Screwed up using a Soulstone : Is there any hope to get help ?

[popps]

"Are you sure you wish to perform this action"

Uh....no, but let's go ahead anyway and see what happens....

Well, how about improving the message in a way where it says :

"Are you sure you wish to perform this action even though it will decrease your Spellweaving skill by 100 points ?"

Had the message told me that, chances are that I would have stopped right there.

Instead, because of a number of issues and being tired the fact that I had marked down spellweaving slipped out of my mind.

A message reminding me of that would have been of GREAT help to me like to many other players who like me where unfortunate to have this accident happen to them.

When a system CAN be improved, and it CAN help players ease their pain and frustration, I do not see why it should not get improved.

 

[wanderer1origin]

isnt spellweaving one of the easy one foir gains like music???

hold button down etc!!

while banging head into wall, or asking questions stratics

It is not about not paying attention, it is about helping us to reduce the number of mistakes even when we are tired, had a bad day, are sleepy and so forth.

I mean, if it happens to quite a number of players and it can be improved than I cannot understand why there should be resistances to something made better which otherwise, left as it is, can get players frustrated over it.

I can only imagine a player losing all lockpicking or taming or some other extremely hard to gain skill.

It could be enough to get them quit the game losing their subscriptions.

If it can be avoided or at least quite reduced then why not ?

Why it should not be done if it can ?

 

[Connor_Graham]

When a system CAN be improved, and it CAN help players ease their pain and frustration, I do not see why it should not get improved.

There comes a point where the game developers have done all they can and the player has to accept responsibility for his own actions. They can not safeguard against carelessness.

 

[popps]

When a system CAN be improved, and it CAN help players ease their pain and frustration, I do not see why it should not get improved.

There comes a point where the game developers have done all they can and the player has to accept responsibility for his own actions. They can not safeguard against carelessness.

Just noting here that Petra said "There comes a point where the game developers have done all they can.... .

"All they can" to means means no room there for further improvements...

In accidents like the one happened to me and others, it seems, I think there IS room for further improvements, for example bettering the Warning Gump the way I suggested.

That is, adding to the Warning the information about any skill eventually marked down which is going to loose points when using a Soulstone to load up another skill.

Such a reminder perhaps can help prevent at least a number of players from doing this mistake which can be quite very frustrating and painfull to bear with.

 

[popps]

isnt spellweaving one of the easy one foir gains like music???

Well, I trained it a while back but I remember it to be a lengthy training....

If anyone knows of a good way to train it fast (like a walkthrough to what to do at what skill level), please PM me.

Thanks.

 

[kittykat]

Well, how about improving the message in a way where it says :

"Are you sure you wish to perform this action even though it will decrease your Spellweaving skill by 100 points ?"

Had the message told me that, chances are that I would have stopped right there.

Unfortunately because you were tired, there's the very good chance you would have blazed right past that warning anyway and still deleted your skill. Sometimes we just don't pay attention no matter what the warnings tell us and we do stupid things (for example, the other day I was playing a game on Facebook and was just not paying attention while I deleted some minor items that hadn't cost me much. In my haste, I deleted an item that was very expensive and had taken over a week to save up for. I got a distinct warning that I was deleting the item, but I just clicked right on through it because I just wasn't paying attention). No matter how much warning, no matter what the warnings say, we all have brain farts from time to time and do stupid things.

Sorry you lost your spellweaving, good luck on retraining it.

 

[Viper09]

All information you want added into your gump as a warning can easily be found in the skill section. Shows all skills and their settings.

I believe the pre-set shortcut is Alt+K, or was it Ctrl+k? I forget.
Or you can go under your paperdoll or that toolbar at the top and click that button for skills.

 

[popps]

Unfortunately because you were tired, there's the very good chance you would have blazed right past that warning anyway and still deleted your skill. Sometimes we just don't pay attention no matter what the warnings tell us and we do stupid things (for example, the other day I was playing a game on Facebook and was just not paying attention while I deleted some minor items that hadn't cost me much. In my haste, I deleted an item that was very expensive and had taken over a week to save up for. I got a distinct warning that I was deleting the item, but I just clicked right on through it because I just wasn't paying attention). No matter how much warning, no matter what the warnings say, we all have brain farts from time to time and do stupid things.

Sorry you lost your spellweaving, good luck on retraining it.

I am not saying you are not right because you are.

We still can make mistakes regardless of the warning.

Nonetheless, even if a more detailed Warning Message can only help "some" players since there will still be a number of players messing up regardless of the warning, I feel that it is worth trying to better the Warning Message to at least help those players who will be able to get help from an improved Warning Message.

