You told me in irc chat today that thieves could never steal and stay blue in Prodo UO. I'm starting to think that most of you never played prodo or have any clue on how stealing did and is supposed to work in this game. http://uo2.stratics.com/skill-guides/skills-and-professions/stealing/thief-essay/ This was written by my guildmate and wasn't even the original thief essay. Let me copy a little tidbit for you: " The Outcomes Of Stealing There are four possible outcomes when stealing items: Unnoticed StealNoticed StealUnnoticed FailNoticed Fail Of course, the best possible outcome would be the Unnoticed Steal. This is when you steal an item, and you do not turn “grey”. When this happens, neither the victim (nor the surrounding players) receive an alert message saying that you are attempting to steal an item. The only way the player will know that you have stolen the item is if you bring it to their attention, or they have their backpack open and see the item vanish themselves. After making an unnoticed steal, guards cannot be called on you. So let them spam “GUARDS!” as much as they wish, and if you want to add insult to injury, chime in and help them call for the guards yourself. Also, if the victim (or any player) tries to retaliate against you after an unnoticed steal, you can call guards on them and have them killed. If an unnoticed steal is made in a town, it would be smart to immediately bank the item. A noticed steal is whenever you successfully steal an item, but you turn criminal. If this occurs in a guard zone, and you are not instantly guard whacked, then run OUTSIDE of the guard zone as fast as possible and hide. If you are killed by a player or guards in a guard zone, while still criminal, then the stolen item is automatically returned to the victim’s backpack. Also, if a player retaliates against you when you turn criminal and you try to hide inside a guard zone, if your criminal status ends and you are killed, then the item will drop to your corpse. That is why it is never a good idea to hide inside the guard zone. An unnoticed fail is the same as an unnoticed steal, except you fail to steal the item. A noticed fail is the same as a noticed steal, except you fail to steal the item. I may decide to quit, 4 years of fighting for the class to be fixed and having to deal with the double standards of treatment, I'm burned out. (You may ask why did I quit before, and it's the same old shit, bad stealing mechanics and your friends getting away with everything, anyone who goes against them gets banned, or harrassed by staff, Ie TT) I've had the nastiest comments and feeblest attempts to derail my threads happen, but when I talk shit back then I get accusations of me taking a victim complex (it's not a victim complex to fight back) or I get banned or lectured. No one is allowed to kick back at your golden boys here. If I do decide to keep playing here, then I doubt I'll be in irc again. If you take anything away from this post, take the goddamn part about the stealing mechanics and pay attention to that.
OK, I remember something about the existence of something called being "permagrey" to a person if you stole from them. This would allow that person to attack you without law enforcement being called on them but your name would actually still appear as blue to the public at large. Does anyone else remember this? The only way to uncover people who were perma grey to you was to use forensic evaluation.
I played a thief for several years on Catskills and can confirm that if your steal goes unnoticed you don't turn grey. I made a thief here but noticed that the failed attempts weren't accurate so I just stopped playing around with him.
The Thief, by Shinobi, October 2009 A post by a player who played a thief 10 years earlier, about the mechanics he remembered is not enough for us to make a change to the server. While we are open to researching any an all mechanical issues with the server. Our moto and mission statement is "History Perfected". A long long time ago we had stealing where you would not flag as a criminal 2/3rds of the time. It was abused relentlessly. Countless players were killed by guards trying to recover their items. This led the staff to look into the issue further and we were unable to find a single piece of confirmed evidence showing a thief could "successfully" steal an item without being flagged as criminal. What we did find were the correct guard mechanics related to noticing a theft. Maybe at some point in time this was a thing, but we are unable to find any concrete evidence that OSI intended for thieves to be able to steal and item and avoid a criminal flag. If it did exist it was fixed quickly as they most likely experienced the same problems we did with the mechanic with abuse and confusion. OSI introduced the criminal notoriety flag for a reason, and it does not make sense that they would intentionally allow a criminal act without setting the criminal flag on the player who committed the criminal act. That is the common sense reasoning of the staff based on our extensive research into the development and history of Ultima Online. Mechanics on the Renaissance server follow some fairly simple rules. We always defer to being ERA accurate when possible, aiming for the vision of the original developers. However those mechanics must make sense and be understandable to the players. While some players who play a thief may clearly remember this and wish for it to exist here. A great deal, if not most, of our players do not remember any such mechanic existing on the OSI servers.
non-directional anecdote : Official publish, patch notes, and updates are readily available for everyone. I'm not sure why this issue has been allowed to become emotionally charged.
I played from 97 to 2003, you could steal and stay blue. I have a feeling I can get 100 people in here to back up what I'm saying and you'll still deny it . I had a great era accurate stealing thread a while back full of screenshots and I was derailed and insulted so much I deleted most of it. Most of the insults came from Blaise and Gideon fyi. And that guide was written in 2009, 6 years after I quit, so it was never taken out. Anyhow, if I say blue is blue, the sky is up, stealing is broken and then lay out how and why and provide primary source info (ie me and other players, screenshots, etc) you'll still deny it out of spite for me and the class in general. All I was trying to do was get the class fixed and fun like it was in era. Apparently it's just pissing into the wind. I should just make a pk and retire my thieves, you don't care about the class at all.
Shinobi is not just a random thief. He is the thieving legend on Atlantic. The network, tricks, and lengths he is capable of are astounding. Any information he has i would deem solid and reliable. He is the thief you report to if you want to steal there... That said i never played a thief there or in the old days... I was a detective for a long time and a rival of Shinobi's. I also think the best way to making yourself heard is by not coming on so strong from the beginning...
