State of IDOC
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Comments
#1I think when a house falls it should spawn 3-5 high tier peerless type monsters and some mid-weak ones im talking when that house falls i wana see 30 aggressive mobs fairly high each containing a few hundred items from the idoc " kind of like an EM event however. all account bound items i think should be sent to either a storage locker for the owner "maybe something linked to your bank like a moving crate" and these would be announced by the town/news crier as "some monsters have destroyed and pillaged a home near XX,YY . and maybe just make each idoc a mini event. and maybe on one of the monsters you get a timed scroll lets say an hour "a writ of lease for the land" that will allow the user to place in that location and after the timer goes off anyone can place.
When a house is idoc it goes into a auction able state all contents of house minus account bound items . are sent to a "auctionhouse" and people bid on the items that were in the idoc as well as the idoc location at the auction house and all money used to buy items would be removed from the game forever. items not bid on will be removed as well.
The other thought i had was when the house was scheduled to fall instead it goes public and the doors maybe get broken down items can NOT be pick up by players but instead monsters would start spawning in the house and looting it picking up the items." these then would defend the idoc from looters "us the players" and we would in turn be raiding a castle which has fallen into monsters control and we must siege the house. almost similar to a champ spawn in difficulty scaling up through the fight leading to a short boss fight. After his death an idea was that he would either drop the "key to the sieged house" and it would give an option to accept the plot "key expires after 3-6 hours IF not used and the house would fall normally" these would be announced by an npc as monsters have taken hold in an abandoned house once owned by a player and start acting like an actual event for the game.
would love feedback/thoughts. @Mesanna , @Bleak , @Kyronix
#2. Auction. Ok - great. Every single idoc on siege, or in fel that leads to great pvp fights - has just been rendered useless. Why come for a big pvp fight, when there's nothing to compete for. After the idoc falls, all you have to do is take your time to bid on the items you want anyways, pvp'lessly.
#3. This sounds creative, but if they struggle with making grubbers work right, this is even more complicated. Also - don't people endlessly complain about how the same "bots" show up at EM events with multiple characters and end up getting all the EM items....wouldn't the same thing just happen here? Also - 1 "key" gives access to loot the whole house...meaning 1 player alone gets all the loot to themselves? Sounds a bit overpowering (I personally would love this, but i guarantee you 99% of people would not, as they'd never get anything and cry). And if not just one person, multiple keys/people, each getting access to loot. Ok - what loot does which key give access to?
You realize EMs have to actually plan events. "This monster will give this EM item, etc". It's not randomly generated. You really think the system will be smart enough to have each idoc divided up into multiple keys giving access to the different items/chests/deco present in the house?
Bottom line - none of the ideas will work, sorry.
Distribution via mob, auction, or any other means other than securing basically says to the lost subscriber that they are not wanted anymore - which is drastically wrong. Yes, it is another "style of game play" and having the loots redistributed encourages that game play - but it only encourages shrinkage in the paying population, which is a bad business model.
Other games in the industry freeze an unsubbed account and its items, holding out for that sub's return. I think it is time BS starts paying attention to that model and looking at ways to recoup subscriptions.
Dare I say it, holding unsubbed items could also be a marketing tool *cough* for RTB campaigns. Tease with EJ, let these fallen subscribers realize all the pixels are still there, but they can only get them with fully subbed accounts. Is already happening with bank contents - add in the IDOC contents (just no house - sorry bub), and I'm sure those returning Vets will resub to realize how much they love Sosaria.
ETA: Since the Siege ruleset is pretty much separate, IDOCs could stay as they are there. Give the prodo-shards the secure IDOC crate, and the SP/Mugen shards the classic IDOC function. Since items cannot be cross-sharded from those shards, I believe it will keep the IDOC community happy and scripters will just have to suck it up.
The issue is scripting at IDOCs, which is pretty lucrative and supports cross-sharding to the massive mall that has become Atlantic shard. It also contributes to the rampant RMT happening and is the number one source of the runaway economy in game.
The issue is also the loss of subscribers. If my friend wasn't so jaded, he could have distributed his loots from his home on his own - but he knows the scripting and RMT is slowly killing UO, and so by just letting his house drop he's succumbed to the sense of atrophy that so many vets start to feel after some time. There is too much competition out there now for a player to ignore. I've only named a few games in a previous post that caters to this exact issue.... It is time BS really looks at how the industry is working. UO is not the de-facto prima MMO anymore (although it could compete again if done right).
