by kobnach » Mon Jul 06, 2009 2:40 am loftar wrote:kobnach wrote:Sure, folks who are offended can kill his/her alt of the moment [...] the basic problem is that the player does not care about the character being killed [...] You've made a decision to allow PVP of various kinds, and not thought through the effect of throw-away characters [...] Like everything else, it's no use when the perpetrator doesn't care whether his or her character is killed.
Unless I'm misunderstanding you, it seems that you largely reiterate the point that it's too easy to be a griefer, since they can always create a new character and start anew if they are killed. As I stated above, our overall plan of action against that (regardless of the actual methods we finally choose to implement it) is to make it hard and/or effortful to create a character capable of griefing, so that it isn't "simply" a matter of making an alt to grief with. Did you merely miss that, or do you disagree with that as a sound way to remedy the problem?
In my mind, the solution has to come as two parts: First, to make it matter to a griefer that his character is killed or otherwise punished; and second, for non-griefers to be able to punish griefers (though not necessarily in that temporal order). We do have systems more or less thought out for both of those parts -- as you may have noticed, much of our changes as of late have been focused at the latter -- it's just a matter of getting it all implemented.
Either way, I do have to disagree with your statement that "those limitations are not being fixed". Both tree planting, the ranging skill, the village system and other things are features that we have implemented precisely to make it possible to combat griefers, and at large, they seem to have been working quite well at fixing the problems they were intended to fix. Naturally, there are lots of bugs and/or unimplemented features left (for instance, the behind-a-house problem or black skills being too easily obtained, among many others); however much I would like to fix them, time is limited, after all.
I guess what I'm saying is that, from where I sit, I and my neighbours can expect to get griefed regularly, no matter what we do, and nothing you have implemented so far has changed this. You may be planning to fix it - but until I can leave a basket in my camp and not expect it emptied within 24 hours, regardless of what cheap junk it contains - with clues leading to a nice convenient spot behind a house, or one of the RoB stones - the problem isn't fixed.
Likewise, I'll consider the problem fixed when leaving a sausage maker outside of a vault doesn't pretty much guarantee it will wind up inaccessible behind my house within the week.
Frankly, I don't think it's sufficient to make griefing difficult - you may need to make it impossible - because of its very special characteristics, different from theft or directed vandalism.
Meanwhile, it seems that all the new systems are doing is producing things like Rift and Raephire's innocent-stomping war. I understand that's not the intent - but what I'm seeing is that people are getting meaner and meaner, and the non-mean are leaving. This is badly broken.
Probably the higher level you are, the easier it is to cope with this. The big boys can go live in the depths of the Utengard, where it takes really high level combat skills to follow. Those of us with less exalted skills can't do that. Moreover, moving is a two edged sword - civilization will follow us, which is good for including less high level players - but bad because various low life can also come live in the now civilized area. So then where are we? Living on isolated homesteads, as deep into the wilderness as possible, discouraging neighbours (lest they civilize the area) and suspicious of all strangers. What kind of game will that be?
