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NEWS [UO.Com] Producer Letter

Viper09

Grand Poobah
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
Wonder if all the people complaining have bothered to read the last sentence and a half that mentions they will be changing the housing decay that is currently going on.

we are going to be putting in another patch to change this. Players will have 5 days for a house to decay.
 

Tomarke

Seasoned Veteran
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
I've read it and what it doesn't talk about is the accelerated decay of everything else that is not a house. Like boats and everything else that's on a timer.
 

Viper09

Grand Poobah
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
They do mention increased decay rates of items and boats as well, but they don't specifically mention whether or not the fix they will be implementing in another patch will fix those rather than just houses. So yes, more clarification should be made. However, I suspect that, at the very least, they will include a fix on the decay rates of boats.

Last but not least, I am sure everyone has seen an increase in the decay rate of items on the ground, houses, and boats. This is due to a fix we had to put in for a shard crash. Due to the fact that the house decay does not give players enough time to move their items from one house to another, we are going to be putting in another patch to change this. Players will have 5 days for a house to decay.
 

Uvtha

Stratics Legend
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
Wonder if all the people complaining have bothered to read the last sentence and a half that mentions they will be changing the housing decay that is currently going on.
I think the point is that they made the change, didn't say anything and as a result people lost homes, boats, and stuff from timed add ons.

Now had they came out and warned us it could happen (and put that warning on the UO loading screen) I really don't think anyone would have been upset.

It's the lack of communication that is pissing people off, not the change. All they have to do is let us know whats going on.
 

Cyrah

Certifiable
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
It's quite simple....
The team had the players and houses in hand and locked the doors took all off the house list, and turned on rapid decay as they unlocked EVERYTHING in the house... things went poofy real fast... all 18k of those nasty shield tokens and all the stuff belonging to the culprits.
Sorry we just got in the way... they needed to do something fast and that is as quickly as it comes. Now to get them to put it back to normal.
That makes it even worse. That no one thought that turning on rapid decay would hurt anyone except the bad guys.
 

icm420

Sage
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
Just to clarify.. I do not know what happened, I was just taking a guess at the exploit thing.. makes sense to me.. and I've seen it a few times before. Perhaps this is a precursor to a "rust storm". In diablo2 they would periodically scan the server for dupes, glitches, bugs, etc and fix/delete them.

I'm still very confused as to how so much gold got into circulation.. I can understand there being lots but I know multiple people with billions and billions...and I doubt they are a minority. Do you guys this think is legit? Sorry to hi jack thread just curious.. sick of seeing things for 100s of millions when the 1.5 for a pendant of magi was barely reachable just a few years ago.. that's why I keep thinking there is a dupe or something going on. How can billions upon billions of gold be farmed in just a few years? I suppose it could be.. but seems unlikely to me.

Perhaps I was just never privy to the wealth of some individuals in UO.
 

Uvtha

Stratics Legend
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
Just to clarify.. I do not know what happened, I was just taking a guess at the exploit thing.. makes sense to me.. and I've seen it a few times before. Perhaps this is a precursor to a "rust storm". In diablo2 they would periodically scan the server for dupes, glitches, bugs, etc and fix/delete them.

I'm still very confused as to how so much gold got into circulation.. I can understand there being lots but I know multiple people with billions and billions...and I doubt they are a minority. Do you guys this think is legit? Sorry to hi jack thread just curious.. sick of seeing things for 100s of millions when the 1.5 for a pendant of magi was barely reachable just a few years ago.. that's why I keep thinking there is a dupe or something going on. How can billions upon billions of gold be farmed in just a few years? I suppose it could be.. but seems unlikely to me.

Perhaps I was just never privy to the wealth of some individuals in UO.
I think for sure that some of the gold in circulation is from duping, but if I had to guess I would say most gold is honest. Over the years the gold that monsters dropped increased, and then when tram came out the population became an uninterrupted gold faucet, and that's been going on for over 10 years now. Wealth conglomerates.
 

Theo_GL

Grand Poobah
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
UNLEASHED
Just to clarify.. I do not know what happened, I was just taking a guess at the exploit thing.. makes sense to me.. and I've seen it a few times before. Perhaps this is a precursor to a "rust storm". In diablo2 they would periodically scan the server for dupes, glitches, bugs, etc and fix/delete them.

I'm still very confused as to how so much gold got into circulation.. I can understand there being lots but I know multiple people with billions and billions...and I doubt they are a minority. Do you guys this think is legit? Sorry to hi jack thread just curious.. sick of seeing things for 100s of millions when the 1.5 for a pendant of magi was barely reachable just a few years ago.. that's why I keep thinking there is a dupe or something going on. How can billions upon billions of gold be farmed in just a few years? I suppose it could be.. but seems unlikely to me.

