I think the main issue is that this server is era accurate. You didn't see as many tamers back in the day because it was a pain the make a tamer and people didn't know what they were doing like they do now. Warriors and mages are very weak when it comes to pvm. If we had chivalry and necromancy with slayer spell books it would give warriors and mages more of an advantage. When I stopped playing osi/ea in 2010, you never seen tamers at champ spawns. If you wanted to do a champ spawn you got on your necro/Mage and 2-3 people had no problem doing it. But then again you had 120 skills and 255 stats and everything was item based. Things were more balanced from a game play stand point but the cost of items needed to compete ruined the game imo. I had over 250 million gold in my Mage pvp suit alone! All 70s resist, 100 lower reagent cost, 40 lower mana cost, 45 defense chance increase, 2/6 casting, 12 mana regeneration. I enjoy the simplicity of this era. It isn't hard to start as a new player and be competitive in whatever you want to do. There is a fine balance to things, and it's hard for a team of coders to figure out what needs to change without breaking things, much less one man. I've personally enjoyed uor so far and have no issues with anything. I think the fishing additions are really cool and a step in the right direction for giving players different ways to play. If we could get more ideas like that for different play styles i think it would help. I had 3 account on osi/ea for years. I don't think limiting things to one account is going to change anything. The hardcore players will always find the best methods to make the most gold and have more than the majority.
You're kidding right? The variety is there as much as you want it to be. No one is forcing you to play a certain template
Lol wanna know who made the most h coins in that instance? My dexxer, I scored roughly 40 coins between all three instances.
Just to understand the actual situation after discussing in private or in public with different types of players (old, new, tamer, non-tamer), I decided to switch my character to taming to understand the experience, and provide a different playstyle to myself as i've never played a tamer in my life before. I've trained from 0 taming which has been very, very painful as I don't do afk-macroing. The first thing I noticed is how difficult is to get a good pet. Stats have a huge variance and chances are you will only see a useful (not the best type) pet in every 10 tames. I've tamed over 40 frenzies in 3 hours and could only find 2 that had very good stats. I would imagine this is same for other pets. So, to get their arsenal, tamers would have to spend a good day to get an excellent dragon, or pay 6 figures (which they can farm back in few hours with a single box). Second thing I realised is that pet training is damn easy. Of course, resisting spells is an exception, but other skills seem to increase quite quickly so once you get a good pet (which you can buy for a few hours of effort) and you trained a bit, you're all set. So in a nutshell, 1 day is enough to get you going with pets. Coming to the topic of triple boxing, I can understand tamers specialising in PvM, however when you see more dragons in a screen than players (see Ragar's post), you need to understand something is wrong. Even with my 2 drakes (yes, no dragons so no spellcasting, no 40 dmg firebreathes and only half strong pets) and 40 veterinary I can easily take down a lot of high-end farming npcs, with little or no intervention. If a single account can do this, three accounts will be very overpowering and unnecessary. I don't think 3 accounts per account will be discontinued, probably not a drop even to 2. So I would propose (but this would require a lot of coding, so I'm not sure if i want to propose) that only 1 tamer could be played by a player within 3 accounts at the same time. It's not easy, but it addresses the problem. Other solutions would include weakening a tamer, and I'm not against this as one, perhaps lowering bond slots to 6. This way, if you want to use 2 dragons to farm, you still can, but you will have an increased risk of walking around and being more in danger. Or you can use a mare + dragon + frenzied, or run a 5-pack frenzied while riding one, or 3 mares. You get the point. I'm not against it being 5 either, but I think 6 provides the single slot taming experience while not putting the player at a massive risk, so 6 is the ideal number. Without a doubt, skill lost should come back, to perhaps even 5%. @El Horno , I loved those events and I told in the #Renaissance channel to each event starter that I completely support any type of event that promotes collective playing. I think this is the point of @Blaise too.
