Stealing/Theft/Hiding/Stealth

I know everyone likes to cry about losing their items... but there really should be stealing for the game to be immersive.

This needs to be a PVP topic because stealing when an NPC turns around or walks out of the room is boring, and if someone steals from me I would want the opportunity to kill them.

As for hiding and stealth, I'm not really sure how I would want it to work yet. Obviously, in the heat of battle you shouldn't be able to hide without some item or spell to create a distraction or make you vanish. Unlimited stealthing for only certain classes of characters (like WoW) doesn't appeal to me.

Hiding in plain sight (like UO and WoW) is less realistic if it's just a skill though. Maybe there could be an aspect of the skill that lets you evaluate your surroundings when you try to hide... If you're in an open field it could fail and say, "Your surroundings are unsuitable for hiding right now." Then if you're in a cave or a busy city you might be able to with the message, "You slip into the shadows and are hidden," or "You disappear into the crowd."

For stealthing (moving while hidden) I liked how you had to be hidden first in UO. Then your surroundings, skill, armor, and bag weight could be factors that affect the distance you can stealth.

This may be getting off-topic, but I'm thinking about locked boxes as well. We used to hide outside people's houses and run in when they opened the door so that we could go in and loot the house. I doubt that we will be able to go that far with it in SotA, but if there were locked boxes to go along with the ability to steal that would give people an oppotunity to secure their items.

 

The best system I've seen proposed yet is one where stealing can only occur in the following ways:

1) You have to be opted into it.
2) Only "special items" of importance can be stolen, not for items of non-importance. By this I mean that there would need to be very powerful items available to players who have opted in. However the downside is that these items can be stolen and therefore they bring lots of risk with them.

The full design can be viewed here:
http://evilgrief.com/2013/08/11/how-to-balance-non-consensual-stealing-mechanics/

 

I hate opting-in systems. 1. You would have to be looking for opted-in players (unless it's grouped with PVP, and that's an opt-in system), or 2. You only get to steal from other people who steal because who would ever consent to being stolen from?

I also hate special reward systems. 1. The items end up useless outside of the field of stealing, 2. The items over-power other items, or 3. The players being stolen from aren't losing anything because the thief is taking something that they didn't have to begin with, and so it's essentially bag fishing.

Like I was talking about in a separate PVP thread, if there are guarded areas or safe zones then people who don't want to participate don't have to. Similar to the hiding in plain sight thing, thieves could get a message like "You can't do that right now. There are too many eyes on you." The other option would be to allow the theft, and the thief risks being caught, killed, and having their corpse lootable (+other penalties, like UO).

It's much better to penalize the thief for taking the risk (and even make stealing very difficult to do) like real life than to kill the entire thing with a system no one at all wants to participate in.

 

I disagree. You're assuming that thieves are something that needs to be in the game. They're not. In fact, I'm not really aware of ANY game that supports thieves as you describe. Name one game with a respectable number of subscribers that has non-consenual stealing in it, just one. I don't think it exists at all.

So your theory is fatally flawed becuase no one is going to play that game. The link I provided explains why that is, but the summarized version is that there's no incentive to have sneaky thief guy take your stuff. It's only fun for the guy doing the stealing.

To combat that FACT, people like you and I need to be very creative and think of ways that people could accept stealing as a legitimate mechanic that adds value to the game without annoyingly destroying it in the process. Your stated solution does the oppossite of that.

The reason that "special" items of power would be important is that it gives players the ability to steal something of value. At the same time, these items would be RARE and so the average players wouldn't have one in the first place, even if they opted into the system. If they opted out of the system they wouldn't get to keep the item. So there you have it, a system where there's something worth stealing without making the people that have no interest in dealing with it have to be a part of it.

 

These particular subjects have been covered in several other threads, but no matter what the player conflict mechanic is, as long as it's consensual, game on.

