Prelude: World 16.1

[JohnBender]

While were at it. Isn't this the perfect world to try the stat cap experiment? Doesnt have to be drastic, have a hard cap per character of 3000 points(just an example) It never hurt pvp or gameplay in UO.

[Havenasket]

You’re overcomplicating this. Rawhide isn’t some unfair “remote toggle to force fights.” It’s literally the built-in risk of going fast on a horse. If mounts had no punish, we’d be back to worlds where nobody ever caught anybody and PvP was just horses zooming past each other forever.

All your proposed “fixes” boil down to:
“Please telegraph, delay, weaken, or negate the punish so I can ride fast without thinking.”
That’s not balance, that’s just padding for mistakes.

If someone is dismounting you from off-screen, that’s not a design problem — that’s you getting outplayed. Rawhide is readable, counterable, and rewards awareness. The counterplay already exists: stop riding in straight lines, scout, and pay attention to positioning.

Horses are strong. Rawhide is the thing that keeps them from being too strong. That’s it.

Fair — keeping mounts from being dominant is essential. But there’s a difference between “punish recklessness” and “invalidate a feature.”
Right now Rawhide skips the interaction phase entirely: one input, off-screen, and the horse is gone before any player agency happens. That’s not counterplay — it’s desync of distance, visibility, and reaction window.

You don’t need to remove the punish, just bring it into the player’s readable space:

same travel speed risk → same reward for awareness

but effect should trigger after the rider perceives a threat, not from two screens away

that keeps “get caught for greed” intact, but stops “get deleted for existing”

If horses were truly “too strong without Rawhide,” players would still choose them with the current risk — yet most avoid them in contested areas entirely.
That usage pattern signals imbalance: deterrence, not tension. The goal of good PvP design is pressure you can answer, not fear that removes options.

[Havenasket]

"

While we're at it, isn't this the perfect world to try the stat cap experiment? It doesn't have to be drastic — for example, a hard cap of 3000 points per character. It never hurt PvP or gameplay in UO.

Nice idea. Or make a dynamic soft cap, like this:
Calculate average stats for the whole world. Once you are in the top 90%, your stat gain is slowed by 90%.
You could even go further — if you are in the bottom 10%, your stat gain is increased.
To prevent abuse, this feature could require a subscription (so at least griefers would support the devs, which is good, right?)."

[dafels]

here is a full summary of the thread for those who don't want to read this ****fest

Compiled Summary of the “Prelude: World 16.1” Thread (23 pages)
Source: Prelude: World 16.1

What was officially announced

• World 16.1 launch: Friday, December 5, 2025 at 20:00 UTC. Runs in parallel with World 16 (no W16 wipe). Major mechanics changes apply only to W16.1.
• Visitor gates: All palisade/brickwall gates are now visitor gates (non-visitor gates removed).
• Gilding rework: More of the power moved into the clothes themselves to reduce “spam cheap clothes for perfect gilds.”
• Legacy client: Verification requirement removed—Legacy is free to play.

Dev clarifications in-thread

• Why visitor-only gates? Change had been queued due to sploitable uses of non-visitor gates; W16.1 is a safe place to test it; not guaranteed permanent if it plays poorly.
• World length / W17 timing: To be determined.

The big debates

1) Visitor-only gates (removing “safe palis”)

• Critique: Non-visitor gates acted as safe harbors that let less PvP-savvy players engage/disengage on familiar terrain. Removing them is seen as anti-hermit and rough on new/mid players.
• Counter-argument: Airlocks were also abused offensively by factions; making all gates visitor-only could make PvP more decisive. If this stays, common asks are owner pass-through during combat and no animal aggro/pathing through open visitor gates.
• Exploit history dispute: Some claim the worst grief was via visitor-gate “honey-traps” (furniture + aggro). Suggested mitigation: allow self-triggered eviction for trapped visitors.

2) Speed buffs / “running”

• Strong calls to remove or heavily nerf speed buffs (shorter duration, lower speed, longer cooldowns, and always visible to everyone).
• Moderate view: keep but tune iteratively rather than delete.
• Popular idea: add a short “running tutorial/dungeon” that teaches chase/escape fundamentals with a desirable reward.

3) Mounts & Rawhide (late-thread focus)

• Pro-Rawhide: Mounted play needs a real punish or nobody gets caught.
• Reform view: Off-screen dismounts skip the interaction window; keep a punish but telegraph it and make it reactable so horses remain viable in contested zones.

Concrete feature / QoL proposals (recurring/high-signal)

• Items & gear: Silk backpack (third column), metal shield, dyeable clothes (or more dyed variants), smaller “meteor” events with higher frequency/smaller drops; occasional meteor armor/weapon wish.
• Crafting/structures: Bigger/faster kilns (Potter tie-ins), wells with soak, compost “clean out,” recipe book/pages to preserve learned recipes.
• World & resources: Rework ore/rock quality deeper down; maintain an endless quality grind (e.g., bone soft-caps on tools again; new ore spots); desert biomes.
• Contracts/quests: “Contract board” structure for bundled multi-item requests with a reward to formalize small jobs and local trade.
• Community content pipeline: Limited tooling for players to submit models/dyes/hairstyles; devs note technical hurdles in the resource pipeline.

