Animal Taming

I like it all so far in this thread. I think the breeding would give people another incentive to purchase housing. It could also give value to "ranch" houses, those outside of town with larger parcels. Breeding it seems would add to the economy greatly, not only for fighting pets but also mounts and random travel companion pets. Maybe the trainer trains the animal but once sold the owner only needs to know the commands. Like service and police dogs, trained then sold. I can't wait to see what they do.

 

I like the idea of being able to leave animal traps in the forest and being able to get them later. We should also add that if a player sees the trap he can steal the animal too, or if he gets caught in the trap it shows that you attacked him (or however PvP will work). It's very realistic and it shouldn't be too hard to do if other people agree

 

Taming, in my opinion, was always a bit overpowered. I don't think you should be able to tame things as powerful as dragons and things of that type. I would prefer like 5 wolves fighting as a pack, under your command, to be the top of tier taming. Also, if your pet died...it died. No following you around as a ghost until you can put bandaids on it. It would keep people from haphazardly just going into the middle of dungeons with no fear of loss. Taming was very fun profession and would love to see something great implemented into SOTA. I just don't want easy mode for anyone.

 

I agree with the idea that dragons shouldn't be tamable, dragons should be top of the food chain and thus too strong to tame. And I like the idea of having 5 wolves with you because that seems like something that would actually happen. With that being said tamers need the ability to tame something that is worth while with the ability to fight higher level mob. I don't agree with you on the pet res though. In UO if a pet dies it loses skill and i think stats (not sure, been too long). That's enough to make any legitimate tamer be weary of entering a place that's too packed. Especially if pets are as annoying to control as they were in UO. And most often then not if a tamers pets dies, their survivability drops exponentially. And taming wasn't easy, it was one of the most tedious skills to GM.

 

Early UO actually did have pet permadeath and I'm okay with that for Shroud. I know others won't be, so as an alternative, they could make it costly to resurrect pets or require you to do a special quest to gather the required components to do so. I think the best part of UO was the risk vs reward. The more that gets watered down, the less exciting and valuable your accomplishments in game become.

 

Ok here's a thought.. what if you could specialize in a specific type of animal? What kind of benefits would there be? What kind of drawbacks for animals you don't specialize in? Most animal trainers don't train all animals universally. Sure many people have a general knowledge to draw upon.. but a horse trainer usually won't be found out training falcons for example. It's not that they couldn't but it's quite literally a whole different beast.

Now on that choice of words of course there will be some folks who want to play the beastmaster type.. and that's great. I think it should take a lot of work. I don't think the taming skill should automagically work the same for every type of animal. I think it should get you so far but if you want very advanced training you should specialize.

 

@Bowen,

Here's a question, should riding & horsemanship be a skill you can master, or just something practiced the same for all players?

 

Ouch.. well that is a good question. lol I'm honestly really torn. It would be so common place in the world that for design/playability it's easy to justify just letting anyone ride a horse.. BUT.. there are also other factors to consider.

1: The intention on Portalarium's part to continue to add new skills as the game progresses. General horsemanship would be an excellent choice.

Now the big issue with a skill like this is apart from simply being able to ride what value is there an advancing the skill? And I'd like to point out the big difference between riding a horse.. and training a horse. These are two very different skill sets that happen to play very well together. Sine a lot of horse training involves breaking them in from the ground.. getting them used to wearing tack.. teaching them basic voice commends etc.. but you do need to know how to ride for that part of their training.. there's just so much that leads up to that.

So as to the question of how advancing the skill can translate into the game...

2: Jousting and mounted combat.

Along with jousting there's other tournament games that are mounted that might be pretty fun if they do that. Mounted combat can also include horse archery and similar cross-skill abilities.

So to answer the question.. yeah I think there's a lot of potential room for a horsemanship skill outside of training.. just allowing everyone to ride might be a little disappointing but justifiable. From an immersion standpoint basic riding skills could be passed off as common place and from a design/implementation standpoint it's be a lot easier than doing a whole skill.. but a skill has a lot of promise.. and as someone who used to teach horsemanship I'd love to it. And if I see anyone riding around with their knees bent weirdly and toes pointing down with a death grip on their saddle I will personally give you a good verbal trouncing.

 

@Bowen,

There are also other possible skills linked to horse riding. Reading about tumblers, vaulters, and other types of acrobats I came upon a description of a "desultor." This was someone trained to be able to jump from one moving horse to another. I don't know how useful that is to implement, though.

 

Vaulting is pretty interesting. I've had the opportunity to do some.. I've no clue how it's broken down from one discipline to another though Apart from putting on a show I don't really see any practical use for it. That's the sort of thing you might find in a scripted event for a flashy scene from Prince of Persia or something..

 

I hope they retain some of the old taming from UO. I really enjoy going and taming a dragon with my bard buddy and training it on earth eles.

 

I'd say no to resurrecting your pet because tamers become less needed.
Maybe when we start the game we can come across with a small pet like a dog or cat.
Since we are immortal then they could be too, and be rezed like we are.

 

Give what little we've heard about dragons.. (likely no one person would be able to kill one solo).. I think it's a pretty safe bet we won't be taming them and honestly I prefer it that way. Dragon's should be special. Not something you can simply put on a leash and have following you around.

 

I think that if you had no horsemanship type of skill that you should be still be able to ride a horse that was maybe tamed by someone with high taming. Tame the animal so well that you could put a saddle on it and let children, with no riding experience, ride it. Perhaps if you had high horsemanship you could ride faster, jump higher, stop quicker, dodge enemies..etc...would be great for PVP dodging bolas and things.

 

Excellent. I like.

Where I taught riding was a horsemanship camp and we referred to the horses as "baby sitters" Just because you don't have a lot of skill doesn't mean you can't ride.. speaking in a literal sense. In another thread I described the difference between knowledge and skill. You can give someone all the knowledge they need to ride a well trained horse in about 5 minutes. In 10 minutes they know all they need to know to do all the common stuff.. the skill comes with practice and a lot of that is also physical conditioning if you really want to do hard riding or advanced moves.

Add to this that saddles in SotA probably shouldn't have a saddle horn. Those serve a function specifically for catching cattle.. (hmmm interesting idea).. They're not meant to keep novices in the saddle.

Anyway.. point being that a well trained horse can indeed be ridden by beginners. The horse itself will probably be fairly annoyed and take advantage of said rider though. lol.. "Pull their head out of the bushes!" "Pick their head up.. that grass is not for eating!" *clears throat*.. yeah..

 

my fav toons in UO were tamers 90% of my play time was taming. I had I house outside the Fire Temple I tamed dragons by the hundreds till they made a 5 pet limit. I might have been the reason for that I tamed tons of dragons one day and released them at the Bank killing everyone and everything. I was banned for that.

 

i don't think you should be able to get banned for silly things like this anymore...

 

lol they gave me a 72 hour suspension then it was banned I made them set back the servers one day everyone lost everything. you logged in you died. it was funny So I bought a tamer account from MarkeeDragon. and was back up taming 5 pets then new limit.

 

What's funny is they also put in a new animal taming minimum level to control dragons that I wasn't at yet. So I went to the stables which were in the town near the bank and did a claim all and they went loose and killed everybody around there... not my fault, I didn't know they did that.

 

Can't count how many times i've died bcs my wyvern cast a area spell and i auto hit the damn pet. with the kind of connection i had at the time i couldn't even run after the first blow the animal gave me, the second one i was already OOOoooooOOOO.