I've noticed that there has been debates going on regarding the changes for the housing system so as to limit house looting. I have stressed my opinion about this in the respective threads and my position is clear: I believe that the features which represent later UO eras are not useful here and are even harmful in a sense that they take away that pre-T2A, oldschool atmosphere. And what is left on the shard if we take away the core UO mechanics besides its pre alpha graphics? Little is left.

That being said, the staff and the players should stop complaining and instead cooperate in order to preserve that unique atmosphere which all other shards lack all together. Instead of adding mechanics which will make gameplay easier and take away risk, I believe we should take another path with more complex mechanics and features to implement instead of adding age old stuff, which won't promote the player base but will just ruin the main course of the shard, which, if I am not mistaken was always risk vs reward, freedom and historical atmosphere.

I've noticed that not many players wish to think about more complex route to undertake when talking about issues such as house looting and griefers. Myself I have been looted here and yet do you see me asking for secures or visitor limits?

What I am proposing is to expand the criminal system in a way that people who decide to harm others in one way or another will have to think twice. See the difference? Manually limit the access to one's property by adding T2A+ features which have nothing to do with the era we represent and making steps towards adjusting criminal system as a whole?

When I was looted, the intruder did not go grey, and I was killed by the guard for protecting my house lol. If that was not added, anybody who is not on a friend list should turn grey. Just grey, not a criminal. However, if he/she steals or lifts an item which does not belong to him/her, criminal timer should start.

Where was once a prison project, just north from Britain. Sadly, it was removed because some voted against it, and I believe it was a bad decision. There is no way we can protect new players, or players overall from griefing without adding the above mentioned features from other eras, which for some reason some players here ask for, without actually adding new mechanics in order to make criminal activity something related to 'risk vs reward' concept.

By building a prison, any person who commits a criminal act, be it theft, picking up items inside other player houses if they are not 'friended' there, attacking a blue player or NPC and finally killing (perhaps we can come up with more offences to implement) will launch a criminal act. Now, ANY witness who sees a person committing a crime, can report it to the nearest guard WHILE his/her crime timer is still going. Once the timer stops, there is no way to report a criminal act to the guard. Once the act is reported, the authorities will have the option to catch the player, and fine, or sentence him/her, depends on the severity of crime a criminal has done. The amount of fine or a sentence time also depends on severity.

Now I will divide what I said by points, which in my opinion should be added in order to counter griefers and pk'ers:

1. Build a prison

2. Implement several offences which the game scripts will react on as a criminal act (stealing from player packs or houses or houses, lifting items not belonging to you, attacking a blue player or an NPC, killing etc.)

3. Introduce friend list. No bans or secures, no 'I ban thee' thing, just a friend list. People who will be trusted by the house owner, who won't turn gray upon entering the house.

4. If it was not introduced before, respectively, make the intruder turn grey for the house owner or house friends and a criminal for stealing/lifting items.

5. Add a house option to guild stones. Guilds may add their own houses to the list of their guild houses so as to protect each other. Every time somebody will try to rob the house, the alarm in the guild chat would notify the guild members of that. However, that option should cost some price. Such as, the protection option would cost 5k a week and 2k for any additional house. I think this would be a fair price.

6. Add severity for offences done by players. The more kills a pk'er has done - the more severe will be his punishment, more time in jail. As of stealing, it should also depend on the amount stolen. Some minor offences such as attacking or snooping can be punished by the fine as well as confiscating the stolen item if found during arrest of player. Crimes such as murder and house robbery should carry more severe punishment, such as real time week in jail + % of days depending on the amount of items stolen, the price of overall stolen goods according to NPC vendor price list, and the amount of kills.

7. Add a locksmith in Britain who can change the locks and duplicate keys for a price.

8. Crimes should be region-based. As such, committing a crime in Cove region cannot be reported in Britain region (town, farms etc.) and vise versa. Guard outposts in town outskirts would also be helpful.


That's it. Now see the difference between adding a secure or 'I ban thee' command, which would certainly ruin the overall atmosphere here and my suggestions, which won't make things easier, but instead would make griefers think twice, balance things and make it overall more interesting. They are, certainly, far harder to implement and will take time to script, unlike simply adding mechanics to prevent house looting etc, but I believe these changes are worth giving a try.

I do wanna state that changes we make are not to trammel this server, they are 100% for the player and to draw in players. If things were perfect the way they are we would have 100's of players by now. Yet we don't which is why changes are being discussed.

The prison is a pretty good idea, I like some features you mentioned but also see a couple hang-ups.

A friends list is IMO needed, and anyone in your home who isnt a friend should be grey while in the home for the reason that you stated, a man gets in your home and starts looting, you attack, and you become the criminal in the guards eyes.

