UO Second Age

Ghosting is NOT just used for PvPing. Its also used for monopolizing spawns of rare items and I have heard of people using it to log when people visit their homes so that they can prepare for scamming them.

Now, we can argue till we're blue about era accuracy and mechanics...but even that doesn't really matter to me. I think it was possible with era mechanics, but it was not era accurate as no one had enough time to waste like that back then.

I think it is not good for the health of the shard and this can be based off many things from actual testimonials of players on this shard to the implementations of rules on a large number of free shards and OSI/EA's own shards. Many have taken actions to curtail ghosting because it is detrimental to a shard's health.

I have been finding more and more tamers lately complaining about not being able to find nightmares. I thought this was nonsense at first as I could find one almost every single day if I actually tried and told them as much. I then would tell them exactly where to find a nightmare to help them. They would still keep coming back to me. I'd tell them the best times. They'd still keep coming back. So, I started checking it out. People are ghost cam'ing the nightmare spawns now.

Not only that, i've found them ghosting the rares spawns. When the "timer" on them is about up on the higher-end rares...low and behold, a ghost is suddenly hanging out checking it out.

Get rid of ghost cams...make someone get a stealth/hider. Ghosting is lame...
It IS accurate mechanically, but in practice it is NOT era accurate. I'm not sure exactly how to go about it, though.

Perhaps if your corpse is gone for 15 minutes, you get zipped to a pre-determined "Junk" spot. Not town...not a healer...nothing helpful unless they specifically use the help function, but to a univerally accepted junk spot that no one would care about. Idunno, I just think it is lame that new players spend hours and days working up their skills to get a 'nightmare' or a spawning rare or whatever the item or thing is and they have to 'lose' to a scripting ghoster.

At least make the "ghoster" be a "stealther". Is this a "End-Game" type issue? No....but it does give the shard a bad face.

Sexy Smithy wrote: Perhaps if your corpse is gone for 15 minutes, you get zipped to a pre-determined "Junk" spot. Not town...not a healer...nothing helpful unless they specifically use the help function, but to a univerally accepted junk spot that no one would care about. Idunno, I just think it is lame that new players spend hours and days working up their skills to get a 'nightmare' or a spawning rare or whatever the item or thing is and they have to 'lose' to a scripting ghoster.

This would be an inaccurate implementation that will not be considered.

The only possible solution for something like this would be a policy decision that disallowed afk macroing with a ghost.

you really wasted your time typing all that.. the same arguments will be made over and over again and nothing will change.

sure, mechanically it may have been possible to ghost with multiple accounts in-era, but not many people had more than one account. dual clienting on 56k aside....
(hey, when did the first multi uo come out? not possible to ghost until it was possible to start a 2nd client)

but whatever.. even if some policy was made about it Choppa and his EUO would just tell him when someone was on screen so he would switch back to his ghost.. goes for anyone else ghosting also .. its hard to believe that groups of PKs that ghost spots are actively watching a location to see when someone is there to go through all the while being busy doing other stuff at the same time... suuuurreee its not an automated alert.

I think the solution to all our problems is pretty simple. I dont know if 3 accounts per player is era accurate, but setting a max of 1 account per IP would solve everything. No more ghosting. More housing spaces. AFK resourse macroing reduced. The problem is that it was already discussed a million of times and probably wont change...

One account per IP is not the solution and the reason behind this has been stated a million times fold.

If I'm remembering correct, on OSI nightmare spawns were locked down by tamers stabling them in T2A, not letting another one spawn until they were ready to take it out & go tame a new one.

Also, we have what? 3 or 4 staff members that do this as a hobby? As much as they'd love to teleport around moving ghosts, i'm sure they have something better to do.

Downs wrote:Also, we have what? 3 or 4 staff members that do this as a hobby? As much as they'd love to teleport around moving ghosts, i'm sure they have something better to do.

If a no multi-clienting ghosting policy was put in place it could easily fix this problem. There are ways to create code for this based on multiple connections and conditions on the ground/in-game to notify the staff much like there is for afk resource gathering. First offense a warning, second 24 hour ban, third offense 48 hour ban, fourth offense 72 hours, fifth perma ban. Yes, EasyUO would pose a problem to this but there are also ways to get around EUO through some creative means. There is a policy for afk resource gathering in place and there is no reason one could not be crafted for this problem too.

While I empathize with Smithy on one hand, on the other I know that enforcing ethics through mechanics rarely works and generally only prompts people to discover new loopholes to continue the same behavior. Often with more resentment than before.

There would have to be a rule change made.

Faust wrote:First offense a warning, second 24 hour ban, third offense 48 hour ban, fourth offense 72 hours, fifth perma ban.

UOSA does seem to run on a "five strikes and you're out" policy.

Ya know, ya'd have to institute it on a per creature/item basis so as to not allow ghosts to block all spawns, but the spawn of a particular creature our item could be tied to ghosts...or even players for that matter if you wanted to avoid people camping rarer items/spawns.

If ghost/player, no spawn.

Then again, people could just block the spawns in general that way and drive prices up. There'd still have to be some kind of kick to the ghost associated with it...

Sexy Smithy wrote:Ya know, ya'd have to institute it on a per creature/item basis so as to not allow ghosts to block all spawns, but the spawn of a particular creature our item could be tied to ghosts...or even players for that matter if you wanted to avoid people camping rarer items/spawns.

If ghost/player, no spawn.

Then again, people could just block the spawns in general that way and drive prices up. There'd still have to be some kind of kick to the ghost associated with it...

I can pretty much guarantee you that someone would camp a ghost at each location for no other reason than spite as there is no era accurate mechanic to transport them elsewhere.

Idunno, i'd like to see a "camping" algorithm developed. If you're ghost is "camping," kick them to a random junk location and then offline. If repeatedly abused, flag they're accounts so that GM's can take a look at their "Practices" just in case they are not in fact ghost caming items.

I know of people that have they're log files saved to their computer...VERY easy to do. They have a web script that parses said log file looking for a keyword. If said key word appears, it throws a pop-up on a lil program they have installed and running anywhere they are....or they even have AJAX web pages that will pop-up on a web-page telling them. This is EASY to do for anyone with minimal coding experience. I have watched people do this in the past.


Please don't let UOSA become this kind of gaming. Risk-free gain is lame.

Sexy Smithy wrote:Idunno, i'd like to see a "camping" algorithm developed. If you're ghost is "camping," kick them to a random junk location and then offline. If repeatedly abused, flag they're accounts so that GM's can take a look at their "Practices" just in case they are not in fact ghost caming items.

I know of people that have they're log files saved to their computer...VERY easy to do. They have a web script that parses said log file looking for a keyword. If said key word appears, it throws a pop-up on a lil program they have installed and running anywhere they are....or they even have AJAX web pages that will pop-up on a web-page telling them. This is EASY to do for anyone with minimal coding experience. I have watched people do this in the past.


Please don't let UOSA become this kind of gaming. Risk-free gain is lame.

The problem with your solution is not that the coding is difficult, the problem with your solution is:

1) It isn't era accurate.
2) You're asking too much from a volunteer staff who already have enough to do.

How about this simple modification:

make it so that ghosts can only see:

• 1. Statics;
  1. NPC Healers;
  2. live PCs with 80+ Anat & Healing;
  3. live PCs with {whatever skill-level, TBD} Spirit Speaking;

if this is too harsh, allow ghosts to see things only within a specified radius of the above.

I concede that this is not era-accurate; dualboxing isn't era-accurate either.

SS