Make Theft Great Again

[czitcpkv]

Why?
Being a thief is one of the most interesting aspects of the game. Living as a virtual outlaw is a fantasy many people find tempting. The allure of chasing infinite riches, the intense excitement of risk/reward, trying to avoid the dire consequences of being caught in a permadeath world, a simulation of the cruel realities of life and civilization.

The problem?
It's only fun for noobs. Once somebody learns the game, there is almost no benefit to stealing from weakly protected claims, yet there is significant risk involved. Anything that can be stolen currently could much more easily be gained legitimately.

The solution?
Add ropes for climbing palisade walls and allow holes to be dug under walls. Maybe: Add thief credo and require these skills to be learned.

These would be similar to siege weapons and require a period of time before they can be used after being set up, giving the victims a chance to destroy it. The chance of it being discovered would work the same way as scents, checking stealth against ranging.

Ropes could be much faster to set up and easy to discover. Holes could have much more stealth but take a significant time to set up.

Chests and stuff would be unable to be lifted over the wall or through the hole.

Also:
Make stealth more OP in general.
Make masks easier to acquire.
Make claim authority buff the ranging skill of its members within the claim.
Make palisades require more investment to build. (seriously they're almost trivial, and that's a separate issue as well). Villages should be more encouraged to store their stuff in a centralized location, or risk having stuff stolen for the sake of convenience. No more building tons of vaults to house their mines, farms, etc...
Make scents become weaker over time, and weaker the farther they are from the crime.

I will probably think of more things later. I think the solutions are reasonable and work alongside the current game mechanics. I truly believe thievery could be one of the funnest things in the game, and could be implemented in a way that doesn't ruin the game for other people and requires dedication on behalf of the thief.

[Vigilance]

sorry man but i can't get down with literally any mechanic to circumvent security and allow you to get your base fucking pilfered at a moments notice no matter what character developments go in to it. siege and player-to-player interactions are already so delicate and easy to make awful at the drop of a hat.

this is the part where you'll be like "hey but theres technically a time period of when people can see that they're being burglarized and they can stop it" but honestly if you raid me while im mid-sleep im not waking up randomly to realize you're in the middle of setting up a hole under my village to rob me fucking blind. short times are just as bad as no times due to the nature of "Oh, you found the perfect opportunity where i'm away from the game for ~~8 hours minimum."

in that apocalypse scenario i'd just altvault all of my possessions, and if they can't be altvaulted i'd just set up an alarm alt and script to mercilessly spam me on discord so i can log on to stop the robbery.

this is also the part where you can say "Heyyy vigi you can't actually take all of someone's stuff with this suggestion" to which I'd say "huh, what? are you implying I can't nomad, tsacks, merch robe, sub, verified drain cupboards one-by-one until there's nothing worth taking?" and if that's legitimately the case it still doesnt matter, if I can get over the wall I can find your coolest nicest stuff right away and just grab that. I don't need to drain your cupboards of spindly taproot and linen cloth, though I'd love to just for the principle: I'll beeline for your metal, I'll beeline for personal houses. I'll beeline for your silkhouse.

so yeah, hard disagree with this thread coming from the position of someone who used to loooove breaking in to bases when the siege system allowed me to (palibashing nab/lower end bases mostly)

to regard your also's in order:
stealth is already obnoxious.
bandit masks? are they not already braindead easy?
okay, maybe I like that one?
absolutely not, buffing walls cost just to buff walls cost simply sets the bar higher, will not ever discourage the current base layout design. just means i've got to work slightly harder to make the same necessary setup.
okay, cool, so i'll use my road network or my custom client to afk travel to the literal other side of the world, rob people, and teleport home. i'm a ghost!

