Rewards for living in the middle of civilisation are poor

[Potjeh]

If somebody can slay a dragon, he is more dangerous than one. Doesn't matter if that someone is a single character or a group. And unless dragons start dropping silk cloths, cupboards of food, high quality arms and armour and start raging in the congress, they'll never be as attractive targets as villages.

Alternative, of course, is to make dragons unslayable and just have them roam around and burn everything to the ground while you watch helplessly. I don't know about you, but that doesn't seem fun to me. If we're going to have such "challenges", might as well save some work on art resource and just give us the bubonic plague.

[loftar]

I don't believe it's possible to make the mobs more dangerous than hostile players.

It should be said that we've long wanted to make hostile players less dangerous in one way or another. The primary problem above all right now is the fact that being off-line makes a player or a village completely defenseless, which is undesirable because it doesn't represent the true power of the player or village. It is not obvious how to remedy the situation in some fun and meaningful way, however.

One thing that we've thought about is to make it so that crimes committed on claimed ground deals damage directly to the offending player, based on a computed "strength" of the village or character being offended. I think that dealing actual damage directly is really boring and too concrete to represent the rather abstract notion of offline players being offended, however, and it also has the risk of making it even more advantageous to be offline during an attack; so please do consider that approach as an imaginary construction to illustrate the problem rather as an approach that we've actually considered as a solution. I would much rather like to see some kind of abstract "curse" afflicting the offending player, but I cannot say that I've thought of any good concrete implementation of such a curse. In short, it would be good to have some kind of in-game representation of the strength of a village or player even in their physical absence.

I also think that with a much more involved crafting system (which I have begun formulating in parts), division of labor would probably be a good incentive for people to stay together, which will likely discourage crimes in itself (if people derive more advantages from the division of labor, they will be less inclined to upset the societal order).

It should also be said that the manifestation of animals is very far from being established. Jorb and I have considered all sorts of changes to the animals (but not decided on anything yet), including, but not limited to, the removal of animal levels (and therefore also of strength differences within the same type of animal); disassociation of animal l3wt levels from the level of civilization; associating it instead to some other local parameter, which might be modifyable by players in various ways; and disassocation of l3wt levels from animal strength.

It should also be said that, while it is an uncomparable advantage to have lots of people playing the game, I do sometimes feel that did have more freedom previously. Nowadays, I have to fear threads like these just by making some little AI change; there is no telling how much RAEG we would attract by replacing animals with some competely new system. We do our best to ignore such concerns, of course, but the advantages of the economic simulation that is possible by having players is also something very much worth protecting, and so losing players to RAEG is, after all, undesirable.

[Potjeh]

Curses I like. Especially cursing stolen items after the actual theft. And cursing someone for five generations, which is a pretty common thing in folklore. If you could make these multi-generational curses something that renders a purpose made criminal alt useless while keeping it bearable for characters with significant time investments in them, that'd be perfect.

That, and Chakravanti's scent deletion idea. Maybe even better, make it so that only village members can see and collect scents on village grounds (not applying retroactively, of course, so you can't build a village to cover your tracks). Fighting on home turf should be a huge advantage.

[Avu]

Curses or direct damage will be useless until you figure out how to take alts out of the equation. That means no more power leveling with thane rings on bears no more str being the supreme and easiest to get stat and no more combat only skills characters that don't actually need to do anything else than kill and eat bears.

Also if you want players not to log off when their towns get raided give them massive combat bonuses while on their own claim or their village claim home ground and all that.

Also about people less likely to disturb societal order you seem to ignore the fact that most crime comes from outside your own society you don't get robbed or raided by your trade partners usually.

As for your AI change that basically made a skill that previously had use completely useless. How about you know improve the skill first and update the AI later?

[theTrav]

lol @ eql.

unappealing == rewarding challenge that players should aspire to
risk vs reward == unconditionally reward players for making the game harder for themselves
I know what the devs want because I guess the game is a sandbox.

Well, at least I know where you stand, however I don't really have any common ground from which to base further discussion, I'll just agree to disagree with you on all those points.

[theTrav]

losing players to RAEG is, after all, undesirable.

YOU SHUT YOUR FILTHY MOUTH!

we can simulate economy without those whiny bitches

[theTrav]

Curses or direct damage will be useless until you figure out how to take alts out of the equation.

Curses that make stolen items un-usable until their scent has cleared and make it visibly obvious that it's a stolen item would work pretty well I think even with alts... Especially if they do the backpack thing to make alt vaults stop working

[Potjeh]

I would much rather like to see some kind of abstract "curse" afflicting the offending player, but I cannot say that I've thought of any good concrete implementation of such a curse.

I've been thinking a bit about this, and I think that this is a perfect niche for priests.

Priests could be another type of village official. They'd use village authority to place wards on important parts of the village. These wards could be sort of like reverse flags - ie they'd constantly drain authority. So, you could set up a single powerful ward that uses all the available authority to protect a small area (village vault, most likely), or a bunch of weak ones to cover the whole village.

Wards could function as a "you must be at least this tall" kind of thing. Ie, a criminal would have to have a certain minimum of some skill (stealth works, I guess) to even enter the warded area. This shouldn't be unreasonably high, of course, and it should depend on the power of the ward. Those that do enter should be at risk at getting cursed with all kinds of nasty stuff, the risk being the greater the longer they stay in the warded area. Finally, the stolen items themselves would be at high risk of getting cursed when they leave the warded area without proper authorization.

To make theft from warded areas easier, witches could brew potions, make amulets and perform protective rituals on would-be thieves. All of these should come with significant material costs and should degrade with use, to encourage surgical strikes instead of the "take everything not nailed down" approach. Witches being associated with thieves would also give a good excuse for priests to burn them at stake, though finding a witch should be a very challenging task.

[theTrav]

Wards could function as a "you must be at least this tall" kind of thing. Ie, a criminal would have to have a certain minimum of some skill (stealth works, I guess) to even enter the warded area.
..SNIP..
To make theft from warded areas easier, witches could brew potions, make amulets and perform protective rituals on would-be thieves.

My first knee jerk reaction is that you'd get a bit of a grind-wars arms race in some of these potential implementations, however on further reflection there are probably ways of implementing it that reduce that.

The idea itself is appealing, I like the idea that you encourage surgical strikes with it.


It really only applies to thieves who want to survive though... most of the ones that hit highly populated areas in a way that discourages people from living there are quite happy to burn their character just to dump a heap of shit on the ground...

Having said that, if you could have a ward that fries their characters with a lightning bolt then maybe that'd chop that sort of mentality off... Oh, but maybe lightning bolts are a bit too "high magic"... Maybe just strike them with leprosy so their legs fall off and they can't move...

[Jackard]

dont like the sound of wards at all if theyre bound to the skill value grind