Pumping up the danger factor?

[Abemore]

The example 3 status system I mentioned allows players that oh so important stop-annoying-me PK.  But it penalizes those that abuse the privilege of PK.  Sadly, I fear no system will have the elegance you seek.  But by keeping the penalties high for abusers of PK, you keep the people who practice it to a minority.  You have an excellent list of penalties there.  

The example system is good.  A tweak here and there is all that\'s needed to polish it to your liking.

Your hypothetical group of PK\'ers would have to wait an enormous amount of time in game to remove their status, all the while being susceptible to all the penalties you and I mentioned.  It simply would not be worth the trouble to any group of sociopaths.  And if it is, simply increase the penalties and time needed for status to decay.

Some further tweaking, and who knows, maybe elegence will present itself.

Cheers,
-Abe

[derwoodly]

Thieving and Pking are related but have different issues.  Here is my ideas for a system that allowed thieving.

The path of a thief would be a difficult one.  At a skill level of zero your first task would be to seek out a thieves guild.  This could be a difficult task in itself.  Something like a quest.

After pledgeing your life to a thieves guild you would become a thief of skill level 1.  At this level your chance for success would be low, and you could only attempt to steal pocket change ( a few triads or less )

The thieves guild would expect a daily percentage of your booty.  You would have to travel to the guild and pay the guild leader otherwise you would loose your ability to commit crime.

If you make an attempt to steal and do not succeed you will draw agro from the guards and the NPC or person you attempted to steal from.  If you are killed while on the guards hate list.  Then you will respawn in the stockades.  While in the stockades your character will become a NPC that players can attack and gain skill points but you will not be able to move or attack back.  The lenght of the stay will be dependant on the stuff you where trying to steal.  Level one it might be only a hour or two. At high levels it could be days!  

The trick to leveling would be to steal out of town.  When out of town if you fail on attempt to steal and not near any guards the player that you stole from would have to kill you themselves.  Once killed you would spawn in the Stockades of the nearest town.

The key to this is the regular trips to your thieves guild to keep up your status, and the stockades.  I believe that the number of thieves could be controlled by adjusting the chance of success and the amount the thieves guild master would take.

In this system anyclass could be a thief and there would not be and red letters over your head.  And if you failed to steal you could aviod getting caught by running for your life and laying low untill a specified amout of time for the agro to clear.  Guard agro could be only a few minutes while player agro could stay untill the player logged.

To make the stockades fun.  Players could get skill increases for throwing stuff at the thieves.  A NPC could walk by and give the thieves regular floggings as well.

Whew. that is all for now.

[derwoodly]

Humm, my system is not 10 minutes old I have already thought of an exploit.  Oh well.

[Armenelos]

I like Derwoodly\'s idea for thieving, make it so when a thief starts off there is a large percentage due to your guild master and as you get higher ranked it becomes less and less, so that there is a profit in doing this.
But a thief shouldn\'t be able to steal everything, I read someone say that it should only be so many pounds, which I think is a good idea. I mean if you were walking and someone took 10 gold, you might not notice, but if he goes and takes 100 gold, you\'d definatly be feeling a little light. You should also be able to steal gems//potions.
The chance of stealing should be determined by the thief\'s skill and the victim\'s ability to catch them should be maybe high wisdom or intelligence. There definatly shouldn\'t be a little icon that pops up, because that will lead to the thief always becoming caught.
If the thief is caught he should have some chance to get away, a one hit KO wouldn\'t give him a chance. If the thief is caught putting him in the stockade for a few hours or days would be a good punishment. and when he gets out maybe his reputation would go down so much like in Baldurs Gate II. Eventually if your rep was bad enough guards would chase you and try to bring you in or kill you. NPC\'s would attack you and merchants would raise prices.
The Stockade is a good idea but not the whole getting skills by abusing the thieves. Then ppl would just hang out at the stockades and get there skills up.
 
I have a feeling a messed up in here somewhere but I can\'t think of it.

There is always going to be someone who doesn\'t like something, you can\'t please everyone no matter how hard you try. The Devs should choose something, let us try it out, and then work on it from there.

[Kuiper7986]

Originally posted by Cyrioch
No level restrictions, very few safe spots. No exp for killing, cause you want someone dead for some intention (material gain, territorial claims).

