Greifing and trammel.

So... can anyone tell me about some experiences they had with greifers in UO in trammel? Im sure that there are plenty of stories to be told. Ive witnessed some of the biggest thefts in trammel. The fact that you dont "bump" into others in trammel made the hiding and stealth skills amazing house looting tools.
Answer me this: Do you think it's easier to loot a house in trammel, or felucca?? Of course, im talking about the felucca trammel split before they made it so that you couldnt enter a player house period unless your invited.
Ive seen this happen a lot. But if you turn on the bump feature in trammel you allow greifers to take advantage of the ability to use tamed animals to block and obstruct... And the fact that its trammel prevents you from simply attacking the tamed animal to get it out of your way.

The way I see it as of right now is that once you take away one feature in a game to prevent greifing, a greifer might use your game change to their advantage some other way...

 

Well.......

- Luring spawn
- Blocking with boxes
- Death gates
- Trade scams
- Stealing spawn
- Spamming
- Poisoned food
- Trapped boxes

Trammel didn't eliminate griefing at all..........it's just people who played tram who did it rather than the people who played fel. Griefing has nothing to do with Fel, Tram, PvP, PK, PvM, PvE......it's actually just a handful of players who get a kick out of it.

 

When you guys post about this, pretend that someone has never played any of the Ultima games online or offline. I have no idea of what you are talking about. Some things I can guess at but:

Luring spawn
Death gates
Stealing spawn
Trapped boxes

just make me go what? What does that mean?
Some of the other things:

blocking with boxes
poisoned food

I say "You can do that!? Wow! Cool!?" OK, I know that it would get really frustrating but it's pretty cool that you can do that, you gotta admit.

Mod Edit: Language.

 

Luring spawns involves getting creatures to chase you, and then luring them to places where they can kill other players.
Death gates are magical portals that people create to ambush curious people.
Stealing a spawn is when a player intentionally invades another players hunting area to stop them from hunting. In some games where only one person can fight a creature at a time, this can be very frustrating.
Trapped boxes are simply boxes that explode when opened. People left them around in UO for fun.
Poisoned food is another trap item that players could leave around or give.
Hope that covers everything.

 

Ah, I knew the luring spawns as "trains" in EQ2. It had encounter locking so it really only worked on characters that used area of effect attacks. When you opened a trapped box, did it blow up on an area or just on the player who opened it? I'm just curious. Thanks for the info. It sounds like UO was a fascinating game.

 

It only blew up on the player opening it. If it had hurt other people, you'd have been able to suicide bomb people by running up to them and opening all the boxes in your inventory.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but house looting in Tram was nearly impossible because of the lock down changes made at the end of T2A.

We were given more secure containers but anything else had to be locked down (which even counted towards locked down containers which would then lock down all items within that container. A real pain in the butt) or it would decay which essentially rendered any type of house looting impossible.

 

Well if we're griefing why be so small time about it? lol. I was just talking to my husband about R4 and saying that I hope they let us kill each other without consequence for a while so that we can get a lot of juvenile stuff out of our system. I am hoping the revive the chicken room or something and just let us walk around and poke things with sharp objects until it stops being funny.

 

Griefers love to grief, and where there's a will, there's a way.

 

You are right. Un-locked-down things disappeared after a while, just as if you'd left them outside.
The only house looting you could really do was pulling things out of decaying houses that were left unattended too long.
But "house sitting" was a different thing.

 

There is that closet in the loft of the barn in OwlHead...the one with the chains/manacles bolted to the wall and the rusty tools in it...

 

Maybe I should not expose anyone to my dastardly deeds but, stealing from players houses in Tram was much simpler. You just had to get a little creative. When the Fel/Tram split, most people migrated to tram, fell in love with the new NO PvP rules and began to drop their guard.

Most players left their houses open to the public with their most expensive items locked down on the floor for everyone to see.

It wasn't long before things got interesting. One trick I enjoyed doing, players started advertising their 3rd party chat client ID's on their house signs (ICQ, Yah00, AIM, etc.) It was very easy to get in contact with the house owner. All you needed to do was find a house that was open to the public that had nice items on display in the home. You would sit in the players home and with the hiding skill, hide next to the item you wish to steal. You would then contact the house owner about a rare item in their home. This took a little skill now, you had to convince the home owner that you was very interested in that rare items and you wanted to purchase it. You also had to convince the owner that you was in a super hurry and if the owner met you at secured location, mainly any bank, with the item, you would pay handsomely for the item.

Once you convinced your target to be hasty about the trade, they would normally log into the game or teleport to their home to retrieve the item. Once inside they would walk up to the item that you are hiding next to, they would unlock the item off the floor. Now if you was fast enough and paying attention, you could snatch up the item before they could and make a run for it. This is not normally a great way to make friends, but house owner started to lean that Tram wasn't all that secure after all. After awhile, player stopped putting three chat ID's on there signs and started to be more cautious when unlocking down things in there homes.

those were the good old days.

 

That's how I got my first daemon bone set. I'm reformed now though lol.

 

i bet

 

Yea I heard of this one. But once they made it so it is impossible to enter houses without being friended that pretty much ruined this. You couldnt even step onto the stairs. So from then on you had to figure out a way to convince a person to friend you to their house, or declare it public. If it was private before a certain era it was enterable so long as the door was unlocked...
Another nasty trick I saw back in the day was advertising for a house that you dont own, and put a very nice price on it then handing over a "blank scroll" which appeared to look exactly like the deed to the house. I watched my friend try this scam on someone and the funniest thing happened... The REAL owner of the house came in, saw the advertising, and the real owner said "not for sale! whats going on here!" and my friend just instantly recalls out. =P
I guess one of the scams that mostly got the newer players was advertising yourself at the forge as a GM smith. People will trust GM smith's with all their items, power, vanq... They fail to check if your title says GM smith.. So they hand it all over thinking that all the work you put into smithing will be lost if you keep their items because they can ruin your reputation as a smith. But because your just a freshly started character it dont matter. People drop it all on ya, and you can recall, or run!
Even dirtier yet is actually doing repairs at the forge as a GM smith and telling someone that their weapon broke during repair... This got all cleared up with the repair deeds im guessing.

 

To me Trammel had scammers not really greifers. The difference being is that a scammer either takes advantage of someone or tricks someone so they can take advantage of them. A greifer is someone that forcibly takes advantage of someone.

example:
scammer - convinces the prey that they can get a 1mil check by placing a valued item in their bag and hitting it with an axe. The prey hits item with an axe and the item falls to the ground so the scammer can steal it.
greifer - runs around with 3 buddies and kills a single player so as to either loot or just for the fun of the kill.

 

I was about the write the same. Beeing a successfull scammer takes time and talent I agree that Trammel opened up new possibilities for looting blues.

 

The biggest scam I've ever seen cost an auction house around 100mil in gold.

A guy who was well known to be a scammer actually managed to befriend an auction house and eventually, managed to get his nose in the door to work for them. This guy had scammed many guilds previous and his name was known shard wide for his antics yet he continued to use the same identity with each scam somehow managing to get people to trust him, then robbing them blind. The obvious happened here: he managed to get a position that gave him access to all the chests in the house that were loaded with about a months worth of auction sale items and he took them all. He did end up getting banned for this (which I totally didn't agree with seeing as he didn't exploit any mechanic other than psychology) but the items were also not returned to the auction house given the nature of the situation. While I don't condone that kind of action myself, I did have to tip my hat to him silently because the guy was a genius.