I am a non-native english speaker too, so no worries both ways. And, thank you. My point exactly. Gold -doesn't-really-matter- when it comes to economy. It's all about offer and demand. As for the pking part, it all winds down to people wanting to kill people. I get that, but as I said before, please be honest to yourself and just say so. Don't sugarcoat it with a noble cause. But here all I see is some people holding on to their right to ruin your game some more, be it for "balance" or for "fun" or for "the betterment of the world". Just be frank, say what you feel. It's your right to play whatever you feel, just be honest. That is why balance is irrelevant. I urge you to take a step back and indulge me. Why balance? What is the cause it serves? If we are talking about balance in pvp, yes that is something. If we are talking about helping the economy, that's something else entirely. Balance in PvM? Sign me up. Make it harder to hit monsters or lower the power of tames. Hell in that aspect we are trammel-er than OSI. But, no! I want to be able to kill pets. That's why I get the feeling everyone in this post is just promoting his agenda. Let's start a new thread, on whether economy is stagnant or not, what the causes and what the solution. Another one, on PvP balancing for classes. And a third one for PvM balancing. In any of them I would accept any solution. Here we are just throwing stuff n the wall to see what sticks so that tamers can't be OP. To sum up, balance is irrelevant for economy and it should be addressed in PvP. I understand why people don't share my point of view. I came here at a time when there was no skill loss. I'll adapt or I'll leave and that's life, that's the way it always has been and will be. TL;DR Balancing is for PvP, PvM balancing is not relevant in this conversation. People can continue arguing to nerf tamers because apparently their main intent is to just kill them, which is ok. EDIT: Sorry, I seem to be missing some insight and detail on who-is-against-who in this server, plus I am a "trammie". Sorry for hijacking this thread, as skill loss and economy repercussions were obviously not the subject. Do whatever you please with the skill loss, I understand all stances on this.
Well, pigs can fly and hell has frozen over. I've been on the side that limitless bonding has been an unfair advantage to a specific skill set that shares a common goal with other skill sets that don't share that luxury. For example, blessed weapons and/or armor via a quest. It has preoccupied my forum input and I've found myself in a few back-and-forth arguments that when I step back and look at the whole thing... has lead to nowhere and accomplished nothing constructive. Well, fine. I'm going to put a majority of my characters on vacation. No more pk-ing. No more explody traps I'm making a tamer. I'm going full trammel. Blaze cloth, sandals, and a headdress. I'm going to out-fabulous you all!
It is not just about killing tamers. When there was no pet stat loss I was extremely frivolous with my pets in both PVM and PVP situations because it honestly didn't matter. I dabbled in triple boxing my 3 tamers because it was the perfect environment to dabble in since a full wipe would not result in 6 dragons and 3 mares taking skill loss. I would tackle bosses I normally would not solo. I iron-manned the zookeeper quest (and my pets died many times). I would set PK traps up with my pets and a naked tamer. All kinds of shit that the risk of stat loss may have made me reconsider. During harrowers that occured during this time period I didnt even pull pets bars to try and heal them, I would just all kill and forget about them. Let them do their damage and eventually die, I will still get plat and can rez them after. Ultimately having no skill loss on pets changes how people play their tamers, and the changes I am referring to make this game too easy and riskfree. I shouldn't be able to approach a harrower, the UO endgame boss, with zero trepidation about the risk that comes with it. I shouldn't be able to triple box bloods with zero trepidation about the risk that comes with it. and so on. On the shard I played on before here this is how I approached farming: The more dragons I brought the faster I could kill shit and make gold, BUT the more painful the loss would be if my dragon turret was disabled. This was something I would constantly have to consider, how much was I willing to put on the line for the farming session. One time a 50ish dragon turret got dismantled, that was painful, but awesome.
I'll be damned. You actually used the argument "skill loss will make 3boxing harder"? Honestly people, you either have no clue or do not care about the struggles that someone who is just starting has. We are trying to do it with dignity but your reasoning is utterly, totally irrelevant. I understand different people care about / do different things but I am not trying to impose my style of play to anyone. I expect the same thing in return. Anyway, I am resting my case, hope to see some ground covered in the topic. Good evening to you all.
This is such a great idea, just make it a more painful fir an immediate res, like 5-10%, but drop it to .1 after a period of time. Even 4 hours would be sufficient enough to satisfy me.
I started out with an axe selling boards. If you need some help, let me know. No, I don't live in a one room house in the middle of the swamp. I actually had a scenic spot near Destard a while back for my first shanty. I think you'll be okay. Remember an avalanche starts with a single snowflake.
I beg to differ. I made no comment about economics! There have been many posts made in the forums where I can easily point out a clear hero and villain. More recently, the Dungeon Guards have been a great example. Check out their guild forum! On the other side of the coin, I enjoy reading the escapades of the RRG. Yes, I have been killed by them. Man, who would Wyatt Earp be without the Clanton's?
Boom... I'm not saying that I am doing anything to save the server by PKing tamers. I just like PKing everyone and don't like the fact that a single tamer can drop a PK instantly with an all guard command while standing there AFK. In Curly Sue land, we pray for nerfed tamers, no bonding slots, (and with this stat loss wouldn't be in in the equation). There are no bonded slayer weapons, why should there be bonded pets... Both are hard to come by. (and this is not a suggestion for bonded slayers) However, in the meantime, I find it crazy that any tamer would complain about a 2.5% stat loss when you could not have bonded slots at all. Tamers who risk nothing can take chances that would normally not pay off in the end without having the chance of losing in their head to slow their roll. If I go to the casino and am told I can never lose, I'm going to bet my life's savings on red and keep playing until someone says otherwise. Giving anyone this ability definitely has an affect on the economy in a negative way no matter how large or small.
