Game Development: Crime & Punishment

[loftar]

It is fixed now. I hope you'll be able to find them now. :)

[kimya]

[quote="loftar"]It is fixed now. I hope you'll be able to find them now. :)[/quote]

nah, gave up on tracking ppl when in realized i was, for some seconds, thinking blaze might have stolen my sausages :)
i dont trust this stuff anymore, its nothing but lies.

LIES!

beware!

[p1geonman]

When comparing a criminals stealth + Int against a hunter's perception + exploration, does the system take into place the current values of the criminal, or only those that he had at the time the crime was committed? If the latter is the case, isn't it outright suicidal for a player to commit a crime given the huge window of time that other players have to advance their tracking skills and summon them through hearth fires?

[RaptorJedi]

So hey Loftar and Jorb, what are your exploration/stealth skill levels at? Because I'm scouting around to see if that little battle you two had left behind a clue :3=

[jorb]

It did leave a clue from my heroic assault on Loftar. I did, however, delete the clue. (My hearth is in an unreachable parallel dimension anyway, so it wouldn't do you much good )

[kobnach]

[quote="shockedfrog"]Newbies are generally unlikely to have stuff that's worth the risk of stealing in the first place. If they do obtain stuff worth stealing, then they have to accept the risks of having it. As for experienced players, they have great risks too. A smart player has to consider everything, otherwise they'll end up finding that guy who stole their steel only to end up ambushed by his gang.[/quote]

Thank you! I'd made it to page 9 of 12 before seeing anyone say anything like this.

I am a relative newbie, with a very basic camp setup. Someone smaller than me might find looting my camp profitable, I suppose, but it's probably easier to build their own than to steal from me. (You don't get LP for stealing.) More problematic would be random vandalism/grinding - drying racks where I'd fall over them, clay fields where I'd planned to plow, convenient stone-chip-source boulders taken for rune stones. I'm not overly worried though.

I went several days without the ability to homestead - and no one touched me. One of my neighbours /kin reports a few harvested plants - never the whole crop - and one case of someone who took a plank or two, leaving a cloak in its place. (I'm not entirely sure it wasn't someone who shares her camp site.) The worst I've personally seen was someone carrying a tanning vat in my neighbour's camp - not entirely claimed, since it's (a) shared and (b) large - turned out the visitor was simply using the well [not pilfering a tanning vat], not having a well in his/her own camp site yet. (If it hadn't been late, I would have offered to go build one for him/her - LP for me, convenience for the recipient.)

Theft is not a disaster in H&H, or even a major problem, at least for beginners. As far as I can tell, one doesn't have much risk of theft until one makes iron, or perhaps steel. And even then - from what I can tell, people on H&H are mostly friendly and helpful - the kind who enjoy building things for themselves. The game mechanics pretty well favour the build-your-own attitude; they even favour building and giving things away - since the LP don't go with the object. People also seem to love trading, even for relative newbie things - rabbit meat and fish, for example. (I get in return consumables I can't make yet.)

I am a little bit concerned by these changes, but mostly because my original plan was to use my homestead to protect things not inside it. (I blocked off a bigger area than I can claim with drying racks, homestead, and cliff wall.) Now I have to rearrange, and should probably expand my homesteaded area. Not a disaster, for sure.

[jorb]

Loftar and I found the site of an actual force summoning kill tonight, while scouting around. We tracked the perps (two assault clues, one battery clue and one murder clue at the site of the murder) and their hearths. Tracking worked pretty much flawlessly, and we even had the chance to have a chat with one of the summoners. Some things hade been stolen from their camp (their place still reeked with theft when we got there), they had tracked the culprit down, summoned and killed him. Interestingly enough, we also found out -- by looking at character data -- that the thief in question had been going towards tradition on the PB-sliders, and was obviously quite well aware of what he was doing. He had also been going through 10+ containers = 10+ clues = trivial tracking.

First of all -- tracking is a boatload of fun. Knowing that you're tracking a murderer, and sensing the sonar getting closer and closer, is enough to make my heart beat slightly faster. Me, loftar, night, torches (miner's helm, actually) and a manhunt under a waning moon -- the stuff of legends. The crime scenes (the one by the summoning kill, and the one by the cabin were the thief had been stealing) also looked beautiful. Just finding two assault clues and from that drawing the conclusion -- Aahaa, two attackers -- felt great.

Things we considered:

1) Non automatic summoning with chance to fail by comparing one skill value or another.
2) Cool down on the hearth fire when a summoning has failed. Giving the owner a respite. -- Problem: Culprit cool down blocking his hearth from summoning by repeatedly failing the summon with an alt character.
3) A high resource cost for the summoning ritual -- Problem: Might make it hard for non-developed characters to get their revenge/stuff back.
4) Making tracking harder by giving the scents fewer uses. -- Problem: Hard/impossible to track over longer distances.
5) Removing the clue objects when a summoning has failed -- Problem: Easy to cover the tracks by thusly removing the clues with an alt character.
6) We have an xmpp deamon capable of sending IMs based on ingame events. Sending an IM when someone tries to force summon you. -- Problem: Will not help the thief most of the time, since most people have other things to do in life except playing H&H, hard to believe though it might be.

Discuss!

[shockedfrog]

That sounds like fun, I wish I could have been there. :)

[theTrav]

You're not considering AI driven combat for the summoned player? A helpless target seems a bit... unfair

[jorb]

@ theTrav: Yes, we are considering that as well. The AI for it is, however, non-trivial. Our combat system is fairly complex. That being said, it might be a good enough start if the summoned character at least were to use default blocks and attacks, and be able to pathfind. Writing an even half decent AI for the combat system will, however, take some doing.