Patch 56: September 16th 2014 - Renaissance Achievements! CTF v2!

That's what I enjoyed about the scoring system. Sure my round 1 team got mopped up, but I led the team in kills and got a trophy anyway.

Nice patch. I also like the idea of chest ID, whether it's actually from ID or detect I would say is debatable. If ID makes it known to anyone after it is checked I'd have to lean toward detect to find what level the lock is. On the other hand, you would not need GM ID or DH to determine a lvl 5 chest unless there was a sufficient gap between failing to detect a lvl 4 and being unable to successfully detect a lvl 5 (I hope that makes sense). Basically IDing/detecting and failing or getting a message that says you don't have enough skill at say 95 skill would pretty much lock down what level it is right? Would you have to target the chest or could you target the area? To promote raising DH skill to GM, could you target an area and determine all chest lvls similar to IDing a bag of items? As far as whether it's trapped, I assume all are trapped, and even if I forget to step back or tele, they are more of a nuisance than a danger. Perhaps the damage from a trapped chest should be ramped up a bit? Thanks for all your time and effort.

CTF is a Team game and there should absolutely always be team selection. If you have CTF with no team selection, I can almost assure you, there will be many many fewer players there.

If by some miracle everyone playing got in voice chat and their respective team rooms, it wouldn't matter. The problem is the majority playing without headsets or voice or even listening to their teammates in the game with text. I and many others would likely never attend such a match. It was bad enough the way it used to be, can we please not ask for worse?


The ONLY way I could get behind "random" teams is if the system actually divided players by skill set to balance out the number of mages and warriors on a team. Otherwise, there is literally no point a all and you will only wind up with countless imbalanced matches and half the people being frustrated because their teammates suck (ie: don't know what they're doing AND don't listen to those who do).

Also, I feel that the Cap/Kill/Heal trophies should be 1p trophies and everyone on the winning team should just get a basic CTF Win, 1p trophy. This way the top performers still get 2p a piece but the whole winning team gets at least 1p each. I had a teammate last night who was a solid member, did serious work, made kills, made caps, tossed heals....came away empty. If he got a 1p trophy for at least winning the game, it would have been cooler.

Think of it like superbowl rings. Not everyone gets MVP, but the winners all get one (I think....I don't know much about fooseball).

The way to get new players, IMO, is to avoid setting up the game so they just all end up on one clueless team, getting stomped by a guild that's played together for a year with the headsets. And who doesn't want to face off against friends every once in a while? As I mentioned, this was a suggestion for *some of them*, but if even that's too much time being apart from one's homies, so be it.

Sounds like I'm still in the minority with this perspective, but felt it was worth mentioning.

I think there's room for it potentially but that's the nature of team games. If people are put on teams and no one takes the initiative to lead, the team will fail. If we do randoms, the teams that win will be the teams with 2-3 players in voice comms that are coordinated better than the others. It's super easy to get a mic, setup the voice comm programs and get coordinated. If you're not taking that step, it's always going to feel random and uncoordinated. You, as a player without a team, would have been more than welcome on my team and using shard vent or my mumble (we could have jumped host for the team). I don't care who's on my team as long as they're part of the team and communicating really.

Seriously? I disagree VEHEMENTLY with capitalized emphasis!

Did none of you play Halo in the days before mics? Or ANY online game before Mics? If anything we've learned from UO you can definitely start a synergistic co-op without words.

While it is true that mic's speeds up the 'introduction' process exceptionally, it's not the only way to do well at capture the flag. Adding mic's to a team that already has synergy is like a lethal dart tipped in poison. In this analogy, the team is the dart and the poison is the teams voice chat. Sure the poison helps finish the job faster, but it's not the voice chat that makes the team lethal, it's the team.

I agree with Dalavar here. As a new player into capture the flag, playing with a team of any seasoned folk would deter me from ever joining again. And I wouldn't want to 'complain' about it and have somebody join my team just to play with the 'new guy'. Having it randomized removes the social awkwardness of having somebody join your team.

It's more like you're tied to somebody as your escaping from a prison train. Sometimes you might get stuck with the skinny guy (Jupiter) and have to make do. Sometimes you might luck out and get stuck with two brawny guys (but both are dumb as a box of roxxors).


tl;dr I think randomized are what's going to make these best. If you are going to be sad that you didn't get to play CTF on your friend's team, then join factions with your friend and cap some friggin sigils!

While I appreciate the grass roots nature of your passion here, voice chat makes the team lethal. There is nothing you can possibly do in text or non-text format, in this game, to be as well coordinated as a team with voice communications.

No, I never played Halo without voice chat. My XBox came with a headset. If I'm playing on a team, I like building a team and I've never had a problem helping or encouraging the new guy or odd man out to become part of that team. Teams don't form by the grace of Telamon in UOR. We're going to have to get rumbled together until more bonds form. Those bonds shouldn't be forced apart in team games, they should be encouraged.

Agreeing with Dalavar. I have dabbled with ctf in the past. One of the reasons I stopped going is walking into a stacked team a lot of the time and getting a buzzsaw through the face. Not fun.

Blaise is coming at me with absolutes, There is nothing you can do in text or non-text format? You could practice outside of CTF

You could also identify, without words, most valuable players, and assist them.

