Thieves automatically flagged PVP - news from telethon

Fortunately they already did! Mob Justice!

 

About as effective as a wet noodle against a tank

 

Ok, if you are caught being a thief, you get 30 point skill point drop spread across your top 10 skills.

 

Yep yep. Now let's do some math on getting caught. There's your wet noodle.

 

Explain yourself.

 

The fine art of PvP is learning to mitigate loss.

I'm talking about fine art to balancing punishment as a game mechanic.

IE if the deterrent for stealing is PvP. Is it possible to time the theft for a time that either no one is there to attack or no is willing to attack.

The other side is when the punishment is too severe it becomes impossible.

IE the guards insta kill.

If mob rule is the standard then the variable is too wide. Impossible to set a % chance of success.

That and once the item is stolen there is nothing to remove that item. It will remain stolen. Which means there is no cost at all.

 

A mechanic where killing the theif, looting the item, returning it to the victim, then collecting the reward would be interesting. (Exploitable if used in the basic brain storm obviously)

 

One of the ironic things about this to me is dissonance between the assumption that PVP is fun, and that (as a result of this mechanic) PVP is a punishment.

However, what might be more interesting, is to rely more on virtue for this system. That is, once you steal enough things, and your virtue becomes negative, you now have a small percent chance of flagging for PVP every time you change instances/scenes. The lower your virtue goes, the higher that chance becomes. A relentless, remorseless thief would have a high chance of being PVP flagged every time they entered a scene, whereas a casual thief might have to endure a small chance to flag until they were able to do something 'virtuous' and bring their virtue back positive. If we have to have the PVP thing for stealing, I'd at least like to see virtue have more of an impact on that mechanic.

 

IMHO every MOB in a certain radius around the stolen item should perform a "detect thief" check. If you fail this check you become perma grey until you either, Turn yourself in and receive both a minor coin/skillpoint consequence OR are dealt with by a PvP bounty system which draws a major coin/skillpoint penalty when you head is finally turned in.

 

Steal item. Runaway and bank all your gear/inventory. Have friend kill you and take the head.

Theif gets the stolen item at the cost of a friend getting gold.

Loss is mitigated

 

You forgot the skillpoint loss.. If you chose the bounty option there would be a major hit.

 

Good thing for that 25%.

Would the skill loss make it harder to steal? Low level characters have nothing to lose. All those people with alts they will never level can steal with impunity

 

I discussed this point with my friend here and determined that their should be a minimum amount of skillpoints one should have before they can attempt to steal. Maybe even attach a level 60 pickpocket requirement as a base with at least 30 in 9 other skills. Until you meet those minimal requirements the MOBS all treat you like a child, slap your hand, call you a fool, take the item back, and turn you grey.

Low level characters will need to put in time before they can start attempting to game the system.

 

Worthy attempt. That narrows down the group and creates a meta game around theft and item recovery.

Problem is this isn't pick pocketing. The only way to pick pocket is to be flagged PvP. Flagging PvP is open PvP.

The stealing being discussed is based on a moral system. The items being stolen are owned by NPC's. Those items are not locked down and can be freely looted.

 

I don't know why people are talking like the only place to get free deco is stealing it out of vendor shops and kiosks in NPC towns. There is a lot of deco in "wild" areas that you can steal. For instance, Tenebris Harbor is a town (currently Etceter clone) in an adventuring area. It has lots of houses to loot.

 

This is actually a point of confusion: what count's as stealing what does not (at least from a virtue perspective). I know there are at least a couple of adventure zones that penalize you for taking certain things.

 

Have you tried reporting that as a bug? It won't fix itself. Also, while that may or may not cause a virtue penalty, the "thief penalty" being discussed in this thread apparently will require an NPC to notice you taking the item.

 

If the game is aimed only at players who can invest much time, then only a small portion of gamers will enjoy SotA...

 

I believe it is a known issue. I agree, as presented they are separate issues (I kinda don't think they should be though).