Assorted Taming Bugs

[Reena Dae]

"All follow me" as a say macro (UO client macro), pets do not hear it unless they are adjacent to you. If you type it out, it works just fine. If you have a macro for "[petname] follow me", this does work correctly.

Doubled up macros don't work for pets. For F1, I have 2 lines of say text "A follow me" and "B follow me" (A and B were pets I would never use together, such as a dragon and a white wyrm). If I am using pet B, it does not respond to my F1 macro at all. All of my old command macros were like this and they all worked on real servers.

Animal Taming can be initiated farther away than you should be able to. I can initiate taming up to 6 tiles away. Taming is supposed to require you to be within 2 tiles to initiate. (http://www.tamingarchive.com/faqs/leadtaming.php)

Pets do not pass through the teleporter in the Moonglow magic shop to Papua (Recsu/Recdu). I'm not talking about quarantined pets like Lava Lizards or Ostards. Horses, panthers, etc. do not pass through either. This seems intentional, but T2A era allowed all non-quarantined animals to pass. Since it is possible to get pets out of T2A through other routes, it seems silly to block this one in such an obtuse fashion.

I've also had problems getting pets to follow me through the Moonglow teleporters. This is probably related to their slow follow speed, since it seems like the ones who lag behind are the ones not able to teleport.

[Mikel123]

Animal Taming can be initiated farther away than you should be able to. I can initiate taming up to 6 tiles away. Taming is supposed to require you to be within 2 tiles to initiate. (http://www.tamingarchive.com/faqs/leadtaming.php)

This page is talking about penalties for para-taming. This is well after T2A, right?

[Reena Dae]

Animal Taming can be initiated farther away than you should be able to. I can initiate taming up to 6 tiles away. Taming is supposed to require you to be within 2 tiles to initiate. (http://www.tamingarchive.com/faqs/leadtaming.php)

This page is talking about penalties for para-taming. This is well after T2A, right?

The distance requirement hasn't changed.

[nightshark]

I couldn't get a single pet to guard me. When I try it says something like "that can not be guarded". But "all guard" works fine. Makes no sense, is this intentional? Also, what's with pets while they are attacking? Even if they are on an adjacent tile to whatever it is that they are attacking, they move back and forth like a mad man.

[Derrick]

These seem like pretty severe problems, and outside of the tame range all seem like very unintended bugs.

You cannot guard anything in town, but it should not be the case that one works and one doesn't in town or not.

Clearly something was broken in last patch. I'm on it. Thanks.

[Reena Dae]

The lone stablehand in Skara says they are full. Should probably put an extra stablehand or 2 there.

Animals are not making a "disobey" noise when you release them. They also don't say they "decided they are better off without a master"

[Reena Dae]

While Animal Lore can be used on any animal, I am unable to determine the current loyalty of a tamed creature that is not my own (currently waiting for an animal I want to go wild, tamer version of IDOC, since I can't normally tame it).

I can't feed snakes. I know this was something that was corrected later, but I think the problem was actually client related. It is near impossible to drop food on their tiny bodies. Not really critical since most tamers don't use snakes as pets.

[Reena Dae]

You can name pets "you" and "your bag", even though it was disabled on Nov 23, 1999.

Commanding/loyalty is off by a fair bit. We never had very many official numbers to go by, but no tamer with GM lore during this time period should have any difficulty controlling anything they're able to tame. My own grizzly bears and panthers were repeatedly disobeying commands (when one was newly tamed, I nearly commanded it into going wild on me). The "guard" command is supposed to work with 100% or near 100% accuracy during this time period, even with modest control of your pet. Found a pair of pretamed Frenzied Ostards this morning and I can't control them well enough to have them kill off my tames for me (69.6 displayed taming, GM lore). You used to be able to control a dragon with ~80 taming and GM lore well enough for light hunting (eg. anywhere you won't need to spam commands due to random crap agroing behind walls, defending against PKs, etc. -- this was tweaked in early 2000, and tweaked again even later). 70ish taming for dragon handling was pushing it, but could be done with patience and occasional feeding.

The kill command is doing a double loyalty check. Currently, when you say "all kill", there is a check. If that check passes, a target cursor will come up. After you select your target, a second loyalty check is occurring. Only the second loyalty check should be happening.

[Mikel123]

The kill command is doing a double loyalty check. Currently, when you say "all kill", there is a check. If that check passes, a target cursor will come up. After you select your target, a second loyalty check is occurring. Only the second loyalty check should be happening.

YES!

I just noticed that.

[Mikel123]

Reena, we had a debate recently about the behavior of pets that are being engaged with a monster and told to follow. What was your take on this?

Right now, if a daemon attacks my pet, it goes off to fight it. If I say "all follow me", it turns towards me, then immediately whips back around to fight the monster. Etc etc etc.

[Reena Dae]

It sounds normal. Pets that are being attacked need to be repeatedly told to follow you. I can't judge the behavior very well with the broken follow speed and odd macro command behavior. I am noticing that when I stand next to the pet, my "all follow me" macro is significantly less effective than when I type out the command manually.

[Reena Dae]

Mount loyalty is not decaying at all. It should decay at the same rate as any other pet, meaning it can go wild on you while you are riding it.

