[I] Ethereal Horse Anemia Facts and a Question for the Devs…[ warning ,HUGE POSTS ]

**Tabbitha** · 21st September 2006, 04:18 AM

source taken from UO.UHall

The story so far…

I have a stealth mage character named Scirocco who uses an ethereal horse. For several years this character had ridden her see-through mount all over Sosaria with never a hint of fatigue. A few weeks ago I logged the character on to scout out the Ophidian infestation at Skara Brae. I appeared at the inn in Britain and began walking towards the West Brit bank debating on whether to take the moongate or go overland. I decided to go overland so I stopped near the bank and mounted the ethereal horse.

By the time I reached the stable area the horse was too tired to take another step. I thought that this was very strange as I had not used that character for several months and the horse had been just fine the last time I was logged on. Resting the horse did not seem to help much so I finally swapped it for another ethereal horse that I locked down as a decoration. The ex-decoration worked fine so I continued on about my business.

Last week I took Scirocco to help out in the battle against the Void. I arrived at the rock entrance early and was hanging around mounted on the ethereal horse for fifteen to twenty minutes before I dismounted and went to battle. I met a grizzly demise after a few minutes battle and exited to the shrine to get a rez.

After I was once again seeing things in color, I mounted my ethereal horse and stepped about two tiles to the public gate and selected Humility. Unfortunately the client crashed - the first of three such crashes I was to experience that evening. When I was able to log back in I was at the Humility shrine so I rode off to the south towards the Lizard town and the entrance to the Void’s dungeon. I had not gone more that three screens when my mount was too tired to move.

Resting the mount did not help much so I was forced to pretty much walk everywhere the rest of the evening. I made some posts in a thread about ethereal fatigue but the consensuses was that the devs had decided that there was not a problem. There were several posts containing various “cures”.

In spite of some limited reassurances from the developers that all is well there is, in fact, a problem with fatigue on ethereal horses. I decided to test some of the “cures” mentioned in the above noted thread and do some testing to see if I could isolate the problem.

Now the rest of the story…

One cure mentioned was to swap the ailing horse to another character. I tried swapping a sick mount to other characters on the same and other accounts and saw no immediate improvement.

I had noticed some improvement in the ethereal horse’s performance after logging off when still mounted. I ran down my two ethereals and logged off one while mounted and the other in-pack. There was no difference in the mounts performance when I logged back in the next day so logging out mounted was no help.

Another “wild thought” of my own was that trying to recall off the ethereal statue might somehow “fix” the problem. That did not help either. Well, it was worth a shot and stranger things have happened in this game.

My own theory was that the ethereal horse’s stamina cap was being reduced to a very low number by a problem similar to the confirmed bug that reduced the strength of “living” pets. This would account for both the ethereal horse’s inability to run very far and the lack of effect that “resting” the mount seemed to have.

I decided to do some tests to determine exactly how “resting” effected these ailing ethereal horses. What I expected was X minutes of rest = X minutes of running. What I found was completely unexpected…

I ran the horses down and logged off for 24 hours. I logged on Friday evening to do my tests. Neither horse could run for even ten seconds before giving out so I chose one and began my resting tests. In the test I would run the horse down, rest for 60 seconds, time how long I could run before the horse would not move and then repeat the process. This was all timed using a stopwatch.

Cycle Charge Time Time Ran Before Fatigue

1 0:00 0:08 (logged on and ran horse down)

2 1:00 0:38

3 1:00 1:15

4 1:00 1:46

5 1:00 2:06

6 1:00 2:19

7 1:00 5:25

By this time I was seeing some pretty bad lag and it was getting worse as the test progressed. A check of my connection showed a problem along the route and my ping was varying between 42ms and over 400ms. I was surprised by the ever increasing time that the mount could run on the same sixty second rest break and thought that, because of the lag, the horse was not really “running” at top speed. I abandoned the test and decided to try again when there was less lag.

I came back early Sunday morning to repeat the test with the second bugged ethereal horse. Here are the results.

Cycle Charge Time Time Ran before Fatigue

1 0:00 0:06 (logged on and ran horse down)

2 1:00 0:23

3 1:00 0:51

4 1:00 1:13

5 1:00 1:45

6 1:00 2:12

7 1:00 3:07

8 1:00 5:06

9 1:00 25 minute run and it was still going strong

The results of the non-lagged test very closely matches the result of my work Friday night. . This also seemed to fit with my “bugged stamina cap” theory in that the horse seemed to be increasing its stamina cap through this “exercise”. At this point I’m thinking that I have found both the reason for and a cure for the sick ethereal horses. Sadly, such was not the case.

I moved the horse back to Jack, on the same account, to see how the horse preformed there and only got a three minute run before it tired out. At first I think that 28 minutes (25 minutes from Scirocco and 3 minutes from Jack) is a good run but then I discover that now a minute of rest only gets a few seconds run just like before!

I ran the horse down and transferred it to another character and started the test over again.

