Crack down on unattended resource gathering.

[Brett]

It's really great that this server has no in-game donation items. I've donated hundreds of dollars to other servers and still felt like my contributions were moot. After all, what's the point of donating for a neon shroud when 1) everyone has one, and 2) it immediately labels you as a "donating newb"

I digress, what the hell is up with people bagging on those who donate? I've heard some really stupid shit like, "I can't believe you'd pay REAL MONEY for in game items LOL fag."

What the duck? Of course I'm gonna spend €25 on 50k of each reg, and here's why: I don't like farming regs, waiting for mages to restock. It takes me about an hour and a half to make €25 at work, and it would take me at least a couple weeks to get that many regs, and that's assuming I already have the gold to buy them!

Since when am I not allowed to spend money on entertainment? I paid for my computer. I paid for the game itself (long ago LOL). So, why would I not pay a few more bucks, not even enough for appetizers at some restaurants, if it can save me countless hours of doing something I don't partiularly want to do?

I'm sorry if the uo experience is brand new for you and you just want to play the game how it was meant to be played. It isn't new for me. It isn't fresh. I played on sonoma until trammel came out. Lost all my shit. I played gamers for over two years. I had one of the first floating houses, and at one point I had two private islands with castles. I've donated over $1000 to defiance. Uo is not new to me. Anything I do in game now is pretty much playing catchup.

The great thing about second age is that it has none of these donation items into which to sink countless piles of hard earned cash. Of course, the unfavorable side effect is that (most certainly?) less donation money is coming in. If the shard population continues to grow as it seems to be, the hardware will eventually need an upgrade. I have no idea what derrick does for a living, but I hope he's wealthy for all our sakes. Once I convince some friends to come over, I'll certainly be donating. I hope you all do the same. Hell, I'd have no objection to paying $10 per month.


And, here's why I don't mind pdonating even though I know I won't be getting 50k regs or a private island... Because second age is more legit and old school than other shards.

I started here macroing Provo and music at the Brit stables. Once I was at about 93 I wandered to moonglow where I accidentally stepped through a gate to destard. Bingo. I spent the next few hours getting used to my character and farming dragons. Eventually I had 20k. Hard earned gold, and all I had to do was give some of my time. Keep in mind, I wouldn't have farmed this gold if I weren't enjoying doing so.

I saw a fairly recent thread which had a castle going for 1.5m. Gold is worth something here. The only way it can be introduced into the economy is through an investment of time. This is a stark contrast to other free shards who's economy has been made nearly inexistant through years of donations introducing more and more gold into the pool with little to no time invested.

Unattended resource gathering will ruin this delicate balance. The balance I speak of is that between time and resources in an economy. For example, let's assume 50 people are willing to actively farm on the shard, this could be dragon hunting, mining, treasure maps, or even npc escorting. Of course there are gold sinks such as reg consumption and armor/wep durabilty loss, as well as idoc houses and red stat loss (remember, time is the most important commodity. In an ideal world, the devs anticipate the rate of gold sink and adjust the rate of resource acquisition accordingly. A couple things make this difficult. First, it's hard to anticipate what people will do. Even a single active guild could completey demolish the balance. The most important thing to consider, however, is the rate at which gold and other resources are being introduced into the economy.

So here's the deal. Most people aren't willing to farm more than a couple hours each day. The devs have regulated mob spawn, reagent cost, skill gain rate, armor decay, and more, all with this in mind. They anticipated (just an example here) that 2mil per hour would be harvested from the world, and roughly 1mil per hour would be destroyed through regular wear and tear. Obviously, some inflation is to be expected.

However, when some dude starts farming 10k ingots per day and selling them for half the normal price, then the value of gold just dropped! If some dude is macro farming 1mil per day, then decides to pay 10mil for a castle, then everyone else is gonna want to sell theirs for ten. Did the value of castles just rise? Nope. The value of gold just dropped.

Recruit a few active staffers dedicated to policing for unattended macroers. Don't be retarded about it. If some dude leaves to take a piss for a minute while his mining macro is running, that's really no big deal. If you watch the same dude doing the same thing for ten minutes and he is miraculously unable to respond, delete his gold. There should be at least one person on at any given time, roaming popular farm/gather spots to find afkers. I could easily set up a rails macro to lumberjack and pick up 10, maybe 20k boards per day. Set up another macro to craft and sell bows to npcs, gg. It doesn't matter if it's afl mining or afk begging. It will fuck up the delicate economic balance and then we might as well be buying mills at $5 a pop. Do something about this.
Annnndddd.....

WHOOSH

[Brett]

Typos and obviously incorrect words are the product of my iPhones terrible keyboard (or lack thereof) and it's ridiculous auto-complete feature which I love to hate.

[venox]

that is a lot of writing and could of been said a little simpler.
yet i agree!

[Brett]

that is a lot of writing and could of been said a little simpler.
yet i agree!

Sorry was testing my new bot for google optimization via content rich landing pages!

[Daolin]

hear hear!

[cletus]

Who cares? Resource macroing is not that great here because there are NPC gold limits. More supply = lower costs. There is a whole thread of butthurt vets crying about people being able to GM blacksmithing for cheaper, lol

The real problem to watch out for is monster farming. With such a low population there exists the very real problem of people just having tamers and hunting high gold monsters for quick trips to the bank and creating gold for basically nothing and with little risk (the PKs are are pretty shitty) thereby simply bringing dumptrucks of gold into the economy pretty much non stop. This is, in my opinion, a more pressing concern as while resource macroers can farm all day long they still have to go through players who can bargain for lower prices.

