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

fix stealing to 2000 accuracy goddamn it

<3 you know I love my succubus

I like to think I made an impact too, and I really and truly do love the shard and regret the feeling I have in my gut. I kinda feel like leaving the things I did for the community unmentioned is an intentional attempt at whitewashing -- but that also may just be my general sadness about the whole situation speaking, and not reflective in reality. Of course, the lack of discourse back when called out directly also speaks volumes, and that IS reflected in reality -- so the proverbial line felt drawn in the sand for me.

Please man, stop the hyperbole, at least for me. Stop being over the top with every example you make of everything -- theres more than black and white.

You know as well as I do that this kind of activity was encouraged, in irc and in game -- within reason of the AFK system (which I still feel should be stricter -- and incur actual account level bans after enough failures). You and I both helped numerous people on how to automate things, with Chris right there beside us. This is a metagame within the sandbox, just like your purple obsession and Pork Fried Rice's liver habit. This metagame was encouraged, heavily until suddenly it was taken away wholesale; no discussion and no forewarning. This metagame is important to many people, not because they want to harm the server as keeps being implied, but because they love the server, and this is how they choose to spend that experience.

I wouldn't have an issue if this had been laid out from the start that these things were going to be cut out wholesale -- or at least a modicum of discussion occurred before the drastic changes to the experience of a 2 year old shard before the changes went live.

Simply put, this strays from what the premise that sold me on this shard was, and I felt adamant about that direction for a number of reasons. You just keep seeing it as being as simple as "I can't press play anymore." Its pure hyperbole, and its insulting.

I’ve noticed that only a few people have provided an overview of their ingot generation methods and rates. How many ingots per hour can be obtained using a scripted recall-mining method? Do these scripts require the player to devote their entire attention to that character or can the player have that character on a side screen while they use another character on a different account?

These scripts are not hard to build. I have done so in the past on another server (and on my own server) but have chosen not to build them here. Why? I want the ‘traditional’ experience I had from 15+ years ago. The hazy rose-colored glasses experience I remember was dangerous, fun, sustainable, and involved other like-minded people (Catskills, Yew area: House of Rosemar, I still remember you).

The fact that this metagame exists forces me to either adopt its methods or become increasingly irrelevant in almost any area that requires ingots (selling, BODs, or even just training blacksmithy) and indirectly irrelevant in other areas as the time sunk in gathering using traditional methods could have been used elsewhere. I’m content with being irrelevant in this area except for one thing…the ability for automated scripting methods to multitask asset generation (get more shinies faster) means that scarce resources (e.g. housing space, rare & server birth items, mid-to-high-end BOD rewards) will generally remain with those that adopt the metagame or are sold for potentially increasing amounts of gold. By the way, what is the rate of inflation on items that do not have NPC support? Could this server experience the hyper-inflation that has plagued others?

I believe that automated scripts that allow for player multitasking of resource generation affect everyone. Those that use them, over time, get increasing benefits. Those that choose to not use them will get reduced benefits- widening the gap. This server needs to explicitly embrace them or forbid them. I’m for forbidding them because they produce unsustainable results.

This may stray from the premise that sold people on coming to this shard, but is the metagame sustainable if everyone uses it? What will happen to the new player base when they are given everything needed to start out (I’ve seen a spike in donations lately) and cannot earn anything of real value themselves (tangibles, not critical things like friendships) because they are too far behind?

Can this even be corrected given the amount of time that multitasked gathering has been going on? Dare I suggest that a server wipe along with these rule changes be considered as an alternative to correct these issues? Can this server be restored to sustainable activities (stable population of players coming, staying, and leaving) by simply changing the rules and retaining everything that has been built from scripting as-is?

Respectfully,
Gerhard

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Seriously?

Fuck man, I don't know how else to say this.

THIS ISN'T ABOUT THE GOLD FLOW. STOP TRIVIALIZING IT. YOU'RE REALLY FRUSTRATING ME IN YOUR ONE-SIGHTED VISION, WHEN I LAID THIS OUT FOR YOU. I DON'T KNOW HOW MUCH MORE PLAINLY IT CAN BE EXPLAINED THAT WHEN YOU HANDWAVE SOMEONES ENTIRE ARGUMENT AWAY AS A SINGLE TRIVIALIZED POINT THAT THIS IS THE REACTION YOU'RE GOING TO GET.

You're smarter than that, Gideon. Please, read between the lines even slightly and stop being a hypocrite and saying that its "Falling on deaf ears" -- cuz clearly ANYTHING from the other side of the table is falling on deaf ears too. This is another two way street.

