The Definition of Unattended Resource Gathering

[Faust]

Hemperor is wrong about things 99% of the time, but he has a point unlike most cases this time around. If I knew that it's legal to run a resource gathering rail macro while I was pvping or playing in general I would have been doing it a long time ago. Now that this issue has been brought to the attention to the majority of the population you can expect to see a lot more people out there doing this.

[RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR]

I just don't like judging people's gaming techniques. You are just upset a small minority found a way to make quick cash. Good for them! You are being a uo nazi hemporer.

Hemperor is jealous?

I don't think so, he has been playing here long enough not to care about any resource in the game, I'm sure he already has everything you could need in UO (except pvp skillz lol). I think he is just fed up with the fact that the most efficient way to get anything in this game is to set a script and watch it, or not watch it. Right now it is funner to play just about anything else than watch or not watch your razor script, as opposed to going out and having fun playing UO even if you're a newbie.

Of course it seems most people don't think early game UO is fun anymore because everyone just wants to macro to 7x and then PVP or Grief or whatever is there fancy, but I'm willing to bet that a lot of people (like me) do like early game UO they just do it because not doing it puts you at a huge disadvantage to other players.

[Faust]

This problem conflicts with game play too. People can instead set a script for cash flow instead of going to dungeons and making the cash there. Most of these people that runs these scripts are too lazy to resrouce gather under normal circumstances and would be farming the gold in dungeons. There are so many cause and effects with this problem it's ridiculous.

[Generic]

I am pretty much in the same place as Pristiq. I first joined the shard excited to get my characters macroing and building skills.

I wrote a script to auto-chop logs, made all the money I needed to get started and macroed up a Provoker to make cash.

Since then, I've been bored.

[Pristiq]

I have officially renounced all razor macros, with exception to:

Macros possible through UO options (LastItem, Say, etc.)
Sometimes UO likes to get funny with its macros, and this way my macros can be used on all my accounts. And no, I will not use loop.

Guards macros.
I still live with my mom (last day of high school May 15th!!) and sometimes I'm called away from the computer. These have become a necessity.


I say we start a movement. Get other people to pledge not to use any macros they feel they shouldn't.

Hey, look: a topic...

http://forum.uosecondage.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=6460

[platypus]

I gotta agree with hemp on this one. IMO, if you're logged onto three accounts, only one should be resource gathering, and that's the character you're currently playing. There's nothing wrong with macroing skills, all it does is save people time.

However, if half the people on the shard are running 3 resource gatherers all the time, ingots/armor/cloth/boards/arrows all become nearly worthless. This happened a long time ago here. I remember starting out here with my blacksmith and MANUALLY gathering all of the ingots needed to GM smithing. This took the majority of my first month here, and I played quite a bit. After I GMed smithing and tried to sell my GM armor and weapons, I hardly made anything. Even with a fully stocked vendor 2 screens away from Britain, I made about 1-2k a day. On OSI, my main was also a smith, and I remember repairing peoples' armor for gold constantly and selling armor/weps for about twice what they sell for here.

Now, I just buy my ingots from people. I could either actively play a tamer or bard and make about 100k an hour farming, or manually mine ingots and get about 10k worth of ingots an hour. If any of you are on IRC after Derrick/GMs go to bed, theres constantly ingots for sale for 5-7gp each. This is WAY too cheap and shows how many rail/afk miners are active here. Its already nearly impossible for smiths/crafters to make even 1/5 as much as a tamer or bard, simply because of the extreme excess of resources on this shard.

[cletus]

My personal point of view is that "semiattended" resource macroing is undeniable constant in UO. Look, when I played OSI I used to mine/macro with penny rolls on my keys while I watched TV, gimme a break. Just because the shard allows multiple accounts and razor makes it easier doesn't make it less era accurate.

The real problem is that players can use more than 1 or 2 accounts. 3 accounts is just basically an excuse to inflate online #s with macroers. So you're looking at the system in a flawed manner. It isn't the actual resource marcoers that need to be rebuked, rather it is the number of simultaneous clients that need to be changed.