Lower gold drop amounts and vendor buyback rates so that it slows the input of gold into the system while also enforcing the rules for once.

[venox]

you do relies the difference between attended and unattended?
im pretty confident monster stomping is impossible without attending to it.
allowing unattended gathering skews the economies of scale.

cletus i think you need to re-read this thread
http://forum.uosecondage.com/viewtopic. ... 6&start=45

if you want to constantly talk about the effects of pvm create another thread about that. but stop derailing this issue at hand.

[tekai]

Cletus, im exactly the kind of person you describe in your above post.

every bit of gold i bring in to the economy, as i'm sure many of the farmers do, simply is dumped into housing. which is a gold sink. What are you worried i'm going to do with my wealth? give it to another wealthy guy for one of his rare items?

I don't have 15 mansions yet, but I might some day, and that doesnt interfear with your gameplay.

[Brett]

Cletus, im exactly the kind of person you describe in your above post.

every bit of gold i bring in to the economy, as i'm sure many of the farmers do, simply is dumped into housing. which is a gold sink. What are you worried i'm going to do with my wealth? give it to another wealthy guy for one of his rare items?

I don't have 15 mansions yet, but I might some day, and that doesnt interfear with your gameplay.

Your mansions would interfere with my gameplay if I was trying to place a house and the entire server is full of empty houses cuz people like you get a kick out of owning them even when you'll probably rarely use them.

[venox]

what issue are you trying to address here brett?
unattended gathering?
or how players choose to spend their loot?

[Brett]

what issue are you trying to address here brett?
unattended gathering?
or how players choose to spend their loot?

wellll the thread is about unattended gathering. I was just responding to the guys post lol... What I say is definitely true though. And, he CERTAINLY SHOULD NOT BE ABLE TO HAVE FIFTENN MANSIONS!!

the limit is 3 accounts.

[cletus]

you do relies the difference between attended and unattended?
im pretty confident monster stomping is impossible without attending to it.
allowing unattended gathering skews the economies of scale.

cletus i think you need to re-read this thread
http://forum.uosecondage.com/viewtopic. ... 6&start=45

if you want to constantly talk about the effects of pvm create another thread about that. but stop derailing this issue at hand.

My point, as always, is that with vendor gold limits resource macroing is less of an abuse than many people seem to think. PvMers will always inject more "money from nothing" into the economy than any resource macroers. I agree it needs to be cracked down on but the reality is that if the argument is against inflation the value of gold being diluted than you simply cannot ignore the effects PvM have on the economic system.

[DrFaustus]

Rule breakers will always exist.

The staff does an excellent job as-is about checking up on people who resource gather in mass. I've had first hand experience with the harassment, yea it exists.

I would suggest you play here a while longer before running to the boards making accusations and demands.

[DrFaustus]

what issue are you trying to address here brett?
unattended gathering?
or how players choose to spend their loot?

wellll the thread is about unattended gathering. I was just responding to the guys post lol... What I say is definitely true though. And, he CERTAINLY SHOULD NOT BE ABLE TO HAVE FIFTENN MANSIONS!!

the limit is 3 accounts.

No one has earned a 15 minute mansion here, that I know of.

If you're proclaiming that every castle you see is the result of some macro kiddy, you're wrong. The fast castles were and are results of group effort. The solo ones are usually from the market players/tamers.

I hold a number of houses in key locations on this server, and I can tell you that I've probably farmed...40 hours total. However, I've been here for almost a year, so your theories are wrong.

[cletus]

Cletus, im exactly the kind of person you describe in your above post.

every bit of gold i bring in to the economy, as i'm sure many of the farmers do, simply is dumped into housing. which is a gold sink. What are you worried i'm going to do with my wealth? give it to another wealthy guy for one of his rare items?

I don't have 15 mansions yet, but I might some day, and that doesnt interfear with your gameplay.

How is it dumped into housing? Houses simply are not that expensive here. With custom housing I might be inclined to at least consider your argument but who really cares if you spend 15 million on 15 castles. Then you wait a bit for prices to rise as they inevitably will as people farm more and more gold so you can sell it for 2x or 3x the price. Unless houses are nontransferrable I don't realllyyy see them as being a gold sink. More like a gold high interest savings account than a gold sink. So where else do pvmers spend their money? They buy rares but that is just transferring money from one person to the other and drives up the prices. Trust me i've seen it happen so many times on these servers. Even where EUO macroing was allowed, it was ALWAYS the PvM/Tamer population that created gold from nothing in simply staggering amounts. As I said in my post previous to this. I support enforcing the rules in place wholeheartedly but I disagree on the impact of resource macroing and the shifting of blame onto it while ignoring the real issue:

While unattended resource macroers do contribute somewhat to inflation they DO lower prices for resources and make them more widely available. However, if the argument at hand is to combat price inflation and gold devaluation than the majority of the problem should be focused on the problem that UO has always had, PvMer gold hoarding.

I am not anti PvMer either... i've just seen and dealt with this both as a player and a server admin and it simply is the truth that PvMers have a much more "destructive" effect on the economy than AFK resource macroers.