[UO Herald] FoF: It's Friday!

[UO News]

This friday we cover luck, TC1 questions, and other Live questions.



For the full article click here.



More...

 

[THP]

THP- Gun slinger of the year!!! kapppowwwwwwwww

 

[Gheed]

Nice FoF... Draconi fielded them all it looks like... Somebody is getting too much time on his hands

 

[MYUO]

The explaination for how the luck works in this week's FOF is quite comprehensive and I bet no one can call it lame this time. Good job!

However, for the quesiton below,
"Would it be possible, please, to add some additional functionality to the Personal Attendants?

Feel free to send in some feedback about what you’d like to see, or start a thread on the forums!"

That answer can virtuelly be used to answer any questions, can't it?

Oh, it is nice to get a confirmation that luck still affects Doom arty drop under TOT rule.

 

[Viquire]

Nice one!

 

[Chrissay_]

oops I accidentally cut off some of Draconi's response for the luck question. It's been updated on the FoF but below is the text:

I think it’s broken though. Not in the actual code, but in all the thousands of loot table definitions. A huge portion of them don’t even allow players to have more than one item from a loot definition, negating the entire point of luck! That’s not even beginning to cover the actual intensity range definitions. I’m willing to bet that the loot tables themselves are the ultimate cause of luck not working properly, and need to be reviewed.

 

[GalenKnighthawke]

This item makes me nervous:

Additionally, the EMs will be leading much of the content for the rest of the arc, including battles.

This makes me nervous for the following reasons.

Reason one.
Given the new EM loot system (basically everyone gets a t-shirt) as announced several weeks ago, I expect people to generally care less about the EM events.

I'd therefore question using the EM system to conclude this very important story arc. I'd hate to see us lose the event cycle due to player apathy.

Having said that, though I'm apprehensive, I expect my home shard of LS to still perform well as the event reaches its climax. We've done well so far, I don't think we'll stop doing well.

But will every shard? Even on LS, though I'm sure we'll do well, will the attendance be down? I hope not.

Reason two.
Also, is the implication that the details and outcome could be different on each shard? Some have speculated Casca is evil, some feel he's not. What if it's different on each shard? Will some shards keep Casca as King and some won't? What are the implications of that?

To personalize things; to give each shard a unique stamp on the game-wide event cycle, is one issue. To turn game-wide history into shard-exclusive history, however, is another.

Is there any way you all at EA-Mythic can tell us in general terms what you all have got in mind?

-Galen's player

 

[MalagAste]

oops I accidentally cut off some of Draconi's response for the luck question. It's been updated on the FoF but below is the text:

I think it’s broken though. Not in the actual code, but in all the thousands of loot table definitions. A huge portion of them don’t even allow players to have more than one item from a loot definition, negating the entire point of luck! That’s not even beginning to cover the actual intensity range definitions. I’m willing to bet that the loot tables themselves are the ultimate cause of luck not working properly, and need to be reviewed.

Ok now I'm left with a Zillion questions...... Draconi's luck table only rolls up with 1500 luck.... my current suit puts me over 1800 luck.... where does the extra luck go????? does it just stop at 1500??????

And if it "IS" indeed broken.... ie the item property tables with the drop loot rates and all..... er.... does that mean that someone is actually going to finally "Fix" luck????? And how about the 100 questions on does luck have a factor in T-Hunter/T-Chest/MIB Loot????? Does it factor into if I get drops from the Leviathan and of course Doom..... I am told it does...

Why does luck not effect things like... Enhancing chances? One would think you were looking to "get lucky" in that???? Could luck be added to other things????

Of course I always thought luck should be a factor even when doing something simple like rolling dice..... Taming perhaps?

 

[Basara]

Chrissay:

Yeah, tell Draconi that he's right; the loot definitions definitely need updated.

Besides (As Draconi noted) the creatures that only allow one item, having the properties artificially capped for effectively lose the luck bonus is silly as well.

