My thoughts on the new mining changes

Someone is well within their right to defend their play style on this server. I and it look like Cynic as well, get upset when people accuse us of exploiting things that other people do every day.. but that's their playstyle and it isn't being infringed upon.

I think a lot of my reaction is less about this actual patch and more towards people crapping on me because I disagree with the patch. Just because you don't wanna work as hard as someone with 1m ingots doesn't mean they shouldn't be able to spend hours writing code, testing, marking books and running their miners. I am certainly not against the usage timer fix or afk gumps.. I also think the usage timer should be fixed for potions as well (if it hasn't been already)

Next time I see you macroing Provocation to 100, I will remind you to get out there and nonstop fail on Ogre Lords until you GM. "play the game!"

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I'll wait for video of you FILLING and flipping BoDs (which does get AFK Gumped) to believe that. The reason it won't get changed is that it can't be done without regular action on the keyboard.

I ran it to compete with Apoc and drive his prices down to a reasonable level. The macro is exactly as described in my guide thread. I could even add to it a method of vendor stocking that makes it significantly easier. All of which still required work and activity at the keys. For what it's worth, the end result is that it is NOT really that profitable. Unless you're charging over 1g mark-up, it's hardly worth the time and more of a community service.

The sheer fact that there are not actually a bunch of miners out there PLAYING UO is exactly what is wrong with the economy and 3x automining as a whole is the source. This is a detriment to the little guy who's ingots aren't really in great demand because everyone knows to wait for the auto-miners to fill up so they can buy in bulk.

Have you tried the Lost Lands? Personally if I'm looking for more than a handful of reagents I'm just going to buy in bulk anyway. Have you not noticed the 50/each reagent bags available on various vendors as well? Seems that despite the occasional buy-out battle, everything you require is still readily available and affordable. Also, it hinges on actually working the vendors up to higher inventory levels, which in the end is a benefit to everyone.



Paradigm, while I appreciate and understand the wonder and pride that comes with watching and reaping the rewards of a good mining macro, I just do not feel that it is really playing the game. I do it myself and perhaps not to the extent of some, but I do not consider it a play style. It is something you're doing with the game to benefit characters you actually play the game with. You are not playing the game when you click the Play button in Razor, you are letting Razor play for you. This is my opinion and however I may automate a great many things, every bit of it is known to me as a detraction from the real beauty of Ultima. I try to fight the urges (hence my Naturalist character) but honestly it's just too easy to get sucked into. Hang up one of those pickaxes and get out there and play the game.

It can be done no problem. You think I can mine from my shitter but can't hit razor to make a few hundred shirts? I mined from my iPad plenty of times and having to adjust my macro to play from the next spot if it ever got hung up or I got PK'd. It's called remote desktop, it's not rocket science. I can still mine, and recall away from the trolls.. all from the iPad. All from the shitter if I please.

I don't remember you running a vendor against Apoc. My issue isn't people running reg vendors. I'm comparing recall reg buying to recall mining. It may not compute to the same profit at the end of the day... but you can do one completely unattended, all day long, with 0 risk. Mining already required you to be at your keyboard, required you to watch, react. There was risk, albeit minimal, still some risk.

What miners aren't out there playing UO? Are you suggesting that people are mining, hording gold, then going to sleep? The average recall miner does it to supplement their BOD gameplay or their income. You think I recall mine then, what, stare at my gold in game? I use that gold almost as fast as I make it by buying plat, resources like regs, houses, etc.. I recall mine where there is nothing better else to do, and currently that's where it's at for me.

The little guy always get's bought out too, let's be serious here. The guy posting 10k ingots on the forums gets bought out within hours. Whether you have 60k ingots to sell or 5k ingots to sell there is always someone willing to buy. It's just like plat, that 1 coin for 6k will sell just as fast as the guy who sells 300 for 6k.

Have you fought one of these trolls yet? 5 ev's to take 1 down... These are mules, not bards with mining. Even coming in with a 3rd account is silly, I have to take the time to kill this thing so that the next loop around to that vein it doesn't eat my miner again. You want to spawn something, fine, make it a regular troll.

