Patch 83 - September 25th, Minor Hotfix for Faction Atrophy, Critical Issues

What constitutes as being "active"? Also, there was a lot of solid advice and suggestions in the faction discussion thread. Can you give any indication if and on which recommendations you're working on and perhaps when these could be realized through next patches?

Chris, fix Tracking, please.

Honestly, I don't see why that was such a problem that it justified destroying the Tracking skill for 1-2 years. If you want to "fix" the problem, that is fine — history perfected, and all. But it doesn't seem like any serious issue. I would much rather have Tracking work, and have some people find some sweet spots, than not have Tracking at all, which is what we have now.

Where are you getting that information? I have scanned EVERY "Publish" note from that year (at uoguide.com), and I don't see any changes to the use of the Tracking skill for Renaissance. In fact, 10-20 tiles would only be about one screen away, which would be crazy and completely useless. I'm not an expert on how many tiles it scanned during Second Age, but whatever that number was, Renaissance should be the same. If the proper number is 100 tiles, then so be it.

Further, I have searched this very forum on this issue about why the skill was rendered broken. The only explanation I have seen given for any change was an allusion to the fact that some people whined about being pk'd in a dungeon. I haven't seen anyone posting anything about era-accuracy — until now. Era accuracy would be to have Tracking actually work.

Even if you could track every single player in every dungeon, you would still lose your quarry once you recalled to the different dungeon.

Thank you for quickly addressing the exploit.

This explains why I lost one of my first great house spots. I used Tracking at least 10x before re-deeding/re-placing a new home and sure enough, a stealther on the same screen placed as soon as I re-deeded. I remember wondering wtf was up with that and now I know why.

I agree here. 10-20 tiles would be basically worthless. I think 80-100 with the regions fixed is better. The skill check with that might negate the value though... as @Syntax mentions

100 tile tracking is OP, and its nowhere realistic if you can track players farming bloods if you stand on the White Wyrm spot, just saying.
Given the shards motto, its also not the goal to be 100% era accurate, its rather to adress certain imbalances (like tracking in this case) and balance them properly ("history perfected")

Tracking will undergo futher changes in the future that i would love to see more than anybody else, but lets face the fact - regular tracking was OP, current tracking is useless.
In the end it will be somewhere in the middle, although i believe that 20 tiles might be too little. My suggestion would be to allow 3 tiles per 10 skill points + additional 5 at GM (35 Tiles at GM tracking)

I did run a Pirate Guild in the Past, which became a realy hard thing since youre basically unable to track for people - you can be creative however and track for sea serpents / pvm monsters instead and check if theres a player there, just saying that the same trick would be possible at the previously mentioned WW spot... Try to track for Bloods instead... nothing found? then you might have a high chance that a player will be there.

Another suggestion would be to increase the distance of individual dungeon levels so they are basically 100 tiles away.. But to my understanding the regular UO Map should be hard coded and its hard to make changes like that (+ link every level / exit properly again)

This explains why my neighbor had 15 fluffy corpses laying around his keep.

Aaaaaaaahhhhh it all makes sense now!!

Lol that was a good bug! Cudos for exploiting it! Haha!

It's not OP. 100 tiles is how the game is supposed to work. Breaking that entire function just because someone whined about getting pk'd while killing bloods is not history perfected. It's just stupid.

If you want to fix the dungeon glitch, go ahead. That makes no difference to me. But while we're waiting around for that bug to get fixed (I assume another 2 years), Tracking should stay at 100 tiles.

Says who? I checked all the game updates during that period, and there is nothing about that change.

Dude, did you just gloss over the response or conveniently took out only what you wanted? You seem to have completely ignored this part:

Chris is trying to justify keeping it broken by appealing to era accuracy. But his era accuracy argument has no evidence in support of it, as far as I can see. It needs to reach 100 tiles.