Then, there's the matters of

• some old items still being on loot tables (some of the Pagan-style necro regs, only some of which will be used in the Mysticism system),
• items that no longer spawn, or spawn non-magical (question balls, magical statues, etc.),
• the absence of SE & ML items on creatures not from those expansions (not to mention in treasure chests from maps & SOS)
• Some creatures routinely showing more items when corpse opened, than actually present (paragon golems, for example), and some showing "corpse" icons in the corpse,
• gold drops really needing rebalanced (similar to the dread spider issues of 2007)
• oddball cut corpse for resources issues (the odd fish steaks from sea serpents, the fact that all but 1 ML creature, and all SE creatures, give ONLY normal leather, etc. Note that the naturally spawning centaurs & Oaks spawn centaurs give spined leather, but the Twaulo spawn ones in the Twisted Weald give normal leather).

The whole loot system needs a balance pass.

 

[Chrissay_]

There is another correction that we would like to make to luck. It doesn't cap at 1500 that was just a small portion of the chart. This has also been updated in the FoF.

Chrissay

 

[Lynk]

The whole loot system needs a balance pass.

It's on their radar, and they'll work on it when they get the time.

 

[Draconi]

Before anyone asks, yes, I think we can all see the irony in finally answering questions about Luck on Friday the 13th.

 

[Larisa]

Before anyone asks, yes, I think we can all see the irony in finally answering questions about Luck on Friday the 13th.

HA AHAHHHaaha...ha...haha...*cough cough*

*glares*

Not funny Tim...not funny at all...

 

[Storm]

Before anyone asks, yes, I think we can all see the irony in finally answering questions about Luck on Friday the 13th.

Lol never crossed my mind ;-)

 

[Maplestone]

It's nice to know that maximum intensity is not ruled by luck - but it is very interesting to see that luck's effect is really amplified when going for that ultimate high-property loot.

I would like to see a few lower-end creatures where luck really stood out - trouble is, without making an exception in how luck works, the only way to do it I can think of would be to have some properties where 0-99% intensity is "useless" and 100% intensity is "useful" (so that 10% intensity boost from luck really shows up).

 

[Cogniac]

My thanks (and apologies) to Draconi for answering my Luck question.

Unfortunately, I still have another Luck question in the system about Luck and the Tokuno Points System in regards to Champion Spawns. Draconi mentioned that in passing in his answer this week, so maybe that means we'll see that explanation next week!

 

[Bomb Bloke]

Ok now I'm left with a Zillion questions...... Draconi's luck table only rolls up with 1500 luck.... my current suit puts me over 1800 luck.... where does the extra luck go????? does it just stop at 1500??????

Cogniac's actually recently posted the maths to UOGuide. In a nutshell, to have a 100% chance of a loot bump from luck, you need 3981 points - Equipping anything over that won't help you.

But that's ok because the highest theoretical value you can get is only around 3740.

 

[Lynk]

Did somebody seriously ****ing ask about test center? What the ****??!? I'm inclined to think that you made that question up because someone didn't ask another dumb question for you to answer.

Seriously Draconi, why don't you address the ****ing speedhack question that people ask every god damned week.

DO SOMETHING. Start banning or just say "It's OK" so the rest of us can enjoy this game.

"We're taking measures", is measures the word you use for doing nothing?

 

[Warpig Inc]

160 Luckblade
80 shield
140 arms
200 necklas
150 hat or glasses
140 legs
200 tunic
140 gloves
400 jewelry
95 cloak
------------
1705 before the luck statue

Be pounding out those luck blades after Imbueding comes out.

 

[Cogniac]

Quick question: The way I'm understanding this is that there is one roll against Luck, and this one roll applies for Number of Items, Number of Item Properties, and Item Property Intensities. It is not a separate roll for each of these three things, correct?

 

[MalagAste]

Quick question: The way I'm understanding this is that there is one roll against Luck, and this one roll applies for Number of Items, Number of Item Properties, and Item Property Intensities. It is not a separate roll for each of these three things, correct?

Was always my impression that it only applied to ONE of them.... if it did apply..... but I could be wrong.

 

[Bomb Bloke]

Regardless as to how it's "supposed" to be, there's no way a single luck roll will bump EVERYTHING. Given the huge intensity bonus (10% of the MAX), it'd be kinda hard to miss if it did.

But since items tend to drop with some (or no) good intensities and some (or all) bad intensities, that would suggest that many rolls are made. It's very uncommon to see an item with all highs.

Which means having a 100% luck suit should give you a bonus to every intensity of every property on every item, while a 30% luck suit might give you an intensity bonus to 30% of properties on every item.