Heh, I'm strangely in agreement with both sides of the tamer dispute. I'm in agreement that tamers need to be toned down. The taming suite of skills are by far the most effective PvM skills available - if you want to be the king of PvM, you can bet your ass taming is in your template. If you disagree that tamers are overpowered, you sir, are a liar. You can try and justify it, but don't tell me that it is not overpowered. It is. Bards don't have the firepower, dexers don't have the endurance, and mages are a flat-out hilarious comparison. I am absolutely all for reducing the max control slots down to 5. But the arguments I'm seeing in this thread, particularly about gold income, are extremely melodramatic and ridiculous. You can make tons of cash in a ludicrous amount of different ways here. My niche and main source of income has been vendoring. Others run BODs and sell the rewards. Others sell BODs. Others fish. Others gather and sell resources, whether it be cloth, lumber, ingots, bones, or leather. Others farm the traditional PvM spots. Others farm the non-traditional PvM spots, such as mining caves or mage towers. Others farm/milk champions. Others flip housing. Others gather spawning rares. Others just make sure they show up to public Harrowers. Others run safari trips through the Wild Tamers quest. Others churn MIBs. Others ironman AMIBs. Others loot dungeon chests. Others run treasure maps. Others just play NONSTOP during holiday/special events and profit off of what they get from those. Others thief/house loot (though you generally have to be lucky and top tier to make a living out of that). Others like to gamble and speculate on the increase/decrease of commodities. You can make millions upon millions with all of these activities. If you say there isn't enough variety in ways to make money on UOR, you should be ashamed. Bottom line: Taming is the best PvM skill here by far and it should be addressed. Deciding to not be a tamer is not "making you poor".
I think we should add greater dragons, that way you won't see as many dragon! http://uo.stratics.com/database/view.php?db_content=hunters&id=2585
I didn't mean i want more variety for myself. I can of course do whatever I want. Beggar detective cook camper dexxer taster and have a blast. But the rules of the game will decide how much of a blast I will have, also this isn't a single player game its an mmo, as a consequence how other players play inevitably affects my enjoyment of the game. It is more fun to go to one dungeon and see X, and another to see Y, and another you see Z then to see X every single time. Thats why I meant variety amongst all the other players is low. Which makes the community and game not as interesting as it could be. I don't know how you can argue against that unless you feel everyone doing the same thing is best. Not every template should be equally strong. I dont even think thats possible. But the more evenly matched templates are, the more players will choose to play a variety. On the other hand, The higher degree to which one template succeeds over all the rest, the more everyone will chose that one template. That's just human nature at work choosing the path of least resistance. I didn't say I wish my play style was more powerful so I could have fun. I meant the game could be more interesting if, for example, instead of 80% of X template there was 50% of X template and 15% of Y and 15% of Z, and that the way to cause this would be to make the paths of Y and Z have less resistance. On an aside, in contrast to what ive been preaching here, I don't really see lack of variety as a problem in PVP. I think everyone playing mages in pvp is fine because pvp is unique and exciting enough anyways and everyone playing the same thing is easily balanced. Look how in chess both players start with the same pieces in the same position on the same board every game and yet it is still interesting and unique each time. Or how in StarCraft there are only three races. So less variety can actually be better in pvp. And adding variety can mess it up. (Like how hard it was for blizzard to balance the four races in WC3 compared to the 3 in StarCraft. If they added 5 it would have been a train wreck.) But pvm is different. Balance doesn't matter as much, people just want to screw around and make a little gold and its not competitive, so might as well support variety. Telamon might also agree with this idea because he could have just added more and more tamer content forever but instead he took the course of making fishing more awesome and is making all the extra carpentry bod stuff so people will have more things to choose from to have fun. I look forward to more content like this for other templates but I hope it isn't instanced and that people can get pked and stolen from.
