UO Second Age

Pac wrote:1) 3) Those houses on OSI were placed pre-T2A when placement rules were less strict and grandfathered in. This shard never went through a "vanilla" timeframe like OSI did so no one here was ever able to place houses like that.

Pac wrote:1) People use bots and automated scripts to systematically buy out all regs on a schedule. This is unattended resource gathering and should be a bannable offense just like mining or lumberjacking, but it isn't.

2) People hoard stable spots in order to be able to sell them to people in need. It is what it is unfortunately.

3) Those houses on OSI were placed pre-T2A when placement rules were less strict and grandfathered in. This shard never went through a "vanilla" timeframe like OSI did so no one here was ever able to place houses like that.

kill drizitz wrote:This is an honest question about how some of these in game mechanics took place. I know and realize there are a great group of guys getting together a lot of the info to get this shard accurate, but a few things just dont make sense. Please dont take this as a complaint.

1. Regs. How is it that regs are almost impossible to buy on this shard? Now I know people have timers down and buy out the regs ASAP to upcharge them 1-2gp per BUT on live OSI during era- I can not see how a shard with 1000+ on at a single time playing/macroing/fighting etc had enough regs. Honestly, I have never read anything or even remember myself not being able to buy almost all regs at a vendor at any given time. Why is this shards experience so different from OSI during era?

2. Stables. Pretty much the same as above. On OSI shards, I never saw or had trouble using the stables. Again, with 1000+ players playing. Granted I know we have unlimited followers, so one person can horde pets, but with MAYBE 150 unique IP's, we still have such a tough time keeping slots open. Again, why is this shards experience so different from OSI during era?

3. Houses. This is really just a quick update to the improperlly placed houses. I have brought it up quite a bit since 2008 or 2009, and never really got any real response from staff. It (to me) is the last BIG change that would seriously make this shard feel more era accurate. There should be houses lining the road to Moonglow (north side, not just south), more GY houses, interesting locational housing etc etc. Just wanted some people to see this and maybe help research to get it done if possible.

First two are just questions, as to why this is so different here compared to OSI. I know we are not "recreating the experience" but just the mechanics. I just cant help but feel maybe we have it wrong, when 1000+ did not have this much trouble getting regs/stable spots. Houses I would just like to see if it will ever come to the shard, hell its been 5+ years, and this is one of the biggest easiest to realize era accurate mechanics not yet in place. Everyone remembers improperlly placed houses who played UO in 99

Kaivan wrote:This topic has already been discussed a little bit, but I'll expand upon this further.

Regarding reagents, it is well known that on OSI servers the restock algorithm was very conservative and did not provide a great deal of reagents. The result was that reagents were difficult to acquire for two reasons. One, the popular vendor spots that actually did have some stock were regularly camped by other players, and two, those locations that were not so popular had virtually no reagents to speak of. This is further exacerbated here by players that recall around and purchase all of the reagents, which effectively turns most or all of the vendor locations into popular locations that are "camped" and thus out of reagents.

Regarding stable slots, we know that on OSI servers, stable masters had a limit of 100 slots with which to store animals. We also have early UOR numbers that give us an idea of exactly how many "slots" existed per server. As a comparison, we have a total of 28 such stable masters, which is a very large quantity for our server. The difference between OSI servers and here is that players treat stable slots as a commodity, which was not the case on OSI servers. This is a dynamic of the game that is completely outside the scope of mechanics, and while I can't answer why it was never regarded in the same manner on OSI servers as it is here, there you have it. The result, of course, is that stable slots will come at a premium here on UOSA.

Finally, we have housing which has several distinct problems.

First, while we are aware that housing was not required to be on perfectly flat land, and we've implemented code that tries to allow players to place on uneven land (although there is a bug that is preventing it in most cases), the issue is that we don't know exactly what the housing rules were for placing houses during most of T2A when it comes to landscape. As a result, we have a loose approximation for the housing rules during T2A, but we don't have the exact rules in place.

To further exacerbate the situation, we also know that certain bugs existed that allowed players to place houses in very unusual locations (e.g. houses with virtually the entire house floating in midair) - which is what the improper house placement / classic vs modern design notation was for (at least partially). Without knowing exactly how the system was intended to work, we have virtually no chance of determining what the bugs were that allowed certain house placements to work either.

Finally, to add one more level of complexity, we also have the issue of certain types of objects blocking house placement. As the patch notes state, a fairly long list of objects no longer blocked house placement with the January 24th patch, but again, we don't know the exact housing rules so we can't determine exactly how they blocked placement to begin with. To add further to that issue, we also have concerns regarding items such as brambles, rocks, and other similar items. These items continually blocked placement on OSI servers up until the release of AoS because these items couldn't be moved through, and were treated similarly to trees when it comes to placement. This adds an issue that is related to the client as much as it is related to the server. If we updated the server to enforce the blocking properties of these items, the effect would be rubber-banding for clients all over the world. So, until we get better information about how the system worked, we have this system in place.

Pac wrote:I seem to recall an exploit on OSI involving use of a flour sack to place a house where it otherwise wouldn't be able to be placed. I think you placed the sack where you wanted the house steps to be and then placed the house on the sack.

Something like that. I never did it myself I just remember reading about it back in the day.

Menkaure wrote:

Pac wrote:I seem to recall an exploit on OSI involving use of a flour sack to place a house where it otherwise wouldn't be able to be placed. I think you placed the sack where you wanted the house steps to be and then placed the house on the sack.

Something like that. I never did it myself I just remember reading about it back in the day.

It also had to be on a small bump/hill.
This was why back then you had all those houses on fire island that you could walk under