Is there anything that cannot be abused?

[Nikodemus]

This is not discussion about thieving, unless you want it see in different forum.

[Raleigh]

If Linus did worry too much about how his project could be abused from adding new features, we would never have seen Linux released and developed to the way it is now.

Of course there were some precautions, but they did not involve not improving thing x or not accepting hack y cause they will provoke more bugs. Instead they involved a clear worry on fixing bugs and security flaws correctly, something that was(and is) augmented by the size of the community of developers and contributors to it.

[Vengeance]

Notice in my equation in the previous post, I also mentioned "Game direction cost".  What I meant by that is the "cost" in terms of taking the game in a direction the developers do not intend and don't like.

For example, Talad doesn't really like "/tell" commands because he thinks they are unrealistic--and he wants this to be a very realistic game in certain ways because it makes it more immersive, which is what he is really after.  The contrary position is that "/tell" is an easy feature to implement and incredibly useful to the community, social bonds, friendships and cybering, so it is "worth it" to sacrifice some realism or immersion to put in the feature.

Pickpocketing, OTOH, really is against our philosophy that one player cannot *involuntarily* or *anonymously* do damage to another player.  Zanzibar's idea actually does get around this principle.  By spawning a fresh item, the thief has the sensation of stealing while the "victim" isn't really hurt.  For small enough items, this probably works.  Inevitably though, if we did this, thieves would rapidly demand that their progression was "pointless" unless higher level thieves could steal bigger, more valuable items from players.  The more we allow, the more valuable "something for nothing" becomes until the skill messes up the economy because it is all anyone does.  Could we then nerf it by adding npc guards who constantly monitor and a system of fines, prison terms, etc.?  Yes we could.  <Insert reminder of coding effort in "Cost" equation here.>

These are just examples.  Every feature ever considered basically has this sort of analysis done on it.

[bilbous]

If you were going to go that route it would be better to call it prestidigitation and do away with the whole thieving aspect. I'm not sure how realistic a world without thieves is especially when you have npc's dealing in stolen goods. I think for consistency's sake if you have npc thieves you need to allow pc thieves. In most game I have played which had thieves, quest items could not be stolen, unless monsters dropped them, and thieves had to take one thing at a time. It worked out pretty good once there were storage lockers and banks, you kept important things stowed away and you didn't let anyone stand too close to you.

Of course this thread is not about thieving except incidentally as it was used as an example.