Notice Heritage shard rules have been updated - Please take a moment to read this post and re-read the rules.

[Dan]

https://trueuo.com/index.php?threads/heritage-shard-rules.85/

The UO Heritage shard rules have been modified today.

The biggest change is it is now against the rules for players to AFK train their pets except inside a player house. The reasoning behind this one was simple. Players AFK gather resources or certain dungeons (blackthorn) to farm better gear to advance their characters or to create a profit (against the rules). Players also train pets to advance their characters or for a profit. You are now required to be actively online and able to respond to staff if you are training a pet in any way.

There has also been an increase in attempts to afk gather and collect items. We will actively jail characters and ban multiple offense accounts. If you get up from your computer you need to make sure your macros are shut off.

 

[tektran]

So, the new pet training rule seems.....off. Before I explain, let me get one thing clear: I have trained maybe 10 pets. Out of those pets, I have afk trained exactly 1 level of 1 pet, while I was doing some cleaning around the house. Obviously this was not against the rules at the time. Every other pet, has been hand trained with me at the keyboard, eyes glazed over, first aiding while they slowly peck away at swoop. Even as repetitive as this was, I found it fun still, because I enjoy the system.

However, I did intend to -eventually- afk train the couple pets I have with magery and the one pet I have with Necro. Cuz raising those skills on pets is like pulling teeth. I can't now. That's fine, I can deal with that. I'll abide by the rules and make no other fusses after this thread.

What concerns me is the logic behind this. Currently, no one really sells trained pets. No one really buys pets. I've had 1 customer purchasing pets for me, because that person enjoys having a collection of pets and hardly even plays. These were all untrained pets, because if I trained a pet for someone it would cost them an outrageous amount.

Resources, I get. It's commonly accepted that these items are some of the most used in the game, and afk farming because a balance issue with the economy.

But afk training pets?

" The reasoning behind this one was simple. Players AFK gather resources or certain dungeons (blackthorn) to advance their characters or to create a profit (against the rules). Players also train pets to advance their characters or for a profit."

So, I just gotta point out:

Sampires train their skills to advance their characters or to create a profit.
Mages/Necros/Spellweavers train their skills to advance their characters or to create a profit.
Bards/Tailors/Blacksmith/Carpenters/Tinkers all train their skills to advance their characters or to create a profit.

Literally every skill is trained to advance a character or create a profit. The combat abilities? That's where all those powerscrolls/arties/marties came from. Repair deeds? Was probably from a character who afk'd his skills.

And those methods are all ok right? Have I misunderstood the rules on the shard and those skills are not ok to afk macro?

I get you may be concerned with pets not losing loyalty. But honestly, that's something the other classes never have to worry about to begin with. Is a tamer's pet really all that different than a samphire or spellweaver's ability to do combat? Animal taming itself doesn't allow a tamer to kill. The pet does. I -highly- doubt we're going to see a huge influx of people afk training pets because now the pet won't go wild. There's no market for the pets. Honestly. Training a pet on this shard is really only beneficial to the tamer doing the training. Hell, I've got a vendor stocked with swamp dragons, blue beetles, and fire beetles and can't sell a single one. And those are utility pets that -anyone- can use. I don't think you need to worry about Heritage's economy going even more unbalanced because pets no longer lose loyalty.

Anyhow, I'm done ranting. I'm just concern is all. Plainly put: I'm here because certain things are allowed to be raised while afk. It allows me to play UO, guilt free. If these things one by one start becoming illegal, I may as well take my monthly donation and resub to OSI. This is not me threatening to leave. This is just the truth. I love the community here and would hate to leave. But if I'm put in a position where the reasons I came to the shard are gone, I'm no longer going to enjoy myself.

This all said, I'm also open to discussion. Maybe there's a side to this I can't see, because I'm a tamer and biased. I'm open to hearing other's opinions on the matter and having a civil discussion.

EDIT: I forgot to mention farming shard loyalty. This is ok, but not pet training. I get it, it's hard to develop a loyalty system. I'm not hating on it. I'm just pointing out that it's perfectly ok to unattended farm loyalty. But not train a pet. It just seems inconsistent.

 

[Dan]

I more meant the AFK attempting to collect ITEMS. You can still train your OWN personal skills, like animal taming and lore. This rule will be enforced but I would love to hear everyone's opinions!

