Justicar appears mid-combat

So I'm in Tenebris harbor, fighting an archer and clicking to target him. I end up stealing a knife. A justicar shows up and fines me 25 gold.

SERIOUSLY?!?!?!?!?!!

Who gives a flip if I steal from an ENEMY?!?!?! You want anti-theft immersion in non-friendly cities? Ok, let me choose to pay the fine or... murder the justicar. After all, we murder people all day long in this game anyway.

Oh and while we're at it, how about a justicar when I loot bodies and his buddies are still around? This is a joke.

 

How would you solve this problem?

Just allow people to steal as much as they want from NPC's?

Btw, I agree that it's lame. But that doesn't really make for an easy fix. PVE stealing is not much a a challenge if you don't have something bad happen when you get caught.

 

Yes.

 

First, the thing about Tenebris is the story goes that the residents were temporarily chased out, so technically the stuff there still has an "owner".

That being said, I find the idea to be hilarious that a Justicar is still wandering around town to enforce property ownership after everyone living there had been chased out by bandits who have effectively stolen the entire town from them.

 

Indeed, how did that ever pass through QA...

 

Ah, the good ol' days....

 

Okay, first off, this isn't about just solving the problem with PvE theft, its also about game mechanics which allow you to accidentally steal things. How do you accidentally steal things in real life?

The logic of the game mechanics is a bit loopy around this especially when involving combat. We aren't allowed to open a chest or other container in combat mode -- we even get a message, "You cannot open this while you are in combat." But we are allowed to do everything else, to the extent that we can even loot corpses when being surrounded by enemies and being repeatedly hit by them. Since we're most likely to accidentally pick something up when fighting someone, the easiest thing would be to bring some consistency across the game mechanics and bring this all in line with how chest/container looting works, and disable all looting in combat.

Of course, having to exit combat even now to open a chest is pretty annoying, because you have to wait for all your glyphs to cooldown even if your sword is back in your scabbard, and that would also apply to looting corpses and everything else. However, I did once suggest adding a short loot timer (the thread is here), which would work in combat mode just like harvesting works in combat mode, and would make a lot of issues easier, in addition to possibly adding some looting skill as suggested by @Damian Killingsworth (here) which would especially be meaningful in PvP scenarios. Ninja looting is just generally a bad mechanic.

As for the issue of theft done intentionally, Chris and LB were originally discussing a system where a person who stole from NPCs would be flagged as a thief, which would make him open to PvP until some type of justice would be done. I discuss that here in my proposal for a justice system based on bounties, and I think there would be an easy out for PvEers who didn't know what they signed up for, because one option would be to turn themselves in to the guards and pay the fine, which would clear the bounty.

Though, honestly, if nobody friendly is there to catch you in the act, as was in this case, I don't see why there should be a bounty, anyway.