- allow outlawed characters to be summon-killed at their hearth fire (or simply die if their hearth fire is broken?)
- prevent outlawed characters from building/moving hearth fires
- remove the unable to log out or take charters nonsense
Why:
To my understanding, the purpose of outlaw is to make criminals vulnerable to retribution, by making it harder for them to teleport away from hearth vaults under siege. In practice, however, it is trivially easy to escape from a besieged vault and hop to a new one. I have attempted to trap outlaws in their villages during sieges on a few occasions, and it simply does not work. It may seem like an insignificant problem compared to hearth vaults or siege as a whole, but I think the idea of actions having (theoretical) consequences is pretty central to this game. For a long time there simply have not been consequences to leaving scents, because it is virtually impossible to be subjugated by a more powerful group if you choose opt out of pvp and evacuate in the event of a siege.
I don't want to sound too nostalgic, but world 3 had a far more interesting political scene than the current one, and I think consequences to actions played a big part in it. To my knowledge, the superpowers at the time only deployed their brickbashers a couple of times, but, everyone in the world still talked about it. I think it impacted everyone's behavior because everyone knew death was a real possibility if they pissed off the wrong people. Compare this to modern day haven, where being sieged is an inconvenience at worst. All valuable structures you can find in a village like kilns are relatively transient, and can be replaced with minimal effort, valuables can be moved, characters evacuated etc. In modern haven the 'brickbashers' have been replaced by 'large groups of autists willing to spend a sleepless weekend fucking up your shit', but it is a similar concept. The problem is that even if the autists do conduct the siege, it dosn't matter. Despite siege almost never happening, having people risk dying in the event that it did would be a good step towards fixing the 'actions have no consequences' predicament.
I don't want to sound too nostalgic, but world 3 had a far more interesting political scene than the current one, and I think consequences to actions played a big part in it. To my knowledge, the superpowers at the time only deployed their brickbashers a couple of times, but, everyone in the world still talked about it. I think it impacted everyone's behavior because everyone knew death was a real possibility if they pissed off the wrong people. Compare this to modern day haven, where being sieged is an inconvenience at worst. All valuable structures you can find in a village like kilns are relatively transient, and can be replaced with minimal effort, valuables can be moved, characters evacuated etc. In modern haven the 'brickbashers' have been replaced by 'large groups of autists willing to spend a sleepless weekend fucking up your shit', but it is a similar concept. The problem is that even if the autists do conduct the siege, it dosn't matter. Despite siege almost never happening, having people risk dying in the event that it did would be a good step towards fixing the 'actions have no consequences' predicament.
How:
Mechanics wise, summoning outlaws on their hearth fires is a relatively simple way to make sure the outlaws receive a meaningful punishment if the people they piss off can get into their village. It would of course need to be impossible to rebuild a hearth fire elsewhere to prevent the vault hopping we have now. The case of hearth fires being destroyed, willingly or otherwise, needs to be handled. The legacy system of letting anyone force-summon-kill a hearth-fire-less-outlaw with a scent would work, or that could all be skipped and a broken hearth fire could just result in instant death or something. The important thing is, there should be extreme consequences to losing a hearth fire while outlawed, and people should want to defend their hearths to the death. In legacy it was necessary to have someones scents in order to summon them to their hearth fire, but I'm not sure I see much point in this. It would be quite frustrating to enter a village of raiders you had sieged and see a bunch of outlaw hearthfires, only to be unable to kill them because you couldn't find their most recent scents.
An added visual effect to an outlaws hearth might be nice. They could turn red, or give off black smoke or whatever, so that an outlaws allies would not accidentally bash their hearth fire, and their enemies would know where to look after a successful siege. Perhaps there could be some sort of timer (~10 minutes to bash an outlaw hearth fire?) or warning to an outlaw that they where being summoned, so that if someone somehow managed to get to their hearth fire without notice, the outlaw could try to defend themselves (i'm mostly considering the possibility of a traitor backstabbing or an alt with a wall jump bug here, not truly necessary).
Additionally, the duration of outlaw should probably be extended. Not moving a hearthfire is not particularly inconvenient so i don't think outlaws could complain much, but the current duration of the outlaw debuff is not nearly long enough to prepare/schedule/execute a siege, and realistically any outlaws would just have lost the debuff and evacuated by the time any attackers got in to their village. Could alternatively leave the duration as is, but add some way for it to be extended by people who had the scents (maybe with mandrakes haha?). This way, outlaws would not need to deal with the minor inconvenience of not moving their hearth fire unless someone actually had interest in getting revenge on them.
The existing mechanics of preventing fast travel and logging out should probably just be removed. Since they don't actually prevent vault hopping, their only current function is to discourage crime by giving an arbitrary punishment to outlaws. It does work to some extent, as I know lots of people who would normally KO every sprucecap they see and steal every tar stick out of docked knarrs they sail past, but simply don't because they would rather have access to charter stones. However if this is actually desirable, I bet there are far more creative arbitrary punishments that the community could brainstormed, and the use of charter stones feels completely unrelated to crime imo.
An added visual effect to an outlaws hearth might be nice. They could turn red, or give off black smoke or whatever, so that an outlaws allies would not accidentally bash their hearth fire, and their enemies would know where to look after a successful siege. Perhaps there could be some sort of timer (~10 minutes to bash an outlaw hearth fire?) or warning to an outlaw that they where being summoned, so that if someone somehow managed to get to their hearth fire without notice, the outlaw could try to defend themselves (i'm mostly considering the possibility of a traitor backstabbing or an alt with a wall jump bug here, not truly necessary).
Additionally, the duration of outlaw should probably be extended. Not moving a hearthfire is not particularly inconvenient so i don't think outlaws could complain much, but the current duration of the outlaw debuff is not nearly long enough to prepare/schedule/execute a siege, and realistically any outlaws would just have lost the debuff and evacuated by the time any attackers got in to their village. Could alternatively leave the duration as is, but add some way for it to be extended by people who had the scents (maybe with mandrakes haha?). This way, outlaws would not need to deal with the minor inconvenience of not moving their hearth fire unless someone actually had interest in getting revenge on them.
The existing mechanics of preventing fast travel and logging out should probably just be removed. Since they don't actually prevent vault hopping, their only current function is to discourage crime by giving an arbitrary punishment to outlaws. It does work to some extent, as I know lots of people who would normally KO every sprucecap they see and steal every tar stick out of docked knarrs they sail past, but simply don't because they would rather have access to charter stones. However if this is actually desirable, I bet there are far more creative arbitrary punishments that the community could brainstormed, and the use of charter stones feels completely unrelated to crime imo.
pls consider this, or some other change to outlaw. I don't think it'd be super hard to implement, but could potentially make a big impact on player interactions and politics.