 

[tektran]

Right, but I couldn't allow my pet to sit there, beating on an enemy, to raise his skills, such as his magery or necromancy, while I was afk though. That's kind of the point of my post. I see the pets skills as en extension of the tamer's skills. Without the pets skills, the tamer is just a gimp mage or archer. For example, mages can afk to train their mage abilities so that when they're ready to be at their keyboard, they can go out and enjoy the fighting, rather than sitting there grinding their magery or spellweaving up. Sure a tamer can spend a couple days afking their animal taming and lore. Then they can go out and grab a tame. But without proper training of skills, tamer's pets are awful. They always have been. the first goal of a tamer once he's got the pet bonded has always been "go and out train the pet" rather than go out and fight. Because an untrained pet just isn't very good.

I hope I'm saying this right. I know you are more concerned with the gathering of items, but the new rule does state you can not afk train your pet. It seems like it would akin to saying, "You can not afk train your spellweaving."

I hope I'm explaining what's in my head right. If it doesn't make sense I can try to clarify a bit more.

Training a school of magic is useless without spells obviously. But then spells themselves don't need to be trained. Training Animal Taming or Lore is useless without a pet. A pet, unlike melee skills or magic skills though, is fairly useless until he's trained. Tamers essentially do double the amount of training. And now we're told that unlike the other classes, half of our training isn't allowed to be afk'd.

Once again, overall this really isn't a game changer. Except for a few pet skills like magic.

It's more effective to be at your keyboard when "leveling" (the blue begin training button) your pet. Because you can fight harder enemies and get higher gains. I'm quite fond of training on Swoop. And I'm always at my keyboard while I'm there, especially those first few levels, bandaiding.

It's just strange to not be able to afk train your pet, which is your primary form of combat, when it's ok for other classes to afk train their combat skills.

 

[DewCono]

I understand both sides of the logic.
Tek is looking at it as: If it's against the rules to train pet skills afk, why can players train their own skills while afk?
Dan is looking at it as: afk training a pet is similar to acquiring gear for one of your characters while AFK since a tamer can realistically get by with no equipment on at all.

 

[Magus Zeal]

You can sell pets. You can't sell magery.

 

[tektran]

Where did all those power scrolls come from on vendors? People politely asking the champ spawns to drop their stuff? I get it. You can't sell magery. But you can make money off of magery. Also, I'll point again to the fact that there is no demand for pets on this shard.

 

[Magus Zeal]

You can make money with pets AND sell them.

 

[tektran]

Lol. Good point. Would you like to buy some of my pets?

 

[DewCono]

If someone can complete a champion spawn with a fully unequipped mage please do so, and record it.
If someone can complete a champion spawn with a stealth tamer fully unequipped please do so, and record it.

Either way, the tamer will always do things easier while unequipped as their pet is an extension of their gear.

 

[tektran]

I don't believe you can complete a champ spawn, as a tamer, relying solely on the pet. Maybe an uber tamer out there can. Maybe. I've read reports of tamers soloing champ spawns. But in every instance that tamer has stated, "The pet is there for a distraction while I nuke stuff with my "insert magic school here"". Yes, an ungeared tamer can kill things better than an ungeared mage. That doesn't change the fact that the only way that's going to happen in any meaningful way, is with a properly trained pet. The same way that a geared mage, without a high magery can't kill things, and ungeared tamer with an untrained pet can't kill things.

 

[xG00BERx]

Lol. Good point. Would you like to buy some of my pets?

Yes. What do you have? I fucking hate training pets and don't know anything about it.

 

[tektran]

None of the pets on my vendors are trained. If you want a specific tamed pet trained contact me sometime and we'll see if we can work something out.

 

[DewCono]

@tektran I only used champion spawns as an example. There's plenty of single target monsters that an unequipped tamer with bandages can fight:
Any renowned mini champ, Slasher of the veils, stygian dragon, Gauntlet, etc. Pretty much anything that's not a cluster of creatures, regardless of how strong that single monster is.

 

[tektran]

@DewCono But your focus there is on gear. My focus is on pet skills. It's what this entire rule is about. The training of pets while afk. Pet skills, I believe, are an extension of the players skills, just as you believe, the pet is the extension of the players gear. Now if you want to get into the semantics of gear, then yeah, sure, an ungeared tamer can do some damage with a properly trained pet. However, an if the pet is an extension of the tamer's "gear" then the tamer is "geared". Now. That same mage geared up will smoke the tamer in dps. This even has proved it. Watching literally every player on here with spellweaving just blow my numbers out the water woke me up to the power of it.