I guarantee you what's going to happen is a serious dip in the availability of ingots or a serious spike in price. Start buying iron from vendors and miners will go away outside of gargoyle pickaxe mining and colored ingots will be worth a ton.

Either that or every miner is going to be mining in guard zone.

Talk to Treasureman about the risks of macroshopping. It cost him plenty, so tell me again about 0 risk. You cannot fill bods from your iPad like you can mine from your iPad. There is far too much interaction going on with actually filling smithbods (even if they are %100 success rate items) to do it through a remote desktop on an iPad would make a person want to punch babies.


I'm suggesting that I don't see dudes out there playing the game as miners nearly as much as I did prior to the prevalence of macro mining here. I think even Ganyon GMed it by hand in two days. The little guys all feel like they need to have mining macros to compete on the market with the folks who have three running in their CY.

I will wait for the outcome of your guarantee and continue to mine as I need and buy what I can.


Also, many people are failing to consider the bulk of ore you can get from using gargoyle picks as well. There are OVER 10000 of them on the shard at this time.

Mined tonight for a couple hours and got my first troll. It killed my miner within seconds and I was paying close attention.

Overkill.

These are miners, not bards. Took 7 blade spirits and mindblasting until 0 mana. 600ish gold and trash loot. I would equate them to AOL's with magery. I'm mining, not hunting.

If you want miners to fight something to prevent full on recall mining then make it a regular troll, these new guys are madness.

BTW it cost Treasureman plenty because Matron griefed the hell out of him, now that she's gone he's back to macroshopping in peace. For the record I do have to interact through my remote desktop when something aggros my miner, my macro breaks, my shovels run out, I get PK'd, or I have to stop for whatever reason then restart. These are all micro actions in game that require me to have to use special gestures on my iPad to accomplish. Whether I'm filling bods from the peace of my home or mining, they are both complex from remote desktop.

Your argument of "the little guys" can also apply to everyone needing 3+ blacksmiths to compete in the smithing bod market. Or 3+ tailors. If people want to sit down and create/edit/refine large scale macros for mining or for whatever then so be it. It takes a long time to make these macros, maybe some people find it easy, I'm not one of them. It took me days to write these macros and I copied half of them. I put in a lot of time and effort so I could go down a path in this game that was accepted at one point, now all of a sudden it's changed, without notice. If someone would have told me a month ago to not even worry about making the recall miners because of the upcoming nerf then I would have ventured down another path perhaps.

It is most certainly not easy to make these macros.. Even the guide on it is above most people's heads. I would argue that most people hating couldn't set this up if they wanted it to.

Blaise and I are bro's but we respectfully disagree here. I enjoy scripting and programming, this is a game for nerds after all! I feel it is wrong to criticize anyone's playstyle. I didn't cry when cA got me, or when I see Jupiter/URK's creating their own adventures.

Cynic has an epic point. You all abuse razor in your own way and you have all bought out recall miners ingots. For the average person, buying 60k ingots from vendors might not be that big of a deal when they want to GM Tinkering. It was just more convenient to buy from Red Rover.

I have faith in the plans Chris has for the server. If we get everyone on a level playing field then things CAN change. I hope for a day when I can enjoy BS bods with out having to grind 100 per 5 'good ones'. Last night I turned in 30x 20 ex cloth bods and got two spined mask bods, the highest possible reward!! Perhaps the real answer here is that the top end of Tailoring is too easy and should be nerfed.. as well as Trolls spawning when cotton is picked.

If the BS drop %s and reward matrix change then the need for 1m iron ingots will cease to exist and the Troll issue won't seem as such a big deal.

All of this does tug on my heart strings a bit.. Looking at the post Lethius made in another thread. A new player planning on fighting the trolls.

Ore is slightly heavy.. and I don't know about you but I don't really want to run around with 10 of each pot, bandages, a studded barbed suit, vanq war hammer.... and picks, shovels, and ore.

