New "fixes"

Weird feeling. 

It seems like the hard core players (no offense to anyone) already got the drops they needed, then it was reported, and now that everyone is doing the captains/boss... none of the newcomers can get the same drops the "first come, first served" folk got.

Same applies to chests.

Again, that weird feeling, that "we don't want to ruin the market"... for some.

I do know that collecting and selling drops is how many players make their event money and later they do their RMT.

However, this is no reason to ruin the fun of the majority of the player base and make folk feel like only a few get to the goodies.

Same thing happened in the NL shard... BT.

Just my 2 cents.
Thank you.   

Did they change the chests with the hotfix? I thought they just nerfed the number of drops from the commanders?

Overall though I agree with you that changing drop rates almost a month after it's been live to DECREASE drops is just bad practice.

I have stealthed  through the town and dungeon looking for the prism. Not just a few hours here and there, hours and hours of searching for a prism, I have tried luck and no luck. The prisms need to be fixed. 

The abundance of rubble is totally ridiculous or give us a reason to keep it. 

__Psycoder said:

Hmmmm,

My understanding is that, they did not change the amount of drops you get from the captains. The captains should give 4 drops and now you get 4 drops.

What they fixed was the bug that sometimes made captains give wrong amount of drops. A guild mate said one time he got 16 drops from a single captain. That is what is fixed.

Am I missing anything? 

I made two runs - one in the morning, one around noonish my time. On the first run, I got 30 drops (including from the satchel), which I chalked up to it being a very small group (we were usually 6, sometimes 7 or 8 people).

On the second run, I got 31, including from the satchel, with around 20+ people at times. 

Both of these were for all 9 commanders and the boss, and both including fighting, rezzing, and healing.

Normally I'm running 15-20 (or more), with or without satchel.

If they were going to drop the #, I wouldn't mind 4 per if it was consistent, but if it's going to end with 30 or 31.....meanwhile the multiboxers/bots/auto-followers are cleaning up there and in the dungeon....I love the event, but that is such a massive drop after almost a month.

Why a month in?  It's  not like they didn't know we were getting the drops that we were a week into the event.

This makes me sad. I just started doing the event on Sunday. So now everyone who did the event from day one has an unfair advantage. I could understand if this was the first week since the patch, but to wait a month to fix the issue is very discouraging. I wish they had changed it right away or just left it alone at this point. 

Agreed on the reduction of drops not being ideal. Also, I previously used portions of fortune (twice) and it didn't help at all. I doubt it'll help now, too 

keven2002 said:

Did they change the chests with the hotfix? 

It seems changed...for the better or worse depending how you look at it. 

I played roughly 1.5 hours this morning and got more turn in chest drops than previous times playing longer hours. 

I say better or worse because the ingredient chests seem scaled back to more regular gem chests. 

Atlantic with a crowd is not giving 45+ drops like it used to...  Get rid of the 8 drop ones but keep the others how they were.

Iniquity said:

I am not interested in farming the dungeon at all. Nothing burns me out more the farming ToT drops. That's why the drop rate for the bosses was perfect, and really felt like the devs respected our time. 

30 Per run is just not enough especially if you play legit with only one account. Please consider reversing this change or bumping up the drops some, hardly feels worth it waiting around 4-5 hours for 30 drops...

I agree. I think you nailed, it's a shame that legit players playing only 1 or 2 accounts are penalized (once again) while people using illegal clients to multibox/bot (using 5+ accounts at a time) have benefitted all this time already. 

It seems kind of weird to me they have seemingly backtracked. When things first kicked off it was presented as an event that allowed multiple playstyles the ability to "get stuff". They allowed crafters to get drops from bombing the gates and allow thieves to get them from chests if that's your playstyle and they made it so that you could fight the commanders (ie boss type things); in addition to the regular ToT dungeon crawls. I think that was a great move by the Dev team. It felt good to be able to do the first 3 stages for the length of this event and feel like I could get everything I want.

Now a month later they are decreasing the drop rate for a single stage (that by the way is one of the shorter parts)? Feels a bit cheap.