For people that are attracted to the Feluccan style gameplay, presumably the reason they're here on UOR, being PKed doesn't ruin the game. Those sorts of risks, the ones that come from other players, are what make the game unique and fun for these people. If you disagree fundamentally with that viewpoint you might never be happy here. (Until things change.)
Every single person who has posted in this thread started as a new player. We get the "struggle". As my post indicated, there are MANY changes in playstyles, not just triple boxing, that are more easily enabled by no skill loss on pets. It really would not be fair to new players to take away the "struggle" when starting out here climbing the ranks. That is one of the best parts of Ultima Online and it would be very shortsighted of us to hand it to you on a silver platter. When you don't have to earn your place in the world, the world in turn has very little value. It's this sense of value that keeps players coming back and keeps them involved in the server. The fact that their wealth has MERIT. And this is not just a philosophical argument. I straight up will NOT give checks and houses to new players. I have found in practice that giving newbies handouts leads to a complete lack of investment in the game and a quick exit from the shard. Instead I will buy any bulk resources at good rates, or take people hunting, or pay them to provide any sort of tangible service for me like sorting my loot room, or just simply help them by answering questions and writing guides.
I think that the people least comfortable with pvp scenarios are also least comfortable with nerfs to tamers - and this is a wide spectrum of players from newer players to the oldest veterans to even the administrators. I think when this discussion is brought up they see this as an attempt to make them easier prey and take away some strength they feel they deserve. Essentially - "I'm not a pvper, so why should I be effected by pvp balance?" And I sympathize with this position, genuinely. I think @McAferty seems like a well-spoken and thoughtful person. I also think she hasn't had a chance to experience some of the things players identify as what makes tamers powerful here compared to other classes. Even then, while much of the community has come to agree that tamers are powerful relative to other classes - not all ever come to that conclusion (honestly Telamon included.) We had a free harrower announced by staff a couple days ago. I think the results showed pretty clearly that tamers produce much more damage than other characters. Despite pets being ineffective in the tentacles phase, they still stayed ahead of pure mages. Of 80 damagers I saw only one dex based character, and 767 out of 1000 platinum was awarded to tamers. I had two tamers in the top ten of damage and I took a break during most of the tentacles phase and waited for others to mop that part up. I also didn't pull my pets' health bars and didn't bother to heal them. My point is - there's a strong case that tamers do much more damage in pve than other characters. There has even long since been scoring rules here for bosses that were designed to not combine the pet+player damage and only evaluate a character based on the highest damage of an individual pet or player character - because there's never been any contest here despite people citing slayer weapons. One of their other obvious strengths is in tanking power - between two dragons and a nightmare they have 2100 more hit points that have to depleted before they stop doing damage. This can be a problem for a player that wants to loot or stand over a tamer after combat or even survive after the player character has already died. In PvE situations a tamer can out perform other characters while hidden or even afk. At the harrower I hid my tamers offscreen. It wasn't necessary for them to even be present in combat. This year it's become more popular to cheese pvp/pve by training up three tamers and setting them out to farm. They bring very little supplies and with basic looping razor macros are suicide for players to attack. Actually the safest way to deal with them is to bring even more tamers to attack them. My tamers heal themselves and attack on their own. If somehow I died I would just sacrifice res to receive what little loot I brought back. All this said I don't really think that removal of bonding or increase of pet stat loss solves issues with tamers in the best way possible. As some have identified, 2.5% resist and magery takes some time to retrain on pets and will probably impact casual players more than anything. I would rather stat loss be minimal - ~0.5% and reduce a tamer by an entire dragon to take away 35% of their damage and tanking power. Then I think scoreboards like the one above would start to look a bit more competitive. Unfortunately when this topic comes up what I have to say on it is referred to as fear mongering or attacks on the server. So I'd like to pre-address that defense and say that I love this server and era, and I expect these things to never change and I'm perfectly comfortable continuing to play here like this. In fact the best decision I've made here in some time was training up three tamers. This isn't Mes's server and back when the event center/CTF thing became big I had to face that reality and accept that I wasn't the designer nor the only target the staff was hoping to bring fun content to.
Don't know how that could ever be valid.. farming a monster with a no cost dragon (or any farming at profit..) is printing gold.. more gold = all other gold is worth a little less...this prices go up! inflation 101! ..Farming gold causes no change in demand. Their are other factors that drive it down again, or even up. Which you have listed, but there no getting away from the fact farming more increases it. Of course it would, the new player starting or even tamer or anyone farming.. would still only have fixed drop rate per monster. so if gold was divided by 10 then they would need to farm 10 times less to acquire things. if things doubled to 200% then they would have to farm double! Note: i cant wait till I bond my dragons,lost 6 in last two days...! slightly sad I will never get chance to simple leave them farming while I afk, but its for the greater good! and defiantly better.
If it wasn't in UO:R then it shouldn't be here. I don't even know at what stage bonding was introduced but it wasn't Renaissance so it shouldn't be here...tamer quests, amibs, level 7 maps, custom houses...
This is a custom server. This shard does not represent the Renaissance era well, but that's not the goal of the shard. Proof is in the patches. Development has been heavily based on custom ideas mixed with selecting features from non-Renaissance eras. Champ spawns exist, yet we have recalling into dungeons and stat loss. When Champ spawns came out, I believe they disabled recalling into/out of dungeons and stat loss was removed for example. I am not arguing for the removal of stat loss by bringing this up, just simply displaying one of the many "selective features" we have here. We have the good (champ spawns) without the bad (no recall, stat loss removal). This is echoed across many features (bonding, theft, home security/safety, etc)