Game Development: Crime & Punishment

[sami1337]

Hmm yeah i think you're right. Tracking a real life thief doesn't always make you find him/her.

[shockedfrog]

This sounds like a good start to me. I can't say much about balance yet since I've yet to try these things out, but I do have some questions/issues.

If somebody's hearth fire is claimed over, would they be considered as trespassing upon spawning?

Does the stench of theft track inventory items? If so, and an item is stolen and then given to another person, would I be right in guessing that the clues would track the original thief and their hearthfire, but would track the new owner? This seems quite abusable, as stolen items could then be given to an alt who would not be summonable.

If the tracked player dies, will the clues become useless after that, or will they point to the reincarnated character?

I think restricting building on others' claims would be a reasonable temporary measure, but I'd like to see it removed when item destruction becomes possible (to allow for protests, sieges, squatting, and so on). Being able to destroy things also prevents the ability to hide a crime scene - for example, by murdering someone, then building racks all around it so nobody can reach the clue.

I'd like to see a 'forgive' option on clues (to reduce unwanted vigilantes and give victims of revenge the ability to stop things spiralling out of control), or a way of giving permission to do things which would otherwise be crimes (such as the sparring system). However, the use of these brings up another issue. Should random fighting in the streets be legal? What about assisted suicide? Perhaps custom laws for villages, made clear to anyone entering the village, could settle this. Those laws should allow for various possibilities, whether it's a peaceful village where fighting is completely disallowed (except maybe against those who have broken that law) and so tracks are left at the scene of any fight, or some kind of barbarian camp where fighting anyone, anytime is accepted. This could perhaps then be connected to the future expansion of personal beliefs, with some kind of trait that allows a player to follow the tracks of someone who has committed what is considered a crime either by them or their village, even if it's not considered a crime in the place where the crime happened.

[jorb]

... wow.

Good morning, everyone. Afternoon, rather.

Before we implemented last night's changes, we had thought of, and spoken about, a system based on getting retribution points when a crime was committed against you, allowing you to take some level of justified revenge and in the process expending the points. As we discussed our work yesterday, however, it dawned on us that our previous ideas for handling crime and punishment were fundamentally flawed. First of all, it did not seem to make sense to get equal retribution points for the theft of a branch and for the theft of a powerful artifact. We realized also that this, in a sense, meant that we would have to introduce a game set value system into the game through a back door, which would be a clear case of plan economy (Which we do not like). Thirdly, related, it seemed to take a level of freedom out of the game when crimes had set costs and values not determined by player actions. Fourthly: Laws breed more laws. If we try to fix a problematic edge case by introducing a specific rule against it, we will soon find that the new rule itself has produced more edge cases, and so on, until our rule book would look like the code of laws for most any industrialized nation in the RL world: Bloated, unnecessarily complex and with a thousand weird little laws that are never used, and with even more weird little laws that, sadly, are being used. Fifthly: It wouldn't have been easy to implement in the first place. Sixthly: It did not track crime. If someone spouted abuse at you in the chat, you would not get retribution points for that (since there'd be no way for us to track or measure that).

New system rocks. It is relatively simple from a design point of view, and it allows for an immense amount of freedom. This game does not want to tell you what anything is worth: lives, wounds, stuff or all the pain you went through. All the game does is provide a mechanism for finding and hurting the person who did you wrong, provided you are good enough at finding him. Some of you have been raising concerns to the tune of: "But this means I cannot have my revenge and still be safe!" -- No, quite right, which is exactly as it should be. In this game, dishing out what you perceive to be justice carries with it about as much risk as doing wrong does. And this is pretty close to what real life is. The faint of hearth (tihi) will not become this game's outlaws, nor its heroes. If you want to be an automatic, fool-proof, hero, or villain, I recommend finding a different MMO. If you do not wish to take the risks involved in defending yourself, your things or your sacred honor, find someone who will. There are already people taking offers.

As for the "cycle of retribution" thing. Have you ever heard of a blood feud? It is a quite common theme in the sagas that I would not mind seeing in game. I don't think it'll go on for very long, though. You might be at full tradition the first time they kill you, but the second time you won't. Being halved in stats a couple of times is, I believe, a pretty good deterrent.