Should I be ashamed? Well I wasn't really trying to say anything about money sorry if I came off that way. There's tons of ways to make money and its great. But for example, the Christmas event story in the tavern all you see is tamers dragons covering the screen. The same with the harrower. And at every bank I go to the most active players are just tamers recalling in and out. Why is everyone playing tamers? Someone answer this question for me. I guess people don't realize all the different ways to make money you pointed out because most of them are all doing the same thing. At least that's what I see on the surface of things. I can't see into the world of people doing amibs or house flipping or running vendors except on the forums. So would if be foolish to increase the viability of different sources of income in order to cure " tameritis"? Or perhaps the cure is simply to better advertise different ways of making money to the playerbase so that everyone doesn't feel the need to make a tamer. Or perhaps there is no cure. People simply Love tamers for the same reason the pokemon games sold like hotcakes and gold has nothing to do with it. Please forgive my forum sins if I am wrong about all this.
I am sorry but taming is supposed to be OP. A small minorities complaints does not make a server wide problem at all. I am against lowering control slots and I am against nerfing damage output. The last thing I want to see is tamed shadow wyrms and crap like that because we have more beastly tames because of fewer slots. Maltman don't worry about what you see at Christmas because last Halloween incessant complaining led to the end of night of horrors and then end of community instances which is why everything will now be amib type scrolls. So you won't be seeing everyone on their tamers. I just absolutely love.how this is turning into an everyone does it and nothing else debate when you run around the world and don't see people much to begin with. Don't worry everyone your incessant complaining will be noticed and nerfs will surely come. It is 100% a small.minority with these gripes. Funny how there are such fundamental problems for server health yet we are healthier than ever.
What I can't understand is why all these people want to change my play style. I enjoy playing my tamer, yet all these people who don't play a tamer want to decide that I shouldn't be able to enjoy my play style. I don't go around bitching about your play style, leave mine alone!
What part of playing your tamer, do you not realize is completely unrelated to playing three of them simultaneously? Yes, we all understand that tamers are the top of PvM capability, because they are the only templates that can tank high end mob damage. The reduction of cooperation as a result of efficient triple boxing, is the detriment I see, nothing more. Gold is whatever, I don't need to make 500k an hour to enjoy the game. I need other people who need other people because that's what UO is supposed to fucking be about. Yes, multiple account holders existed on OSI. No, none of them ran three tamers at a spawn in this era, ever. If you can prove otherwise, I'd love to see it. As I said already, anyone even attempting to do that in era would get raped so fast it's hilarious. Considering there's not 10000 players on this shard, perhaps some AI changes or other interesting 'challenges' could be implemented to make running three tamers unmanageable, on the same screen. In the end, meh, I'm already over it but won't stop debating it for the good of the shard and enjoyment of conversation.
Maybe the fact that everyone keeps screaming nerf tamers? Sorry for getting off topic, it just drives me insane with all the non-stop tamer bashing in general. I don't see them making people get rid of 2 accounts full of characters. Instead of concentrating on tamers, why not add some stuff to warriors. I can't see why chivalry skill would not work in this era. You have lots of chivalry spells that really give warriors a boost when it comes to pvm. Then you could tripple box with 3 warriors.
It's a combination of things and topics are bleeding into each other. Tamers were designed to be more OP than in era, from Beta when staff upped control slots to 8 as some sort of concession for people coming from Second Age where they could have 50+ dragons out at once. Unfortunately, they got a mega-hyper-do-deka-OP bonus when Telamon developed the Zookeeper's quest which effectively mitigated any TANGIBLE losses for them in the field (ie: not reagents, leathers and training resources). In short, Tamers are living Trammel lives in a Felucca world and not a single other template has gotten such a treatment. Not that they should because that treatment is disgusting and shouldn't even fucking exist here. No, they aren't getting rid of extra accounts and no, I don't want to fucking triple-box anything. That's the point of this damn thread, is the problem of triple boxing. Triple boxing (despite only using one "box") has reached it's peak of exploitation through efficient tamer control and utter lack of detriment in the system for doing so. It's not the gold influx or platinum take, it's the complete lack of necessity for a party to handle a champion spawn or other. Just the fact that anyone can solo a champion spawn means something is so fucking broken it's embarrassing to try and support the shard as zealously as I used to. This is a huge fucking mess that makes me not want to play a single warrior, let alone three. Trust me when I tell you I could easily roll out a triple box combo of my provo and a couple warriors and just assrape some spawns with high end slayers and daisy-chained recall macros to boot. I just won't because it makes me want to puke on my screen and throw the fucking PC out the window. I miss real UO.
