Ability to hunt/track other players.

So I've spoken about these concepts in a number of other threads, but figured it'd be easier to follow if I stuffed them all into this thread.

So while I don't completely hate PKing, I do want death to actually suck, so I don't want to be PK'd every 3 minutes with no repurcussions. I think the best way to handle this would be to create a "bounty hunter" system, as well as a series of "assassin" skills.

Here's the basic premise:

Footprints: All player movement will create "footprints" that get stored on the server. These "footprints" will be stored as a small node in the database, every 1 second while a player is moving, and will last for a maximum of 30 minutes. This equates to 1800 nodes per player. They will contain rough directional information (which direction the player was facing) stored as a single byte (so 255 degrees of resolution) as well as location information, and a timestamp. I figure if location is 3 64bit integers, and the timestamp is also a 64bit, and you include the UserID as an integer, this still equates to well under 50 bytes of data per node. So even a user that is on the move non-stop would generate a maximum of around 88kb of "footprint" data in a database, which should be quite doable. Players not moving generate no data, and the only "reads" from the dataset will come when hunters turn on their "track humans" which not a huge amount will be doing simultaneously. So from a technology perspective, it should be doable.

Bounties: Under the condition where player A started a fight without first getting permission to duel, and player B died from that fight, player B will get the option to place a "bounty" on player A. When the window pops up, it will show the contents of their bank account, and they can place either cash, or items as a bounty. A bounty will last for 24 hours (or more if they pay more?) real-time. If the bounty is not collected, the items are returned to the player (in the form of a letter in their mailbox that will eventually expire to prevent this system being used to store extra items). Once the bounty is created, it is immedately added to a "bounty board" in the nearest town. Multiple bounty hunters may accept the bounty, but only the first to turn in the ear of the bounty at the bounty board will collect the bounty. At the time that the bounty is collected, player B will receive a letter telling them that on this day, a bounty for X player was collected against the assassin that murdered them by X bounty hunter. They will receive a frameable letter that can be hung in their house. The bounty hunter themselves will receive a similar certificate. Multiple certificates can be bound into a "book" to keep a record.


Implementation:

First, a series of new skills for both those that enjoy a good PK session, and the bounty hunters that want to go after them.​

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For the "Assassin", add the following skills:​

* Tread Lightly (passive) - This skill reduces the length of time that your footprints will remain visible or "trackable" by bounty hunters. The higher the skill level, your footprints will disappear x% faster. By default, footprints will last half an hour.​

* Cover Your Tracks (must activate) - This skill you must activate in order to use, and deactivate to turn it off. Your character moves exceedingly slow while this is triggered, and perhaps an animation is shown to illustrate that you're covering your tracks as you move. While active, the player leaves no tracks behind them at all, but moves so slow that they will not get far moving like this. At higher levels, you could move slightly faster, but still only a fraction of normal speed.​

* Assassin's Stealth (must activate) - Same as originial UO "hide" skill. You can simply disappear, so long as you don't move. At higher levels, you will be able to move while hidden, and at even higher levels, you will be able to attack while hidden and remain hidden so long as that attack resulted in an instant kill. Attacks while hidden are double-damage, maybe triple in higher levels.​

* Assasin's Perception (passive / must activate) - This skill will notify you when a new bounty hunter has picked up a bounty for you, or abandons it. At low levels, it will simply tell you that you're being hunted. As levels go up, you can trigger it to tell you how many people are hunting you, then at higher levels it will name names. At the highest level, it will tell you how close the nearest hunter is to you, and even higher, which direction they're coming from.​

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For the "Bounty Hunter," add the following skills:​

* Bounty Hunter (passive) - This skill does nothing more than allow you to collect bounties. You "practice" the skill by turning in the ears of bounties. To start, you can only grab a single bounty, and then hunt down that one person, and turn it in. At higher levels, you can carry more bounties at a time. At the highest levels, you can even get notifications when new bounties pop up on the bounty board (at higher levels, what the price of that bounty is), and finally, at the highest levels, you can purchase a "Bounty Hunter's Rune" to retrieve new bounties from the board without having to physically go to it.​