Blaise, I could see your argument if we were looking at a UO:R CTF population equivalent to BattleField or Halo (millions of people). Lets be honest and look at the population of UO Freeshards. If you are facing up against thousands/millions of other teams, yeah I could see wanted to form a tight group to further excel in dealing death.

I guess in the end, I'm just terrimad because when I was 9 in JR. Jazz (basketball) my first year team of kids who had never played basketball before was pitted up against a team of kids who had played together for 4 years in a row.

To Blaises' argument, is the 4 year team at fault or separated after being a tight nit team? No.

To my point, should the administrators of the Jr. Jazz League done something to perhaps better match the 4 year team against the 1st year NEVER PLAYED BBALL BEFORE TEAM?

I could have been pro yo. Now I'm a UO Freeshard junkie...

^^^

The only absolute is my understanding of your perspective. However, your superlatives leave much to be desired. Yes, there is much a team without voice can do to coordinate, so "nothing" is a bad paraphrase or assumption. The point I'm trying to make is that the very best of that, will not compete with even an average voice-coordinated team.

The real beauty of it all is free use! You can get on a shitty team and die a bunch of times and what does it matter?
You took a risk, of time spent, to potentially find a good teammate and get some practice with your hotkeys and real live pvp. What did you do to try and bring that together for the cohesion needed to win a match? Did you encourage voice chat? Did you call out the name of the flag carrier so everyone knew who to target? Did you ask people to help you guard the team flag? There's a whole lot going on in there and it takes a lot to bring it together.

Sure I want everyone to have a good time but if dying a bunch while learning how to play a game and potentially form a team is foreign to you...I guess you just haven't gone into enough solo. Every time I fire up a game with online multiplayer (basically all I play now) I immediately get the best communications I can get and start trying to find people who want to party and work as a team. I know UO didn't come with voice, but voice is the core of true online multiplayer coordination. I didn't fire up my XBox knowing ANYONE online at the time. By the time the 7th Call of Duty with online MP was released, I could bank on 20 friendlies with solid comms, ready to go, on release night. That's the beauty of modernized MP to me and I think that's what has managed to keep UO alive this long.

So sure, if full random is what you're after, I'm not going to avoid them. I just don't think that's what team games are really about. You know there's CTF and if it gets on schedule you have plenty of lead time to coordinate with a team and plan your tactics, with or without voice communications.

So as to not detract from this patch that is full of AWESOME, I have created an OPEN debate thread.

Mind you I have no heated investment in CTF events, but I would like us to consider this rationally.

http://uorforum.com/threads/capture-the-flag-ctf-randomized-proteam-solution.6844/

Please see this new thread for discussion of Random Vs. Handpickd CTF teams.

Great patch, thank you for all that work (especially detect hidden and ID item new stuff).

Can I suggest getting me a better connection as part of patch 57?

One other suggestion regarding Capture the Flag. I was on the orange team of a 4-team game, and it was really disorienting. I am not sure why, but I think my cursor was highlighting enemy team players as orange, as if they were in a rival guild.

I'd suggest changing the orange team to be yellow, which shouldn't conflict with anyone's stock color scheme setup.

Yeah, I think having Orange as a team color is a tricky problem because of the default "Enemy Orange" hues. Absolutely a good point to be addressed.

Hi everybody,

I want to add a thing about Chest Levels and GMing lockpicking, which has been discussed in this thread: I can't quite understand what is so problematic about Chest levels and why no APPROPRIATE runebooks are available. In principle, everything necessary is already provided in Mutombos excellent guide to GM LPing (http://uorforum.com/threads/mutombos-rhodesian-lockping-guide.673/). About 90% of that stuff is still correct and I am already considering to add/update that guide in order to cover the changes made on this shard and some mistakes. Also everybody can update their rune libraries with that list of lvl4 chests (or I can provide my runebooks). But the bottom line is that there really is no need to do thousands of lvl 2/3 chests. With a little bit of effort and research everybody can be a dungeon crawler. And I don't think that additional Detect Hidden functionality is necessary. It makes things way to easy and decreases game fun as less effort is needed.

Best regards,
Sup aka RelicHunter ingame

It's not like there will be a number floating over the chests. Personally, I would be much more entertained being able to examine a container to determine the difficulty of it. Rune Libraries completely remove any "hunting" involved in dungeon chests anyway, as I can tell you for sure, I never left the 5-10 tile area around each mark when I was GMing it.

Allowing a function of Detect Hidden is a great way to apply actual skill use to clearly identify them and make a game of it. If/When Level Five chests hit, if that works, we'll be having a fun time of trying to find all of their locations. I dunno, I'm not going to lose sleep if it stays the way it is but I haven't picked a dungeon chest since I GM'd LP. Perhaps some adjustment would make that actually fun/interesting, instead of just a training regimen on your way to real fun (treasure maps).

You are right, now you only do it for GMing LP. Additional content in order to keep dungeon crawling interesting would be great. Though, right now, I can't see how the proposals for improved Detect Hidden fits in the mechanics, except that you find the lvl4 chests a little bit faster.

There are for sure many possibilities for changes like spawning chests in the whole dungeon and not only in some small areas. Or you have to find several pieces of a tattered map within lvl4 chests in order to find a lvl5 chest or something like that... But that is stuff for a different thread I guess.

I like that idea for the pieces of a map thing. I'd absolutely love spawning chests to spawn all over/random. I've also found that, at least documented historically, dungeon traps should be spawning/random but here they are static.