The untold houseing changes...

[Giggles]

They aren't falling anymore. I have spoke to IDOCers on three different shards who are all seeing the same thing. 10-20 houses per week on average, and now its down to 0. Oh I did find one, but it was a active account and the guy was moving.. This goes a little beyond everyone is all of a sudden in love with UO and no one is quitting. It has only been since the publish, and for years prior there has been 10-20 per week. Now there is zip. Can any devs comment on this please?

 

[Fayled Dhreams]

Well ... from here

"Punctuation is cool and all, but where are all the exploit fixes?"

Exploit fixes are a tricky thing to talk about - it's terribly demoralizing for players when a well-known exploit seems to go ignored, and we'd love to be able to reassure you that it's getting fixed. However, we don't want to spread knowledge of a given exploit before the fix goes live, so we end up having to make vague statements ("We're fixing house placement exploits!") without giving any real detail. That's the situation we're in with publish 52 - when I was putting together that preview list, I cut out at least half a dozen exploit fixes, not including the house placement exploit stuff. Sometimes, we just want to be able to savor the image of all the exploiters suddenly discovering their favorite tricks don't work...

humph ... totally removing the IDOC phase ... no ... was not mentioned ... personally don't think that's a good idea ... (removing the "countdown" from the signs)

lesse ... pub notes ... pub notes ... ah !

House Placement Changes

This publish implements several changes to prevent house placement exploits.

* 15 day character age requirement to place or trade a house
* Water barrels/magic fields/etc will no longer block house placement
* When a house is placed on top of a moongate, the placer will get a message about placement being blocked, and the moongate will be destroyed (at both ends.)
o IDOC behavior (houses that collapse through decay) When an IDOC drops, housing cannot be placed on the lot for a random amount of time
o Items that drop from the IDOC will have protections against scripted looting
* House placement tool will have a cooldown if used too many times in a given time period
* Must now wait one hour after building a home before demolishing it (previously 15 minutes)

Nope ... don't really need it either (no data on the house sign)

Might be like the "monster curse icon" ... code snapped with the added lines ...
*shrugs*
Maybe ...
waiting for the "burning lots" to go active ...

 

[NewThunder]

humph ... totally removing the IDOC phase ... no ... was not mentioned ... personally don't think that's a good idea ... (removing the "countdown" from the signs)

There are still some houses showing decay, just not new ones it seems. Perhaps they had to reset the 90 day timer for all houses in order to fix part of the housing issue.

 

[DevilsOwn]

soooo...... ninety days from publish and another Big Fall Day, you think? puts us where, August sometime, I think

good for people that want a new place for a house, good for IDOC'ers, but that last one just made me sad.. imagine it will do the same this time

 

[Lord Richard]

There are still some houses showing decay, just not new ones it seems. Perhaps they had to reset the 90 day timer for all houses in order to fix part of the housing issue.

See, now here's a player with a suggestion that makes sense.

 

[Marcellis]

The only ones I've seen decaying are condemned from people moving, and the usual OSI owned ones.

 

[JC the Builder]

This is why you don't deploy housing changes to live shards before testing them.

 

[THP]

See, now here's a player with a suggestion that makes sense.

Hopefully yes hopefully we will see big fall day 2!!!

Jeremy did day it was in the scedule , so maybe this is it, every single house is preset to full days days timer after which time if they are not refreshed by paying for the account then they will fall!! This would seem the most logicaly explanation for the drying up of house decayers....

Sooo we looking at roughly mid- August!!! just right for the kids holidays...LOL

 

[Plucky Duck]

Simply putt what they did was reset the timer that starts to decay houses at 90 days on any account that has been inactive for 90 days. It has been reset to zero for all accounts starting with the date of the pub or the day after most likly. This was a pretty easy fix rather then them having to pen point inactive accounts over ninty days. I am assuming the coding is pretty difficult since they never were able to switch the timer to 30 days a year ago like they had wanted to. But at least its progress.

I know why they didnt say anything and even though this doesnt fix all the housing issues it will fix the majority of them.

 

[Fayled Dhreams]

Simply putt what they did was reset the timer that starts to decay houses at 90 days on any account that has been inactive for 90 days. It has been reset to zero for all accounts starting with the date of the pub or the day after most likly. This was a pretty easy fix rather then them having to pen point inactive accounts over ninty days. I am assuming the coding is pretty difficult since they never were able to switch the timer to 30 days a year ago like they had wanted to. But at least its progress.

I know why they didnt say anything and even though this doesnt fix all the housing issues it will fix the majority of them.

Not too likely .... else, This would not have occured ... (the "reset" would have delayed that ... eh?)
* *shrugs* maybe ... sure ... IF they had fallen/entered IDOC .... before MAY 5th-6th(edited to match ww pub date) ... possible ... but not too likely ...

and ... seeing as how the pub was apr29th'ish MAY 5th-6th ...ish
They could have just as easily ... reinstituted the 30 day "grace" period ... as far as a "reset" would go ...

See ?

