Collar Recovery Skill not working

Wow... thats very dissapointed indeed. I will be happy if someone of the QA team give us some light about these issues.

 

Whats so disappointing about it, is this bug is NOT listed in the known issues part of our patch notes. At least recognize this as a bug or let us know this is how its suppose to be. Its been over a week now. I really want to try the skill out, but since it costs so much and I spent a lot of time getting the recovery up to lessen how much silver I'd need. Thanks!

 

I'm starting to think they don't want people choose taming:
- taming has been nerfed like nothing
- some pet to raise taming are almost impossible to find (obs bears are nowhere, obs wolves have been removed from Deep Ravenswood and almost everywhere)
- when a pet is used focus is drowned much more than summoning pets but they don't require any cooldown
... now the collar recovery skill is not working for a bug and ... this bug is forgot from devs

It's a pity, I choosed SotA because I liked a lot beeing a tamer mage on UO that it was for that a lot different from the other games, I really would like that SotA it become again good also for tamers!

 

I tried to tame Obsidian Wolf last night. It's < 1% taming chance, but I used 20 collars on 20 attempts and my collar recovery is 48%. So collary recovery is definitely not working as described in the skill description.

 

You'll find quite a few Obsidian Wolves in Necropolis Barrens, along with large Red Spiders (and Undead of course). As for Obsidian Bears, have'nt seen one yet (I haven't seen one spawn at Bear Den at Deep Ravenswood)

 

I think that i have seen obs bears in the entrance to spectral mines.

 

Was actually there today farming xp, and although there used to be one that spawned not far from the entrance, it now only seems to be the usual Bear Patriach. Lots of Obsidian Wolves there though....

 

@Attenwood, @Chris, @DarkStarr - Can we please get an update/acknowledgement on this?
If you need more input from us to speed it along, we'd be happy to.
If this is how it is supposed to work, please clarify because the tooltip heavily implies it isn't.

As it stands you are completely stopping an entire class of players from playing out of uncertainty and fear. If it is broken, anyone who tames now is paying a 500%+ tax on their taming costs, and will be unable to recoupe them once it's fixed. If it's not broken and is intentional, we need confirmation that losing a collar at gm+ collar recovery on almost every fail against a rabbit is intended behavior so we can adjust our prices with certainty that they won't be boned in the future.

I have no problem if the collar recovery is only going to be a 10% reduction at gm. But asking players to gamble 200k+ gold of resources on whether or not something is working as intended is a bit unfair.

 

Thanks for tagging me. Looks like we missed this when we did the curve adjustments on the other skills. We will fix this in R34 with similar curve adjustment like we did to the other skills (exponential increases in effectiveness vs linear) and we are doubling the effectiveness of this skill.

 

@DarkStarr - Thanks for the reply!

Just to clarify:

1. The skill is working as intended? Can you confirm this. Even linear vs exponential, if someone is at GM collar recovery, they will have 74.4% if my formula for linear is right. However, currently, when attempting to tame a low level creature (large grey wolf) at gm collar recovery, I was losing almost every attempt, and my recovery is well above GM. So my gut instinct says even if the skill goes from linear to exponential, there's still some other bug in either how it's playing out, or how the tooltip explains how it's supposed to work. If possible, could you share what your vision of how the skill is supposed to work with a few random non-specific non-binding examples of vague rounded non-commital target numbers for collar loss vs difficulty of animal?

2. Why R34? I mean that in an actually curious way. We've seen skills adjusted in patches before, and we just got a patch the other day, so I am curious, from a tester perspective, what makes this change require a wait for the full release, so we can better understand the patch cycles and help explain to people why some things are patched early and some are patched only at releases. Do we only have patch abilities for certain types of adjustments?

3. What information can we provide as testers in the intial report, to help portalarium isolate whether skills work in accordance with their idea of how it's supposed to work? It's hard for us sometimes to tell the difference between "works as intended" and "bugged". For an issue like this, rough collar recovery level, taming level, animal being tamed + scene I figure?

 

Same experience here ... had some collars left from my last tour and tried to tame a red spider with them ... had 8 collars, made 9 attempts before my collars were gone. I had a "saving rate" of ~40% through collar recovery (at least the skill description said so) which was not nearly hit by my attempts. I have now some new collars (40+) and will do another test run tomorrow or the day after (need some xp pool first) to make sure that my results are valid (showing that the mechanic of the skill is broken)

 

here is a simple testing check when changing skill effectiveness. Pop into your test server and check the tooltip % and use the skill a few hundred times and make sure the results match within a standard deviation.

If they do not, consider which one is wrong and adjust either the tooltip or the skill math. Seems pretty basic and reasonable QA logic to me.

Somehow I am sure if someone had run into Collar Recovery now doing sub 5% effectiveness at GM, things would have not made it into Live.

 

Stil no quick fix for this? I guess I will hope it is fixed in R34.