What about thievery?

[chumbucket]

This also makes it really easy to grief thieves, by forcing them to deal 1 damage to you with a punch, then committing suicide - hence kicking them out of the thieves guild for 40 (or 8?) hours playtime.

False. This is not possible. Auto-defend does not work in these situations.

Though I think there is an inaccuracy on thieves here - it seems they are able to steal during combat. During T2A I'm sure thieves could not steal whilst they were attacking/being attacked.

False. "I'm sure..." = I seem to think I might remember that 10 years things may have been such that...

The Thieves Guild bullshit confined the thief skills to an extremely narrow role - you couldn't be a PK because of the murder count nonsense, and you had to jump through a lot of hoops just to get to steal from players.

False. Not being able to play one role (LEET PK) does not mean you are confined to a narrow role. There are things to do in UO besides 1v1OMGLEETPVP. And the fact is no one has as much fun on this shard as (competent) thieves. Sure, there are people like MsT and POO who just stand at the bank all day and steal bandages, but real thieves are out making this shard a far more dangerous--and hence more fun--place than all the LEETPVP guilds combined.

The Thieves Guild was a great innovation. Yes, we lost the ability to LEET PVP, but we were given stealth and it was no longer possible to create a 50 stealing/50 snooping character for stealing 2 mandrake at the bank. You think bank thieves are bad now?

OP: Long story short, thieves are extremely viable here. And they are for the right kind of person the absolute best sort of character. Go check the stealing entry on the wiki for a start.

[Mikel123]

I will say, I played nearly every character type on this shard, and my thief was a ton of fun. I only had one thief template, but I could have had a half-dozen templates that all used the skill differently.

Stealing someone's vanq as they sit outside the Britain graveyard looking for l33tpvp is one of the more fun things I found.

In terms of profit... recall nearby a good hunting spot (Elder Gazers for example) where there's an active tamer. Stealth up, snoop them. If they have a map, steal it and leave. It's a guaranteed level 4. If they have no map, check for vanqs and power weapons they've looted. Take them. If there's none of that, wait until they bank their loot. If they recall out, gate-steal their dragons.

Steal runes, steal house keys... loot houses... half the fun I had with my thief didn't even involve the Stealing skill, but instead the snooping or stealth skill.

I lost probably 5 very good weapons to thieves that looked like pvp characters. I'd be fighting them, I'd feel like I was smoking them with my vanq kryss - look, he's running away! - and then I'd realize while I was omgleetpvping him, he stole my vanq war fork.

[Oswald]

Stealth is cool but I really preferred the pre-carebearing of Thievery.

Yeah getting your stuff stolen at the bank was a little annoying but you could just call guards.

[Boudoir]

"I've been talking to my thief friend about training a thief, and it not hard at all."

IMHO, thief is the easiest template to rise (it took me 4 nights to 5x gm), but it's also the hardest to play. As Matron said above, it's a "social" gameplay. I would like to add that it's very close to roleplay. Stealing something is very hard, especially if you are looking for vanq or t-maps. You will need to talk a lot, draw the attention of your victim, steal and fly away discretly, etc.

Also, people are almost paranoiac and they will quickly understand your intentions if you are running on them and jumping on their backpacks...

You may want to stay at the Britain bank, but you will fall asleep before stealing something else than 10 bandages or a potion bottle.

I played a lot at UO, now I'm bored of provoking monsters. I find that playing a thief is the most rewarding experience.

[nightshark]

Steal runes, steal house keys... loot houses... half the fun I had with my thief didn't even involve the Stealing skill, but instead the snooping or stealth skill.

IDK how anyone gets their house looted.

Recall home, double click sign, change locks, open door, throw key in the trash.

Heck, if you're too forgetful to remember to trash the key, you can even have warnings in your macros.

[chumbucket]

Steal runes, steal house keys... loot houses... half the fun I had with my thief didn't even involve the Stealing skill, but instead the snooping or stealth skill.

IDK how anyone gets their house looted.

Recall home, double click sign, change locks, open door, throw key in the trash.

Heck, if you're too forgetful to remember to trash the key, you can even have warnings in your macros.

Where do you live?

[nightshark]

This also makes it really easy to grief thieves, by forcing them to deal 1 damage to you with a punch, then committing suicide - hence kicking them out of the thieves guild for 40 (or 8?) hours playtime.

