i see no criminals anymore in the game and from resorces am told they are barely around. it just ruins the game if you cant get robbed or assaulted just by logging in thats part of what makes an rp world. constant good vs evil battles if its a small pickpocketing and arrest to a major battle headed by the elemental light and outlaws. not sure if EL is still around. and why in the world is there an npc at kada's? since she left that has been the prime RP spot.
The main problem is that there aren't the resources to be a villian without the good guys agreeing to it. If pickpocketing (takes a random item under a certain size, or trias, possible to spot the person), a low level spell that would keep people from running (If you've heard of Neverwinter Nights, the comparison would be "hold") were available, and full pvp existed (maybe a list of everyone in the area, with a like/dislike ability, and very strict rules about it (such as--MUST have an rp reason, no interaction for 24 real hours unless otherwise agreed upon by both the killer and the killed, a cap on the number that can be killed within a time limit, and a flag for any player that kills another without 'x' lines of dialogue between them in that area within a talking radius, or a tell warning them that they're in for a possible assassination)). There would have to be strict enforcing, and the ban stick would have to be applied liberally for abuse. VERY liberally. However, it would be in the GM's hands as to what was acceptable, and they'd have to come up with a standard to enforce. Petitions would be the main way to report it. Also, we'd need guards that did something while in town.
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On improving rp in general:
Another thing that could be cool is a private rp rating, that gives you a certain amount of exp. per ingame hour, and is set by the GMs when they see you rping well, or decently, and can fluctuate between being high and low (depending on quality of rp--you get less for mindlessly grinding, and more if you're rping beyond a certain level, at the GM's digression within a set group of guidelines). It should give comparable exp. to killing monsters (perhaps monster xp rates should be lowered, as well, to make training harder, and the trias needed lowered (quite a bit) as well--and then make gold harder to mine
Right now, all people need massive amounts of trias for is training, so the only real reason to amass that number of trias is to go on a training binge). Perhaps bounty hunting, as well, would be a good thing to implement (hunting extra strong NPCs for a bounty, that're randomly spawned with a name and then added to some sort of board that says their name, a *description* (for IC recognition purposes only) and they loot what they were using, and their head (captured head, or the like), which a npc will buy for 1000-10000 trias, depending on how difficult the enemy was ("is considered: *danger level* and, if targeted, should be attacked with caution"). Perferably they would be far away from the roads, have some guards, and not move unless attacked, in which case when you attack them, they can run and it would probably take a few (3-5) players of a skill level comparative with the enemy's danger level. Spawning them randomly throughout the map would be good (with exceptions for cities/BD guard area, of course).
In closing, if this is going to be an rp game, the dev team needs to make it HARD to grind. Make it less rewarding to grind then to rp. MUCH less rewarding. Make it so that player's main source of xp is roleplay, the better, the more xp. Make it so that grinding doesn't help you very much (perhaps a "day-endurance" that lowers when you craft something/dig something up, related to the run endurance, that resets every IG day. This would keep people from grinding mining and the like (of course, make it easier to level up trade-skills, because of this). Enforce a level of RP, and use the ban/xp drain/delevel stick liberally on those who obviously metagame (OOC information ICly), godmod (dictate what their actions do, to the determent of others--it's fine if you RP missing, but you can't hit every time, doesn't make sense), or abuse the death realm as a means of transportation. I know, sounds hard for the GM team to do, but it can be done (I've seen this done before in NWN, that's where I'm getting most of these ideas, and with a smaller team of DMs then there are GMs here, from what I know of it. I will admit, the server is capped at 60 players there (what's the average online here? It'd make policing here hard, that much I'll admit. Might need more GMs.), but it almost always is full, or past full (61/60) during daytime (est) hours, and I haven't seen it drop below 20 people (5 in the morning, EST) without a crash or reset).
