Balron farming solution

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Silent
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Re: Balron farming solution

Post by Silent »

+Colibri wrote:
Tue Feb 14, 2023 5:59 am
Another idea we had is to make monsters drop less the more you farm them. So even if you revert down to liches, after some 15 minutes of farming they would start dropping less and less, until you would find that it's better to switch to a different monster, or a different dungeon. Well, over the course of an hour or two (depending on how this is all configured) you could go back to balrons and farm them at 100% loot, but you'd have to cycle thru 4-8 places or types of monsters.
Please be careful with this. If I have 1 day off at work I would like to make as much money as possible so this would reduce the income of people that dont play daily and continue to barely affect the home-office people.
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Muolke
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Re: Balron farming solution

Post by Muolke »

Silent wrote:
Tue Feb 14, 2023 8:52 am
+Colibri wrote:
Tue Feb 14, 2023 5:59 am
Another idea we had is to make monsters drop less the more you farm them. So even if you revert down to liches, after some 15 minutes of farming they would start dropping less and less, until you would find that it's better to switch to a different monster, or a different dungeon. Well, over the course of an hour or two (depending on how this is all configured) you could go back to balrons and farm them at 100% loot, but you'd have to cycle thru 4-8 places or types of monsters.
Please be careful with this. If I have 1 day off at work I would like to make as much money as possible so this would reduce the income of people that dont play daily and continue to barely affect the home-office people.
I think you bring up a valid concern. Some people work from home and let their automatic farming script run for the entire 8 hours they’re working by having UO on a side monitor. Some people only come on to play for 2 hours at night 2-3 days per week and this wouldn’t be good for the casual player either.

When we really think about it the issue is just that Balrons and Lurgs drop way too much gold. Combine that with how easily accessible they are and you have a problem. I don’t think anyone cares if you farm liches 8 hours per day because they drop 200-300 gold each…not 2,000-8,000 gold each. And that’s the problem.
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ButteryBiscuits
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Re: Balron farming solution

Post by ButteryBiscuits »

When looking at solutions, it might be better to define what the actual problem is. What I hear is people are making too much gold and I can't so I can't get the cool things at auction. I remember feeling that way when i started again in 2018. Rather than whine about what I couldn't do, I found it more productive to find things I could and the rest started to fall into place.

Not having many events on the shard and not a lot of quests leaves the auctions as a kind of high point. You may be able to find an hour alone in ballys here or there but not after an auction is announced. And grand auction? Players that only pop on to keep their account active crawl out of the woodwork to beef up their bank balance. As items get bid higher and higher, there is more pressure to find *the one best thing* to get gold quickly. If auctions are part of the problem, the solution is to offer the items more often. Once you have an all-season totem or Ancient Composite Bow, very few will come back and get more for alt characters.

The focus on certain spots is purely gold per effort. If you could hit a liche in one hit and get 5k gold, they would be it. Like others have said, a revamp on the gold drops based on hit points/ease to kill would make the shard a lot more diverse. If it take 5 hit to kill a bally and you get 2500 gold but you could go fight that big red dragon with your pets, die multiple times, and get comparative gold and not have to wade through everyone else.... woot!!

Also on ease of kill is how much traveling you have to do.... having them spawn in roughly the same place every time makes it easy to pop in on "the locations" to see if they are there and then keep popping till you find them. Making more random spawn points, and even more random spawn timers would make it much harder to game (that) area.

I have run into multiple people in multiple mob locations, some even on top of champ spawn points, just sitting killing claiming. Sometimes even dead. For hours. There is no requirement to respond to anyone but not giving a spot up so someone else can have a turn is. People do this in doom and hide next to the titan hammer boxes and then pop out and get the key and try the boxes when the timer respawns. Thus the instanced dungeons now. Rather than turning everything into instanced dungeons, why not make it a default that if you have not moved from your location in 10 minutes that you get popped into the Brit Bar? Don't even need to afk check, no worries about people camping things and not letting others play through.

Balrons are not really the problem, they are just where people go based on the dynamics of the shard. Change those dynamics and people will just go wherever it is most advantageous. Maybe it is still ballies. Maybe it is some hole in the wall spot in Felucca. The goal should not be to nerf the heck out of the shard to try and punish the vets but to shape the shard for all levels of players so that there are ways to advance for everyone.

BTW.... I was doing ballys with my own uosteam script after a couple years on the shard. It was not perfectly optimized but it was fun to tweak it and get it better. Along the way, others helped offering their fighting scripts, recall scripts etc. Working your way up through the game is the challenge. More power to anyone who got the free script ZeeeQi posted, but those who get things without working for them will soon find something else to complain about. It is probably time to stop giving in to the loudest whiners.

Peace out ya'all
BB
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Wil
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Re: Balron farming solution

Post by Wil »

Muolke wrote:
Tue Feb 14, 2023 9:50 am
When we really think about it the issue is just that Balrons and Lurgs drop way too much gold.
Is that an offer to tell us all your farming spots now that you've decided other players are getting too much gold from the balrons?
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Re: Balron farming solution

Post by Geriatric »

i sort of half agree with the statement buttery makes

i dont necesarily think reducing the gold balrons drop is the best way to go about it
but rather increase the gold from drop from some of the other creatures

this is the similar situation in society people complain about a rich ceo who makes 10 million a year while the employees get 10 dollars an hour
the difference is that dollars are a finite currency where as ingame gold is a potentially infinite pool we can all fish in
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Muolke
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Re: Balron farming solution

Post by Muolke »

