Patch 32 - 08/22/15 - Item Values, Supply & Demand, Spell Damage Changes

[Jack]

For this patch, many changes were made that are very fundamental to the shard's rules - including housing rules, pricing, item durability, spell damage and more. If you notice anything awry, please let me know immediately.


IRC Bot

• The IRC bot will now also join #lostlandspvp. It will make all the usual announcements in this channel, as well as inform players of any bounty activity (in real time). The bot will announce bounty activity only in the PvP channel, such as "Jack has placed a bounty of x gp on the head of Bloody Bandage!", or "Bloody Bandage's head was turned into the guards by Jack for a reward of x gp!". These type of PvP messages will only appear in the PvP channel and not in main.
  

Items, Item Values & Item Identification Skill

• All clothing, armor and weapons now have the correct amount of durability and durability is scaled according to the correct T2A rules.
  • When an item is created, it is assigned a random durability between the minimum and maximum value for the type. These values can be found on the website under item information. This has not yet been updated to reflect the new minimum/maximum values, but the values which exist on the site already are mostly accurate. To see the new values, you can look on these page: Stratics Armor, Stratics Weapons, Stratics Clothing. The Lost Lands website will be updated soon to reflect these new values.
    
  • If the item is exceptional or low quality (craft), then the item will be scaled by +- 20% of its durability.
    
  • If the item is magical armor, and the magical durability level on it is not zero, the following durability bonus is applied:
    • Weapons: +10 (Durable), +20, +30, +40, +50 (Indestructible)
      
    • Armor: +5 (Durable), +10, +15, +20, +25 (Indestructible)
      
• Using the item identification skill now returns the monetary value of an item, as well as identifying the item as per usual.
  
• IDing a container will return the value of the the container and all the items within it.
  
• As your skill in item identification raises, the accuracy in which you can predict the value of the item also increases. At GM Item ID, you will accurately predict the value of the item 100% of the time.
  
• Item values are also affected by their properties. This is most notably useful for blacksmiths, who will now be able to tell the difference between the durability levels on an exceptional weapon or piece of armor. During era this was called "VDP", aka "Vendor Display Price". A higher vendor display price meant the exceptional item had more durability and was thus better quality.
  
• Tools do not currently adjust their price based on durability/uses.
  
• Spellbooks no longer return their spell count when the item ID skill is used on them. Instead, they return a monetary value based on the spells contained within the book. This can be used to accurately predict what is inside the spellbook.
  
• Runebooks will also have additional value based on the number of charges contained in the runebook, the max charges of the runebook and the runes contained within it. Runebooks can not be sold to NPCs; identifying them is just a good way to avoid getting scammed.
  

Vendor Supply & Demand

• All NPC guilds are now active and the proper discounts will apply.
  
• When selling crafted maps to a mapmaker, the map maker will now restock with blank maps.
  
• NPCs now use an accurate price list for T2A, taken from Stratics. The average item has had a price increase, which means that you will be able to make more money from selling crafts & loot from adventuring.
  
• NPC mages now buy wands.
  
• Jewelry and magical clothing now has better sell prices when the items are charged.
  
• Scrolls now sell for their accurate T2A values, which are considerably higher than they were previously.
  
• Vendors will now increase their prices for items when their current stock is partially drained. For example, if the vendor has a stock of 160 blood moss (@6gp), and you buy half of it (now 80 bloodmoss remain), the vendor's new price will be increased by 50%, and blood moss will be 9gp each. Once the vendor hits its next restock cycle, the price will be reset to 6gp. This can only lead to buy prices being more expensive and not less. I realise this will not be a popular change for many people. But it is entirely manageable - if the price is higher than your demand, don't buy it (or use a player vendor instead).
  
• Vendors now start to lose interest in buying items when a player sells a lot of the same item to them. At first they will decrease the price they are willing to buy for, and eventually the vendor will stop buying the particular item completely, until the next restock. This will be massive help in combating "afk to riches".
  
• If a vendor changes their price while you have an active buy/sell window open, the vendor will notify you that the price changed and cancel your sale of that particular item.
  
• House deeds, guild deeds and boats deeds do not scale in price.
  
• If an item is hued in a vendor buy window, the vendor will now actually sell you a hued item when it is purchased.
  
• Armorer NPCs now sell different, otherwise unobtainable platemail & helmet hues. The range of hues was taken from stratics and you can see all hues here:
  

Combat & Spell Damage Changes

• Stamina fatigue from damage has been greatly reduced.
  
• You will no longer turn criminal for standing in your own fire/poison field. Also fixed a problem where you would not take damage from your own fire/poison field.
  
• Magic Resistance is now checked when the damage of a spell is applied. This fixes a semi-exploit in which players could repeatedly suicide themselves onto a ton of WWs and gain resist very quickly.
  
• Spells now always do 1 damage in town. This includes spells from wands, staves and magic weapons.
  
• The "resist gain bug" in which you could gain magic resist from a caster outside of town, while the target was inside of town, now works.
  
• Spell damages are now all on dice rolls.
  