Perhaps I was just never privy to the wealth of some individuals in UO.
There was some massive duping of gold and items when shard xfers were borked and people could crash shards effectively duplicating 800 items. Think 800 mil each attempt. At one point the dev's destroyed like 10 trillion in gold (thats 10,000 billion).

There have been dupes as far as I have played the game from time to time involving gold. At one point you could smelt ballot boxes made with wood and get ingots. You could make heater shields and sell them for gold. The first guild I was in had a woman doing it nearly 20 hours a day to make money to pay for a nicer guild house. I didn't find out about this until after they closed the loophole but again - a gold exploit.

Many of the high end rare collectors ran ingot scripts to get the money to buy rares. I mean how do you come up with 100's of mllions to bid up the value of items though any sort of 'normal' gameplay? Those millions selling ingots though came from legit players but still it was creating very wealthy through these means.

But lastly many of the idocs and people quitting has consolidated wealth. When you have 50-75% of your players leave and their accounts and stuff passed on or passed on through IDOCs - the remaining 20% of the population has 100% of the stuff or 4 to 5x richer. Its more gold and stuff floating around. I've always wished IDOC's would just decay instead of leaving the stuff behind. With a declining playerbase it has really hurt the economy. A declining population and an increasing money supply (M1 for your economists) is a recipe for inflation. If the population was increasing - an increasing money supply is fine as its got a larger and larger base to share it.

Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be nice to do a full wipe and everyone start out with no items and no gold - just character skills again. That fixes all the ill gotten gains and you could *fix* armor to make it simplier. Its far too complex. I've been crafting for 12 years and at times I"m as confused as ever to all the options, mods, tweaks through runics, reforging, imbuing, enhancements etc. I wish at times I could just look at a shield and say oh' AC 8 must be better than my AC 6 shield' and move on.

There is a balance between complex to give options and complex to overwhelm. We are way past the overwhelm point.

I used to take time to explain things to new players - now I don't. I don't have a month to explain the basics. Its way too much.
Its really completely daunting for any truely new player. I really can't imagine a new player starting and staying with this game more than 3 months. Even returning vets are completely lost.
 

Uvtha

Stratics Legend
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
There was some massive duping of gold and items when shard xfers were borked and people could crash shards effectively duplicating 800 items. Think 800 mil each attempt. At one point the dev's destroyed like 10 trillion in gold (thats 10,000 billion).

There have been dupes as far as I have played the game from time to time involving gold. At one point you could smelt ballot boxes made with wood and get ingots. You could make heater shields and sell them for gold. The first guild I was in had a woman doing it nearly 20 hours a day to make money to pay for a nicer guild house. I didn't find out about this until after they closed the loophole but again - a gold exploit.

Many of the high end rare collectors ran ingot scripts to get the money to buy rares. I mean how do you come up with 100's of mllions to bid up the value of items though any sort of 'normal' gameplay? Those millions selling ingots though came from legit players but still it was creating very wealthy through these means.

But lastly many of the idocs and people quitting has consolidated wealth. When you have 50-75% of your players leave and their accounts and stuff passed on or passed on through IDOCs - the remaining 20% of the population has 100% of the stuff or 4 to 5x richer. Its more gold and stuff floating around. I've always wished IDOC's would just decay instead of leaving the stuff behind. With a declining playerbase it has really hurt the economy. A declining population and an increasing money supply (M1 for your economists) is a recipe for inflation. If the population was increasing - an increasing money supply is fine as its got a larger and larger base to share it.

Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be nice to do a full wipe and everyone start out with no items and no gold - just character skills again. That fixes all the ill gotten gains and you could *fix* armor to make it simplier. Its far too complex. I've been crafting for 12 years and at times I"m as confused as ever to all the options, mods, tweaks through runics, reforging, imbuing, enhancements etc. I wish at times I could just look at a shield and say oh' AC 8 must be better than my AC 6 shield' and move on.

There is a balance between complex to give options and complex to overwhelm. We are way past the overwhelm point.

I used to take time to explain things to new players - now I don't. I don't have a month to explain the basics. Its way too much.
Its really completely daunting for any truely new player. I really can't imagine a new player starting and staying with this game more than 3 months. Even returning vets are completely lost.
You can make a ton legit by just being a merchant. Buy low and sell high. If you do it long enough you'll have enough money to start buying really expensive stuff low, and make a crazy profit. Especially running around going to EM events, or selling off IDOC stuff like you mention. It can take time, but it's not so hard if you are dedicated.
 