* Track Humans (must activate) - Toggle this skill on and off to see footprints. At low levels, the footprints will need to be very "fresh" for you to be able to see them, and they'll fade rapidly once they're "old". At higher levels, they'll fade more slowly. At higher levels, you'll be able to select a specific footprint "trail" and "lock on" to it. (It'll show as a different color). Any time the Assassin used "Cover Your Tracks" though, the "lock on" will fail. At much higher levels, the "lock on" will no longer fail, so a specific trail can be easily followed through a city. At very high levels, mousing-over the trail will bring up a popup telling you varying details about the player: Sex of the player, armor they were wearing, and eventually, actual name. At the absolute highest levels, you'll even be able to tell how long ago the track was made.​

* Forensic Investigator (must activate) - If used at the site of a murder, the player can find various details about the murder that took place. More information becomes available at the higher levels. First, it can tell you weather "someone was murdered" or "someone lost a duel." At later levels, it tells you WHO was murdered, and eventually, by whom. At even higher levels, you can collect "clues" from the scene (samples such as a fingernail, tuft of hair, or piece of cloth - to be used in conjunction with the next skill). At the highest levels, you can quickly identify who those items belong to by simply mousing-over them.​

* Scrying (must activate) - By using an item that previously "belonged" to a person (the before mentioned tuft of hair, fingernail, cloth) the hunter can now find out approximately where that person is. At the lowest levels, you can only use this ability if you're at a location that the target used magic to escape from. So going to a moongate where the target ported away, you can scry the item to see that "Person went to one of these three cities", with the number of cities lessened at higher levels. If the person used a rune to port away, scrying at that location will tell you an approximate area that they would have ported to, dialing in closer as your levels go up. At the absolute highest level, scrying the item from anywhere in the world will tell you if the player is currently online, and a very broad and generic location of where he can be found. (Bearing in mind that the bounty has a time-frame on it, so it's time sensitive that you find the PK).​

I believe this system will accomplish the following:

1.) No more camping a body and repeatedly killing them. With this system, since the bounty goes up on the bounty boards immediately, bounty hunters watching those boards would get your "distress" call on the first time you're ganked. The PK generally won't know the size of the bounty you've just placed on him, so he better haul tail or he could find himself swarmed by bounty hunters within minutes.​

2.) No more PKing just for the sake of PKing. If being a PK puts you on the run (which it should), you'll think twice before ganking an innocent person knowing that it'll stop the flow of whatever you're working on today. Are you ready for the cat and mouse game, or do you have better things to do?​

3.) You have now made PKing more immersive and realistic, and actually FUN. A game of cat and mouse where as the PK, you're on the run trying to outwit your hunters... Or perhaps even draw them into a trap to kill them yourself.​

4.) With this system, those who WISH to focus on the PK part of the game (PKs themselves, and bounty hunters) are now drawn to each other, and drawn away from the innocent players who like the "danger" of a PvP world, but might prefer to just tend their gardens.​

5.) The "self policing" nature of this design has created an entirely new take on the PKing of players in the game. It not only becomes something that takes more skill than, "My gun is bigger than your gun, har har" but actually increases the immersiveness of a game where PKing will be seen as the societal taboo that it should have.​

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This could also be extended to "theft". By adding a simple "property" tag to items, stealing something could also flag you as a thief with similar repurcussions. So if an item is in my house, clearly it belongs to the owner of the house. Stealing it gets you flagged. But if I drop an item on the ground, the "property" flag goes away (after a short time). Same holds true for any item in my inventory. A thief stealing something out of my bag (if caught) could have a bounty placed on him by the victim. Perhaps even if the thief is caught, he still gets away with the item he stole? (Purse snatchers get away all the time.) There's lots that could be done with a system like this.

