So Filling Bulk Order Deeds is Tedious - Lets talk changes.

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Even without BODs in mind, this would be a huge help for just general crafting (i.e. you run a vendor that sells exceptional weaponry).

We've already seen a sharp decrease in player mining after the initial recall mining nerf (super awesome patch)

The result was a lot more players buying their ingots from NPCs which basically sell them for 8gp each.

This has lead to the huge demand for colored ingots we're seeing at the moment. Every iron ingot bought from an NPC is an iron ingot less mined with a chance of getting a colored ingot. The NPC ingot sales prices are also a very strong price barrier for iron ingots on the market. If you plan on leaving the price at 8gp (which already makes a GM Blacksmith the most expensive skill on the server) there must be additional changes to give mining a little profitability. Even with a perfect recall mining macro, the best yield I could get was probably 2k ingots which hardly sold better than 16k gold. I can potentially make more gold doing NPC escorts ...

Now let's say the NPC sales price for ingots remains at 8gp which means a GM Blacksmith is still somehow affordable for new players.
In that case the yield of colored ingots should be drastically increased when mining. Turning mining primarily into a way of getting colored ingots. Make each mining spot product 100% the same ore type and thus decrease the "iron by-catch" making mining for colored ingots worth the time. Sure those golems are also fun and entertainment but if you want mining to compete with other PvM activities reward-wise, you gotta add lots more ingots to make it compete with elder gazers and arctic ogres. Not even taking into account that you have to invest into those shovels for PvM-Mining.

No matter what is done here, I don't think the 54/55 nerfs should stand alone without some SERIOUS support for the BOD/Crafting industry very very soon. We've seen people craving for colored ingots before this patch already and the market is going to run dry really fast. Please don't take too much time balancing this out again, BODs has become the end game for quite a few vets here (excluding myself hehe, look at my veins they're clean) and I'd hate to see them leave.

I'm glad I've held onto my crappy bods for so long. I can do something with them soon! These changes sound cool. Looking forward to the future.

I'm starting to understand the idea of those shovels ... but to make them really useful, they should at least have enough uses to retrieve the same amount of colored ingots that were used to fill the bod (statistically of course)

This could create a bod/mining cycle where you can actively regain the colored ingots lots when filling bods by doing some PvM sessions against golems. I can really see this happen ... also with BOD addicts working together with miners ...

But if you keep loosing (colored) ingots even if you get the max out of your shovels, this will be a dead end I'm sure.

Not sure when was the last time you manually mined but when I started on this server I made a miner and it is easily the most boring and least profitable thing you can do unless you automate it and just watch it run. If we're relying on manual miners to supply the colored ingot market, I'm sure we will see a collapse.

Woodan makes such a good point. Every mining change has resulted in nothing more than people quitting to mine.

The current ingot economy is wholly supported by NPC sales

Recall mining is not a bad thing. We have AFK gumps so we KNOW people who partake are at the keys. We now have TROLLs which keep those miners even more honest. People who ACTUALLY partake in mining are frustrated with all these changes. The only people who seem to like them are people who don't even mine.

1.6 second delay is absurdly long and NOT ERA ACCURATE

The delay brought upon by the troll patch was a good middle ground from where it WAS and where it IS NOW. The current state of things though is NOT WORKING.

Are we SERIOUSLY trying to make a double click / point and click shard?? No one is going to accomplish anything. That is not even fun.

Another point. We all come to UO to play the game in whatever way we have fun. Why does it matter if we DIVERSIFY our game play or not? We should be able to have an entirely singular approach to the game if that's how we have fun and want to play!!!!

I'm frustrated with this constant micro managing of both our game play and the economy. Its TAKING AWAY and brutally and painfully killing everything that makes UO fun.

Last point is NOTHING has a bigger inflationary impact on the economy than all these holiday events with there holiday rewards. If you want to be filthy rich all you have to do is schedule your next Work vacation days around one of these events, stock up your fridge with monster and ramen noodles, and play non-stop. You will make way way way way more money doing that then you will ever make mining.

STOP this senseless campaign against mining!

As far as filling bods goes... why is using razor to fill bods suddenly an evil thing we apparently MUST fix?

These changes simply do not make sense.

If you are worried about afk bod filling then just slap some AFK gumps in there and be done with it.

