I now remember why town invasions suck... 118.2 feedback

username

Checked out the invasion briefly on Baja. Was in Trinsic and then Vesper. Spawn very sparse  (most cities are very large), spawn in walls, on roofs, 2nd floor of buildings behind 3 doors, outside of walls, tons in unreachable/stuck areas.... yuck. This sucks.

I thought we all agreed after Shogun that open areas for ToTs were awesome? What happened?

Give us Winter Spur back @Kyronix and give us more spawn than we can handle. What are these wimpy town invasions where you have 1 skeleton per screen? Not very "invasion" like. Let players pick between doing a city invasion with a boss VS Winter Spur. Why not both?

Check the feed back on the unofficial forum who shall not be named. They're more vocal about these things and they are echoing exactly what I'm saying. 

Theo

Tend to agree. Also spells limited in town. So many spawn creatures in the walls at Trinsic. 

This should be sufficiently annoying.  Winter spur was great. 

Violet

Theo said:

Tend to agree. Also spells limited in town. So many spawn creatures in the walls at Trinsic. 

This should be sufficiently annoying.  Winter spur was great. 

 Before giving feedback, it's probably best to test things first.  Spells can be cast in town.

Grimbeard

Violet said:

Theo said:

Tend to agree. Also spells limited in town. So many spawn creatures in the walls at Trinsic. 

This should be sufficiently annoying.  Winter spur was great. 

 Before giving feedback, it's probably best to test things first.  Spells can be cast in town.

Indeed and thunderstorm great for clearing walls 

Pawain

username said:

I thought we all agreed after Shogun that open areas for ToTs were awesome? 

Is that why the posters are always asking for city invasions to return?  Maybe learn how to do these before whining?

username

Violet said:

Theo said:

Tend to agree. Also spells limited in town. So many spawn creatures in the walls at Trinsic. 

This should be sufficiently annoying.  Winter spur was great. 

 Before giving feedback, it's probably best to test things first.  Spells can be cast in town.

Correct. It does appear that EVs/summons, and other out-of-town spells, can be used in invasion towns, for what they're worth, since the spawn seemed to be so sparse that they weren't really worthwhile. If you're doing EVs you'd basically cast 2 to kill 2 things then be forced to dispell them, just to recast them a screen or two away, or let them be mostly useless for their lifespan.

I really don't play casters so as a sampire or archer I don't know what to do with the unreachable spawn. I tried to page a GM but got canned response and no monsters were moved out of the walls. And they tend to pile up the longer the invasion goes. No weavers around we were stuck and eventually abandoned the town.

Pretty much every town I've tried an invasion in has had several issues with stuck/unreachable monsters and low spawn rate @Kyronix please give us an open area alternative. Let me choose: do cities OR do an open area that's more difficult and high spawn rate. Go back and check the feedback from Shogun, you'll see that open areas were incredibly well received. 

And before anyone says anything about random towns hurting the bots, please understand the tmap locations are infinitely more random along several facets and yet they manage to show up to every manifestation spawn 24/7 on Atlantic. Plus we've already seen the bots outsmart multi level dungeons in the past, like Deceit, check my post history. Stop punishing legit players.

PsycoderToo

I have never done city invasion. I was asking for city invasion because I thought it would be fun. I was especially hoping for luna invasion.

Is a mage template more suited for killing things in city invasions?

Grimbeard

Turn spawn up 63.6%
Include luna,umbra etc 
Beef up "boss" 

Cookie

Ok, I am worried.
You may be about to make the best reward arc ever, a Sampire fest.
On top of that, if there is not enough spawn, it will be worse, nothing else will stand a chance.
Even with enough spawn, it may not help.
1 solo Sampire can solo Deceit, or Abyssal Inferno, you need to understand their mass spawn destruction ability.
This could actually turn out to be the worst fail ever. 
Which would be hard to take.

sibble

Cookie said:

Ok, I am worried.
You may be about to make the best reward arc ever, a Sampire fest.
On top of that, if there is not enough spawn, it will be worse, nothing else will stand a chance.
Even with enough spawn, it may not help.
1 solo Sampire can solo Deceit, or Abyssal Inferno, you need to understand their mass spawn destruction ability.
This could actually turn out to be the worst fail ever. 
Which would be hard to take.

How's that make this different from any other event?

Sampires aren't new.

