RAGE POST! Stealing.

It should be harder to steal equipped items, that i can agree on.
And probably would be a good idea with a warning when you logout without paying a ransom.

 

There was an alert system months and months ago, then we removed stealing from the 5 card system and only have 1 card. Stealing literally cant be nerfed any more and I believe Saladid wouldt have made this post if he actually had a clear understanding of thieving, which i taught him months ago but he obviously forgets things....

PS Stealing equipt items is a bug and even thieve's wants that changed, we don't want to see your underwear!

 

This all this. The warning when logging out. Not timing out but you yourself logging out and. Port giving a message "hey idiot you didn't pay for your crappy item the awesome cool PvP flagged thief took."

 

If you do not realize that you no longer have an item equipped it is not the game's fault

 

Equipt item has no visual in play screen. I agree with Vallo. Please make any equipt item have a visual. Harp hanging on belt, flute hanging around neck. Bow across your back. So we can see when they go missing! Thanks Val.

Much love!

 

HELLO Saladid, Its a bug to steal equipt stuff so yahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. LOL

Rings the Church Bells as loud as possible

 

So, one more time, the devs dont have to implement it in that particular "broken" way. They can implement it in a near infinite number of other ways, just not this way that youre referring to, that is apparently broken. Perhaps you have not decoupled the concept of "bounties" from "this one particular implementation of bounties that diddnt work out."

by the way, bounties in UO come out of your pocket (or, well, bank account). If I place a 10,000g bounty on your head, its extracted from my balance. If I only have 100g in my bank, the highest bounty I can place on my murderer is 100g, and afterwards, I will have 0g.

 

Yes, I am understanding that you've rejected this approach. What I'm wondering is what the alternative actually is. For an "infinite list", nothing seems to be coming to mind?

So far this sounds like the "broken" Eve system I referenced. Again, what's to stop me and a friend or alt from just claiming it?

 

Because it would be much simpler to just hand your friend your money, rather than exchange that money through the murder/reputation/bounty system. You could totally exchange money this way, but it would be tremendously inefficient.

Of course, if youre talking about an exchange between > 2 persons, then technically that is the point of the bounty. You kill me, I want others to kill you to have my revenge or at least bring attention to your deeds, and a third party kills you and claims the bounty. Thats the expected use case. If that third party is "your alt," then once again, youve created a very inefficient and risky way of handing your own money to your alt.

I suppose I should harken the entire reputation system of UO, rather than just the bounty feature. It might sounds feasible to team up with a friend and let them get lots of bounties on their heads and try and profit from that by killing the murderer and collecting the bounty. The problem there is the extreme risk one takes trying to gain this much "reputation" - the penalty for death is non negligible, and that part where you actually accrue significant bounty value is also extremely challenging.

Its pure chance that youd get a return on that investment, its a lot more likely you would

a) not get very high of a bounty cuz your not a very good PK, or no one sees you as any real threat or nuisance, so you get bounties of "1g" and "2g" etc all the time. Your "long term murder count" increases with each kill, increasing the penalty if/when you get pwned by some gang of blues when your guard was down one day.

b) be a really good PK, and encourage people to place high bounties on you, but if youre a really good PK youre making a lot more $$$ off your kills than their bounties, so your "scheme" to let your friend in on the bounty by killing you is not nearly as profitable as what youre looting from your kills / winning at PVP events. Oh, and then those murder count penalties to deal with when your friend does come to collect on your deal...

c) realize that even under optimal conditions, it takes an extremely long time to accrue a bounty to make any of this worth it. you realize you can actually make way more money farming gold, so you log off your pk and onto your miner or whatever.

so yah, with bounty system, comes also the full reputation system: successful PKs do not do it for the money, they do it for the extreme difficulty of being a PK with a reputation system. The risk is of the most extreme. The in-game social penalties the highest. Dying means youre probably not going to be playing (UO, on that character) for a few weeks.

meanwhile, the penalties for being a bounty hunter are minimal in comparison: you lose some regs, some generic armor, a few generic swords and bandages, maybe some magic trap'd boxes, etc.

basically, with UO rules, trying to exploit it in that way would be remarkably inefficient. make a bard and provoke dragons to kill each other, its much easier.

so to me, bounties are just part of a greater reputation system. every successful PK brings more and more attention onto the PK'er, and its actually unlikely anyone places large bounties on the PK'ers head (esp once they realize its a one-time donation to some anonymous player). The penalty for death rises for the PK, the risk remains exactly the same for non-PKs. The reward rises for non-PKs, the reward stays exactly the same for the PK. Suiciding to your friend would be really dumb! The opportunity cost of stat loss outweighs the bounty.

