Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

There is simply too much damn whining going on! Look it’s enough that I have to deal with my 4 year old begging for a pop-tart in the morning. When I get to work I expect some god damn quality surfing. What do I find? Whining. From battlevortex to Lum to the COB Dev board all you wankers are going off like frigging schools kids. “Don’t just give ’em stat loss, put ’em in jail!” “Get rid of the rep system and bring back Dread Lords!” “So and So ganked me a called me a bad name!” “They nerfed the foobar skill!”

You know, I’ve got a solution for you all. Pencils ready? Shut the fuck up and play the god damn game!

That’s right. Shut your damn pie holes! (copyright Alora of UDL) Launch UO or AC or EQ and play the damn game. All this whining is making me sick. Go play Unreal or Quake for an hour. Not much bitching there, just gaming.

If you have a need for mindless chatter then feel free to discuss anything from my mighty PvP prowess to the need for craftable masks in game. Just quit the whining, you smarmy cheese eaters.

I simply cannot wait until PSX2 arrives and I can r0xx0r people in peace.

Currently, the hot debate in the UO Dev circles is whether or not to eliminate stat loss in the PvP+ lands in the upcoming Felluca/Trammel thingie. Personally, I would hope that Anti-PK groups alone would be enough to stop PKs and keep non-combatants, it seems to work on Siege. With the introduction of the PvP- lands, IMHO, I think that stat loss should be removed completely. After seeing Lum’s poll, I realized that many, many players don’t agree.

As longtime Anti and a player on Siege Perilous, the only shard with no stat loss, I’d like to bring up an idea. Let’s go over a few facts here:

1) Murderers need to be punished in some way for their deeds.

2) Permanent stat loss is too harsh a punishment for a game.

Many might are argue that loss of town privileges alone is a big enough punishment for murders, on an advanced shard like Siege, that’s all we ready need. Everyone is fine with that system on Siege. I can understand how others feel that harsher punishment is needed. Many players just want to be a merchant and not worry about things like combat.

Permanent stat loss is not the answer either. Ultima is a place where players are given the ability to shape the world more than in any other MMORPG. Taking 20% statloss on GM level skills is simply too harsh. Let’s be generous and say that an unfortunate victim loses 5,000 gold to a PK. How long does recovery take? A night focused on gold making? Let’s say a PK dies and gets stat lossed from 100 magery to 80. You are talking about weeks to recover from the death. It is simply too harsh.

The solution? Taking a hint from Asheron Call’s vitae penalty, the solution is simple, TEMPORARY skill loss. We can argue about the details, but the idea is simple. If you are a PK and get killed, you take a temporary loss of stats. After some amount of time, your skills return. The idea is to put a damper on the endless killing from the days of the Dread Lords.

My initial idea would be a that your temp stat loss is equal to your short term murder count, capped at 20%. So if you have 10 murders on your count you take 10% loss. If you decide to be mass murderer, you’ll take 20%.

Recovery of stats is probably up to discussion. I would suggest that stat loss is reduced by 5% once a day. No need to sit online waiting it out, make it an automatic change. Consider that it would take a 20+ kill PK four days to fully recover. If you can’t agree that taking four days to recover is a harsh enough penalty, you need to consider joining a MMORPG with a complete ban on PvP combat.

Well, what do you all think?

You need to read the Player Interaction Changes at uo.com to make sense of this.

The problem with the proposed positive/negative/consent plan is that guilds declare war on other guilds to form alliances. Since there is no seperate way to declare alliance, warring must be used.

In the current plan, there will still be a way to ‘blue heal’ if guilds use guild wars for alliances.

If official alliances were allowed, the change to the current plan would be minor.

If a Non-Guild War guild is allied with a War Guild, the Non-Guild War guild can decide to do ‘positive acts’ on their ally. Once a Non-Guild War member has commited a positve act on an ALLIED Guild War member, the Non-Guild War member is now flagged the same as the War Guild member for some time, thus becoming vulnerable in the guild war.

For example:

Guild A and Guild B are allied
Guild B and Guild C are warring

Guilds B and C are fighting. Guild A is watching. If a member of Guild A does a postive act on a member of B, that Guild A member flags the same as a Guild B member and is vulnerable to attack by Guild C for 5 minutes (or whatever time sounds good).

Make sense?

Great Bob, a UO player and writer for Lum’s page, is losing his daughter to a terminal illness. As a father of two girls, this sort of thing absolutely crushes me.

Please go to the Families of Spinal Muscular Atrophy and donate some money “In Memory of Claire Elizabeth Roland”.

I can think of nothing more terrible than losing a child. Please donate whatever you can. Not only will it help find a cure, it will help Bob & his wife feel better in this terrible time.

The UO Dev Team has released a plan for the revampof some PvP tactics.  Boy, I can hear the whining now coming form theDev Board.  Personally, it’s not what I expected, but hey I’ll takeit.  I was against it RoT skill gain at first and now I’m a believer.

