UO Second Age

UOSAers,

Introduction

I have heard a lot of players, especially newer players, complain bitterly about never being able to find a stable spot, and other players hoarding them to either grief tamers, store 50 dragons they will never need, or to sell the spots for profit. I spoke to Derrick about some possible solutions and he was very forthcoming and sympathetic. He said he was doing some changes to the mechanics soon, but ultimately the solution would need to come from the player base.

To that end, until a new tamer is able to try out a few stables and find a slot for a pet or two and not regularly find ALL stables booked, I'll be buying slots and accepting donations in the form of stable slots and giving them out to new/needy pet owners for FREE.

I can't do this alone. A few people in DG and friends of DG are helping, but we ultimately need the majority of players who have stable hoards to help.

I'll be creating a Google Spreadsheet soon and be giving access to some key members here who want to be a part of the solution. It will list who to contact for slots and who has been given slots (to prevent abuse). We will also be interested in obtaining any info on players who are filling the stables to grief the shard and will share that information publicly.

What can you do?

1. Donate stable slots
2. Donate your time and become a temporary FREE stablemaster. You will get access to the spreadsheet and players will know they can go to you if they need stable spots.
3. Provide information on the players griefing the stables. We encourage players to dig, or to run logs (options-> miscellaneous -> Save text log file) at stables, or to run ghost RPVideo via Razor, so we can ID these players.

Stable Slot Donators:

1. ElHorno
2. TheBreadman

Players Offering Free Stable Slots:

1. Forum and IRC: TrojanCow [~20 slots in Trinsic]


And then?

Ideas on how to do this better are more than welcome. Help is appreciated. If we can keep less than 50 slots total spread out over all the stables, it shouldn't add to the problem too much. We'll stop maintaining slots as soon as the stable griefing/hoarding is over with or until this tactic doesn't do any good.

great idea man, iv had a problem with this, so glad there seems to be some sort of solution, i would appreciate 1 spot

Anyone who needs a spot or two, please PM me in IRC. Hopefully more people will be available too, to make getting spots fast and almost painless.

Giving people spots fails in the same way that letting noobs use housing does. They don't put value on anything that isn't theirs and sometimes don't care even if it is theirs. They'll let that crap decay without thinking about it.

I just had 2 houses decay because the people I let use it decided it wasn't worth their time to pm me saying they were done with it or refresh it.

Let's say I give someone 5 stable spots. They will most likely put something in it and then take it out next day and then leave it open. Someone will just steal it. It will solve nothing.

If you had 2 houses decay from lack of use, then that is your fault.......I have 10 full time houses dedicated to noobs and it is very successful. I check all of them regularly and if a house goes greatly the noobs are kicked out, defriended/unco-owned immediately. Haven't lost a hous eyet, and several of my noobs have moved on to successful UOSA careers.

I think in the real world...stable masters would limit a max of five pets per location per player because of civil unrest.

I am open to any better ideas. At least this way, players who need stable spots have another option, other than camping stables or having to buy one. Shrug.

GuardianKnight,

I just want to say that you gave me three stable slots a couple months ago and I have been able to hold on to them until recently. My tamer was Kim Jong'il and you called me the poorest tamer on the shard lol. Anyway I just wanted to thank you for helping me out as I was having to keep my few dragons in the house and fed by hand.

I think this could be a good player initiative and could really help out newer players. Please don't assume all new players are the same and are not grateful for the help you may give them. I am not one of those at any rate.

That being said is there something going on with the server that would cause the stables to "over book" their given number of slots? I went to refresh my pets this morning (7:45AM EST) and was only able to re-stable one of the four I claimed. It was very odd as this has never happened to me before and I use a stable macro to do the re-stabling about as quickly as possible. There was no one else around as I was able to reclaim and stable the one multiple times.

This was at the Lord British Stables...anyone else experienced anything like this?

Yea, I've experienced that several times. Not sure what could cause it aside from a bug (assuming there really wasn't anybody hiding in a corner waiting to steal your spots)

I've heard this happens when another stable becomes unavailable; the slots spill over to other stables and create a surplus, so when you take out your tame, it instantly fills the slot with a tame from the defunct stable. Supposedly this happened when the Urk stables were removed. Not sure this is what is happening, though.

Some slots still available in Trinsic and a few in Del now.

Me and another player will be doing a large, unplanned release soon (as we acquire more slots), and will continue to do releases of acquired stable slots as we are able to acquire them. Once it seems like it's not nearly impossible to acquire stable slots, i.e. slots are relatively available, we'll stop and hopefully stable hoards/hordes will go down.

I also have a number of slots available just PM on irc.

Also, GK I don't think it is so bad that noobs loose the stable slots it is infact a good thing. As a lot of this problem is driven by the fact because the stables are full everyone has become better at refreshing the sables. So there is a lot less free spots opening up for general useage each day and no cyclelation of the slots.

By giving around 5 to lots of differnet people these will decay at points etc and be cycled back into system at random times.. the people herding the stables can't be on 24/7 at each stables to check they are full..

The stable give away only works IF people are bad at refreshing..

Note these slots im offering are not held by rats etc.. but by my own dragons that ive bought or tamed...

I will also randomly leaving a couple of slots open from time to time at differnet stables.