Philosophy, emotional investment and Questions that arise

[Colbear]

Valid playstyle: the devs want players to have mains that are thieves, or farmers, or miners, etc, etc -- as in, your main character can primarily steal stuff, and still get by okay. So, rolling up a character and having him go out and steal shit and having that be what your guy is, is as expected (think DnD or whatever).

I think the problem is that people are too attached to their characters right now -- your character is your accomplishment, and losing your character loses you most of your goals. By contrast, I think a shift to a town being an accomplishment might be beneficial (though, this would need dev maneuverings). For example, I'll be pretty miffed if I get ganked by someone, but I'd be less annoyed by someone stealing my shit, and I'd rather my character die than Gooncastle get destroyed completely.

[Laremere]

As you become a more powerful character you're able to do more things, this includes things like doing things that require high level skills, and also being able to hunt higher level creatures with decency. Our village several times have gone out hunting

currently the risks of paying even a simple peaceful person are so high I'm questioning if it's even worth playing the game.

Well, lets see what he's really lost then... Has Rugs busted into his village, killed everyone and stolen all the material goods there?

Is Cor unable to create a new character, return to his village, and continue to play with lower stats?

Losing a developed character is a pretty heavy loss, but once you've cooled down and stopped swearing, what part of having a high stat character was important to you having fun?

together. It's quite fun, but with Cor being reset as far as any combat efficiency goes, he would be set back very far and have a long way to catch up before being able to fight with us and mater. That's just one example. Also, people invest time into their characters. Try telling someone who fairly leveled up their wow character to the level limit that their character was killed by another character and now they have to level up all over again, I'm sure they'd be mad, and dis-like the fact that someone else dictated their fate.



Edit:

Please do not mechanically enforce morality.
Perma-death is awesome.
Literally unstoppable characters are not.

You can't, with intellectual honesty, claim that it is unjust that someone lost a lot of effort since:
-It is clearly stated that you can lose your work. In fact, it is a selling point for the game.
-A mechanic specifically to mitigate said loss exists. It is out of avarice that one does not take advantage of this.

Please actually read my post on the top of the second page, I explain some flaws in the system that defines if you retain your stats. Also, seeing as you just joined, you either have a low level character that you haven't invested much into, or you're a coward afraid to use your main account for some dis-crediting reason.

[Eustace]

They are not flaws. You just do not like them. I am not someone else's alt.

[Rugs]

Rugs, dearest and most beloved of thieves will now recall a tale of tradegy and woe.

Rugs had snuck up to the gate of the deserted town, keys in hand. Being the master thief and deadliest foe of farmer and miner alike, simply had to pick one of his many, many keys to open the gate. Once inside, the thieving began.

Suddenly, from a house, Corr emerged. Panic! Rugs, despite all his foresight and cunning, had not planned for this event. Corr was engaged by a single marksman, hoping to drive him back into his house and force him to log off. It was not to be. Corr bravely soldiered on through the hail of arrows, after he had located the rather well hidden source of them. He chased the archer out of the gates, locking them behind him, sealing his fate. He lunged at the nearest target, despite their vastly superior numbers. He engaged one, but he was outskilled and could not land a blow as heavily armed bandits surrounded him. The fight lasted several minutes, Corriander standing his ground as he was slowly whittled down. Before long he collapsed, the vicious band of thieves realised the magnitude of what we had done! The thievery began again, two-fold in speed as the thieves heart hung heavy with guilt.

They had had no choice, Rugs could not risk his new alias being uncovered, murder was an ugly business.

Thievery on the other hand, is beautiful.

[Potjeh]

Question: how do you feel about killing thief mains, then? Because as far as I can tell, thief mains (also weeks/months of work, etc, etc) are under the "kill as often as possible" rule, with "if one is found, everyone band together to hunt him down", while it appears that the reverse -- a farmer being killed by a thief (or a bandit or whatever) is now some huge deal and totally not fair at all. I mean, to some extent "a thief being caught stealing asked to die", yeah -- but then you get into the question of offline deaths, and whether or not that's fair.

Thieves should be full tradition. Yes, it greatly decreases LP gain rate. So what? In exchange for LP, you get filthy rich. I think it's a fair trade-off. If thieves gained same LP as producers and 10x more wealth, theft would be unbalanced and thus everyone would flock to it. This would lead to game losing all it's producers (whether they turn to theft or quit due to prevalence of theft), and then all the thieves would quit as they have nobody to steal from. Point is, making theft superior to other playing styles is bad for the growth of playerbase.