Town invasions aren't new.

Everyone has the ability to make a sampire...  It's an easy-to-play PVE template for all to use.

If towns lack spawn for the player population, then just turn it up.

username

Cookie said:

Ok, I am worried.
You may be about to make the best reward arc ever, a Sampire fest.
On top of that, if there is not enough spawn, it will be worse, nothing else will stand a chance.
Even with enough spawn, it may not help.
1 solo Sampire can solo Deceit, or Abyssal Inferno, you need to understand their mass spawn destruction ability.
This could actually turn out to be the worst fail ever. 
Which would be hard to take.

I'm really not sure I understand your post at all. Nothing I have suggested will make it a 'sampire fest'. In fact, the only change that could make it a 'sampire fest' is the change that's already being implemented by the devs, allowing to leech from the paragons. Sampires were rarely played at these events because of it: non paragon monsters don't require a sampire as hit leech on weapons was plenty for any normal monster and you couldn't leech from paragons. You can see posts for YEARS where people are dropping Necro in favor of Healing at these ToTs back to when they added the paragons. Sampire template is dying in favor of just using these 'new' weapons with 100% life leech.

username

Grimbeard said:

Turn spawn up 63.6%

sibble said:

If towns lack spawn for the player population, then just turn it up.

Unfortunately this doesn't really address the fact that these towns are miserable to fight in. If you haven't tried yet, go try it out, you'll see what I'm saying. Once again: monsters stuck in walls, on roofs, behind 3 doors on the 2nd floor of a building, outside of town walls, under the ground. In an open area we don't see these problems.

Go do an invasion on one of the live servers you'll see what I'm talking about. 

Radst

Just tune up the spawn density x5. Too much time is wasted on running around.

Still, switching towns is great idea to minimize the bots that run in certain routes AFK.

Cookie

sibble said:

Cookie said:

Ok, I am worried.
You may be about to make the best reward arc ever, a Sampire fest.
On top of that, if there is not enough spawn, it will be worse, nothing else will stand a chance.
Even with enough spawn, it may not help.
1 solo Sampire can solo Deceit, or Abyssal Inferno, you need to understand their mass spawn destruction ability.
This could actually turn out to be the worst fail ever. 
Which would be hard to take.

How's that make this different from any other event?

Sampires aren't new.

Town invasions aren't new.

Everyone has the ability to make a sampire...  It's an easy-to-play PVE template for all to use.

If towns lack spawn for the player population, then just turn it up.

• Invasion paragons will no longer be immune to life leech, but instead have the amount of life than can be leeched capped

That is what is changed.
Sampires were pegged back the last few events.

"Everyone has the ability to make a sampire...  It's an easy-to-play PVE template for all to use."

Yes, thank you, don't we know it.

username

Radst said:

Just tune up the spawn density x5. Too much time is wasted on running around.

Still, switching towns is great idea to minimize the bots that run in certain routes AFK.

I'm just going to copy paste as you didn't read anything and this has already been addressed:

And before anyone says anything about random towns hurting the bots, please understand the tmap locations are infinitely more random along several facets and yet they manage to show up to every manifestation spawn 24/7 on Atlantic (and every other shard almost). Plus we've already seen the bots outsmart multi level dungeons in the past, like Deceit, check my post history. Stop punishing legit players.

Unfortunately this doesn't really address the fact that these towns are miserable to fight in. If you haven't tried yet, go try it out, you'll see what I'm saying. Once again: monsters stuck in walls, on roofs, behind 3 doors on the 2nd floor of a building, outside of town walls, under the ground. In an open area we don't see these problems.

Go do an invasion on one of the live servers you'll see what I'm talking about. 

Pawain

So tamers pets still do half damage while sampires can run around and 1 shot everything faster than I can say all follow.  Plus they don't have to worry about death. Nice event...  

username

Just some feedback from another place so @Kyronix sees it.

username

PsycoderToo said:

I have never done city invasion. I was asking for city invasion because I thought it would be fun. I was especially hoping for luna invasion.

Town invasions can be fun, so the title of this post is a bid deceptive, however, the town invasions we've seen in the past were not ToT style and both the Lighthouses and 20th anniv invasions didn't require speed killing monsters to get a reward. They were 'boss' rewards, being killing the Lighthouse and the 4 Titans of Pagan when they spawned yielded the rewards. Monsters stuck? Didn't require everything to be dead to spawn the 'boss' to get the rewards.

