|0|0 Assistant.Macros.PauseAction|00:00:02 Assistant.Macros.DoubleClickAction|1077408262|2474 Assistant.Macros.PauseAction|00:00:01.5000000 Assistant.Macros.HotKeyAction|0|Restock Agent-2 Assistant.Macros.AbsoluteTargetAction|0|0|1077408262|1912|3112|2|2474 Assistant.Macros.PauseAction|00:00:08 Assistant.Macros.HotKeyAction|0|Restock Agent-2 Assistant.Macros.AbsoluteTargetAction|0|0|1077408262|1912|3112|2|2474 Assistant.Macros.PauseAction|00:00:05 Assistant.Macros.UseSkillAction|21 Assistant.Macros.PauseAction|00:30:00 Assistant.Macros.HotKeyAction|0|Play: Greatly checker\rune6 RUNE 2 MACRO (Open runebook, go to next rune, hide, Item ID sign, screenshot, go to next rune) Code: !Loop Assistant.Macros.DoubleClickAction|1077338183|3834 Assistant.Macros.WaitForGumpAction|1431013363|False|2 Assistant.Macros.GumpResponseAction|11|0|0 Assistant.Macros.PauseAction|00:00:01.4000000 Assistant.Macros.UseSkillAction|21 Assistant.Macros.PauseAction|00:00:10 Assistant.Macros.UseSkillAction|3 Assistant.Macros.WaitForTargetAction|2 Assistant.Macros.AbsoluteTargetAction|0|0|1090778829|1623|837|5|3026 Assistant.Macros.PauseAction|00:00:02.5000000 Assistant.Macros.HotKeyAction|1107| Assistant.Macros.PauseAction|00:00:07 Assistant.Macros.HotKeyAction|0|Play: Greatly checker\rune3 B. Organizing, distributing and fencing your loot. Once the loot is piled high on the patio, the lootgimp goes to the busy work of separating the wheat from the chaff. Garbage is tossed, containers and tables are turned into premade door bombs, worthless weapons and whatnots are added to CUB bags, resources go over meh, and ogre magi statues go over meh. As soon as humanly possible, these sorted plundered pixels are either loaded onto the guild's vendors to fill the Residual Income vault or sold on the forums. Let me hit pause and talk a little while about Residual Income, so capitalized because it was one of the few great pillars of our success. While many goods, especially the higher-end items with elastic values, were fenced in forum auctions, the remainder was sold on guild-run vendors and it provided a fairly predictable payout to our members (on average about our vendors made us about 1 mil/week). Harnessing the power of Residual Income, even the worst weeks could see decent pay checks for all. The secret is in our unspoken and unwritten maxim: get it ALL and liquidate. No IDOC was too small for us for two reasons: even the junky idocs quickly add up and sometimes a house was not what it seemed. We encountered more than one small house with junk all over and just one chest... which contained nothing but hoarded anniversary clothing. We recovered (very expensive) first anniversary sandals buried in crap in a tower filled with crap. We could have a slow week, our competition could have taken a little bite from us, but with Residual Income constantly flowing from vendor sales, we were always able to pay our bills. In our guild, everything except resources went up for sale immediately (or as close thereto). Occasionally, members allowed other members to purchase things usually with more of a fixed price before they were auctioned, but that was on a case by case basis. There was no set rule or procedure and it never seemed to be a problem. For an alternative method of distributing loot, check out Section 10, the round-robin approach. Before pay bags were handed out on Friday nights, the lootmaster would usually update the resource totals in the spreadsheet and try to pawn them off on guildmembers. It often meant a decent boost in the end of week total. Resources that linger too long are sold en masse on the forums. Friday night, the lootmaster took all the gold, regs (if enough were collected), platinum, and holiday coins and divided them equally among all active members. 2. The Loothouse For some handy loothouse etiquette with illustrations, check out the Point Check Log (tab3) in the spreadsheet. Further: There is only one choice for an IDOC guild's loothouse and that is the large house with patio (a.k.a smithy) for two main reasons: you can toss loot over the railing and it's easy to secure the back rooms from theft. The first thing you want to do when a house disappears is pop a gate to the loothouse (macro below). PROTIP: you will need the macro to transport heavy goods by dragging through gates but keep the number of gates to a minimum. If there's no rush, just pop one gate, two tops, and the rest of the team move containers and pixels closer to the gates for faster transport. The more gates that are up, the longer it takes the macro to find the one near you. When an IDOC is in progress, you will want someone logged in with patio access at all times. The patio troll is tasked with moving loot onto the table barrier to make room for more loot and also