Further expansions:

Implement with Pets: If the pets themselves have their own skill trees, train a pet to "Track Humans" as well. However, their skill will be that when you click on an area that footprints have recently disappeared from, they will "sniff" that area, and if the person you're tracking is within the radius, they will make a bee-line for them. If the person is not nearby, they will find the newest "visible" track within a certain radius that was made by the same person, and make a bee-line for that. The radius will expand as the animal becomes more skilled.​

Notes:

If this were implemented, I believe a lot of fun could be had by both sides with it. Imagine as an assassin, (since footprints are directional) walking backwards over your tracks to create multiple false "paths" that the hunters would have to go down to find you. Running through rivers (where tracks will disappear far more rapidly, or all together if you swim) and diving into forests that you've previously cleared out, but timed it so mobs will spawn behind you. Or having your guild waiting in ambush in a valley as you bring a posse of bounty hunters into the trap.​

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Again, with this system, you've now brought together those PvP players that WANT to PvP in a natural, immersive way. You've also allowed those players like myself who may not wish to be doing the PvP thing today to play my game with a slight risk of being PvP'd, but without the ridiculous gankfest that WoW PvP servers have become.​

Thoughts?

Edit: One note for the devs should anything like this ever decide to be implemented: When the players kill a character that they're holding the bounty for, the "ear" of that player should be "bound" to that bounty chit. If you have the system only check and say, "Well, you have a bounty for Steve, and you have an ear that belongs to Steve, so here's your reward" then the system can be easily "gamed." All I'd have to do is create a new character on an alternate account, have my "bounty hunter" kill him a few thousand times, collect all my ears, then retire for a bit. Once my assassin is worked up, I run around ganking all over town, and when the hunters start closing in, I log out. Now I log back in with the bounty hunter, and collect all the bounties with the ears I'd taken when my assassin was a newbie. There would have to be a mechanic where the bounty chit would have to be held in the inventory at the time of the kill for it to be considered legit. Perhaps an invisible token gets dropped in the inventory that says, "Player A killed Player B on this date." Then when you go to turn in the bounties, it's actually that token that it's looking for, and so long as your chit is "older" than the invisible token, the token and chit are used to "cash in". Something along those lines, I'd think.

Edit #2: Um, yeah, thought about it again, and it'd be way easier to prevent the above than I first thought. Just timestamp when the actual bounty chit object in the inventory is created, and timestamp when the ear object is created. If ear is older than chit, all is good.

 

Just to add something. The bounty system in UO worked only because there was a statt loss for PKs.
Now IM NOT entirely sure about this one because I don't remember how huge was the statloss for people with a ton of murders, was it bigger than for people with 5 murder counts or not.

For example, if Gotto Killnoobs has murdered 40 people over the past two weeks, the bounty on him is huge - 200,000 gp. Now, Gotto's friend, Aylak Griffin could just kill him, turn in his head to the guards and collect the bounty then split between them BUT. 40 kills meant that Gotto would have to either ress with a huge skill and stat loss and spend a ton of time and money raising his skills back to GM, or wait as a ghost for approximately 300 hours until he can ress safely.

 

Genius. I'm pretty sure input like this is why LB & Co. put SotA on a Kickstarter with forums DURING development.

 

Of course not all animals should make good trackers. Dogs are okay, but a huge lizard or a bird should not be the best idea for tracking anything.

 

The way I see it is that your stat loss would be a flat percentage when you die. I believe in UO it's a random number of skill points (1-3) lost randomly. (Don't quote me.) So if Gotto has murdered 40 people over the past, say, 2 days, he may have 40 separate bounties and 200 different bounty hunters after him. If he's not any good at hiding, he may get killed 200 times and lose 400 skill points, but only the first 40 bounties to be turned in get the goods.

Once a bounty is turned in, all bounty hunters carrying that bounty should get notified, and they'll call off the hunt, but that's not to say he won't get ganked a few times before the first hunter makes it back to a bounty board. So even if his buddy is there to kill him all 40 times and collect the reward, he's still got the risk of hunters finding him in the meantime, and he's still going to lose a good chunk of experience when his buddy kills him. (And if bounty hunters see this going on, what's to say they won't gank his buddy, too, and just run the risk of getting a bounty on themselves?) Unless the bounties on his head are phenominal, his best and safest option is to haul-ass and stay on the run until the bounties expire, at least for as long as his "Assassin's Perception" is telling him he's being actively hunted.

