Brickbreaker wrote:Ok. So to summarize your post you are basically saying if I don't steal too much then the victims would not bother hunting me down. But if I do take too much then a ranging party will come and track me down.
But I could argue that even if I ended up stealing what I needed, I value the stolen goods just as much as the victim does.
For example.
If I manage to enter someone's area and I find a cupboard full of cheese, by following what you're saying then I could take something like 5 slices and leave.
The owner would find 5 slices not worth the effort of tracking me down and would probably forget about it. But you also got to remember that I the thief too wants
to benefit from this and 5 slices are still not really worth stealing. Which in that case I decide to steal the entire cupboard, because it's worthwhile.
Stealing the entire cupboard would almost certainly anger the owner.
Another point is. If I steal 'anything' from a piece of Q4 leather to a chest of dragon's helms. The owner would acknowledge that a robbery has took place and despite what's stolen he wouldn't want it happening again. Therefore decides to improve his defences.
So me being the thief would think ahead and grab what I can because next time I visit it would be much harder (or impossible according to the recent wall updates)
to enter.
Unfortunately, yeah, I agree with you. Right now a thief who takes one q7 carrot from a claim puts himself at risk for execution. It's not likely anyone will track him down for that, but he still knows that he is taking the ultimate risk. The proverb that comes to mind is, "May as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb." This is the way it works in practice and it is not optimal. Thieves do not have an incentive to limit their damage, and the victims or robbery do not have any incentive to hold back on revenge. Both sides are working from the standpoint that if he didn't destroy me this time he probably will the next, so the sooner I push him out of the game the better.
Some of this may be a lack of community. If I were a thief and robbing from my high school pal Sandra who is also playing, and she were telling me from time to time how well her silk operation were going, when I went raiding for cheese I'd likely not go to any special effort to kill her and completely trash the place. But a great many petty raids are happening between strangers where the attackers know so little about the settlers that they may not know what language they speak unless they pause to read a few runestones during the attack. When you rob me on Monday, you are not thinking that on Friday you will probably want to buy some cave bulbs from me, and if you wipe me out there goes your only reliable source of psyche.
Another part of this may be the type of game that many of the players are coming from. They likely have a lot of experience with games where the object is to kill and the more kills you make the more xp you get. When the other players count as xp on the hoof waiting to be harvested of course you are going to take pride in pleasure in annhilating them. Destroying a settlement and killing the population gives you more lp than anything else you can do with them. That is a pity. It would be a great deal more fun if you could get more lp by showing off your cunning or high stealth, than by acting like a bulldozer.
Similarly it would be a great deal more fun if the settlers didn't react with enraged indignance when they do get robbed. If I am playing Monopoly and the other guy puts a hotel on Mayfair, I don't generally put out a forum post complaining that I did NOTHING to you, so your attack is utterly unprovoked because I am merely a peaceful little landlord and commercial traveller who should have been regarded as neutral!! But there does seem to be a very strong territorial strain in this game so that the inevitable raid generates real anger, real outrage, even real sorrow. You had no right to invade my territory! You took my rook! And my pawn!
Well, my little farming alt means more to me than a simple pawn I can't tell apart from the other half a dozen chess pieces, so in the end I do think that characters should not be killed lightly and as a matter of course but how to get that fine balance in a pvp game with character development I can't say. I only know it would improve things so that more people would be having more fun.
by Shinto » Tue Jun 08, 2010 10:02 pm 