keep it from getting stolen. PROTIP: you can hop your enemy's gate and steal the things off their patio if it is near the edge. If you cannot access directly, trying using a restock agent, or if it is loose, a scavenger agent. After the IDOC is cleared, at some point the "lootmaster" will move all the stuff into the secure inner rooms, but no doubt not before the rest of the crew has peered into all the chests and bags like a pack of pixel-crazed jackels. You will make enemies. Always keep the doors locked. Always Detect Hidden when you walk in. Put it in a macro. If you set up your loothouse correctly, infiltration should not be an issue, but some minor damage could still be done. 3. Concepts and Systems that WIN. A. Meritocracy Our systems, which I credit with being the chief component of our success, were designed to anticipate and address two key truths: 1) unless every member knows that profit and effort are fair and balanced, the idoc machine will quickly break down. 2) every member will at some point slack, loose interest, have babies, etc, and so the system must accomodate fluxations in the active roster as well as the personalities within it. To this end, we elected to go with an IDOC system based on merit: a points-based system based on each member's activity week by week. Our members earned activity points by meeting their responsibilities and doing good work by the guild. Just as important, there were also major consequences put in place for failing to meet one's responsibilities. In our guild, you needed to get at least 40 activity points every week to get a share of the IDOC profits for that week. With a system like this, a guildmate's activity level is free to wax and wane as the mood strikes them, but if they do not pull their weight, they do not get paid (and the members who did pull their weight get paid more). For so long as your members feel that everyone is doing their fair share and are compensated handsomely for it, even an IDOC guild made up of utterly disparate personalities can flourish in relative harmony. Things can quickly snowball when this is not the case, e.g. player1 sees player2 getting paid the same every week for doing much less, decides to follow suit, more workload is put on others, who also eventually take notice and.... you can see how it can get messy quickly. If you think that players will always behave in the best interest of the guild, even if they are making a fortune, you are wrong. Therein lies the crux of why a meritocracy that addresses potential problems before they occur is so damn effective. B. What your team should look like. First, I recommend the number eight as being where you cap your membership. At times we operated fine with slightly less, but it wasn't pretty. The trick here is to have the minimum number of players to acheive all objectives for the maximum amount of profit. Too few members, and you won't have the muscle to address any competition and the workload will grind you to smithereens; too many members and you start losing people because they're not pulling in enough scratch. Eight always seemed like the sweet spot for us. Before I go into the various roles that we created and that I think served us well, there is one thing that should be common to every member. Everyone should be able and willing to PVP. At the very least you should be comfortable and fairly accurate with syncing on enemies and crosshealing your friends. This guide assumes you will be attempting to run a dominating IDOC guild. If that is not the type of guild you want to run... well, good luck with that. Anyway, you won't be able to dominate squat if your members are worthless in a fight. Now, to roles. Some of these roles demand more time and effort than others. More responsibilies, but also little concern over if they will make active any given week. Because more is expected from the members in the specialized roles, it is doubly important that everyone else does their fair share, since so much less is expected of them. Members in these roles need to be bolstered because you can burn out quick. Here, then, were our roles: 1. "The Heavy"/IDOCLORD - neither were actually titles, but what we called the one person entrusted to make and enforce rules and consequences when all other options had been exhausted e.g. asking a member to stop missing his zones who then does not comply. We never had a de facto leader. Two or three members just seemed to organically make most of the decisions. The "heavy" was the closest we came to a leader. In my opinion, the best fit for this position is someone who it seems is capable of being impartial and seems decent at seeing "the big picture" at all times. As someone who may occasionally need to step in to resolve some negative behavior, it's also