In order to script something that makes you go grey by picking up an item on a players floor in their home would be challenging in the sense that what if someone accidentally drops something in your home, someone you dont wish to friend but have invited inside. That item would then become yours because if they re-pick up the item they go grey. Which would be a flaw.

The rest that you said is all legit and are great ideas, they are unique features which would require a bit of work to add and get right, but still great suggestions.

Right, that could be a possible flow, but then again, I am sure there is a workaround for it, such as the item would still belong to somebody who dropped it and the the item would belong to the house/owner only if it is either locked down or was on the floor for at least 5 minutes, for instance.

What if a group of players (3-5) start going house to house of active players camping hidden outside waiting for the player to open the door. They barge in and kill the player fast because 1 vs 5 the 5 always win. Players will literally be afraid to leave and enter their own home. It's an issue. This system still will not limit this. Jail time wont stop a player when all the loot is in their home, serving a sentence wouldn't be a big deal. We are trying to work out a balance that literally limits the amount a player or players can loot.

So that houses can be looted, yet at the same time owners have a chance to protect it other then pvp.

Because giving players the option to choose whether to house loot respectfully or not doesn't seem to work. Which we understand and aren't judging, just trying to fix.

There is no problem in casting Reveal before entering the house/inside the house. Most players use alts to open doors and before they do they make sure it is safe to do so. It is not an issue. If you think that's an issue, come on, there are many shards, well, actually most shards use T2A+ housing, yet only few are actually popular, all other shards are dead. I used to play on pre-t2a shards for years. No secures or lockdowns, no key duplicates, no bans or friend lists, no nothing. It was the best UO experience and people learned how to secure their houses. House looting only happened either because of bugs and or trust-based scams. Bugs can be fixed, common sense can't. If people use common sense house looting won't happen. Not using common sense is an issue, not traditional hardcore UO mechanics.
Not being able to play for weeks is not a big deal? Doubt it. I played on the shard which had both, perma death, 1 char per IP and prison system. Believe me, it was the best UO experience I've ever had. Of course, the shard did not just focus on PvP, because if it did, it would be worst as people would either die constantly or sit in jail. The gameplay was more economic-based, so people were more concerned with market, prices, product, supply and demand issues. However, some people did not want to play fair and wanted quick money, and killings, clan wars and disputes happened. Personally, I was excluded from the shard for 4 months the most. When the staff found out I was using an alt, the alt was banned. My friends tried to organize the prison break, but I was killed by the guard NPCs in the process. It was the best fucking experience most UO players will ever have.

Funny how people say jail system won't work without ever witnessing it at work. I know only one western-based freeshard which kinda employed the prison system. AI. Yet prisons in AI were only used by pker's who did not want stat loss and everybody knows that stat loss is not a solution to pk'ing. House looting was very difficult on AI, so there was nothing to fear for home owners so prisons were kind of useless, the way I portray prisons is nothing like that.

What I know is the prison system was almost introduced here once, yet the project was canceled because some whiners complained. Where are they now? They quit despite the fact that Draconis did as they wanted, he did not introduce jails even though his vision was slightly different from mine. Now, perhaps it is time to listen to me, eh?
You can try to balance all you want, but years of my UO experience show that all the age old T2A+ settings only ruin the shard. We need new ideas to introduce and the unique jail and criminal system would in fact attract players for simple reason...it's unique. Simply limiting players from doing what they want to do is called Trammel, and this is something that killed UO. It did not just ruin the game, it was the conclusion of what has ruined the game. Many small 'security-based' mechanics were implemented by OSI over the course of 1998-2000 and Trammel was the conclusion of all it, which basically destroyed the classic feel of the game. OSI was commercial organization, we are not. OSI was interested in keeping the players, yet they failed as many players have left it over the course of systematic ruining of the game, since they now preferred free shards now that official retail shards were no longer interesting to them. We are interested in attracting players, not keeping them as our player base is small. We cannot attract players by age old mechanics, as UO Forever already did it for us.

As I said, players play for nostalgia. And nostalgia for us is freedom which almost no other game provides, yet post T2A settings take away the lion share of that freedom. If somebody is afraid of loosing his stuff and he/he is incapable of common sense in order to protect his property, I think there are plenty of gaming titles which guarantee loot safety. If I leave my house unlocked when I leave at morning, the thief is to blame, sure, but so am I as I am being a complete moron for not locking my own fucking door.


I would also suggest to expand house regions by adding courtyards to the houses, so that smiths and carpenters can craft fences to make additional protection for the house.




Anything real, but not mechanically taking away freedom. If you do this - Enigma is gone as the initial idea behind this shard would disappear. What's the initial idea? Pre-T2A ruleset, freedom. Otherwise why not just make another T2A or Pub16 clone? Let's see how many players we will attract competing with biggest UO market titles out there.

