My thoughts on the new mining changes

Agreed.
I will say, my battle miner build is well enough along now to go out with a buddy and do some mining. Last night, Les and I ran a pair of battle miners, not fully trained, one with 0 Resist, but we had a ton of fun doing it. Not only did we cop a bunch of ore from the ground and tons of ore elementals we spawned using some of the 10,000+ gargoyle picks on the shard, we got a fair amount of gold and decent high end gear from the high end ore elementals.

Yes, auto-mining is significantly restricted at this point but it is promoting actual activity in the game and that is something I can get behind.


Also, from what I understand, a bug in the troll-spawn logic has been identified and will be remedied in the near future. Something about spawning on folks who didn't really meet the magery/mining use requirements.

You had me at "battle miners".

Well, I can tell you that my father absolutely hates these changes. He has magery so that he can recall to the various colors of ore. He's not a big PvM'er nor is he quick on the keyboard. You've essentially ruined 1/3 rd of the game that he enjoys with these changes. Not that you actually care.

For the record, the "Recall Miners" are now just "Gate Miners" and nothing has changed....except that people, like my father, had an aspect of the game that they enjoyed ruined.

Strike 1.

I would be interested to know who has experienced positive changes from this? Has the economy drastically changed? How can we even know if we didn't fix the item timer first then add this later?

I'm experiencing positive change because instead of sitting inside flipping bods and clicking AFK gumps, I'm out there with a buddy laying the smack down on elementals and trolls and reaping the rewards. They are not hard to escape if you have proper loops in your macros and there are plenty of OTHER places to mine if you spawn one or two up.

I beg to differ. I spent about 4 hours yesterday mining by hand. I spawned 2 trolls within 10 mins. The 2nd spawn meleed my miner for 30 then back to back mindblast. My miner doesn't wear armor and doesn't have balanced stats... so am I being forced to build a god damn pvp miner now?

The changes are overkill. I don't see anyone particularly benefiting from this.. The ore ele's were there before the change for anyone that wanted to do "battle mining"

As one of the "despicable" people that sells their recall ingots, this puts a big dent in my pocketbook. But I think you're exaggerating quite a bit.

• All the old recall miners are definitely not gate miners now. I'm not, and none of the recall miners I converse with are doing that.
• If gate mining was everywhere, what's stopping your dad from being a gate miner too?
• I've got about a 5% mortality rate on trolls I dig up, thus far. This is as a naked miner with no wrestling or resist while playing another account. I find it hard to believe that this change has absolutely shut down his style of play. If it is really giving him that much of a problem, I'd bet adding Wrestling and a suit of store-bought leather armor would go a long way towards helping him out. Resist would help even more (there's a free session in 2 weeks).
• I'd bet Telamon & Co. actually do care quite a bit what the community thinks of this change. If they didn't care about the players, I don't know why they would bother putting all the time, effort, and resources into keeping the shard moving.

http://www.uorenaissance.com/?page=m_player&id=179212
I have to carry a bit more weight for proper heal/cure/reflect reagents, and I wear leather armor for the med factor. However, with the proper resources, it works quite well.

There's nothing stopping you from updating your macro to have two miners (or three) all recall within a single tile of each other and incorporate a crossheal check/step in the macros. These macros are complicated and if you wanna get right down to it, you could very easily counter this inconvenience with the same intuition you used to operate previously.

Now with boss mobs.

I've gotten a plat and a +25 vanq from cave trolls today...+ about 8k dull copper ingots. The difference was that I was actually ENGAGED with the client, in lieu of being mildly attentive to it.


Oh yeah, in related news, I banged out a 20 piece exceptional large plate bod set today in 7121 ingots.

Thanks Chris I have to admit I was shocked today when I was walking up the farmlands of brit and popped a troll

• As far as you, particularly, not doing the gate mining. That is either your choice, or you haven't figured out the workaround yet.
• My dad wasn't one of these "Recall Miners". He did it by hand. He simply had magery to get him to his spots.
• The point was, Miners have been a peaceful crafter since 1997. How many of you had a miner/smith/tink/carp/etc...? He has no real interest in fighting things on his miner. When he first started playing here, I even tried to get him to make a warrior/miner for the sandstone ingots and such. He simply has no interest in playing a miner like that, but now he is FORCED to. FORCED to do something that NEVER was in UO since 1997. He did not wish to do it before these changes and he certainly does not wish to now that he is FORCED to.
• I do think they care, however, I think they're solely focused on a handful of people that abuse such things.

