Talk:Bag of Sending

How exactly does saturation work? Is it predictable? Random? Gettingbetter 18:13, 9 September 2008 (PDT)

I can't see how the rate of champ spawns is related to the bags of sending nerf Ceruleus 12/04/07 10:28 EST

Opps, your right. I somehow completely missed that he was talking about monster spawn rate in Felucca and not bags of sending. I'll have to move it somewhere else. - JC the Builder 08:28, 4 December 2007 (PST)

Moved the passage in concern here for now. It's more or less talking about the same thing (a major change to the economy), so perhaps a new article could be created on that subject.

- Bomb Bloke 00:42, 17 April 2008 (PDT)

Former UO developer Wilki provided further details in a posting on Stratics.

Well, since I'm the one who made the change, I'll tell you how it came about.

I thought it was done on purpose too, but when I investigated the spawning system, I simply could not find any way to change the spawn rate by facet. But clearly, the monsters on the Felucca dungeon server were spawning very rapidly compared to the same monsters in Trammel, so something was indeed changing it.

After a few hours of tracing code, the culprit turned out to be a spawn clock override function. The only place it was being called was in the champ spawn script, and it happened as soon as the server started up when each champ spawn altar initialized.

The comment that went along with the override said something like, 'Champ spawn monsters aren't spawning fast enough to let players kill them fast enough to advance the spawn. Let's speed it up." Clearly, they intended to override it because of a problem with champ spawns.

However, the override applied to the entire subserver, which effectively meant that any subserver that hosted a champ spawn altar had a much higher spawn rate than the designers intended (it's supposed to be set in each monster's template). This didn't just apply to Fel, but also to parts of Ilshenar, and half of the Tokuno Island (and wherever else we might put a champ spawn altar).

So, what I did (with the help of Stormwind, who is the UO server master) was to put in a check that let the spawner run at the faster rate if the spawning region was in a champ spawn area, otherwise it ran normally. This pretty much limited the override to the intended areas: champ spawn regions.

Now, all of that said, I too seem to remember the faster spawn being explained as "risk vs. reward" as well. I'm wondering if perhaps we're not just remembering something that a player made up to explain the change that got repeated until it became the accepted "truth", or maybe even that the dev/community rep who said it didn't really understand why it was made. I don't know the answer to that, as it's too far back in time to look it up now.

The proper way to have done a "risk vs. reward" change would have been to add a implicit way to specify spawn rates by facet or region. To do it the way it was done wouldn't make much sense if that was their intent. Not only do the comments for the override specifically state that it was done for a different reason, but the fact that the override isn't facet wide, but rather just on subservers that happen to have a champ spawn, pretty much tells me that wasn't at all what they had in mind when they originally made that change.

Now that this is fixed, designers in the future will have their monsters spawning at the rate they intended for them to spawn.

Hopefully all of that made sense :-)