People who want to play will pay their subs - but sometimes life happens. When they are able to come back, and they realize their house is gone, being able to still get the house contents may just help these people resub. An account is saved! Currently, they come back, see the house is gone, realize the script-kiddies got all their pixels (or trashed them), and that player is demoralized. Since the game's producer doesn't care enough to preserve something of value and meaning to the player, why should the player cough up the funds and resub? UO has become less community and more solo-play. I'm not going to get into that whole mess. However, by catering to an individual's desire to hoard pixels - it just might contribute to more players who will help to reform a sense of community.
Bottom line, BS needs to lure, cater to, and keep subscribers.
kirthag.blogspot.com
As you can see, everybody is asking the same thing, Turn Idocs OFF, take the entire content of the house,.put into a moving crate for the owner when he comes back, charge a fee or so. It is a win win, no more idoc scripting.
If IDOC was relegated to ONLY the SP ruleset, would that be an adequate alternative?
kirthag.blogspot.com
Many players play the game mostly because of idocs. You remove idocs - you remove a big facet of the game and lose a lot of subscribers that way too.
It would be akin to saying "pvp'ers are overpowered, they cheat, speedhack, etc etc" and someone saying "ok - let's get rid of pvp!" to fix it.
No. Also - nothing so drastic is necessary. There are ways to fix idocs without resorting to "ok lets delete them altogether".
Finally - a LOT of people still pay for their accounts specifically to preserve their houses/items. I myself have barely played uo in 2019 - just been busy. But both my main accounts have remained active throughout, so my houses and items don't go away. If I knew my "items" would be stored for me in a packing crate no matter what? I promise you i would have turned off my accounts, and then just reactivated when i'm ready to play. There's a HUUUUUGE # of subscribed accounts who I promise you fall in a category similar to mine. Doing this hurts Broadsword's bottom line, which isn't a good thing for them.
We are mad about all this, so 2 things come in my mind now, either delete them all, or make a town cryer give us all the idocs and falling time and allow us too to bring 5-10-50 packies to compete as equals.
Tired of this Idocs are part of community BS, lets save the History of that player and BS, Idocs are for greed people, that want something for free and make side money of, why only this idoc person can benefit of?? . I am very concerned that the new coming soon fix, will screw us even more and benefit him even more.
So just put an end.
They need to just make tweaks and fixes, or changes, to limit the ability of players like the one you're describing to loot everything as fast as you're saying. A few easy suggestions i've mentioned before:
1. "Containers" can no longer be grabbed after house falls, for say ~30 minutes. So a scripter can't automatically grab all containers, you have to manually actually open bags and pick out the good stuff. Sure there are probably ways for scripters to open containers and grab stuff too - but it gives the actual player who can recognize what's worth more the edge, as odds are they're going to grab that big time artifact instead of the "normal" sword first, which a scripter can't differentiate between.
2. 5/10/15 hour timer. This is to a scripter's advantage. They always know when the house falls, and can show up at last minute, gives them an edge vs the more casual player. To help - you can keep the 5/10/15 hours if you want, but add in addition a "when house is within 1 hour, sign turns RED for all the see - when house is within 10mins of fall time, it turns GREEN". Allows everyone to be ready at the right time, and not waste hours camping.
I kind of like the idea of putting all items at the tram/Malas houses as drop on monsters that spawn, but I guarantee you that it will become rampant with multiboxers just like EM events are. It will be a fight for loot rights and that will be dominated by a select few I’m sure most of which are cheating.
I can’t stress this enough - it doesn’t matter how things are changed if you DO NOT enforce the rules in place. It will just become another system exploited because there are little if any repercussions for not following the rules as intended and that’s the reason why we are where we are. We are where we are because dishonest people took advantage of the system and nothing was done about it. And this didn’t just happen 4 months ago on atlantic shard, it’s been going on for well over a year on a variety of shards by a variety of players.
the items from the house would be on the monster you fight trying to siege the home. the key from the boss would only be for the plot like i said or maybe its something you return to the king of Britannia for a lease to the home.
and the reason people say grubbers don't work is the way they were set just have the monsters loot the chests as if the were a corpse which many monsters do currently. set the # of monsters relative to the housing size and not the amount of items so lets say a few hundred inside maybe 100 outside scale it to relative house size. "large army for castles" detachments for smaller houses . casting on the ledges of keeps and castles killing monsters relative to the location area maybe something near deceit get invaded by the undead spewing from the dungeon. and would need to set it so you cant lure them to far off so rubber banding would be a good idea keeping them relatively close to the house.
you should not be rewarded by BS saving all of your houses contents when you decide to stop paying monthly and let your house fall cause i would drop 4 houses just to store stuff im not using.