The essential point here, however, is that we do not police this world. You, the players, do. We hope and believe that this means that justice will, to a large extent, be a self regulating and always evolving case of spontaneous order (As is, mind you, the rest of the game, which is working pretty well). The real beauty here is of course the ability to Force Summon. I think that was some very interesting and original thinking on our part, and I do believe it will work pretty well, at least once everything is in place.

That being said, there is still work to be done here. Some features are not implemented, there are tweaks and balancing issues to be dealt with. Force summoning is a bit harsh of a potential penalty for theft, but then again you could, well... avoid stealing? Also, if you've only stolen something small, the ranger might very well decide to leave you alive, and just beat you up and take back the stuff after the force summon. If the ranger doesn't want to leave a murder clue, for example. There might still also be some issues with the way claims are handled. For now, though, they can't be used to wall people in, nor would the erection of an "unjust" claim (Shady Acres) make a colony completely unlivable. We will implement some way to remove claims, as an offensive action, in the future, probably, but the exact details of that have not been discussed. Also, we do plan to implement ways of sharing claims between several players, so you won't have to deal with an impenetrable wall of trespassing odor. The new system is far more coop friendly than the previous was, though.

Also, please note that this does in no way shape or form exclude things such as walls, locks, rutabagas or deviled eggs -- we are implementing things, they do have to come one at a time, though.

And the really cool part? If someone messes with your steel production, which a complete n00b couldn't do, since it requires some investment to get theft, you can hunt them down and kill them. Cool, huh? I know I'm just waiting for someone to try and take my stuff now. My biggest fear is actually that we might have made it too difficult to steal and get away with it.

There was also a question about the reek of theft and its ability to track the stolen object. Right now this only works for objects that always have a place in the physical world, i.e. cannot be placed in an inventory, big objects such as chests, baskets, meat grinders, carts, etc. In the future, the plan is to make any stolen object trackable. This requires some reworking of the way inventories are handled, so it might not happen tomorrow, but it will happen.

[shockedfrog]

People should be forced to read jorb's post before playing. :)

[jorb]

Also, some of the comments in this thread, I am sorry to say, seem to completely miss the point of this system. If you have not done anything wrong you cannot be force summoned. Why on god's green earth would that be "a griefers wet dream"? Learning murder, and the combat skills to go with it, is hard in the first place. If you kill another player, all that player would have to do is find a ranger (Or, for that matter, the entire god damned village) and go out on a little hunting trip. This would leave the murder with having to go through the quite laborious task of upping his stats again, before trying that kind of bullshit again. I hardly think a professional army of griefers will be attracted to a game that has you weaving baskets and picking flowers for hours before even being allowed to throw a punch.

I love critique, but some of the posts in this thread are knee-jerk reactions that point at obvious issues as if we hadn't already thought of them. I do not wish to beat my chest, but neither Loftar nor I are idiots.

Take care, and try this out before trying to shoot it down, I think you will find it to be much better than you might at first imagine.

[trollfairy]

[quote="jorb"]
Wall of text.
[/quote]

Tears of joy.

[Vattic]

I think this will makes things more interesting hehe. I do have two questions though, firstly, why don't the hearthlings fight back when dragged out of bed using rage? Secondly what happens if you've never built a hearthfire?

[jorb]

I think this will makes things more interesting hehe. I do have two questions though, firstly, why don't the hearthlings fight back when dragged out of bed using rage? Secondly what happens if you've never built a hearthfire?

Hearthlings do not fight back because we have no AI for it. It could be argued that they should, but it is far from obvious exactly how that would work. If you've never built a Hearth Fire you cannot be summoned, we plan to fix this, and one idea is to have summoning be possible by a World Hearth in the center of the RoB. If someone does find that they are having actual problems with this, please post in the forums and we'll see what we can do.

[Vattic]

One more question, how long would you stay logged in for if you did get raged back into the game?

[jorb]

One more question, how long would you stay logged in for if you did get raged back into the game?

Your character spawns as being in a fight relation with the Ranger, and with the "End combat button" (Left of enemy avatar), for lack of a better word, set to wanting to end the combat relation. This means that the logged in character is handled in the exact same way as any character who wants to log off while being in a combat relation. He stays in game until the combat relationship ends per the normal rules for this. Peace, ranger leaving the building, etc. As soon as he is able to, he will log out.