UO Second Age

Some concrete evidence about the speed at which dragons and wyrms attacked:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.game ... ort&lnk=nl&

My average ping is 200ms on a dialup and usually if I am
targetted by a dragon I am toast. I can fight gimps, I can fight mages, I
can't outrun dragons usually, even on a lag-free (for me) night. I NEVER
can outrun wyrms, they teleport across the screen.

To remind people "teleport" doesn't mean the spell, it means how they appear to skip frames as they run at you. Watch a balron on our shard to see it in action. Hellcats of course don't have any magery, but still "teleported":

Something that much fun has got
to be illegal. Those hell cats I picked up, they teleport/hit faster then a
harm wand.

It isn't every time with every bear or every time with every dragon. It does
seem to be every time with hell cats though. Some people have apparently got
the bug working everytime they want to use it.

I have no idea how to translate a 200ms ping into a running speed, but there you have it if any of you do.

Same conversation:

I actually ran in to a uber-dragon a couple of weeks ago (not a wyrm).
Now I'm a LPB'er (most of the time) and the dang thing could move
nearly as fast as I could gallop. Yeesh ...
Most dragons are as slow as molasses.

Note "nearly as fast as I could gallop". So we know we're talking about a horse here. I have no idea what made this dragon so special... maybe someone doing the "a kill", "a follow" trick?

In any case... taken together, it's pretty clear that a dragon could nearly catch someone on a 200ms ping and a horse, and a wyrm could keep up with them just fine. How this translates to us and our 40ms pings or whatever, I have no idea.

More guesses:

I don't tame, but do escort some, and I often see what I think Q meant.
Often when I get about a screen away from the escrotee the escortee
seems to "teleport" closer to me. I seem to recall tamers complaining
in the past that pets were too slow to be effective, and I believe OSI
added to the code so that if a "follower" (pet/escortee/etc.) gets too
far back (more than one screen away?) they teleport the follower to
within a certain distance (6-7 paces?) so the follower can "catch up".
I have a decent system and good connect usually, so I don't think what I
see is due to a graphics problem where the follower really crosses the
intervening space and my system is too slow to render that. Add in all
the complaints about the "teleporting" pets, and the chance of it being
just our imagination is low.

So, the first quotes are talking only about tamed dragons or also about wild ones? I understood that this would affect only tamed dragons attacking people, is it correct?

Sorry, yes for context, it was a thread about stealing that kind of got threadjacked into a discussion about Order/Chaos tactics and how some O/C players were using dragons. So they're talking about pets in all of these situations.

I don't personally recall much about the speed of wild dragons and wyrms, because I'd either paralyze them and then tame them, or beat the heck out of them to like 5% health and tame them, in which case they don't move anywhere near full speed.

Awesome thread mike. I really hope Derrick considers changing this. Wyrm's and Dragon's move way to slow when on the attack command. Even follow I feel is to slow.

Please change.

White wyrm speed is absolutely wrong right now.

I decided to tame one for the hell of it the other day and was shocked to see how they were no longer quick like they used to be here. Wyrms should be running at least the same speed that balrons are able to run here. Running with UOE's fastwalk on a horse at the pace of 0 ping back in the day was the only possible way to get away from a player's white wyrm. However, even that was proven to be difficult from time to time in narrow or closed places. The way their current speed value is right now is not right at all.

Dragons were definitely slower than wyrms based on my recollection.

I only recall wyrms having the fast walk.

Phoenix also had this which is why it was pretty much always only farmed with tamers..

I thought it was said after some patch that all move speeds were set to a minimum seconds per tile and that anyone that could possibly ever argue against it would be considered stupid.

Some of these changes to tamers seem to be published on a "take my word for it" basis. Then someone throws out some formula that only a minority understand in the first place. Tells anyone without a formula to stfu and they are wrong. I remember someone saying speed was messed up and then "someone" outright told em they were wrong. 4 or 5 months later, we are told it's not right.

I can't help but wonder how much other stuff is messed up in this manner.


*edited to drop name blame *

Actually, I think he was arguing that they were that darn fast.

Regardless, we now have math, so it's academic. Figure out a way to make wyrms outrun horsed players with a 200+ ping (as for less than that, I guess we don't know... they may well have outrun people with a 30 ping as well), and dragons to outrun horsed players with a 200+ ping and 1% packet loss ("moderate" lag, from how I'd describe it... 2% was "bad" lag and 3% was unplayable, if I remember my UOTrace tests and personal recollection), and you have era-accurate speed. Apparently small hellcats were as fast as dragons too.

And btw, on a random note, birds on UOSA move like freaking silver snakes. They may very well be one of the fastest animals.

GuardianKnight, have not the slightest clue wtf you are talking about... I have always maintained my argument that wyrms had godlike speed and always restate my recollection of running from them with UOE's fastwalk. Derrick or Kaivan in the past has made comments about a speed cap. However, if Balrons can move that fast under that cap than so can White Wyrms.

GuardianKnight wrote:Some of these changes to tamers seem to be published on a "take my word for it" basis.

I have to wonder if the current follow speed wasn't pushed to give PvPers/PKs an advantage against tamers. I don't know because I wasn't there. All I know is that I feel defenseless unless someone is stupid enough to stand next to me the entire time and let my pets eat them.

The fact remains that tamed creatures should not move slower than their wild counterparts, they should move faster when they are in follow mode. This is the most obvious with frenzied ostards. If you try and walk while mounted with a wild one chasing you, it has absolutely no problem keeping up and pecking your face in. Tame it and it moves as slow as every other tamed creature on this shard.

A pet commanded to follow you should, at the very least, be able to keep up with you if you are walking while mounted. If you have more than 2 pets, then it becomes a problem because they should be tripping over each other and they have to be commanded fairly often to keep following you.