I wanted to make a constructive thread on Harrowers, since the other thread ended up getting into mud slinging arguments. There will be some harrower changes, that is known. This thread is simply to float healthy ideas and see what the community is interested in. If you have your own ideas, please post below. This thread is not for arguing and insulting people, I'd request that @The Cigarette Smoking Man delete any garbage. Thanks.
I am in favour of turning in the skulls to create a Harrower scroll as that will prevent the afk macro monitoring as I understand it. If that scroll could then be used to start an open world Harrower in a random dungeon (exactly as the skulls do now) I believe that will preserve the system as it is currently intended. Nothing would (or should, in my view) prevent other players from jumping in but they would need to actually exert effort to patrol the possible spawn sites or luckily happen upon it. In my opinion this fix (or a similar one to achieve this end) is far and away the most significant improvement required. Of less importance and admitted, a far more subjective improvement, would be to include a generous range check (i.e. it could be 2 screens) for the plat reward. This would prevent 'dumping pets' on the True Harrower and leaving and collecting the reward from the safety of your home. Though admittedly, I do not expect this to be a significant issue if the afk macro monitoring is curbed.
As someone who has raided and been raided on harrys as much as anyone on this server, this mechanic has been around and in play for as long as i know. Ive had mine crashed using the same methods, but i didn't complain on forums about it. I got better. There are many defenses against what happened, you just have to take the time to think of them and implement them.The first time I did a harry i got raided, I didn't even realize i had been raided till we were counting the plat and totaling things up. Then we thought about things and discussed techniques for a week+. I don't think this mechanic needs any change. On the other harrower changes, I support changing the decay timer on the skull, so it decays like a normal item. That will prevent any tracking using macros, and make people have to manually check the star room. I think making it instanced would be a bad idea. I play for the felluca aspects of this shard. Pks/pvpers will miss out on alot of opportunities if that happens too. This is suppose to be dangerous, risky, literally endgame. This is the ultimate UO Boss, with the biggest cash reward. This shouldn't be a walk in the park to collect that plat.
3. Remove Harrower platinum cheese where it goes to your character anywhere in the world (even logged out). How to fix: A. Plat should only be rewarded to living characters within a few screens. If dead or out of range, the plat should be destroyed. 1. I think this mechanic needs to be fixed, simply recalling in and throwing pets and recalling out voids any risk.. but all rewards... 2. If harrowers were to be instance, In my opinion would have a negative impact on the server and even further push the shard towards Trammel.
2. has been fixed for months. 3. platinum "cheese" works two ways, the way its set up right now, its almost impossible to lose most of your plat. With the proposed changes, a group could easily lose everything if they get steam rolled at the end, dragons tied to harrower. Imagine the complaining if instead of loosing 300 plat, new group lost everything. Im pretty sure people would complain even more about this if changed. People would complain either way.
Champs are this way, and I've lost skulls this way, but I think its a great aspect of UO. RISK vs REWARD. You could always do harrower on off hours, hire a PVP team to guard your event.. ETC... Your dragons aren't tied to the Harrower, you can simple throw in a command to attack them. Add your guild to friends list in razor, add target closes blue/red and spam that hotkey and your dragons will come off the harrower. I accually miss 20 per account that did damage, but Im also aware of people creating VPN accounts ebolting to gain extra plat.. I think the old system was healthier to UOR than this new system.. Promoted WORLD WIDE event.. Maybe add a cap on how many harrowers you can spawn a day if your worried about Vella type events where he spawned 10 harrowers in a day.
Plat for anyone out of range should go to the harrower corps. If it were destroyed ppl would still all kill recall just to make us get less plat