IMO ToT style town invasions don't work very well from the testing and feedback I've done and seen.

ForeverFun

From the town invasions of past, involving generals, spellbooks, etc.

Trinsic and Vesper were the cities that resulted in the most "support calls".  e.g. pages to GMs.

If the issues with those towns cannot be fixed, please just remove them from the rotation.

All ToT events that I recall, people have asked for MORE spawn!  Please do it...

Grimbeard

If we can be sure of anything it's that the developers will ignore all feedback 

Jha_dur

All ToT events that I recall, people have asked for MORE spawn!  Please do it...

Yes to this. I have been doing the town invasions on Baja. Sometimes you find a pocket of spawn no one has touched. Other time I run half the town to fine two skeletons or a Zombie.The more people that are on and doing this (Primetime) the harder it will be to get drops.

Can we also get some feedback on whether the potions are going to come back to the store and be useful for increased drops? I have not read this yet and if it has been posted, I apologize for asking again.

Pawain

I hope this event is not based on luck.  So potions would be useless.

Violet

username said:

PsycoderToo said:

I have never done city invasion. I was asking for city invasion because I thought it would be fun. I was especially hoping for luna invasion.

Town invasions can be fun, so the title of this post is a bid deceptive, however, the town invasions we've seen in the past were not ToT style and both the Lighthouses and 20th anniv invasions didn't require speed killing monsters to get a reward. They were 'boss' rewards, being killing the Lighthouse and the 4 Titans of Pagan when they spawned yielded the rewards. Monsters stuck? Didn't require everything to be dead to spawn the 'boss' to get the rewards.

IMO ToT style town invasions don't work very well from the testing and feedback I've done and seen.

So let's talk about the 20th anniversary invasions.  They did actually require speed killing monsters to get the reward.  And it required running through town fast beating everyone else to the Mage Generals.   They also required a nearly full clear of towns to spawn the boss, which doesn't need to happen to in this content. We did both the 20th Anniversary invasions and the Covid invasions and were quite successful at both.

Stuck Monsters?  There are several mechanics to deal with them, there is the stuck mob teleport script that can get them out a lot of them, if they cannot reach you they will often try to teleport to you.  And then there is the enabled aoe in town. There is also archers for things on the roof.  We don't play this game in a vacuum.  

I have done Shattered Sanctum invasions on Baja in Trinsic and Vesper, I was finding plenty of density and have the screenshots to prove it. Yes, when you kill everything on the screen you might have to move to another screen.  It's called playing the game.  Winter Spur was just a bunch of boat camping bots and botted sampires, why do you want them to encourage botting?

We have also done the towns of Minoc, Britain, Yew and Nujelm and we averaged 15-30 drops (without a potion) an hour, which is in line with previous tot drop rates.   And that is using a single played character. The only town that was actually bad was Nujelm.  I came late but still walked away with 10 drops without using any slayer weapons.

Grimbeard said:

If we can be sure of anything it's that the developers will ignore all feedback 

Let's talk about feedback developers have acted on recently, off the top of my head:

1. hotfixes to totems
2. hotfixes to thunters getting a Manifestation of Evil drop
3. hotfix to shadow hound spawns
4. hotfix to give more nightmare spawns
5. hotfix to the Manifestation having more survivability
6. removing tainted life leech from paragons
7. removing the anti-tamer AI that was on paragons. @Pawain ;
8. return of town invasions
9. return of a lot of wanted items
10. giving thieves content with town chests
11. invasion towns not spawning in artisan cities
12. town invasions in felucca, not just trammel

We are not getting winter spur bot grinders with this event.  People need to play the event.  

Also, the spawn is dynamic, more people playing the more spawn.

PsycoderToo

Violet said:

So let's talk about the 20th anniversary invasions.  They did actually require speed killing monsters to get the reward.  And it required running through town fast beating everyone else to the Mage Generals.   They also required a nearly full clear of towns to spawn the boss, which doesn't need to happen to in this content. We did both the 20th Anniversary invasions and the Covid invasions and were quite successful at both.

Stuck Monsters?  There are several mechanics to deal with them, there is the stuck mob teleport script that can get them out a lot of them, if they cannot reach you they will often try to teleport to you.  And then there is the enabled aoe in town. There is also archers for things on the roof.  We don't play this game in a vacuum.  