From a former admin/staffer on UO shards point of view, the staff here could actually enforce the rules rather than the current do nothing policy that seems to be in use. It is fairly easy to pop up and ask if someone is attended. Yes, this is easily circumvented through EUO checks for IDs and journal checks. However, this would still catch most violators that do not have script editing experience. The truth of it is only a small % of UO players can go beyond the script kiddy method of downloading scripts to gather resources. I don't really see the big fuss as long as the person as at/around the computer but if they are leaving it on all night long then i'd agree that if the staff has the rule in place it should be enforced.

This is really much ado about nothing imo as your primary target of complaint, vlast, has stated that he does actually attend his macros in the traditional definition of the word. Anyways, the prime thing wrong with this type of argument is that the reason this even exists is that through a combination of lax enforcement and relaxed IP restrictions the environment has been created that fosters this type of play.

[nightmare]

I voted no. My reason is that there are 3 accounts you can use and if you were rich enough to have 3 accounts back in the day you could macro the same way. The gm would show up give you so much time to respond and if you did in that time you were good it didnt matter if you were on another account as long as you were on the comp and checking up on the others. The whole game we play now is whacked with eveyone having 3 accounts from Pking to farming and just plain skill gain its all easier now so we have to live with that fact or take away 2 of the accounts and everyone just have 1!!!

[Hemperor]

I voted no. My reason is that there are 3 accounts you can use and if you were rich enough to have 3 accounts back in the day you could macro the same way. The gm would show up give you so much time to respond and if you did in that time you were good it didnt matter if you were on another account as long as you were on the comp and checking up on the others. The whole game we play now is whacked with eveyone having 3 accounts from Pking to farming and just plain skill gain its all easier now so we have to live with that fact or take away 2 of the accounts and everyone just have 1!!!

You didn't read the whole topic, or at least original post, did you?

With your kind of mindset, every single player might as well go out and do this...everyone will have hundreds of thousands of resources and Derrick will join the UOGamers empire.

[RoadKill]

The biggest problem ALL free shards face, and will ALWAYS face if they are aiming for any sense of accuracy to any era is the fact that Britannia is a BIG map for the amount of people playing on it. There are way to many mountains and trees for the amount of people interested in farming resources.

There is no easy fix, but what is suggested in this thread is a damn good patch on the sinking ship.

[Jiggo]

This is more of an general observation of the shard as a whole and its mentality about era accuracy, but it fits in very well with this discussion.

Alot of things that were done back in the day were not legal to do. If you got caught, you stood a good chance of getting banned. With this in mind, many players opted not to do said things. On this server, it seems the mentality is "you COULD do that back then, so we will just allow it altogether". I think this is somewhat flawed in its reasoning. Just because bugs and certain functions of old illegal programs can be reproduced for era accuracy, does not mean they should be legal to do, and we end up with somewhat of a paradox. It removes the checks and balances on what kept things from being so widespread.

Yes, you could run 2 accounts at once, but if they caught you, you could get banned. So assuming everyone had 2 or hell, even 3 accounts back in the day, alot of people would not use them at the same because:

#1 They didnt know programs like multiUO existed
#2 They didnt want to get caught

Neither of those reasons exist on this shard to not multi client. Its legal to use, and everyone knows how to do it. Thats like saying we should allow speedhacking because plenty of people used to do it. We should also implement a variety of dupe methods and let players have at them. Nothing like reliving the good old days, huh?

This could go off on a long argument about harassment as well, and things like griefing, which are perfectly legal here, but on OSI you could actually be banned for doing some of these things, as people often were. Thats a whole other argument, however.

Bottom line is:
If you remove the consequences of doing something, you remove the era accuracy.

[Wise]

The real problem is that players can use more than 1 or 2 accounts. 3 accounts is just basically an excuse to inflate online #s with macroers. So you're looking at the system in a flawed manner. It isn't the actual resource marcoers that need to be rebuked, rather it is the number of simultaneous clients that need to be changed.
.