Friar Joachim -- the take rates have been discussed ad nauseum. 1.1k to 1.5k iron ingots an hour, plus whatever incidental color ores you pick up. Approximately 1800 an hour if you're at breakneck speed via script. In terms of gold generation, since thats all ANYONE CAN SEE IN THIS DISCUSSION, we're looking at about 20k an hour sold at generous market prices -- 9GP per for iron, and 11 or so for any other colors. This isn't the crux of the argument, because you can generate SIGNIFICANTLY more by doing ore elementals or ore golems. Thats not the point. The point is that if I want to compete as a miner, I have to be a PvMer. Thats not what UO was ever about in my history.

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So how is that different at all from "If I want to compete as a Miner, I have to run three automated Recall miners?"
No, it's not identical, but you feeling like you're being forced to pvm mine, sounds %100 like me being 'forced' to macro mine to sustain the ingot production required for the massive amount of BoDs on a shard without a massive amount of people. I couldn't hope to run around previously with my miner and make the amount of ingots any 3x Autominer could generate. Not even 1/3 because I actually walked places. Yes, I've guided people in automation. I've let people copy my runebook sets that took me several hours to complete due to the nature of grid intersections. No, I never wanted it to be that way.

I would like to see perpetual ore golem spawns in caves turned off completely.
I would like to see Recall into caves restored to its original function.
I would like to see increased/harsher penalties for AFK check failures.
I would like to see more troll-spawn on Recall miners (I had fun hunting those).

No, I'm not going to agree that you or anyone should be able to click play on three Razor macros and eat a fucking pizza while you wait for a gump so you can click the one that doesn't match and go back to the TV.
If you don't have to interact with the keyboard more than once an hour or so, you're not playing, you're pumping resources out for doing nothing at all. That's not UO to me, sorry. I'll never agree with that. Call it hyperbole all you like, I'm not exaggerating greatly or making claims that are way off base. I've used a few analogies. Same thing goes for burning murder counts while generating platinum for doing so. It's shitty and shouldn't exist, in my opinion.

If you were sold on the shard because you could automate your resource gathering legally, I'm sorry that got pulled out from under you. I never read anywhere that the goal of the shard was to perfect automated Ultima. I came here for a great many reasons, like 2 account limits (that nearly broke me when it expanded to 3), viable dexxers, and no stupid trammie shit. But here I am, riding an ethereal on my third account and looking at now useless complex mining macros. I didn't beat them, I joined them and accepted that it's still the best I'm gonna get in the freeshard world. Yes, there's some growing pains and hopefully we'll overcome this one with a bit of readjustment, server side or player side.
If it's just never going to work for you without that ingot faucet, I'm sorry to see you go. I really like you and miss having people who always catch on to my random lyric drops in conversations.

I'm sorry you feel insulted by how I describe the situation. If you can explain it in such a way that doesn't sound like "I played 3 recall miners on OSI in 99 and this is how I remembered it". I mean, that's how you sound. You come off like this is how the game was and maybe Pacific was a dead shard in 99 (lol) but I never in my life saw a Recall miner. Maybe I wasn't as active then as I am now or paying as close attention. I could be wrong, so if I am, I'll give you that. I still don't agree it should be possible or encouraged to gather more resources automatically than anyone can manually. Collecting purple items over time is not even remotely close to collecting stockpiles of ore on three accounts simultaneously while also catching up on Season 3 of Game of Thrones.

Agreed!

Oh, I just wanted to say that I've had no problems purchasing thousands of dull copper ingots from players I've never met in recent weeks. I just asked and offered 10gp per ingot.

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You're right, it doesn't have to be a binary "It's In" or "It's Out" kind of situation. There is a middle ground where it can be tightly controlled. The part that I'm agreeing with of Friar's post is we need to identify what the goal or the 'vision' is here. Do we want it gone? Do we want it to stay? If so, what is the acceptable amount of ingots we should allow it to pull in an hour? No one knows!

Until that's identified, we're driving blind.

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Perfected indeed. There is so much right about UO:R right now. I love the added content for fishing, love the rewards systems (current), love the added fortress and keep even though I'll probably never own one, love that I can run on a horse longer than I can on foot (dig on UOSA), love the BOD system (think it should be harder to get them, not harder to complete them), and love that my weapons and armor can't be dyed neon (at least I don't think they can). I like the idea of adding and adjusting content, but not at the expense of playing the way I did back when, and I thought that was the point here. Drastic blanket changes are going to hurt the server in my opinion, especially without valid or at least understood explanation. People shouldn't have to learn a new way to play (such as gathering ore from a golem), but having the option is a great idea/addition. All the ranting and raving is kind of petty, don't you think?

