Town of Cove - Docks Are Protected?

[RoadKill]

I remember part of Cove's docks being out of guards protection. The best "proof" I could dig up is a screenshot of the "resist trick" using town borders.

[Derrick]

I've seen this infamous screenshot before. I hadn't thought about it in that context though. I think you must be right.

In that picture, what do you think it is that's keeping the NPC's from leaving town?

[Kaivan]

Supposedly this is actually a screenshot from when you could hire NPC mages for working your skill in town. Naturally, the fact that there was no limit on the number of NPC mages you could hire, and the fact that people could gain resist in town led people to hire all of the NPC mages that were available and simply tell them to attack themselves. The result was free resist gains that could not be produced by any other means singlehandedly. As for how the NPC mages were told to stay where they were, that's something I don't know. As far as the AI is concerned from the demo, any mage will advance on your position until they are within wrestling distance, and they also ignore town guard lines. As for the guard line around the cove docks, there is no information citing a change to the coverage of the cove docks for guard protection anywhere in the patch notes from 97 to now, so if there was a change to the docks, it was an undocumented change that we can't prove actually happened.

On a small side note: Cove should not actually have a bank. The Febuary 8, 2002 patch notes located at http://update.uo.com/design_405.html cite the addition of an enchanted sextant that aids new players in locating towns and public moongates. A mention of the lack of the Cove bank is also made as part of this patch note.

[Ebywok]

I've brought this up in the past also. I distinctly remember slaughtering nobles for their money on the cove docks... Have no proof.

[Faust]

Does this include hired mages from the demo, or did you test out the shop mages Kaivan? I know control commands worked differently they do in the later years of UO. For example, saying stop wouldn't actually make them stop where they were standing. You would have to actually use the "stay" command for that to happen. I'm assuming this is the same for this. They probably were able to tell them to stay and they would stay where they're standing and continue casting the spells. I'll have to test this out on the Demo if I can find any hirable mages on there.

[platy]

Very cool, although I never went to Cove so I woudln't know..
Not to hijack this but does anyone remember when BladeSpirit damage gained Resist? My friend showed me a method a long time ago during t2a to gain resist up to 84 or something using bladespirits..(cast on ground while standing on a certain point in a guard tower outside of guards- could still be hit even though elevated)

[Faust]

The bladespirit trick was fixed in the last patch of '99. I'm assuming this happened because bladespirits only poisoned you when you ran over them. If you did this at an elevated level such as a tower wing for example it would trigger this. I'm assuming this poison level was at a higher level I think around greater poison compared to the lower level third poison, which probably made the bug what it was to give you a resist gain. You still could be hit by the bladespirit below by it's melee damage.

[Ezp]

Pretty sure this is a pre t2a or very early t2a picture. This was a resist bug.
Also I actually think this is on UOSA currently?

12/16/97
Nondamaging spells (including damaging spells in justice regions) no longer increase magic resistance, though they do check against it.

So ppl would stand outside town to gain it and not take damage like on here. So the picture is after that patch. So Cove was prolly unguarded there? Just some input

[Faust]

That patch removed the ability to gain magic resist from spells that were casted from guards protection such as buffs and any beneficial spells that you could cast on yourself. At one point in UO you could actually gain resist from any spell that was casted on you. This was of course a bug like so many that existed back then. Casting damaging spells from the protection of guards was already previously removed before this patch.

The patch that made it to where you can't gain magic resistance from town was publish in a patch on February 24th 1999, which is quoted "It will not be possible to learn magic resistance in towns." in the patch log. This ended the bug from that picture you see above.

The cove docks was in fact unguarded during this era.

[Ebywok]

So can we expect this to be changed eventually?

[Derrick]

Aye. I'll fix the town lines. As soon as I can.

Thanks much guys