In the end, I will never support a change that makes my father not enjoy playing this game as this is one of the ways we hang out. It is not more complicated than that. Furthermore, I will not support a change that only hurts the people not abusing it as the others just find another way. Adding on to that, I cannot support a change that effectively punishes new players who, like 99% of new miners, started their miner with Magery so that they could get around.

I think this is a bad change, and I do not see the Staff changing their mind on it.

I want to highlight this part because I agree with you here.

I think staff is focused on recall miners as a whole but they are throwing all of us in the same ring as those who exploited the mechanic and produced an uber amount of ore/ingots. (I know my picture got thrown into this thread too but if you knew how long it took to get that much ore you'd laugh at me. Considering I run 3x miners at a time when I go mining. I could probably mine that faster by hand.)

I don't think this absolutely kills recall mining but it does put a damper on it, especially to those who run 3x miners. My argument still stands though, there are other aspects in this game which can be done with 3 automated clients but for some reason only mining was addressed.

This gets my vote. I had hoped the anti-AFK system would have been enough to deter folks.

As in all things in life, it only takes a few bad apples to ruin things for the rest of us following the rules...

Personal Experience:

I ran two miners during my smith building days. I now run one miner to keep up with bod needs. During my entire experience doing this I have only misclicked the gump once and the reaction time was so miniscule that Chris was able to strike the charge because it was clearly a misfired synapse and not unattendedness.

Bring on the bannings! I have no intention of running miners improperly.

Conceptually, my understanding of playing AFK is that it is fully and 100% legal here. With the understanding that it also carries the prescribed penalties for missing the AFK gumps. That's why I was surprised to see this additional penalty being added against mining macros. I would have assumed any desired tinkering with the desire to curb AFK resource gathering would have been done through the existing gump.

For myself, I thought the AFK gump penalties were too lax when I first got here - I thought they should have been much longer. Since then, I've failed I think 7 gumps, of which I was present and actively playing at my computer for 6 of them. (The 7th, I forgot about a lumberjack standing at one single tree for about 20 minutes, and he got nailed while I was AFK). So given the amount of false positives, I think the ban times are pretty reasonable.

I should add, the text that people include in their macros is probably not to try to convince others they are AFK (I have no idea why anyone would want to do that). There is a LJ macro on the forum that uses "NEXT TREE", which is the macro I used for GMing lumberjacking. That text in fact is there to alert you that you need to manually move to the next tree, so it is really intended to be for attended playing. I also use similar macros like "Spot 15" speech in my macros, but it is for troubleshooting. And in fact, I use guild chat for it, so no one else can see it but I can see it across my characters. So hopefully the speech people are using is not nefariously intentioned. (I should add, you can also make your characters say these things via "whisper", which only makes the speech available to yourself and players directly next to you).

You could say this about most things though. I would bet 40% of the monster statuettes are owned by only 10 IP addresses. 40% of the prepatch sandals are owned by the just 10 IP addresses. 40% of AMIBs are owned by 10 IP addresses. Heck, I bet you could say it about platinum as well.

I don't think this metric is indicative that there is a problem. Unfortunately I think that the term "problem" differs from person to person. Most of us agree that fully-AFK mining is a problem. But there is not universal agreement about semi-AFK (gumped) mining. Or mining with trolls. Or fully-AFK vendor buying. If the term "problem" is related to fairness, then that is an even bigger can of worms. For example, it is unfair to me that some players can semi-AFK mine for 10 hours a day (I can for 0). And it is unfair to them that I can very actively play UOR for 10 hours a week or so. Many players here have nowhere near that opportunity.

So as long as the notion of "problem" is one of a judgment/opinion, and Chris' opinion is the only one that matters here... the best thing to do is just continue being as up front as possible about perceived problems and the changes being made to address them. I think a lot of the bad feelings from this launch came from the fact that it seemed out of nowhere to many of us.

Not against longer jail times whatsoever.

I think people are okay taking risks because the jail time is so short. If you know your account is going to be knocked out for a week or two though, and your ill-gotten booty taken away, you may do things differently.

You added AFK checks for these areas, except housing which you also added a delay. However, mining is the only one where you added a delay AND these new trolls which force us to have to PvM as well as gather. Add some trolls to rare spawns or BoDs and watch how fast the sky falls.

You make it sound so simple. Not everyone has what it takes to build a recall miner, the macro building process takes hours, days even. Most would dismiss this venture based on the time it takes to create. I know I dismissed this from day 1 because it would take too much time to put together, it took me almost a year to get my operation running.. and it's amateur at best.