Lets take it a step further. A geared sampire such as yourself can take literally anything in the entire game solo. Yeah, you had to earn your gear. But your skills? Your skills had to be trained. And if you wanted, you could have afk trained them. Yeah, I have to earn my gear. My pet. But my pet's skills? Well...that's gotta be trained by hand. Oh, and once I'm geared, and my pet is trained? I still can't compete with a sampire. And I can't compete with most of the geared mages.

So, gear seems irrelevant to the topic of "you can't afk train your pets".

 

[tektran]

I meant to say "This event has proved it." Meaning the invasion event

 

[DewCono]

Also to be fair, I put like 30+ hours into making my suit. How many hours does it take to peacemake, and tame a pet? or beat it down to 12%, and tame a pet? If that's the only prequisite to getting the majority of your gear (your pet) then that's a problem in itself. What does a tamer need to run? 100% lrc? So you literally start with the suit you need for a tamer when you join this server.

A tamer's gear IS pets.

A Chivalry pet with Armor ignore will do a ton of DPS, and what does the "player" have to do? Watch it? Throw a heal here or there? I have to do a lot more to keep my sampire alive..

I'd love to slap a set of unimbued, unreforged, unenhanced gear onto my manequinn, and tell it "train this gear so I can play my character later".

if pet training didn't exist I would agree with you: but now you can raise all resists to 80 (well, 73 give or take?) and powerscroll your pets, etc.

 

[tektran]

Once again, what does that have to do with the pet's skills?

 

[tektran]

Also, even though all of this talk of gear i feel has nothing to do with the training of pets. I feel the need to point out, my crap sampire was how I even afforded my tamer. I made my first 300k, using a sampire, whom I afk'd the skills of. Then took him into new haven mine and slaughtered earth eles over and over and over, using only my 100%LRC that the shard gave to me, and a couple things of jewelry I looted from the corpses. I flipped his gold to my tamer, got some animal lore and taming ps's. I mean, you speak as though it's impossible to play any character except a tamer as soon as you join the shard with ease. It's the opposite. The shard gives you a 100% lrc suit. I can immediately play a sampire or mage and start making money. My tamer took me almost a week to get my taming up enough. Then I had to wait for the pets to bond before I could use them. I didn't have to do all that with my sampire.

But I truly feel we're off track, and just getting into a pissing contest of who's got it easier. Who's got what easier doesn't matter, or at least it shouldn't. Because at the end of the day, none of this talk of how well a tamer can do with what gear and how long it took you to get your gear has anything to do with, "players can't afk train their pets cuz of advancement and/or money"

 

[DewCono]

I don't speak as if it's impossible to play anything but a tamer.. but pets are literally the equipment that a tamer uses.
If you get that through your head then maybe you'll understand the point that I was trying to make.

Whether you're playing a mage (which requires good gear, and then focusing on actually staying alive + doing damage in big clusters of mobs)
whether you're playing a sampire (which requires good gear, and then focusing on actually staying alive in big clusters of mobs)
whether you're playing an archer (which requires good gear, and then running around kiting the mobs so you don't die)
whether you're playing a crafter which requires resources (which you need to then play a gatherer to get the resources to do so)

What do all those builds have in common? They both require you to train their skills (which as you said can be done afk) and they require to to gather resources to afford gear (which can't be done while afk).

If you play a tamer it requires: a stack of bandages, and a trained pet. (which the pet takes a few minutes to tame).

It's not a matter of a pissing contest, it's a matter of common sense.
If you can afk train a mage and go use it without gear do it. If you can afk train a warrior and go use it without gear go do it.
ANYONE can afk train a tamer, and use it with NO GEAR therefore the pet IS THE GEAR.

Pets have ALWAYS been overpowered, and pub 97 made them even more powerful.
A pet with 73/73/73/73/73 resists, 15-25 base damage, innate abilities such as armor ignore, or self healing, or spellweaving with an HP pool of upwards of 700 (so 5-6 players worth of HP) requires NO EQUIPMENT to have it follow you around and do your bidding.

Your tamer taking a week is your own speed. My tamer took me less than 3 hours to go from 0-110 taming, and lore the other night.

Also my pretty much untrained (low skills) pet can clear out abyss spawns with almost no intervention from my player character (who is wearing a 100% lrc suit with crap resists)