My thoughts on the new mining changes

I think it is unfair to use the 40% data with out considering the impact of changing the item delays. I don't grind like some of these guys did, and I never have used the item delay bug.

The story of Lightshade's dad saddens me. I can see this happening to fresh new players each time they come here, unless they stay in Occolo. Who would think not to include recall on their crafter?

I originally started recall mining because I enjoyed tailor bods and I looked at the top 3-4 BS bod guys on the server. Gideon, Blaise, Mut, whoever else. What would it take to be like those guys? Well, first things first, I needed three GM smiths. Under the patch at the time I probably spent 200-250k iron ingots to get there. I then started filling small bods for the hopes of getting larger, cooler rewards. I have still yet to fill anything above a colored Anvil and I have been aggro flipping since October!

I cannot physically mine 200k iron ingots. I can't even imagine farming 1.6m to buy them + the time running up the vendors, days of buying them out waiting on respawn.

If it had not been for attended script mining, I wouldn't be near where I am today. Sorry, I helped ruined this guys.
I get to play approx 10-20 hrs a week. I guess I should come to terms with the fact that I can't do certain parts of the game, but I chose to find a way!

Most have dismissed it. You can find those guys being the first ones to say that what we are doing isn't fair to them.

I agree that it was out of hand and perhaps too easy to amass the ingots that Mutombo did. It was a low risk venture and if you put ALOT of time into it, you could crank out tons of ingots... However if you had limited time or time that was broken up by interruptions, macro mining was a way to stay viable in a lot of endeavors. For me, It funded pixel purchases, resource buying, skill raising (smithing) and crafting needs to keep an active Vendor shop going.

I basically had 2 types of UO time available to me... Casual and Hard Core.... during casual, I would mine, gather resources, craft, raise skills. During Hard Core, I would hunt, do content.etc..

Now that my #1 casual activity (mining) is no longer viable, I have to decide if I want to devote some of my Hard Core time to mining. I CHOSE not to.

I do not agree with the changes, but I do see why something needed to be done. Time will tell how impactful they are to players and the economy. Neither of which are obvious within such a short time of the change. I am here for the long haul. While I may be playing less now, the time I do play is more "productive".

I can live with changes that impact my personal playstyle if they are good for the server as a whole. Things change... they always do... the trick is to remain calm until they change in the way you like

Chris and everyone..

What is your expectation from the BOD system? When do you want a Val hammer to hit the server? What effect does it have on the econ?

I think it might be best if we all understood what the staff and player expectations are here. I can make a special mask dye easy enough. I accept its level of difficulty.

Part of the need for recall mining is because I need so many ingots. I don't want to sell them, I want to turn them. The money from turning / bulk rewards everyone has, are hardly enough to profit after buying recall regs. Flipping Smith bods is like the equiv of hunting Ettins on your 7x tamer.

The only reason for me to recall mine is to flip enough crap bods to hit a set of phoenix armor. If recall mining is 'killed' (either truly or I am just inconvenienced out of doing it) and the bod drop rates don't change.. That is when I see a potential problem for my long term UOR enjoyment.

Buying BoDs from disgrunted former miner/smiths. PM for deets.

Selling BoDs at inflated rates to affirmed Forum/IRC "Outspoken Orators" PM for Deets

i do believe that there is a huge discrepancy between the difficulty of obtaining top-tier items from Tailoring and Smith BODs. however, i am not entirely convinced that the difficulty of Smith BODS should be lowered to match the current difficulty of TBODs. instead i would like to see TBOD rewards harder to obtain and SBOD rewards easier to obtain.


Top-tier TBOD rewards should be rarer

TBODs should have further rewards for extremely hard large BODs. this could be easily accomplished by creating a new set of rewards which only 6 part 20 ex horned and 6 part 10/15/20 ex barbed reward at 100%.




Top-tier SBOD rewards should be more achievable

easier, yet. increase the %age drop rates of colored SBODs across the board. blammo.

.

I never afk reg-purchased. If anything I attacked the people doing these types of things.

I still don't get it, maybe because my mining macro is like 6 lines and no magery (miner has magery but i dont recall mine, i walk along mountains doing relative location, repeat) but whats the big deal about recalling to the next spot if you spawn a troll and just avoiding that spot until someone takes it down?

