Getting guard whacked outside the guard zone.

[Derrick]

An Corp.

I just updated Test Center (test.uosecondage.com)

The major changes are as follows:
* The guard behavior changes as discussed earlier in this thread (this is the top of page 6)
* You are not eligible to receive a murder count unless you actually do damage, or paralyze or debuff your victim
* You will be eligible for that count until at "full health" which is now defined as not only having all your hit points, but also no longer being paralyzed, poisoned, or debuffed.
* There are currently debug messages on test center to let you know when you can and then no longer can get/receive a count
* House placement changes, especially relating to placing over "dirt patches"

Please test and let me know if you discover any quirks, this is a big patch code-wise, and I am hoping to roll this out by Friday Morn.

Thanks!

[marvin]

An Corp.

I just updated Test Center (test.uosecondage.com)

The major changes are as follows:
* The guard behavior changes as discussed earlier in this thread (this is the top of page 6)
* You are not eligible to receive a murder count unless you actually do damage, or paralyze or debuff your victim
* You will be eligible for that count until at "full health" which is now defined as not only having all your hit points, but also no longer being paralyzed, poisoned, or debuffed.
* There are currently debug messages on test center to let you know when you can and then no longer can get/receive a count
* House placement changes, especially relating to placing over "dirt patches"

Please test and let me know if you discover any quirks, this is a big patch code-wise, and I am hoping to roll this out by Friday Morn.

Thanks!

I just tested it.

#1, NPCs do not call guards unless they have line of sight. I have seen a post on this forum from someone who confirmed in the UO demo that NPCs do not need line of sight.

#2. The range restrictions prevent victims from calling guards if, for example, the attacker casts explosion and then runs 15 tiles away. I do not recall such range restrictions on OSI. Is there a patchnote saying that it was like that at some point and then this restriction was removed? If so, when was it changed?

For example: You could get poisoned by a PK outside of town, run into the guard zone, and then call GUARDS when the poison "ticked". This would send guards teleporting even halfway across the map, way out into the wilderness, into the PK's home to whack him.

Energy Vortexes could be gated to town, and when the guards got called on it they would also whack the caster, even though the "guards" call was miles away. This would provide immediate feedback that the person was whacked because you get to watch the EV disappear through the gate and the guards showing up in the person's house.

I'd love a link to some patchnotes about when this range restriction was implemented and/or removed. It seems more likely to me that the range would be how far the person calling "guards" is from the crime, allowing the victim to always call guards because they are always 0 tiles away. I do not recall any range check at all on the distance between victim and attacker.

[Derrick]

I just tested it.

#1, NPCs do not call guards unless they have line of sight. I have seen a post on this forum from someone who confirmed in the UO demo that NPCs do not need line of sight.

#2. The range restrictions prevent victims from calling guards if, for example, the attacker casts explosion and then runs 15 tiles away. I do not recall such range restrictions on OSI. Is there a patchnote saying that it was like that at some point and then this restriction was removed? If so, when was it changed?

For example: You could get poisoned by a PK outside of town, run into the guard zone, and then call GUARDS when the poison "ticked". This would send guards teleporting even halfway across the map, way out into the wilderness, into the PK's home to whack him.

Energy Vortexes could be gated to town, and when the guards got called on it they would also whack the caster, even though the "guards" call was miles away. This would provide immediate feedback that the person was whacked because you get to watch the EV disappear through the gate and the guards showing up in the person's house.

I'd love a link to some patchnotes about when this range restriction was implemented and/or removed. It seems more likely to me that the range would be how far the person calling "guards" is from the crime, allowing the victim to always call guards because they are always 0 tiles away. I do not recall any range check at all on the distance between victim and attacker.

Thanks much for testing!

The new abilities and restrictions of guards are based primarily on Pre-T2A OSI code. In that OSI code (circa mid 1998) the range from the caller and from the crime location was chanced when guards were called.

There has been no indication found that there were any changes to this behavior at all. If what you are suggesting is true, any one who poisoned a player anywhere on the shard could easily be killed by the victim recalling to town and calling the guards on the next poison tick. This would be highly abusable, and weighted with other evidence just does not seem like it could have been the case on OSI.

However with your example regarding EV's, it is possible that pets and summons followed different guidelines (first checking the creatures proximity to the scene of the crime, but skipping that check for the responsible player), this is something that can be looked into.

[SirChandestroy]

One oddity with guards from the past (I'm not sure exactly when this was in, it was either during the start of t2a or just before it) was the ability to call them through a gate.

I found out about this by accident because a friend of mine already knew the trick, here is how I discovered it:

Me & 2 friends (that could not recall) were leaving my house. We were a short run from skara brae so we were going to make the run.