 

The problems I have with trying to give a game "realistic" and "immersive" theft mechanics are the same as the problems I have with "realistic" and "immersive" OPO PvP. REALISTICALLY, if I cought you stealing from me in the town square, I'd not ONLY beat the crap out of you (assuming I could), but I'd publicize your status. That's the FIRST time you get caught. The community would react to you like all communities do, punishment, loss of social standing, imprisonment, ostracism, etc.

But, see, knowing that we are all immortal and come back from death and all, if you kept doing it, and we kept catching you, the REALISTIC way of dealing with it would be to arrange a prison that you rezzed inside of. Some magic or another would be found, if it isn't blatantly obvious (for all we know graveyard or corpse camping will work in SOTA, so problem solved) and once you got caught too many times and conviced us that you weren't gonna reform, you would spend the rest of eternity chained down spread eagle, starving to death in a magic blocking hole in the ground, and then rezzing back into your dessicated body. Because no society is willing to tolerate a career repeat offender.

What's unrealistic ISN'T your ability to steal, or what you might steal. What is unrealistic, and unnacceptably so, is the idea that I wouldn't cheerfully mount your head on my wall, and that the entire rest of Brittania would ever ever ever forgive you. Get caught once or even twice, maybe, but people PLAYING THIEVES will get caught many many times, and anyone paying attention will quickly comprehend that they are not going to reform. Your name and face would get passed around, you would be forever a wanted man, and against an entire nation, especially with magic powers, with large numbers of motivated and inventive hunters, you would get caught. At which point you wind up in the hole.

I would accept a system of player theft that kept it minor and petty, so that even after catching you a hundred times, I was satisfied with seeing you beaten by a guard and thrown out of town. In that case, I would REALISTICALLY move on and forget about it, thus becoming a future potential victim once again. If however, any significant stealing was going on, if I was losing large gear items, or difficult to replace/expensive stuff, the only thing that would be realistic for ME at that point would be you experiencing a form of permaban. I just don't think that's a viable way to run the system. I don't think it would be fun.

 

IMHO any kind of thieving system needs to be opt-in only.

But, if there is both thieving and player looting, both should be controlled by the same opt-in. After all, if someone steals from another player, the victim should have the option to go kill the thief and get all his things back. And, by the same token, thieves get the chance to steal from someone that has looted them earlier.

 

I suppose this would be one way to take a huge break from Ultima lore in a very unexpected direction. Instead of a paragon of virtue confronted by moral dilemmas, you're a common thief sneaking around in the shadows stealing from people. I've got nothing against putting in the temptation to pocket something which isn't yours or not return recovered items. But I don't know why you'd go any farther than that.

 

The virtues become unimportant if you force every player to be on the good side of things. You need evil players in an RPG and the ones in between, of course. If there is no possibility to be evil, it would be a huge flaw in the game design, and certainly not the ultimate rpg...

 

Dayz? The standalone is not released yet, but this game was particularly popular for the reason that it is an open sandbox and it has player stealing and player full loot possible.

Anyway I hope that when the dev team refers to "consensual/opt-in PVP/Stealing" it means that, when you're set to be online with others this is the consensual part. If not interested you can set it to play with your friends or play alone.

 

DayZ is an unusual example in that, as far as I know, the players themselves created the servers; the only thing hosted by the mod creators was the character database (and mod download, of course). So, for all purposes, players were able to play alone, or just with friends, which means that the PvP, stealing, and looting parts were effectively optional.

On top of that it's a permadeath game with very low life expectancy for most characters, meaning that losing anything is equivalent to losing only a few hours of "progression" at worst, and typically less than an hour of "progression".

As for SotA, the current idea seems to be that players can choose between PvP and PvE for all game modes, including the pseudo-MMO (OPO) mode; the devs intent seems to be that everyone, including players that dislike PvP, should get the opportunity to meet with other players they don't yet know (which I completely agree with, BTW).

 

Whats wrong with the original thiefing mechanics from UO?

- If you want to steal you have to join the thief guild.
- If you are a member of the thief guild you can not give murder counts.
- If you steal from someone you will be flagged perma grey to this person.

+ There where a lot of anti theft strategies that was working pretty well. For example putting a dozen cloth parts to your bag, to cover your stuff ...

