Untrainable Prepatch Pets

[Patrick (Fargoth)]

So I saw a few posts regarding prepatch pets not being able to be trained on TC1.

This is a thing a thing because they don't want people to train up these pets, put loads of cash into them via scrolls, only to have them get reverted.

I had Mesanna take a look at my prepatched scrolled dragon because it reverted in tc1. I gave her a nice lengthy email about it.

So they took a look at my dragon on live, then copied it to tc1. This is the conclusion they came up with, a temporary status of not being able to train so they come up with a way to where this code doesn't hit these legit pets.

I hope this takes some stress off.

 

[North_LS]

as long as its a temporary measure and not a hamfisted "THERE I FIXED IT", i'm fine with this. As i understand it, only legacy dragons are untrainable? or does this apply to other legacy pets as well.

 

[Patrick (Fargoth)]

As far as I'm tracking it's only prepatch dragons. It is indeed a temporary thing.

 

[Keith of Sonoma]

I saw NOTHING to indicate this was "temporary". IF that is the case, I would think that the developers would have been smart enough to share that EXTREMELY pertinent detail.

 

[Patrick (Fargoth)]

Here's the email

 

[Khaelor]

Here's the email

And I had Mesanna come to see our prepatch dragons, and she did not say any of that.

Nor do patch notes say it's just dragons, nor did patch notes explain it was temp.

Nor do they say anything about what will happen during an exploit fix to any trained dragons.

If that is their intention, they made NO clarification of it when they were asked to explain numerous times about it on the official forums.

 

[Khaelor]

I saw NOTHING to indicate this was "temporary". IF that is the case, I would think that the developers would have been smart enough to share that EXTREMELY pertinent detail.

Exactly Keith.

They were asked all yesterday about it... and that was NOT said.

Even when pressed about it....

 

[Keith of Sonoma]

Exactly Keith.

They were asked all yesterday about it... and that was NOT said.

Even when pressed about it....

And the fact that email is a week old.

 

[Khaelor]

And the fact that email is a week old.

When Bleak was pressed about it yesterday, all he had to say was "we hope this is a temporary fix to issues blah blah blah"

He did not.

 

[Keith of Sonoma]

When Bleak was pressed about it yesterday, all he had to say was "we hope this is a temporary fix to issues blah blah blah"

He did not.

He never mentioned "temporary" to me either when looking at a few of my pets.

But then again he didn't respond when I asked him, while having a discussion on cheaters/scripters/multibotters/RMT people, if he was aware that a CURRENT EM is "joined at the hip" with a gold selling site. LOL Had we of been in real life, I imagine it would have gotten really quiet in the room!

 

[Khaelor]

He never mentioned "temporary" to me either when looking at a few of my pets.

When he was asked for clarification on the uo forums all he had to say is "we hope this is a temporary"

All SOMEONE had to say was "we hope this is temporary while we find a solution"

they did not.

 

[North_LS]

at this point i'd be very happy with killing the revert code altogether and making legacy pets fully trainable. i dont care if theres a handful of exploited pets in the wild. i have zero confidence in this dev teams ability to apply reversion code globally without negatively affecting legitimate pets.

 

[MalagAste]

I'd prefer if they just allowed us to point out the illegal pets and came and deleted them... Rather than destroying old legacy pets.

 

[Lex Darion]

The way to deal with this shouldn't be to do everything at once.
Each patch should do one thing, and do it well. Instead of a blanket half-assed revert/nerf/bugfix.

What should be done is (different patches):
- Identify the exploits used and patch them out. (prevents new exploited pets from entering market).
- Identify slot jumps. Make sure pets do not jump from 2 to 4 when training from 2 to 3 for example. The current jump code seem very iffy.
- Identify intensity / max training points for prepatch and current pets. Write filter that cycles through all pets in existance revert pet to baseline stats MINUS skill prices training points.
Save before and after results so false positives can be verified and rectified (it shouldnt be a blanket revert where nobody has a chance to appeal).

And most important of all. Start to be open with the playerbase.
At the moment a lot of panicking and training pets they intended to save for a long time.
Some exploited pets will most likely pass under radar even when revert codes get added back again.

Pets should probably have a pet intensity overlook too.
Beetles have 7900 - 8800 training points from 1 or 2 slot beetles (fire beetles / frost beetles).

Cu sidhes are around 8000 points for a perfect spawn.

A lot of pets are quite weak, ossian ram for example has about 6900 points total.
In my opinion almost all pets should have at least 7300 points to make them balanced.

 

[Khaelor]

The way to deal with this shouldn't be to do everything at once.
Each patch should do one thing, and do it well. Instead of a blanket half-assed revert/nerf/bugfix.

What should be done is (different patches):
- Identify the exploits used and patch them out. (prevents new exploited pets from entering market).
- Identify slot jumps. Make sure pets do not jump from 2 to 4 when training from 2 to 3 for example. The current jump code seem very iffy.

This is kind of sort of how the original exploit of last summer was fixed.

Once word got out, they fixed the exploit rather quickly. Then they did another patch a month or so later with revert code and addressing slot jumping. The code in place was all about intensity.

This time for reasons I do not understand, they waited 4 months from when the bug was originally brought to their attention to patch the actual exploit and with it, they lowered the maximum intensity a pet could have (which made prepatch dragon problems worse on tc1).

Pets should probably have a pet intensity overlook too.
Beetles have 7900 - 8800 training points from 1 or 2 slot beetles (fire beetles / frost beetles).

Cu sidhes are around 8000 points for a perfect spawn.

A lot of pets are quite weak, ossian ram for example has about 6900 points total.
In my opinion almost all pets should have at least 7300 points to make them balanced.

It's because of how highly they weigh some pets innate abilities (magery(and eval)/necro(and spiritspeak)), even if the abilities are not active. This is why legacy dragons revert and 3 slot dragon wolves do not.

 

[Lex Darion]

They should just make it easy and only calculate the trained skills.

The exploited pets all show pretty easy.
Essentially two things to look for

Over cap hp and mana.
Or multiple magic school changes that are expensive on points and overcap the pet.

There is also an exploit where str can be upped too. Essentially you can turn any non prepatch pet into a fake prepatch. I think bs is panic stopping training on overcapped pets like dragons to prevent fake prepatch to enter the market before they can identify legacy pets and separat them from fake legacy pets Just a guess though.

Haven't figured out exactly how this exploit is done yet but I for hunches. Reporting it to bs as soon as I figure it out. Sorry if this discussion is skirting forum rules, but by now I think the cat is out of the bag and we should teach people how to spot pets.

I will be releasing a web tool later where you can input your pets training details and stats to calculate training points and how good it is compared to max. It'll also make it possible to get a good induction on if it's likely your pet is overcap exploited.
I've collected a bunch of data from prepatch and current spawning from different generations.