(Setting aside the issue of extra items/properties, though the same should be true for them: A 100% luck suit should give you LOTS more items and properties all up).

That's the way I interpret it when taking into account how the game seems to function.

Though MalagAste could be right and the luck bonus only applies to one property per item. Still, I'd kind of expect the FoF to point out such an important detail - read as written, it should apply to all properties.

 

[Cogniac]

Though MalagAste could be right and the luck bonus only applies to one property per item. Still, I'd kind of expect the FoF to point out such an important detail - read as written, it should apply to all properties.

I'm just trying to figure out if it's:

• roll once for an extra item on the corpse, then roll once for each item on the corpse for an extra property, then roll once for every property on every item for extra intensity.

Or:

• Roll once, everything goes up if possible.

 

[Arafel Ilianna]

"The explaination for how the luck works in this week's FOF is quite comprehensive and I bet no one can call it lame this time. Good job!

However, for the quesiton below,
"Would it be possible, please, to add some additional functionality to the Personal Attendants?

Feel free to send in some feedback about what you’d like to see, or start a thread on the forums!"

That answer can virtuelly be used to answer any questions, can't it?

...It's even worse than that! I was the one who posted the original question... (well, at least I doubt that anyone else would have used my exact words as they were placed in the FoF, so I'm PRETTY SURE that was my FoF question! LOL!)... and the rest of my question was not even included in the FoF!

In the rest of my question, I specifically asked for the ability to change the clothes worn and items held by Personal Attendants, rename them, change their skin tone, hair color, hair style, and gender--much as we can with our vendors. I would also like an easier way to make Personal Attendants face a specific direction so that they could be placed and faced exactly where you want them. The other thing I would love to see fixed with Personal Attendants is that they seem to forget themselves in their scripted greetings-- specifically, my home is owned by me, Arafel Ilianna-- a female character-- and yet, whenever anyone BUT me enters the house, my silly Attendant trills out that the "LORD of the house bids you welcome!" Oops! It should not be that hard to properly link the Attendant's greeting to the owner of the house, and the gender of the owner!

Thanks all!

Lady Arafel Ilianna
Lake Superior

 

[Cogniac]

Another question: In the example, the RNG rolls a 30 and the player's Luck result is 56. 56 > 30, so the character "wins." What if the RNG had rolled 30 and the player's Luck result was also 30. Is it

• (Luck > RNG) ? Increase Loot : Don't Increase Loot

Or is it

• (Luck >= RNG) ? Increase Loot : Don't Increase Loot

?

 

[Arafel Ilianna]

"Chrissay:

Yeah, tell Draconi that he's right; the loot definitions definitely need updated.

Besides (As Draconi noted) the creatures that only allow one item, having the properties artificially capped for effectively lose the luck bonus is silly as well.

Then, there's the matters of

• some old items still being on loot tables (some of the Pagan-style necro regs, only some of which will be used in the Mysticism system),
• items that no longer spawn, or spawn non-magical (question balls, magical statues, etc.),
• the absence of SE & ML items on creatures not from those expansions (not to mention in treasure chests from maps & SOS)
• Some creatures routinely showing more items when corpse opened, than actually present (paragon golems, for example), and some showing "corpse" icons in the corpse,
• gold drops really needing rebalanced (similar to the dread spider issues of 2007)
• oddball cut corpse for resources issues (the odd fish steaks from sea serpents, the fact that all but 1 ML creature, and all SE creatures, give ONLY normal leather, etc. Note that the naturally spawning centaurs & Oaks spawn centaurs give spined leather, but the Twaulo spawn ones in the Twisted Weald give normal leather).

The whole loot system needs a balance pass."

Just to add on to this, why is it that Tokuno home styles may be built anywhere, but that Tokuno loot only shows up on corpses in Tokuno? After all, the loot that is generated on monsters in Ilsh, Fel, Trammel, and Malas shows up on monster corpses in Tokuno--why doesn't this work in the other direction?

