Pet Guarding, Orneriness, and White Wyrm speed.

[Roser]

Note: The issues I am about to bring up have not been acknowledged as proper changes, I am therefore under the assumption that these mechanics have been broken unintentionally.

Pet Guarding

I tested the pet guard function today with three lesser pets (bear, cougar, and wolf) my findings are as follows.

The initial guard command works great, when I attack a mob, or a mob attacks me the three pets do their job and attack said mob. After the mob dies, usually one or two of the pets (sometimes all) will forget to guard the tamer and begin to wander aimlessly, the pet(s) that do remember to guard have their follow speed reduced dramatically even tho their health and stamina are full. If the tamer issues a new guard command the pets will begin to move at the usual guarding speed as well as guard.

This seems to be broken considering not long ago pets would remember to guard the tamer no matter what, so long as both the tamer and pets remain in range of each other. Also the speed was never cut down.


Orneriness

There seems to be a large inconsistency going on with orneriness. This can only really be seen in high end tames like dragons, white wyrms, nightmares, frenzied etc. I tested this with 3 dragons and my results are as follows...

I took three dragons from out of my stable and used them for about ten minutes. In theory I expect all three dragons to have equal orneriness when giving them similar commands (guard, attack, stop, etc) but this does not happen. After a short time (about 4 or 5 mins) one of the dragons will be very difficult to command, one will be moderate, and the other will accept commands with ease. I cannot tell exactly why this is happening given the fact that they are all being commanded to do the same thing and are all well fed and happy.

Why is it that one dragon will get hungry/disobedient way faster then another? This seems to be wrong.

Also on a side note, if you leave a dragon out to wander for a long time, let him get very hungry, then begin to spam commands to him (about 200 times) I would expect him to become un-loyal, however no matter how hard you try, they just wont run away.


White Wyrm Speed

Actually these critters are working quite good except for one thing, and that is the attack speed. A while ago a patch went in that allowed a tame white wyrm to attack at the same speed as a wild one does. The follow/guard speed is the same as any other pet, however the attack speed has been reduced back to what it was pre patch.

Is this intentional or should white wyrms be tele-walking and attacking at high speed like they did before?


Thanks for taking the time to read this, and tamers please comment/add to this.

[GuardianKnight]

Note: The issues I am about to bring up seem to have not been acknowledged as proper changes, I am therefore under the assumption that these mechanics have been broken unintentionally.

Pet Guarding

I tested the pet guard function today with three lesser pets (bear, cougar, and wolf) my findings are as follows.

The initial guard command works great, when I attack a mob, or a mob attacks me the three pets do their job and attack said mob. After the mob dies, usually one or two of the pets (sometimes all) will forget to guard the tamer and begin to wander aimlessly, the pet(s) that do remember to guard have their follow speed reduced dramatically even tho their health and stamina are full. If the tamer issues a new guard command the pets will begin to move at the usual guarding speed.

This seems to be broken considering not long ago pets would remember to guard the tamer no matter what, so long as both the tamer and pets remain in range of each other. Also the speed was never cut down.


Orneriness

There seems to be a large inconsistency going on with orneriness. This can only really be seen in high end tames like dragons, white wyrms, nightmares, frenzied etc. I tested this with 3 dragons and my results are as follows...

I took three dragons form out of my stable and used them for about ten minutes. In theory I expect all three dragons to have equal orneriness when giving them similar commands (guard, attack, stop, etc) but this does not happen. After a short time (about 4 or 5 mins) one of the dragons will be very difficult to command, one will be moderate, and the other will accept commands with ease. I cannot tell exactly why this is happening given the fact that they are all being commanded to do the same thing and are all well fed and happy.

Why is it that one dragon will get hungry/disobedient way faster then another? This seems to be wrong.

Also on a side note, if you leave a dragon out to wander for a long time, let him get very hungry, then begin to spam commands to him (about 200 times) I would expect him to become un-loyal, however no matter how hard you try, they just wont run away.


White Wyrm Speed

Actually these critters are working quite good except for one thing, and that is the attack speed. A while ago a patch went in that allowed a tame white wyrm to attack at the same speed an wild one does. The follow/guard speed is the same as any other pet, however the attack speed has been reduced back to what it was pre patch.

Is this intentional or should white wyrms be tele-walking and attacking at high speed like they did before?


Thanks for taking the time to read this, and tamers please comment/add to this.

I tested the things rose mentioned and I too am having these problems. It felt like every 2 commands I would have to feed 1 of my dragons.

The guard command basically stops the second your pet attacks or gets attacked.


Also noticing that pets feel sluggish when i target things with them. It's like they have to take a second to think about it rather than just doing it. They shouldn't hesitate so much to attack someone targeting me. When i say "A kill" It should do it instantly, not pause for a second and then walk slowly to them.

[Sandro]

I agree, white wyrm attack speed should be the same as its passive/movement speed.

I thought this was fixed? Ninja revert patch?