Systems & balance experiments suggested for W16.1

• Proto-Kingdoms (“tribes”): Early, thingwall-based tribes with random buffs and public ownership, later inheritable by a victorious kingdom; add a clay coinpress for early currency.
• Death & danger: Remove PvP permadeath (seen as disproportionately punishing weaker players); make swimming KO + auto-hearth instead of lethal.
• Progression: Try a per-character stat cap (example discussed ≈3000) as an experiment.

Overall read of the 23 pages

• Strong optimism about W16.1 and excitement that Legacy is free.
• Visitor-only gates are the flashpoint; if the change stays, broad appetite for owner pass-through during combat and animal pathing fixes.
• On speed buffs, the center of gravity is “change them” (or teach running better) rather than silence.
• On mounts/Rawhide, most want tension, not deterrence—keep the risk, but make it readable.

[maze]

The "rawhide" horse thing is a silly augment and makes me wonder if most pvpers even ride horses in the last 2 worlds.

Rawhide drains the stamina of the horse regardless if your ride it or it's following. Most pvp use them to run into combat and "catch" someone on the run but they typically have to port them in or catch the group off guard. They're purely meta gamed in any pvp instanced, with rawhide completely making them useless.
someone see's a horse? rawhide instantly goes off and that person is stunned for 1 or more sec, while the pvpers sprint to be on top of you. if you're not there to combat, you likely do not have the kit to deal with pvpers. It's already GG for you.

The kit of pvpers is always the biggest thing here in ANY FIGHT, a lack of water, bunny shoes, the ability to see speed buffs and player support is basically always a knock out on the receiver.

horse breeding vs water meta. One is grind based the other is skill based.
if horses were unable to be rawhided the person with better horses always wins.

Rawhide is the problem, but changing how rawhide works will either enable horse combat over foot combat or visa versa.

my only suggestion is rawhide used within 0 to 10m of player knocks riders off horses (gets ride of the stun bullshit) and makes the horse run away from the rawhide user.
from 11m to screen horses get spooked and sprint away from rawhide user and all other players (the horse will attempt to try to keep 180* away from the rawhide user so that it does not run back to the user).
remove the drains all stamina from horse.
That way players on horses can still have time to react to suddenly sprinting pvpers, and not get instantly rawhided (i know some clients have a auto rawhide built into it).

[dafels]

Any hermit or any non-faction group being pro-changes for rawhide are basically shooting in their foot, there was a good reason why and how it was implemented initially, but you do you bros.

[Jenno]

Please go all out with some crazy experiments and don’t hold back.
Most of your playerbase doesn’t care about small tweaks to PvP.

[Vladichka]

Idk I think spooking horses into nearby lakes with rawhide could be funny

[magnet]

Any hermit or any non-faction group being pro-changes for rawhide are basically shooting in their foot, there was a good reason why and how it was implemented initially, but you do you bros.

explain it then

[Luno]

I'm open to explanations on why either of these would somehow ruin the entire game, but my personal opinion, Raw Hide! effect should be one of the following:

A) Simply locking all horses within the effect radius to their slowest speed for X amount of time (perhaps scaling from the exact distance.)
-give horses an animation where their head droops down to indicate this status
-can stay one the horse and slowly waddle away, or freely dismount to run normally

B) All horses within the effect radius gain "fear" status which causes them to move away from whoever casted Raw Hide!
-remove anyone on horseback from a PvP fight
-perhaps an option to dismount before the status ends, but it requires a lengthy hourglass or taking damage similar to a Wildhorse throwing you off

Basically, I just think the Raw Hide! should NOT be a "hard CC" because that makes it such an effective "noob trap" to curbstomp people who don't know how it works. I couldn't blame anyone for thinking that they can "safely" converse with a random person because they're on horseback and the stranger is on foot. Just gallop away if they make any hostile moves, right?

B just creates yet another free escape tool, this one even easier than having ur friends waiting on Snekkja. I think A is viable but it's not very different from waht we already have if not from the option to dismount, if anything, it ruins the theme of startling the horse. Why not simply add the option to dismount from what we currently have? Maybe add that stand up animation so that the hearthling is stuck in place a little bit just so it doesn't get used aggressively, u could even maybe make it so that characters without Rage don't have this animation and will instead fall safely on their foot? I don't know.
I guess this would make horses mandatory for those who want to quickly join pvp fights, since they won't be stunned for so long, they are now viable to get there and start fighting. Sounds like an awful idea either way and i would prefer if horses stayed the way they are, lol.

I still think Mrage simply being removed would solve most of the gooder gamer abuse in the game