Suggestion (stealth/mount)

[Mistril]

First off I am new to this server and I would like to say that it is one of the closest to T2A I have seen to date.

But of course with T2A there were several great improvements and extreme downfalls.

From what I can see from my first login to UOSA is that 40% of the logged in characters are multi-cliented and all macroing, which is kind of depressing as that means less players to interface with.

Also in the begining of T2A hardly any of the players were 4 way GMs or more and stats were odd as it was awesome to have 70 str, but of course with T2A players needed to become either high INT and STR or STR and DEX. This is not so much a draw-back but historic as 70-85% of the players on UOSA will not pvp unless 6-7way GM which is not accurate to the better first half of T2A.

Also I know this may have been brought up a thousand times but why are we still needing mounts. We know it was a T2A thing but it was for a completely different era of the internet. Right not I have business class cable at home and a dedicated T1 & half that I play with and with horses there is little room to die and players on foot have no chance. Now I am going to get flamed for this but I truely feel mounts are not needed for this server or they need to be modded for a slower speed or stamina changes. This would help out those players who have a 20-50 ms ping difference, as on foot thise would not be noticed so much. This would also help make stealth a useable skill outside of bank thieves.

I would love to see Stealth acually have a use, because as of now you can't even run away from someone on a horse to hide, so stealthing never gets a chance.

All in all everything looks good, just would like the development of "T2A" instead of picking a few things to upgrade and staying historic on somethings. And no, this does not mean we have to do UOR, blah blah, just staying what was best for T2A as we all know T2A was NO WHERE NEAR finished and there was lots of improvements we wanted that may have been addressed in UOR but we don't want UOR we want T2A polished. =o)

Thanks goes out to UOSA Counslers who have made me feel welcome and derrick for his hard work.

[ecetres]

From what I can see from my first login to UOSA is that 40% of the logged in characters are multi-cliented and all macroing, which is kind of depressing as that means less players to interface with.

Typically speaking, at peak we have about 500ish clients online and 300 to 350 unique IP's. So a little less than 40%. Not to mention we get about 30 to 50 new players a day for the past couple weeks. So hang in there we grow quite a bit by the day!

[Senses]

It occurs to me, after readin posts like this for like the 20th time since i started playing here, that many new people judge the server based on what they see at West Britain Bank. For the life of me, I don't understand it, because its not how I play, but because it is reality, perhaps we should go out of our way to keep this one bank looking good?

Why not make W. Brit Bank a macro free zone so that when people log in, and run there to make a judgement, they only encounter actually playing characters?

[RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR]

It occurs to me, after readin posts like this for like the 20th time since i started playing here, that many new people judge the server based on what they see at West Britain Bank. For the life of me, I don't understand it, because its not how I play, but because it is reality, perhaps we should go out of our way to keep this one bank looking good?

Why not make W. Brit Bank a macro free zone so that when people log in, and run there to make a judgement, they only encounter actually playing characters?

I've got a idea that doesn't use the staff, just explosion pot bomb the shit out of Brit bank, someone should make a designated guild to kill AFK macroers in town.

[EVeee]

Do away with all unattended macroing? That would be historic, eh? That'd be keeping it real.

[Safir]

The OPs suggestion with removing the horses is a total no-go for me... I mean, I lagg like extremely, and if I don't use a mount I can't even outrun a zombie...

The following ideas that would put an end to afk macroing at the WBB are good though. Many people get their first impressions at the WBB and thus it would be good to show it off on it's best side.

[Finesse]

i would like to see stealth work on horses i beleive it to be a useful pking skill but its not something that bothers me to much.

and let me exsplain why horses should be in.

when you ping over 100 your lag doesnt hit untill 8/10 tiles as you get an intial packet burst when moving. someone pinging under 100 will always catch up to you though as after the intial burst they will be moving 1 tile closer every 10 tiles. the benifit you have on horses is that your turning is also at a faster rate than off horse so its harder for the person with less ping to predict your movement. also when your off horse and ping over 100 it takes longer for you to stop and cast a spell than someone who pings less thus if you hit recalling when your running away the person chaseing can cast there spell later than you ie weaken and disturb you everytime.

as a side note recall should take longer to cast

[Mistril]

It occurs to me, after readin posts like this for like the 20th time since i started playing here, that many new people judge the server based on what they see at West Britain Bank. For the life of me, I don't understand it, because its not how I play, but because it is reality, perhaps we should go out of our way to keep this one bank looking good?

Why not make W. Brit Bank a macro free zone so that when people log in, and run there to make a judgement, they only encounter actually playing characters?

Acually I started out in Moonglow and Vesper. Both are just as bad. =o) And sorry to be redundent to other posts, it was not my intention to beat a dead horse.