Removing resource gathering messages from SysMsg has a grave effect on macro mining.

Looking at the ingots charts, you can clearly see the recent months have barely added any colored ingots to the economy while there was a steady increase in ingots since the server started.

The high number of colored ingots remaining in game are most likely being hoarded or are stuck in some inactive bank boxes.

I really hate being the person spreading his B-hurt about another set of mining nerfs but I'm just having a hard time seeing the vision you have for mining here. Are we just fixing bugs/exploits or is there a concept for mining that includes the demand-side of the industry (BODs/Crafting/Skill training) ?

And that's not me trying to make the changes look like hasty fixes with a cherry on top. We've really seen a lot of fundamental changes to resource gathering in the past two patches. And you've said it yourself, changes to the economy are very delicate. Unless there is a clear vision of what the outcome of this should be, we're risking to be going from patch to patch just reacting to the way mining develops.

Mutombo and myself are the responsible party for that influx of ingots you see on the graph. This is the result of 2.5 months of mining between the two of us.We worked around the clock mining until our eyes burned. Judging by the change on the graph and from where it was idling at, we had a HUGE impact on the number of ingots on the server. But... we are just two guys. Being just two people I feel this just shows how much people are really mining out there. The answer is: not much... So why are we hurting them more?

With these new changes I feel our game style as well as anyone else who fills smith BoDs, is being further suppressed. Sure, we hoarded and smelted a ton of ingots... Is this a threat to the economy? No. We aren't selling any. Leave us be, we just want to fill and flip BoDs. Thank you.

As woodan said... what exactly is the vision here?

I honestly like it better when there is a player-to-player market for ingots. But these are just another set of changes that are damaging that market.

And who the heck wants to deal with Golems? Is that seriously suppose to make things better? We are killing recall mining but don't worry we have golems now. Great.

And Why do we need to make bod filling a non-razor event? It just makes no sense why the server feels we need to make everything unenjoyable and hard.

UOR should be FUN, not a second job

Well let me try posting some ideas as well ...

When it comes to making AFK gumps more effective, why not add "statloss" to the AFK penalty. For the resource gathering skills, take away an increasing % of the involved skill for repeated offender. Second time caught AFK mining ? 5% Mining skill loss. Next time it's 10%, 20%, 50% ... same for fishing, lumberjacking and BOD filling (if you want to include this in the AFK Gumps)

If those bod-shovels really allow retrieving ~100% of the colored ingots used in filling the BOD, this could give the BOD business a whole new component where you do PvM to fill BODs ...

As you can see with this graph http://www.uorenaissance.com/itemgraph/19BA/DullCopperOre/single we are really the only two blokes mining colored ingots at any capacity. With trolls in place it is difficult. You can pinpoint our smelts on the graph above, as well as when we start mining. Do we really want to discourage mining even further and turn it into a PvM fest? I don't want that.

if only two ppl are mining in any capacity that really shows that we should be making mining LESS restrictive not more so....

Without a reduction in overall scale for consumption of ingots vs BOD fills, all that this will end up achieving is an even more dead colored ingot market. If we're still having to spend some 7k+ ingots to make a single platemail set -- sorry, but I don't have the interest in spending endless hours killing the golems to achieve this; and you can sure as hell bet I won't be doing the work to turn around and sell that same amount of ingots for a fraction of what the time spent is worth. Like bart and mut, I was one of the more prolific miners here, but now I basically have zero desire to do it again in any capacity -- including for personal consumption.

Furthermore, this notion that somehow the market was just absolutely flooded or that this was a detraction to A) the expectant flow of BOD's, or B) to the market at large, causing a slump in sales and reduction in price, is patently false. Of the 10 most prolific miners that I know on the shard, all of them save 2 mined for their own bod flips -- and even then, the only way that the existing standing armor set and valorite hammer exists is through the expectant function of the bod system; inter-player trade. Which should be the driver of the system -- but because everyone already feels the constraints of high consumption of materials to produce your goal combined with drastically lowered turnover rates, these ingots simply will NEVER make it to market. You're not helping this problem with this 'fix', you're exacerbating it.

I stopped selling ingots because I began flipping bods myself -- but trust me when I say most people knew me as a prolific miner and I still get requests frequently for stacks of ingots that I simply don't have. The demand is already there, and the supply is already non-existent in the marketplace REGARDLESS of what the total numbers in any players hands say. Those numbers you see are as meaningless as gold in non-active account bank boxes are; they for all intents and purposes simply don't exist.