Debate should never stop and I am in the same boat as you as far as continuing to voice my opinion. For me it is just that "there's not 10000 player on this shard"....that is why this argument is moot IMO. This is a free server for UO; A game which is nearing 20 years old (CRAZY!!). We will never have those populations ever again and we will never ever come close. Running 3 accounts at the same time (no matter what you choose to do with those 3 accounts) have been part of this server since its inception and should continue to be so. Relying on others is great and there is certainly so much nostalgia from the good old days of large groups of people but that isn't the case anymore nor will it be. I like relying on myself. I like using 3 accounts. I don't have time to do group activities because my schedule is particular and I get on when I can not when there is some scheduled something to do. If this server was one account only and yata yata I would not have come to play here. Period. Cooperation is great and there are still great advantages for people that have a group of friends or guildies that they play with. Making that cooperation more necessary when we are talking a couple hundred people is just silly and unethical. Whats truly silly is having some form of punishment for conduct that is completely within the guidelines and were since its inception. Sure "welfare plat" is part of it but this server was not started with the thought that people will have 3 accounts and there won't be those that use all 3 at the same time. Nerfing is bad business. It is just simply bad business. The proposed "imbalance" certainly as far as gold will still be there even if a nerf comes into play. Then the issue won't be that there are players with that imbalance but that so many can't ever attain what was possible for those in the past. If it were some bug being exploited then this would be a different conversation. Also really and truly the whole bonding situation being brought in just to nerf pet damage and limit control slots is just taking steps backwards IMO. If we were going to dive down the hole like this I would simply rather just see bonding completely removed but then it won't be an imbalance of risk as the issue just simply the gold per hour or whatever and there will always continue to be gripes no matter what is done. Nerfing is bad business. Plain and simple and I will always firmly attest to that.
When I quit osi/ea in 2010, we would chain despise champ spawn for hours on 2 necro/mages. It was very boring but extremely profitable. We of course had ghost cams running at every spawn location that would report if the spawn was active and what lvl the spawn was at so we could go in a raid/take the spawn from whomever decided to try and run one. Needless to say I got pretty burnt out on doing spawns and the thought of someone soloing a spawn doesn't seem that big of a deal to me. I understand how this can frustrate people but I really don't know what the best solution would be.
Real UO has been dead for a long long time. In fact IMO it was 99 when Renaissance was started that the real death of UO began. It is not coming back. Oh and there were people on OSI that made 10's and 100's of thousands of dollars and many were employing multiple account usage and yes doing so at the same time. You think with money to be made like that people weren't doing everything they can to maximize real money earnings? Now we can nit pick all day saying "well they weren't using all tamers on every account" but that is besides the point. You choose not to 3 box because you don't like it. You have that choice as everyone else does. I don't 3 box either actively like some but I still don't see why they shouldn't be able to. The proposed problem only seems way more inflated than it is because of constant spamming of the same business over and over again by the same people. This is not directly pointed to anyone in particular though so please no one take direct offense.
It was 2 accounts on inception here and adding the third was just another blow to the already diluted community that is a direct result of being able to make everything yourself. I don't care what kind of excuses people want to make about schedules or RL timing. There are people playing this game literally at all hours and you absolutely don't need three accounts to play by yourself either. It is not silly or unethical to require teamwork in an MMO. It's supposed to be implicit. If you're not interested in playing a single account shard, that's fine. I just see it as the beauty of the real game being completely tarnished because people are what make the game, not templates.