Cycle Charge Time Time Ran before Fatigue

1 0:00 0:06 (logged on and ran horse down)

2 1:00 0:26

3 1:00 0:54

4 2:00 2:54 (I decided to try a longer charge here)

5 1:00 2:10

6 1:00 3:14

7 1:00 1:15 (After charge I xfered to another character)

8 1:00 0:58

9 1:00 1:15

10 1:00 0:49 (After charge I xeferd to another character)

I decided to try a few other things and started a new set of tests:

Cycle Charge Time Time Ran before Fatigue

1 0:00 0:06 (logged on and ran horse down)

2 1:00 0:26

3 1:00 0:55

4 1:00 0:47 (dismounted and re-mounted after resting)

5 1:00 0:32 (dismounted and re-mounted after resting)

6 1:00 0:27 (dismounted and re-mounted after resting)

7 1:00 0:53 (no dismount after resting)

8 1:00 1:05 (no dismount after resting)

These tests show several very interesting things:

1) The run time of a bugged ethereal horse is not directly proportional to the rest time. The run time seems to be proportional to the rest time and how many times the horse has been “cycled“ without dismounting on the current character.

2) Transferring the bugged horse to another character does not transfer expected run time to that character. In fact, after a small initial boost, the run times fall back into the expected pattern.

3) Any work rebuilding run time for a bugged ethereal is negated by transferring the horse to another character.

4) Any work rebuilding run time for a bugged ethereal is negated by dismounting the horse.

Is this how ethereal horses are supposed to work? This certainly looks a bug to me.

and

Excellent analysis!

This issue definitely needs additional attention for the Dev Team.

and

I feel somewhat compelled to tie two problems into one.

Wilki said in this thread:

Quote:

5. Are you going to fix ethy stamina loss?
I think stamina loss and mounts needs to be looked at in general. Currently, there isn't much of a disadvantadge to riding a mount in combat.

This basically suggests to me that the Dev's feel ethereal mounts should lose stamina, to give people an incentive to use real pets.

Wilki also said:

Quote:

28. How about NPC's who rez pets?
We've thought about that, but the feedback from our Japanese market is that they believe it would take away yet another reason for players to interact with each other. Perhaps one that would rez them on a limited fashion? Not sure...

For me, this is where the whole problem with players choosing ethereal mounts over normal mounts comes from. It is too difficult to maintain a normal pet when you yourself cannot resurrect it. There are often tamers around who can do it for you, but finding one who is willing to resurrect your pet, or more to the point, finding one that isn't AFK, is usually time consuming and very frustrating. This is exactly why so many players use ethereals - no resurrection required, and no upkeep necessary.

So what am I asking for? Well, I'm certainly not asking for ethereals to be nerfed. If anything, the stamina loss is a problem that should be fixed - there is no need for it, it doesn't make sense for an ethereal mount to run out of stamina. What I am asking, is for normal mounts to be made more "attractive" to non-tamers. The best way to do that, is to make it easier for non-tamers to upkeep them and get them resurrected - which is why I feel NPC veterinarians should be considered, or at least some other means of resurrecting pets without forcing player interaction. Player interaction in situations like this is overrated anyway - as someone else said, it's usually a simple "Pet Rez Plz!" followed by a "ty" and then an "np". It's not as if divine light shines down from the heavens and the sounds of angels singing befall people who meet for a pet resurrection... Anyway. Something the Dev's need to keep in mind, is that it is human nature for people to find the easiest means of accomplishing something - and as it stands, ethereals are much easier to use than normal mounts. If you really want to balance the two, then normal mounts will need to be made a lot more convenient.

and

No ones from EA will respond to this, If , and this is a BIG IF, one does respond, all they are going to say is we will look into it.

Now you ask, why is this? well, thats because they can't respond, not that they won't, but CAN'T... If you notice , Wilki only responds to account problems, and very FEW other things. he post info up, But he NEVER give anyone an answer... He can't....its an EA RULE......

this question like many other have been asked and never responded to...

He can't say it a programing error from a bad patch, EA doesn't want any bad things like that being told...

IF he could, he would just say what the problem is, and not something like we will look into it. or we are working on it.. when they really aren't...

They won't tell you why GM's do auto responce to 99% of the call, but everyone knows then have a quota to fill and can't help you, they main job is to keep the que going.... and that many GM also are handling other games as well....

also that most of the bans from the that big gold clearing they did were 30 trial accounts.

or that dupes will never be fixed cause of how they are done,, can't fix it til they change the way the servers are... , How do i know this, a t2a dupe, one that came out then, still works to this day...

they won't tell you Counselor's, back when we had then. Found out HOW TO TELL IF A HOUSE WAS Illegal or not.. Yes, there was a VERY simple way to find out...C's could take a Coor of there LOC. it gave x y z the z = how high or at what lvl you were, so if a number of your loc under the house sign was something like 237 127 3 then you took the LOC of the house sign, it should have read 237 127 9 The sign was 6 lvl higher then ground lvl BUT if it read like this 237 127 10 the house was set on something first.

you might remember how some houses you couldn't get on the steps, or just from the side or just from the front and not sides? all them were one lvl higher then norm....But we told gm's this, and nothing happened, why you ask, they didn't want to start banning because everyone was doing it 1/2 of every server would have been ban... The GM's Could have taken down the houses, but again, bad for bizz.. and by then GM's had alot of there powers taken from them cause of the GM cought making gold and selling it on ebay. or did you all forget about him????

I rreally wish he would respond and say why they are broke, and not blow smoke up you know where

and

Wilki UO Community Coordinator

You must have missed the "50 on Friday" post.

The answer to this, as with all questions I don't tend to answer, is simple: I don't know. Though, IMHO, I think stamina should allow you to gallop further than it used to back in the day, but nowhere near as long as it does now. There are few disadvantages to being mounted.

By the way, there aren't any "EA Rules" that aren't the standard things such as "Don't talk about unannounced projects", "Don't talk about things you aren't familiar with" and to be civil while posting, etc.

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