That is, it will not make the system 100% proof but still, if it will help more than the current bare Bones Warning Message Gump, than I think it would be worth it.

 

[Sarsmi]

I am not saying I did not make a stupid mistake.

I did and I said it. I am only trying to make a point that perhaps, thanking to the beauty of programming, mistakes like these could be reduced by many folds.

You said it yourself and you got lucky it was animal lore more than lockpicking.
But what if it had been lockpicking instead ? What about someone losing 120 taming over a stupid mistake like this ?

I told you what if, I would have cried. Well, teared up anyways. Then I would have set about gaining my skill back.

I mean, is it really so bad to actually improve the Warning Gump and also have it mention that the loading of a Soulstone is going to cost skill points in this and that other skills marked down ?

I mean, in just half hour in this thread we already have several players who had an accident like this happen to this.

This shows to me that this kind of problem is rather common, unfortunately.

It's a lot less common than people forgetting to lockdown/secure a container and lose their stuff, or people who log out with a pet and lose them because the insta stabling didn't work for whatever reason...There are probably 1000 things in UO that could be "improved" as in, idiot-proofed. And I'd rather not see dev time spent improving a single thing that could be circumvented by common sense.

Therefore why not improve the Warning Gump so that these incidents get minimized the most possible ?

Why should players get frustrated over accidents like these when they actually want to play the game to enjoy and relax ?

The Warning System CAN be improved and quite some, why not do it for the benefit of players then ?

You probably do not understand a lot of things popps. I don't mean that as a slight. I think you see the world as it could be, with every square corner smoothed and every time something bad happens you feel strongly that there could be a way to prevent it. Me, I see the world as a place where despite our attempts to rein in every aspect of our existence we will never manage complete control or dominance of our world.

I really dislike the trend of making people dumber by making them safer. It teaches us that we don't have to think for ourselves or be responsible for our actions, that there will always be a larger entity looking out for us (big business, the government, whoever).

All that aside, I don't want to see dev time wasted on something trivial. Thats an hour (or however much amount of time) that could be spent on something worthwhile. LIKE BORDERLESS GOZA MATS!

 

[popps]

All information you want added into your gump as a warning can easily be found in the skill section. Shows all skills and their settings.

The key word here is "REMINDER'....

If something has slipped out of the mind of a player, the fact that it is accessable via the skills menu does not help a tiny bit.

The player has the head somewhere else, perhaps because of a fight with the kids, the boss at work, was just told bad news about a cared one, whatever.

The issue here is that the mind is floating somewhere else.

Yet, the player is playing and the Gump shows up with a warning.

Sure, the player can well ignore it, but the player might also read it AND, if the warning ALSO mentions of skills in danger of being REDUCED because of that action well, it CAN be that the player will stop it there at least in a number of cases thus reducing the number of such incidents.

As I said, not a 100% proof improvement but one that could at least help some....

 

[Sarsmi]

I have done this before. I lost all my animal lore and a few points off of my GM lockpicking. I would have cried if it had been the other way around, as it was I still had to train back animal lore (and I was stuck with the pet I was on till I got it high enough thanks to my now reduced stable slots). I figure I got off easy, really. I mean out of all the skills to lose that has to be one of the easier ones to get back up.

Anyways I came to the boards to find out if there was a decent way to get my lore back up quickly, and now when I swap out skills I am super extra careful.

Life is a balance between what we are responsible for and what other people should be responsible for. Recognizing which is which is a sign of maturity and growth. When you make a mistake, your first thought should not be how it was someone else's fault that they didn't work with your mental parameters in mind.

If this was a group issue requiring a dev response there would regularly be posts on U Hall saying "I lost my GM blah blah cause of soulstones". There are not posts like this, it is not a group issue but a personal one.

For what it's worth I am sorry you lost your spellweaving skill. It sounds like a horrid skill to train, and I bet next time you will be extra careful with soulstone skill swapping.

This is the perfect reply, I envy you for that oO.

Your props warms the cockles of this cold, black husk I call my heart.

 

[popps]

All that aside, I don't want to see dev time wasted on something trivial. Thats an hour (or however much amount of time) that could be spent on something worthwhile.

Well, I can understand that but honestly, when I see sometimes that time is spent on yet another ethereal rideable or something that is merely eye candy well, then I wonder if that time would not be better spent on making players feel less frustrated by mistakes like those that can accidentally happen using a Soulstone.

