State of IDOC
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Comments
enough of Idocs, enough of scripting, enough of people gating 20,30 packies, enough of 20 llamas hide, people been asking you guys for a while and You know the GM's cant be there 24/7 on over 20 shards trying to catch idocperson and his crew. and since the normal players have no chance against this situation and been like this for years, why not just delete Idocs from the game or just delete stage on signs, but at least Do something!!!
Cheers MissE
There are many ways to "fix idocs" without getting too drastic. Making away with idocs completely would be a shame - they've been a part of UO from the beginning, and a playstyle many players have enjoyed over time.
I haven't played much lately, so I admit i'm not super familiar with what the main issues are with idocs recently, but here are a few easy suggestions that should help the non-cheaters...
1. The "idoc timer" is too long/random. Most of the time the people who have the "exact time" a house will fall do it by cheating. They also have the ability to track 10+ houses at a time that way. More casual gamers suffer, because they end up having to spend up to 5-10+ hours sitting at an idoc unsure of when it will fall, until it falls. And of course - they often don't get loot - so it's double frustrating. Why not make the final 'idoc timer' simply way, way easier? You can keep the 5-10-15 hour if you want, keep the greatly and fairly worn stages etc...but when you're within 1 hour of actual fall time - have the house sign turn RED to alert all players you're one hour away. That way casual idoc'ers can still camp an idoc without having to waste all day waiting around, while the cheaters instead have each idoc perfectly timed down to the minute. You know within the hour when it's going to fall - so standby and wait for the action. Maybe even make it a bit more dummy proof then that - Sign turns BLUE to signal 2 hours left, sign turns RED to signal 1 hour left, sign turns GREEN to signal 10 mins left. Even easier to follow and not waste time...
2. Placing houses. There are too many ways to cheat the system now. I think game lets you place a house randomly at some point between ~20mins to 2 hours after it falls right? Advantage cheater. It's easier to keep trying by cheating over 2 hours than it is to do so manually non stop.I even hear there are ways to cheat the system and predict when you should place exactly. Why not level the playing field again, to give everyone who wants to place a house at an idoc a chance? Same idea as above, make it easy for everyone. After a house falls...have a sign go up on ground that says "you cannot build a house here". Than 5 minutes before the spot opens up for placement - have the sign turn red, or the message change to "5 minute warning for housing spot to open up". Gives everyone a 5 minute warning to try to place like crazy fast, fastest one/luckiest one wins. Get rid of the "house tool timeout" rule too - give everyone a chance to place super fast.
It's not any faster to place with a script than it is by mashing buttons over and over - so it again levels the playing field. The randomness of it helps the cheater, not the non-cheater. Give a set window - and people can mash the tool over and over again and everyone has a fair shot.
3. Looting. This seems to be the biggest issue. There's a lot of easy fixes i'm sure without having to get too drastic and "delete all idocs" or "save everything for the returning player in a bank". You can't really save all their items in a bank, or business would suffer - a lot of players are paying for accounts to keep storage - if you let them keep their stuff in a bank for free, that will hurt the bottom line as a lot of paying subscribers won't pay anymore. Also - a ton of those players never come back, and it would ruin idocs for everyone, which is a playstyle many players enjoy - so i'd rather find a fix to the system, then get rid of it completely.
Are packies a serious problem? Why not make it so packies can be killed around idocs area. Can't no longer gate 20-30 packies if they can be killed, like in fel. Simple fix. Don't want your packies killed? Ok - make it so idoc items can't be dropped inside a packy for ~30mins after an idoc falls.
Do grubbers actually work? I don't know how easy or not it would be for devs to code this - but could Grubbers be programmed to grab the 'best of loot' from idocs? So the rares, and deeds, and artifacts, and typically higher end stuff. That way to get the 'good loot' you have to kill the grubbers, no more scripters grabbing stuff off ground. It wouldn't be 100% accurate (some rare/valuable items might still end up on ground) - but most would go to grubbers. Maybe even make grubbers slightly more challenging if need be, so scripters can't auto kill them. Not sure if that's easy for Devs to do or not though.
In the past I saw a lot times near an idoc someone place a "looting house". The idea is they grab all the loot on the ground and drag it to the plot next door with backpacks set up on steps for easy looting. If that's a problem - why not make it so items picked up from an idoc cannot be dropped on the floor inside a house for up to 10minutes after you first loot it. Ruins the use of such a house, levels the playing field.
