Faith in our Neighbors: Better City Building

[TeckXKnight]

Hrm, perhaps interpret it like this. At the moment it is piss easy to do maximum damage to a village with even a newbie character unless the village is built for maximum defense against exploitation. Even then, unless you have completely locked everyone out of EVERYTHING, it is still easy to do a lot of damage.

My suggestions are to make it more difficult and take more planning and more time. This is all I'm asking. Stop making us play with bad mechanics, annoying exploits, and annoying work arounds. These do not make for good play or fun play. They make for needless paranoia, lots of unnecessary frustration, and really lame drama that no one appreciates or enjoys. No one has ever seen a thread about internal village trashing and gone, "Wow, what a good thread! I'm so glad this guy fucked over his allies. That sure was a clever play." Even when that happened to Sodom, the biggest most hated faction at the time in w3, it was lame. Not even their enemies enjoyed that. It was sad and pathetic and caused a lot of personal mistrust and dislike without adding anything to the game.

Edit: One amendment. There are stories and actions from professional thieves and spies from earlier worlds. What they did was nothing similar to this and actually wouldn't be affected by any proposed modifications. What they did was gave away sensitive information, opened gates, stole or trashed critical supplies, or just caused dissent amongst their own people. All of these things are great and I've proposed nothing to stop this.

[ImAwesome]

My post makes no sense to you, fair enough.
Consider that some cops etc are corrupt....also if you are the leader of the village - your word is law.
Yes you want to keep people from accessing certain areas- you telling me you would allow villagers to wonder into a storage where you keep valueables like pearls? no theres no good reason to, like theres no reason for a farmer bern able to access your mine if its nearby, or any other area thats not where hes suposed to be...are you allowed to enter the bank vaults in your local banks? Of course not, what about your supermarkets warehouse? No of course not
There are areas in a village that villagers should not have access to, because they dont work there or because that area is too sensitive (where you keep most valuable stuff.

all cops are corrupt, and noone will live in a village run like a dictatorship!

as for your bank example; exactly I'm not an employee there, but what of the actual employees? that new teller that was just hired at a bank isn't going to be allowed in the vault either. why would you want the newest member of your vilage in your vault? in game theres no way to stop that except to kill that person if you catch them going there! if not they can come and go as they please. now as you've said you're a hermit with no intentions of joining a village so this really has no concern to you so I'm going to stop arguing the point with you now.

like Teck said this is a game go have fun! griefing a village where people trust you ruins their fun, and shouldn't be possible(or atleast so easy).

[TeckXKnight]

like Teck said this is a game go have fun! griefing a village where people trust you ruins their fun, and shouldn't be possible(or atleast so easy).

It should be possible -- just not quite as easy. At least require a vandalism alt, come on.

[Kubius]

This really has a whole lot of potential and most of this stuff I'd like to see in game.

[Gorlie]

I agree on the fundamentals, but I think your solutions are too extreme and do infringe on the freedom to commit crimes that makes H&H so special.

Cattle killing, farm uprooting, and all other acts of destruction are all examples of griefing. They are criminal acts but they aren't treated as such by the game. Something needs to be done to make it harder to do these things; but not impossible. In my opinon a village should be able to be infiltrated and destroyed from the inside, but it shouldn't be simple. One idea is to add a permission system that governed over who are allowed to do what in the village, and the only way to get around that requirement is a high stealth skill; lets say higher than the highest village rangers exploration skill. Also limit the amount of harm you can cause in a limited amount of time, based on the ratio between the impostor and the ranger. I don't think these crimes should leave a scent; the ranger weren't good enough.


Problem with hearthfires are that they are easily rebuilt. If you actually do siege a hearthvault, it will be empty by the time you get in. Simple solutions;

1. The hearthfire of criminals are immovable,
2. when you rebuild a hearthfire you get some sort of cooldown on your destructive abilities
3. The village lawspeaker can see the position of the hearthfire of each member, or maybe just whether or not they are within the village claim.
4. Make the hearthfire of criminals burn black

A completly peaceful village would easily spot the criminal amongst them, with an inspection of everyone's hearthfire. But a village filled with trespassers and murderers would find it hard to pick the real criminal from the bunch. Obviously something would have to be added so that they can banish this person, maybe destruction of the hearthfire forces the person to spawn in a random spot rather than where he logged out. And if they, or anyone else, picked up a scent of this scoundrel they can summon and kill him, if not they have to let him go but at least their village is safe again. Do not let him rebuild his hearthfire until the scent period of whatever crime he commited runs out.

[Sardte]

Some really good ideas/thoughts, but it really boils down to this.

But I doubt jorb and loftar will ever listen or care.

[Vaku]

I agree with the greater notion of this thread, that at the moment, village options are rather flat, and do require a slight amount of mechanical aid to deal with the costliness of absence, that not all of us will have 24 hour surveillance and time to act against crime. While I am a big believer that communities can function fully with only social rules, I do agree that portions of these suggestions can go a long way in providing a bit of flavor and accountability for bad seeds within a community.