 

Agreed. I'd think if the animals have skill sets, they'd also have certain traits. For instance, certain animals will be much better in combat, but poor in tracking. Others will be good in tracking, but poor in "finding items". Some could "find items" (search randomly bring back a potion or something) and suck at something else. With no idea what they're doing with pets, we could speculate quite a bit on how to set up the animal skillsets, too.

 

..but why 40 separate bounties? WHy not one huge bounty? 40 bounties do not make much sense.
Some people might donate 40 gp to the cause, others - 10,000. Do I get 40 gold if I collect the bounty?
And the other guy gets 10,000?

 

Like..i search a patch of grass and...like..find a potion in there? Or a sword?

 

Mostly for precisely the reason you listed above. It would be insanely easy to abuse a system where a single kill nets the whole lot. A PK would run around ganking lowbies all over the place, racking up his bounty, and just as a bounty hunter is closing in on him, have a buddy gank him. Then he'd just stay dead in "ghost" form until his buddy turns in the bounty, and boom, they've now gamed the system horribly, and bounty hunters would quit even bothering to play. Not to mention that this does complicate the actual bounty system itself slightly.

As it is, there wouldn't be a matter of people "donating to the cause." The only person placing bounties would be the person killed. Now, perhaps that person could have the option of going to a bounty board themselves and increasing the bounty, so if they only had 4g in their account when they're killed, they could submit a 4g bounty. Then their guild pitches in, and gives them 10Kg for the bounty. That person now takes that 10K g and goes to a bounty board, and ups his bounty. Not only that, but there's not going to be a huge number of PK's on any one specific server. (Keep in mind that in its hayday, UO didn't have more than a few hundred people logged on to the same server at any one time.) Keeping things separated also gives the bounty hunters more targets to go after. (But mostly, it really cuts down on the abuse of the system).

Kinda, yes. I forget which game I was playing (Torchlight maybe?) where you had a pet and you could tell them, "go find something." And your pet would run off for a bit, then come back with some random item it'd found. You could do something similar with pets in this game as one of those little semi-mini-game type skills. Send your pet off to find something (during which time, you don't have them there to protect you) and after awhile, they'd come back with some random object. Better quality objects based on the animal's skill. But I think that's for another thread.

 

Finding potions in a patch of grass or in a pile of cow sh*t is bad game design if you ask me.
Unless we're talking about some game like diablo or wow, then its fine.

 

Oooo, I like this the more I think about it. Suppose increasing the bounty by, say, 10% resets the bounty's timer? So if you REALLLY want that PK dead, you could go in every day and increase the bounty by 10%, keeping it on the boards until someone gets him. I like that.

 

Not even a little bit. For one, you don't know where your pet found the item. The pet runs off screen and is gone for a set amount of time (2-5 minutes, say) before they return. For all you know, they found the body of someone else that was killed, or found some gear that someone discarded at the side of the road. I know in the game I played (still thinking it was Torchlight) it also came in REALLY handy, when I'd gotten the hell beat out of me, and went and cowered in a corner, unable to get back to town, and too weak to continue. I sent my pet out, and was lucky enough that he came back with a town recall scroll. So it can add a lot to the game, even though it's a very simple mechanic to employ.

 

Except they goddamn didnt because they just disappeard and then appeared with an item.
This is some ugly design decision. It's like having thieves in game, but instead of stealing an item from a player when he targets their inventory, the thief just gets a random item out of thin air.

 

We'll just have to agree to disagree with each other on this. It's no different than monsters "spawning out of thin air" or reagents "spawning out of thin air" or resources "spawning out of thin air" or any other way that an item is introduced to the environment. What's more, it's a proven game mechanic as it's been included in more than one game. (Dogmeat did it in Fallout, the pet in Torchlight, and I'm certain other games as well.) But it's also not an idea I'm married to. Just something I threw out there to illustrate how pets could be more than just another tool used to attack.

