Thoughts on The Black Arts.

[kobnach]

Yeah, that's fair enough.


TOWN 1, a town of high leveled, well equipped players, raids TOWN 2, TOWN 2 are no match, they are lower skilled and badly equipped and take a number of losses.

TOWN 1 logs off for the night, happy with their victory.

TOWN 2 now track them, break through their walls with a high STR character and kill all of TOWN 1 while they are offline.

TOWN 2, in fair combat could never have beaten TOWN 1, but thanks to offline summoning it is not an issue, as player skill is completely negated.

What's wrong with this? Town 1 is a bunch of bullies, that use their superior strength to attack lower level players. Fortunately the offline summoning mechanics allow their victims to take revenge.

[theTrav]

What's wrong with this? Town 1 is a bunch of bullies, that use their superior strength to attack lower level players. Fortunately the offline summoning mechanics allow their victims to take revenge.

Agreed, Town 1 deserves to be murdered in their sleep.

Perhaps guard bears would make it less of a cake walk for Town 2.

[sami1337]

Yeah, that's fair enough.


TOWN 1, a town of high leveled, well equipped players, raids TOWN 2, TOWN 2 are no match, they are lower skilled and badly equipped and take a number of losses.

TOWN 1 logs off for the night, happy with their victory.

TOWN 2 now track them, break through their walls with a high STR character and kill all of TOWN 1 while they are offline.

TOWN 2, in fair combat could never have beaten TOWN 1, but thanks to offline summoning it is not an issue, as player skill is completely negated.

What's wrong with this? Town 1 is a bunch of bullies, that use their superior strength to attack lower level players. Fortunately the offline summoning mechanics allow their victims to take revenge.

That's not revenge that's unfair massacre. You could argue it was unfair that they got attacked but there's several things that trigger such an attack. They could even provoke an attack and use the scents to massacre them. This would lead to towns not wanting to go down the shitter thus making the game bland and un-interesting. Even in a fair battle you can use this while they are sleeping and having nightmares of how their friend died and how they revenged the friend by shoving a sword up the killers rectum.

[Krantarin]

It makes sense to me. Town one and town two probably have players in different timezones, it's highly doubtful that a town of powerful players will have no one logged on at any one time, and unless the entire town committed murders and failed to finish the job, it's unlikely that town two's revenge will be complete either. There will always be a few people left alive. Hopefully, NPC guards and soldiers will also help to protect each town. Hopefully, summoned characters will be able to put up an auto-fight. I just don't see the summoning as a huge problem.

What I do see as a problem is the idea of logging off with your goods to protect them. I hate the fix that requires goods in an inventory to decay over time, though. I want to be able to log off with a bunch of sticks and refill the crucibles as soon as I log in. I also want to be able to keep my weapons on my person at all times. Suddenly, these (and many other things, I'm sure) are impossible.

One suggestion to fix this that I really like is that when you log off a bag of your possessions is left at your hearth fire. Then, you can be stolen from, but as soon as you log back on you'll have the stuff that is in your inventory and if you were stolen from (even if you don't have a claim) you have a thief scent to track.

An alternative to the same fix is something I suggested last night. Perhaps characters should stay in-game, asleep on beds by their hearth fire. If attacked, they'd wake up and fight back, but if beaten could be stole from. There would be the problem of teleporting back when logging off, but that is only truly a problem if the "sleeping character" is implemented for realism. I'm suggesting it not for realism, but to aid all characters in interaction with thieves, murderers, etc. You can kill a character if you want, but only if you can fight your way into his keep and beat him. Then murder is easier, retrieving stolen goods is easier, and the summoning debate is over.

[theTrav]

One suggestion to fix this that I really like is that when you log off a bag of your possessions is left at your hearth fire. Then, you can be stolen from, but as soon as you log back on you'll have the stuff that is in your inventory and if you were stolen from (even if you don't have a claim) you have a thief scent to track.

I like that idea, even though it leaves me a lot more vulnerable. I like it more than offline decay.
Question though, what happens to players without a hearth fire?

An alternative to the same fix is something I suggested last night. Perhaps characters should stay in-game, asleep on beds by their hearth fire. If attacked, they'd wake up and fight back, but if beaten could be stole from. There would be the problem of teleporting back when logging off, but that is only truly a problem if the "sleeping character" is implemented for realism. I'm suggesting it not for realism, but to aid all characters in interaction with thieves, murderers, etc. You can kill a character if you want, but only if you can fight your way into his keep and beat him. Then murder is easier, retrieving stolen goods is easier, and the summoning debate is over.

I REALLY like this idea. However don't give characters free beds or anything, put them just sleeping under the stars if they don't have a bed/cabin, make the bed a buildable object and have it give some benefit (eg, healing HHP more slowly than first aid).

Follow it up with a wardrobe / chest / cupboard to keep your belongings in that's slightly more secure than a sack (but less than a gate) and then maybe we'd start to see people building in their own cabins etc, slightly more realistic than the current "hearth wherever" sprawl.

Unfortunately new players would be fairly disadvantaged in this system, but I'm sure if they found a nice community to join they could be on their feet in no time

[Krantarin]

One suggestion to fix this that I really like is that when you log off a bag of your possessions is left at your hearth fire. Then, you can be stolen from, but as soon as you log back on you'll have the stuff that is in your inventory and if you were stolen from (even if you don't have a claim) you have a thief scent to track.