Memories are not evidence and we've known this since the first discussions about anything on UOSA. If you could find 100 people to agree, I'd bet at least one of them could find evidence to support the notion you're fighting for. I don't agree about the flagging but wouldn't be upset if it changed, in light of supporting evidence, not conjecture. I do feel that there's room for improvement in stack stealing and that non-thieves without Forensics should have no way of "detecting perma-grey". Aside from that, good luck!
http://uorforum.com/threads/ultima-online-relevant-publish-archive.52/ We even have them linked for easy research. And like I said, even if this was the correct mechanic for the ERA. It would still need to suit a Renaissance ERA server running in 2017. While we do what we can to re-create the experience of Ultima Online adding a bad mechanic simply because it existed is never a good enough reason. You came from the same T2A server that I did Shadowjack and we all saw how much we hated the decisions they made because era accuracy > logic and common sense. Ergo declaring a bug that allowed you to be killed in the center of your house as era accurate, rather than fixing an obvious line of sight mistake by OSI. Items should decay in houses and there should be no house looting, and yet rather than the correct Renaissance mechanics. We selected Publish 1 housing mechanics vs Publish 16. Both are valid for our ERA. But only one is true to the spirit of Ultima Online. If a player is given two choices, which do you think they would select? A sparsely populated server with perfect stealing mechanics that benefit the thief explicitly, and provide the victim with minimal recourse to understand what happened. Or A server with a vibrant community of players and stealing mechanics that are of a more common sense variety. In the end stealing is a skill that only is fun for players . . if there are other players. And sometimes the mechanics need to be fair to everyone. Not just one subclass of player. None of this means we won't look into perfecting a trade for the Renaissance server. After all that is our mission statement. However if we change anything, we will make sure we get it right and all of our playerbase understands the change and how it benefits the experience.
http://www.crazyjoe.us/crazyjoe.old/ultimaonline2/episodes.htm http://www.uothief.com/ http://uo.stratics.com/content/guides/thiefproof.shtml http://looterslair.com/guide-to-looting-in-ultima-online/ http://www.uoguide.com/Stealing http://uothief.com/faq.html http://looter.4t.com/ http://stratics.com/threads/thief-faq-under-reconstruction.10052/ I played with and long before Shinobi, I was in the most prominant thief guild in UO (LBSC ran by the stratics thief mod Crazy Joe) I played with Galad, Belan, Rico, the theafers, etc etc etc. If I come on strong it's because I'm tired of the insults and attitudes after 4 years of this. The links above should provide entertainment at least, information in tidbits at best.
What is the "date range" that this server is based upon? Publish 5? Period or any updates/patches after that?
Sadly most of the original thief posts in the stratics forum and myuo are gone now. the patch notes and the demo aren't always 100% accurate on gameplay sometimes I've noticed. I'll dig for more thief info later. I'm pretty burned out right now.
I don't even care about the always grey thing really, I care about stacks, weights, fails, guards everywhere, and items being made too heavy to steal, but lootable to pks. There are a lot of other little things like you could use a town gate while grey after stealing an item and a dozen other little things like that. I mainly care about auto kills and fails though. I'd also like to see us have some added content like every other class has gotten. Even if it's hued/deco items to do a thief theme, special clothing or spellbooks that can be worn with cool rp thief type names (or a spell book you can hold and use the stealing skill) or even a thief town for the few player thieves we have for fun and events. There are quite a few player towns with addons already and a lot of out of town stable masters. I don't think having a town for the thieves would be that big of a deal. I don't understand why pking is lauded and you get the "welcome to fel attitude" about it but stealing is always treated with a "fuck that class and those guys" mindset. It's not right. But I'm going off on a tangent, I just want the class tweaked a bit, no complaints on the trade window fix, or anything involving stealthing houses such as cub rune clearing cys, but weights and fails and a few other bugs need to be addressed, then some content added to show some love.
When disarm came out we were a straight up menace, esp considering how many people were running around with silver in Deceit and Khal, we did pretty damn good up until item insurance came in, even after trammel (I had quite a bit of fun during those times, but the insurance just killed it)
I can support that. I do a bit of stealing here and it can feel pretty rough. Mostly you're just praying to luck out, unless it's a holiday town event w/o guards There is Mask of the Wilds... Why not Gloves of the Snatcher. +steal skill. A mask would be more obvious than a disguise kit name and hair color.... Would be awesome to bring glasses over from pay shards (just item type, not actual buffs) to use instead of hats too. Burglar's Glasses! Add a good bonus to snoop to free up skill points. But now we're walking a line of what's too much, what's blessable and worth risking. There are some item's like these, example: Shadow dancer's Leggings. But they don't belong outside of an insurance system shard. And this we for sure do not want!!!
Hey ShadowJack, I have done some thinking about your struggles with thievery and this era of Ultima. I wanted to share my concluding thoughts and this thread seems like its a fitting place to do so. Thieving is heavily reliant on your prey. Your thieving experience could be horrible even with the "perfect" mechanics if everyone played smart enough. Basically you rely on stupid people to give you good opportunities. Sorry to get bitter but if there is one thing that is certain in life it is that people=problems. If you are heavily reliant on other people for your gameplay you are gonna have problems. As time goes on there are less stupid people because people eventually learn from their mistakes. New players grow fewer and fewer especially given this is a free shard. So your desirable gameplay will eventually get smaller and smaller as time goes on unless you are offsetting this by bringing more people into the UItima Online community. The endgame for thieving in Ultima Online is none. Thieving is and always has been 100% dependent on taking advantage of noobs and idiots. Without a constant influx of morons your gameplay is doomed.