False. This is not possible. Auto-defend does not work in these situations.

Really? It should. I pulled this trick all the time, from T2A until I quit on AoS release.

Equip dagger (0 fencing), attack theif, get punched, run away and kill self. I actually learned the trick when I realised how boned thieves were (after playing my own), in the fact they couldn't defend for 2 mins after stealing.

I got a LOT of thieves kicked out of the guild. 100% sure on that. The only way my memory could be faulty, is if all of this happened after T2A. Though in this situation, OSI would of had to change a mechanic between T2A and UO:R, with the sole intention of forcing theives to take murder counts via auto defend (and there would really be no other explanation for a change like that).

Where do you live?

About 20 secs from brit x-roads. I'm moving tonight though. There are always practices you can put in place to completely avoid getting house looted. The only time I ever got houselooted was actually on a pre-t2a shard, when I let someone macro in my house and they took advantage - learned my lesson from that.

[inmani]

The Thieves Guild bullshit confined the thief skills to an extremely narrow role - you couldn't be a PK because of the murder count nonsense, and you had to jump through a lot of hoops just to get to steal from players.

I played before the change went in and it was fine. The whole system was just a knee jerk reaction to all of the rampant bitching and crying about the thieves - the same kind of thing that brought us trammel in the next expansion.

It was a knee jerk reaction to UOExtreme really when it came down to it. People that didn't use it don't have a clear idea on how much better stealing was with it which private servers can't accurate reflect in relative terms in a practical sense.

Thieves had the ability to use a bladed item on items inside a players snooped pack to make them disappear client side from the pack as if they had used a axe on a empty chest and go *poof* so they couldn't hide a small pouch easily behind a mage book and 40 death robes which was a rather common practice of the era. Another common practice was carrying a few backup weapons in case your equipped one got stolen and splitting apart all your stack able items like regents, arrows, and bandages into many many many smaller piles so the thief had to steal more piles before you'd run out of a specific regent. This made it much harder for a thief to simply take all your black pearl in one quick swipe and laugh at you.

Now another feature exclusive to UOExtreme outside of the bladed item *poof* item hiding was a feature named prevent container auto-close this made it so once you opened a players pack regardless of whether you had opened it 5 hours earlier and had gated all over hell to different dungeons that pack stayed open. What that allowed players to do was they could be hidden and use last object on a item while hidden several tiles away from the player then come out of hiding and steal that specific item as you ran past them then keep running a few steps until the hide skill timer refreshed and tab and hide again which bare in mind back then you could hide like a tile step away from another player.

In relative terms this is like players not being able to hide their pouches and bags behind other objects to deter a thief and not being able to simply move a step away and forcing the thief to try to snoop again. Sure a thief can still blindly steal a random object, but that's a far cry from being able to pin point a players black pearl or bandages or whatever to steal as if they were just a AFK player sitting around macroing in town whom you could easily snoop. So enjoy your history lesson of pre-T2A thievery from Grandmaster thief Chris Kennon of Atlantic member of the run that shit crew since 97.

[inmani]

This also makes it really easy to grief thieves, by forcing them to deal 1 damage to you with a punch, then committing suicide - hence kicking them out of the thieves guild for 40 (or 8?) hours playtime.

False. This is not possible. Auto-defend does not work in these situations.

Really? It should. I pulled this trick all the time, from T2A until I quit on AoS release.

Equip dagger (0 fencing), attack theif, get punched, run away and kill self. I actually learned the trick when I realised how boned thieves were (after playing my own), in the fact they couldn't defend for 2 mins after stealing.

I got a LOT of thieves kicked out of the guild. 100% sure on that. The only way my memory could be faulty, is if all of this happened after T2A. Though in this situation, OSI would of had to change a mechanic between T2A and UO:R, with the sole intention of forcing theives to take murder counts via auto defend (and there would really be no other explanation for a change like that).

Where do you live?

About 20 secs from brit x-roads. I'm moving tonight though. There are always practices you can put in place to completely avoid getting house looted. The only time I ever got houselooted was actually on a pre-t2a shard, when I let someone macro in my house and they took advantage - learned my lesson from that.