Theo_GL

Grand Poobah
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
UNLEASHED
You can make a ton legit by just being a merchant. Buy low and sell high. If you do it long enough you'll have enough money to start buying really expensive stuff low, and make a crazy profit. Especially running around going to EM events, or selling off IDOC stuff like you mention. It can take time, but it's not so hard if you are dedicated.
Oh, I'm not debating there are other ways to *become* rich but this is only possible because of so much gold floating in game. You wouldnt' get so much $$ for any event item if people weren't sitting on billions in gold that entered the system through dupes or other questionable gameplay. Think about how long through actual gold collection methods (killing monsters, champ spawn gold, etc) it would take to amass 100m gold that you might get for buying your event item.

Yes, as new player can go to an event and get an item that can now be sold for lots of $$ but only because the economy is such that the standard of living or average gold hoard is very high for the reasons I detailed above.
 

Lady Storm

Grand Inquisitor
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
I have no doubt that a portion of the duped gold didnt get caught as I remmeber it was explained once the duped gold was laundered it is virtualy impossible to detect. So thre is no record of how much was actualy done.
Now back to the subject of this post.
Cyrah you must understand when it was first discovered the Dev needed to take swift action and with 2 of the main Dev on a trip...
The fast action to stop the spred was needed. I mean imagine the 18,k of tokens they did and had it gotten out to others how to make...
For the greater good the Dev who had to deal with it did it quickly.
Yes it was harsh.. and well I do fear many will not accept the reasons.
Imagine how long it would take to delete 18 k of any thing. Add in the combined other items in the homes and the homes..
We still dont know how many we can only do the math and thats alot of castles or wow the idea of it being in towers or 18s.
Mind boggling.
You cant just poof a house full of things without some way to insure they dont get left behind any trace of its method of how.
It was a knee jerk move and I do understand many are angry at the decay timer being so disrupted.
I am not happy on it myself.
But..
If it was the only way they could come up with to handle it..... and know it was done where anyone couldnt get their hands on them...
 

Uvtha

Stratics Legend
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
Oh, I'm not debating there are other ways to *become* rich but this is only possible because of so much gold floating in game. You wouldnt' get so much $$ for any event item if people weren't sitting on billions in gold that entered the system through dupes or other questionable gameplay. Think about how long through actual gold collection methods (killing monsters, champ spawn gold, etc) it would take to amass 100m gold that you might get for buying your event item.

Yes, as new player can go to an event and get an item that can now be sold for lots of $$ but only because the economy is such that the standard of living or average gold hoard is very high for the reasons I detailed above.
I think some of it is because of duping, but I think most of it is just because of how things are. Gold flows in nonstop and never leaves, and over time it just conglomerates into a group of players who all have hundreds of millions.
I really don't know how much gold the average prodoshard player has but I have a feeling that there are those who have far more than most, and they probably are they ones buying and selling all the stupidly priced things, and they are probably regular traders.

It was a gradual process, rather than one that just dramatically rose over one year then basically stood pat.
 

The Old Man

Journeyman
Premium
Stratics Veteran
Overheard an in game conversation a couple of days back, that one of the big GOLD/item seller web sites was down. Had a look...Is still down (for 'maintenance') and has been for 2 or 3 days now.
Just wondering if there is any connection between this and the recent in game events. Guess we will never know.
 

DJAd

Stratics Legend
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
Overheard an in game conversation a couple of days back, that one of the big GOLD/item seller web sites was down. Had a look...Is still down (for 'maintenance') and has been for 2 or 3 days now.
Just wondering if there is any connection between this and the recent in game events. Guess we will never know.
I have a funny feeling that particular website has been in trouble before...
 

Riyana

Operations
Administrator
Professional
Governor
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
Event Coordinator
UNLEASHED
Campaign Patron
It's quite simple....
The team had the players and houses in hand and locked the doors took all off the house list, and turned on rapid decay as they unlocked EVERYTHING in the house... things went poofy real fast... all 18k of those nasty shield tokens and all the stuff belonging to the culprits.
Sorry we just got in the way... they needed to do something fast and that is as quickly as it comes. Now to get them to put it back to normal.
If they seized the houses, made them inaccessible to players, and unlocked everything in the house... why would it matter what the decay timer was? It could be the normal timer, it could be ten seconds, or it could be ten months... it wouldn't matter because no one could get to the stuff. This scenario makes no sense.
 