[czitcpkv]

Everything you said is just an issue with balancing the mechanic. Your example of being robbed while you sleep goes against all the balances which would be in place to give you ample opportunity to prevent this from happening, and lessen the severity of when it does happen. You act like a theoretical mechanic will result in making griefing really easy, but it seems like you're just afraid that the mechanics will be implemented in a shitty way, which is not unreasonable, but not a reason to instantly shoot down what could be an awesome addition to the game. It doesn't reduce griefing when the small portion of people you're talking about who try to exploit the game have much easier and more rewarding ways of ruining the game for you already. Stealing just gives "lower" players something more exciting and competitive to pursue, and comes with its own risks which will probably not end well for the thief. If you hate that small portion of players may meta-game to defend against this, all that does is lessen the chance of being griefed. If you hate that a small portion of players may meta-game to make stealing easier, then I'd ask you to take a look at the game you are already playing and realize that mechanics such as this must be tweaked over time and that is no different than literally every other competitive mechanic in the game. If the problem is bots, travelling, vaults, etc... Those are all separate issues.

"absolutely not, buffing walls cost just to buff walls cost simply sets the bar higher, will not ever discourage the current base layout design. just means i've got to work slightly harder to make the same necessary setup."
This is bad why exactly? Why should building walls even be so easy as it is. And I disagree, it will discourage over-using walls in base layouts, which are completely insane as it is, requiring no consideration of required resources. This was just one small suggestion though and not really the main point.

"okay, cool, so i'll use my road network or my custom client to afk travel to the literal other side of the world, rob people, and teleport home. i'm a ghost!"
Some power-gamer obsessed with stealing, representing a small portion of players, creates an alt, invests in tons of stealth and skills just for stealing, creates and maintains a road network, avoids bears while crossing the world, waits around for the hole to finish, waits for you to go offline, vandalizes your doors and chests to steal one inventory of items without getting caught, sits in a vault for a week while they are a criminal, and this is bad?

[borka]

Alt to warm up old C&I stuff again ?!?

http://www.havenandhearth.com/forum/vie ... er#p746547
http://www.havenandhearth.com/forum/vie ... er#p481539
http://www.havenandhearth.com/forum/vie ... er#p458813

... while i wonder if this would motivate gunnar to have fun again ...

Besides ... all thieves that wanted an easy game had very short lives in HnH ... so wtf wasting dev time for such when there's more to fix that suits the masses

[czitcpkv]

Alt to warm up old C&I stuff again ?!?

viewtopic.php?f=48&t=58216&p=746547&hilit=ladder#p746547
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=36425&p=481539&hilit=ladder#p481539
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=34806&p=458813&hilit=ladder#p458813

... while i wonder if this would motivate gunnar to have fun again ...

Besides ... all thieves that wanted an easy game had very short lives in HnH ... so wtf wasting dev time for such when there's more to fix that suits the masses

Not a waste of dev time though. It is awesome and should be part of the game, would be worth the dev time and breath fresh air into the game, nor are these overly complicated to implement compared to anything else in the game. You would rather them work on something else, that's cool.

And yeah, that's kinda the point of being an outlaw, dying young, living dangerously. Not just walking into any place you want and stealing anything you want. The point is that it should be possible to pursue this lucrative profession rather than scavenging a bunch of noob claims.

[Vigilance]

yeah wait why am i discussing literally anything with a brand new account on his first three posts

words written above borka

what balances could you possibly add to me needing a short time to set a rope or a hole, that wouldn't just make rams or outright siege easier/better? because then i can REALLY hurt someone. you make a fair point about me being worried a mechanic will be implemented poorly-- and you certainly cannot blame me-- especially when it pertains to literally THE MOST fragile thing in the game right now. as for the rest of the beginning paragraph, it's relatively incomprehensible. yeah you kind of die if you get tracked by someone, that's a huge ass deterrent. why are we setting people up to jebait themselves in to getting murdered by rangers? that's realistically the only outcome a "lower player" can have unless they're robbing someone who if we adhere to your new suggestion of "Make walls really hard to make" will probably barely have mustered a wall of their own. i think theft is totally fine as-is and that siege is to be MANDATORY for serious and intense robberies, vs "Hahahhaa I took that dude's LC's and wheelbarrows from his knarr what an idiot"