To go one step further - why not make it so when you first loot an item from an idoc - the only place you can put it for 10 minutes is in your own backpack. Can't drop it off at the bank, or in a packy, or in a house...for 10 minutes after you put it in your backpack it's stuck there. ie - every player can carry a maximum of 125 items. So you can't just massively grab everything - you need to actually take the time to sort through stuff, if not you'll max out your backpack too quick and won't be able to loot more. After 30 minutes of the house falling - everything becomes free for all (that's when you bring your packy over to get all those ingots and such).
Probably lots of other creative ways to counter some of the scripters going on.
Don't need to completely get rid of idocs imo, just small tweaks here and there.
First is sad to see that he can just come to the front of the house, using his main acc, Mr Darexxxxxl with packies and than he open the 1st gate and bring 3 other accs with packies, move the toons to each side of the house, than here come 2nd gate and 2 more accs with packies, than he have the balls to go to gen chat and say: "wow, lot of BOTs on this Idoc.
After 15 hours of wait, plus server down time, House goes down, everything is gone, i mean gone in matter of seconds, everything flying, deeds, boxes pooof, than mr idocperson open gate and move allllll his toons and packies to luna gate and than luna bank to trash items , all his accounts and all his packies are loaded and I am supposed to just be quiet about?
And this is only Atlantic, imagine doing that on 20+ Shards?? And that is Ok?? @Mesanna, @Kyronix ?
If this is ok, than may as well cancel idocs for good.
And certainly there can be some rule set to delete junk items especially BODs.
Lets also examine some other "ideas" we've seen so far and why they wont work.
1. Auction of some kind
Just a bad idea in general. Take the GL museum as an extreme example: it easily has 150+ plats worth of stuff. How many people in UO can easily throw away 5 or 10 plats to bid? Not to mention the ability to transfer their gold to any shards if needed. The winner (or top winners) will always be the richest. This is a trap that the top IDOC cheaters are trying to sell to you. Why?
It's less scripting work for them also, and they have huge amount of gold that you dont have.
The usual rate for an Atlantic Luna plots went for maybe 7 plats a couple years ago. That gold is a ton for most people, but is only a dime to those IDOC'ers. They could buy all/any plots (Luna and Castles) if they get the chance. Just to show how much gold they can effort to spend. You'll never be able to compete if IDOC becomes battles of gold.
WORST IDEA. EVER.
2. House sign shown only to the owner
Currently most players simply dont have the luxury to look for house signs already, as it takes too much manual effort. And if the decay info were to be removed entirely, no players will even bother spending any amount of time just trying to get lucky. It makes absolutely no sense to say it will encourage players to run around the map...etc.
The result will only have the scripters running their auto bots even more often non-stop, detecting grubbers or certain containers...etc. Congrats, you have just fallen into yet another one of their traps that they have been feeding on various forums, coz this will only benefit them further and eliminating casual players.
As to the house owner, this change simply does nothing to/for them at all, because house owner should/already can see their house sign (but only after they re-sub and login to see if house is refreshed). For an inactive account, the first place the owner goes to is the account management page, where they can see when the acct expired and guess when to re-sub.
Some players do use EJ chars or co-owner active accounts to check if their own other inactive houses are decaying. Therefore, adding this feature - being part of anything at all going forward - may just backfire.
3. Add Area of Effect when house falls, or No-Packy Zone, or No EJ Zone (ex: poison field; strong mobs..etc)
You would start seeing scripters gating in 20 Thrower bots x-healing each other and auto killing whatever mobs. This is so easy. May take longer time for sure, but still, you cannot join a party if you didn't look for it or got invited.
No-Packy Zone: Currently some big time IDOC'ers already use AFK scripts to loot, and not just the items on the floor. They have the ability to look into the containers and loot items inside, and use bag of sending when overweight.
IN SUMMARY:
The IDOC situation of as today is an accident that should have been addressed long ago. In the early days this made sense to let houses decay naturally. But now this game is 22 years old, and its players also grew older; people have more important focus now in their RL.
Some people may want to return but would NOT if they lost 10+ years of stuff due to careless IDOC. This just hurts too much.
This is not just a "Trammel" issue or scripting issue. FEL Fights is just some free parties along the way. And using "play style for some people" as reasoning to keep IDOC alive doesn't make sense, either. Heck, that's EVERYONE's play style, isn't it, less work for more free stuff.
How many players (vet and even newer ones) only do IDOCs now because they soon learned that this is the only big game?
The ONLY sensible solution, really, is the IDOC Crate: keep all items for the owner, and not just account-bound items. End this now - once and for all.
This is also coming from someone who by accident lost a castle jam packed with items from years of playing.