No level restrictions? Person who has the potential to die the first time he\'s playing? That would suck for the people who are new to the game.

Very few safe spots? It should be very few un-safe spots. If there were very few safe spots you couldn\'t go anywhere, you\'d most likely be killed by a griefer pk\'er.

No exp for killing, cause you want someone dead for some intention. How are you going to get the guy you want to kill to the unsafe zone? If he knows your going to kill him, why would he go to an unsafe zone.

I\'m not flaming you, I\'m just directly replying to your opinions.

[tallimar]

the whole stockades idea wouldnt work out too well.  first of all it takes away from the player\'s game time just having to sit in a cell or chained down, thusly decreasing the games overall funfactor(as referred to in some mags).  secondly a player could simply just log on as the imprisoned char and go to work or eat dinner or something and it would defeat the purpose of being in there in the first place, even if a min inactive port timer was setup, ive seen the multiple inactive port timers fooled endlessly on UO.

paxx, i like your anti-pk ideas!

[Armenelos]

Tallimar if your trying to cut down on the amount of PVP, Thieving, Killing then why would you make a punishment fun?? The stockades are suppose to be a punishment for something bad you did.

[tallimar]

just having players standing around in a cell for X amount of time would take up valuable bandwidth from the players that are following the rules.  it would just be better all around to ban the account/ip/whatever for however long the punishment should last.

[Armenelos]

hmm good point. I\'d have to say the account though.. cause people can just change their Ip address can\'t they?

[FunGun]

Ive read through most of this posts and saw the general problem of ppl having many different accounts. But what would be if u couldnt exchange things from one char to another. If there would only be one IP allowed per user than noone could trade his stolen/gained through pk goods. This way a player simply couldnt benefit of his temp char and one of the main problems woulda been solved.
Only people who can have more than one Ip or play with a friend could do such things. Furthermore I would  delete every item dropped in the world by a specific player as soon as he disconnects.

Imo looting dead bodies isnt too bad, but there should be a timed restriction in which only the char(and maybe his party) who died can see his items/the whole body. This restriction could be set to 10 minutes, so if u r not into deep in a dungeon ur stuff wont be looted, and if you should be that deep in a dungeon ur char is surely pretty strong and there arent as many people running around in that part of the dungeon!

I really appreciate the idea of a thief guild. You could even steal some ideas from Terry Prattchets Discworld where thiefs have to pay a certain amount of money to their guild to be allowed to steel stuff. Furthermore they are only allowed to steal like 10 things or something in a months. This could be done with a credit system. You have 10 credits in a month when u begin and get a bit more when ur status in the guild has arosen. Different Items are worth a different amount of Credits, if u steal too much you get punished by degrading of ur status, loosing a whole bunch of money and having to give back the stolen stuff.

But this way there would be quite many thiefs, this could be changed by increasing the monthly(whatever) fee that is needed to be in the guild, this way only already richer players could get into it and the thief guild would be kinda \"noble\".

If you dont pay ur monthly fee you get thrown out of the guild and if the guild gets to know that someone without the guild license steals, the person will be punished in some evil way that is...well whatever cant think anymore way too late T.T.

If I wrote something that was already mentioned sorry if not, im pretty lucky huh?

[Armenelos]

The whole thief guild idea is a good one make it so you have to do go to the guild right away upon making you character so you don\'t have people with good stats doing the same challenges and kicking their butts as people with low stats. Then you have to find the guild, make it somewhat of a challenge so you can knock off some of the pesky people, then when they finally get into the guild and find the guild master they have to steal something from a certain NPC, this would also be somewhat of a challenge but not that much since you are just starting out. After you\'ve accomplished these tasks then you are accepted into the thief guild but you start at the lowest rank. At the lowest rank you have to give so much of what you have stolen to the guild and after stealing from will say about 20-30 people you move up to the next level in the ranks. At the next level you owe your guild a little bit less of your earnings but it is now harder to attain the next rank.