For me, the first month made it worth running around trying to find the HP bar of a commander and spamming flamestrike that is only doing 4hp damage and sticking around until they die to max out my damage... but if each commander is only going to give 4 drops per then I'll just cast a few spells for credit and move on (if I do them at all). In case any of the Dev team is paying attention... capping the commanders at 4 drops per toon is the EXACT reason nobody fought them down in the hives during the last event... every single time (on ATL too) they spawned people completely ignored them bc they weren't worth it. 

I completely agree. I enjoyed this event, doing the different phases in it in the beginning, and skipping the dungeon entirely. I tried the dungeon a few times, but on ATL... As always, it's a lag fest, and the mob density is insane due to the fact there's 15 different 10 person trains botting their way to the 300+ drops per hour that I, as a legitimate player, will never achieve.

While I think yes, the drop rate was somewhat broken and random before this, sometimes I would get 2-4, sometimes I would get 16 - it absolutely balanced out for me. I knew other's were farming the dungeon 24/7, with WAY greater returns than me, so it almost felt intentional that the drop rate was higher on those mini bosses.

When they opened the solen hives in the past event, I thought wow, they made it accessible for real players.

This event - they did the exact opposite.


This just makes me want to take all my vendors with ammo and barrels down and go home.

I love how they "fixed" one of the best features of the event -- the massive drops from the bosses. It was an appropriate drop level for the critter. Not sure why it had to be "fixed" unless they wanted to reward those who got to it early, in which case this isn't a 'fix,' but a policy change.

Some additional thoughts on the "fix"...

I've done stage 1-3 the past 2 mornings and managed to do it today mid-day and it seems like this "fix" did nothing but hurt legit players. I'm seeing blatant multiboxing of 1 toon leading 5/6/7 followers (maybe it was more covered before because there were more people in general) and when you do the math they are still getting 30+ drops (accumulated) from EACH commander whereas the regular casual player is getting that for the entire round since they only get 3 or 4 drops per commander. When I was walking away with 50+ drops from stage 3 I wasn't concerned about the multiboxers because I was getting what I felt was a fair amount of drops for the level of effort. 

That said, the "fix" has also removed any motivation for anyone to actively fight (as hard as possible) each commander. Last week I was taking my toon and trying to max out my damage & heal as much damage as possible in an attempt to get a bump on drops... sometimes that resulted in just 4-5 drops but sometimes it got me like 10-12 which made it worth it, but you couldn't just sit there and do nothing to get 10+ drops (I tested this). This week, I just go and cast a few thunderstorms or earthquakes and then just sit back and do nothing because I'll never get more than 3-4 drops... feels cheap but what's the incentive to do anything more? More drops for being more active solves that problem, but the way it is now encourages lazy play.. 

Apparently I'm in the minority on this one. I find the current amount of drops perfectly acceptable, and I'm not one of the multi-character crowd. I run through the mini bosses because I enjoy fighting them. I deal with the main boss because I have to, but the mini bosses are just fine to me.

popps said:

I mean, if this "fix" came with also a serious, working blocking of those players who script, bot and multibox then I could be OK with it...

If it was about the multiboxers/scripters/bots we are all seeing, it should have went in on week one.

On a medium shard like LS you were getting 5 drops per Commander 45 drops.
Now 30s drops.

On Atlantic you were getting 50s 60s drops per session. 
Now 30s to 40s.  

Noticeable difference.

Just did Atlantic Commanders.  Only 33 drops.  sad.

Nerfing the funnest part of the event is not Kool @Kyronix ;

Man we're ungrateful even if you only get it two runs that's 60 easy drops a day ...

People were getting 100-200 artifacts from the 9 commanders on Atlantic with a single character.  It was broken.  It has been fixed.  Be thankful it isn't like it originally was on TC1 where you got 1 artifact per boss. 3-4 per boss is still a generous drop rate for that phase. When anything is taken away it can feel bad but it was for the best.

Violet said:

People were getting 100-200 artifacts from the 9 commanders on Atlantic with a single character.  It was broken.  It has been fixed.  Be thankful it isn't like it originally was on TC1 where you got 1 artifact per boss. 3-4 per boss is still a generous drop rate for that phase. When anything is taken away it can feel bad but it was for the best.