...your friend might choose to take advantage of the bounty and kill you anyway, and then, id say the RP benefits of the bounty system are working as intended

 

I think you missed it once more:

Evil Dude kills me.
I place 10k bounty on him.
Evil Dude asks a friend of his to kill him for the bounty.
Evil Dude and friend are up 10k, you are out 10k

 

I'm not talking exchanging money. I get pissed at you, put a 10,000g bounty on your head. I don't want your friend to simply kill you, collect the gold, and then the two of you split it.

Are you saying that the bounty is taken off me if I give someone else some money?

How is it risky? Me and my alt go into my basement, or off into the woods somewhere, and my alt kills the one with the bounty and collects. Where's the risk and inefficiency?

If I was a nasty individual, I'd try to get many people placing bounties on me. I'd be raking in the cash!

 

Pardon, I make the naive assumption that everyone is on SotA cuz they played lots of UO too.

Now, SotA should blaze its own trail and make its own reputation system. Im using UO's just as a comparison to a system I thought worked really well and was (and is) really fun (im not referring to the entire game, only the bounty/reputation/karma/murder system).

The rules change a bit depending on which era and any customizations a freeshard might add, but generally speaking, it goes like this -

When you murder someone, youre flagged as a criminal. That person can chose to place a bounty on your head. History shows its rare they place anything significant though. It happens that people place tens of thousands, but most of the time expect 1g-500g range (usually more in the 1g end of things). As a criminal, anyone can attack you without penalty. This wears off in about 5 minutes.

If you murder 5 people within a 40-or-so hour period, youre flagged red. Now not only can anyone attack you, but theyre encouraged to do so because of the likelihood that there is money attached to your scalp. 500g is still better than 0g, plus killing a red is fun.

If you die while in this state, you will experience stat loss when you ressurrect. Some skills in UO are maddeningly long and expensive to master, so this is a serious deterrent to most people, and why few people are ever successful as PKs. Lots of people get this perception that UO is nothing but PKs, thats cuz being on the receiving end of it can be so frustrating. Its just emotional hyperbole, being a PK requires the highest level of skill. There is a special NPC healer that rez's murderers, but its also in a town full of murderers, so youll be weak and vulnerable and also fun to kill. Alternatively, you can sit around as a ghost for about 40 hours per murder count you have, which removes a count. Once youre back to zero counts, youre blue again, and can function like a normal player. Its likely people know youre a PK tho, so expect people to study your patterns, when you log on, where you hunt, what your style is, how you fight, etc, and make it part of their long term agenda to kill you lots.

You can choose to resume PK'ing. You can rack up 5 more kills and get red again. Once you continue killing players at this point, you turn perma-red. You can never again be blue, always auto killed by guards, always hunted by other blues. You cant do anything without drawing a fight. You cant trust other reds that much either, they have just as much incentive to kill you as anyone else. Every kill is 40 hours of stat loss time if you die and resurrect. If youre a very successful PK, and you die, you can imagine it is a very long time before you can rez without stat loss. Alternatively, you can rez, and then spend gobs of gold trying to force your way back to mastery of skills. That still takes a long time, but far less than waiting for your murder counts to drop. Especially if you have hundreds.

Amidst all of this, thinking you and a second party have the upper hand in an exploit to trick people into putting big bounties on your head, let your friend kill you, and then split the reward is just silly. Your friend benefits, you get chump change (compared to what youre looting from people), and you get to deal with stat loss.

I would hope SotA has enough experience and creativity in its team to come up with an even more sophisticated and balanced reputation system.

Either way, the one for UO worked and still works great. Many people try to PK, but give up before they rack up significant kill counts once they realize how freaking hard it is. Few people are long term successes, and they are usually the best of the best at PVP, so they need this level of challenge as remaining blue is not enough. Likewise, being a bounty hunter is fun just for the RP PVP aspect, the monetary reward is a secondary bonus.

 

dont flag if you are not aware and prepared of what you are doing

 

yes

 

That sounds ridiculously complicated to implement.