If you have a recall mining macro you are likely getting a ton of ore already, whats one spot less for a few hours? 0.5% of your total ingot haul for the day?

Most of the previous complaints, aside from script mining are solved by the commitments from telamon.

From the beginning it has been stated that they will improve this for those like light shades father who doesn't have a recall mining macro. So really to rest your opinion on the argument that this is bad for the point and click miners needs to be suspended until the fixes are out. If, after the updates, the pack llama and point and click miners are still oppressed by the evil trolls I think this will be an issue.

For those who want to recall mine, I salute you for your desire and ability to write complex macros, and I also welcome you back to the danger that those of us who choose to leave the guard zone face on a daily basis regardless of our chosen occupation.

I do speak from experience about this as I have personally had a pleasant chess match interrupted by covetous liches and murderous pk's because I chose to hold the match in covetous.

For those who make a miner with 0 magery and start gate miners using an alt to gate your miner, please remain attentive while macroing.

Okay so it is a combination of mining and magery that triggers the spawn of a cave troll, correct? Do mountain trolls spawn from the same combination, just the non-cave version? How does one get forest trolls to spawn/where can they be found? Does the magery and mining have to be done by the same character? I would like to be able to intentionally spawn these by the mining house, it would be a fun addition to the elemental hunts the missus and I do. What is the best way to get these to spawn?

I made a miner the day after the patch was released, he started with 30 something real mining (vendor trained), which equated to around 45 shown. My magery has been 30 something real and 37 shown the entire time I mined. My experience with mining has been thus:

I spawned no (zero) trolls from my first use of my first shovel, until I reached 95 shown mining. I mined both in caves and along mountains.
Once I reached 95 shown mining I spawned two trolls within 15 minutes.
I have not mined yet today, but will give it a try soon.

Anyone can tell me what magery is required to have 100% success chance with a recall scroll?
Anyone can tell me if there is a way to lock mining so that it doesn't reach a specific skill level?
Is it possible that I just got freakishly lucky then freakishly unlucky?

On another note:

While I am new to UO, I am not new to MMOs, I just happened to chose a different game back in '98. My perspective on the mining issue and growth of the server is the following:

There will always be power gamers, it's inevitable. The difference with powergaming a crafter as opposed to a "hunter" is that only one can be done without actually playing the game.

I want to propose a question: do you have to be playing (read it as macroing) a game when you are not playing the game?

I'll give an example, if you want to play Who Framed Roger Rabbit on your NES (lol what?) you grab the game, play it, get bored and stop. Did anyone complain as a kid that there is no automated way of reaching the last town so you can just kill the boss? Back then you used to play a game to play it, and as far as I can tell, UO is a game, but I stand to be corrected.

Right now people are essentially threatening to quit playing on this server because of this change. If people start leaving and the server population goes down, less new players will be attracted to a dying low population server. No one wants that to happen. However I see this as more of a bluff than anything else, since the same people who complain about mining will leave three (or more) accounts online at all times anyways just to earn those free platinum coins.

So my advice to Chris is, don't worry, nothing will come of this whining, great job so far, but it needs to be improved.

Now, if you actually want to implement a solution to mass resource gathering, introduce fatigue. Gather X amount of Y in Z amount of time and you're too tired to keep going for Z (or Z*something) period of time.

Now time to stop writing and actually play the game.

Cheers

Check the Paws Rune Library for the natural spawning habitat of these diabolical creatures. See the book named "Perilous Prospects." The library is organized in complete contradiction to the Dewey Decimal system, so good luck.

My understanding is that these spawn like typical mini-bosses such as the Purveyor of Darkness, the Grand Visor, Beholder, etc. If you kill enough trolls in these natural habitat areas you can spawn one without mining.

The literal translation of my statement is not above, instead it is more like this:
I want a set of phoenix armor but only have 10 hrs a week to play. What is my best way to get this.

Maybe I was wrong in thinking that I should get/deserve a set of phoenix armor. I don't want to get rich.. who want's to be rich? Gold is the least valuable resource in the game! One of a kind property, plat, crafting resources that allow for rare rewards. These are the real gems.

