Harrower 2018!

I think this thread has run its course at this point. If I let this go a few more days this trick will be blamed for 9/11, Waco, why that girl never called you back and worst of all ... trammel.

I have also had to type this post with some Saturday Night Live yokel mouthing "yes" at me 1000 times. Thanks for that.

Some general Tips.

In the context of this post and the Harrower. If this trick was being used, this post will pretty much ensure that the people abusing it are given a free pass. The staff could have easily entrapped them to catch them in the act using it to raid champion spawns. As this post serves as a warning not to do it again or the excuse for why you are doing it. It makes it difficult for the staff to take action.

Making claims of extensive abuse without facts/proof in order to paint another group of players in a negative light never helps. If anything this post will do more damage than the tiny fraction of the playerbase that ever used a trick like this combined with UOSteam. After looking into this myself I find the claims that "everyone is doing it" hard to believe as this method is less effective than most normal human methods and for others there are simply better ways to do things. We appreciate the report but there are better, more patient, ways to go about it.

"OMG it can track online players...." *cough* Online Players *cough*
"OMG it can track when a monster dies" *cough* so can you, with your eyes *cough*
"OMG it can track IDOC houses" *cough* It can tell you when a house decays, just like a ghost or stealther could, except only slower *cough*
"OMG it can broadcast decays in a discord channel, and alert their phones" *cough* The average house decay looting is over in 120 seconds, this would be extremely useful for showing up to a bunch of empty small houses. Of course unless your actively at the computer, then why not simply . . . be at the decay watching. *cough*

You get the idea. The fear of the demons in the closet is always great until someone gets out of their chair, puts down their monster energy drink and turns the lights on and finds the teddy bear you told you mom you don't need anymore sitting in the closet.

And of course it is going to be fixed. It would have been fixed much quicker if someone had bothered to explain to me exactly what was going on. As it is the only verified use of the trick was a guild using it to raid harrowers. And even this is unconfirmed as the staff never witnessed it. We only have anecdotal evidence about something said by someone in a discord channel somewhere.

And no the fix will not be range checks to items in the world (outside of our normal logic). Once an item is gone (champion skull, house sign, etc) You can not determine the range to an item that no longer exists in the world. But fix it I will and in a way that allows me to catch people trying to use a macro to determine if something exists and pairing that with a check for UO Steam use.

For the Harrower we have been considering a change to a scroll based system as the star room method does constantly lead to unfair raids based on watching that room. However any reduction in risk will result in a reduction in the rewards obtained from defeating the harrower. (Use skulls to get scroll, use scroll at a later time in a location of your choosing for a 1 way gate to the harrower)

For house decays I am not concerned because there are a variety of completely legal methods to alert a player to when a house decays. One common method used in rare hunting is a simple program that detects a pixel changing color on the screen. It can then play an audio file alerting the user to the change. This type of trick has been used for easily 20 years. When I used to play I simply turned the volume up on my computer and went and watched TV. When I heard gates opening there was a pretty good chance the house had decayed.
Note: Tracking when a house decays (change from greatly to IDOC) will however always be closely monitored by the staff and addressed harshly should we find someone using a non allowed 3rd party application to automatic this process. Using item id + razor is our allowed method as the player has to be alive, and can be killed in the process.

On UO Steam. Several players lost access to their accounts this week for UO Steam use. While it might take us some time to catch you, you will eventually be caught and there will be no polite chat in jail. The next patch will include a wide array of UO Steam honeypots and AFK system modifications to trap some new behavior I have witnessed.