This whole thing kinda sheds light on the PVM problem that is just inherent in UO. Dexxers just have a tough time hanging against a monster that can combo heal, etc. Right now it takes around 5 EVs to kill a cave troll. I brought out my Peacer and not only did I fail 5x with gm/gm/gm instrument, but it took forever to kill this thing. I don't know about forest/mountain but melee against a cave troll is not really an option unless you like running away, healing, then coming back.. and when there isn't one, carrying around 150 stones of crap you don't need.

Time to rething your battle miners, boys..

Just sharing my experience so far:

I've spawned probably ~10 trolls so far, and they seem to pop up about 1 per hour of mining. I died to the first one (partly due to slower response time and partly due to getting poisoned and not having garlic for a cure, lols...), but have successfully ran from the rest. They don't seem too hard to escape, as my miner has no resist and no weapon skills, but if you don't react within ~5 seconds, you're toast. I brought in my tamer to kill them at first, but they are super beefy and take awhile to kill even with 2 dragons and a mare. I've decided the best course of action is just to lure them away from the cave/mountain, hide, and then recall back to the bank to resume. If I can stack up enough of them in an area, I'll bring my tamer by later to clean them up.




My miner(s) generally run while I play my main account. My gaming playstyle is that of an optimizer. If I see a way to make a little revenue on the side with an otherwise idle account while I play my main account, I'm doing it. It's basically akin to leaving accounts logged in overnight to make welfare platinum, which I'm sure the majority of players do. Maximize your time.

For those interested in fleeing:

If hits <= 99
Cast Reactive Armor
Cast Recall



On top of the 3 cave trolls I disturbed, I found a couple Cave Trolls that some other miner(s) left behind this morning.

Proper cave troll etiquette, according to 'Don't be trollolling my caves' Chapter 6, page 238, dictates that if you disturb a troll, you must clean it up yourself. However, since we're all new to this, I don't mind taking care of them for you.

Hi guys, thanks for the discussion. This is kind of relevant to me because I'm thinking about breaking into smith bods and just a week ago I started trying to recall mine.

I only have one miner, I use him attended, and I did not see any guides or scripts or have any inside information in making the macros. For that reason I was not effected by the 1 second delay change that from my understanding hurt some of the super miners. I could write some more macros and expand this to three miners, maybe I will, but haven't really decided yet.

I missed an AFK gump one day because I zoned out watching a TV show. There was noone to blame but myself, and I had no problem with that. That said AFK gumps are few and far between. Hours go by between them.

I've probably mined up the 50-60k iron ingots range. Haven't really taken inventory of it yet, but also gone through a decent amount of recall regs.

I continued right on mining once the patch hit and did not have to make any adjustments. I've been waiting for the right moment to weigh in and now I think I see where I can contribute.

I want to keep this as constructive as possible and just say that my experience has been different with cave trolls. This is the cave troll page and I've killed 18 trolls now according to it.. I spawned them while recall mining and jumped on an alt to kill them.

I lost my miner to them maybe 1/3 of the time, as his death history claims 6 monster deaths. My miner has no defensive capabilities other than 100 strength. He's not wearing armor. The times he died it was fully because I was not looking at the screen enough to run away. A couple of EV's kill them fine. They have high hit points but are slow and can't seem to dispel. Pets kill them fine without even healing. Out of 18 trolls I've pulled 8 peculiar meat. I don't really care about the meat but maybe someone will buy it from me eventually.

I can definitely see how this would be annoying to someone that wants to answer the AFK gumps via phone. Or perhaps someone running 3 miners and has to juggle characters in order to kill them. I did not feel like the sky was falling per se, and found the cave trolls to be pretty infrequent. Maybe once an hour or so. I would probably advise not casting mindblasts on mobs ever. It never does more than 40 and doesn't seem to receive the double damage to mobs that other spells do (or perhaps it does, but it will never exceed 40 anyways). Also people often say you don't need eval to mindblast, but you do if the target has resist.

I don't understand even remotely why mutombo reacted the way he did, it almost feels like there are a lot of players blaming mechanics or changes for a lot of their unrelated frustrations.

I can't speak on smith BOD's and ingots needed etc. But I will say that I can't see how iron ingot supply to the community is cut off in any way. Ingot prices were already right around vendor price, so there's really no way for that to change much.