 

[Demonous]

the 1st big fall was dumb, i spent countless hours marking 8 full runebooks to idocs and i didnt get 1 items worth keeping in the end because EA decided to make them all drop at 3 am on a wednesday morning instead of something like a saturday afternoon

 

[Lady Aalia]

the 1st big fall was dumb, i spent countless hours marking 8 full runebooks to idocs and i didnt get 1 items worth keeping in the end because EA decided to make them all drop at 3 am on a wednesday morning instead of something like a saturday afternoon

Wow we filled 3 18x18 plots with welll umm..."treassures" but we had loads of fun

 

[Leana Sidhe]

I have to admit, I had a lot of fun, and met some great players...
I gotta pay attention to this thread, I have to know if I need vacation time.... LOL

 

[Demonous]

Wow we filled 3 18x18 plots with welll umm..."treassures" but we had loads of fun

yup i would have definitely had hundreds of mills worth of loot if they fell at a decent hour and placed some big houses but that ea for ya, they expect you to make your schedule around them

 

[THP]

Well as a idocer on europa i can def say there aint many if none decaying at the mo. the ones that are i guess are simply peeps moving house...so iam guessing for sure that the 90 day timer as been reset for every house on every shard, so assuming some old accounts dont pay for an account in the next 90 days then one can only assume that quite a few unused/unpaid for house will go into decay....Hence bring on Big Fall Day 2, they may even tie it in with the so called ''main event'' maybe have them all fall while there hoardes of nasties running riot througout the lands!!!

 

[Plucky Duck]

05 May 2008 16:24:26

All shards will be published with Pub 52 during their next scheduled maintenance.

This was the date of the pub where the timer would have been reset for housing inactive accounts. So anything on the 6th would still have been set to decay as normal since the coding could have easily been set in place as an effect to hit the next downtime cycle. So it means that the 7th would have been the first day no house would have been set to decay do to the inactive account timer. So that means because the decay cycle is five days it would mean that Monday the 12th or Tuesday the 13th would have been the last houses to collapse do to being on inactive accounts (unless there demo pending osi houses so just don't bother posting those as a retort please). Now with all do respect Fayled the persons houses that fell actually fell before or on the 12th since that's the day they posted they had collapsed and thus would have been possible within the guidelines of my speculation. If I am wrong you know I would own up to it but I really don't see allot of other possibilities for this situation.

 

[Fayled Dhreams]

*shrugs* maybe ... sure ... IF they had fallen/entered IDOC .... before MAY 5th-6th(edited to match ww pub date) ... possible ... but not too likely ...

and ... seeing as how the pub was apr29th'ish MAY 5th-6th ...ish
They could have just as easily ... reinstituted the 30 day "grace" period ... as far as a "reset" would go ...

See ?

better?

 

[the 4th man]

"the 1st big fall was dumb, i spent countless hours marking 8 full runebooks to idocs and i didnt get 1 items worth keeping in the end because EA decided to make them all drop at 3 am on a wednesday morning instead of something like a saturday afternoon "
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
I don't know what shard you were on, but I saw them go at 6 AM cst......how I got my 18 x 18 too,......you're the one who wasted your time, and was assumptuous.

3 am?? seriously.

 

[Marcellis]

"Big Fall Day"


OMG.....First week of August? Publish 52 was on May 6th, wasn't it? If this is how it's going to go I got a while to make tons of room in my house!

 

[Demonous]

chesapeake, 3 am eastern time

 

[Salivern_Diago]

Well if we are having a big fall day #2 then you'ld better watch your houses.

Last time did they decay or just all drop?

 

[xStrikerx]

The time at which houses fall is why I gave up on IDOCs, they almost always fall early morning on LS. For 2 weeks I ran around marking runes and checking daily. Always checked runes around 10pm. Any greatly worn house was gone by the time I got home and could log on the next day.

 

[Shamus Turlough]

The time at which houses fall is why I gave up on IDOCs, they almost always fall early morning on LS. For 2 weeks I ran around marking runes and checking daily. Always checked runes around 10pm. Any greatly worn house was gone by the time I got home and could log on the next day.

I beg to differ, optimal fall time on LS was, before the changes, anywhere from 10am to 1pm central time. Now it seems that the houses that do fall are completely random...

 

[Moby Grape]

Ok, what is all this talk about resetting the 90 day timer?

What makes some houses on inactive accounts so critical, that they do a total destroy on the IDOCer playstyle?

After the great job they did in the fixing problems, that had dogged us for years, via the last patch. Then to let us enjoy it for one week, and to pull the rug out from under us, with no comment as to why.

More likely, that its a Bozo error, caused by fixing the rushed changes to the last patch.

Which was handled like, hummmmm, maybe they wouldn't notice that, the playstyle is gone. Just leave them in the dark and say nothing, after all we gave them this great event, they should be doing that.

UnBozo the changes and give us back our playstyle.

Is that too much to ask for?

 

[Spellbound]

Perhaps there is an issue with the recent housing changes. Seem to recall, right before the old boards croaked, there was a post about someone's house decaying for no reason. That may have spurred EAMythic to freeze decays for the time being, until they figure out the problem. If that is the case, kudos to the team for ensuring more of our homes don't decay without due cause.

Ok my bad, was after the boards returned I read this post:
http://vboards.stratics.com/showthread.php?t=491