In general, this feels like a major step in the wrong direction, and makes me feel like my choice of an extended hiatus was the right one.

Mining issues aside... I think the BOD turn-in idea would be great. I also like the idea of increasing AFK-gathering penalties to include Wodan's thoughts on stat loss and the eventual banning of accounts. If we make the penalties harsh enough (after the second offense or so) and ensure Razor cannot answer AFK gumps, we shouldn't have to worry about much else.

I don't like the idea of trading them in for other bulk order deeds. Or for trading in anything, frankly, for copper coins that turn into other bulk order deeds. Allowing bulk order deeds to be turned in empty for new ones is a huge eff-you to those who have spent a lot of time and effort actually filling them, and allowing other items to be turned into bulk order deeds inflates the rate at which the rarer (and more common) rewards are going to be on the shard.

I had always assumed CUB would give out platinum, and maybe you'd expand the platinum rewards list a bit to offer a few new things. That would make the most sense IMO for these unfilled bulk order deeds - some sort of fractional platinum. And no need to worry about the rarity of the bulk order deed in calculations... just give a standard amount per BOD. Most people would be turning in their lousy ones anyways, and *encouraging* people to turn in the higher end ones would give incentive for newer players to do something against their best interests. I'd imagine a collector would always pay more for a higher end bulk order deed than the copper/platinum system would pay out.

These wouldn't have to be mutually exclusive. I think both would remove some of the tedium and some of the need for a highly tuned macro to pump these out. Small nitpick: don't *replace* the single item button, but just add a button that takes up to the required amount from a container. And as Basoosh said, the exceptional-only option would be a great boon to the crafter-merchants out there too.

Without detail here, this seems unrelated to filling and turning in BODs themselves.

There is already a finite number of bulk order deeds on the shard, and a finite rate at which they can be acquired. Turning in bulk order deeds always ends with less new ones than you started with (due to larges). This is why I said above that it would be a bad idea to allow other things to be turned into new bulk order deeds. I don't see how limiting one's ability to flip is solving the endless cycle that is mentioned.

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As far as colored ingots go, they are a major bottleneck in this system, given the mining changes made to this point. The lack of colored ingots has led people to just buy iron from vendors. I don't even bother filling non-iron "flips" at this point, because I have so few ingots for just filling sets I've completed. I think the best idea here is probably what Wodan mentioned, which is changing colored veins to provide only their colored ore type. As it stands, players are the only way to get colored ingots, but the way one gets colored ingots leaves them with more than 50% iron ingots, which are in abundant supply from NPCs.

It would be more appropriate to implement ways to improve a system that offers a better way for people to play BEFORE destroying the creative ways people have discovered that are within your posted rules. In my specific example with BOD filling, without any warning you implemented a change that broke 100+ macros before you've come up with a solution to make BOD filling less tedious. The correct course of action would be to come up with a better way to do it so someone doesn't have to make 100 macros to help fill smithing and tailoring BODs more effectively before you simply break what someone has done. I don't know that I've seen you concede a point, I expect you to simply dismiss this point with the "protecting the economy" sticker.

A couple ideas I have tossed out there to help address the lack of colored ingots and the need to flip bods:

• Create some mines with richer veins near town that cant be recalled into to encourage people to mine those areas and get the colored ore into the economy. Be it more ore per vein, or all colored ore or something.
• Add some benefit to filling BODs that normally wouldn't be filled.
  • Fill a large iron BOD that no one in their right mine would do now and the chance at a higher end bod is increased. 6 piece weapon LBOD for example, turn it in and your chance at higher end BOD on the flip is increased

But those are things you aren't even considering for whatever reason.

I'll simply take a break from BOD's for now, its not worth my time to manually fill a bunch of crap for a 1% chance at something I can use. I can still get my 9 smith and 9 tailor BODs a day with my crafters. I just won't sink gold into the economy buying iron to flip the garbage anymore. At the end of the day, the BOD flipping change is a change that pisses off a few and benefits nobody. I think the time that went into arbitrarily messing with this would have been better spent focusing on CuB where there is a real opportunity for the entire server to benefit in many different ways.