Besides, would it really take that much of a time to get an enhanced Warning Message Gump when using a Soulstone ?

 

[Pfloyd]

Look at it another way...You didn't mess up. You found the fastest way to lose 100 skill points and probably won't do it again.

I've done something similar...once.

Every hurdle in life has something good on the other side.

 

[Gellor]

Can someone shoot me yet? Yet another popps "the game is outsmarting me" post... last time it was "I can't learn how to stealth so please make a walk always option"... now this?:loser:

Really... you even stated it yourself that you did something while tired. Maybe we need a new big warning screen while UO fires up that says "If you are tired, the game may outsmart you"

Really... does the game need to be dumbed down THAT much because three people out of several thousand players can't figure it out?

Mistakes happen... but it doesn't sound like there is some huge mass of people who are having issues with soulstones. Why should the devs waste even a minute on adjusting this? It isn't like the devs don't have a buffet sized load of things to fix that they don't already.

 

[NewThunder]

Well, I can understand that but honestly, when I see sometimes that time is spent on yet another ethereal rideable or something that is merely eye candy well, then I wonder if that time would not be better spent on making players feel less frustrated by mistakes like those that can accidentally happen using a Soulstone.

Besides, would it really take that much of a time to get an enhanced Warning Message Gump when using a Soulstone ?

I heard if you travel to FEL you can train Spellweaving faster, just my tip of the day to help you gain back your skill.

 

[Ailish]

In the time you have wasted here, complaining that someone should protect you from yourself, you could already have trained back up to AT LEAST 50, more likely about 70.

Yes, spellweaving is tough to gain after about 105 and the best way is to just use guaranteed gains and SOT.

I can't believe you actually asked for DONATIONS of SoT's.

 

[Alezi]

Wow. Just wow. He's posting like every 2 seconds. New threads every 5 seconds - crying about issue X that's broken.

popps start playing WORLD of WARCRAFT. You will be happier, we will be happier. Actually you'll just probably cry in WoW as well ("I DIDNT KNOW THAT RESSING AT THE SPIRIT HEALERS TAKES DURABILITY FROM YOUR ITEMS OMG GM HELP PLEASEEE! I WAS TIRED AND I DIDNT READ THE WARNING!"

 

[Black Sun]

Well, I can understand that but honestly, when I see sometimes that time is spent on yet another ethereal rideable or something that is merely eye candy well, then I wonder if that time would not be better spent on making players feel less frustrated by mistakes like those that can accidentally happen using a Soulstone.

Besides, would it really take that much of a time to get an enhanced Warning Message Gump when using a Soulstone ?

Good god man, you've been going on about this for nearly 3 hours now. I don't think posting here 120 times is going to bring back your skill points. bdh

Here, That's for you. Feel better now?


Really, the dev's have better things to do than make the game 100% idiot proof. That's why they gave it a T for teen rating. As with everything in life there's a little risk, it can't all be padded and safe.

 

[sablestorm]

Well, if I have not been the only one to screw up perhaps introducing a "reverse" button would not harm...

That is, when a player realized after the incident that they wrongly wiped out points they still can reverse that wiping say, for like 15 minutes after the incident ?

I don't know, I just don't feel it as right that for a stupid mistake one has to go all over again to retrain a whole skill back up to 120......

There should be something there to be able to reverse the accident.

A fifteen minute reverse button just sounds like it would be abused in some fashion. For instance, players could soulstone GM arms lore for their crafters and craft a few items then hit reverse. That basically circumvents the skills cap.

So intimating that Devs haven't done all they can is just..... I won't finish that statement. As a programmer myself, there's a well known maxim about idiot proofing in programming and that's you can idiot proof to your heart's desire, but there will always be a bigger idiot waiting around the corner. You sorta agree that the fault lies with yourself, but you still make excuses and are looking for the Devs to account for all those bad things that could distract you? Perhaps if you are distracted, you shouldn't risk playing, or risk driving, or performing surgery, or whatever!

Sorry about this incident, but as others have mentioned, there already are safeguards which we often ignore in our haste. The fault lies with us and asking the Devs to go further is just us hoping we can get the world to revolve around us.

 

[kelmo]

*sighs* Consider this a mercy killing. Most of us have screwed up in one way or the other in game. It happens. Popps... The skill is gone. Send a feed back to Mythic.

Or restart this thread in say... six months. The Devs are rather busy right now and a day behind... *winks*

Remember. It is just pixels and data... pixels and data. You will likely spend the time in game anyway and 120s are likely to become cheaper and more available.

So chin up and get back on that horse.