UO Second Age

There currently is a significant decrease in all combat skill gains when sparring with players, I'd be hesitant though to single out a particular creature (other that players) to give a skill gain chance adjustment to.

I also would like to see things like the BK wall, but I myself gm'd parry on blade spirits, so i wouldn't want to create what would almost be a mandate of any particular method.

I think the emphasis for fixing this problem is to completely solve the penalty from gaining combat skills off of players. There is no concrete evidence on how severe the penalty was beyond tweaking it until we get the desired results. The combat skill gain rate off of players was damn near impossible during these days. This even existed up through the current OSI system. People would use npc fighters from the Jhelmon duel pits for combat gains in UOR. If it's pretty much impossible to gain off of players like it was back then people would be forced to go to the BK room or earth elements in Shame. I haven't actually tested the current penalty myself yet, but I recently got some old friends to start playing again. They are currently macroing combat in the house and said the gains seemed fairly easy to them.

I think the fact that unattended macroing is legal is why no one uses the bk room. Sure it may take (just guessing) twice as long to gm melee skills off a player as opposed to a monster, but that is time you dont have to sit at your keyboard.
The gains when in safe environment such as a house are much more consistent considering you don't have to worry about monsters killing you or pk's, thus making sparring more viable.

mrbojangles wrote:I think the fact that unattended macroing is legal is why no one uses the bk room. Sure it may take (just guessing) twice as long to gm melee skills off a player as opposed to a monster, but that is time you dont have to sit at your keyboard.
The gains when in safe environment such as a house are much more consistent considering you don't have to worry about monsters killing you or pk's, thus making sparring more viable.

You also have 3 accounts to use at a time, so while you are macroing on 1 or 2 clients, you can be playing the third.

mrbojangles wrote:Sure it may take (just guessing) twice as long to gm melee skills off a player as opposed to a monster, but that is time you dont have to sit at your keyboard.

Just because "macroing" was illegal on OSI doesn't mean nobody macro'd... I macro'd constantly and was never caught. The only time you got caught is when someone notified a GM that you were macroing. Mostly it was people macroing in town and so forth. If you knew how and where to macro it was very easy. When I say that combat skills was "very" hard to gain off players I really mean very hard... It was damn near impossible to do it. I'm not talking half or seventy five percent harder it was practically impossible. If it was even half as hard during OSI I wouldn't have hesitated even a second.

If you made the bone knights the place to be, and the wall, etc... the amoutn of already finished active PK's would dominate it, and make the whole adjustment useless... this isn't realyl in theory, this is what would happen in practice.

I wouldn't ever touch anyone at the BK wall. I can't say this for anyone else, because I know the majority of the PK's on here are pathetic. They dry loot and kill horses on the spot. I never kill horses or take runes of the people that I PK. I will only kill the horse if it's a tactical decision. I even resurrect them and leave recalls. People don't seem to understand that brings people back to the dungeon much quicker.

Before the BK wall can even exist a few things need tweaking.

1. Remove the "I heal myself" Order guards, they make gaining combat skill extremely easy, and they aren't era accurate.

2. I heard aXe I believe, in IRC saying he GM'd wresting off a horse in like 3 hours with 25 dex. Now he could be lying, but if he isn't.. I'd say that's not right at all.

As of now, anytime I need to change combats, I just snag an Order guard, set a macro, and come back in 3-4hrs. On OSI I remember spending 12-14hrs in the BK wall anytime I wanted to convert my combat skill. (obviously it wouldn't take so long here, but I do remember the BKs in Deceit or T2A being the only 2 "fast ways" to get combat skills maxed, up until rotting corpses came about)

I think parry itself needs to be addressed on this shard. Old school parry ws l33t. You could literally handle dozens of mobs at once if you were gm. Parry should be a bitch to gm but worth it. And why im at it, why the hell does lightning bolt pwn on this shard?