The elephant in the shard.

[Hemperor]

Make people's lives harder? It's a matter of accuracy, and I guess you haven't noticed how people are enjoying automating with 3+ clients every single possible way they can think of. I know UOA wasn't capable of a lot of this.

It's like Kaivan said, Hemperor. I don't feel this is really an accuracy issue. You'd better buy a 3rd hand Pentium with Windows 98 (the first edition) and play using that.

Enforcing UOA will only make the gap between computer minded guys and the average player bigger. Free shards don't use encryption, one can easily use an interface library to WinPCap to interpret packets and text messages and then send keystrokes to the client to behave accordingly. What about OpenCV, take a screenshot and analyze it. Imagine, you're running an afk macro and your screen turns gray? Have your program send a mail or sms to yourself... 12 years ago I wouldn't know about those things. The technology wasn't widely avaible. Now it is. Enforcing UOA, for me, feels like "mopping the floor with the crane open" (direct translation of a Dutch expression).

And it wouldn't even be against the shard rules, as Derrick currently only forbids programs that interfere with the packet stream directly (besides Razor).

The bigger problem imho is that every one can have 3 accounts but that's another discussion. But even that is unsolvable, VPN's, computers at work, high speed bandwith, multiple ISP's at home. People with the resources can cheat the system easily without ever being detected.

The elephant is more a mouse.

From past discussions, this discussion has largely been avoided for irrelevant reasons, hence the elephant

I want to explore all avenues to try and fix the wild issues that I feel plague this shard. I hadn't fully thought this one through, but I made that clear in the OP, and I can agree that between old client issues and the ability to circumvent them in many ways that this is likely not worth pursuing. This topic was at least useful for me :p

As for 3 accounts each, I have always seen this as an issue and years ago it wasn't worth looking at and we are so far in now that it isn't even worth mentioning. I hope something can be done to hinder the complete automation of so many facets of this shard (PVP included) but I can't imagine what at this point.

[Light Shade]

I've always been rather annoyed when people say something is not worth doing because someone can just cheat it anyways. Its the exact same situation before and after and should be a moot point if we use the slightest bit of logic.

Just because someone can find a way to cheat doesn't mean we should abandon initiatives that can make things better.

If that were the case, we should just unplug our computers and go outside and play because someone will figure out how to hack us eventually.

[Blaise]

Granted, I hardly ever used UOA back in the day, but Razor is far more capable than I ever recall UOA being.

People brushing this off as irrelevant are clearly looking right at the elephant and only seeing gray (step back and really look next time). Ease of automation and the ability to circumvent intended game functionality is not only innaccurate but a nasty detriment to the societal interactions possible and likely in UO. If no one is really levelling up in the field and all you have are either n00bs or 7xGMs, there is no middle ground. Once the n00bs cop a deal on a home or get enough hand-outs, they retire to macroing and come back when they're 'ready to play'.

I guess it's just a curse of the modern day. Everyone wants instant-level playing field without any sort of structure or progress from direct effort. Bleh.

[chumbucket]

It would be interesting to at least scale back Razor's functionality, but, as I recall, Derrick has said that will never happen. It would require that everyone be forced to log in with Razor, and Derrick doesn't want that.

[Blaise]

It would be interesting to at least scale back Razor's functionality, but, as I recall, Derrick has said that will never happen. It would require that everyone be forced to log in with Razor, and Derrick doesn't want that.

Yup, as I had said, he doesn't use it and doesn't intend to force his clients to. Personally, I think it's the best path to really locking this shard into a format of accuracy as can be best controlled by Derrick. In other words, I'm in favor but won't leave if he doesn't.

[GuardianKnight]

Of course everyone loves the way we have it now. We allow illegal macroing and light filter bugs.
You don't have to deal with ANYONE on the shard to do anything but buy things. Our way of playing right now, it pretty much stops most social aspects of the game.

It is pretty much like the digital age. Can now just order everything online and stay in your house forever. You don't have to deal with people if you don't want to. Downfall of human civilization.

[Stranger]

Of course everyone loves the way we have it now. We allow illegal macroing and light filter bugs.
You don't have to deal with ANYONE on the shard to do anything but buy things. Our way of playing right now, it pretty much stops most social aspects of the game.

It is pretty much like the digital age. Can now just order everything online and stay in your house forever. You don't have to deal with people if you don't want to. Downfall of human civilization.

I would tend to think tech has made us more social. Look at facebook. Even dinosaurs like my parents used to meet people from across the country on AOL and become friend and meet up with them. I remember UOA being pretty simular to razor, though you couldnt light levels.

[Light Shade]

Of course everyone loves the way we have it now. We allow illegal macroing and light filter bugs.
You don't have to deal with ANYONE on the shard to do anything but buy things. Our way of playing right now, it pretty much stops most social aspects of the game.