you seem to have entirely missed my point about walls: If you change palisade materials to be expensive, they're still the cheapest wall. They are no longer "not sustainable," you are MOVING THE BAR. THE BAR IS BEING MOVED. If you make palisades take hard leather, well shoot, I better just make more beehives to sustain my need to wall my mineholes, my village, and my vault, and whatever else needs a separate wall. Oh by the way, you're also just encouraging awful wall layouts that circumvent needing additional CP's. Unless the cost you're mentioning is the per-segment, in which case you're literally just adding tedium. Because either you're asking to add complex materials per-segment, which will absolutely slay new players in terms of walling in their bases (Imagine needing to grind for 480 pieces of leather to wall off your village claim radius.) and totally not touch high end players (It'll sure annoy them though!) or you're asking to make initial CP's worse, which means I'll just find as many ways to squeeze all of the utility/cost out of the singular CP. Kind of moot! But you're right, not the main point.

The thing with the last point (only two points rebutted?) is that ONE player being a very serious full time committed criminal is causation enough for it to be a problem. Imagine having your stealth so unreasonably buffed by distance that you legitimately cannot have your scents seen by anyone short of the strongest rangers in the game. You could do legitimately whatever you wanted. I know so many people that would play just like this if it was implemented, so it's not really a small minority power gamer like you seem to be convinced. It's not really hard to shift+click on a knarr through the ocean, it's not really hard to build a wall in the corner of the world, it's not really hard to make a theft alt. It's not really hard to do pretty much any of this stuff. You're just allowing nerds to be nerdier for the TOTALLY naive hope that weak players will actually be able to get something fun out of robbing people, which is just outright not how this game works or hopefully will ever work. As far as stealing "one inventory of items" I'd like to see your reaction to some dude walking out with 72 slots of your pearls, gold bars, steel bars, troll skulls, silk cloths, whatever you could possibly have. Hell, even if your very best things were hardened leather for your secondary palisade that now requires two pieces per segment, you're now boned cause this goon set you back 36 walls!

But you're right, no-name-anonymous-alt-account-to-post-questionable-ideas, I've no idea what I'm talking about and I'm paranoid of the boogie-nab stealing my cool stuff because I can't be bothered to set up my discord alarm. It's a cute idea, but it's not the way this game should be at all, at least not in this implementation.

BONUS ROUND: Since it took so long for me to write this I can address your new post!

Not a waste of dev time though. It is awesome and should be part of the game, would be worth the dev time and breath fresh air into the game, nor are these overly complicated to implement compared to anything else in the game. You would rather them work on something else, that's cool.

And yeah, that's kinda the point of being an outlaw, dying young, living dangerously. Not just walking into any place you want and stealing anything you want. The point is that it should be possible to pursue this lucrative profession rather than scavenging a bunch of noob claims.

Totally cool, admittedly, but it's NOT worth the dev time because it'd mean they need to figure out all kinds of funky ass stupid math for the implementations here, find a way to balance it among siege, find a way to address your individual points, whatever you're doing. And you have no idea how difficult things are to implement-- nor do I, to be fair, but that's a terrible argument to throw out. It's easier to do nothing than to make an entirely new system. Sure, they can copy-paste siege as a start and then add in some sloppy hacks to make it work the way you want it to, but you've still got a bunch of dev time to actually figure out how to balance this INCREDIBLY VOLATILE feature.

That next line scares the fuck out of me because you're legitimately implying you should have fruitful successful heists with a "young" character, which translates directly in to "Oh cool I can pump 300 stealth on my alt and rob the fuck out of people and throw him in a vault somewhere on the other side of the world to wait out his scents til I use him again." Imagine raiding A.D. or similar factional bases with an alt that took you a few weeks to make. Seems like a huuuuge imbalance and another strain of tedium on the defenders.

[czitcpkv]

yeah wait why am i discussing literally anything with a brand new account on his first three posts

words written above borka

what balances could you possibly add to me needing a short time to set a rope or a hole, that wouldn't just make rams or outright siege easier/better? because then i can REALLY hurt someone.

