Greetings fellow colleagues, distinguished members of the press, ladies and gentlemen. It is my hope, that we can, utilize this meeting of the minds, to successfully convey the essence, of our platform, to you, a grand and noble audience...... I feel, however accurate or not (I don't care either way) to the era, that gaseous elementals should not leave a corpse. As I understand the corpses were created to support looting rights for the party system which is too Trammel for the shard's standards. This should be corrected however I see complications with the sheer amount of loot one might obtain from a Diseased Blood Elemental or Efreet Sultan. The only complication being how exposed your loot is to thievery really, as far as I see it.
I do not like this because the ground becomes way too cluttered with items, and I believe corpses disappear quicker as well.
It is indeed not era accurate, but i do not see the benefit in not having a "corpse". It is cleaner to have all the loot in a container. Anyone can still loot it (so there is no trammel like protection). As to it making sense... who are we to decide if it makes any sense for some elementals to leave a body (air, maybe not, blood? it might coagulate )or not.... and anyways, why would an air elemental carry gloves or a katana hey? So I'd say that there must be many many other things that would have much higher priority on the list
As I understand it, the change would be simple, per the brief discussion with Telamon in IRC main. I don't ever recall ground clutter being an issue in the dozens of hours I spent farming air elementals on other shard. In regards to who we are to decide if it makes sense, considering the gaseous elementals explode into a fine mist on death....where would a corpse come from? It is silly and the puddle corpses also look out of place Thanks for sharing opinions all. Please refrain from 'there are more important things to do' responses if you did not include an opinion on the matter. This is not a prioritization thread, it is an idea discussion. How long it takes, when it should happen, etc, are all aside from the point of whether or not it is for the best. Not saying your opinion on priority is invalid, just that this is not what the thread is about.
I'm torn on this one. I feel that being accurate to the era is a good thing, but at the same time the idea of moving forward without the influences of Trammel means some things that happened in the era won't here (like, for instance, Trammel). Corpses for air elemental body types was certainly a change in response to the looting system changes that came with Trammel. So, I guess I agree? With Blaise? :cry:
I completely support this. Seeing all that loot drop to the ground after the elemental explodes is extremely satisfying to me. It's also convenient; your scavenger grabs the gold (maybe gems) and you pick up the rest without having to open a corpse. I also like the idea having another difference between monsters of various types. It just adds diversity to gameplay which I would think every UO player can appreciate. Overall, I can't say I think it should take priority over other things, though.
I definitely don't mean to undermine the discussion, but I do think the fact that it requires a code change is a small knock against it. As I see it... Arguments For: Era Accuracy Looting via Scavenger Agent Arguments Against: No uniformity with other monsters Not as tidy Requires a code change (albeit very small) I think the 'flavor' argument can go either way, so I'm personally not including it. So they explode - all that stuff it explodes into could be denser than air and then drop to the ground in a puddle. Far stranger things happen in the world of Ultima. Ultimately I'd say make the change, simply for era accuracy.
Air Elementals started leaving corpses during the UOR era, for the trammies (of which I was the biggest).
I think if we take out corpses for these, we should follow the same logic across the board. No corpses for liquid-based or fire-based elementals either. I don't really care one way or the other though.
Certainly, I suppose gaseous doesn't appropriately imply fire or water elementals, but that was my intent. I was at odds to pick a word that would describe them all. Basoosh, it's ok to have that opinion, however, take these stats for example: Patch 36 Stats Modified Scripts - 48 New Scripts - 9 Code - 500+ Lines Patch Application / Patch Notes - 2 Hours Timeframe - 7 Days Coding/Testing Time - 50 Hours Coding happens and a lot of it. If you saw some of the more far fetched ideas I've bounced off of staff as mere food for thought, you'd think I was (more) insane. Hence my request that considerations of complexity not be included because I wanted opinions that were not swayed by required efforts. I know their time is a finite resource and I also trust they will prioritize it in the best interests of the shard as a whole.
Historically this is correct, various elementals originally did not have corpses. They were later added, I suspect, with the party system to allow for looting rights. Once Trammel was added monster corpses were needed so that the largest damagers would have rights to open the corpse. The party system also allowed looting rights to be applied to corpses based on party membership. As for the application of this change to UOR, this is within our design guidelines and will further the goal of providing our players with an experience they remember. Basoosh is correct as well, we do prioritize our coding tasks by which items are most critical. Although sometimes depending on the availability of testers we will work on single items that require little testing. While the actual design of changes and new additions is complex, it is much more time consuming to test changes effectively. Regardless of how critical or trivial an idea is we welcome them all.
More precisely they were disarmed and since the monster did not leave a corpse the process simply dumped its items to the ground. Quite a clever discovery actually.
