Fist de Yuma - December 10, 2002

Tradesperson It took some sacrifice but I was able to empty a mule to start my Armor tradesperson. I ended up tossing a lot of good stuff but most of the room was made by giving my SIK's to Jeff. He is pulling scrolls right now. I'll need the scrolls as I'm making changes. Fist is getting life so there is a bunch there I'll need. I decided to make the mule one that can level on his own. My vassals and items leveled all my mules in the past. The Armor Tradesman needs specialized stats and really high skills. I'm finding that even the 520 skill weapon on Fist is to low for some work. My other tradesperson only needs high stats as the requirements are not that lofty. By making the Armor tradesman playable he can help several of my players at once. I found that the mule I was building for Alchemy and Cooking had perfect stats for two other tinker skills. With a standard mule start of 100, 10, 100, 10, 100, 10 he has the max start for Magic Item and Weapon Tinkering. That tradesman is at 48lv and has been leveling with gambling and Golem Hearts/Yellow Jewelry. The problem still exists that the tradesman will need to be very high level before he can do the really risky work. I'm solving that problem by making the Armor tradesperson the vassal of the Magic Item/Weapon tradesperson. I know that the cheaters will try and point out that this can be called a chain but the name is about all that is similar. It is a permanent relationship, not the chains temporarily one. I swore the new armor mule to my Magic Item/Weapon tradesperson. He in turn is sworn to my Alchemy tradesperson and then to my old archer who is sworn to my new archer. From there it goes to Mage. With the tradespersons taking leadership and me putting a bit of the xp into loyalty I'm can hunt the bottom mule and get xp up through all the other mules. The first tests are showing a full passup to all of them. Of course only a very small percentage of the xp the Armor tradesperson earns is passed up for now but I'll be putting a lot more into loyalty. He made around 400k and 60k of it passed up to the others. The plan is to have both tradesperson ready to go in six months or so. The Armor tradesperson is strictly a BM/Tradesperson. There had to be a few things that would hurt it as a mule in the normal sense. The stats are 10, 100, 10, 10, 100, 100. This means his carrying capacity will be very low. On the up side mages have a lot less burden worry today so it can be a good player. His skills are standard BM template from there. Spec Life/War and nothing trained. He got Mana Conversion at 5 because of the changes in left over xp. He took Item at 16 and will take Creature at 40. From there I'll take Lore and finally Armor Tinkering at 75. The final goal is a base 400 in Armor Tinkering. Of course I might decided to keep it going and get more but I figure that will be a good goal for now. After creation I had Mage to buff him. I also give him Mages pre-GSA. This is the only real advantage to pre-shadow armor other than status today. The 30 weld on the new stuff would prevent this. After he reaches 30 he will get a normal set of GSA. After running through the beginner stuff I ran him to Nanto and set his LS. Nanto is a good spot and it has cheap prices. An added bonus was a shop that sells level III scrolls. With buffs and a little leveling III spells were no problem. For his first big hunt I buffed him for Lugies and made a portal to Lin. He ran to Tou-Tou and took the Awric portal. Then hit the Arwic Mine portal and ran to Old Mine. One thing I found was Old Mine for a mage is not the sweep that it is for melee. With buffs a melee with an untrained bow can quickly clear it. As a mage, even with VII buffs, I could only kill two or three before having to sit and recover mana. So the first thing on the agenda was to add as much mana conversion as I could. From there I added mana and stamina to help the recovery. At 16lv I took him to the to Citadel. I waited to 16 so I could tie there. He will stay there for about 10 levels. After that I'll take a look at the new Tusker places and see if he would be better there or BSD. Given that I need really high skills to do what I want, this player is a long-term project. He will need to be in his upper 80's to 90's before I'm finished. One thing I'm finding is he is fun to play. With the old leveling spots almost empty there is no down time. The 100 endurance start is a big help and because of buffs I'm not finding the 10 strength a problem. Under the old system a 10 strength start was impossible. I was fighting at 130+ burden even with 60 strength when I started Mage. Now that pyreal is weightless and comps far less in weight this start is possible. Of course I would not recommend a 10 strength start for a main player. I'm sure there are those who would disagree with me. I find that I quickly get overburden when out hunting with Mage. Even with a very high strength (base 197 + VII buffs) a monster tossing weakness will have me at burden. There are those who could live with that problem and there are a lot of advantages to a 100 endurance start. That is one of the fun choices you can make. If they ever let us rearrange our stats I'll be dropping some strength to add to endurance. Maybe not to 10 but I'll make that choice when and if it comes. (There is some discussion on the subject at the Turbine board.) Mental Defects There is many works that contend really stupid people think they are smarter than everyone else. I have not seen the studies and cannot be sure if this is true or not. I do know