Pickpocket Nerf

I would say a PvP player doesn't tend to go afk in an area where they can be attacked. Yes I am aware that there can be emergencies where there is no other choice for the player (ive had enough of those myself) but as a PvPer you accept that risk and actually real life emergencies are much more important than pixels (so why would you care if you lost stuff.....its not important.)

All i'm saying is as of this moment in time even with the cooldown reduced to 1 minute, why would anyone want to be a pure thief?

 

Last October when this thread blew up the forums - nothing got nerfed...
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/oh-snap-i-got-robbed.67917/

Seriously... what's changed from last October to now? Oh, more people have flagged to get the PVE grind bonus. So, more people want the grind bonus so they flag for PVP... uhm.

My character is a good guy in PVP - I like hunting the thieves.

THERE ARE NO BAD GUYS NOW! It's just everyone vrs everyone until you get carpal tunnel syndrome.

 

There's always the opportunity to go the other way, or increase amount stolen, more choices, etc. From my pvp character it seemed kind of ludicrous that you could keep your deck stacked and mind-locked and then spam pick-pocket every few seconds whether you were level 40 or level 100 you could spam-rob people.


I'd like to see more stealth options for thieves but if 4 folks target someone in pvp and they kill them fairly easily - it's by design not full loot (maybe it will be someday or in some areas). 4 thieves come up to you and it's kinda heading to full loot despite that not being a design decision.

 

I think you might want to throw your anger at the people who were exploiting it before the release which I know was majorly urking a lot of people.

 

If this fix was meant to curb AFK robbing, then why is it still gimped when i steal from someone who isnt afk, but doesn't realize I'm hidden behind him? Also, people have been loading up there bags with crap to deter my GM skill before and it worked fairly well. They same people doing this, with the way the timer is now, im better off playing mega millions if i want to pull something of value out of that bag with it being completely random. with a 1 min 10 sec CD for GM pickpocketing, the design is now it is VERY UNLIKELY you will lose anything of importance from a thief, which means no one will want to play the thief class.

 

I would imagine that better thieves should be able to loot more items or at lleast have option to choose from several items which they are trying to steal.

I also think it kind of make sense to pickpocket from different people rather than the same guy over and over. The game might encourage that a bit more.

Anyway the game is far from balanced, and there is a lot of work to be done to have balance between the robbers and the robbed.

 

[removed negative connotation, by Berek. Please restate] In UO, you could steal in combat. The purpose would be to steal there regs/weapon when the chugged pots and they would run out of resources faster ; You couldn't have fixed CD to where they hold even when switching decks? I have 5 cards per the skill tooltip as of todays patch but can only use 1. I should be able to stack 5 cards in my non combat bar then and those be on individual CD's

 

Unfortunately this fix has showed us How much the thief's rile up the game. Dev + forums people and their Afk reports have totally turned pick pockets card system into its own system.

 

Also, just noticed my execution time went up from 3.5 secs to 6 secs

 

Dang that's some fast stealing. That's like .5 seconds faster than me!

 

Reminds me of the good old days of the disarm thief

 

Inspires me to load up a player run server, vanilla days. Where pick pocketing was its best

 

@Duke Avery well that house deed I got from ya will now go on a big display of times past.

 

l e g e n d a r y !

 

The good ol days in sota

 

Dear everyone,

Please do not flag for pvp if you don't want to accept the risks involved.

Your friend,
Audi


Surely there are other ways to balance between pickpockets and victims. One idea for pickpocketing is that if the person gets caught, add them to the players list (similar to friends list but involuntary) and show their location for the next hour of time logged in game. Keep the items in the price of the oracle until that hour is up. Then we can just hunt them down and if we defeat them we can get the items back. Make the chance if getting caught scale with the level of pickpocketing so higher level skill is less likely to be caught.

Another is to let thieves dig through the bags to pick their item but the longer they look the more chance of breaking stealth and getting caught.

#weneedbadguys
#dontneutertheworld

 

When I read this, I hear that when exploits get fixed it's somehow the victims of the exploit that are the problem and not the ones exploiting the game.

I don't find that to be a very convincing argument. I begged the developers to add pick pocketing for years. I want them to add pick locks too. But what I don't want is a game that is only fun for one side, and that's what happens when someone exploits mechanics or exploits the design or exploits known bugs.

Trammel didn't kill UO. The players that made Trammel a necessity did.

 

Oh please. Asking for some personal accountability is not "blaming the victim."

I stay flagged 95% of the time. It takes less than a minute in most cases to zone out to the overworld map before going afk.

Edit: I do not even have pickpocket trained and have no intention of ever doing so. I just want to see a thriving pvp community which includes villains as well as heroes.

 

I think that making pick pocketing an exclusively PvP skill was a mistake. Pickpocketing and, someday, Lockpicking would both be great against NPCs as well (as they were in UO). Still require a PVP flag to use it in these places (so avatars can be "heroes" and defend the merchants), but let thieves cast a "wider net".

 

It is in this context. The reason for changes was to further support the original design. There was never an intention to allow players to wipe everyone out the moment there was a connection issue or they took their eyes off the screen for 30 seconds. The same reason we don't have full looting is the same reason we don't have instant snatch and grab mechanics. It's not fun being on the losing side of that. Not once in all my years of gaming have I ever seen someone say "I got all my stuff stolen from me, it was awesome!"

I have yet to be stolen from in this game. But if someone teleported into my home, chain mesmerized me, and then stole all my inventory in seconds, I think I'd have a right to be upset. If for some reason I was AFK in a pvp area, I agree, I'd have a death or a theft coming to me. But 20 deaths and 20 thefts? Who wants to be the loser in that situation? Who really expects anyone to say "You got me! I had to run down the stairs to answer the front door and 30 seconds later all my stuff is gone and I'm being killed repeatedly. Good one! I love this game."

Personal responsibility is not a substitute for balanced game mechanics.

That means 5% of the time you would be arbitrarily risking everything in your inventory. That doesn't make any sense.

I understand where you're coming from. I share the same goals of having a thriving pvp community. However, I'm certain that some of the people in this thread don't actually have any idea how to accomplish that.

PVP is not something that people do until they're comfortable with the risks involved. If you are a very aggressive player and you're almost always in hunting mode, then being killed or stolen from is something you do by default. But for players that don't have a constant desire to kill or steal from everything that moves that isn't THEM or in their GUILD, that's not very much fun. So if the goal is to get some of those people to enjoy this game then we have to provide an environment that makes sense FOR THEM.

The alternative is to have a very empty PVP scene where players learn that the risks are far too great to expect any fun to occur. If this wasn't the case and I was wrong, then we'd already have a huge pvp community and we wouldn't be having this discussion at all. The more we balance the risk and rewards the more people will start to be involved, but until then we can't have people pillaging the game like it's their own personal grief and misery sandbox.