I also thought up work-a-rounds for cave trolls pretty much immediately- but I think 3 account macro mining and circumventing AFK gumps (or skirting them with your phone or whatever) kind of trivializes traditional miners. Even the one miner recalling I've been doing feels the same way. So I don't really want to help people get back to doing that. But there are some pretty common sense answers to cave trolls.

Yea, I've got a few myself

You guys are blowing me away!
[second link to cavetroll page]
http://www.uorenaissance.com/info/?page=g_info_t5&id=1371

I am winning with 16 kills! All from my miner and his EVs! I have probably run from 1-2 more. It is INSANE to me that you guys are getting 1 per hour. I have 16 kills from 3 hrs of mining after work this week. Last night, I literally got 2 immediately back to back at my first stop!

I look forward to BOD trading with you in the future, Mes!

There is doing things purposefully to prevent players, such as myself, from babysitting afk gumps from mobile devices. Then there is doing things that require players that are right at their keyboards to have to immerse themselves into mining.

I think this could have been solved with spawning a regular troll, not a beefed up troll that can end your miner in as quick as it takes for you to hit your recall macro.

There's going to be a select few people who are going to think of a workaround for this, how to avoid the trolls.. or maybe, like me, just leave them there and recall away. Caves are going to be full of these guys, mountain passes, etc..

Mindblast works wonders on them, does 40 dmg. Same dmg as EB with half the mana cost. Again, miners, not bards.. not mages... not warriors.. not tamers... miners, with mining.

But now I have to carry full reg bags on my miners which is silly.

I would never go as far as Mutombo did, not even close to it, but this change is something I'm willing to argue about.

I guess I could just remark all my books to guard zones and be done with this argument but I'm sure that'll get nerfed almost as soon as I do it.

Wow are you running 3 miners at the same time? I am only running one so that could be a factor.

Honestly I think recall mining was exploitative the way it was, and I think those defending it are those who benefited from it, not those who are objective. I may start trying it (thought not as complicated of macro's as you guys use) because if you guys are spawning the boss's at that rate, that's a good shot at a statuette.

Okay, well, Cynic, I'm sure that this thread serves as a place for Telamon to receive feedback and maybe he will take your suggestion into consideration? Again I haven't had any real frustrations with my miner dying but I'm actually at the keyboard and I run away from the trolls and have only died when I wasn't paying attention. It has slowed me down since I have to stop and kill the troll, but as I said before I don't believe I see more than 1 troll per hour so this hasn't been a big hassle. But perhaps a normal troll would be fine too. I imagine what he wants is to not have people's miners kill the troll via the same macro.

The trolls do seem to me to be heavy-handed. As said above, this is basically a 5-10 second AFK gump. Spawning a regular troll would be a 30-60 second AFK gump.

If you want to make the mining gump be 5-10 seconds, just make it 5-10 seconds.

If you want to give players more content that they desire, make these things spawn from gargoyle pickaxes. Or make a Carp BOD reward something that spawns them.

It just seems like a circuitous route towards an unclear goal.

If the afk gump was 5-10 seconds you guys would all be constantly jailed for 2 weeks at a time like tater and mutombo were. It seems like everyone is calling cave trolls a heavy handed nerf to recall miners but I feel like it is an attempt to discourage afk resource gathering without being heavy handed.

My point is, there is a system in place which discourages recall mining, and it's the gump/jail system. As far as I can tell, the intention of this aspect of the trolls is to reduce the amount of time in which someone can be AFK while mining. But, that could have been accomplished without adding the trolls, simply by reducing the amount of time available to respond to the gump.

Maybe I'm using the phrase "heavy handed" incorrectly. What if I said "passive-aggressive"? Because the simplest, most direct way for Chris to say "I don't want you AFK for more than 10 seconds while mining" would be to adjust the gump time. Keeping the 120 second gump time, but adding trolls under the guise of "more content", seems disingenuous.

All that said, obviously some people like these trolls for the PvM possibilities. So certainly it's a nice content addition. IMO, it would have been more transparent and honest to reduce the AFK gump time to the desired time limit, and add the trolls in a way that allowed interested PvMers to tackle them when they chose.