I have noticed people state that mining really isn't worth the time and effort when you can just join the tinker/bs guild and recall throughout sosaria and collect ingots at 8gp per. Outside of that there is even less of a need when you add in the always spawning ore golems. Why not show some love for traditional mining and also make it a bit more Era accurate as well. First Era Accuracy: In Era the only time you would not get full ore pieces (the ones you get 2 ingots from) would be if you either semi failed a dig or the vein was drying up, usually the last dig would yield the pieces which take 2 pieces for 1 ingot. Here it seems there is little rhyme or reason outside of a roll of a dice, these pieces are burdening and just straight up a PITA, especially the aformentioned 2 or 1 pieces. Now whether these are Era Accurate or not: The speed at which one mines feels excessively slow. It just feels straight up clunkified, this is coming from someone who used to mine in 1999 on a 56k. Ore respawn timer also seems to be excessively long, is this a default setting? Was this originally set to be this long before the anti-macro system went in? If not, what happened/what's the point?
Oooooooooooooo he's definitely right about the reject ore pieces coming up as you finished off a vein.
They slowed down the respawn of ore, because people mined too much. Then, even that didn't stop people so they had to put in ore golems... basically a lot of anti-mining because of BODs. I hope explosive ore comes out next. What we have is a lack of miner PKs stomp them out.
People mined too much so they tried to curb that? Seriously? Seems fairly intrusive for those of us who enjoy mining. Why not just remove mining all together? Have other stop gaps happened for those that like to PvP/Fish/Tmap/Tame "too much"?
Maybe they need to nerf the golem drop amount and bs guild crap.. i kind of agree I have never seen anyone mine in the month I've been playing and someone laughed at me when I made mention of making a miner. It also could be the fact that everyone and their dog wears black barbed leather.. anything above that seems useless even with the recent fix of ring and chainmail.. still can't med so invulnerable or barbed leather ftw. Best gear jn game obtained off yew vendor with the noob gold pile 2 mins after install.
Nobody want's to hear this argument here, trust me, I've tried many many times. It always ends up with how bad the recall miners are for the economy and how stupidly rich they get for doing practically nothing. Practically weeks of creating, editing, and refining macros that is.. I can't find anyone willing to sell colored ingots now. Anyone that mines uses their own colored ingots or already has someone they consistently sell to. I haven't seen colored ingots on a vendor in about a year now. I don't think the current state of mining is where it should be.
I have been getting a fair amount of ingots by purchasing them from other players. I respond quickly if they offer in IRC and I bump my forum buy thread whenever I'm in the mood. It has panned out quite well thus far.
I think you're the consistent buyer cynic is referring to. So basically if I sit and watch the troll spam that is irc I may eventually see someone sell in g colored ores. Hmm.. k
Or you could stop lurking and ding ding ding, make your own post. I'm sure the people who don't like me would love another customer for their ingots. Also, I know this isn't an Econ 101 class, but if you offer MORE than I do for ingots...you're likely to get them before I do. As for consistency, I only start playing with BoDs once every few weeks or so (you can tell by how often I bump my ingot buying thread).
My opinion is the entire process of nerfing miners and recall miners - every single thing done except preventing 6 shovel power-mining, was heavy-handed and killed the two powerful nostalgia(s) of mining and, later, recall mining. Mining may seem clunky because it was intentionally designed that way. Also agree that the "trash" ore should be dropping at the end of the vein or on fails. This server does a ton of stuff well or even perfect, but the mining "fixes" remind me of Bruce Jenner's face. Chris is not interested in hearing any more on the issue, though. You'd have to start an Occupy movement to get him to roll things back. His server, though, take the good with the very little bad there is I guess. Enjoy me my golem lord statuette, though.
Ore Re-Spawn is the correct 40-50 minutes as witnessed in the UODemo (Mid 1998 UO Code). This was also confirmed by various additional research into the T2A/UOR era. As for the ore piles, and I will need to double check on this. But ore was serialized as a single item. That single item has a certain chance to be a full pile, one of the two middle piles, or a partial piece. Based on my previous testing in the UO Demo I was able to generate similar results while mining. By default RunUO's harvesting system is very trammelized. From double resources in felucca to no penalty for failing to mine a vein, to being able to mine at light speed. Even in their own code they have a system to correctly implement some of these features but if you look close enough none of them work. I believe this can result in a wide array of expectations when harvesting that never existed during OSI. That said we are always willing to do more research on the subject. I will mention that during OSI I was an avid miner and even owned a town house behind Lord Brit's castle which I used as a miners workshop for many years. Given my lack of time on other free shards my memory of OSI mining from 1998 to 2000 is quite good. Ore Re-Spawn is the correct 40-50 minutes as witnessed in the UODemo (Mid 1998 UO Code). The main thing we addressed in the last 6 months was the tool delays that were allowing people to mine 3 times in 2 seconds. This was clearly incorrect and was adjusted to the correct delay of around 1.25 seconds per harvesting attempt. Once this was addressed most of the other fixes for recall mining were disabled. However we do have a cool down period when trying to recall min in a town region, to ensure that recall miners choose spots out of town. There are quite a few miners, however the method in which you can mine varies. Some players create combat miners and hunt ore golems, and some players grab one of our stronger packhorses (that can hold double weight) and mine traditionally. As for leather armor this was addressed in a recent patch to conform material and magical bonuses to a more applicable system for the Renaissance Era (Publish 1). Any new player attempting to sell ingots will find a buyer immediately and usually at a premium. Most of the changes made to this point have been to simply restore mining to something similar to what was experienced on OSI. From ore respawn, to tool delays, to the success/fail logic when mining an ore vein. We have worked to get these systems as close to what players experienced in 1999 as possible. Now for the custom changes we have made to mining outside OSI norms. Players must attend mining actions, and recall or travel mining must be monitored more closely Players must wait to gather in a town region if they arrived at that spot by gate or recall. Players cannot recall inside 15 or so caves around the world. Players may hunt ore golems, or use gargoyles shovels to summon them for battle as an alternative to classic mining. Players cannot use system messages to determine when there is no metal left to mine. It's possibly some of the misconceptions about mining come from reading the forums vs attempting certain tasks ingame. As those 6 players you mentioned have been very vocal about how "We destroyed their gameplay experience". At the time 6 players had 30-40% of the ingots on a server. This was clearly an issue and was due to several aspects. The high speed tool use issue, using system messages to determine when there was no metal left, mining in relative safety in town and using a complex system of razor macros to afk fill and flip BOD's on a grand scale.