I want IDOC houses to stay and players who cheat to haul off the lions share of the loot to go away.
Make the area around an IDOC a pack animal free zone. Don’t allow other houses to be placed in close proximity to the IDOC until after the clock has run out on the IDOC plot and you’re able to drop a house there again.
Create something that’ll take the place of UO AutoMap or whatever that other mapping program is that some use and crack down on third party programs.
If possible find a way to scatter house contents to the winds. Make it a level playing field for players to find items randomly.
"Im sick of these kids who do not work, and do not leave their house reaping all the benefits that you indirectly @Mesanna helped them with! the 5/10/15 helps them ONLY! the scripters, the ones that never leave their house and use this system for financial game. The idocperson and his king friends! On every single shard every single idoc every single tick. Whereas the working class citizens of this world get to go to the five hour which it never falls on and then miss out on the rest! I had this past week off from work, I did 48 idocs on 4 diff shards, the idocperson and his king friends were on every single one of them. out of 48 two fell at five hours, 7 fell at 10 hours and friggin 39 fell at fifteen hours. Then I talk to my friends who do other shards, combined about 8 more shards im told oh this idocperson and his king friends are at all of those everytime with 100 packies! Enough is Enough! Ive sent countless emails to you, you never respond, so now im posting here. There is only one way to ever fix idocs. Let all idocs fall at server up on the shard. So theyll be like 4 or 5 times a day idocs can fall, all the eastern ones would fall the same exact time. You cant set up scripts to loot all of them at that time, and there would be too many for the idocperson and his king friends to be at at once. So locals would have a chance at looting them as well not just the scripters. I'm sure theyd make login scripts to loot some but it wouldn't be 1000 packies atleast. If thats not possible, just cancel them! send all belongings to players bank for safe keeping if he returns and be done with idocs once and for all. Those are the only two ways to make it semi work. All others were thought up by scripters to help them, or ppl who have no idea how idocs work. Taking the stage off the house sign means nothing. this idocperson and his king friends will just create scripts to run shards lookign for grubbers, or boxes or items and ding off when they find them. They will win again and again. Start listening to people who actually understand game mechanics and who've been idocing for fun for 15 years! End rant"
Also I think all FEL IDOCS should stay if we delete others lol. Cheating is very hard in fel. Just make it a window like once it turns idoc, can fall within 2 hours at any time, just like placing. 15 hours is rediculous. if it can fall anytime within 2 hours everyone would be fighting for position. it would be so much fun. I know the devs and mesanna only care about trammies but for once think about Fel as its own entity and not grouped in with the trammies!
The server up idea is not bad either, bc ad it is right now , the idocperson crew can be on all shards, 24/7. But if all houses collapse at server up, no way he can be on all of them at the same time, which will give people a small better chance to loot something at le least , other than nothing at all nowadays
Would be funny if they have not played in years.
My IDOC opinion:
Let them stay but have a GM monitor the ones that have a large crowd. End the vacuum cleaners.
Answering to the post in the recently locked thread. The above quote explains part of the problem with all the solutions. You do realize that recirculating the stuff from IDOCs actually deflates gold (lowers prices), right? If your aim is to have a normal player compete, you want as much stuff as possible dumped into the circulation. Your solution would do the opposite of what you want to accomplish.
I have no Ill will and even buy your stuff from time to
time, but let’s be real here.
3) Post links to the script programs the cheaters are using, and let everyone use them.
- Randomized resource harvesting: benefit scripters, hurts normal players
- Blackthorn Dungeon anti-AFK: benefit scripters, annoying to normal players
- Blackthorn Dungeon now only on captains: LOL, this will absolutely benefit scripters
- 2015ish IDOC changes: yea, scipters loved this one for sure. LOL
So really the best option is to end IDOCs totally. Either delete every item or just throw it in some secure container they can retrieve later when their account is reactivated (or maybe need to buy some sort of token off the store to do so?). I'm ok with either choice.I will be slow to reply because I cannot log in/stay logged in to the forums.
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Last July (2018) I came back after about a year away. I historically did idocs on Chesapeake (home shard), GL, LS, Pac and Sonoma. I had one Malas house I found on Chesapeake first week back, first house I did. Had to wait to the 15 mark, I’m there on my one guy ready to loot and here opens a gate and 8 gargoyles with packies waltz through. With the gater manually looting while the other 8 script loot. And sorry folks it wasn’t idocperson or whatever we are calling him because he doesn’t use gargoyles.
Needless to say I got very little for my effort. Primarily because someone else was cheating and incredibly greedy.
How are you supposed to compete against that on one account?