Picus at the office

Certifiable
Supporter
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
It's quite simple....
The team had the players and houses in hand and locked the doors took all off the house list, and turned on rapid decay as they unlocked EVERYTHING in the house... things went poofy real fast... all 18k of those nasty shield tokens and all the stuff belonging to the culprits.
Sorry we just got in the way... they needed to do something fast and that is as quickly as it comes. Now to get them to put it back to normal.
You are trying to tell me that the team doesn't have the ablity to delete stuff and the only tool they have is to unlock stuff and wait for the server to clean it out? If this is the case the game is screwed.
 

Arcades

Sage
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
I personally think they should post the character names of players to shame the dupers and delete not only the one account, but all the accounts associated with their CC/account name/email. F- them all.
 

Tomarke

Seasoned Veteran
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
So I took a chance and left my garg ship out on the water last night and about 18 hours later it still showing "slightly worn". Is it safe to assume that decay been set back to normal for all structures? I haven't been watching any houses, has anyone noticed any of those still decaying at an accelerated rate?
 

wanderer1origin

Lore Master
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
UNLEASHED
Just to clarify.. I do not know what happened, I was just taking a guess at the exploit thing.. makes sense to me.. and I've seen it a few times before. Perhaps this is a precursor to a "rust storm". In diablo2 they would periodically scan the server for dupes, glitches, bugs, etc and fix/delete them.

I'm still very confused as to how so much gold got into circulation.. I can understand there being lots but I know multiple people with billions and billions...and I doubt they are a minority. Do you guys this think is legit? Sorry to hi jack thread just curious.. sick of seeing things for 100s of millions when the 1.5 for a pendant of magi was barely reachable just a few years ago.. that's why I keep thinking there is a dupe or something going on. How can billions upon billions of gold be farmed in just a few years? I suppose it could be.. but seems unlikely to me.

Perhaps I was just never privy to the wealth of some individuals in UO.


lol on pendant magi, some would hunt for that sell rinse repeat!! gold at 1m per item trading every third day adds up on those that figure out drops and what too hunt!
100m foor an em robe with a nice name lol is nuts !!!!!!!!!!!!! is bought gold or scripted,
old time rare collectors ran scripts, rails for golds, on spare accounts for gold 24 /7
 

GarthGrey

Grand Poobah
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
UNLEASHED
I'm on the side of "there's more duped gold than earned gold". Was just talking about this earlier in gc. I think the total amount of gold that was duped is wayyyy higher than any of us ever dreamed. And it's such an insulting ridiculous amount that OSI/EA/Mythic/Broadsword will never tell us.
 

Ender

Crazed Zealot
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
UNLEASHED
I wish there was a way to fix the gold supply, but short of a wipe or a new shard or something I got nothing.
 

G.v.P

Stratics Legend
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
I wish there was a way to fix the gold supply, but short of a wipe or a new shard or something I got nothing.
1) Bring back Orc Slingers, riding Tormented Minotaurs (no wonder they're tormented)
2) Remove all gold spawns/vendor sales/etc
3) Release the Orc Slingers en masse upon towns
4) Profit
 

Ender

Crazed Zealot
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
UNLEASHED
My best idea is something like dividing every pile of gold and every check in the game by 100 (or something; I don't know how much gold there floating around). Leave gold dropping roughly the same, probably decrease it a little but not too much. The issue is that there's too much gold floating around compared to the amount of players right? I think something like this could help to fix that. It's not perfect but it's the best I got.

(also crack down on gold being sold for $$ but I'm not sure how big of an issue that is right now)
 

CovenantX

Crazed Zealot
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
UNLEASHED
So I took a chance and left my garg ship out on the water last night and about 18 hours later it still showing "slightly worn". Is it safe to assume that decay been set back to normal for all structures? I haven't been watching any houses, has anyone noticed any of those still decaying at an accelerated rate?
As far as the decay timer it seems to depend on which shard you're on.
Some houses seem to have been decaying faster on some shards than they have been on others.

Lake Superior seems to have the normal decay, as it has been for ages.
 

Jirel of Joiry

Certifiable
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
Okay I am ROYALLY PISSED! Luc and I started back to college this week. Luc and I checked the boats Saturday. They were pristine. The Tokuno ship she uses for fishing is still there and slightly worn. Her Britannian Ship which I paid 17.95 for (bought her the captain's bundle)
is gone! I'm sorry but when you spend 189.90 to 269.80 PER CREDIT HOUR...Yeah college is the #1 priority. Any one of you says UO is more important than a bachelors degree needs a CHECK UP FROM THE NECK UP! the Britannian is blessed and should have NEVER been subject to decay! I want my sister a new ship or my money back!
 
