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PATCH Patch Notes April 28, 2019

A screen of information is 18 tiles, so 50 tiles are 2.7 screens warning. Considering you have 18 tiles on your screen so you get 1.7 screens away of warning a player is coming. How is that not enough to run to a moongate that is usually a screen or so away?
Do you have ever consider people with low ping? I play with avf 300 ms there is a huge difference agains someone playing with 30 ms and the 100 tiles make that even for this share of players
 
I am not here to debate screens and pings. I am just saying that if on avg even if you only get an entire screen warning before they show up on your screen, it allows you to begin running to a moongate and probably never even see that player on your screen. Now if you choose to farm in an area that is between the way they come and the moongate is in the middle, that is your own decision and should come with risk, as I said earlier. You can choose how much risk you want.

The 50% change at least puts this risk/reward situation into the equation. Before there was no risk, as was evident by the massive amount of people with tracking.

In general from a neutral standpoint, having risk/reward is much better than not. It creates a better game long term. I honestly don't know how people died with tracking how it was before. I guess many people didn't as the discord consensus was if you don't want to be PKed take tracking. That was the number one suggestion in discord PVM channel since the inception of the shard.

Another thing to consider is this is a buff to PVMers as well particularly if you are doing T-Maps and Overland farming spots. I know of several people who would run active tracking overland and run around just playing bingo picking people off every time they got an active track. It allowed them to cast FS/hamstring and run in and hit the player with hamstring and FS then an EB and kill a person before hamstring wore off.
 
Arena Tournaments
  • Any player participating in an Arena Tournament will earn at least 3 Arena Reward points for participation
  • We will be restarting the Arena Tournament schedule again shortly, with some new modifications and schedule updates

I am very happy about this.

The idea tournament structure to me would be something like 3 times a month(first three weeks) with the final week of the month being the championship.
Prizes being a special hued cape for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, that is player bound and unsellable. The cape is removed when the new champions are crowned on the following month's end tournament.

Use the different cape graphic that is longer and skinnier and give it a gold, silver and bronze hue!
 
Another thing to consider is this is a buff to PVMers as well particularly if you are doing T-Maps and Overland farming spots. I know of several people who would run active tracking overland and run around just playing bingo picking people off every time they got an active track. It allowed them to cast FS/hamstring and run in and hit the player with hamstring and FS then an EB and kill a person before hamstring wore off.

Oh don't worry, that will still happen
  • Tracking distance in dungeons has been reduced by 50%
 
Oh don't worry, that will still happen
  • Tracking distance in dungeons has been reduced by 50%
Oh, I missed that. Haha. So nevermind on that buff. I guess if the overland players run tracking its same as the PK though? Tracking is so OP. It really is. Even at 50% I still think it is probably the best skill on outlands.
 
Yeah, overland should remain the same....rightfully so due to the tracking ticks and mount speed imo. Cant tell you how many reds I've had recall in on top of me.

A nerf is fine I guess, although I feel 50% is a bit drastic to start with.
I mostly run it for the bard and damage perks, so 50 tile tracking is still better than nothing.
 
I mean the thing is nothing is set in stone, so many things have been changed multiple times. If the developers see that 50% was too much, they can just as easily go to 65 or 75. But I feel 50% is a decent place to start, it definitely pushes it towards the risk/reward though.
 
For sure,
my angle is mostly from the traditional effective pk templates vs non traditional pvm templates due to outlands unique skill changes.
An example being that barding requires all the help you can get (ie. 120+ effective skill and still can fail on a cyclops). Players want to farm faster and more efficient so as not to have an encounter with a death squad so we run gimp templates...often relying only on pots for healing. It puts pvm templates at extreme/sitting duck disadvantages out of the gate vs those templates so the tracking buffer was nice.
...And I rarely ever see a solo red player.
 