Also, how do you know they "goddamn didn't?" I could tell you they did, and you'd never know the difference. It's a big part of how game design works. So long as an effect is "faked" well enough, from the player's perspective, it doesn't matter in the slightest.

I could tell you that the server actually tracks where every player or monster dies, and any items left on the body after it decays gets "buried" in that location. Other players can't see or pick it up, but if you have a pet, it can "smell" that location and dig up an item as much as two years after a player died there... Then I write the code so your dog runs to a random spot and pulls up a random item. You could never possibly know the difference. It's not "ugly design" it's "game design."

 

It is different.

Creating MMOs without open pvp and full loot is also a proven game mechanic.
Creating games for Facebook like that "hemp farm" or whatever is a proven mechanic too, those guys earn more $$$ than the developers of EVE, probably.

Because it's obvious. because you are proposing a crap mechanic that's against everything RG stands for while making his games.

You only find potions on the ground if some other player left them there. Or if they were in a locked and trapped treasure chest. Thats good game design. Pulling items out of thin air is not.

Then I'd test it.

 

You are presuming an awful lot and putting a rather ridiculous amount of words into Richard Garriot's mouth, here...

So... If a chest randomly spawns in an area for you to dig up (precisely how fishing up bottles with treasure chests worked) you think RG's okay with that, but if an item randomly spawns in an area for your pet to dig up, you think he's morally opposed to it? Your logic isn't working on this one, man. Not even a little bit. Speaking of fishing, do the fish have to physically exist before you can catch them, too? So you're saying he'd be morally opposed to you throwing your pole in the water and getting a random item? (Which is the exact mechanic used.)

I've been writing games for years, and am a professional programmer by trade. I have a little insight here... And I'd be careful about invoking RG's name and speaking for him when you're stating your personal opinion.

 

LMAO! K.

 

Very well. I'm done here.

 

So I like the footsteps idea though I think it can be tweaked someone. Recording the location of a player every second in motion should be relatively easy but I think 1 second can be tweaked. All you really need to do is establish for the tracking player a path to the next 'node' they need to find.

I had thought of a very similiar (if not practically identical) idea when we started talking about tracking by scent. To smell or not to smell

Generally speaking I don't think you should be able to tell who you're tracking unless you 1: have a very high tracking skill 2: are familiar with whom you are tracking.

Also as to a comment above I would think that predatory birds would make excellent trackers.. considering how they use their exceptional eyesight to hunt. If the person you're tracking is in the same area you should be able to send up a falcon and pin point their precise direction.. unless perhaps there's some sort of spell allowing you to understand animals.. (interesting thought).. in which case they could give an exact location (assuming they are outside)

 

Ok, trying to jump in after skimming so if I say something that's been covered I'm sorry.

# of Bounties:

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Agree with Javin. In order for bounties to be meaningful you can't just have one kill outdo 100 PKs on the "criminal's" part. However, that doesn't mean that the game created bounty amounts can't be scaled by how many bounties are out on them. Actually, that would create some competition. Say it was even something as small as 50 gold per bounty. Criminal A PK's 40 people. He has 40 bounties on his head. The first person to get the bounty on him gets 2000 gold (40 bounties x 50 gold a bounty). Now, the second person to bring in a bounty will only get 1950 gold because one bounty was already filled so now there's only 39 left (39 x 50), and so on. There is incentive to hunt the criminal down first, much like IRL where the person who gets to the criminal first gets the bounty. Only since there is no "bringing them in" being slow just gets you less gold.

Stat/Skill Loss:

If bounties are implemented and being PKed has a statloss associated with it, I think it would make since for the loss incured when you are hunted by bounties to be reduced. Perhaps people going after a bounty click an option that says they are going after Criminal A. When they then meet this criminal and PK them, the person who was PKed for a bounty still has some loss, but not as severe as it would be for other PvP or PvE PKing. I just see someone playing a mass killer having a mob of bounty hunters coming after them and then suddenly being unable to do anything useful in the game again because soooooo many skill points were taken down. I mean, if there is full loot then losing your stuff to the bounty hunter will be a severe enough consequence. Yes? No?

My 2 cents.