I also do not want any inexperienced players to think that BS bods are a money tree. I am not convinced that rewards + gold = time taken to get ingots, fill/buy bods and 'luck' factor. You should stick to farming to get gold rich.

Please do not mistaken anything I have said here. I am not crying because I want to be rich. I am merely opening up the communication because I fear recent changes to hurt my chance at my REAL goals in playing UOR. Hitting high end bod rewards. I could careless about having 1m ingots or 1m gold.. I'd rather have a blessed kewl orange suit for my bard to wear when I am out running a champ spawn.

Please do not take any of this as disrespect. I honor what you guys do here and would never flame out or disrespect anyone here or their playstyle. Trolls or not, I don't see myself ever having enough time or luck to hit a phoenix set.

My over all goal would be to see everyone be able to make smiths and participate in the rewarding bod fun that I and a few other enjoy. I wan't to be able to trade my faction hammer bods with people for phoenix armor and the world to be peaceful. If I have to give up recall mining, only to see a drastic bod over haul that resulted in 100 more players on this server bod trading and making that .05 val seem not so bad? I would be overjoyed.

<3

If there is a forum award for most respectful dissent, I think Paradigm deserves it.

In fact, I'm going to award him with it right now!



This is in no ways a mockery of Paradigm. In watching this thread I have seen several invitations for him to complete flame out like others past, but he has stayed committed to defending his point of view respectfully and without reverting to debased comments or accusations.

This leaves me hoping

1) that the changes Tel makes to help the 'non-recall' miners will go off without a hitch
2) that the Ingot market doesn't become a 'black market' or 'who's your buddy' market in order to obtain the necessary amount of ingots required to explore the BS BoD aspects of this game.

Maybe this is better suited for a PM, but perhaps the advice applies to everyone. We discussed trading BODs a long time ago. You mentioned some small-to-mid set pieces you needed (brazier, hanging armor perhaps). And you flat-out refused to even tell me what you had of higher-end BODs that filled runic and phoenix sets, as you told me you wouldn't trade anything you didn't have duplicates of. This is not the route to attain your goals. You seem convinced that you will not fill many of these sets yourself, so why not put all of the assets you have towards one or two sets that you actually want?

There is virtually no barrier to entry for smiths joining the BOD game. No matter how difficult mining gets, iron ingots will hover around 8 - 8.5 gold each because they're in almost limitless supply from vendors at that price. And of course, you only need iron ingots to GM a smith and fill the majority of BODs to flip. The mining change here will make dull copper and shadow iron BODs harder to flip, sure. But there was already more of those BODs than ingots on the shard (even with the rampant strip mining). So I think the mining change will only slow down flipping and hammer/phoenix production by 10% or so. Which stinks, but it's not catastrophic.

My best advice is to be positive and encourage new players into the profession. Working on a finite number of sets, and not being afraid to make trades of singles to complete those sets, is a great way to make sure you enjoy the profession yourself. And from there it should be easy to share the feeling of accomplishment with others. As you correctly mention, the frequency of these rewards is directly dependent on the population size of smiths.

Dalavar_Swapmage!!!

(I would say I tried to resist the urge but we can all agree by now that I have no control over my impulses...)

/agreed

I was able to make a couple hundred thousand ingots with recall mining with only a few hours effort setting it all up, the whole time I was thinking "this is a joke - there's good reason other servers don't allow this, regardless if yer just using Razor". It was good while it lasted but it is certainly in the best interest of the server to throttle that down a little. I consider myself fortunate I got 3 GM smiths out of it while I could. When I run out of ingots, Ill go back to mining and simply rescue my miner when he gets in trouble or buy ingots from people starting out.

Glad to see this thread starting to die, pretty crazy to see people with fortresses and ethys and multiple GM smiths get so bent over this change. As if they had been specifically targeted while other things are rampantly destroying the server or something. It's almost comical the way people rationalize things to support their desire for the next uber pixel item.

Anyway, i'm casting my vote that this is good for the server in the long run and adds another interesting mob out there to tangle with.

p.s. - not a peep from Red Rover on this topic? He still alive?