I agree, its not the actual macroing, which has been discussed to death about other skills & character builds but the fact that you can play 3 - 4 of them at one time, I also remember semi-afk mining back on OSI using heavy objects on the keyboard its one of my fondest memories of the day, but the fact the account limit era accuracy factor will never be reached it would seem reasonable to point out the potential ways to flaws of this system, most notably is the fact that you can have 3 or 4 accounts loged in going at once but chance are you can only watch 1 MAYBE 2 if your lucky and have 2 monitors, but I certainly agree with the fact that if a player types on his keyboard and it will only type in one client, thus you are AFK in the other 2 - 3, but here is a basic list of fix's that are era accurate for this problem,

#1. Account Limits - when players only had 1 account they couldn't/wouldn't want to spend their day semi-afk mining and if they did it was because that's the profession they choose and often mined it themselves at that point

#2. Macro Aids - Things like EUO & Razor were far and few between, while they did exist getting caught using them was immediate ban hax, so even the players that ran these programs paid pretty close attention to their macros, Razor is NOT era accurate, banning this program/now allowing log in through it would also solve this

Less so era-accurate for so era-feeling

#1 AFK macro pop up, while this did not exist in OSI it was because they were staffed 24/7 this is not the case here, staff doesent have time to watch everything going on, but you dont necessaryly have to have a pop up, have a scripted GM NPC macro bot pop in and ask a few random set questions, if the player doesent reply they get jailed.

#2 Stricter punishment & redefining - Redefining what AFK really is (to not main client/not top client) and putting in place a harsher punishment would likely be enough to detur mostly people, Jailing a AFK macroers and after 5 minutes of none responce ban that account, players (since there is only apperently a 3 account limit) should be crippled/upset enough from having 1 accout likely full of characters banned to be a deturant for them in the future.

#3 Derrick once mentioned it was not a big thing to limit how many clients can log in per IP so if players caught AFK macroing under the new definition of so have their account limits turned down to 1 account on that IP, and if that player is caught cercumventing this they will be banned.


The deflation in Ingot price has been rediculus when I started playing six months ago players were buying Iron Ore for 17gp per and Ingots at 8gp per, as months have passed the price has droped off rapidly from 8gp to 7, 6, 5, 4gp per ingot, the price drop 50% in six months if thats not deflation I dont know what is...

the fact remains that there is MORE ingots and LESS demand for them then six months ago, and with more players now then we had then, this can only mean that the ingot market has been falsly inflated, this hinders not only ingot price, but crafting prices as well, GM crafted weapons, GM armour, House add-on deeds etc all the priced drop significantly for these as ingot prices fall, and as GM Blacksmiths rise, it takes at least 50k ingots to GM smithing what used to be a 400k+ investment has become a 200k investment making it much for appealing...

also, there seems to be alot of flaming/negativity towards the op, and this is a serious subject, while Hemp might not have the most serious reputation, personal attacks/flames/decreiting this toped based on who raised the issue is not only a sign of a weak minded individual but SHOULD NOT be tollerated by Moderators.

[Freeza]

is there anyway to make uo assist work with the shard instead of razr? I'm pretty sure that would solve this issue. Prob much easier said than done.

[Daolin]

The ingot price never really dropped to 4gp. The lowest average real price was 5gp. Since then, i've actually seen the average ingot price jump back up to 6gp. A good sign indeed.

[cletus]

So, Is watching multiple windows considered "AFK" for any non highlighted window or not? I err on the side that it is infact, not. Mostly because i've played quite some time with multiple windows on freeshards and it isn't like UO requires hawklike attention to one window to some ridiculous degree. We can all multitask, lol.

Three clients online per IP is the problem but the issue with that is that it might dramatically decrease the online #'s everyone likes to boast about. I'd conservatively guess about 30-50 of those clients are just the idle/macroing 3rd clients... That isn't a big drop and dropping the max number of clients down to 2 would help out in combating this problem

If unattended resource gathering is illegal and there are punishments, police it.
If you can't police it, hire counselors to help
If the counselors can't help I suggest the staff make more efficient use of their online/ingame time or script tools to track resource gathering.. Here's a hint.. NO ONE lumberjacks for 14 hour stretches attended.

So really, its lack of enforcement rather than needing fancy tools and statistic gathering.