probably important to have no qualms about confrontation. The heavy is the lifeguard, the adult driving the minivan filled with feral children. As much as they may or may not want to get absorbed in the chaos and fun, someone needs to keep the kiddies from drowning themselves. Someone needs to keep an eye on the road. 2. The Vendorerer - the player who ran our vendors was one of the pillars of our stability because he fenced the goods and consistently furnished us with something quite magical: RESIDUAL INCOME. You will want to select an area to fence your goods that gets the most amount of exposure, stay consistant, and advertise constantly. This role takes a lot of work and may require a potential investment in high end vendor real estate. The personality for this job quite frankly is someone insane enough to not go insane running what will be a very busy vendor with supernerd-like organizational skills. Our vendor was GideonJura. Enough said. 3. The Recall Botter - another secret to our success is we added redundancy to our timing operations. We aimed to manually run greatly checks at least every hour, but let's face it: people sleep, people poop. The person who ran the recall bot was tasked with narrowing down the windows from our manual checks, and bailing our asses out if our coverage was lacking. As often as necessary, the recall botter would load a blessed runebook with the latest and greatest Greatly Worn runes and run a macro that used the Item Identification skill on the house signs and take a screenshot of the results. We ran ours out of a secure courtyard in usually 20 minute intervals, so as not to be molested by ne'er-do-wells. Whenever a manual check would find a new IDOC, the Recall Botter would sift through his screenshots and find the time his bot captured and update the spreadsheet with the reduced time window. By pairing manual checks with semi-automatic ones, we were able to consistently enjoy windows in the 30-45 minute range. That is huge. Your guild and especially "the heavy" should focus most of their energies on keeping windows as narrow as possible. Large windows make for disgruntled members and disintegrated IDOC guilds. And the tighter the window, the more tactical options are available to you should you have opposition (more on that later). I'll be providing a copy of the recall bot macro in the section on timers. 4. The Lootmaster (a.k.a the Gimp a.k.a the slave a.k.a MrSortyPants) - this role is probably just barely worse than being the "heavy" in my opinion. For a very long time I was both. No one knows how I did it and neither do I - attempt at your own peril. The lootmaster's role is to dump the IDOC loot dropped onto the patio into the secure back rooms, sort it, organize it, and either sell it or task other guild members to help him/her do the same. In the beginning, even faced with a relentless torrent of bags and chests, the vast majority of which are horribly unorganized, it may seem like Christmas opening all those mysterious containers. Enjoy the feeling because it won't last. Unless you ignore the part of this guide where I talk about how essential Residual Income was to us and go only for high-end idocs, most of the loot you encounter will be a snoozefest. After doing it for months, even encountering server-births, statues, and so on will barely register a tic. As Lootmaster, my goal, though Herculean, was simple: to turn every single pixel, down to the very last lockpick, into gold to be divided equally among all active members. The emptier the loothouse was, the better I was doing my job. Very often I was drowned in bags and even with help could hardly accomplish that feat. This role can be very stressful because the Idoc Machine waits for no man and dragging thousands and thousands of pixels from one container to another can be a grind. It is essential that every member do anything in their power to bolster this individual because from them is demanded the most game time doing not-fun-stuff. A player in this role may be more sensitive to "slackers" due to their constant workload, so try to always do your part in the interest of group harmony. Make them happy because pretty much their entire job is making you happy. A great fit for this is a highly organized personality type. The temptation to take pixels on the sly is probably strong, so if possible I'd recommend someone already pixel-rich or a player who has shown a detachment for pixels. A Trammy who already has it all or a person who hates Trammel. I believe theft was never an (known) issue with our guild because its membership were already well established and wanting for little (except just a little bit more). 