As long as we're talking about loot found on slain monsters, could we PLEASE remove the very lowest levels of loot from the game, such as rings and bracelets with one or two ultra low mods on them (e.g., "HCI +6%", or "Magery +3")--or even no mods at all(!), and other worthless "treasures"? After all, think of the needless lag that is caused by the generation, collection, and storage of items like this--not to mention the affect of cleaning out a treasure chest in a public place (like in front of New Haven Bank) and discarding all of this worthless junk all over the ground. I am not advocating getting rid of all low-level treasure, such as daggers, pieces of armor, bones and body parts, or torches--after all, some of these materials are used in crafting (tailoring bones), and others can be collected by newbies and sold to NPCs for much-needed starting cash. All I am suggesting is getting rid of stuff that gets an ultra-low randomly generated intensity assigned to it, that really helps nobody in the game.

Finally, (and this might be better placed in another thread), I am wondering how the slayer weapons were arrived at and placed into the game--specifically, we all know that there are demon slayers and lizardman slayers and ophidian slayers, but why are there no slayers for other monsters that appeared later in the evolution of the game and are not covered by a Super Slayer of some kind? It sure would be nice to see a Changling Slayer!

 

[Bomb Bloke]

Just to add on to this, why is it that Tokuno home styles may be built anywhere, but that Tokuno loot only shows up on corpses in Tokuno? After all, the loot that is generated on monsters in Ilsh, Fel, Trammel, and Malas shows up on monster corpses in Tokuno--why doesn't this work in the other direction?

Easy: Samurai Empire and Mondain's Legacy are expansions. If you don't have them, you're not supposed to have access to the related zones (eg Blighted Grove, Tokuno, etc).

But the items are ALSO part of the expansion. You won't see ML/SE items dropping in areas where people without those expansions could get at them. Nor are they craftable for those people.

It's not the case that not having the expansion stops those monsters from giving you the relevant drops. Instead, not having the expansion stops you from fighting those monsters at all.

Presumably, the only way to get Gargoyle items to drop will be to enter the new areas that the Stygian Abyss expansion will add to the game.

 

[Righteous]

QUOTE
Item Property Intensities

Finally, the luck roll also modifies the actual intensity of any magic property, as long as it doesn’t exceed the property’s max.

This part is somewhat tricky. Every loot definition has an intensity range attached. This actually modifies the range available compared to the item property’s actual range.
For instance, Damage Increase has a range of 1 to 50. A loot definition might declare an intensity range of 0.25 to 0.3. This would mean that the available range for DI is really 13 to 15 for that item.

The initial intensity is a random number within that range. In our case, let’s choose 14.
If we make our luck roll, our intensity is increased by 10% of the *item property’s max value*. So, 10% of 50 is 5. Our result is 19. However, that’s outside of that nice 13 to 15 range we established: it’ll cap at 15.
END QUOTE

So lets say I get an item that has 5 magical properties and by some miracle I have 4000 luck, so each of those 5 properties would increase by 10% of the max intensity as long it doesnt exceed the max or does it increase everything on the item for instance all the resist plus any magic properties IE MR, LRC etc?

Righteous

 

[Arafel Ilianna]

Easy: Samurai Empire and Mondain's Legacy are expansions. If you don't have them, you're not supposed to have access to the related zones (eg Blighted Grove, Tokuno, etc).

But the items are ALSO part of the expansion. You won't see ML/SE items dropping in areas where people without those expansions could get at them. Nor are they craftable for those people.

It's not the case that not having the expansion stops those monsters from giving you the relevant drops. Instead, not having the expansion stops you from fighting those monsters at all.

Presumably, the only way to get Gargoyle items to drop will be to enter the new areas that the Stygian Abyss expansion will add to the game.

Thanks for the response, Bomb. While I don't care for the answer, your logic is accurate, and your answer is undoubtedly correct. It's nice to actually get a question answered in this game! Appreciate ya!

-Lady Arafel Ilianna
Lake Superior

 

[MalagAste]

Actually and in my opinion the loot of ML and SE should be available in more areas like T-Hunter chests and in MIB's as it stands to reason that these Items "might" be considered treasure... and therefore should appear "if" the one digging the chest has the required expansions.... I think the "loot generator" should take into account whether or not someone has ML and SE and then generate the loot to match.... and while we are at it then on lvl 6 maps they should also spawn minor tokuno arties that could be saved up and turned in as well as the ML minor arties.... right in there with all the other regular Mini-arties... but that's my opinion....

And I have said before that T-Map and MIB's need to be improved drastically.