A group of pk's attacked us just after we stepped out of my house. I had high magery so I decided to open a gate for all of us to escape through. I opened the gate to brit and stepped through quickly.

One of my friends thought I had opened the gate to call the guards and yelled guards! The guards came from brit through the gate and killed the pk's.

I had a kill-on-sight order on me for awhile over that one, the pk's would never believe that I hadn't known about this ahead of time. 2 of the pk's suffered stat-loss over this (which leads me to believe that this was during the t2a period, stat loss came in real late in the pre-t2a era and didn't happen very easily, conditions had to be right).

I don't know if this is something that you would wish to implement, but it is how it worked on Atlantic back in the day....

[Derrick]

One of my friends thought I had opened the gate to call the guards and yelled guards! The guards came from brit through the gate and killed the pk's.

This is an oddity for sure.

This was a similar disturbing incident on UOSA last week in which a player was guardwhacked in Bucs Den. I responded to a page about this and there was the guard standing there near the bank. I was unable to determine why or how he responded, or what he was reponding to. The page was from a witness and not from the player affected so i didn't get the direct story.

[nightshark]

One of my friends thought I had opened the gate to call the guards and yelled guards! The guards came from brit through the gate and killed the pk's.

This is an oddity for sure.

This was a similar disturbing incident on UOSA last week in which a player was guardwhacked in Bucs Den. I responded to a page about this and there was the guard standing there near the bank. I was unable to determine why or how he responded, or what he was reponding to. The page was from a witness and not from the player affected so i didn't get the direct story.

I know on OSI you would actually get the "guards can now be called on you!" message when your victim recalled into town and was hit with poison/explosion, but I actually tried calling guards on myself a few times out of curiousity and nothing happened. One thing was for sure - if you were on a different subserver to someone, then all interaction between characters ceased.

For example, if you crossed a server line with an explosion spell pending on you, it would do 0 damage. That's why brit moongate server line was 100% safety once crossed - delayed damage would not hit you. You could not murder count someone who was on a different subserver. You could not guard call someone who was on a different subserver (and from the previous example, the guards would not appear even if called from their current location). Of course, we don't currently have server lines so none of this matters at the moment.

[Derrick]

I agree that you should get the message no mater where on the shard you are; for should you recall into that town within the area in which that damage was done you certainly could be guard whacked.

[marvin]

I know on OSI you would actually get the "guards can now be called on you!" message when your victim recalled into town and was hit with poison/explosion, but I actually tried calling guards on myself a few times out of curiousity and nothing happened.

Maybe if there was some sort of range check involved with guards it was between the caller and the scene of the crime, meaning you couldn't call them on yourself from across the map.

There was never any time nor conditions on OSI when I played that a victim could not call guards on their attacker and have them whacked, except maybe as you say in the case of server lines. This includes all of t2a and UO:R.

I used to get people whacked (and get whacked myself sometimes) all the time by fleeing to guards when poisoned, then running back out into the woods to collect their loot as a guard stood beside them. There is no way this could happen by coincidence.

It seems to me that the only range check which would have been involved in calling guards is if the person calling them "saw" the crime, which would have been a simple distance check probably the same as for NPCs (there was no LOS check). This is reflected by my experiences on production shards. I do not recall any time at all which OSI coded in elaborate checks on where the criminal was to decide whether to protect them from any consequences. On the contrary they went in the completely opposite direction and introduced trammel.

The LOS check for npcs (and maybe players too i havent tested), the "you are immune to guards as long as you are outside the guard zone", and now the "you are immune from guards if you stay x tiles from the guard zone" features of this shard never existed on OSI. Why has so much time been spent putting these inaccurate "features" into the shard? It seems to be purely for the sake of protecting incompetent PKs from the consequences of their actions.

Apparently the ultimate goal here is not accuracy. The goal is to neuter the guards so nobody can get guard whacked unless they decide they wish to be guard whacked.

[Derrick]

Why has so much time been spent putting these inaccurate "features" into the shard? It seems to be purely for the sake of protecting incompetent PKs from the consequences of their actions.

Apparently the ultimate goal here is not accuracy. The goal is to neuter the guards so nobody can get guard whacked unless they decide they wish to be guard whacked.

There honestly hasn't been "so much time" put into this, we have simply used the OSI code almost verbatim. The actual code for guards on OSI is much simpler than what we currently have.

The LOS has not yet been addressed in test center.

[marvin]

This would be highly abusable, and weighted with other evidence just does not seem like it could have been the case on OSI.

This WAS the case on OSI, and was hardly "abusable" considering it was incredibly easy to not get whacked: Just don't commit criminal acts on blues.

OSI never added in any safeguards to protect criminals from the guards under certain conditions. When "the guards can now be called on you" they CAN be called on you. You were at risk no matter where you went until it said they "can no longer be called on you".