5,6,7,8 - The Goons - the rest of your group should be veteran PVPers or as close thereto as you can mange. As I said earlier, every member and every role should be able and willing to field and be proficient at the very least at syncing and crosshealing. Beyond that, you will want as many members as you can find that excel at killing other players - because your guild will not survive if you cannot carve out at least half of the total IDOC goods in play. Think of your guild as an orphanage filled with petulant and ever-hungry children. Every week is a new struggle to keep them from tearing down the walls and appease their amazing appetites. In the absence of small and easy windows, something to kill, and obscene gold, they won't stick around for long. The reward must always outweigh the work. In my group, we always had 3-4 veteran PVPers. During the mornings and afternoons, we usually only had one or two of them available, but just two veterans who had clocked much field time together were usually enough to keep us together and fighting effectively. In the evenings when most of us could be on and when we had as many as four veterans, even significantly greater numbers were pretty ineffective. Our veterans were too fast and proficient with picking people off one by one. I cannot stress enough how important it is to have a core of veteran PVPers (and to be clear, by veteran I mean years of PVPing, a long time fielding with their fellow IDOCers, comfortable using wands and pots, including explode pots, and generally not sucking). I may refer to them as Goons, but they are a guild's backbone! If possible, always roll with a vet who is good at calling targets and setting up syncs and, obviously, when there is competition it should be mandatory that everyone be in a voice chat program (we used Mumble). Of course, muscle isn't everything. In other sections I will go over some tactics that will let you do a little more with a little less. C. Real case study: where we succeeded and what could have been done better. Okay, I'm a nerd. I've been looking forward to writing this section because part of this game to me and one of the perverse kicks I got out of IDOCing, was strategizing. Here I want to share some strategies I think served us very well, and maybe one or two things I would do different in hindsight. A. All about that ABISM. (A)Always (B) be (I) in (S) stealth (M) mode. In the first weeks of our guild's birth, we decided stealth mode was the way to go. This is a broad, many-tentacled stealth like a shadow government employes, or the Illuminati, or the Grand Society of Snakes Biting Their Own Tails. What this meant was no boasting or advertising our actions on the forums, not feeding any trolls on the forums, hiding our identities: on the forums and in IRC and also in game by extensive use of disguise kits, camping IDOCs on kitted blues or with ghosts, and never killing anyone until the IDOC dropped or very near the end of the window. The why of it was manifold. You cannot strike a target you cannot see. You cannot track a hated Bart or an Amfekk if their names are Mario and Absinthe. People tend to notice and protest when they see Reds and are killed by same. You cannot grow overly envious and want to organize yourselves to stop the gravy train if you don't know there is a gravy train or just how long it stretches. You cannot cry or yell at us if you don't know who we are. ABISM dictates how we interface with IDOCs. ABISM is an enforced rule, so all members are required to camp IDOCs under the influence of kits or incognito or, preferably, as ghosts. Looting and defending IDOCs was big activity points so there was strong incentive to attend every one. We used one or two tactics for maximum ninja stealthiness, depending on if there was competition and how large the window was. The first was just camping the IDOC on kitted blues if there was no sign of competition. The second was watching it with a ghost, with all active members waiting back at the loothouse for when the ghost-scout called drop in Mumble. Usually the only time we would forego this rule was when Bart or Amfekk got too bloodthirsty and just charged in willy-nilly, or when there was more value in pixels that can be quickly scavenged, so it made little sense to roll our forces in at "drop" when everything will be picked up before we can start tossing ebolts around. Deprive your enemies of actionable information and they will make crucial mistakes or not know where you are so they can come beat you up and take your gld and lord title. B. Tiny Windows, Big Surprises. One of our favorite tactics is to lull our opponents into thinking we might have missed an IDOC, then zerging it when it has 5-10 minutes left to drop. We do this very often and even if you're expecting it, it is still effective because he who strikes first, strikes best; in dominating