If people are enjoying something then, well, thats really good and why change it and ruin it when they are having fun with it. I don't think anything needs to be nerfed. Don't nerf tamers. I was not thinking of ever nerfing anything. Here's the ideas I was thinking about: 1.A dungeon that is like an AMIB but persistent that tamers simply can't enter. Kind of like how recsu recdu would leave your pets behind. The spawn here would be challenging requiring large groups of 4 or more players (1 more than tripple boxing) to band together to take down. But the loot the spawn drops when split four ways equates to roughly 50k an hour for each person. Also the dungeon will be built so every class does really well here.(besides tamers of course) This would help, at least a little, create Blaises dream of player's cooperating in the MMO. Some might say this is too customy and not nostalgic enough or history perfected but there's already tons of custom stuff like this in instances events. 2. Adding Order and Chaos shields that protect against PVM damage so that the parry skill will no longer be worthless. And so that order and chaos pvp action will be pumped up by dexxer pvmers looking for added protection. And so dexxers can farm better and without slayers. This shield would be unable to be used in instanced events. 3. Creating a way for 5x mages to pvm besides mass blade spirit or ev, which is boring. I think perhaps a way for spells to do more damage to monsters or something. I've always wanted to kill dragons with ebolts but its just not effective. Some servers have slayer spell books. This could open up a whole new market. They would not be blessed and would be stealable of course. 4 increasing the damage of slayers in general. If they are more effective more people would use them. Each of these four ideas won't nerf anyone they just give greater power to everyone else and open up more options for them. I am not a balance expert and I don't think these changes create perfect balance nor do I care or think perfect balance is even important. They just add more options to what people can do. Concerning triple boxing, three accounts is crazy and game breaking and not at all nostalgic or historical just as lots have pointed out. But its also found its place into a lot of players hearts and I have found some fun in it I can see the appeal its like mixing baldurs gate with UO. And also its not likely to be removed... So I have to ask, why not compromise and just allow two accounts? Who decided on the number of three and why? I mean if there are three allowed then, in the other direction, why not four or five? Then the shard population would instantly increase like 200 players on connect UO and would we be any worse off? Would people really quad or quint box? Or even deca-box. Why not just give people the freedom to have as many accounts open as their CPU can handle? Also concerning triple boxing pls stop implying that it was era accurate because yes it was era accurate that some did it but 100% of everyone doing it is not era accurate and that's the point. Also please stop saying "you have a choice to do x(multi box, tame, etc) If you want to. You don't HAVE to do it". Some players see potential flaws in game design, and the presence of Freedom of Choice does not instantly fix any poorly designed gameplay elements. " your choice " is not the end all be all rebuttal to player base suggestions. This is actually the same reasoning that got trammel instated. Trammel, in theory, didn't force anything on anyone, it merely presented freedom of choice for all the players so that if they wanted to they could be free from non-consentual "negative" actions. Nobody had to go to trammel ever. No one was forced. Nobody had anything taken away. So why was it such a bad idea? It just gave people more choice and freedom. When people complained about trammel, defenders of trammel would say "you don't have to go to trammel you have a CHOICE" This was of course wrong though because, as I previously stated, since this is an MMORPG, the freedoms and choices offered to other players directly affect everyone's experience of the game. We are all connected. Therefore giving players the choice of trammel hurt the game. And the presence of free will and choice was no defence for trammel. It was just a poor gameplay design.
Thank you for clarifying that I did not know that it was originally 2 accounts. It is rather unfortunate that you find the game so tarnished. Essentially I don't see how me having three different characters in 3 different dungeons does anything to anyone's view of the game. No of course it isn't silly to require teamwork in an MMO what is silly is having an established shard that has been around for 3 years and then all of the sudden making swooping huge fundamental changes to things such as the amount of accounts being able to be used at one time or what in particular you may be doing on all three of your accounts at any one time. Having less accounts isn't going to make our community any different and it isn't going to make anyone's game play any different. OK you may see less dragons at a champ spawn....... Bottom line is it will be far more detrimental to make huge fundamental changes such as that. Sure some people would feel that their particular experience is less tarnished knowing that people aren't farming three accounts at the same time but many more would not like the changes IMO and it will be bad for server health. Now we all have our view of whats perfect for this and for that and I know this is a conversation that can continue forever. My stance simply is: Taking away=bad. Nerfing=bad Especially when it is a small minority wanting said changes. I have no doubt that most people are just content playing the game the way it is. When and if more content gets added then thats great too. We all have things we would like a certain way don't we?