The "short time" was never mentioned and is one of many things worth considering

A thief can work alone. Not many people even get far enough in the game to ever participate in a siege. Siege weapons and ropes can be destroyed, but walls must be rebuilt, and leave a huge opening in defense, so sieges are definitely more damaging

Not sure I understand your point though. You're echoing my point that somebody who can siege would never waste time with a rope/hole anyway, the type of player who would actually be able to do significant damage with either mechanic? So then what is bad about this?

yeah you kind of die if you get tracked by someone, that's a huge ass deterrent. why are we setting people up to jebait themselves in to getting murdered by rangers? that's realistically the only outcome a "lower player" can have unless they're robbing someone who if we adhere to your new suggestion of "Make walls really hard to make" will probably barely have mustered a wall of their own.

Why is there permadeath in the game? Why are noobs allowed to headbutt bears? Because it's part of what makes haven epic, and crime and punishment is already a huge thing in haven, so why is theft so bad when you can literally genocide an entire village for killing your chickens?

The theft game is about stealth, and somebody who buys theft, enables criminal acts, gets themselves caught because they failed to play the stealth game correctly, that's the consequences of their actions

Yes stealth/perception/ranging probably requires a few tweaks to make it more viable

i think theft is totally fine as-is and that siege is to be MANDATORY for serious and intense robberies, vs "Hahahhaa I took that dude's LC's and wheelbarrows from his knarr what an idiot"

That is just dumb though. Why should a robber have to literally break down your walls just to sneak into your base? At that point they are raiders and warmongers. Why should a robber be limited to stealing wheelbarrows? You steal from a powerful base without investing significant skill and planning, you pay the consequences for it, but It shouldn't be impossible to attempt. This is also where authority buffing ranging comes into play. If you expand an enormous village without having the resources to guard your outer walls then it should be easier to sneak in. If you have tons of people and power then it should be very difficult to slip past.

you seem to have entirely missed my point about walls: If you change palisade materials to be expensive, they're still the cheapest wall. They are no longer "not sustainable," you are MOVING THE BAR. THE BAR IS BEING MOVED. If you make palisades take hard leather, well shoot, I better just make more beehives to sustain my need to wall my mineholes, my village, and my vault, and whatever else needs a separate wall.

And just like real life, people get lazy, decide a single wall should be enough to keep their ore safe inside the mine, because "it wont happen to us". Why invest more resources just to prevent one thief from grabbing a handful of stuff? That's the dilemma villages have to decide for themselves. It just makes it slightly more viable to steal, and you're making a lot of assumptions about how much more expensive it should be when no number was ever mentioned. And walls are realistically a huge undertaking, the way they are used currently is ridiculous IMO, but I'm not saying it should be 100% realistic.

which will absolutely slay new players in terms of walling in their bases (Imagine needing to grind for 480 pieces of leather to wall off your village claim radius.) and totally not touch high end players

You're still just assuming numbers when this could be handled many different ways. It's also extremely trivial for even a new player to construct a palisade, so making it more difficult is not a big deal. It becomes a bigger deal when you are constructing tons of walls just to partition off every single thing you have, which makes it become a consideration for larger villages who aren't worried too much about petty theft, and have to balance security with expansion and storage rather than walling off every single resource they come across and never worrying about it

The thing with the last point (only two points rebutted?) is that ONE player being a very serious full time committed criminal is causation enough for it to be a problem. Imagine having your stealth so unreasonably buffed by distance that you legitimately cannot have your scents seen by anyone short of the strongest rangers in the game. You could do legitimately whatever you wanted.