IDOCs, at least. As effective as it is, you cannot do this without getting narrow windows. If you have a superior force, you will usually be able to kill everyone at the IDOC before it drops and before they can call in reinforcements or bring in their alts. By the time they come back, there's a good chance you and the loot will be gone. If you do not have a superior force, gating in en masse at the end of a window usually will cause enough chaos and distraction to let one or two of your guys to start looting chests and pixels unmolested, at least for a short time. On numerous occasions, we faced a zerg of multiple guilds at an IDOC. Using this tactic, we had our fighting force focus on just staying alive and occupying their defenders while one of us gated away the entire IDOC. I'll say it again, small windows are everything. C. Operation Attrition. We were keenly aware of what attrition was and how to cause it, I think another key to our success. Our goal was to make our enemies work as hard as we could make them, while denying them as much reward as we could. We wanted them running their zones and busting their asses running greatly checks and attending bots for nothing, or almost nothing. If the only way to deny them was to deny ourselves by calling in our own zergish allies, so be it. We knew that with every victory, far more damaging was an enemy with high morale than the loss of any loot. Our constant stream of residual income insulated us a good deal from the effects of attrition and we could weather many stale weeks of profit. So long as we felt we inflicted the greater attrition on them, we knew whatever annoyance we were suffering was not bound to last. We "defeated" quite a few guilds and lone-wolves. I believe it was the effects of attrition that stopped every single one of them. Too much work and fighting for too little gain. The only way to survive is to endure longer, to win more, and/or to set up residual income or some other way to mitigate the affects of loss (or just slow weeks). D. Organized Looting. Another advantage we had over most of our competition was our efficient looting. If we were actively defending, at least one of us would be doing nothing but gating out pixels and throwing them over our smithy railing. Everyone else would be focused on defense. In the case of an uncontested or lightly contested IDOC, the whole team would work in concert to suck everything out like a vacuum, often in just one gate. It is essential that all loot be either liquidated or handed out round-robin AFTER the IDOC is completely looted and everything is secure. We fought many guilds that let their members keep whatever they could loot. This resulted in most of their guild being taken out of the fight because they were distracted by looting pixels and us killing most of them and getting the lion's share of the loot. Loot smart! Loot with friends! 4. Alternative Systems To recap, our system was based around merit: you did not keep what you looted; all went into a pool and was liquidated and if you put in an equal week's work, you got an equal week's cut, and it was a LOT. Our goal was to seize every last sellable IDOC pixel and turn it all into two types of profit: immediate and residual. There are likely many more alternatives and then hybrids of each. These two tweaks are just ones that I am aware of and think could work. 1. Payment - instead of liquidating pixels, letting guildies choose round-robin style. They can keep the pixels or liquidate them themselves. Resources get divided equally once a month. (I say once a month because doing it every week would be a nightmare) 2. Rethink IDOCing - the idea for this is not mine but I am not sure if that person wants me to credit them. Anyway, instead of running the entire map every week and spamming greatly checks, there is an viable alternative. Run the map once in a blue moon, perhaps every other month? and only mark the high-end IDOCs. Instead of checking every house on the map every week, only check the high-value IDOCs you marked. I have no experience with this method, but it seems viable for a guild that loves big fights, is content with making a little less profit than a full-blown IDOC guild like I ran, but also wants to do much less work. 5. FAQ Q: Can I do this solo or casually? A: Absolutely not. You can, and you will certainly occasionally be able to snag something nice for yourself, but more often than not you will waste a tremendous amount of your time for little or no reward. In my opinion, the only way one could expect any reasonable success IDOCing solo or casually is in the absence of a well organized IDOC guild. That is, if everyone is going about it casually, the playing field is level. Otherwise you'll be doing a lot of waiting and a lot of dying.