Now stealing from PC\'s and NPC\'s is allowed but you do not exactly steal the item you more or less steal a shadow of an item or a tag and you can bring these tags//shadows to your guild and recieve money for them. There is no stealing of large or heavy objects, anything bigger then a dagger for weapons is to big other things use common sense on what is to big, no stealing armor, no stealing large amounts of money, gems, rings, glyphs, whatever those little things are. At the most you can only take 50 tria or so about 3 or 4 gems maybe, a ring or two, a few glyhps. Mind you this amount you are stealing is per attempt, their should also be a maximum attempt for stealing from each player maybe twice at the most per day, possibly week. And remember you are not exactly stealing these items but rather shadows or a tag for this item, so the PC\'s//NPC\'s still have these items. So their should be no grief. Thieves can only steal from people who are standing still or walking, not while the PC//NPC is running or is fighting and such. The degree of getting caught depends on certain stats, the higher the intelligence//wisdom//dexterity of the thief the better chance of getting away with stealing, the higher the intelligence//wisdom of the PC//NPC is the chance of catching the thief. If the thief fails and is caught he can run away and the PC//NPC has the option of chasing down the thief but what\'s the point? It\'s not like you lost anything. If the thief is caught they are taken to a jail where they are stuck for so many hours. You can accomplish this by banning that character for the select amount of hours. The accounts are not banned because you truly haven\'t hurt anybody with this system.

You can break into stores//houses and steal stuff from the owners but remember its only a shadow. Oh yeah and this shadow can only be redeemed at the thief guild and it only can be redeemed for money, you don\'t get the things you steal, just their worth. Which can be used to buy other things!!!!! How wonderful!!!

Now you can make the amount of thieves smaller by making the amount they must give the guild a large percentage but not too large since you don\'t want to discourage even the hardcore theives. Maybe put a restraint on how many people can join the thief guild per month, say 100? well the devs choose, something that goes with the number of players playing. Make the option to pickpocket only available to those who have gone to the theif guildmaster and accomplished the task.

Now I think I covered everything, if I see anything else I\'ll post it. I\'ve stolen some ideas from other people but whatever. It\'s something to look at and work with if people want, there doesn\'t seem to be any grief in how I see it, but like I said maybe I missed something. This is just a rough idea so far, I think I will come back and look further into it later on and have some new ideas.
There is no looting of corpses in any of this so all of those people don\'t worry about that. There is no stealing of large amounts of things, no stealing large things at all. And hell not really stealing at all, just shadows or tags, so their should really be no complaints on that end.

[dfryer]

That is a very interesting idea.  The economic implications need to be carefully considered, i.e. it should be balanced so that people can\'t get too rich too fast.  Also necessary to prevent exploits like one player getting a whole stack of valuable items, and then letting his friends steal them repeatedly.

[Darkblade]

Maybe you don\'t get their entire worth, only a part, like 1/3 or 1/4. That would slow down people getting rich fast.

But with the situation dfryer mentioned, it becomes harder. I suppose that you can only steal from a certain character a certain amount of times a week or month. Which theif would go back to the same person again and again?

[derwoodly]

I would like to refine how I think a stockade could work.  I envisioned catching a thief and killing a thief as very similar.  To \"catch\" the thief you would wack\'em untill their health was zero.  At this point in time you would be given some options on dealing with the thief.

A window could popup like the \"trade with player\" windows in other MMORPG\'s.   It might look like this

----------
Zales Fivefingers has stolen your money bag!
You hit Zales Fivefingers for 100 points!
You have subduded Zales Fivefingers.

.........................................................................
:  O-- loot items, release thief                          :
:  O-- loot items. kill thief                                  :
:  O-- loot items, drag body to stockades         :
..........................................................................

Sending someone to the stockades would require you to drag there unconcious body back to the city guards.  

Someone is sure to say \" I will just log off!\"  To combat this I would have your character stay in game, even if you were not online, and yes your hole stockade time could be over and done with by the time you log back on.  But your character would prety much striped of all his stuff.

This sounds like a lot of hasle and most people would just kill the thief.  Some might try to leave the thief in limbo by not answering the question, in that case a one minute timer would expire and the kill option would be the defalt.

[Black_rose]

Originally posted by paxx
In short, people are thinking of the lone Pker?I am thinking of legions of them coming to this game and playing it in mass?and while they are at first a minority, they become the majority cause it will be PK or die anyway. If we allow certain actions, it is as if we encourage it. In fact it is that way.

If we see some type of exploit we will remove it, if we see an error or some incredible advantage to certain races, we will correct it?.this is the same in most MMORPGs and I don?t think is different here.

-Paxx

dude your acting like a klan member acts with african historied people


ok..... whats your chant? noob power?