More specifically, here are the new concepts and my comments:

Healing and Poisoning
You will not be able to heal a poisoned character through any method (healing skill,spells, potions, etc.) until they are first cured of the poison. 

This is going to make sword and fencing fighters nice and happy.  Deadly& greater poisons were a pain to deal with in the past, now they will be aserious reversal in a battle.  Anyone poisoned will need to cureimmediately.  That will put them on the defensive and open to furtherattack.  I better get my healing and anatomy above 60 soon.  It willalso make poison a viable mage PvP spell.  

Magic Reflect
The magic reflect spell will be enhanced to provide additional tactical options inplayer verses player combat. At this time, any spell, regardless of its circle, can beused to counter a magic reflect spell. This results in the same spell (or few spells)being used every time to bring down the reflect. This change will add variety andadditional tactical options when fighting a character who has cast magic reflect. 
[details all snipped]

This will make for some unhappy mages.  I think it will add a whole newlevel of complexity to PvP mage combat.  Many will hate it, simply becauseit is different.  To a character with low INT, this change is no bigdeal.  As a dex monkey, I am happy to hope that a mage might actually eatsome damage taking down my reflect.   However to the current ‘tankmage’ with 100 INT, their Reflect will stand up to a nice beating.  Undoubtedly,mages will determine the best method for dropping the reflect of another 100 INTmage.  Maybe an explosion/greater heal combo will work.  CastExplosion and during the delay for effect, cast Greater Heal to fix the damage.

My hope is that a few serious PvP mages test this out on TC and help the DevTeam tweak it correctly.  Otherwise, this could easily make warriors immuneto all but GM mages…  Prepare yourself for the whining over thisone.  The complaining over this one will reach a  fever pitchsoon.  My only hope is that in the furor, precasting will finally beforgotten.

Archery
The archery skill will be tweaked to balance it and make it more effective in Playervs. Player combat. 
    The minimum damage on bows, crossbows, and heavy crossbows will beincreased. 
    The maximum damage on bows, crossbows, and heavy crossbows will bedecreased a small amount. 
    The rate of fire will be increased a small amount for bows, crossbows, andheavy crossbows. 

Yee-haw.  Look like archery is getting unnerfed.  Again it’s notwhat I expected, but I’ll take it.  As any that fight with katanas andkryss know, it’s not maximum damage that’s important, it’s rate of fire. Archers should have a chance in PvP combat.  Don’t know who’ll be againstthis one. Most agree that archery is nerfed currently.

Overall I think that the Dev Team is trying to find reasonable way to tunePvP without ganking anyone’s current playstyles.  I think the warriors arethe bigger winners here.  Mages get the benefit of stronger reflect, butthe drawback of not being able to use Magic Arrow anymore. 

Let the testing commence!

I posted a new Siege story about fighting the GC guild.  

I try reading the COB Dev Board these days, but I tend to find it filled with morons.  I wish OSI had a better forum for developing ideas.  The Ultima onelist is OK, but the signal to noise it low as well.

Lum’s page has become a general MMORPG site.  He still hits the mark on things, but the message board has gone to hell.

I’m severely addicted to Unreal Tournament.  I love the purity of the game.  The sweet feeling of a head shot with the sniper rifle is unparallelled. Go buy it now…

Lastly, Poor George W. got trounced in New Hampshire.  The controllers of this Stepford robot better get to work.  It seems that it’s not his ideas people don’t like, it’s the guy himself.  What’s up with that smirk?

A good buddy remapped my keyboard controls for Unreal Tournament. It made a big difference. Now I can roxx0r all of joo.  Ph3ar my mad skillz. Of course, I didn’t get much sleep last night, but who cares.
 

Well, I was perusing the site stats and checked out the type of browser you all were using.  The results shocked me.  It looks like 78% of you are using Internet Explorer.  Am I really one of the few Netscape users?  I’ll admit Netscape is buggy as hell, but using Explorer seems weird.  Explorer does that weird thing where items change position on the screen as the images load.  Almost makes me seasick.  Also, what’s up with ‘Favorites’?  Can’t they just call it book marks and be done with it?

BattleVortex has started a campaing to ‘fix’ a few of the problems with Siege.   Click below and read it.  I suggest signing it.  It’s free…

After a frustrating night of UO, I’m taking a few days off from it.  Unreal Tournament arrived in the mail and I’ve got DVD’s to watch with the wife.  While I enjoy UO, there are time I want to reach through the net and strangle someone on the other side.  You can read watch my latest image stories or see the updated Counselor appreciation section if you need an Ultima fix.

BTW, I must confess a truth.  Unreal Tournament is better than Quake 3.  Yes, I know I talked about how good Q3 was, but believe me Unreal is better.  The pure style points of having an Enforcer in both hands cannot be matched by anything in Quake.

My brother has done a good Flash animation.  You will laugh.   Go take a look. Click on Catching On.