Let's Talk About Sheep, Baby / Sheep! (There It Is)

[MatronDeWinter]

As some of you may know, cA has been patrolling the shard in search of sheep for some time now. We play this role in a comical fashion, seeking a moderate sum of 10k for a permit under the guise of semi-rp shadowey fun. However, this is not a profitable enterprise, we do this to keep these sheep in the pens where they belong. The moderate donations for permits just barely covers the cost of EQ regs and the time spent tracking these sheep horders down. You can view our work here: viewtopic.php?f=53&t=12935

Here is my concern. I have noticed a DRASTIC increase in not only the number of these establishments but also the quantity of sheep which they house and the stockpile of cloth that they produce. I have found a sheep containment facility with approx. 42k bolts of cloth, that's 2.1 million yards and an estimate street value of around 5 million gold if sold for the lowest price I have recently seen. This shard has absolutely no market for cloth and bandaids, which used to be a staple of the new player.

In 1999 NPCs, animals, and mobiles were limited. If you took the sheep from Jhelom into your home, they would not respawn (I suppose depending on server lines etc perhaps). This obviously caused a problem with in-house non-tame animals on OSI, and was addressed in April of 1999 by Designer Dragon:

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.game ... ae1cb84071
(this link references the OSI site, which is now defunct)

NPCs
Is it legal to trap NPCs or monsters in a house?
Game Masters will delete monsters and NPCs from houses and trapped
locations for a variety of reasons. If a GM finds or is alerted to one
of these houses, he will proceed to see if the monster or NPC should
be deleted or not. Due to the limited amount of monsters and NPCs that
the game world will allow at any given time, it is not fair to all
other players if a particular player “hoards” monsters or NPCs.

If the monster was tamed or the NPC hired, the GM will check to see if
there is any loyalty to the house owner.

If the loyalty is zero, then the GM will delete that particular
monster/NPC. The monster/NPC will spawn in its natural location once
again.

If the monster was never tamed or NPC never hired, the GM will delete
it, allowing the monster/NPC to respawn correctly.
Possibly the best examples of resources (or lack thereof) are the
trapping of sheep and polar bears. Due to the large amount trapped
within houses, these creature templates literally stopped spawning.
Lack of sheep in turn affected players’ ability to get wool from the
sheep, which in turn crippled tailors’ ability to weave clothes. The
trapping of polar bears meant that other players who ventured to Ice
Island seeking to gain valuable experience were kept from doing so
against the bears as they were all in houses. In each of these
instances the trapping of NPCs actually had ultimate dire
consequences.
If you do come across a house that you feel might possibly have
wrongly trapped NPCs and monsters, please contact a GM. Since we get
the location that you called from in our call queue, we can simply go
to that location as soon as possible and take care of any
inappropriately trapped monsters/NPCs.

I know this is more of a policy thing, and it's not as important on UOSA because all of our monsters magically re-appear or pathfind (also inaccurate) towards their spawn. However, I think that a good amount of these sheep horders are afk macroing up the resources. Either using some other software, or a simple razor macro to loop through, which would be virtually secure because they can just have it on a delay and what are the chances that a GM will stumble by for the 2 minutes that they are actually performing any action every X hours?

Let's say that no macro is being used, and Player X is just hording 200 sheep on the roof of his castle, logging in twice a day to collect the wool. Is that significantly different from the player above running a collection macro? I fail to understand how this is completely different from say, a miner who runs a macro all day dropping the ore at his feet, and then checks in once or twice on an alternate character to gather the ore up.

[archaicsubrosa77]

I wonder why they said it was okay if the animals were tamed?

[Alex the Artist]

Sheep don't grow wool forever. Eventually, they stop. They either have a set number of times they will grow wool, or the delay between 'regrows' gets longer and longer. So having sheep penned up is not an endless supply of wool. You have to keep releasing and regathering sheep.

They WILL grow wool in captivity, so an afk macro could be used. . . but it's not going to produce 42k bolts of cloth. That would happen over a very long time via many different methods.

This is neither an argument for or against the nurfing of private sheep pens. I'm just letting you know how they work. I do have private pens, as cloth is one of my main businesses right now. But I can assure you, penned sheep do not produce 42k bolts of cloth (quickly). I can also assure you that the majority of my cloth comes from wild sheep and other means. Not my pens.