So after seeing this repeatedly on other shards, and paging, taking screenshots, sending in screenshots and nothing happens, you’re left with three decisions - continue to put out a lot of effort with little results (insanity), quit and let them win, or fight fire with fire. And I eventually chose the latter.
I think things have progressed to the state they are now because a lot of the people who idoc heavily, like me, got sick and tired of trying to play the way the TOS dictates we should play, expecting those responsible to do their jobs and enforce the rules and consistently seeing that responsibility skirted. I’m sorry but if you have rules that are never enforced, you basically have no rules.
And this situation is far worse than just idoc looting, idoc house placement is also being hijacked by a small group that have access to an exploit that apparently nothing has been done about either. All in the name of Cash for gold.
You can most likely see this at any high profile idoc on any shard. I've only done been to a couple in the past few months and they were swept dry in around 10 seconds.
I don't even try anymore. I can't stay online the entire time and it's pointless to do so anyways.
Recently heard about an old friend's house going IDOC - got a hold of him and he said he's done with UO and to get whatever I can. He's not logged into his 1997 account for almost 2 years, and figures his subscription money could be used for something else (something about vanilla....*cough*). So I sat and timed his "medium profile" IDOC deep in the woods, an L-shape with some nice vet rewards in it. I was there with my stealthing-ninja to grab only a few personal effects I knew to be in the house (whispering roses, a few written books, armor). You know, all those things a lot of IDOCers simply trash. About 10 minutes before the house fell, I watched our "favorite" scripters & "friends" come through their gates. When the house fell, I didn't even see items hit the ground - scripters grabbed it all up and just went their merry way in less than 15 seconds. Didn't bother dropping a house - they just sucked everything up and left.
I was stunned.
I have said some things in the past about changing IDOC timers, having more grubbers, having IDOC loot fall into the cavern of discarded - but after witnessing this... damn.
I wanna throw my lot in with the secure-storage until a ransom is paid - be it a resub, or perhaps someone else has a chance at acquiring the loots if they talk with the old owner and get a token/code/something to acquire the items.
Another idea is to have the dev team hold the account, and then auction it - but that, again, gets into the golden aspect (he with the gold....) and smacks of pay-to-win again.
~~~
How about we take a look at how other games manage the whole issue of homes and dropped subs..
SotA - when a player doesn't pay rent on their lot, they lose that location, but all items (including house deed) are put into their bank until they return. SotA is a F2P game and operates on microtransactions (I'm sure BS team is familiar with it). If the items overflow the bank, players cannot put anything into the bank (including gold) until some space is made - they can only remove stuff.
Tibia - when a player doesn't pay their house/guild-hall upkeep, the house reverts to the auction market and all their items are packed up - placing into the owning toon's depot, with overflow into other toon's depot storage on the same account AND server (or is lost, randomly). As you may well surmise, this doesn't happen too often (storage is huge in Tibia). But when it does happen, people quickly scramble to get the owner to resub again and at least pass around items - particularly for guild halls.
WoW - Although there are no real "houses" as we know them in UO, when a player drops sub, everything they own is kept until he/she returns (at least has been my experience). However, WoW instances everything, so my keep will still be there, just sparser than my years would suggest - as will all the junk that sat in my bank the day my sub ran out.
When you think about it, every item is just a line in a database... that is all which is being maintained.
Seeing the scripting so blatant as I did when my friend's L-shape fell really put this into perspective. I've seen scripting before when I helped with some "we-shall-not-talk-about-those-shards" - but this is just insane and really needs to end.
~~~~~
Something else to think about - as I am always talking about how this game needs better marketing - I asked random gamers who are familiar with "archaic games" like UO, and they asked about the rampant cheating. Such "old games" are rife with cheating bots, they asked what BS has in place to help with that. I know there was something a few years ago... but it failed. What about now?
The other oldest MMO out there still running (Tibia) uses BattleEye (https://www.battleye.com/) ... perhaps this is something that should be looked into? If BE can be made to work with Tibia, perhaps it can be done with UO? Not sure about the tech/stack - but to get the conversation started is something.
A partnership of this sort just might be something to consider.
Food for thought... @Mesanna
kirthag.blogspot.com
Easy solution for all this @Mesanna, cancel all idocs and put everything into a moving crate, so if the owner ever decide to come back he will have all his belongs back and on the same time you will put an end for idoc scripters.
To slow the scripters update the client to disable the interface provided by the client for scripting while the player is in the footprint of the IDOC. Macros are blocked from working. Scripters would need to screen scrape to find stuff.
Pack animals would be banned in the footprint as well.