I have done Shattered Sanctum invasions on Baja in Trinsic and Vesper, I was finding plenty of density and have the screenshots to prove it. Yes, when you kill everything on the screen you might have to move to another screen.  It's called playing the game.  Winter Spur was just a bunch of boat camping bots and botted sampires, why do you want them to encourage botting?

We have also done the towns of Minoc, Britain, Yew and Nujelm and we averaged 15-30 drops (without a potion) an hour, which is in line with previous tot drop rates.   And that is using a single played character. The only town that was actually bad was Nujelm.  I came late but still walked away with 10 drops without using any slayer weapons.

Grimbeard said:

If we can be sure of anything it's that the developers will ignore all feedback 

Let's talk about feedback developers have acted on recently, off the top of my head:

1. hotfixes to totems
2. hotfixes to thunters getting a Manifestation of Evil drop
3. hotfix to shadow hound spawns
4. hotfix to give more nightmare spawns
5. hotfix to the Manifestation having more survivability
6. removing tainted life leech from paragons
7. removing the anti-tamer AI that was on paragons. @ Pawain 
8. return of town invasions
9. return of a lot of wanted items
10. giving thieves content with town chests
11. invasion towns not spawning in artisan cities
12. town invasions in felucca, not just trammel

We are not getting winter spur bot grinders with this event.  People need to play the event.  

Also, the spawn is dynamic, more people playing the more spawn.

I agree, the devs do listen to the player feedback on the events. Let's hope there will be enough farm for all of us on Atlantic or the spawn rate will be tweaked in a very short time if that is not the case. There are so many good items this event cycle. I would like to get my hands on all of them, and have few backup items to sell in the future. Last event, void pool, was amazing for acquiring items.

username

Violet said:

Stuck Monsters?  There are several mechanics to deal with them, there is the stuck mob teleport script that can get them out a lot of them, if they cannot reach you they will often try to teleport to you.  And then there is the enabled aoe in town. There is also archers for things on the roof.  We don't play this game in a vacuum.  

I have done Shattered Sanctum invasions on Baja in Trinsic and Vesper, I was finding plenty of density and have the screenshots to prove it. Yes, when you kill everything on the screen you might have to move to another screen.  It's called playing the game.  Winter Spur was just a bunch of boat camping bots and botted sampires, why do you want them to encourage botting?

We have also done the towns of Minoc, Britain, Yew and Nujelm and we averaged 15-30 drops (without a potion) an hour, which is in line with previous tot drop rates.   And that is using a single played character. The only town that was actually bad was Nujelm.  I came late but still walked away with 10 drops without using any slayer weapons.

The anti-stuck teleport script has been in place for years now and does NOT work reliably. I have hundreds of pages on this in Deceit alone last time. This was one of the reasons cited why they opted for an outdoor area last time at the M&G. It didn't work and is clearly not working now.

I am averaging about that, about 15 an hour. However, last time even in the wastes which had a low spawn rate I was getting over 20 an hour. Over 30 in Winter Spur on the low side.

Spreading out spawn and making it low relative drop rate to last time and very annoying to kill monsters is going to ENCOURAGE BOTTING MORE. You realize these players are running 24/7? LOL. In what world does making the spawn more sparse and annoying for regular players to handle work better for regular players? Normal players get demoralized and bored, since time not unlimited. I work over 40 hours a week and I can't sit there spending 3 days of my extra time to get 1 reward. Bots press play and cash out 4 days from now, why doesn't anyone get this simple logic?



Since they're clearly not going to ever do anything about the bots might as well make this shit as easy to get as possible to put everyone on a level playing field. The UO community remains to be the most toxic and self loathing community ever. Why would we REGRESS to these city invasions alone when we had better last time? Why are you against the idea of having BOTH options available to players, especially when there are clear issues and inherent flaws with the town invasions? Seriously?

Violet said:

We are not getting winter spur bot grinders with this event.  People need to play the event.  

How incredibly naive are you thinking that rotating towns are going to stop the botting? Have you not seen large groups of players 24/7 botting the Manifestation? The more mindless and low drop rate for a reward = the higher chance of it being infinitely botted. What don't you get about simple logic?