I like that idea, even though it leaves me a lot more vulnerable. I like it more than offline decay.
Question though, what happens to players without a hearth fire?

An alternative to the same fix is something I suggested last night. Perhaps characters should stay in-game, asleep on beds by their hearth fire. If attacked, they'd wake up and fight back, but if beaten could be stole from. There would be the problem of teleporting back when logging off, but that is only truly a problem if the "sleeping character" is implemented for realism. I'm suggesting it not for realism, but to aid all characters in interaction with thieves, murderers, etc. You can kill a character if you want, but only if you can fight your way into his keep and beat him. Then murder is easier, retrieving stolen goods is easier, and the summoning debate is over.

I REALLY like this idea. However don't give characters free beds or anything, put them just sleeping under the stars if they don't have a bed/cabin, make the bed a buildable object and have it give some benefit (eg, healing HHP more slowly than first aid).

Follow it up with a wardrobe / chest / cupboard to keep your belongings in that's slightly more secure than a sack (but less than a gate) and then maybe we'd start to see people building in their own cabins etc, slightly more realistic than the current "hearth wherever" sprawl.

Unfortunately new players would be fairly disadvantaged in this system, but I'm sure if they found a nice community to join they could be on their feet in no time

Yeah, I think we're getting somewhere!

In terms of new players being disadvantaged, they're also disadvantaged because they can't afford a sweet battle ax, so I don't quite see how that's a problem.

[kobnach]

This is being discussed everywhere, so, in the spirit of that, I'm making a completely new post on the topic instead of replying to a relevant thread. When in Rome. Here are some extended thoughts on Crime & Punishment in Haven & Hearth.

Currently held beliefs:


10) Players with high public/forum profiles get hit. Casual players are left alone 99 times out of a hundred. The thief problem is overstated due to the newsworthiness of thief incidents. Normal play time is severely underreported in the forums.

As developers, you can test this, at least for clue-generating crimes. Count all the claims and villages. Note claims belonging to village members as part of villages. Note the number of forum postings by claim owners as an indicator of someone being high profile. Count all clue-generating activities, and create a histogram of who got hit. Perform some statistical analysis.

Also interesting - record amount of login time for (a) people who have clues generated on their land (b) people who generate clues (c) people in neither category. Also record character age. is there a trend? (Obviously newbies too low level to have claims won't be hit, and folks who don't have black skills trained won't be hitting anyone. You can correct for this.)

If you want to get a measure of newbie abuse, you need a bit more code. Define some radius around the hearth of a person with no kind of claim and no ability to make one. Objects that nearby are presumed likely to belong to the newbie. Note when someone not kin to the newbie does actions that would be criminal if that area were claimed.. including vandalism. It's not foolproof, and will tend to overestimate - but other techniques under estimate.

I'm sure you can come up with more interesting questions to ask along with ways to answer them. I suspect you will find that a lot of people are quietly putting up with a lot of abuse.

[kobnach]

An alternative to the same fix is something I suggested last night. Perhaps characters should stay in-game, asleep on beds by their hearth fire. If attacked, they'd wake up and fight back, but if beaten could be stole from. There would be the problem of teleporting back when logging off, but that is only truly a problem if the "sleeping character" is implemented for realism. I'm suggesting it not for realism, but to aid all characters in interaction with thieves, murderers, etc. You can kill a character if you want, but only if you can fight your way into his keep and beat him. Then murder is easier, retrieving stolen goods is easier, and the summoning debate is over.

So what you want is for innocent characters to be just as vulnerable as murderers? This sounds like a great help to griefers and no solution at all to the perceived problem of protecting the main characters of thieves, murderers, and vandals.

[Krantarin]

I completely disagree with your analysis of my idea, Kobnach. It's true that it would make the game a little bit more dangerous, but any player would be able to defend himself if attacked. The murderers or thieves now can fight back when "summoned," and people who are stolen from can always get their goods back.

Someone with an alt will not be able to defeat a sleeping player, and if the griefer uses their main, they will leave a murder clue and be trackable. With good reason, I'm sure a powerful posse would be happy to quickly track such a clue.

[niltrias]

Just tossing this out there, but what if summoning was not automatic, but instead a percentage chance based to the difference between the summoner's exploration skill and the summonee's stealth skill? Maybe with different base chances as well, like:
Theft&Bettery -10
Vandalism 0
Murder 10

Then it would be harder to kill an experienced thief for a single act of theft, but easy to summon an unskilled thief or a thief who took, in jorbs words, "the whole henhouse". This would promote surgical strikes on valuables, which is the kind of theft I would like to see.
Also, in case of theft, many people only want the name of the thief...let this be a choice. They can attempt a summon, or they can attempt to get the name. The name, obviously, would be much easier to obtain.
I think overall, in order to balance out theft, two things need to be changed.
1 - It needs to be harder, somehow, for alts to run off with everything in a place and hand it to a main.
2 - It needs to be safer for experienced theives to steal things, especially if they do it in a sneaky (as opposed to ransack-y) manner.