It is pretty much like the digital age. Can now just order everything online and stay in your house forever. You don't have to deal with people if you don't want to. Downfall of human civilization.

In understand what you are getting at here, GK. This automation of the game is ruining the social aspect of the game. Player interaction just keeps going down.

Its almost like Power Hour...
Nope, can't hang out, i'm in power hour....
Nope, can't hang out, i'd have to stop my AFK Bot.

[Blaise]

In IRC: "Sorry, I'd come gate you out of the farm you got PKed in but all three accounts are macroing on each other and I don't want to go to all the trouble to set it up again. Just use the Help/Stuck, no societal interaction required."

[Kriav]

The answer is dont use the UO client. Develop or use a custom version of something like sallos. I see delphi programs that can read the UO files. A delphi client would great. since now it could be xplat.

I like what we have now

The only plus side of using a UOSA specific client is that client encryption can be enabled and it can be made more difficult for players to use macro utilities which are forbidden on this shard. But then again, any binary patch made to an old client can be analyzed quickly and circumvented.

[Kriav]

I took a quick look at runuo code. I think that there areas for improvement.

What I find interesting is its basic design. it is modeled directly from OSI. A core program that loads scripts. I can easily guess why OSI did like this. The core program can be different a program depending on whatever server platform they port . It saves them the trouble of porting the scripts. I would imagine doing this way helped runuo to reverse engineer the program. Also I see all the words information is in flatfiles- binary.

Its 2012. I would not use files like that. SQL server or mySQL.

To go off track a bit.Game economics interest me. I would want to know and see the lifecycle of items their age. See the flow of gold and track inflation. I think if we knew more how ingame economics worked. I think the original vision for UO could happen.

ultima online and runuo are pretty poorly coded for today's programing. It is extremely easy to script and to do everything you want afk if you know a bit of coding. Its fairly easy to find sourcecode for half finish software that can log you ingame, do what ever you ask him to do without ever opening the uo client. I won't give more info on this because its not fair play and I like the shard afk gatherer free but you will never be able to cancel or ban third party app.
.

[Kriav]

You don't have to deal with people if you don't want to. Downfall of human civilization.

you mean like hundreds of years ago when very few people were on the planet like 1800 900million (http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/history ... growth.htm) you could live in the forest away from people too. do it rather easily.

[Pirul]

We can talk about custom clients, limiting Razor, etc. but as has already been stated, the administration here has already made it quite clear that: a) you will always be able to use a normal UO client, b) you cannot limit Razor unless you force EVERYONE to log in using Razor, and c) UOSA will never FORCE the use of Razor to log in, thus they'll never limit Razor, and never will use a custom client.

Time to think outside the box to solve this one.

[rwuser]

Automation should only ever be used to create a medium, never used in a medium, if you wish to preserve it.

I agree with hemporer and there is a way to do this.

We create a lightweight middle-man (razor-lite, sort of thing) application that the UO client connects to the shard through. This approach allows massive amounts of control over almost every aspect, because server specific rules can be enforced though the interaction with the local machine.

It also means we can fully free the shard from any issues concerning manually editing clients.

[Orsi]

It has been a long time since I've logged into this shard. It has also been a long time since I've checked the forums and I'm surprised you are still keeping up the battle for this, Hemperor. The main reason I haven't been involved has been because of the automated and stale nature of this shard. I'm also discouraged by the inability of the players and some of the staff to understand the core issues of this topic.

The main issue I have is this: all those 'tedious' things, which are by-passed through using Razor/UOA/insert-generic-automation-program-here, are part of the game. By automating all these 'tedious' things, you are effectively not playing the game the way it was intended to be played. The reason for them being tedious and time-consuming is so a players has to put forth an effort to prepare, progress, and establish themself in the game. For example, if the player does not want to put in the required time to cut 50 bandages, perhaps they shouldn't pick healing as a skill; if a player doesn't want to run around to every city to buy the cheapest reagents, perhaps they shouldn't be a mage; if a player doesn't want to sit in a mine collecting ore to blacksmith, perhaps they should hire someone to mine for them or pay a premium on someone who already has ingots, or simply not be a blacksmith in the first place.

By using automated programs to eliminate the work and effort that go into performing all the 'tedious' tasks, the tasks that are intended by the game designers to do, players don't have to play parts of the game which they don't like. This leads to the game becoming fragmented, with each player never playing the whole game but only a fraction. Eventually, each player is only playing their favourite fragment of the game, and the shard isn't a living world with all players playing the same game at the same time. Rather, the shard becomes a single-player online zone where each player chooses to play with other players only when they want to. That is not Ultima Online, that is Ultima partially-Online.

EDIT:
After looking through this thread more, I'm a little more encouraged by the slight increase of people who seem to understand the negative social impact of these automation programs.