That trick only worked when they intentionally attacked a blue not when they auto attacked back as a result of being attacked from what I recall. So if you were attack and hit back then went hidden you couldn't attack them back again until 2 minutes unless they attacked you again of course when you did come out of hiding. That gave thief victims a easier chance to ultimately kill the thief because OSI wanted to ensure stealing was shitty after queers bitched about it during the archery tank mage era of UO.

If you didn't play pre-T2A UO then chances are you don't even realize that stealing was overpowered in the right hands and *ahem* 3rd party software back then UOExtreme was pretty much like god mod for stealing you could take on multiple players at once routinely shit was funny usually took like 3 or 4+ mages working together to chain paralyze and reveal or throw purple potions at a thief to stop one back then and the potions thing was damn risky to attempt in town then as well because all the smart players would purpose try to get hit by it to get the one that threw it guard whacked.

[archaicsubrosa77]

Thieves are/were kinda shitty in the t2a era because they introduced the lame 'thieves guild' system without any of the perks that later came (like stun and disarm).

You can't steal from other players without being a member of the thieves guild, get kicked out if you get a murder count, and have to wait 7 days after character creation to join the thieves guild.

You can steal from other players that are not blue guilded or not with or without murder counts. It is possible to be red and a thief. It is possible to be perma-red guilded thief (Bucs guildmaster) and steal from blues as long as you have no counts, or if they attack you first (or otherwise flag or warring guild) even if you are statloss you can steal from them and kill them without worry of being npc guilded.

Good ways to do this is to snoop on one character and set the marked objects to steal as absolute targets in macro. Log out entirely razor and everything then log in on your thief on another account. Log back in on your snooper. Snoop without hiding first to reveal to expose yourself (set a script to run around and heal yourself casting everything but recall lol). They will most likely attack you and flag. Jump on your thief without snooping take everything you can...Kill them.

In this way you murder them but they (if your snooper is not guilded as a thief) will take the count. And if it is guilded as a thief your disguise will allow you to do it again to the same person to instill a new found paranoia concerning stealthers in them.

This is an important thing to know if your build would do better without snooping on it.

Possible variations is 5 X mage Macing and stealing, or substitute eval for tactics and up dex to medi-dexxer status....or 6 X Dexxer with stealing. These are all good PK thief templates.

* It is important to log completely out of razor and then back so your targets stick to the macro in relog, meaning no other instances of razor should be running until you are ready to come in.

[Kaivan]

The Thieves Guild bullshit confined the thief skills to an extremely narrow role - you couldn't be a PK because of the murder count nonsense, and you had to jump through a lot of hoops just to get to steal from players.

I played before the change went in and it was fine. The whole system was just a knee jerk reaction to all of the rampant bitching and crying about the thieves - the same kind of thing that brought us trammel in the next expansion.

It was a knee jerk reaction to UOExtreme really when it came down to it. People that didn't use it don't have a clear idea on how much better stealing was with it which private servers can't accurate reflect in relative terms in a practical sense.

No, it wasn't a knee jerk reaction to UOE, but a reaction to the very idea that a thief could act as a near PK without any penalties, simply by stealing from a victim. They make this clear in their HoC chat on the changes for thieves.

This also makes it really easy to grief thieves, by forcing them to deal 1 damage to you with a punch, then committing suicide - hence kicking them out of the thieves guild for 40 (or 8?) hours playtime.

False. This is not possible. Auto-defend does not work in these situations.

Really? It should. I pulled this trick all the time, from T2A until I quit on AoS release.

Equip dagger (0 fencing), attack theif, get punched, run away and kill self. I actually learned the trick when I realised how boned thieves were (after playing my own), in the fact they couldn't defend for 2 mins after stealing.

I got a LOT of thieves kicked out of the guild. 100% sure on that. The only way my memory could be faulty, is if all of this happened after T2A. Though in this situation, OSI would of had to change a mechanic between T2A and UO:R, with the sole intention of forcing theives to take murder counts via auto defend (and there would really be no other explanation for a change like that).

Where do you live?

About 20 secs from brit x-roads. I'm moving tonight though. There are always practices you can put in place to completely avoid getting house looted. The only time I ever got houselooted was actually on a pre-t2a shard, when I let someone macro in my house and they took advantage - learned my lesson from that.

