Shard shield discussion...and more!

[cazador]

Figured I would start the thread!!

Questions maybe for the devs and not the UO Stratics armchair coders..

-Is it even possible to make shard hopping gates given the way the code is currently?

-And if not is it even worth re-coding to change vital issues?
Speed hacking detectors?
Some sort of afk monitoring?
Cleaner code?

-Any way you would ever add in a mini shard shield? Something that is a monthly transfer at say 25-75 items..

Off Subject...

-Is it possible to say "box up" a house and re-place it with all items in a box for easier transport?

-What about adding a PVP shard..and a free token to whomever wants to move a character..only good for that shard. One token per account ....we could call it Armageddon(Sort of a new aged Siege but better)
-Gold cannot be transferred

( Housing size maxed at 10x10 )
-Name Change Tokens disabled
-Forged Pardons Disabled
(Live by the sword die by it)
-Soul stones disabled
(You make a choice and live with it..or drop skills and rework)

-All overland spawn is "Paragon"

-No NPCs
(Makes crafters relevant and needed)

-Champion Spawns tweaked to be more difficult and the champ can only be summoned when 4 people are on the alter..
( minimize farming and eliminate solo farming )

-Guard zone removed
(Except at Britain, and the holy city)
(Pretty self explanatory)


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[The Zog historian]

There's a hard cap of several tiles per second at running speed, and I've wondered why there isn't code to enforce that limit. It shouldn't be hard for a shard to count __ movements per second and refuse to accept more. A speedhacker can use whatever he wants, but he'll surge forward, stop for half a second, surge forward again, etc., or he might surge forward at double speed, then rubberband back, surge forward, rubberband back.

What you're suggesting with shard gates is very complex. An entire character and bank box would have to be recreated on the new shard, verified, then removed from the original shard. That takes quite a while, and as I said to Kojak, consider that EA would lose revenue from no longer selling some transfer tokens.

Kojak suggested:

me personally, I wish they would just put up a moongate-like portal that you could go through as often as you wish to go back and forth to any shard you want to (on second thought I don't want atlantic a**sholes raiding my spawns)

barring that it would be nice if you had a common bank box for each account that you could access across shards - put something in it on one shard and take it out on another

and since I know that would result in epic pancakes from people, as a last resort, I'd like the ability to shop vendors on other shards with this new vendor system - even if I had to pay extra

My reply:

This would require a massive overhaul to existing item code to prevent duping and lost items. It isn't hard to code safeguards around normal maintenance schedules. As a safety buffer, I'd put it at ±60 minutes of a shard's scheduled time. But this still cannot account for any unexpected shard maintenance.

Moving an item to another shard is not as simple as moving an item on a shard, even from one container to another. It requires destroying the item's original information and recreating it: item ID, CC container and location, EC container and location (or facet and coordinates if not in a container). This is going to be a lot of server load -- a genuine higher use of CPU cycles, not just item count. There would have to be a limit per unit of time to prevent scripters from trying to break the system. I'd personally code it so that while an item should transfer a lot faster, it wouldn't be available on the destination shard for a full hour, after which time another item can be transferred. This way, any unplanned server maintenance would cause the transfer to abort, and the item would be recreated on the original shard. Always, always assume the worst intentions with any given user, that 1% who are looking for a "But I followed your rules!" excuse. Stress-testing and bug-hunting are things I've done more than a little of, and I've routinely discovered bugs that none of the formal developers conceived of, because they couldn't put themselves in the mindset of someone looking to game or outrightly circumvent a trading system.

Finally, you said you'd be willing to pay extra, but how much, and how many other players would? Transfer tokens are revenue generators, and EA would have to replace that revenue somehow. Lots of players won't want to pay more for a feature that they wouldn't want to use, or in the case of 14+ year vets, a feature they already have. How much extra would a player be willing to pay every month for enabled transfer? With an hour limit, that's 720 items per 30 days, a bit more than a $20 token, and you're talking about multiple directions, multiple shards. An additional $5 would be a tremendous value for players, and a possible revenue loss for EA, unless it somehow encourages a lot of players to sign up for it. Ten dollars would be more realistic, but then would there be enough interest? If the Dev team could devote resources to making this happen, it would have to be a pilot program whose price may increase, or it might be scrapped without enough interest.

 

[Lythos-]

I think it was stated a long time ago it would be impossible to make a gate from one shard to another. That is why it takes around an hour to transfer from one to another.

Speed detectors would have to go comp side since server side is already capped. Should the cap be lowered more? I don't think speeders make THAT big of an impact on play to require monitoring software downloads.

Afk monitoring could be easily fixed with in game captcha codes if doing repetitive tasks. That would really work as long as they're easily legible.

 

[The Zog historian]

Client-side could still be circumvented if the data stream can be manipulated. Server-side is better, and there's no reason it couldn't be done.

Speedhacking is inherently a problem in PvP, though I haven't seen any flagrant offenders in a while. The legitimate speed cap is fine. Anyone with a decent connection, who isn't living too far away, can move at maximum speed. There's no need to lower it (I don't think it's ever been lowered), and doing that would put speedhackers at greater advantage anyway (as well as encourage players on the fence to try speedhacking out of frustration).

 

[Captn Norrington]

Regarding the shard hopping gates, last year one of the developers (Kyronix or Mesanna I think) said that it would not be possible with the games coding.