that immoral people think their immorality is a sign of superior intellect. Lets start with fast casters. Turbine as stated many times that this is a bug they are trying to fix. And yet the immoral cheaters will state over and over again that what they do is not a cheat. They say it is a skill. It may take some skill to cheat but only immoral people will practice a cheat to gain it. Another cheat is gaining richest for those who practice it and costing some good people their hard gained items. This is using rank mules to gain rank 6 and purchasing a mansion. They join a chain of their choice until it is time to make payment on the mansion. They break from the chain for just long enough to make payment and rejoin. They are not monarch. In fact they don't have the leadership to have vassals and depend on assignment of vassal from a chain. About all they really have is time, meaning no job, to get the mansion when it first became available. Now you end up with people like Mars-Hill and others who have thousands of vassals, legitimate rank 7 or 8, great leadership and super people. They are a true alliance. They need a mansion but find them all taken, many by people who are not even monarchs for more than a few days at a time. The cost of mansions on MT is in the range of 2000 to 3000 points. It could well be more. They are being hogged by greedy people who are an alliance of one. There is a call on the boards for Turbine to start checking for this. The simple solution is anyone who has a mansion and is not a monarch will lose it on log in. The response from the cheaters in typical, they are smart to have done this. They mistake immorality with intelligence. They don't understand that moral people would not do this even if the opportunity presented itself. The fives chests seems to be the only advantage to doing this until they sell the mansion. The main goal is not to have a mansion but to speculate. They use the mansion as nothing more than a house with more chests. It is also a big EGO builder. "See how smart I am! I have a mansion!" Someday we will have a society where cheats and immoral people are looked down on. When that happens there will be less incentive to do things like this. Meanwhile Turbine needs to do a sweep and clear the trash out. Postscript No sooner do I write this and Turbine put out a letter with a fix. They are going to make so anyone with a mansion unable to swear to another until they drop the mansion. It is not a total fix because they will sell them off but it will release mansions to alliances, not greedy cheats. The stupid lame It is one thing to cheat. It is another to brag about it. It is still another to show people how you're going to cheat while saying you are not going to cheat, it is for a different reason. That sound convoluted but you'll see my point in a second. -------------------- This hit the boards the other day. Title: Admin alert plugin is nice for those worried about missing an admin tell. I was worried when I was in the heat of battle I might not see an admin talking to me and get an unjust ban. Now I hear an alarm thru speakers whenever an admin is talking in open chat or in private tells. It sux it had to come to setting up admin alerts to protect yourself from a wrongful ban but it does take the worry away from not seeing a tell while you are fighting or alt-tabbed checking other sites. -------------------- Like they will not see a big guy in a red robe standing in front of them. I guess they are blind as well as illiterate. Now give me break. This will be used for one thing and one thing only, to cheat the system. They will have a macro log off or alert someone monitoring several macros at once. Just whom do they think they are fooling? I wish the cheaters would just up and go away; I really get sick of them. If they spent half the time playing the game as they did trying to break it they would all be 200. Board politics I mostly stay away from the board politics. As long as it does not affect me they can play their little games. I left one board when I started getting harassed by a mod. When he left I was able to go back. Once again board politics has affected me in a negative manner. I just started a new column on AC Vault. It has a few drawbacks but also some advantages. For one I was to get VIP status. The other was the ability to include pictures and format better. I submitted a column last week. I had some trouble doing so because there is a size limit to the persons e-mail. Fortunately I could send the pictures a few at a time. I knew it would be some work for them to get it posted but was looking forward to the results. I cannot be sure what happened. Unlike many on the boards I understand I don't have all the facts. This was the word I got. There was a mod that might or might not have abused his power. The people I'm working with on the column demoted him. The demoted mod then proceeded to make a post that almost demanded he get a ban, which he was. That was when board politics started in. The mod had a lot of friends. They, without any true knowledge of what was going on, started a campaign to remove the people who demoted the mod. At this time I'm not sure of the status of the people I'm working with. I'm not even sure this board system will survive all this. If it does fall apart one of the oldest boards will be gone. It will be the fault of the very people who use it the most. No worry about the lost column. With a little editing to remove picture references it will fit nicely here. Of course I still have hopes that everything will work out over there.