Suggestions from a New Player

[Fcn]

As a member of Something Awful I've only been playing for three days, and I thought I'd put out some of the issues I feel I've spotted, and various other suggestions in a thread.



Permadeath and Crime

Permadeath is always a bold move for game developers to move towards. On one hand it offers a unique, and for some people a very attractive element of massive risk, of real fear of losing something that is not present in most other MMOs. On the other hand, it can also lead to massive bleeding of the playerbase for a number of reasons. A few of these just to elaborate my point:

*Losing thier character due to lag or other connection issues.
*Losing their character in some way that the player deems 'unfair'
*Losing so much that the player feels they can never 'catch up' to their previous levels of advancement, and lose the motivation to play.

I'm not a huge fan of permadeath, full item loss is fine, property loss is fine, but I dislike the concept of losing a character I placed a great deal of energy into. This is somewhat remedied by the personal beliefs system, which lets me greatly reduce the detrimental effect of death.

I cannot however find any real merit in a system that allows players to kill other players while they are offline. It seems to go against the concept of a high-risk PvP game. While it is indeed a strong deterrant for committing crimes, as it adds a huge risk, it seems to me to not work as intended. For example, right now if you murder someone, the most serious possible crime, if they have anyone remotely close to your combat level, and you are not bricked into a building, you will more than likely be killed in retaliation. You cannot hide, the safest possible course of action is to not log off at all, which is obviously impossible. Some people may disagree and truely believe that this is a fair and balanced system, but below I have made a few alternate suggestions that I'd like to get some feedback on from the community, and for the developers to consider.

Suggestions
1. Remove the ability to summon players, instead change scents so that they decay differently. Instead of, for example it being 8 hours of RL time before it decays, whether the thief is logged on or off, be it 8 hours of RL time that the thief is online for. So, if THIEF1 steals a steel bar from GUY1, for the next 8 hours of THIEF1's playtime, he can be tracked, hunted down and 'punished'. Murder therefore means for an entire week, you will have to constantly watch your back as your enemies will be able to track you.

2. Remove the ability to summon players, add a timer to crimes. If you commit a theft, you will be unable to log out for a select period of time, just as if you were in combat. The time for murder would be longer.

I personally favor the first option, as it removes the lack of fairness that can destroy a players motivation.


Customisation

While it is rather clumsy at the moment, the inability to see a players name easily from a distance is one I actually enjoy, and is one of the reasons I am opposed to a village chat system. You do not want to be able to tell who is in a town just by looking at a list of names, as that makes it far, far harder on trespassers and thieves. Dispite this, visual variety would add a lot to the game.

Suggestion

1. It would be fairly straight forward to impliment, simple pallete swapping of armors to allow different colours and the inclusion of a dyeing trade skill. Perhaps even make the plants ungrowable, requiring the player to search for them in forests and add more utility to plant lore.



Salvaging

Simple really, if a building is destroyed on a claim you own, recieve a % of the materials back, possibly add into the crime skill tree as 'pillaging' on a much lower percentage.

[kobnach]

The problem with vengeance only while online is twofold. First, it means one can steal from people in different timezones with near complete impunity. Second, if you stay off for a while, the victim is likely to stop constantly checking whether you are back yet, and their clues will wear out.

Other than that, well, IMNSHO, the only good thief is a dead thief. If the player gives up playing, so much the better. You can avoid the summoning while online risk entirely if you keep criminal acts turned off. So the only problem is if you need to kill some louse who's been thieving from or vandalizing you - thereby leaving a murder clue.

[Peter]

I'd be fine with any of those suggestions. I think your alternative to loggoff summoning has a lot of promise.

[sami1337]

I am a bit surprised that out of all the people you say you're against village chat while you use irc to do just that. How does that work?

For crime i think that if you summon a person you should not be able to murder him / her. Just KO so you can rob back whatever is left that is yours.

[Rift]

i vaguely recall suggesting this at some point, but i suggested changing the way summoning works so that if you go to a hearth fire you could... acquire its essence or something, then take that essence, combine it with a crime scent, make a big pyre or something, and then you can force them to APPEAR at your pyre [ie.. teleport them], but it would only work when they were online. I am much more favorable to something like this. They could avoid punishment simply by never being online... but never being online is a type of punishment yes?

[Talvara]

I think the helpless hearthfire summoning is also a good deterent for 'more powerfull' characters to turn to crime tough, But I also think alot of people disagree with that, and with the new brickwalls... well lets just say if you have your hearth in a nice sealed off brickwall fortress you wont have much to worry about anyway.

so yeah, maybe crime does need a closer look.

What I dont want tough... is to make crime easy and riskfree, but I guess noone wants that.

also.. in a way you have a choice wether you want permadeath or not... with the change/tradition slider. the only downside is that playing as full tradition is really hard and slow, but the choice IS there.

I agree, anything below murder and maybe assault the other player shouldnt be killable without a chance to defend himself, so summoning from theft and knocking their teeth out to try and get your stuff back is ok, I just dont see it as a killable offence. maybe we need "Karma" back? if you have a really bad karma you can get killed, if you have a neutral/good karma, KO is the best you can do.

edit:
OEH, rift I like it. its kind of like calling someone to trial. How would you suggest dealing with timezone criminals tough?

[sami1337]

I see, that sounds like a good idea too Rift. And as added bonus you could expect some hirdsmen too.

[Potjeh]

Yeah, I think being unable to kill summoned thieves would be best solution. However, for those really outrages thieves, it needs to be an option. So how about if you have a certain number (a fairly large number) of theft clues from a single person it works just like now?

Also, harvested clues timing out should be a development priority.

[Fcn]

Yeah, I think being unable to kill summoned thieves would be best solution. However, for those really outrages thieves, it needs to be an option. So how about if you have a certain number (a fairly large number) of theft clues from a single person it works just like now?

Also, harvested clues timing out should be a development priority.

A possible solution would be to be able to combine scents of indivudal thefts, so it would be easier to punish a theft of 40 steel than 1 steel for example, perhaps 1 theft alone would be hard to track, with a huge haul being very obvious.

[Fcn]

I am a bit surprised that out of all the people you say you're against village chat while you use irc to do just that. How does that work?

For crime i think that if you summon a person you should not be able to murder him / her. Just KO so you can rob back whatever is left that is yours.

Well the issue with the village chat is that if you can quickly check everyone in the village you can see who should not be there, with IRC it's not that simple, you can't see their location in game. Perhaps a village chat could work if it did not show if a player was online or offline, you would just send messages to it, but I'm going off topic and it's an area I haven't really considered.