Ending cosmetic item extortion

[VDZ]

Without an easy way to transfer hats, you no longer get a choice and things just go back to how they were before, meaning you die by default.
You always have the option to tell them to fuck off. But even a hermit character is sometimes worth more than a store hat.

From what I've seen, the ones that pull the hat or die thing are mostly Snail's and Ozzy's groups. They attack anyone in sight, hat or not. If you don't have a hat, you typically don't get to choose.
Extortion was always a thing, though at least in Ozzy's case, it used to be a bit more creative than just "hat or die", like "make my guy lawspeaker or you all die". A hat would have been preferable in that particular case.

So objectively speaking this is not a good idea for potential victims, so the remaining question is whether this is really making the game look bad enough on social media that it's worth doing something about it. Links to relevant discussions on social media would be helpful in determining that.

Disregarding the matter of whether or not people accurately judge getting KOed to be worse than giving up a store hat, the chance of getting hats is a major incentive for attacking players, and specifically the more vulnerable ones. Yes, hat raiders would still attack sprucecaps when coming across them even if they couldn't get hats, but would they go out 'hunting' as often when the expected yield becomes so much lower (hats being worth far more than anything else you could get from a sprucecap)?

Not quite sure what to think about it, tbt.

Do you endorse 'hat or die' and feel it doesn't negatively affect the game? If you do think 'hat or die' (and/or the increased griefing it incentivizes) worsens the experience for players, there are various trivial changes that could be implemented to simply ensure hats cannot be transferred in unsafe situations. (In addition to Sevenless's suggestions there are also various other options, like only being able to transfer hats while at your hearth fire, having the option to back out of the transfer for X hours after transferring, using a system similar to claim ownership transfer (pulling your hat out of your HF before it finishes transferring cancels the transfer), etc.) I really don't see any beneficial use case for being able to transfer a real-money item in a situation where you can be attacked, unless you actually like the element of people losing real-money items to gankers.

Simple question though, what is stopping the person from telling the extortionists to eat shit and not give them anything?

Sevenless explained it in the OP:

To start with there's an interesting question: why doesn't "Venmo me 5$ or die" exist? Why do we only rarely hear about "Give me hats or we siege your hermitage"? It's important to understand that hat or die is not a scam, it's a predatory high pressure sales pitch. Much like being overwhelmed and pushed into buying a vehicle you can't afford at a car dealership, hat or die is a high pressure "trade me X$ worth of hat to keep 60% of your LP/FEPs" that only works in a specific environment while forcing people to make quick decisions.

People get psychologically pressured to make a very poor trade due to natural loss aversion bias. Being under serious pressure, they don't realize that getting KOed isn't that much of an issue, so they effectively pay real money to avert what is in their mind a disastrous loss. (It also doesn't happen that people keep repeating the bullshit claim that getting ganked is likely to kill your character, because it isn't unless you're already heavily wounded. Victims are likely also unaware of inheritance mechanics or the fact that your infrastructure and possessions are worth more than your character so you retain tons of progress even on death.)

[Potjeh]

IP ban them so they have to deal with lag from playing via proxy.

Alternative punishment: nudge the RNG for accounts that do the extortion, so they keep getting shitty results in everything that involves randomness.

And you can always go the boring but tried and true method: nuke some villages.

[Baba_Ji]

Anyway what in the fuck is tbt? damn young hip kids and the lingo.

That being Thsaid

[dafels]

I think all hats should be deleted and the game returned to purity of the game's essence. It is a shame that the devs decided to sellout hats that don't fit into the game for extra shekels

[SnuggleSnail]

Hats make up a tiny portion of haven's RMT market. If you want things that have theoretical IRL value to be arbitrarily protected you may want to start with anvils. A single anvil will probably get sold for more USD than every hat that gets RMTed this entire world combined.

People feel differently about hats because it's much easier to place a real world value on them because there's a specific number on the store page, but realistically a highQ stone axe RN is worth more real world money than any hat, and extorting somebody for that axe is the same thing - exchanging an in-game item for an in-game service.

I may be biased, but I think it would be very silly to have murder/theft/etc be core features of your game, then draw an arbitrary line in the sand at trading away in-game items for not getting murdered.

[VDZ]

and extorting somebody for that axe is the same thing

You're not going to be able to extort a sprucecap for a top-quality axe. That's complete horseshit and you know it. That axe isn't leaving the village it's kept in and it's definitely not going to be carried by a sprucecap. Likewise, I've never seen sprucecaps hauling anvils (top-quality or not) while foraging for nettles. As Sevenless rightly pointed out, 'give us hats or we siege your claim' is not a thing, so all of the actually valuable non-store items are out of reach for hat extortion.

And the suggestions aren't to make hat trading impossible, it's just to put them on the same level as the stone axes and anvils you're clearly gaining through hat extortion. You'll still be able to walk up to their claim and say 'give us your hat or we'll siege and kill you', you just won't be able to force people to make really dumb choices with real-money implications under strong pressure anymore.

I may be biased, but I think it would be very silly to have murder/theft/etc be core features of your game, then draw an arbitrary line in the sand at trading away in-game items for not getting murdered.

That line already exists. You cannot take my hat off my unconscious body. If I ever drop or misplace it, you cannot pick it up. It persists beyond world resets. Hats already adhere to different rules than actual in-game items and are where most interactions are concerned a property of the account, not an item in the game world. Being able to force a trade under duress is a loophole within that system, allowing you to steal an item that is otherwise not obtainable through in-game crime (with protections against in-game stealing being explicitly built into the game!).

[TheServant]

A good way to approach this would be like tibia in 2005 w/ gamemasters enforcing rules against powergame, but tibia had rules against it. It's a bit irrelevant to discuss mechanics to solve it, the only thing that matters is how jorbtar perceive the issue.

[VDZ]

Hats make up a tiny portion of haven's RMT market. If you want things that have theoretical IRL value to be arbitrarily protected you may want to start with anvils. A single anvil will probably get sold for more USD than every hat that gets RMTed this entire world combined.

People feel differently about hats because it's much easier to place a real world value on them because there's a specific number on the store page, but realistically a highQ stone axe RN is worth more real world money than any hat, and extorting somebody for that axe is the same thing - exchanging an in-game item for an in-game service.

I may be biased, but I think it would be very silly to have murder/theft/etc be core features of your game, then draw an arbitrary line in the sand at trading away in-game items for not getting murdered.

Okay, so I was just checking The Moot while mining, and this is more convincing than any argument I could make...

[fedor77]

If only the devs were smart enough to sell protective services within the game instead of stupid hats.

edit: because id actually pay for the latter.

[Halbertz]

In my honest opinion game still (after gorillion years of existence) lacks of advanced tutorials. See, the only time when "chapeau or perish" might work if the attacker is already inside your palisade and caught you at HF. At this point, 5 american presidents seems like not a big loss compare to potential damage to infrastructure.
At the moment, most Hermits are walking and swimming (poorly) punching bags. That allows you to do whatever you want with them. An actively resisting character is hard to knock out and nearly impossible to kill. If the goal is to protect a group of players who still haven't figured it out, it's worth adding more detailed (or even forced) tutorials.
There should be something like "basic pvp survival training", where game will explain players that they should always run on max speed (avoiding deep water), stay hydrated, click on speed boosts, clock on critters and spam defenses. Extorting hats from a spinning like a whirligig hermit is very tiring and problem with extortion will go by itself.