Anyway, back to topic. Yes, getting killed sucks, I know from experience. But you have to remember that at the end of the day it's just a game. People can hurt you through it only if you let them, ie if you get too attached to your character or your possessions.

To the thieves: that was a real dick move. What was wrong with just knocking him out? It'd let you rob him just as well as murdering him did. And saying "I'm sorry" (not that you said it, Delamore did) doesn't mean shit. Offering some kind of compensation for his loss would show that you really are sorry about what you've done.

[Caradon]

Just remember people, It is very unlikely that anyone is creating cast-away thief alts anymore. The LP required to learn those skills is not worth the repeated deaths, and brick walls are not perfect.

Situations such as this will be very rare.

[GrowOps]

Just remember people, It is very unlikely that anyone is creating cast-away thief alts anymore. The LP required to learn those skills is not worth the repeated deaths, and brick walls are not perfect.

Situations such as this will be very rare.

*macroes 100k overnight*
*robs u blind*

[Spiff]

I think killing him was not the smartest move and he would have been better left knocked out. That said, he would have killed the thieves just as quickly if not quicklier than they killed. He was given the choice of fight or flight and he chose fight. Oops. Let me make an analogy IN RL to guns. If you brandish a gun during a robbery, you might scare the robbers, but if they have guns too you'll probably get shot. If you run and hide, you probably won't. Maybe.

Also, some of you works are awful worked up over the death of some internet pixels. Let's stop fighting and get to arguing about potatoes again. It's an alpha, you're gonna die one way or another. Don't get too attached to your characters because in a game with permadeath, you're gonna die.

[kobnach]

Cor was using the repetitive contribution to our village as a sort of therapy for his depression (it's actually a neat, helpful way to combat it). Now it is tough to imagine him coming back. I wonder if the monsters who did this realize how they affected real people.

I don't know why it is we invest our emotions in a game so much. Our game up till here was a game of trading and farming, mining and diplomacy. Our relations with other villages have been excellent, and our village has maintained itself as a peaceful one. It is tempting to declare all out war, or at the very least hunt down every murderer to the heart of goon castle and give them a taste of my battle axe. But I think again--is this violent game, a game where so much emotion is at stake, the kind of game that I want to spend my time playing?

Your predictions were correct, but you have my sympathy - and understanding. Truth to tell, I feel the same way, and so do most of my village. Several have pretty well stopped playing, and others hover on the brink of quitting. We do get invested in the game - perhaps because we are builders, not griefers, and not punks who prefer to take from others rather than build.

I also like Coriander, and am sorry it was him who got killed. I hope someone follows the killers home, and deals appropriately with both them and any villagers who try to defend them. I also find myself comparing, unfavourably, Goonheim's reaction to their murderers with Barrenburg's reaction to "its" thief - who proved not to be a village member, just someone who'd snuck into our perimeter and left a hearth inside a mostly inactive player's house.

I don't have a solution, either to the emotional investment or to the game balance issues that allow reasonably well developed characters to be wiped out in an instant, even though they are not looking for trouble. I'm sorry in a way that Coriander was trying to interfere with a theft in progress, rather than being attacked out of the blue - as certain goons have done to others - one being a person whose land they/JTG had stolen, when the moving-out player went back to harvest a bit more of their tea. (That player got away, fortunately, as did the now infamous Jon, when goons and JTG attacked him, leading to the later developments that made various goons so very unhappy.) If Coriander had simply been jumped on as part of a strategy to eliminate Pine Valley's owners, that would have made this case even clearer.

Perhaps the solution is indeed the one some of my villagers have chosen - stop playing. Let the game become a haunt of PvPers, with few or no builders to provide them with prebuilt villages, ready made steel, silk, and even food. I've suggested, repeatedly, a level of immunity for those who don't learn the black skills, or don't use them aggressively - and been laughed at by those who like the excitement and risk of perma-death -- and, I suspect, expect the risk to apply to their victims not themselves.

Ultimately it's the developers' decision what type of game they have. Perhaps it would be boring if it were entirely a matter of development, without risk. But I think it's very different to have the risk be almost entirely from other players, and involuntary, while the development part has no pvp aspects. If the risk were from bears, it would be a whole different thing emotionally - and those risk averse could stay home and do less LP-producing activities that involved little risk. Instead we have semi-random PvP (you never know when some punk will target you) and a game system where protecting against the random death risk requires cutting your LP production drastically - only then possibly to find the game is bugged, and full tradition didn't restore all one's LP (from a recent thread).

[Humps]

Corr made a series mistake, and he paid the price for it.

This harshness isn't everyone's idea of fun, and if they don't want to play in this kind of enviroment, there is nothing forcing them.