That trick only worked when they intentionally attacked a blue not when they auto attacked back as a result of being attacked from what I recall. So if you were attack and hit back then went hidden you couldn't attack them back again until 2 minutes unless they attacked you again of course when you did come out of hiding. That gave thief victims a easier chance to ultimately kill the thief because OSI wanted to ensure stealing was shitty after queers bitched about it during the archery tank mage era of UO.

This is false. If a thief was attacked within the first two minute period after they stole something and damaged an opponent via auto-defend, they would be flagged as the aggressor, and could be given a murder count, provided the victim committed suicide without recalling away. This behavior is made clear in a HoC chat (Note: The flag which is described in some newgroup posts by Raph is a "stealing flag" which prevents anyone from getting an aggressor flag on the thief when they commit an action that would normally give them one, and thus leaves the code open to give the thief the flag).

Also, 3 year old thread.

[Freight Elevator]

Not his first An Corp of the week.

[inmani]

[/quote]
This is false. If a thief was attacked within the first two minute period after they stole something and damaged an opponent via auto-defend, they would be flagged as the aggressor, and could be given a murder count, provided the victim committed suicide without recalling away. This behavior is made clear in a HoC chat (Note: The flag which is described in some newgroup posts by Raph is a "stealing flag" which prevents anyone from getting an aggressor flag on the thief when they commit an action that would normally give them one, and thus leaves the code open to give the thief the flag).

No, it wasn't a knee jerk reaction to UOE, but a reaction to the very idea that a thief could act as a near PK without any penalties, simply by stealing from a victim. They make this clear in their HoC chat on the changes for thieves.
[/quote] Great looks like your right on the 2 minute flag perhaps, but it still doesn't change the fact stealing was all ready a piece of shit skill T2A era regardless of a easy exploit method to fuck over thieves with a murder count which that method still applies to any player criminal flagging on you, but was simply more harsh for thieves because of the fuckwad thieve guild stipulation. Also if you regened the hp to 100 first before killing yourself that trick didn't work either if I'm not mistaken it's the same trick you can use against a blue that criminal flags on you accidentally with say a purple potion you can screw them over with a murder count.

Don't kid yourself on why stealing got nerfed though despite OSI's claims it was still mostly the result of UOE and to lesser extent UOA they didn't nerf it until those illegal for the time period 3rd party programs came onto the scene. If stealing was that fucking bad originally to OSI why did they launch them designed that way in the first place and why was that changed only after the arrival of UOE and UOA 3rd party programs followed by lots and lots of bitching and moaning from inferior players that couldn't coup with dealing with stealing. Stealing wasn't "near" PK it took legitimate skill and effort to beat a well prepared player that actually took the proper precautionary steps to help deter thieves. Using several bags deep of your vital items hiding them behind objects and splitting apart stack able items into several smaller piles along with carrying around a extra weapon or two in case one got stolen.

Like it mattered outside of town if a thief was near PK like or not you had actual PK's back then without stat loss and inside town it was pretty straight forward try not to let a thief stand near you and if your going to afk put your bag of shit in the bank so they have nothing to steal. It's not liking stealing was a exploit that was corrected it was skill that was fucking nerfed and shit on along with hiding and archery as well both things thieves made use of then later they further went through the trouble of shitting on thieves by encrypting the client so UOExtreme stopped working pretty much after version uoe607e aside from a few version Evilseed didn't release upon the mass public until those stopped working as well because Evilseed either stopped development on them at that point or was banned or moved on from UO to another game.

Let's face it even after OSI pissed all over stealing they pissed on them further. The very idea of something they originally put into place to begin with when they designed the game yeah god forbid players play the game the way they designed it I fucking hate the idea of that sure UOE had nothing to do with it at all it's all merely coincidental that's why even after those initial changes they further went through the trouble of encrypting the client to break UOExtreme because even with the 2 minute gift carded from OSI stealing was still popular because thieves simply said fuck you to it and worked together and a lot of crappy mages were still bitching and moaning about how evil it was that they couldn't just be flat out overpowered against everything else in game.

[Kaivan]

I don't typically respond this way, but you seriously need to clean up your post in order to make it readable. There are a ton of things to refute, but I can't be tasked with untangling your post in order to do it.

[Freight Elevator]