 

In addition to the original UO stuff cited by robatzen, the "prison" was an ever-increasing inability to resurrect. If you die within a certain period of time after having stolen, you are unable to resurrect. It's just like WoW does for all deaths (which is very, very annoying when being camped by a higher level player), but it only applies to people who have been caught or killed shortly after stealing.

 

Or keeping stuff in your bank that you didn't want stolen... or in your house... or in a locked box within your bag... (edit or watching your surroundings while you have something of value on you...

 

I don't see how it's a break from the Ultima lore. Ultima Online had the stealing system I'm suggesting, and an even deeper reputation system that took into account your good and your bad acts so that you didn't progress on the path of virtue while your true intent was to steal, murder, and amass wealth at all costs.

 

I wonder how will be stealth made in SotA. Is it gonna be vanishing in plain sight? Or do we have to stay in bushes/behind objects/out of sight of someone/behind them to avoid getting spotted?

Is revealing going to be selective? Like, I spot a stealther and now he is visible to me, but my buddy still doesn not see him because the stealther is behind his back?

 

I'm with you on this... Even though the theft thing is a much touchier subject, stealth is more likely to be a major game-changer for most people.

 

My questions concerning theft are many. Here are a few:

Why should I work my butt off collecting and fighting for hours only to have some thief come steal my stuff. A few hours for me and a few seconds for them.... Not really balanced.

Why is death the go to/assumed punishment for being caught stealing? Seems kind of harsh in a realistic sense, but in the game it's no big deal. Rez and return. Punishments need to be put in place if a thief is caught and I personally don't believe that other players should be enforcing the punishments.

Why does everyone assume that PvE theft has to be boring? There are entire games devoted to it. It could be great if attention was paid to it. Should include not just pick pocketing but also burglary.

Why does a criminal record get wiped on death? Don't the guards keep records? Once a criminal (in a specific town), always a criminal. That being said, there should be some way for a player to change his appearance magically in order to avoid some of this. It should be expensive and single use, but it should be available.

I don't believe that people who want to live the infamous life really want to suffer the consequences for their decisions....

Edit: Oops forgot the dungeon crawling thief who finds and disarms traps and locks. That is hugely fun too!

 

It really isn't hours of hard work being taken away in an instant. To be a good thief, you have to choose your targets wisely, be standing right on top of an unsuspecting victim, snoop around in their bag for something of value (takes time while standing on top of someone), and your skill level determines the size/type of item that you can steal (and even at max level, still with a limit).

Say a gold coin weighs a value of 1, and requires 1 skill pt to steal, 50 coins weighs 50, but requires 100 skill to steal because of the complexity of stealing 50 coins at one time... or you want to steal a large battle axe: that would obviously take a high level of skill because it is a large object, probably heavy, and your chances of being caught are very high.

In UO, you would call for the guards or any NPC's in sight would call them for you. Guards instantly killed the thief. You then had to run to find a place to get resurrected (after a period of time elapsed for your criminal flag to go away, which is like a time-out). The wait for resurrection was always more like jail than death because no good thief would carry anything of value on themselves.

I like the idea of being kicked out of a town for theft... it really increases the risk factor, and therefore the fun.

Disguises eventually came about in UO, but they gave you random NPC names and looks, so smart players could still spot you and kill you if they wanted to.

Dungeon crawling lockpicks aren't thieves. Just because you can pick a lock doesn't mean you are a thief. I know that traditionally the two skills are related or required grouped, but anyone should be able to pick locks with practice.

 

Wow! How'd you get the inside scoop on how stealing was going to work in SotA? I haven't seen anything official as of yet.... Looks more like you are expecting the same system as in UO, but I am expecting something, I don't know... Good.

Traditionally, it was indeed thieves who delved into dungeons to pick locks and disable traps. Been this way since Tolkien first introduced Bilbo the Burglar and it's been carried on in the genre since that time. Thief is a convenient term isn't it? I mean realistically a warrior who waylays and loots travelers is a thief, right?