Sounds like Stockholm syndrome... we should be grateful that we get anything from the Devs?? Please. Again, who in their rightful mind is in favor of DECREASING (or getting less) drops mid-event? Only the greedy people (ie scripters/botters) making money off the drops are in favor of making things harder to get, IMO.

Also just to clarify people were not getting 200 drops per round... first off they can only carry 125 items total (I did many runs and people were not leaving) and that would mean people needed to get 20+ drops each commander...sorry that was not happening. If people were getting 80 drops in the 45-60min of game play; that's about equal to being in the dungeon for the same time period using luck.....let's keep in mind stage 3 happens MAYBE 4 times a day max. That's equivalent to doing a full 4 hours of a single stage. They nerfed one of the more fun parts of the event, IMO... I'm just glad they gave us a month of fun. I will not be doing the commanders nearly as much anymore, I will most likely just do the gate for drops and then hang out in the middle of the city waiting for the champ.

Violet said:

People were getting 100-200 artifacts from the 9 commanders on Atlantic with a single character.  It was broken.  It has been fixed.  Be thankful it isn't like it originally was on TC1 where you got 1 artifact per boss. 3-4 per boss is still a generous drop rate for that phase. When anything is taken away it can feel bad but it was for the best.

I run 3 accounts, did 2-3 runs a day. Never once did any of my characters get over 100 drops, it was 55 on average, just shy of 75 on rare occassions. I need proof of this "people getting 100-200", or it didn't happen and a rumor is being used as an excuse to screw over legitimate and casual players. My data does not match this rumor whatsoever. This change doesn't effect a psycho like me playing 3 accounts, it doesn't hurt the bots AT ALL, the only people it screws over is legit and casual players. God forbid we expect the devs to respect our time amd not blatantly make changes that ONLY BENEFITS BOTS, a WHOLE MONTH after the fact. Nevermind the fact the dungeon is damn near unsurvivable for people who aren't psychos like me or bots because of the density mechanics and tight corridors. As soon as a bot train shows up, it becomes unviable for most because its too packed, most players rely on the boss drops for turn in rewards because of this. Even a sampire will struggle to stay alive once the bots have the spawns packed from wall to wall, and thats damn near the only build even viable down there without a party in tow.

If this was happening exclusively on Atlantic, why does every shard need to be gimped too? The turn-in rewards are shard bound, as are the turn in drops. Outside of Shadowmane, none of the items get to touch the "market" outside of their own shard, and Shadowmane is going to be massively devalued anyway come The Shattering.

There are ways to clear your character of artifacts without leaving the event.  I was able to get over 100 a round on *Chesapeake* during certain times of the day.  It was broken.

And yes, I have screenshots from Atlantic of people getting 20 drops on a single character from a single commander. 



16 shown on this one:



And one of me getting 11 drops on chesapeake.  Highest was 13, I could consistantly get 9+ per boss before the fix because there was a way to pretty much guarantee the high drop numbers.


So do people think it was fair for people on Atlantic to get 100+ drops per run and people on Baja getting 50-60?  Now it's fair across the board.  

These changes do not benefit the bots. 

Violet said:

So do people think it was fair for people on Atlantic to get 100+ drops per run and people on Baja getting 50-60?  Now it's fair across the board.  

These changes do not benefit the bots. 

ChumboWumbo said:

Violet said:

So do people think it was fair for people on Atlantic to get 100+ drops per run and people on Baja getting 50-60?  Now it's fair across the board.  

These changes do not benefit the bots. 

You say that, but the only people effected are legitimate and casual players. The dungeon remains unchanged and near impossible for regular players. Bots can now sell their drops because regular players now have to do significantly more runs (2-3x the amount, in fact) than last month to get rewards, while the bots can, again, just merrily go down to the dungeon practically designed for them. Again, regular players relied on these drops. 

As for "fairness"? Atlantic is a completely different beast to every other shard and should really be treated as such. I genuinely don't care what goes on there, there's far more players than is even reasonable for the size of the game. Changing every other shard because of Atlantic specific issues is nonsense. Every other shard is more similar to each other than Atlantic is to any of them, with the obvious exceptions of Mugen, Siege, and NL.It is not the litmus test for every other shard and sure as hell shouldn't be.The fact none of these rewards can be transferred to begin with makes changing it for "fairness" even more moot as well.