You were never safe from guards simply by standing 15 tiles outside the guardzone on OSI. That is ridiculous, and would have required them to explicitly code in immunities for people who meet the conditions for having guards called on them. You were ALWAYS at risk of someone getting to the guardzone before an explosion went off, or running to guards when poisoned. The only way to avoid this was keep your PKing in dungeons or off any tile on a server that has a guarded region.

we have simply used the OSI code almost verbatim

Where is this osi code from? Are you talking about the demo? I would like to see the code specifically which makes people immune from guards if they are x tiles away from the guardzone or x tiles away from the crime.

The guards here are heavily inaccurate and none of these inaccuracies were in default RunUO code, so I can't help but wonder how they all appeared if you have the original OSI code to work from.

[Derrick]

Your theory here is based on these distance checks never having been coded, there is nothing complex about this, and it has nothing to do with the edge of the guardzone, it's a distance from the crime location and the callers location, as stated earlier in this thread.

This shows the two distance checks, and it is from witness.m

If you are interested in seeing the entire code you can follow the instructions presented at http://uodemo.joinuo.com

Enjoy

Code: Select all

ONEVENT( speech , "*guard*" )(object speaker, string arg)
{
  Q49H();
  return(0x00);
}

void Q49H()
{
  location Q4F5 = getObjVar(this, "crimeLocation");
  object criminal = getObjVar(this, "lastCriminal");
  if(getDistanceInTiles(getLocation(this), Q4F5) > 0x19)
  {
    if(isValid(criminal))
    {
      if(getDistanceInTiles(getLocation(this), getLocation(criminal)) > 0x19)
      {
        return();
      }
    }
  }
  if(isValid(criminal))
  {
    object victim = getObjVar(this, "lastVictim");
    integer Q5RN = getObjVar(this, "crimeSeverity");
    callGuards(criminal, victim, Q5RN);
  }
  cleanup();
  return();
}

[nightshark]

Marvin, wait and see with the upcoming changes to guards.

Derrick can't just put something in place like super guards that teleport half way across brittania and into dungeons where they start slaying dangerous wizards, without some substantial evidence... which you haven't provided. Like he said, guards are being changed to reflect the demo code, and while some of what you have said is provable, he's obviously taken the 15 tile limit from the demo code.

[Derrick]

15 tiles is not correct either, looking into that. I'm not sure if that was a guesstimate in the report above or not.

[marvin]

Your theory here is based on these distance checks never having been coded, there is nothing complex about this, and it has nothing to do with the edge of the guardzone, it's a distance from the crime location and the callers location, as stated earlier in this thread.

This shows the two distance checks, and it is from witness.m

If you are interested in seeing the entire code you can follow the instructions presented at http://uodemo.joinuo.com

Enjoy

Code: Select all

ONEVENT( speech , "*guard*" )(object speaker, string arg)
{
  Q49H();
  return(0x00);
}

void Q49H()
{
  location Q4F5 = getObjVar(this, "crimeLocation");
  object criminal = getObjVar(this, "lastCriminal");
  if(getDistanceInTiles(getLocation(this), Q4F5) > 0x19)
  {
    if(isValid(criminal))
    {
      if(getDistanceInTiles(getLocation(this), getLocation(criminal)) > 0x19)
      {
        return();
      }
    }
  }
  if(isValid(criminal))
  {
    object victim = getObjVar(this, "lastVictim");
    integer Q5RN = getObjVar(this, "crimeSeverity");
    callGuards(criminal, victim, Q5RN);
  }
  cleanup();
  return();
}

It's only checking the distance from the criminal if the distance from the crime location is > 0x19. If BOTH the distance from the crime AND the distance from the criminal are > 0x19 it will return without calling guards.

If the witness is within 25 tiles the check for distance to the criminal will be skipped, and it will go directly to the whacking. If the witness is away from the scene of the crime, it will check the distance to the criminal (giving a second chance for a successful whack).

This means:
a) Victims can always call guards, no matter where the criminal is or how far he has escaped. Even recalling.

b) Witnesses or victims who chase the criminal, or are still within range of him for whatever reason can also call guards, even if they are away from the scene of the crime.

This is consistent with my experience on OSI and also with what I have said in this thread. It is not consistent with the current test center guards.

[marvin]

Furthermore, this is consistent with the account of the person who thought guards could be called through gates, although he was mistaken as to the reason.

When he fled to town himself and came under protection, the criminal act was performed there. The reason his friend was able to call guards on the other side of the gate, outside of town, is because he succeeded with the second distance check to see if he is in range of the criminal.

The person who fled to the guard zone also could have called guards himself, had he been aware of the potential.