As I just joined the shard a few days ago, I am now reading all the guides here in the forum. All in all, the quality of the guides here is exceptional! Really exceptional! Honestly, this forum is - how do you say in English? - the best advertisement for this shard! And this guide stands out as well! @TrojanCow Thank you very much for your efforts! This guide is very much appreciated! It was a blast to read! And I am looking forward to doing IDOCs again! Although I was never even close to this form of organization, I managed to do pretty well on my own on OSI in the beginning 2000s. Even managed to loot a few server borns which sold for hundred of millions (and I still remember that I looted them from some crap cabin on the most remoted part of Britain). But you are certainly right: Can't tell how often I was ganked by some reds who regularly recalled in minutes before the drop. Sometimes - even on working days - I got up in the middle of the night because I couldn't stand to miss that special IDOC! BTW: I will never understand why not a single MMO after UO (to my knowledge) has adopted this mechanic!
@Kalvasflam - welcome to UOR! IDOCs were some of the most fun I had on this shard, but also the most frustration. I never understood why all of UO's mechanics haven't been built upon/copied at least conceptually. It's the perfect recipe for addiction fun.
A few months ago there was an IDOC in my South Moonglow neighborhood. It was a small vendor house in a very good location, on the road west of the gate. I was not really interested in looting; but just wanted the spot for my own vendor house. Being relatively new to the server, and not knowing any of this, I just camped the IDOC by myself and waited for the shop to drop, a little worried that when all the crates the shop was filled with dropped, I would have a lot of difficulty placing the house due to obstructions and such. I did notice a few blue scouts recalling off and on, then close to the drop time, a few reds showed up and needless to say, I died a few times, well...very much more than a few times. It was very interesting to read all the prep and organizing that went into that little IDOC instance. I remember watching the house drop as a ghost. By the time i went to the nearest wandering healer and came back, which was just a couple of minutes, I caught a glimpse of the last red entering the gate and the plot was so clean it looked like nothing happened there. I quickly double clicked my deed and placed my little vendor shop with no problem at all. After reading this, I believe these guys were following your IDOC system to the hilt. Thank you for clarifying the whole thing for me. It was an excellent read and I learned a lot
With the info in here, I'm gonna say Yes You Can. Adding players to a group that's doing *anything* will have diminishing returns and I think that holds for IDOC'ing too. "Occasionally" is all the success you need, because you get to keep your success all to yourself instead of splitting it 5 ways. @TrojanCow how many hours a week did you spend on this for the million gp?
The IDOC scene has changed since you left. Before, you could expect a win here and there because some of those group's members slacked or made mistakes. Now there is not just one, but many competing groups and they are more consistent. So, you can still snag stuff but it's much harder. I wouldn't ask how many hours I spent, I was an anomaly. I would guess on average my group spent about 10 hours worth of greatly checking, zone running, bot checking and resetup, camping and fighting and looting. I think what you are driving at is that, yes, you need to spend many hours every week doing stuff you don't want to. There are certainly a lot of other things you can grind away at that give you equal or greater rewards than IDOCing.
Wasn't driving at anything, it was my inner bean-counter curiosity 10 hours makes sense. Ultimately I think this shard is big enough that things are pretty efficient. You can make about the same amount of gold killing Elder Gazers as filling BODs as doing the IDOC spreadsheet. If you got a million gp check for one or two hour's work every week, I'm sure there'd be more competition, so it seems to all even out. The screenshot macro stuff, and just plain posting the actual decay per stage, is really all I think a solo person needs to be pretty effective. I find as a solo player, once you have a rough idea of a timer, it's pretty easy to be sneaky and grab some stuff in the chaos if you plan ahead well. I think the only advantage a group has is the ability to specialize... like maybe one person is better at managing a spreadsheet, one person is really good at driving out competition at a drop, one person makes really efficient macros and shares them, etc. Anyways, there's much steadier paychecks out there, but all this info almost intrigues me enough to want to try something like this.
I think it is about the journey, not the destination. IDOCing in a group is an unique UO experience that is worth trying if you have the opportunity. If one is all about the riches, it is Known that grinding holiday events and instances results in the most reward for the least risk and effort.