Basoosh, Gideon, you are correct in this matter. What I mean is that we need to know explicitly what is allowed, what is not, and have it enforced. Some scripting makes sense (weaving cloth...good God)...others, such as multitasked resource gathering, less so...but let it come down from those that run this server where the line is to be drawn.

I wouldn't have said anything if I didn't care. As jerreryjay says in the above post, this server, with the diverse people and updated content (e.g. the murder maps...I still look those over occasionally), is amazing.

*sigh*

Yes. Because its personal opinion when I state you flat out that what you're saying my intention is, is what the underlying problem is. You're so closed minded sometimes, its unbelievable.

I guess I'm done with you bud, since you can't see past the end of your nose. I'm sorry that you can't seem to accept, by your own definition, that differences of opinion can exist. And that your clear opinion of why I'm upset about this is clearly wrong. Have a good life bud, good luck with your son. I mean that genuinely, but I'm also genuinely finished with you.

For the record, I did 90% of the mining and selling I did with a single miner. Whether it was on a boat, recalling, or elemental hunting, it was a single miner being driven by me and never with me "feet kicked back and watching netflix" as is constantly implied. My guildmate and I played with razor, to learn it and the game server's ins and outs. We watched our macros run line by line, determined what every segment was doing, and learned the most efficient way to handle them. We would try to play with what we could, share information back and forth, apply changes and further test. Its not this endless fountain of wealth that I feel is going to be lost here without any real clarification, its this endless fountain of JOY that this aspect of the game brought to my guildie. Seriously, this is 50% of what my game was, and 95% of what my guildie's game was. Why should we be punished when there has never been any clear rules stating an affirmative or a negatory -- at least make it clear what absolutely is and isn't unacceptable. This uncertainty, this willfullness to gut that core that was there for 2 years of the shards history, has left me with significantly less to do, and a guildie who has no desire to log on anymore because his entire fun is now being removed, and he has no idea how far it is intended to go -- since theres been no clarification on the subject.

Just to clarify once more for the TL;DR'ers out there like Gideon -- This is not about wealth. This is about the fact that this underlying core of testing and experimentation was important to us. We have developmental mindsets, and this gives us a realm to play with developmental flow, in a visual and fun way -- and its being taken away without discussion. I couldn't care less about the loss of wealth, but the loss of the main person I play with, and the main thing we enjoy doing together on the other hand...

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Oh man, there would be so much crying.

This isn't supposed to be a server that gets reset. Like with the original OSI servers, people invest a lot of time here in the good faith that it's worth their time. I'm not even going to whine about the mining changes any more and the still missing un-nerf for the SysMsg changes but please keep in mind that many players here choose to spend their free time playing here. Most of us don't have as much free time as we once did and thus hate the feeling of having wasted this precious time.

I just finished an hour of recall mining. I haven't smelted the ore yet, but judging from the piles it should result in about 1200 ingots, maybe slightly more. I spawned zero mining trolls during this time and got only one AFK-check GUMP. I answered it correctly. This will probably result in about 12K gold of profit if I decide to sell it all.

I had to make some changes in order to adapt to the last patch.

• I had to use a for loop instead of an if on the system message as to how long to mine an area.
• I had to add a 10 second wait after recalling for my in-town locations.
• I had to mark some new runes, as I had some cave locations previously.
• I had to rethink pickaxe creation. This part is still not perfect - the macro got hung up a couple times during this hour because of it. As I'm typing this, I actually just got a new idea I want to try. We'll see how it works tonight!

For the troll patch, I made some other changes:

• I added Wrestling onto my miner so that he doesn't get mowed down by trolls.
• I changed some of my out-of-town runes to now be within guard range.
• I made a similar set of mining runes to keep at my house, so my tamer can roll in and kill any trolls that spawn along the way.

This is the part I don't understand. You say you like the testing and experimentation of these macros (and I do too, I love it). This patch introduced a new set of rules and constraints for us to tackle. Isn't that a good thing for people like us? Joe Schmoe that knows nothing about Razor and just copied a mining macro from his buddy is paddle-less and up a creek now, but people like us that are willing to sit down and tinker with things for a couple hours will be back up and running pretty quickly.

I agree that there's really not much of a point to these changes. I also agree that Telamon should probably communicate where he'd ultimately like to go on the whole recall mining thing. But I don't see this last patch as a negative for our playstyle. Recall mining has definitely not been "taken away", as my stack of 1200 ingots shows. If anything, it's been fun having a reason to tinker with my macros again.