[Mistril]

i would like to see stealth work on horses i beleive it to be a useful pking skill but its not something that bothers me to much.

and let me exsplain why horses should be in.

when you ping over 100 your lag doesnt hit untill 8/10 tiles as you get an intial packet burst when moving. someone pinging under 100 will always catch up to you though as after the intial burst they will be moving 1 tile closer every 10 tiles. the benifit you have on horses is that your turning is also at a faster rate than off horse so its harder for the person with less ping to predict your movement. also when your off horse and ping over 100 it takes longer for you to stop and cast a spell than someone who pings less thus if you hit recalling when your running away the person chaseing can cast there spell later than you ie weaken and disturb you everytime.

as a side note recall should take longer to cast

I don't know how much the horse acually helps out with a lesser ping as I have several networks to use from as I am the head of an IT department for a company spanning several countries so I yes I am bad and play UO at work and on several networks. So as for a horse helping out with lag that much doesn't seem realistic because if you are running along someone with a 30-55ms ping vs 300-500ms ping the horse doesn't seem to help out. Granted on foot you can see this difference as well but at least the person would not be able to bounce in and out screens at a time. I literially had a 30 ms ping bouncing from 30-100 ms ping and I watching players bounce half screens which is redicious for any warrior to fight against. Granted my taste is with a hybrid of many flavors.

Also on a side note whats with the clothing / armor issues? I do not remember not being able to kilt with bone nor long pants with bone leggings on.

*I guess I should check out this RunUO code before I complain because I don't know what you can and can not do. From the scripts I have seen it looks very flexable*

I agree macroing in town or in your house should be not allow for skill gain as this is not T2A friendly. Also correct me if I am wrong but wasn't UOA not completely legal for the better half of T2A because I remmeber people getting banned for it. With this being said no last target and etc made for interesting pvping. I know its not realistic not to allow Razor, etc but that would be truely interesting.

Onto the mounts again, I still feel they are unneeded. If foot travel stamina was increased then horse travel would not be needed as the playing field would be level.

**Also isn't there an option for frame skipping in UO to help out poor ms ping, this might help people foot traveling... Not sure if that stuff works right anyways.

[Mistril]

The OPs suggestion with removing the horses is a total no-go for me... I mean, I lagg like extremely, and if I don't use a mount I can't even outrun a zombie...

The following ideas that would put an end to afk macroing at the WBB are good though. Many people get their first impressions at the WBB and thus it would be good to show it off on it's best side.

What internet connection are you using over there in Sweden? I visit there several times a year in Bromma and my internet gets a decient connection to the US. I have yet to test it out on uosecondage.com.

[Safir]

The OPs suggestion with removing the horses is a total no-go for me... I mean, I lagg like extremely, and if I don't use a mount I can't even outrun a zombie...

The following ideas that would put an end to afk macroing at the WBB are good though. Many people get their first impressions at the WBB and thus it would be good to show it off on it's best side.

What internet connection are you using over there in Sweden? I visit there several times a year in Bromma and my internet gets a decient connection to the US. I have yet to test it out on uosecondage.com.

I have no issue with my internet connection at all, I'm on a 100mbit/s line, I'm laggin' cuz I'm using an "antique" computer (not by choice btw). Nevertheless, removing mounts would slow both me down and perhaps others that have brand new computers but slower connections, compared to those who live much closer to the server. While it's true that the majority of the player base here on UOSA is mostly North American, there still are people from all over the world playing.

[Kaivan]

Unfortunately this is a change that steers away from accuracy. The argument of mechanical hardware has been brought up several times in recent suggestions, but the reality is that because a majority of people used slower computers and internet connections did not guarantee that all players used slower connections. Given that as the case, we can't start making changes to the mechanics of the game in order to adjust for the gameplay differences that a portion of the T2A population sees between their current experiences and the experience that they had during T2A, because the experience for any given player are always going to be different from the next player, and trying to capture the feel of the game for any one person will inevitably cause problems for another player in that same respect.

[Senses]

"It's within our technical means to create unique events and quests within the game which are "in the spirit" of that which was done by OSI during the era, but was beyond the technical ability of that time. Most of the events run off map and as such do not effect "normal gameplay", they help bring the players together as is essential for shard with a population much smaller (to say the least) than the production shards of the era"

These are Derrick's words from another post but I think they apply here. It shows two things.

1) the spirit of the era was important at one point to this server. Whether that has changed or not I don't know.

2) At that point in time you were willing to stray from era accuracy, even on a technical level, when the outcome of not doing so was unhealthy to the general population of this shard, and in as much different than production shards of the era.

[Derrick]

I don't believe we should modify normal game-play mechanics for the "spirit" of the game; Events are clearly very different in this regard. This has been proposed by others as well, that if we have events that aren't accurate why can't we have <insert inaccurate mechaniic here> as well.

Somewhat off topic and rambling here but:
To me a lot of these suggestions are black and white, we're going for mechanical accuracy. Back in 1999 not everyone had lag, some had incredible connections then (not me), but everyone who was on a 14.4 modem playing UO prayed for a T1 connection to get rid of the lag, well now we've all got much better connections, but our goal is to reproduce the accurate mechanics, not the accurate lag. Lag is something anyone can opt into if they desire, but to impose lag on your opponent is certainly not in the spirit of T2A either, as with my crappy connection it was always the guy on the T1 that got me.

I don't intend to redesign the game to be accurate to a specific level of lag, everyone's latency varied, and to some extent still does.