Animal Lore messages are wrong. I've seen "wild" as one of the messages a few times, which is not one of the possible options (http://www.tamingarchive.com/pets/loyalty.php, note the last paragraph refers to testing done in era).

Pets are starting at "happy" loyalty when they are tamed. During this era, they should be starting at "confused" or some other very low level. People are leaving their skillup animals tamed all over the place on this shard, and they stay tamed for hours. This was a problem on real servers, too, but starting at the lowest loyalty level ensured they only stayed tame for an hour. This is probably why I remember feeding newly tamed creatures, not because it was some superstitious "stop killing me" peace offering.

When you rename a pet, there should be a system message like "You have renamed [old petname] to [new petname]".

[Mikel123]

This.
Is.
Amazing.

Reena... do you have archives of any control rate calculator? I know Stratics had some well after 1999, but I don't know how applicable that would be.

Also, I agree they should start off "Confused". In practice, although it says "happy", I feel like they start off confused in practice. Because when I tame a dragon, at 100 Taming, 100 Lore, it doesn't do a damn thing I tell it to until I feed it.

Lastly, with regards to mounts... since players have a 100% chance of succeeding a command on a mount, wouldn't the mount losing loyalty just mean you'd have to get off and say "all follow me" 10 times every hour, to return it to 100 on it's happiness?

[Reena Dae]

Lastly, with regards to mounts... since players have a 100% chance of succeeding a command on a mount, wouldn't the mount losing loyalty just mean you'd have to get off and say "all follow me" 10 times every hour, to return it to 100 on it's happiness?

For horses and forest/desert ostards, yes. For the players who have nightmares and frenzied ostards with 0 taming/lore, no.

I've also noticed that when I release normally aggressive creatures, they will attack other aggressive creatures, but it is inconsistent. A released mongbat wasn't attacking an ogre, but a different mongbat did attack a giant toad I was in the process of taming. Only non-aggressive creatures should do this.

[dren]

Mount loyalty is not decaying at all. It should decay at the same rate as any other pet, meaning it can go wild on you while you are riding it.

Animal Lore messages are wrong. I've seen "wild" as one of the messages a few times, which is not one of the possible options (http://www.tamingarchive.com/pets/loyalty.php, note the last paragraph refers to testing done in era).

Pets are starting at "happy" loyalty when they are tamed. During this era, they should be starting at "confused" or some other very low level. People are leaving their skillup animals tamed all over the place on this shard, and they stay tamed for hours. This was a problem on real servers, too, but starting at the lowest loyalty level ensured they only stayed tame for an hour. This is probably why I remember feeding newly tamed creatures, not because it was some superstitious "stop killing me" peace offering.

When you rename a pet, there should be a system message like "You have renamed [old petname] to [new petname]".

I agree, I have not seen a mount throw anyone off on this server ever. Mounts seem to stay tamed much longer than they ought to, out of the sight of their owners, and not being fed for the nov 99 era. In nov '99 your pets would go wild very quickly even after buying them from a stable if you didn't feed them soon enough. On this server people tame pets and leave them everywhere and they stay tamed for hours upon hours - this doesn't make any sense....

You should be able to raise your horses or other mount's loyalty with commands.

You should also be able to lower the loyalty with unsucessful commands. If your loyalty is low enough that your mount isn't listening to you, if you give it commands enough times unsuccessfully it should go wild - I remember this happening in 1999.

I also found patch notes, post nov 99; but it should give an idea of what things were like in nov 99
http://update.uo.com/design_168.html

Pet Loyalty Duration
Pets will remain loyal much longer than they did in the past. Pets will remain loyal for over 24 hours.

So pets weren't loyal for nearly as long as they are now, until feb 2000.

Pet Changes
Various fixes and enhancements to pets.

* Pack horses now have their packs on them when they die.
* Pet transfers will perform the loyalty checks before the transfer window appears.
* Friends of a pet will have a slightly more difficult time issuing commands to the pet.
* Pack animals and horses will no longer say [tame] above them twice.
* Horses and pack horses that go wild (and have had two or fewer previous owners) can be retamed and controlled by any of the original owners without any added difficulty.
* Transferring a pet will no longer increase the difficulty in controlling the pet. However, if the transferred pet goes wild or is released, it will still incur the penalty for two previous owners.
* When a pet that has had previous owners is retamed, the tamer has a chance, based on the tamer’s animal lore skill, of calming the pet down. A calmed pet's difficulty to control is the same as if it had had one fewer owner. The difficulty will never be reduced below the pet's original difficulty.
* Starting loyalty of tamed pets is now slightly higher. This will prevent pets from going wild instantly on a failed command.
* Failed pet transfers will now impact the creature's loyalty less.
* Pets who are automatically controlled without any taming or lore skill (horses, pack animals, and dogs, for instance) will no longer gain loyalty when issued a successful command.
* The messages have been restored when you have no chance of taming a creature.

Sometimes pets would go wild right after buying them if you didn't feed them; this was changed after feb 2000.

I don't really know exactly what the goal is here in terms of thematic accuracy or in nov 99 era taming accuracy.

At the least I think that the mount loyalty system needs some adjustments. Thanks for reading.