FS#1809 - Guarding system unrealistic, interferes with RP
When items are dropped, they are magically protected from being picked up by others, even when that is desired.
Case in point: one character sets a table with a delicious meal, and people sit down to eat. They can’t take any of the food items. RP is interfered with. One must leave the table and walk across the room before someone can take their food. Repeat every time they want a new item, or have them pick everything up and drop it again. Painfully interfering and unrealistic.
Even if you leave the table and go for a run across the city, to another map, then come back – still guarded. You can reload PlaneShift, still guarded.
Solution: /unguard
Either the item that is selected, or if no item is selected, unguard all items marked as owned by your character.
Also please make guarding optional.
I for one do not want guarding on by default. It is unrealistic and interferes constantly with RP. The only time I would want guarding enabled is when my character is merely “showing” an item to someone, but still holding on to it in ICly (e.g. setting it on a table OOCly for people to see).
Think I’ll add a feature request for “show item to person/people”, as the trade window is confusing for that purpose, and doesn’t work anymore now that books and maps are not viewable in the trade window.
23.03.2009 16:12
Reason for closing:
Additional comments about closing:
Weltalls implementation works.
Making new.
Just a thought, but since guarding is necessary to prevent theft issues, what might be workable is a /disown command of targetted item. Guarding is a proximity thing for anything that is owned by you. If a /disown command would clear the ownership of the item (making sure the one issuing the command is the current owner) then guarding should no longer apply to that item. Extension of this would be /disown area:nn which would clear ownership of all owned items within nn meters of you.
Bovek, from my original posting:
:)
The name of the command is semantics. I suggested /disown because it would more clearly describe what is actually happening in the database / on the server to create the effect you want. Guarding is based on who the Owner is, and their proximity to the item at a given moment to allow (or not) an action such as pickup on an object. I believe it's calculated constantly, not stored in the database for all items. To relinquish ownership (DisOwn) would have the effect of making the item public, thus guarding wouldn't apply. Same for /disown area:nn to clear the owner of everything in that range. Example you set out dinner for twelve, then put in '/disown area:5' and everything within 5 meters of you that you own would have ownership cleared, making all those items public and thus unguarded.
To make guarding optional on a per-character basis, would be more difficult, in that changes to the client GUI would be necessary, along with a new flag in the database for it, and the code to check for the flag and clear ownership of an object when dropped so that guarding wouldn't apply. I dunno if/when you'll get this part, but the other part above would be easier at least in the short term I think.
I'm sure the devs will chime in on what can be done.
Edited for clarity and typos.
assigning to me as I'm implementing this after rizin request.
Please leave guarding on by default though, as opposed to what's suggested in this report. Turning it off by default would take away the point of the whole system. A /disown or /unguard or whatever would be nice though :)
sure default will stay as guarded, maybe in the future an option to set a default, but this will be later
some revisions ago the drop command was expanded to support specifying noguard in case you didn't want to guard, additionally now there is a /guard target [on|off] in r2448 which allows to unguard an item guarded by you (and for gm+ to guard/unguard any item)
Related to this is that developers/gms should have the ability to set the "guarded by" option so for example all Grok Idons goods and chattels are not guarded by bovek pelequin as they are currently.
Can NPCs be guardians with the current system? If not perhaps some kind of "guardian alias" could be used, so the name of the actual guardian in the system becomes replaced with an NPC name or an institution like "Yliakum Government", "Hydlaa Library".
I imagined Guarding a dropped item would eventually develop into a PvP challenge.
Player2 attempts to pickup guarded item of Player1.
Player1 gets notified and given a choice:
1 - Ignore = Player2 picks up item unchallenged & unwarned about guarding
2 - Defend = Player2 sees Player1 step over and guard item
Player2 would then have to duel Player1 for the item.
just an idea that came to mind when I saw guarded items on the ground.
I guess that's up to the players to roleplay themselves, not everything has to be enforced within the game :)
i disagree with KiltJoy it would cause PLed player take all stuff and easy kill others..
guarding of items for npcs has been moved to a seperate request
bug 2576