Distance doesn't make scents near the crime scene harder to discover, it makes it harder to track the criminal the farther you follow the scent. I still don't see why this is a big deal, and you're still assuming the absolute worst case scenario of game balance and circumstance. It should absolutely be possible to commit the ultimate theft if the circumstances are perfect and the thief dedicates a ton of time to it. That one player who commits the ultimate theft of 72 pearls(which probably had to get past multiple walls over a long period of time, break chests, etc, all without being caught red handed), from some other powerful player earned it and risks the wrath of the player they stole from, it's not over just because the thief SOMEHOW made away with the goods, and said player is a complete idiot for not securing their pearls properly. It's incredibly easy to protect your most valuable stuff in this system, all this system does is make it easier to steal more than wheelbarrows so the thief can actually make a living and have fun. If you can climb walls that opens so many possibilities, but it doesn't instantly make everything steal-able. Put your gold bars and pearls inside your central vault. Create degrees of separation for the thief to cross over. Problem fucking solved. Worry less about storing your less-valuable-but-still-valuable-to-a-thief stuff.

Totally cool, admittedly, but it's NOT worth the dev time because it'd mean they need to figure out all kinds of funky ass stupid math for the implementations here, find a way to balance it among siege, find a way to address your individual points, whatever you're doing.

Your opinion. Just because you don't have the imagination or ingenuity to make it work doesn't mean you speak for the devs or anyone else.

And you have no idea how difficult things are to implement-- nor do I, to be fair, but that's a terrible argument to throw out. It's easier to do nothing than to make an entirely new system. Sure, they can copy-paste siege as a start and then add in some sloppy hacks to make it work the way you want it to, but you've still got a bunch of dev time to actually figure out how to balance this INCREDIBLY VOLATILE feature.

Making a fucking MMO is not easy, not a single mechanic in this game wasn't difficult or volatile to implement. The smart thing to do would be to make it overly-difficult to steal and then slowly make it easier over time. It's just a matter of if the devs think this would be cool enough to add. Were you a naysayer when people talked about knarrs, visitor debuff, nidbanes, travel system, any of the hundreds of potentially "volatile" features that have been added to this game?

That next line scares the fuck out of me because you're legitimately implying you should have fruitful successful heists with a "young" character, which translates directly in to "Oh cool I can pump 300 stealth on my alt and rob the fuck out of people and throw him in a vault somewhere on the other side of the world to wait out his scents til I use him again." Imagine raiding A.D. or similar factional bases with an alt that took you a few weeks to make. Seems like a huuuuge imbalance and another strain of tedium on the defenders.

Nowhere was this ever implied, and quite the opposite has been said.

[Granger]

As much as I disagree with Vigilance on other topics I agree with him on this.

Giving the ability to negate walls would motivate the usual suspects to, in addition to roflstomp, also rob blind their (mainly lower developed, to have a better tears generated vs. risk taken ratio) random victims.
And the fun part (for the usual suspects) would be that they could do the roflstomp now inside the bases of their victims, would these be stupid enough to open combat - while making the smart ones (that don't suicide by attacking) watch helpless as stuff gets looted that is selected solely on what maximizes harm to the victim.

I think implementing this would massively worsen player retention issues.

[MagicManICT]

Not a waste of dev time though.

Completely a waste of time when a half dozen people want this, and hundreds hate the idea. Let the old, dead ideas go to bed and rest with other old, dead ideas. Jorb won't come out and say a hard 'no' on it, but no other MMO in existence allows this that I'm aware because of all the flaws in the nature of a video game.

@borka: thanks for the legwork on this one.

[Tamalak]

Thieving in this game sounds real damn exciting, and I love the concept of 'roping' into another base, but I just can't figure out how to make it fun for the thief without making it 10x more miserable for everyone else.

Definitely, if you rope in, you should only be able to tresspass/steal, not vandalize. No killing livestock no harvesting crops, no dropping sand fleas. Roping in should give some kind of debuff state that restricts what you can do:

Lockpicking should be a lot harder so villages can actually protect what's really important.

And, actually stealing while under debuff should do like 20 HHP damage. Or something like that.

But even with all that, I dunno. Even though I'd like to be a thief, you need people actually playing the game for that to be a possibility and I worry that enabling thieving would take that away.