I agree with you and would add that (even as admitted by Violet) people needed do "certain things", which for me was just being more active in casting and healing people, to get more drops. Interesting that I never saw anyone post publicly about the drop rate being "broken"; I thought the Devs designed it to be that way where active players were rewarded. I'd get 10 or so drop from a few Commanders but NEVER got 10-20+ from every single one... that's not how it ever worked so again 200 drops is an over embellishment (you'd need to get 22+ drops on every Commander to get 200). Now I just show up and hit the Commanders a few times and that's it... very lazy and not fun.

Again you bring up another valid point; people that are multiboxing don't care because they are running 5+ accounts at all times so they are getting 150+ drops each round regardless.... meanwhile the poor sap that is trying to play legit with just a single account is maxing out at 30ish. I'd still get up to 10 drops on Origin depending on how many people were there so it wasn't just an ATL thing. I've played both ATL and Origin and the Commanders take longer on ATL because of all the people and the damage drops to just 2hp per hit so IMO the extra drops were warranted compared to Origin where I'm still hitting flamestrike for 100hp until they die.

Bottom line - the more active players are the more drops they should get because this encourages playing AND helps the single players that are active. Devs need to stop nerfing the game for legit players and stop catering to greedy players looking to profit (ie botters/scripters/etc). 

__Psycoder said:

I will be eaten alive for this but I think this fix was on point. 

A guild mate got 16 drops from a single captain. Getting 16 drops after 2 minutes of fighting is wrong IMHO.

Personally, I would settle for 5 drops per captain. 4 drops per captain is not that much of a miss. I think the dev team is doing a great job with this event and the changes so far. 

As for the other, dungeon is too hard crowd, maybe the devs can tune down the paragon monster hardness a little bit. I think the paragon amount is about right, but yeah maybe they can make them a bit easier to kill? Would that make the dungeon better for you guys? 

At the end of the day, this is a 2+ month event. You have to fight things to get drops and fight you shall! That is the purpose these events. 

Just my 2 cents. 

I think this post is a bit contradictory because you think stage 3 (limited to 9 captains every 5ish hours) was "too generous" but you want to "tune down" the dungeon stage difficulty (ie the longest part) to make it easier (ie more drop). 

What I think many people are missing is the reason this event is different/better than most others when it started was because it allowed people to collect drops in more ways than ever. People that typically didn't like the grind of the dungeon or don't have hours on end to play are given an option in stage 1-3 to collect drops....and I don't mean in the "play a thief to get drops" way where you are only getting 15 drops an hour. This "fixed" nerfed that so that the dungeon is once again the primary way to play the event.

I don't have a problem with the dungeon the way it is.. the Dev team has done a pretty good job IMO at zeroing in on the right amount of spawn and they switch up the big monster every round so we aren't stuck with ancient hell hounds all day/every day. Personally, I was getting around 80-100 drops for stage 1-3 on ATL (helped bomb the gates etc) and this took about an hour. If I go into the dungeon and play for an hour straight with my sampire or weaver I'm right around 100 depending on what the main baddie is and how many ppl around. That original "mix" felt right to me as someone who doesn't multibox/script based on my hour of play because it very close in drops AND scales based on how much you participate.

Here are my 2 biggest issues with the "fix" (ie nerf). 

1. Keep in mind that stages 1-3 in their entirety are MUCH LESS than stage 4... so people will only get a chance to do stage 1-3 for about 3hours worth of time a day compared to 12+ hours in the dungeon. 
2. The only people really impacted by this are the legit players only playing 1 or 2 accounts (ie bard support type) which if you combine this with the fact they aren't taking any action against even crappy/blatant multiboxing; that sends a pretty clear message IMO that 

It was fine the way it was and there still would have been plenty of people doing the various stages the entire time even though numbers might have eventually dipped due to the multiboxers making their money (because legit players would be able to get their own rewards). 

There is a balance to this, I believe. I understand if people were getting 200 drops during the LT run, I could understand "fixing" that -- however, my perspective is they went too far in ensuring less drops. Personally, I never had a 100 drop run with the LTs despite doing it probably a dozen + times. I did use luck potions twice (pre-nerf) and saw no increase. I always had looting rights and all that.

