Game Development: Iced Bait

[pawnchito]

But your character still remains in the game if you are in the middle of a fight, no matter if you are outlaw or not, no?

And yes, I think i should be able to port back - outlaw and redhand have wasted alot of my time for no reason.

Right, no reason. Not like you committed a serious crime or anything...

So lets say we are in a fight and clearly I am going to lose, I just pull the plug on my internet. Poof now my dude is protected. Thats what you are asking for right?

[MrBunzy]

For the love of god revert to legacy summoning/outlaw system and remove redhand.

That's perhaps a discussion we can have, but certainly has little to do with what we tried to solve with this patch. Meanwhile, Legacy's system had enough problems of its own that I'm sure you realize you'll at least have to suggest solutions to them to make that an interesting option.

Can you elaborate on the problem? iirc there were two issues, first people would purposefully break their own hearthfires in order for others to summon them with scents, as a form of teleportation. This was pretty handily fixed by causing summoning with a scent to instantly kill the character. The next problem was that people would start preparing the scents of naked crime alts and summon them mid fight, creating corpses as obstacles for their opponents. This again, I think could be very easily solved, perhaps by a long channel timer on summoning.

Personally I think the outlaw system hasn't really accomplished what it set out to do, and you should definitely consider reworking it. I made a thread a while back on the subject too.
viewtopic.php?f=48&t=66373

[Massa]

What DOES [...] forcing their character in the world actually do?

It mainly avoids having to have the fairly broken summoning system.

If a player is offline, they're offline. If they get caught offline by someone pursuing their scents with intent to kill, they get killed. You still have to access their home/siege and raid their walls and access them, or their HF.

So what's the difference between summoning a corpse in your home/at their hearth and killing their idle character in their village? Both require the same effort to access theoretically, without leaving an idle shell behind out in the wilderness if one wants to log off or do something.

I suppose it can lead to trust issues, but I also assume I'm forgetting something.

So people are suggesting their criminal acts shouldnt have any sort of drawback or am I missing something?

You are missing a lot. The former summoning system was much different, but arguably more punishing in many circumstances. The 'drawback' of having committed a crime being your character is static in the wilderness if you disconnect is pretty whatever, and it's meaningless if you just hearth TP and chill inside your walls when you want to sleep. It just presents a potential pain in the ass situation during active play. Same function, less cringe of having a static character.

Some might argue this point, but I can take or leave either system. I actually don't hate the outlaw system, and kind of like it as a general mechanic. That's really not relevant though, and the old system did have some flaws for sure. Red handed is just too punitive at 2 hours. It would be too punitive at 30 minutes. In general I find it cringe past maybe 5 or 10. Being caught red handed means caught in the act, not 2 hours (which in Haven time is like fucking what, 8?) after the fact.

[DonVelD]

But your character still remains in the game if you are in the middle of a fight, no matter if you are outlaw or not, no?

And yes, I think i should be able to port back - outlaw and redhand have wasted alot of my time for no reason.

Right, no reason. Not like you committed a serious crime or anything...

So lets say we are in a fight and clearly I am going to lose, I just pull the plug on my internet. Poof now my dude is protected. Thats what you are asking for right?

Its not like its a real crime or something, maybe its just different perspectives. But yeah for me its waiting for no reason - wasting my real life time because I KOd someone in a game.

And about pulling the plug - not in the slightest. I said that you still get KOd anyways and I think thats fair.

[DonVelD]

But still, this solution takes out one of my problems like getting finished off with second KO after a crash, so I appreciate the update.

Ah and by the way im taking it back, it seems like it doesn't do that or i'm missing something - my outlawed character stays in place if i shut down the game mid fight and let it get KOd

[pawnchito]

Its not like its a real crime or something, maybe its just different perspectives. But yeah for me its waiting for no reason - wasting my real life time because I KOd someone in a game.

And about pulling the plug - not in the slightest. I said that you still get KOd anyways and I think thats fair.

I guess it is about perspectives. Wasting real life time is as trivial to me as Ko'ing someone in game is to you.

I've done my share of criminal nonsense and I feel the trade off of getting some tasty treats is off set by the fact that I have to watch my friggin' back for a while. I went out and probably shit on someones day so I shouldnt get to run around eating my cake too. Thats the risk you take. You knock someone out now you cant be free with your bowels or something.

[mulamishne]

I love the people saying that because you choose to play the game in a manner that they disagree with, your punishment should be worsened by a situation that has nothing to do with game mechanics.

If you're in combat, no shit, keep the character in the game world. If you're not then just allow the character to be logged/hearthed on a disconnect. Redhand/outlaw gotta go tbh

[loftar]

Right, no reason. Not like you committed a serious crime or anything...

Not to deny your point entirely (I do find it ironic that the complaints mostly seem to be coming from people who superficially seem to match what you're saying), but let's not forget that the crime system is intended to be as agnostic as possible of the intentions behind the crimes. Some murders are griefs, others are responses to griefs, and yet others are between equal parties who went into what they did fully knowing and agreeing on the consequences, so killing another character shouldn't necessarily have punishing consequences in itself, and that wasn't really the intent of the Outlaw/Red-handed mechanics either. That being said, there's also the angle that tracking and justice can be quite difficult to carry out, and that the offending party can set it up to be particularly difficult, which should be taken into account to some extent.

iirc there were two issues, first people would purposefully break their own hearthfires in order for others to summon them with scents, as a form of teleportation. This was pretty handily fixed by causing summoning with a scent to instantly kill the character.

Other than creating corpses, that "fix" also had the issue that the "correct" way to kill someone you had scents against was to just break their hearthfire and then teleport back home to commit the murder crime safely in the safety of your village. Also, even to the extent that it worked, it was always an ugly ad-hoc solution. I think the Outlaw mechanic is a lot more elegant than summoning in several such ways. I'll also admit that I don't exactly remember all the other problems with summoning right now, I mainly just recall it being constantly problematic and requiring such ad-hoc bandaids to be added over and over again, and it's not like it was fixed at the end of it.

Generally speaking, I'm a lot less attached to the Red-handed mechanic than I am to Outlaw. Red-handed was Jorb's idea to begin with, and I don't exactly remember the details of what it tries to achieve, but I think it was mostly just about not letting someone commit crimes and then immediately dash out and hearth home before anyone even has a chance to aggro them. I do think that's a legitimate case, but if someone has alternative solutions and/or wants to debate the time that one is Red-handed, that's something I'm very open to. I'm open to debating Outlawed as well, let's just leave the nostalgia glasses off and not pretend that going back to Legacy's summoning system is a good solution.

[loftar]

Ah and by the way im taking it back, it seems like it doesn't do that or i'm missing something - my outlawed character stays in place if i shut down the game mid fight and let it get KOd

Ah, yes, the UI was mostly intended as a solution to the common complaint that nubs don't know what's happening and don't realize they can do these things. The actions are tied to the UI, and the UI can only exist when there's a session. It wasn't really intended as crash-proofing, but that is perhaps an extension of it that can be considered. Not immediately sure exactly how that would be defined though, because if I were to lose power in the middle of somewhere far from home, I wouldn't want to automatically get thrown back home again just because of that.

[pawnchito]

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