• Average non-resisted spell damage is now higher, and it is much less likely you will roll extreme damages one way or the other. You should see a great reduction in the amount of 5 damage or 40+ damage ebolts.
  
• Resisting a spell, once again reduces the damage to 50%.
  
• Wands and staves no longer use the same spell system as regular casting. The biggest effect of this is that you can now use a wand spell while simultaneously casting another spell - for example, equipping a greater heal wand mid-cast to heal yourself before your main spell is up.
  

Housing

• You may no longer lock down or secure items on any kind of stairs.
  
• You may no longer lock down or secure items within 1 tile of a door.
  
• You may no longer lock down or secure items on the fence of a patio.
  
• You may now lock down a keyring on your porch and securely use it. This will be the exception to the rule of lockdowns/secures on porches.
  
• If you tinker trap a chest that is inside a house that you are at least friended to, you will not be responsible for any damage incurred by that particular box. 
  
• You can now use your house sign from up to 24 tiles away (up from 12).
  

Misc

• CTF and DD now automatically end when one team is more than 50 points ahead of the other.
  
• Added "heart" and "entrails" as possible body parts when you cut up a human torso.
  
• When resurrecting, if you already have a death robe in your backpack (that is unhued), it will be equipped instead of giving you a new death robe.
  
• Uncontrolled NPCs can now enter player houses.
  
• "Imported material", which returns only 1 ingot or 1 cloth when smelting/cutting, is now only applicable when the item actually originated from an NPC vendor. For example, you can now smelt a ringmail tunic which drops from an orc lord, and it will return the amount of ingots as if it were crafted or magic. This patch also assumes that all backdated items were not vendor purchased, which means any prepatch items can be smelted.
  
• There have been changes to drop/stack code. Items dropped into a container, in any fashion, should now always stack with the existing items in the container.
  
• Reduced the item count in CTF bases to avoid client crashing. I tested hopping back and forth between bases for 10 minutes straight and did not receive a client crash, so hopefully this fixes it.
  
• Targeting a creature now refreshes it's eligibility for deletion. Mobs in houses are usually deleted after 20 hours - if you target it, it will refresh the lifespan of the creature back to another 20 hours.
  
• The chance for sandal & blood tile drops from the evil mage boss have been increased.
  
• The chance for a glacial staff drop has been significantly increased.
  

Online Client Statistics & Time Based Item Data

• For those interested in seeing long term player trends on the shard, we now have a page which shows daily and long term graph counts: https://uolostlands.com/online-graphs
  
• Time based item data is now being collected for items. Once there is enough data, you will be able to see item amounts vs time graphs in the item database. Data is collected daily, after maybe a month I will make this data public.
  

Bug Fixes

• Using an ankh now only sends 1 res gump
  
• Fixed a small memory leak with items.
  
• Jhelom pens are no longer guarded.
  
• Fixed descriptions on practice weapons introduced in patch 31, eg "a a crook (practice weapon)". These are not grandfathered.
  
• Fixed a bug where looting a corpse in town (and being guard whacked before the item bounce info was processed), would result in the item going into the looter's backpack and persisting through death/resurrection. The item will now bounce back to the corpse in this instance.
  
• Fixed issues where players were getting caught in a spam filter when chatting to NPCs.
  
• When failing to craft an item that requires 1 resource, you will no longer receive that resource back.
  
• Fixes to bounty boards (since they have finally gotten some player testing!):
  • When a player is bountied, their raw name is now used for the bounty board message and is unaffected by incognito.
    
  • When bountying a blue player, the bounty will not properly show up on the board once the player turns red.
    
  • Bounty messages are updated every time a player receives a murder count, so the kill count displayed on the board will now be updated regardless of whether a bounty was applied.
    
• This bug with Bagball is extremely hard to track down and is becoming a bit of a running joke, but I am confident it is fixed this time. Players should no longer get stuck and unable to move in Bagball.
  

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What's Next?

The plan for patch 33 is to concentrate on the additions of the BOD & Champ Spawns like have been promised. I feel these 2 (era inaccurate) activities open up a world of PvM and crafting activity, while encouraging players to be more interactive. Unfortunately in the past I have nuked almost everything to do with these from the scripts, so I will have to piece them back in and apply the changes relevant to making this fit in the era.

Patch 34 will be focused on skill gain and a way to help natural (no macro) or casual players keep up with macroers on some level. This will likely only apply to combat skills. Other skill gain will also be reviewed and adjusted.

Patch 35 will be dedicated to pet and monster AI. This will include things that could be perceived as nerfs to tamers, but will also increase pet responsiveness in combat situations (which is very clunky at the moment).

Please report bugs in the Bugs forum (so long as it's not an abusable exploit - then PM me), it's hard for me to keep track when people tell me about bugs while I'm at work or busy on something else.

[Jack]

Reboot with the following fixes:

• Keyrings should properly work and be able to be used on the porch of a house.
  
• Gnarled staves of identification have been fixed.
  

[HateCrime]

Excellent work Jack. Thanks for putting in so much time and effort so we can all enjoy UO.

[Abyz]

Ilu2