Patch 101 - May 14, 2009: Spell recovery time

[Faust]

I guess you will never know anything about me besides where my safe rune location is even if this patch didn't exist.

I pitty those that actually carry runebooks like that...

It is simply a waste of time in my opinion.

PS
I really don't play my thief much... It is a very boring template to me. I would much rather PK or PVP in general anyday. Thieves were pretty much only enjoyable to me before the implementation of the thieve's guild and even better than that the t2a expansion.

[Wise]

I am not 100% sure when but I belive its around jan 1999 - 2000

It has been mentioned before, but we do have things from every T2A era...

[Kraarug]

Faust i've stolen well over a thousand runes, and atleast three dozen runebooks. matron de winter will agree and attest to this.

This has gotten me ten house loots. TEN. it has Nothing to do with griefing the player by making him make new runes. its about getting information on you.

With runebooks costing dirt, and them being ustealable people will carry them. I will now no longer be able to steal their exit rune, find where the house is, find thier farming spots, where they bank, where they stable

do i need to go on?

All my information about you is based on your runes or runebooks. people DO carry runebooks. I do! even when you could steal them i carryed them for the simple fact that they are nice, and not expencive.

This has crippled the thief class beyond all measure for the theives that accually know what they are doing.

It may not be era accurate to have stealable runebooks. ill attest to that. what ever. but back in the day on OSI getting a rune book during those four months that you could get one during t2a was very hard. you didnt take it with you, your brought runes.

now people wont bring runes. they will have this unstealable runebook, not the 3-6 runes they normally carried.

everyone posting that doesnt have a theif just doesnt understand how much this has hurt us.

*edit* Before any nonsence about how you can get them if you kill the person.. we are NOT pks' we are thieves, there is a very very huge difference.

Stealing runebooks and house looting is a condition that did not exist in T2A.

Runebooks came about after the houseing changes that virtually eliminated house looting.

So in other words, it is 'accurate' to be able to steal a rune that lead to house looting. I believe that is unchanged.

It is 'inaccurate' to have been able to steal a rune book and go to a house where everything dind't have to be locked down and thus unlootable.

[tekai]

Next youll want a trammel so that I can't steal from you at all.

You get one secure chest in a small house, That is not a lot of space. the rest needs to be in locked down chests-- IE Stealable during a house loot.

you never get the guys secures, you get the guys stuff thats to heavy to put in the secure and they guy doesnt want it cluttering up the floor locked down.

My arguement is that during t2a no one carried runebooks but on this server they will.

plain and simple, I want people (with money) to keep brining runes wherever they go.

[Kraarug]

Next youll want a trammel so that I can't steal from you at all.

That's a slippery slope and nothing I said had to do with trammel.

I want era accuracy, that's all.

Trust me, Trammel and UO:R nerfed my theif and game play too.

As a theif on OSI and a OSI house looter I can tell you that runebooks and house looting are about on the same level as the idea of man walking with dinosaurs.

[tekai]

My arguement is that during t2a no one carried runebooks but on this server they will.

[Faust]

I am still amazed that houses even get looted here...

How hard is it really to set up a detect hidden macro that reveals 100% of the time before unlocking/relocking your barricade?

I guess there are those that get looted and those that don't...

I have never had a house looted ever in UO even during the massive house looting exploit days of pre:uor that existed such as the bugs that involved the flour bag gate/res, log/relog, and even the lovely mushroom break in exploit in '99.

There were plenty of people that was hit by me legit and non-legit though.

[tekai]

The simple fact though, is many people especially in small houses have zero house security. go for a run looking for IDOC's youll see one in three has security if that.

[Faust]

Small houses definitely lack security compared to their counterpart houses. However, in all honesty no one is lootable if the person is smart even in a small. It only takes roughly half a second to drag/drop and relock a barricade if you're smart. There are even ways to do it without even actually manually dropping it back onto the barricade location... Simply walk into your small house shutting the door behind you, use detect hidden to make sure no one stealthed in, and simply use the process to get through your barricade. If someone is able to open the door and get by you without you banning or killing them you pretty much deserve to get your house looted... First, no one should ever be that slow getting through a barricade to allow someone to open a door and run through it. Second, if the person kills you before you can get an "i ban thee" off that is simply absurd. Third, detect hidden/i ban thee macros is all that it takes for 100% security...

[tekai]

Agreed faust, make a nice guide with pictures i'm sure 3% of the community will look at it.

lets please stay on task here- quasi-blessed runebooks being carried by all is terrable for the thief community and something we did nothave to deal with during T2A.

[noxmonk]

I'm pretty sure runebooks are not t2a accurate, why correct an inaccuracy on their weight and "stealability" when they're not accurate to begin with?

[Kraarug]

I'm pretty sure runebooks are not t2a accurate, why correct an inaccuracy on their weight and "stealability" when they're not accurate to begin with?

runebooks, which are not era-accurate anyway

It blows my mind that people are still saying runebooks are not era accurate. Unblessed runebooks are era accurate. On one side, guys ask why we have them, and on the other side they ask why they are not blessed.

It's been posted in response to the statement above many many times, likely a couple times in this thread:
http://wiki.uosecondage.com/index.php?t ... 11/23/1999

[son]

Why no discussion on making runebooks untargetable until this patch?

This feels like a trammel change against thieves.

[Silverfoot]

Why no discussion on making runebooks untargetable until this patch?

This feels like a trammel change against thieves.

Because this information was brought to attention: http://web.archive.org/web/200003041851 ... nebook.htm

"Rune books have no weight. A direct result of that is that a thief cannot steal a rune book by directly targeting it. A rune book can be stolen however if a thief does a random steal from your backpack."

