I was traveling through Ocllo today and I noticed a player that had young status (meaning they are protected from the many dangers that Britannia presents) riding a nightmare. I know nightmare's are extraordinarily powerful creatures and quite difficult to tame and even control. I found this quite amazing for a young player who is new to the game and still learning the game how they could be able to understand how to control such a powerful beast.
"young" just means the account is young, not the player. You can have up to three accounts, and so there are a few opportunities for the characters on new accounts to enjoy young status. You will find that *most* of the players here are actually UO vets, and have found this awesome shard to come play on. A character can gm basically any skill in the amount of time you have as young status, so that character has most likely already GMed taming and animal lore and has either gone out and gotten his own mare, of been given one by an alt or a friend.
But the rules do state if you leave the isle of Ocllo your young player status ceases. So someone probably got them the mare (or they did on a different account.) I guess, and this is just my opinion, I am not in favor of being able to gm multiple skills using the protection from the young status. That to me brings about Trammelish ideas where you can create, ex. a 5x gm character with 0 risk. I understand completely what you are saying Krake that probably 98% or so are UO vets because well the game has been around for what 17-18 years now. I was just kind of rping my comment there. Even though I find this situation odd, I am still do believe Telamon's new/young player program is good and serves a good purpose for those just starting out. To me it seems a bit odd for a young player (whether they are actually a vet or not) to own a nightmare, a couple dragons, and some creatures from the taming quest.
How do you GM taming from Ocllo? I didn't know there were enough bulls or harts or whatever, to do this in a week.
On the point of leaving Occlo: You can come back to Occlo and regain your young status for a while/within certain limitations. I agree that its kinda of Trammy to do so many things with little to no risk while in young status. But this is a shard that aims to promote and keep new players interested and thats very very difficult to do with a standard vanilla OSI type server. But what I also understand about this shard and this game is that its not all about the skills/items. Its about the experience! So lets say you have your tamed animals and some gmed skills while in the safety of the young status. You now have to go and get experience the world, and the players here will, for sure, make that interesting, regardless of how many skills you have mastered or what beasts you can get to follow you. Thats just my two cents.
Dal, a few people also use the drake/strong bats down in the sewers to get additional things to tame. I guess if you work with another tamer in that one bull pen near the stables you could get quite a large amount of bulls as well since a new one spawns when the old one in the pen is tamed.
I would suggest that any "Young" character with over 80.0 of certain "advanced" skills or above 400.0-500.0 total points is automatically booted from the "Young" program. The reason I propose this is there are certain skills which are too powerful/useful for a "Young" character to have. Skills I would suggest are: Taming Magery/Resist/Poisoning (Very expensive and really only possible to raise past 80 when you are quite well established, note resist parties require you to leave Ocllo) Tailoring/Smithing/Carpentry (To avoid trammel BoD farming) Tinkering (If tinker traps get fixed, I would hate to be killed by a "Young" players trap!) Mining/Lumberjacking (To avoid trammel resource gathering) Stealing (Players should definitely not have the "Young" status after joining a thieves guild, not sure if this is currently possible but if you can ride a mare as a "Young" player I have no idea what is!) With the exception of a few of the above (Stealing/mining/LJ etc), I would say anyone able to get past 80 in the above skills is definitely not "Young". I would also propose that some other skills boot you from the "Young" player program when you hit GM (Provo/Healing etc). That being said, a nightmare on a young player is quite an impressive feat... Surely worth an achievement!
It used to be like this: http://uorforum.com/threads/a-youngs-guide-to-animal-taming.4446/ I believe some changes were made, so the guide is not accurate anymore, but those young'uns have definitely been riding mares for awhile now.
Yeah, a lot of the monsters in the "young guide" are aggressive to young players and some of the spawns were moved/changed. You can still take advantage of the young status to train taming safely/quickly. I rode the giant toad train to a pretty high skill level in the sewers. Eventually I got bored and ditched the young status though. I was probably pretty close to the level of taming you need to buy a nightmare and probably could have made it using Smaug/bulls/strongbats.
One of the things that has actually kept me on this shard was the easiness of building up another account. Personally I've been on and off Ultima since Catskills was a beta server, till AOS, then over to Ambiance, Hybrid, Defiance and now here over the years. One thing that absolutely sucks is being a player who's built at least a hundred accounts and having to do it all over again. The Trammel/Fellucca comment I will agree is pretty fitting, but if it's one thing I've learned in all my years of playing UO, is that you can't get frustrated over someone else having something over you, or over others. There are loop holes in every system, and I personally enjoy the fact that I can hop onto a server, and focus on my character builds without interruption of other people, and slowly have been exiting Occlo and getting situated at my pace.. If this was 10/11 years ago when we were teenagers and didn't have lives, I would probably be agreeing with you, however with only being on this shard for 2 weeks I do have to say, even against defiance, so far I'm having more enjoyment after all these years, and find myself anxious to do character builds I've never even done before. Thanks to the community for keeping this game fun, and shoutout to the players pulling nightmares and building new player houses and keeping it real.
Having just gone through it, I can say the young player program was integral in getting me set up here on a new server. It seems pretty harmless to have whatever amount of resource gathering is possible on the island when you're just starting. It's not a permanent safe haven; it just gives you a toehold on a server with plenty of well-established players. For example, I'm a semi-veteran player. I know enough to have quickly macroed up a peace dexer and was farming mages and liches within a couple days. I had a fisher going at the same time and a miner in the works. I made enough to finance a decent house and get some regs to start magery training and some mats to start a crafter. While all that was going on I learned about some quirks specific to UOR and Renaissance in general. Certainly there are players that are more efficient than me, and able to play even more, but I can't imagine they're going to be able to affect the economy significantly within a two week period. At the end of the young period, you've got a player with enough horsepower to contribute to the overall health of the server. Then you can steal, pk, and otherwise grief the hell out of them all you want and they won't be as discouraged because they've got that base under them. All that being said, it is a little weird that you are actually allowed back on the island after leaving. I think most of your concerns would probably be addressed if someone coudn't leave the island to go buy a bunch of resources from player vendors, maybe place a house, and then go right back to the island for another week of safe farming.
Given our attended verification system and the confinement of the program this is all handled well. Should a young player be wandering the outside world on a nightmare then I feel we would have a problem. The young program works like this. - You can join up to 4 times. - You can join anytime within your first 30 days since you created your account. - You can be young for the first 500 hours across that account (all 5 characters). - Leaving the island removes you from the young program. - You can only recall to locations on the island of Ocllo. - Failing an AFK check can result in immediate removal from the young program. That said over time we have slowly adjusted the system to address concerns the players have brought to us. We do want to allow our players to being their path on Renaissance in any direction they should be interested in, which means there is some basic taming content on the island. Several players have correctly mentioned the purpose of the system, which is to help get a foothold in the world and hopefully to encourage them to stick around in the harsh outside Felucca world. While avoiding the trappings of trammel. That said it should not be the end all solution for the easy path to gm taming so we will make sure that the spawn is in line with a new player program, not trammel.
