Keeping robbers away.

[Lightning2]

How the hell do I keep robbers away? They keep coming and steal tons of shit, buying land cost's tons of LP, I don't want to waste LP for buying ground while the map is going to change, I can't attack them, because I have to buy rage which cost's 30.000 LP which takes years to get, how do I keep these kids away from my city? I can't even protect my own camp...

[KoE]

Claims aren't permanent. You can de-claim an area and get all your LP back. Whether J&L will be refunding it automatically when the reset comes is up in the air, but they should give fair warning for you to be able to pull it up on your own.

The only other way you're gonna get much done is to throw up some walls or ask for help from an outside source. Or move, I suppose.

Oh, and if you're gonna ask for help, it's a good idea to have a claim 'cause then said robbers will leave clues which allows said help to track them down.

[foboslc]

Use altstorage. The more people use it, the faster it will get fixed.

[loftar]

Use altstorage. The more people use it, the faster it will get fixed.

We are very unsure just how to fix that problem, though. The only real thing we are sure of is that it is a problem and that it needs to be fixed.

We are currently leaning towards a model that will make some scream out in terror, I believe, but I'll put it out here for future reference (and note that we have far from decided) -- the model is that 1) if one logs out without having a Hearth Fire, everything they have in their inventory or equipped will be stripped of them and left on the ground where they logged and; and 2) that it will be possible to steal stuff from logged-out players' inventories by interacting with their Hearth Fires.

Got a few screams, yet? Well, at the very least, we are planning on mitigate this
1) By always leaving Theft scents by people doing that (regardless of the Hearth Fire being claimed, that is);
2) By adding actual vaults (an actual safe, made from like 10 bars of steel and yielding a key much like the wall gates, taking as much or more damage as a segment of brick wall, and only being possible to carry away by characters with like 200 or more in strength); and
3) By making it harder to steal "senselessly" in general (as stated previously, we would like it to be possible to be a thief, or even form bandit gangs, but it is unreasonable that one or a couple of players can pillage and destroy an entire settlement in any short amount of time when every inhabitant is logged off).

Please do comment on this. If you have any better suggestion for preventing alt storage, we'd like to hear it, because the above is just the best thing we've been able to think of.

[Delamore]

2) By adding actual vaults (an actual safe, made from like 10 bars of steel and yielding a key much like the wall gates, taking as much or more damage as a segment of brick wall, and only being possible to carry away by characters with like 200 or more in strength); and

This makes thievery really about having a few strong as hell people, so it gets back to the point where they can smash everything and grab it all.
And when you're leaving one clue, it's just as bad as leaving 100 so why stop at one safe?

[Potjeh]

I'd like safes to be immobile and indestructible. Only way to get into one should be key or picking the lock, which I guess could be a (very high) roll of the stealth skill (I'm assuming this skill is meant to cover all criminal stuff).

[sabinati]

wouldn't the thief just be able to steal the key from your hearthfire or something?

[KoE]

Strangely, I didn't really scream at the hearth thing. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Assuming steel becomes sufficiently rare and a vault is sufficiently small (say, 9? 12? 16 at an upper limit?) spaces, it seems reasonable to me. The only thing I can see is... What's stopping them from stealing the key from your hearth fire? That becomes a pretty much automatic breech. The key itself needs secure storage, which I suppose could be achieved with a key ring and keeping it in your equipment, which is untouchable (barring a force summon, naturally).

It'd also be nice for these things to (eventually) be bypassable by some sort of lockpicking ability so that thieves have a better way to go about it than HULK SMASH and avoiding the uberthief problem Delamore mentions.

Also, since when is leaving one clue as bad as 100? I agree the same outcome is possible, but you get a lot less uses out of one clue than you do picking up every clue, merrily skipping across the map, slaughtering the thief, and then chucking out all the excess scents you never used. I'd go through the effort for a thief who took the whole henhouse 'cause that's basically griefing. I don't think I'd take the effort for even my nine or so most valuable items. I'd hardly say the system is perfect, but I'd rather leave as few clues as possible myself.

[Lightning2]

I just want to be able to throw away kids that keep making no sense and steal things then just walk away with us getting mad.

[Delamore]

What I'd like to see is two things:
Lockpicks and locks made of various materials, link it in with the quality system the devs are talking about
Clay 1-20 quality
Cast 1-40
Wrought 1-70
Steel 1-100

With the same applying to lockpicks.
So an example formula that could be used:
(Stealth /3 + Lockpick quality) - Lock quality *2 giving you the chance of you picking the lock, with a solid %X chance of the pick breaking regardless of the outcome.
This would make the investment involved in stealing from someone nearly on par with the investment of the things protected.
While the maths isn't perfect, it's an example of how a system could work.