I agree with this part of the first proposition:

1. I propose that members of a village should not be permitted to destroy production facilities without special permission from the village lawspeaker or chief. This includes production facilities built by the player trying to destroy them.

I do not agree with the sabotage portion, though I understand where that is coming from. It is relatively simple for someone vandalize at will, and I think that should be the case. The option for violence should have the opportunity to occur at the drop of a hat--but there and then at that moment should be the accountability, which means the leaving of vandal scents.

What this proposition then seems to become, without the extra feature of sabotage, is the plea that Village Idols come with the similar features of a Personal Claim, managed ultimately by the Lawspeaker, and as to which Claim permissions will supersede the other, that should be a check box left at the hand of the Lawspeaker.

Though, before I get ahead of myself, it may suffice to say that to even favor suggestion #1 is excessive, and that the current system as it stands is close enough to fine, and could be made agreeable by an aware city-planner. I say this because I've dedicated a lot of time to making and testing as open a city as possible, where I've come close to my goal. This involves mostly the inclusion of Personal Claim rules.

A Personal Claim cannot be within 5-tile's distance from another Personal Claim
A Personal Claim, claims immediately 5x5 tiles with the Stake centered.
A Personal Claim will remain rectangular and extend only at the cardinal directions (So that means no oblong shapes).

With these rules in mind, it's possible to make city that is open, with private properties, business sectors and so forth. I would go so far as to suggest that it should be possible for players to stake multiple Personal Claims, but with the LP Cost for expansion to increase exponentially, and adherent to the aforementioned Personal claim rules. So instead of 10 LP per tile, it becomes 100 LP with the second claim, 1,000 LP with the third claim, 10,000 LP for the fourth claim and so on. This way, the necessity for claim alts will diminish, eliminating "annoying workarounds" as TeckXKnight put them.

The second suggestion, I do not find myself agreeing with:

2. Hearthfires are unintuitive for new players and a deathtrap waiting to happen for criminals. In its current system, hearthvaults become the norm and the concept of having a traditional village is lost. Instead, raiders have a little 10x10 box of bricks. Hearthfires should be securable inside of traditional buildings and should only be summonable on contact rather than at a range. Houses should have a special room just for storing hearthfires. It is not a necessity to place a fire in there but once someone does, the area becomes only accessible to them until someone forces the door or destroys the house.

Having criminals summonable at contact seems to promote walls. And even if the system was made only pertinent to villagers, it would still promote walls. Though I can imagine a few ways this Hearthplace could be implemented into homes, it seems counter-intuitive, though it would still make a nice location to stick Hearth Fires. I imagine them actually being placed within an actual Fireplace-like location, similar to how you can stick objects underneath a leanto.

As for the third suggestion, I find myself disagreeing with it. It is in a word, excessive, and I think just the ability to change out locks would suffice. And I mean of course to change out locks without the ill-conceived need to bash down an entire gate, only to rebuild it again. It would work like this:

1. Collect the materials to build a new Lock and Key.
2. Craft the new Lock and Key item.
3. Navigate to the "Apply Lock and Key" skill.
4. After clicking on the skill, click on the object you want to lock. You will receive the New Key in your inventory and the Lock and Key item will disappear.

It would be wonderful, you could change out locks on your compromised gate, apply a lock to your cellar door, even your daughter Helga's pants! For simplicity's sake, changing out the lock to an object that you do not own the Original or Copy of the key should not be possible, nor should it be possible if you do not have a claim over the object. These parameters would then exclude the locking of objects that do not already come with keys.

I think the key item should not be abstract. I feel that their presence in the world is an important feature that can be lost, destroyed or exchanged. I feel that the further we stray from the personal interaction of features, the farther we get from the HnH experience. When community experiences become automated, such as the defense of location, I feel it becomes a bit of a cop-out on the importance of trust and social interaction. I would only go so far as warning systems that would alert the community that they're under attack.

With regards to teleportation, I would be more than happy to see it gone altogether. I feel it's important that armies need to march to their goals, not spawn on top of them. I feel that the influence of one faction ought to be dependent on the connections they hold within their immediate community. I feel that a global economy should be earned with a well thought out transit system, rather than an expectation with multiple village idols. Teleportation seems to, in many ways, cheapen the experience of community and the necessity of trust that comes without it.

As far as Jorb and Loftar listening or caring--they've gotten this far, and we're still loyal guinea pigs for their cash cow. Here they're free to experiment without fear of losing business, and I hope they exploit that so that we may enjoy some interesting gameplay.

[Bossy]

I would make BW gates bigger ... so i can use my wagon inside village
Other things about lost key or steal keys kindya like

[sparkeagle]

well what i like to do when i build my cities is have the city sectioned off to where the newbies start in the newbie section, then you have the miners section , farmers section, etc sections, along with my own section that has a little bit of everything to protect the city from everything being destroyed and have still some high quality stuff if everything except my section gets destroyed