One example: For an experiment, I gathered, I would guess, over 200 sheep at one point. Took me a while, but I did it. I kept them for about 10 days. I ended up letting them all go because the experiment was completed to my satisfaction. I was pulling about 32 piles of wool per day after about a week of captivity. I tried many things to try to kick start the wool growing. I would move them, I would harm them with fire field and I would retame them daily (I had to, or they would decay). It didn't help. The return from the sheep was very minimal. At the end of the experiment, I took them to a private area (rather, a very infrequently traveled area) and released them into the wild. I wanted to see if they would start spawning if they were truly wild. The next day, I returned and pulled about 27 piles from the sheep. The next day, there were far fewer sheep (about 1/3 were left) and pulled 8 piles. Day 3, they were all gone.

It got to the point where maintaining that large sheep pen was far more work than it was worth. Retaming 200+ sheep multiple times per day to keep them from decaying while pulling 30-40 piles per real life day was not worth it.

[MatronDeWinter]

You were doing several things wrong with the sheep-farming process, but I won't go into detail.

[DrFaustus]

Not the entrepreneur are you?

I believe the difference between an AFK macro versus and attended macro is simply that an attended macro requires some amount of attention...which requires the person to physically be at their desk/computer/whatever watching it at some point, and often. I find this to require a greater deal of effort compared to an afk macro. Both are performing the same task to reach the same end but require a different level of effort.

I do think that sheep farming in general is pretty lame to be honest. AFK sheep farming that is...

I do support people taking the time to gather a bunch of them up and sheer them, and honestly I don't see how going off on a dungeon crawl or PK hunt and coming back to shear them in between is much different than leaving your desk until they regrow their wool.

[Arsen]

SAY NO TO AFK SHEEP MACROING!!!!

ill start to kill every sheep outside of town from now on and mark runes to ilegal
sheep farms!

pictures will follow...

[2Cents]

I wonder why they said it was okay if the animals were tamed?

Tamed npc were considered dead npc and would respawn on Osi, i don't know here. Non tamed npc would not repop if they were taken from their location and trapped. And Osi have so many houses on their map that taking those mobs lead to problems. But then again that was one of the good thing from that period, traping magic monster to train resist and those stuff.
If some recall that was a problem with the mare spawning at terra, because you always had some smart ass using that so that nighytmare wouldn't respawn, i can't remember exactly what they did thought to make the mare not respawn, but they used that for sure, the mare spawn was always "bugged".

[Alex the Artist]

I find it interesting that not long ago, you (Matron) were reporting a bug that your penned sheep were not respawning wool. Now, you're campaigning to shut it down? When you reported the bug, you were adamant about how you used to stock sheep for their wool and it should be working here. Now you're claiming the opposite.

Why the change of heart?

[GleepGlop]

I find it interesting that not long ago, you (Matron) were reporting a bug that your penned sheep were not respawning wool. Now, you're campaigning to shut it down? When you reported the bug, you were adamant about how you used to stock sheep for their wool and it should be working here. Now you're claiming the opposite.

Why the change of heart?

I'm thinking Matron found cA doing it and got mad

[fox_phyre]

I wonder why they said it was okay if the animals were tamed?

Tamed npc were considered dead npc and would respawn on Osi, i don't know here. Non tamed npc would not repop if they were taken from their location and trapped. And Osi have so many houses on their map that taking those mobs lead to problems. But then again that was one of the good thing from that period, traping magic monster to train resist and those stuff.
If some recall that was a problem with the mare spawning at terra, because you always had some smart ass using that so that nighytmare wouldn't respawn, i can't remember exactly what they did thought to make the mare not respawn, but they used that for sure, the mare spawn was always "bugged".

trick was to stable it in t2a i believe. if you took it out of the stable they would start spawning again, but my source was kinda iffy on it.

[Sexy Smithy]

Just had to take the animal off the server it was spawned on. OSI had server lines, remember?

[Populus]

I find it interesting that not long ago, you (Matron) were reporting a bug that your penned sheep were not respawning wool. Now, you're campaigning to shut it down? When you reported the bug, you were adamant about how you used to stock sheep for their wool and it should be working here. Now you're claiming the opposite.

Why the change of heart?

No change of heart, Matron has a permit.