Wil wrote:
Tue Feb 14, 2023 2:29 pm
Muolke wrote:
Tue Feb 14, 2023 9:50 am
When we really think about it the issue is just that Balrons and Lurgs drop way too much gold.
Is that an offer to tell us all your farming spots now that you've decided other players are getting too much gold from the balrons?
All the spots I farm are regularly farmed by other players. There’s no secret farming spot. The advantage I have is that I can kill fairly quickly. My top 3 farming spots regularly have at least 2-3 other players there.
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Muolke
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Re: Balron farming solution

Post by Muolke »

Geriatric wrote:
Tue Feb 14, 2023 2:37 pm
i sort of half agree with the statement buttery makes

i dont necesarily think reducing the gold balrons drop is the best way to go about it
but rather increase the gold from drop from some of the other creatures

this is the similar situation in society people complain about a rich ceo who makes 10 million a year while the employees get 10 dollars an hour
the difference is that dollars are a finite currency where as ingame gold is a potentially infinite pool we can all fish in
So your solution is to just dump a ton more gold into the economy when people complain about inflation as it is? How’s that working out for the US economy? You think 800 million gold for a Totem at a Grand Auction is a lot now…just wait and see how much higher it would go if you raised the loot on a bunch of creatures…
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Re: Balron farming solution

Post by Geriatric »

lower the balrons gold or increase the others

its still gonna have a similar effect

inflation or deflation the outcome is still the same, balancing monsters gold drops

if you increase the gold drops the player to player economy prices will increases
but player to NPC objects will be comparitvely cheaper, reagents, plain boards, leather, scrolls, arrows

think of it as a luxury tax....
the price of sports cars, totems and other auction items will increase
but the price of bread and apples stay the same so the poor people wont starve
Last edited by Geriatric on Tue Feb 14, 2023 3:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Wil
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Re: Balron farming solution

Post by Wil »

Muolke wrote:
Tue Feb 14, 2023 2:53 pm
All the spots I farm are regularly farmed by other players. There’s no secret farming spot. The advantage I have is that I can kill fairly quickly. My top 3 farming spots regularly have at least 2-3 other players there.
You'll forgive me for suspecting the motives of the richest guy on the shard who wants to nerf the best known farming spots but strongly rejects the idea of adjusting the drop rate anywhere else.
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Muolke
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Re: Balron farming solution

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Wil wrote:
Tue Feb 14, 2023 3:06 pm

You'll forgive me for suspecting the motives of the richest guy on the shard who wants to nerf the best known farming spots but strongly rejects the idea of adjusting the drop rate anywhere else.
First off, I’m not the richest guy on the shard.

Second, I was the first player to make an Orion Balron script available to anyone who wanted it. Not free, but the 30-40 million I asked for it was a lot less than another player who asked 600 million gold for theirs just a few months back.

Lastly, I don’t “strongly reject” the idea of adjusting the drop rate anywhere else. Increasing gold drops of most of the creatures listed above would actually benefit me even more as I regularly farm areas loaded with those creatures. My conviction in simply reducing gold drops by Balrons is because they’re the outlier here…not the other creatures. I used to think messing with recalling capabilities was the solution but you and others brought up valid points against that so I changed my mind on that.
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Wil
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Re: Balron farming solution

Post by Wil »

Muolke wrote:
Tue Feb 14, 2023 3:13 pm
First off, I’m not the richest guy on the shard.
Pretty sure you passed Alejandro, the previous richest guy on the shard, when you built that uber weapon of yours. Whether you got it from donating or grinding, you spent the equivalent of thousands of dollars on it alone, yet remain one of the high rollers at each auction.

Not the richest guy on the shard. Really.
Last edited by Wil on Tue Feb 14, 2023 3:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Geriatric
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Re: Balron farming solution

Post by Geriatric »

hes gotta be in the top 5
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Wil
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Re: Balron farming solution

Post by Wil »

Muolke wrote:
Tue Feb 14, 2023 3:13 pm
Lastly, I don’t “strongly reject” the idea of adjusting the drop rate anywhere else.
Well you certainly didn't like the idea of dynamically adjusting the drop rate based on how heavily any particular spawn is being farmed. So where / how are you farming where that'd be a problem for you?
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Muolke
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Re: Balron farming solution

Post by Muolke »

Wil wrote:
Tue Feb 14, 2023 3:55 pm

Well you certainly didn't like the idea of dynamically adjusting the drop rate based on how heavily any particular spawn is being farmed. So where / how are you farming where that'd be a problem for you?
I’m against the idea but some of my longest farming routines and loops take about 45 minutes to complete…so I’d only kill a specific creature once during that time. I can run it all day and the dynamic drop rate wouldn’t have an impact on me at all. It’s not all about how something impacts you specifically, sometimes it’s about the community as a whole because if we scare off any more new people none of this will matter when we don’t have a shard to play on anymore.
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Muolke
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Re: Balron farming solution

Post by Muolke »

Wil wrote:
Tue Feb 14, 2023 3:50 pm
Pretty sure you passed Alejandro, the previous richest guy on the shard, when you built that uber weapon of yours. Whether you got it from donating or grinding, you spent the equivalent of thousands of dollars on it alone, yet remain one of the high rollers at each auction.

Not the richest guy on the shard. Really.
Some people spend their gold on housing, some on deco, and some on gear. I make gold dozens of ways…it’s an all-encompassing strategy. Interestingly enough, one of my most profitable ventures was lending out gold to people last year when we had that mega/grand auction. You just have to know when to play and when to watch.
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