T

Tazar

Guest
Okay I am ROYALLY PISSED! Luc and I started back to college this week. Luc and I checked the boats Saturday. They were pristine. The Tokuno ship she uses for fishing is still there and slightly worn. Her Britannian Ship which I paid 17.95 for (bought her the captain's bundle)
is gone! I'm sorry but when you spend 189.90 to 269.80 PER CREDIT HOUR...Yeah college is the #1 priority. Any one of you says UO is more important than a bachelors degree needs a CHECK UP FROM THE NECK UP! the Britannian is blessed and should have NEVER been subject to decay! I want my sister a new ship or my money back!
Hopefully she had it tied to a lighthouse and can reclaim it there.
 

Jirel of Joiry

Certifiable
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
Hopefully she had it tied to a lighthouse and can reclaim it there.
Here lighthouse is broken she never could get a ship to tie to it. She paged a GM and we all know how WORTHLESS they are, so its still broken and now her Brit is gone! I DNK about the rest of you but I am mad enough to demand the Duper/s name/s. I say we file a class action lawsuit against the duper/s because of them the game is fouled up, because of them we have all suffered losses. So since they're all about the money lets hit em where it hurts.....THEIR BLOODY FREAKIN BANK ACCOUNT! I am sure we can find an attorney willing to take it pro bono, since they would be setting case law precedence in the US. (precedence has been set in China, I don't know about any other countries).
 
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Picus of Napa

Certifiable
Supporter
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
UNLEASHED
Here lighthouse is broken she never could get a ship to tie to it. She paged a GM and we all know how WORTHLESS they are, so its still broken and her Brit is gone!
I DNK about the rest of you but I am mad enough to demand the Duper/s name/s. I say we file a class action lawsuit against the duper/s because of them the game is fouled up, because of them we have all suffered losses. So since they're all about the money lets hit em where it hurts.....THEIR BLOODY FREAKIN BANK ACCOUNT! I sure we can find an attorney willing to take it pro bono, since they be setting case law precedence in the US. (precedence has been set in South Korea, I don't know about any other countries).

You are joking, right?
 

Assia Penryn

The Sleeping Dragon
Alumni
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
Oh, I'm not debating there are other ways to *become* rich but this is only possible because of so much gold floating in game. You wouldnt' get so much $$ for any event item if people weren't sitting on billions in gold that entered the system through dupes or other questionable gameplay. Think about how long through actual gold collection methods (killing monsters, champ spawn gold, etc) it would take to amass 100m gold that you might get for buying your event item.

Yes, as new player can go to an event and get an item that can now be sold for lots of $$ but only because the economy is such that the standard of living or average gold hoard is very high for the reasons I detailed above.

Wow. So, yeah. It isn't hard to get 100m gold if you have someone to show you how. All I do is buy/resell items in the game. That's it. I don't "script" to earn gold . I started out in pre-trammel with doing it with dailies and crate spawn, NPC books, etc. I used that to get started as I got more and more capital I was able to buy larger items and more packages of rares at a discount from people needing gold or quitting the game. I took a new apprentice of sorts this last week. I gave him 50m and a list of items that I would buy and the prices I would pay. I told him when he doubled his money, he could pay me back the 50m and choose to keep the arrangement or strike out on his own at anytime. He made 10m from me on buying 30 items the first night... I paid him and now he's looking for his next purchase. It isn't hard to make gold if you have the knowledge of the market and a bit of capital to get started. He could have started with the 280k he had in the bank and gone from there and built it up, but I wanted him to be able to give him a chance to start.

Do I believe a lot of gold is from scripting, etc? ABSOLUTELY... but it drives me crazy when folks brand all rares collectors as dishonest just because they have a lot of gold. An' some of those rares collectors actually do nice things with some of their gold too.
 

Assia Penryn

The Sleeping Dragon
Alumni
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
Now... I originally came here to ask if anyone knows if the housing decay has been fixed yet. I have a friend who temporarily picked up a second house on her account and will be moving it it's own account in 48 hours... I would like to make sure she is safe.
 

Goodmann

Babbling Loonie
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
Now... I originally came here to ask if anyone knows if the housing decay has been fixed yet. I have a friend who temporarily picked up a second house on her account and will be moving it it's own account in 48 hours... I would like to make sure she is safe.
NO it's not fixed I had a friend lose a house. He bought a new house then left last weekend for a business trip. Was gone for 3 days came back assuming he have plenty of time to retrieve his things but to his surprise it was all gone. He lost everything he had collected over the last 10+ years (soulstones ect) some things that just can't be replaced. I tried to give him gold to get back on his feet but he said he is done with UO. Sad day when you lose good a player over something like this.
 

Assia Penryn

The Sleeping Dragon
Alumni
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
Thank you Goodmann *hugs :grouphug:* I'm sorry to hear about the loss of your friend.
 
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