 I'll once again repeat myself: 

And before anyone says anything about random towns hurting the bots, please understand the tmap locations are infinitely more random along several facets and yet they [the bots] manage to show up to every manifestation spawn 24/7 on Atlantic [and every other shard]. Plus we've already seen the bots outsmart multi level dungeons in the past, like Deceit, check my post history.

Stop punishing legit players.

Here's something that will stop bots farming for profit 100%: account bound items. Yet it's funny the people that say they want to "stop botting" are silent once this is suggested. 

psycho

I remember running around as a mage some years ago getting 4 dynamic event items pr hour,

then at the same event as sampire getting 15 pr hour.

If that is the case here Id say mages need a buff.

Another question is if the town event is same as previous town invasion events, you might want to improve the content, people rushing in to kill certain mobs then leave the town deserted for next 2hours for people to cleanup without rewards is not nice.

loop

Let’s simmer down, friends. The point of these events is to vend ultra powerful items and compel UO store purchases. It’s candy and popcorn to keep the game afloat. The events offer opportunities for all players to become ultra powerful and rich very quickly.

To the extent that bots contribute financially to the game, botting is desired by design. If it wasn’t, they would ban the bots. They don’t need to do anything annoying like making items account bound, which is a bad idea because many legit players enjoy selling things.

The details don’t change the underlying feedback loop, but variation is the spice of life. Last event we got whatever. Now we are getting town invasions. In the end, there’s more than enough time to get the stuff you want. Personally, I find town invasions fun.

username

loop said:

Personally, I find town invasions fun.

This isn't really much about anyone's opinion. It's more about towns are inherently bad for these events where spawn is supposed to happen for periods of time.

If the spawn in town wasn't sparse, spawned in walls, on roofs, 2nd floor of buildings behind 3 doors, outside of walls, tons in unreachable/stuck areas then it wouldn't be an issue. Putting them in a wide open area, like we've seen in Shogun and hat event, just plain works and makes it easier on the gameplay to feel like less of a grind. Do I really want to run around buildings just to kill 1 monsters? Swap to a different template just to kill a few stuck monsters? Sure, but it's a waste of time to legitimate players that have limited time. Do you know who doesn't care where monsters are or how efficient/inefficient the event is? Bots. Realize: it's going to be a botfest not matter what, so why not just make it less of a grind for normal players? People continuously try to straw man this, where the main point is that towns are factually just bad for these ToT style events. I don't really care your drop rate, or if I have to swap 3 different templates to kill different types of stuck monsters, the fact remains ToTs in towns is annoying and not ideal for legitimate players.

Grimbeard

We can also be 1000% sure the pompom crowd will speak again simply turn the spawn rate up and include luna etc not hard or earth Shattering 

loop

I getcha. Monsters spawning in places that can't be reached is annoying. They should fix that in the context of town invasions.

Monsters spawning in various buildings isn't a big deal to me. That's part of the change of pace of fighting in the town. A bit like guerilla warfare. If efficiency is key, then let's just do Destard for every event and let players AFK at the entrance all day. WinterSpur was quite nauseating :P.

username

loop said:
Monsters spawning in various buildings isn't a big deal to me. That's part of the change of pace of fighting in the town. A bit like guerilla warfare. If efficiency is key, then let's just do Destard for every event and let players AFK at the entrance all day. WinterSpur was quite nauseating :P.

It's not really a huge deal, it's just annoying and inefficient to regular players. Players will give up faster because we're limited on time... we can't press play and go to sleep. And since the Devs haven't given up on these grindy ToTs, I would hope they would at least make them less annoying for regular folk. Plus we saw this already with as you mentioned Destard, Shogun Winter Spur last year and Shrouded Sails in the spring. 

Now I know you're being facetious and years ago I'd disagree with this. BUT seeing how they're not doing anything against blatant bots, the same ones that have been running these ToTs for the last 4 years, the same ones that are AFK 24/7 the Manifestation, and you know the same ones that will 24/7 this ToT, they might as well just make everything easier for the legitimate players. Again, it seemed like they're going this direction anyways.

Case and point: the last ToT, the Shrouded Sails (aka the hats), made everything worthless and easy to get, but at the same time everything was so worthless and easy to get, almost everyone had no problem gathering it on their own and not having to buy it from bots. I'd rather that then making stuff harder. Well, I'd rather account bound items, but it seems that's not going to happen anytime soon at least.