The only way to stop this is to send all contents to a long and dangerous place that doesn't allow recalls or follower slots and auto boots out of area if logged.
Any action a character can do in this game can and most likely has been automated at some point. At this point, you can only hope to slow it down.
1. That's exactly what grubbers are supposed to do. Only - they don't do it properly, because they're broken. If they can easily be "fixed" (as you seem to think) - then they should just fix them. This solves a LOT of the current problems with idocs...
2. Don't want to create too much big/bad monsters, or else you're starting to sound like an EM event. And although EM events can be fun - if you go back to the main forum you'll notice just as many complaints about EM events as you do idocs, where multiple scripters take advantage of those...So you're not exactly fixing anything.
The only exception - if there was some "rental vendors" on the house - sometimes instead of decaying, it goes OSI OWNED for ~1-2 weeks. The reason behind is, it's not the player whose renting a vendor's fault the house is decaying, so the game gives him an extra ~week or so to claim his vendor before house goes POOF.
That's the logic behind the house not refreshing when it's OSI. It's because technically, it's almost as if it already fell, since it went through the normal decay stage already.
Mesanna and even GMs have often been pretty good about helping players in the situation as the one you describe here. I'd feel pretty confident they step up here and help the guy out to refresh the house. Even though it's weekend, the house seems only somewhat worn, so likely has till past monday before it goes IDOC again and falls, so should be enough time.
As to your argument about "well this is why houses shouldn't fall/some players come back". I understand that in some cases you hear sad stories, and sometimes it's unfortunate since when a player does come back, his house has fallen and so they leave again. But - UO is a business. One of the perks of having an active paid account is owning a house and stuff in it. They already give a 3 month grace period before a house decays. If houses never fell, or you never lost items you had - they would lose a LOT of active subscriptions. Bad for business. That's why - it won't change, nor should it.
This would be interesting... I'd go just to watch!
Is a regulated event, can be observed, players can take what they can get (and keep), open PVP until the cows come home, whatever "junk" is leftover can be picked up by non-combatants and/or deleted.
edit: thinking about this... is like fighting the scripters with scripting. it would take a script by the devs to get the house and all items moved into GA - or the devs have their own script to rake up everything dropped from a house in the shard into GA - scattered in a sectioned field, forego the house completely. Then just allow players in to battle it out and grab what they can - a la the pit battles we used to hold back in the day.
kirthag.blogspot.com
Please make the Grizzled Mare a 5 slot mount, it's incredibly rare and deserves it. Some of us have been waiting a long time for this simple addition.
Some are some aren't. This one doesn't make much sense either. The only way decay status should be removed is if all friends/co-owners/vendor renters could still see it. Even then, all it takes is one person to camp outside and it makes it kind of obvious what's going on so that's just wasted dev time.
The 1 year crate is just silly. The 90 day game will become the 1 year game.
Please make the Grizzled Mare a 5 slot mount, it's incredibly rare and deserves it. Some of us have been waiting a long time for this simple addition.
Right. I could care less either way. I would like to see soulstones go back to the owner. Other than that, the rest means nothing.
1. remove decay state
2. when it falls there is an area earthquake so people nearby/neighbours etc know a house has fallen locally
3. contents fall as normal but do not decay quickly, say 24hr or so, so those that players look for idocs will come across them etc.
4. have a serious word with the ATL player that thinks its a good idea to ruin the play style by giving out free meal tickets to non idocers.
You want them you go find them like the rest of us.
only draw back Is the idoc cheating scumbag (can't name him or the crew, but we know who they are) will send his script searchers out more often and I suppose he will set an alarm to notify him that they have found a dead house.....
and time to REALLY limit EJ accts, No one is coming back, but EJ accts are being exploited by that scumbag so time to keep them in town or guard zones with specific gates to hunting areas only, and only way to return is through the same gate etc. We should NOT have EJ accts running around the whole map.
It is supposed to be a taster to see if people want to return or new players want to stay. Not to be able to do pretty much anything for FREE. Otherwise why am I paying. I will see what I can do for free.
I just hope one day the current DEV team actually takes time to stop firing out crappy shinies and crabs and think about the NEGATIVE aspects of new content, like how will players exploit EJ accounts and how do they limit that BEFORE the exploitation happens. Come on Dev's be PROACTIVE not REACTIVE you are being paid to do a good job.
couldn't?
Just like the new account mgmt system, the new Idoc changes are coming soon.