If you want real revenge, just go do it yourself.

Paying someone else to do it for you really isn't satisfying at all, no matter what system is in place.

 

You're correct. I never played UO.

What you've described is fairly similar to how Eve does it. What you described at length is a bounty system that was barely mentioned, let alone relevant. In "broken" Eve system, the bounty payments are also tied to loss, which is why people don't bother to try to exploit it. Eve also has "bounty hunters" who only really do so accidentally or dependent on roleplay.

.. but for the people who gain bounty, they don't care. No one cares.

In this system, when a person is flagged criminal, the bounty is mostly incidental to everything else that's going on. Once the criminal flag drops, what happens with the bounty? Can you still kill the person, collect it, and that person then gets stat loss?

What I'm getting out of this is that the "bounty system" is merely sort of a side-quest from a main justice system, as opposed to a direct solution you seemed to be proposing for the original post's dilemma.

 

At some point in Ultima Online, if I recall correctly - when a thief stole from a player, this created a global criminal flag that everyone could see for a few minutes. It also created a semi-permanent criminal flag for the victim. Once the global flag wore off, the thief's victims could still see him as a criminal. If the thief died however, this cleared the victim's flags and the thief would be considered an innocent and was protected by the town's guards. The exception to this scenario would be if a thief did a 'perfect steal' which would ignore the above flagging rules.

In SOTA perhaps it could be handled a similar way. Criminal flags don't exist in SOTA, but your pvp flag does get activated when committing certain actions such as stealing private property from npc's, or when you attack other players. Perhaps when you steal from a player, a similar situation occurs - the global pvp flag is activated while you are in the zone, but after you leave the zone your pvp flag is cleared. However, a semi-permanent pvp flag is activated between the thief and the victim - the victim has the option to attack the thief, regardless if the thief is pvp flagged or not. This flag can be cleared if the victim kills the thief, or if the thief atones for his crime. Atonement might be handled through the Oracle.

From the victim's perspective, they would simply see more ? entries on their /who list but they wouldn't actually know the player is a thief or not, unless they're with a group of players and compare their /who lists - and the names of those players would need to be revealed by encountering them in the scene.

This would work well with an Enemy list in the social tab. This allows players to keep tabs on those who have wronged you in some way. Right now when something happens, you can make a note on a player but it's hard to keep track of this.. if it's someone that was on your friends list and you unfriend them.. you kinda lose track of that player unless you encounter them again and right click on them and select the note option. If the player notices the theft, add them to the enemy list and create a note 'thief' or whatever. The Enemy list is dynamic and influx, players would only keep names on there that are considered real 'enemies'...

If a thief contacts the oracle and wishes to atone for his crimes, perhaps the thief pays a fine of some sort, and the thiefs name is added to the enemy list of the player(s) he has atoned for.

A conversation with the Oracle might go something like this:

Avatar: atone (or atonement)
Oracle: For all of your crimes or just one?
Avatar: one

This would display a list of avatar names. The number in paranthesis is how many times the thief has stolen from the player

Alexander John (3)
Ancev (2)
Atos (5)
Devilcult (1)
Kor (3)
List Rostov (4)
Zed Leppelin (2)

When the thief atones for his crimes, this creates a gold debt (much smaller than ransom fees) with the Oracle. The thief would need to pay this debt in order to earn the daily gold reward again. (?) Atoning for the crimes against a player would clear the PvP flag for that player. The player/theft victim would get a notification and the thief's name would appear on the enemy list.

If you were to put some sort of virtue/anti-virtue system on top of this.. perhaps the thief could clear his debt by stealing items from players/npcs with high-anti virtue and turning the items into the oracle? These items could be taken out of circulation or added to the loot system.

just some ideas..

 

"Are you saying that the bounty is taken off me if I give someone else some money?"

That's a very strange way for "bounties" to work. Do I also reduce my mortgage if I give my friend some money?

[Edit] Also, what if I give my alt that money, and the alt gives it back?

 

Excellent post, been trying to tell them for 3 years...

 

That is right, except the criminal flag did not end upon death, so that a thief could not just jump back and harass people, also the longer criminal flag to the victim also remained much longer, death or not

That would make much more sense.

Great ideas... but I don't think dealing with the *$&*#@ oracle should remove any flag, you stole from me and I noticed, you better run everytime I see you