[fortin]

1. All guard me is broken. Confirmed.

2. I had three dragons out this weekend and experienced similar things as Rose described. I noticed one dragon out of my bunch was being a little cranky for no good reason. Every command would take two tries. Even after feeding him the first command would always fail while the other dragons would happily listen. This happened over and over again.

3. I will test out the WW later tonight but even tame ones should have increased attack speed like the wild ones(tele walking).

[Mikel123]

Orneriness

There seems to be a large inconsistency going on with orneriness. This can only really be seen in high end tames like dragons, white wyrms, nightmares, frenzied etc. I tested this with 3 dragons and my results are as follows...

I took three dragons from out of my stable and used them for about ten minutes. In theory I expect all three dragons to have equal orneriness when giving them similar commands (guard, attack, stop, etc) but this does not happen. After a short time (about 4 or 5 mins) one of the dragons will be very difficult to command, one will be moderate, and the other will accept commands with ease. I cannot tell exactly why this is happening given the fact that they are all being commanded to do the same thing and are all well fed and happy.

Why is it that one dragon will get hungry/disobedient way faster then another? This seems to be wrong.

Also on a side note, if you leave a dragon out to wander for a long time, let him get very hungry, then begin to spam commands to him (about 200 times) I would expect him to become un-loyal, however no matter how hard you try, they just wont run away.

Let's say pet happiness is from 0 to 100.

100 = Wonderfully Happy
90-99 = Extremely Happy
80-89 = Very Happy
etc.

Giving your pet a piece of food raises their happiness to 100.

Succeeding in a command raises their happiness by 1. Failing a command lowers it by 5. (Numbers are approximate, but I'm pretty sure these numbers are correct... note that I believe on the demo or some other source, a failed command only lowers it by 3).

And let's say for a GM tamer, your chance of succeeding a command is Happiness*.80. So a wonderfully happy pet has an 80% chance of obeying a command. Note that this is a RANDOM 80%, i.e. 4 times in 5 it will succeed, 1 in 5 it won't. But you could succeed 16 times in a row or something.

What happens is, each failed command makes the pet more likely to fail a future command. So some pets get on a downward spiral and never get back up (well, odds are very slim).

This is how it worked a year ago or so. I have no idea if anything changed since then; I haven't seen any patch notes so who knows... but Rose your quote is entirely explainable by this system, due purely to random chance.

[Roser]

Interesting, good post.

I wonder then, how the decay is scaled based on the level of happiness. At what happiness level will a pet stop taking commands? At what level does it begin to effect ability to command? How does time passed effect this?

Try it out now mike, tell me if the pet happiness seems to decay to fast, perhaps failing a command decreases it to much right now.

Giving your pet a piece of food raises their happiness to 100.

Succeeding in a command raises their happiness by 1. Failing a command lowers it by 5. (Numbers are approximate, but I'm pretty sure these numbers are correct... note that I believe on the demo or some other source, a failed command only lowers it by 3).

So in theory, if you keep getting successful commands on a pet, you wont need to feed it?

[Mikel123]

Interesting, good post.

I wonder then, how the decay is scaled based on the level of happiness. At what happiness level will a pet stop taking commands? At what level does it begin to effect ability to command? How does time passed effect this?

Try it out now mike, tell me if the pet happiness seems to decay to fast, perhaps failing a command decreases it to much right now.

Giving your pet a piece of food raises their happiness to 100.

Succeeding in a command raises their happiness by 1. Failing a command lowers it by 5. (Numbers are approximate, but I'm pretty sure these numbers are correct... note that I believe on the demo or some other source, a failed command only lowers it by 3).

So in theory, if you keep getting successful commands on a pet, you wont need to feed it?

Look at my formula above. At any happiness level, there is always *some* chance they will accept a command (I think).

Time passed has no impact on happiness if the tamer is within LOS of the pet (if it does, it's negligible). I think it does decay quickly if the tamer is out of sight.

Yes, if you keep succeeding commands, you will never need to feed a pet.

[Roser]

Bump.

Ive also noticed Birds are not as fast as they once were.

Have White Wyrms and birds had their speed toned down intentionally?

[GuardianKnight]

Dragons don't listen worth a crap now. It's dangerous to use them.

I have been using White Wyrms even with their speed decrease, simply because they at least listen to me.

[Roser]

I think Mike took care of the Orneriness part...

But, bump for the Guarding and Wyrm speed.

[GuardianKnight]

How is the orniness fixed? In what world do wyrms (that hate everyone) listen more than dragons?

[Roser]

Here is a Dragon vs White Wyrm comparison report pulled from the taming archive.

http://www.tamingarchive.com:8080/old/

[Mikel123]

I think everything from the Taming Archive is post-1999, isn't it?

[Roser]

Some is undated, some is T2A, and some is after 2000.

Its hard to tell.

[Derrick]

I think everything from the Taming Archive is post-1999, isn't it?

This archive of the taming archive was put up by the owner specifically for us; but it's still dated a little bit into UO:R.
However the above chart does reflect other era sources about the behavior of dragons and wyrms. Great find.