[Clark_Kent]

The Daily Planet's Official initial response to this change is as follows, as reported by Clark Kent:

I don't want to be sensationalist about this, so I'm going to attempt to approach this change with an open mind and just attempt to analyze what effect this change will have on the economy.

To start, I will say predict the following: this will be moderately detrimental to the thieves viability as a source of any sort of reliable income. A thief will now need to supplement his income in a wider varierty of ways (likely, through alts--causing more multiclienting, and more inflation).

I'm one of the few thieves out there that is actually a thief main (chumbucket is about one of the only other ones I know within our guild). I don't make any significant amount of money outside of stealing. I do have a couple of alts, but they are rarely used for any form of farming or PKing/PVPing. I play here to roleplay the Clark Kent persona through the lens of a thief. Despite the negative reputation that a thief garners, to give a quick viewpoint inside the thieves life I'll share a few things about the trade.

First off: We live a life of poverty. Yes, I own a yew gate house--that came from playing the real estate market, getting to know people through my ever-increasing reputation, and ultimately, winnings from player run events and my participation within the community. Thieves do not earn a solid living. Yes, you hear stories about capers and epic robberies, but these are actually few and far between. If I spent the same amount of time on any other character playstyle (say taming or barding), I would have a castle by now. The majority of my time is spent wandering from bank to bank, player city to player city, and generally just burning through recall regs looking for a score.

There are three things that are the bread and butter of the thieves normal routine to target first once they have found a player worth snooping: magic weapons, runebooks, and house keys/rune (or runebook) combinations. Obviously we will nab treasure maps (although most of the GM T-hunters here are pretty intelligent about their banking) and ship keys if we spot them, but those are rarer things to spot (and I figure deeds doesn't even need to be mentioned, but they are a few-in-a-lifetime thing for most thieves).

So if you took a look at my vendor at any given moment, you will likely only see runebooks (typically empty, players are much more protective of full runebooks or even partially loaded, because they are such a customized, personal item) and a scattering of magic weapons (mainly silver and power, people are pretty protective of their vanq). As you can gather, that's a pretty paltry source of income--items ranging in value of 400 (or less) and 2000 is our staple.

Runebooks come in two varieties as far as player vendors are concerned. Recycled discount runebooks (typically from thieves and PKs) at a flat rate, and marked up scribe made books sorted by the amount of charges they have. These range in price from 499-1000 on the vast majority of player vendors I see. This change will pull thieves out of this equation, likely leading to inflation due to the black market price regulation being largely cut out of the picture. Runebooks are our quickest fence, because often we can sell them right back to the player.

Magic Weapons are the second quickest item to fence, and supplement our income while keeping the overall economies inflation down by recycling the weapons and creating a gold sink (Crazy right? I'm actually arguing that thieves help the player economy!)

With this change, I don't actually think that we will see a significant decrease in house robberies. As others have pointed out in this thread, it's ridiculous that house robberies are as common as they are. House break-ins come in largely two categories--there are more variations, but these are the two most common ways we get into your homes. The first and foremost way we break into your home is because you invite us in. How and why you may wonder? Everytime a gate opens anywhere near a thief that knows his profession, the thief will immediately either stealth or blindly jump into said gate. Simple as that. Yes, we often end up stuck in Hyloth or whatnot, but that's half the excitement of playing a rogue skill set. A lot of the time, though, we also end up on your front door step or even inside your home. As annoying as chumpbucket's reign as a doppleganger town crier in vesper was, he raised a damn fine point--all you have to do is detect hidden inside your home with a zero fail rate. As most of my victims can attest to, I have no problem in using my theft of their item as a lesson and return or sell back the item on the spot and advise the victim on how to safeguard for the future.

The second way, is that we manage to steal both your house key and your rune or runebook. No different than the way a PK does it, really. It's a race to see how quickly you notice it's gone, and how fast I can recall there and hope the key isn't dead. Usually I lose this race with the ability for people to multi-client with multiple accounts here (an issue not often raised in the mutli-client/multi-account debate). More often than not, someone has a multi-cliented character macroing inside their home and will reveal and ban me upon my arrival. Or, because it's a double steal required to get both the key and the rune (unless you're lucky and get a prominent player with a known house local or a guild town, then you only need the key and this change has no effect on this), the owner beats me back and has already changed the house locks.

Back to the topic of runebooks.

Stealing runebooks isn't as easy as it sounds. There is something strange about runebooks in that, in my mind, they are the most common item to get guard flagged on. I've died more times at banks due to instant guard whacks on runebook attempts than any other way, I'd confidently state.

I'd also point out that I think there is a bit of a misconception going on in this thread. It isn't players prized, fully customized runebook to all of their friends houses and favorite rares or farming spots that we typically get. Those are pretty rare, because being an owner of my own set of personalized runebooks I know that I treat them like some of my most valuable items because of the amount of time I put into marking (or otherwise gathering ) custom runes. I, like many others, never have my runebook taken out of my bank box or my home. What we actually end up stealing most of the time, is players with a pack full of new runebooks in the process of creating their own personal rune library. The other variety we run into is scribes themselves, afk at a bank. The final way we typically encounter runebooks, is outside of player vendors, freshly purchased. My point here being, having runebooks stolen isn't typically a matter of griefing a player and forcing them to remark all of their runes, it's usually an inconveinence in the form of a gold sink which actually improves the player economy.

The fear of having a runebook stolen creates a barrier in ease of travel in favor of safety, heightening that sense of value in our items and sense of overall danger when traveling. This, I would imagine, is why most of us prize this era of Ultima Online so highly. I'm not going to join the outcry that this is trammelizing the game, because that's a pretty hefty claim, but I will say that this will have a noticible impact on the way people travel and it will have detrimental effects for the thief as a viable skill set for the players that limit themselves to a few characters.