First, you're jumping the gun. You have no idea what we're planning or what direction we plan to take, all you're going off is the notion that we are making changes.

You're saying we're saying a jail system wont work without trying it. Please realize the amount of man hours toward something just to figure out if it will work or not, and if it doesn't its a complete waste so lets be practical here. I've played servers with jail systems, one for example you had to mine rocks until you reached a certain ore amount to be set free. But those were always for doing actual crimes, spamming, cursing staff, breaking actual game rules. They were never for stealing, looting, murdering, thats playing the game. We can't punish for that type of stuff, thats what guards and the criminal/murder system is for. I do like some ideas of your proposed idea, I'm not rejecting it entirely.

Also keep in mind I don't have final say in anything, Draconis does. If I dislike an idea it doesn't mean he will also.

"We can try to balance all we want." Yes we will try to balance, all that we want lol. You seem to object any other idea on this issue expect your own. I like that you're hell-bent on helping, but if an idea isnt welcomed with open arms a page long reply as to why I'm wrong and why you're right isn't needed.

Nostalgia is more then just freedom, for each person it represents something different so using the word "us" and "for us" isn't needed either since you're referring to your own opinion and personal preference.

So again, there is no loot safety and it was never said that there would be.

Also jailing a player for weeks you say? What could possibly be the crime for something like that? House looting? We can't put a player in jail for a week because they house looted or anything like that.
Thats a sure way to get a player to quit.

You're not the only experienced UO player here, and you're not the only pre-t2a veteran here, I personally am aware of the era well.

We are wanting to use a bit of the second age housing system.

Since we don't have proper banks, a player deserves some type of secure container in a home.

100% cut throat servers don't survive, Fact.
We need a good 80/20 balance or so.

Thanks for the ideas karma.
I'll let Draconis reply to this thread if he has any say on this.

I am not jumping the gun. I do not know what changes Draconis is planning, but I know crystal clear that there are two ways to create balance for any issue. The easy one is to impose certain mechanical limitations to the system thus "handbraking" the features by limiting certain activities, such as inability to open the secure box. This is a T2A feature and has nothing to do with pre-T2A UO. Second one, is a hard one. By implementing wider and more complex system to create balance, such as the prison and criminal system I described above. Which path will he choose is up to him, but having mixed era features (pre-alpha graphics and T2A mechanics) is a bad combination imo. Other shards have tried this mixed era formulas before and they turned up uninteresting to the community.
The above described guild protection system can be found in one of the source codes available on the net. Draconis will only have to adjust the code to the suitable RunUO version of his own shard and won't have to write anything from scratch. The jail system can be taken from AI and the source code is also available, just adjust it to the version of the shard and do certain changes so that it would work as intended. I would not suggest unrealistic amount of hours given that I know how busy Draconis is. But what I propose is anything but unrealistic as the most of the code is already available and I can send him all the links if he needs it.
First off, I said if they get caught by the NPC guards. It won't be automatic recall to the jail. Secondly, since people here (and I also believe that was the case of you back then, not sure though) used to quit over the looted house. Why not punish the looters giving the 'victims' motivation? Lastly, guards and criminal system as well as stat loss are nothing usable against pker's. They do not solve the griefing problems at all. So the only way to limit aggressive pvp activity is to implement mechanical limitations which you are talking about. Just because one's name is red does not mean it bothers him/her.

I have never looted a house on this shard. However, I was looted before. Do you see me asking for secures or ability to lockdown tables to block the entrance? That is a T2A feature. Why don't we also introduce mounts, T2A lands, insta-hit and many other thigns which would promote PvP but would destroy the pre-T2A feel Draconis spent hours to create?

I am not just rejecting other ideas. I am analyzing what I know from years of experience including this shard. I am analyzing what I know from all the events that I reminisce have happened on this server including the canceled jail project, which was a purely populist idea to cancel it, yet the people who stood behind its cancellation quit. I do provide arguments, and strong ones I believe, I am not just yelling what I feel or think is right and what's not.
Yet I still have to meet a person who would say how he misses the good old days when he could switch from Fell to Tramm.
Since you have been taking your inspiration, at leas tin your previous posts, from Hybrid, I believe that your inspiration is toxic for this particular shard as these two eras and shard establishments are too different to be even compared, not to mention inspire ideas from each other. No offence though, just saying. T2A+ (and that applies to every era or mechanic past 1998) will not make this shard better.
Yep, that's locking down furniture so another player can't pass. That's secure containers. That's a ban option. That is anything but pre-T2A. Of course, Draconis can do that too, if he thinks it would be right, I am just stating my opinion on this one.
So don't casual servers if they add what has been added billion times before them and not introducing any new ideas. People get bored over the same pew pew activity they have been involved in for years before.