Ensuring people didn't get 200 drops while not greatly reducing it can be done. 

@keven2002 sorry buddy, I was wrong. You were right. 

While 10+ per captain might perhaps be too much, 4 I think is way too little.

popps said:

While 10+ per captain might perhaps be too much, 4 I think is way too little.

They should make it like 6 per Commander, possibly 7 drops per Commander.

So, if really some players were getting 15+ drops per Commander the fix was needed but the number of drops was made too conservative now, IMHO.

If you fight hard or your pets do, and not just a run in and drop a few arrows or spells, 3-4.  Add in 1-2 more for healing and rezzing others. Max total of 6.

Man we're ungrateful even if you only get it two runs that's 60 easy drops a day ...

Grimbeard said:

Man we're ungrateful even if you only get it two runs that's 60 easy drops a day ...

Grimbeard said:

Man we're ungrateful even if you only get it two runs that's 60 easy drops a day ...

You can do one run a day and go through 10 ammo packs at the catapults and get nearly 30 drops (not counting rubble and void cubes).

I see the phrase legitimate player so much.
Is a legitimate player someone who pays for just 1 account, as I see so much, or is a legitimate player someone who pays for 5 accounts?
The bias from the complainers is that it very much only includes 1 account players, how come?
Maybe you want to play more, and do more in UO?

I saw someone complaining on the official discord, they cannot compete, because people paying 5-6 times more than them, get 5-6 times more rewards...?!

Guys, think about it, it is all relative.
You are not competing, and you are getting the same.
If you have 5-6 more accounts, you have 5-6 times more characters to gear up.

You are all effectively saying, you want UO to be aimed at 1 account players only.
I do not think that will help the game.

The logic of what I am seeing from you guys is this;
A. I want to get the same amount of drops as someone who pays for 5x more accounts. OR
B. I want someone who pays for 5x more accounts, to get the same amount of drops as I do.
Both forms of logic are wrong in my opinion.
A one to one ratio, relative fairness, is the correct place to be.

The answer is easy, you pay 4-6x more.

He is actually complaining about a system that is completely fair.

Honestly, I thought you Americans understood capitalism. 🙂

A bit off topic, but within the context of automated multi boxing, Broadsword describes what is legitimate here: https://uo.com/support/

Cookie said:

I see the phrase legitimate player so much.
Is a legitimate player someone who pays for just 1 account, as I see so much, or is a legitimate player someone who pays for 5 accounts?
The bias from the complainers is that it very much only includes 1 account players, how come?

You know that when we say “legitimate player”, that we are talking about players who control one account at a time, regardless of how many accounts they may own or pay for.

We are not talking about the players who are multiboxing/controlling/synchronizing multiple characters at the same time.  Thankfully, they seem to be cracking down on some of them, as I’m aware of at least two being recently banned. I’ve also seen fewer multiboxer/bot trains showing up. I know a few people were reporting them and doing video capture (whether to show Broadsword or put on YouTube I don’t know).

Cookie said:

The answer is easy, you pay 4-6x more.

He is actually complaining about a system that is completely fair.

Honestly, I thought you Americans understood capitalism. 🙂

If you are able to use your 4-6 accounts legally all at once fine. but I think everyone except the developers know that's not the case..

popps said:

I think that the Design for gameplay should NOT tailored towards the hard core players but, rather, towards the casual players who usually cannot spend countless time at a game...

That is at least how I see it.

I think this event can and does work for both types of players you mention.  I’ve done both - as a casual player, popping in and asking when the next reset is and then later logging in just for the amount of time needed for the event. 

Grimbeard said:

Cookie said:

The answer is easy, you pay 4-6x more.

He is actually complaining about a system that is completely fair.

Honestly, I thought you Americans understood capitalism. 🙂

If you are able to use your 4-6 accounts legally all at once fine. but I think everyone except the developers know that's not the case..

You can easily enough in the stage 2-3 of this event - I have done it.
4 characters, put them on tow, then use each one for 30 seconds, standing the other 3 just out of range. Or, if they are in attack mode, leave them to it. 4th character is a healer, to keep them all up, so focus on the healer.

Yeah, because we see a lot of trains where each character is being controlled every 30 seconds.

That's the Allen Train. Toot toot.