I am not disagreeing at all that the pvm/pvp differences are massive. I don't know a solution to it. People want maximum efficiency, but that comes at the cost of being a glass cannon. I personally ran a pvm/pvp build when I was pvming in the early days, it wasn't optimal at pvp or pvm, but it could do both well enough that I didn't have my experience ruined by PKs and I was able to fight off or kill the majority of them. What I think a lot of people don't understand is that most of the PKs are horrid, but since they are running these templates with 0 defensive skills in PVP they just don't have any chance at all.

I assumed that people would eventually go towards pvp templates and use aspect to make up the difference, but that never really happened.
 
One of the selling points of Outlands was giving life to dead skills. But here you did the opposite, took a useful skill and rendered it useless.

Even some of the people who wanted tracking dialed down think this nerf went way overboard. If you can't track anyone until they're almost on top of you, there's no point in tracking at all.

At some point you're going to have to stop coddling the "pks" because they will just want it easier and easier the more spoiled they get.
 
This wasn't rendered "useless", you still get 25% damage buff, you still have full range out doors, and honestly, 50 tiles is 2 1/2 screens, let's not over exaggerate here as to it's useless ness. Tracking was far too powerful before, it may be that it's not powerful enough now and needs to be tweaked, but let's at least experiment with it..
 
You're wrong, Kidden, but I'm not going to waste my time typing constructive feedback for the devs to ignore anymore. Life is short and the list of other games to play is long.
 
I would have understood a damage bonus nerf instead. Ok, tracking was too op but not because of tracking distance alone: it was op because of tracking ability PLUS damage bonus PLUS barding skills bonus. No other skill offers so many advantages.
With a damage nerf people would have to choose between a 25% bonus (camping, forensic, etc) and a smaller bonus (15%? 10%?) plus the ability of tracking reds.
Otherwise, I think a 75% effectiveness in dungeon would be fair, 50% is a huge nerf.
 
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You're wrong, Kidden, but I'm not going to waste my time typing constructive feedback for the devs to ignore anymore. Life is short and the list of other games to play is long.

Would at least appreciate seeing how I'm wrong, since you called me out on it..
 
The PvM changes are great. The housing change I dont understand. The str pot change is good too. Though you shouldnt be able to be weakened a third time. If you are below your native strength total , weaken shouldn't affect you. I assume right now if you are above your str - a weaken total, it allows another weaken. I like that dexers are being made more powerful because they need it, but 6 second hamstring is drastic. I agree about cooldown reduction rather than effect increase. The majority of the patch is legit AF though. If you dont wanna learn new systems, then don't . That doesn't mean you should block other people from investing in them.
 
Ad someone who uses tracking on almost every character, pvm and pvp, I would like to see at least 75% or a faster pulse rate than 10 seconds. 10 second pulse rate is just too damn extreme at 50 tiles. To the one guys point above, if one tick is 25 steps then you are really looking a potential nerf of 66 percent (100 steps minus 25 vs 50 steps minus 25 steps)

I also saw a proposal that the buff is scaled by number of reds in dungeon(if that can be coded). So more reds in a gank squad=greater tracking. Solo farmers (on a pvm build) were the people most relying on tracking and are the ones getting shafted the most....well actually anyone new to the shard is getting shafted the most.
 
I have to say, I like it all. Not going to complain about any of this, thanks for the hard work. I will buy you guys a beer sometime (via donation), cheers.
 
Patch is amazing. Really is AAA quality and professionalism on a UO freeshard. Crazy!

As far as tracking goes, for me personally, it's a wash. My PvE template that uses tracking is stealth back-stab. Maus 3 prison is where it's at and the way the layout wraps the entrance is near 50 tiles. Reds also track at 50% less distance so stealth PvE folks don't have to worry about being within 10 (usually was 8) tiles of a red anymore. They have to get a lot luckier to stumble across you.

My other builds are hybrid PvPvE builds. It often only takes 1 blue to fight back and make a difference. If all the blues started running hybrid builds and actually fighting back they could start killing reds together and having that much more fun in the game. Repentance should be next on the chopping block to make killing reds more rewarding and playing them more intense.