Comments on Boats
- Faramir - 11 January 1998 -
(modified 12 February 1999)
[Version 1.5: major revisions based on thoughts from Kim]
[Version 1.1: Added Calis Dragon's brilliant "bill of goods" idea, and more on boat types.]
[Version 1.0: Broke out this section from the essay on community.]
[ Economy Treatise ]
- Make drydock claim tickets work completely differently. Basically, when you dock your boat, it puts the claim ticket into your bank directly, and you can't move or remove the ticket except by again talking to the harbormaster (claim or undock or something similar). The ticket could be weightless or very light, regardless of what is on the boat. Trying to drydock a boat when you already have one docked would result in a message to that effect from the harbormaster.
- Because of the above, everyone is now limited to one boat drydocked at a time (but not necessarily one boat overall), but they can easily and freely use the docks without worrying about what's in the hold. This means that we can make boat security and ownership completely different...
- Boat ownership and commandability should be done using the pet logic: the tillerman recognizes commands, including "friend" and "transfer" as well as the normal boat commands, from the owner. Secure trading of boats can be worked out along the same lines of anything that is ever done for pets, which also need secure-transfer code.
- Boat keys would be for the hold. I'm in favor of a non-pickable hold to allow people to adventure freely, and I'm in favor of a non-lockable boat on realism grounds and also because that works well with a pet-style ownership. Unfortunately, that combination is really bad for lockpickers, so I'd consider either nonlockable boat with pickable hold (bad for boat users) or a non-pickable hold on a pickable boat (unrealistic) as options as well, unless something else can be done with lockpicking and boats.
The large numbers of boats in the world (either lost at sea, anchored in the wilderness, or jammed into the few real docks) is both unsightly and unnecessary. It also encourages (or, at best, allows) item hoarding, which is itself bad for lag and the economy. I propose the following ideas to encourage the use of docks and simultaneously prevent them from becoming overcrowded.
- Automatic Drydocking: harbormasters should "clean up" the docks, automatically "dry-docking" docked ships into their inventory (as is done for stabled pets), and "cleaned up" ships could be undocked with the claim keyword, or something similar. Claim bring up traditional ship-placement outline usable anywhere within range of the dock and place the most-recently-docked boat of yours into the water. For this purpose "docked" means within line of sight of the docks; harbormaster intelligence must ensure that docked boats do get cleaned up; boats not within line of sight of a dock are considered to be in the wilderness, affecting decay rate (see below). To discourage people from using this sort of drydocking to hoard items, the harbormaster could charge a fee; alternately, items from the deck and hold of boats being auto-docked could be unceremoniously dumped into chests on the docks, available to anyone with Stealing and Lockpicking skill.
- Manual Drydocking: in order to promote the use of the docks, manual drydocking should be free. Drydocking manually instead of letting the boat be "cleaned up" would be desirable since the owner would receive a physical claim check (as is done now, except into the bank as above), ensuring that the boat would not be lost in the event of the untimely death of the harbormaster.
- Decay rate should be radically changed:
- Docked and anchored: cleaned up (drydocked, see above) after 1 real-time day.
- Docked and unanchored: cleaned up after 1 UO day.
- Wilderness and anchored: become unanchored after 1 real-time day.
- Wilderness and unanchored: drift (random motion) every UO day.
- Drifting: become unlocked after 1 real-time day. Decay after 3 real-time days of disuse.
- Any use of the boat (lock, unlock, anchor, controlled motion) resets the timer as appropriate for the boat’s location at the end of the use.
Varying the range of boat speeds and hold sizes (and corresponding prices) would be a great addition to the game. It would encourage players to buy boats that suit their needs: travel, transportation, price, or even piracy, and would encourage people to work together to form fleets. Price, speed, and hold size suggestions (the reader can probably tell that the author came up with these prices ages ago, before the price increases -- they are now provided for comparison against each other, and not as suggestions):
- Small boat: 3k gold pieces, 1x speed factor, 1000stone hold (standard first trading ship)
- Medium boat: 3.5k, 1x, 2000stone (intermediate model for budding traders)
- Large boat: 4k, 1x, 5000stone (the ultimate trading model)
- Small dragon ship: 3.5k, 1.5x, 500stone (standard adventurer's ship)
- Medium dragon ship: 4k, 2x, 1000stone (pirate's preference)
- Large dragon ship: 5k, 1.5x, 4000stone (the top of the line adventuring model)
- Bill of Goods: when a boat is manually drydocked, any hold contents are listed on a "bill of goods" which is automatically provided by the harbormaster. This is a transcript which lists all of the items in the boat. Anyone with a key to the boat (if it's locked, or anyone at all if it's not) can sell items from the transcript by dragging it to a shopkeeper, which brings up a normal "sell" window of all of the items that the shopkeeper will buy. The shopkeeper charges a porter's fee (around 5%) for transporting the goods from the boat to the shop. The transcript is stealable, but is not useful without the key to the boat. It is voided (and disappears) as soon as the ship is undocked.
- Secure trading of boats as I have already proposed (elsewhere) for buildings (similar logic needs to be done for pets).
- Movement: it would be nice to see an improvement to boat motion. Surely the current jerky travel is not intentional?
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