I would still personally like to see the normal mines we all know and love return to something without persistent spawn. Let the battle miners summon their monsters with their magic tools. But let us simple folk take a walk to a mine and do our work. As you said, you were a miner and as I'm sure you're aware then, we all suffered some from monsters but nothing quite like this. The occasional troll in the wilderness or other regular wilderness spawn is feasibly avoided or lured off by a quick footed miner of old. These golems that are constantly there simply prevent any traditional mining of such a nature without hired help.
It's not about facts or data for me. It's about perfecting these things, and by perfecting, I mean giving the most players possible the best experience possible. I remember how mining was in 1999; I know what it is now and what it should be to bring back that good old nostagia, to lend the feeling you are frantically working to empty a vein. *click * wait *click* wait is not the way it was and it's not the way it should be. Veins only shat the trash ore at the end of the vein. No research needs to be done. Doing it the above way, the way many players have been asking, would make a lot of people happy and make no one unhappy. Taking away the "no ore" system message handler I also think is heavy handed. In the words of David Bowie, "let them boogie". If they want to recall mine, so long as they aren't exploiting with six shovels or something else, laissez-faire! Somebody has to be at the top: let it be the crazies that do the work I say. Let there be BOD moguls, vendor moguls, rare moguls, and even mining moguls, if they are smart enough to learn the systems and do the work. Also what Blaise said. I can't go back and forth on this anymore, though. Everything said has already been said, and the counter-points have all been laid out too. I moved on when trolls were introduced and found other aspects of the game that I do, in fact, enjoy very much and think are well designed. We bitch, but we bitch with grateful hearts.
I never used that shovel trick, I didn't know about it until it was fixed, and still really don't even know how to do it. I did, however, town mine. Although the risk of mining out of town was limited to Pork Fried PKing my miner, I preferred in town for simplicity in marking veins. Mining has turned into cotton picking.. Lucrative for the new player, silly for a veteran to even waste time with. Mining was traditionally a mule/crafter skill and this found mainly on blacksmiths, tinkers, etc.. My smiths aren't battle smiths, they are mules with a little magery to get around. Having to drop tailoring/blacksmithing/fishing so that I can battle mine is a hardship.. I never caved miner, I never exploit mined, I never flipped smith bods. I was the simplest of recall miners, I mined and sold ingots. I mined town spots and remote mountainsides. I went out mining to mark a few valorite spots recently and I was shocked at how different it was. I was shocked on how long it took me to mine 1 vein dry. There's a reason why you can hardly find colored ingots anymore. Rarely will people sell them. I should be able to go to yew and find vendors stocked with ingots of all colors... nah, instead I find reg vendors galore because that's an aspect of the game that has yet to be controlled, even though it's the similar concept of printing money afk. Again, another dead horse I'm beating here. Some people may argue that you can't place an afk check on a "gold sink" but I say you can and you should. I'm making money while taking someone elses money, all afk. Mining is a gold sink too if you think of it. Regs and shovels are consumed.
I guess this is something that has been hashed out over and over again and nothing has changed. That's a shame. Though I mained a miner/blacksmith on OSI from pre-t2a through all of t2a, as well. If I wasn't at the forge doing repairs/orders I was usually at the mines in Minoc. As I originally posted I know for a fact the medium/small ore is FAR more abundant than it ever was on OSI pre UOR. While I appreciate that you mained a miner during the same timeframe it is awkward that everyone else has a different memory of this. The rest of the things I posted were things that just felt "off". I'm not sure how recalling a battle miner throughout mining caves (a great way to mine here) is a better solution than Era Accurate classic mining. Regardless, thank you for being willing to look into this, for a person who once again wishes to revisit maining a miner/crafter.
I would like to point out that my Golem buddy is quite dumb and can be lured away from his mine quite easily. I have noticed that he has had some recent combat training and hits a lot harder than he did when I started here. But it would make me feel sad if he disappears forevers. @Blaise - if you want any more of the ore I occasionally sell you stop this campaign of discrimination against my Golem friends!
It wasn't people mining too much and folks really need to get that concept out of their heads. It was people playing too many Razor macros while watching Netflix, too much. If people were actually mining, I daresay we'd probably not even ever have seen an AFK gump system. Let alone all this other crap designed to mitigate people who are quite literally just pumping resources in the game world without any effort at all, beyond the building of a macro. That's great and I enjoy it as well, to an extent, but it's just not playing Ultima. Sorry.
