Achaea has become soft.

Batang

I would like to share a quote from nearly a decade ago.

 

 

Really, the fear is that by making life too easy and reducing the consequences for your actions vis a vis other players we might end up robbing Achaea of its soul. You can lose your niche by trying to appeal to too broad an audience outside that niche.
--matt

 

Bring back theft please.

Antonius

I don't really see how that quote applies to theft, though. The consequences for theft are almost all on the victim, since they lose considerably more than the thief, and have nothing to do with -their- actions towards other players. Certain items are irreplaceable, and there's no reason to put people at risk of losing those.

Silas

Bringing back theft wouldn't make Achaea more dangerous. There are very few interesting characters nowadays that would fill the thief role (RIP *tenebrus ), and it'd just go back to a bunch of try-hards like Glint snapping newbies and heartstopping if it turns out they're not afk.

The best thing to do would be to make pickpocketing an interesting mechanic, so that it can be balanced by the admins rather than by a vague hope for restraint on the part of the thief, and to add some way of retrieving looted items by people who are inclined to bash thieves' skulls in.

Batang

It made the game safe...as many changes have through the years.  If you don't want things stolen, learn selfishness.  Pretty much every house and city had scroll upon scroll of how not to get robbed, even without selfishness.

 

If you lost something important, you should have 1: protected it better, 2: made it resetting.

Silas

Telling people to throw 100 credits into every item of any sort of significance they pick up is a terrible idea.

Antonius

You won't convince me that people being at risk of losing items that they can't ever replace makes the game better in any way, and suggesting that people should spend 50/100 credits making an item resetting is absolutely ridiculous. Not everybody has them just lying around spare for things like that.

Trevize

Silas said:

Bringing back theft wouldn't make Achaea more dangerous

This. Nice quote, but it doesn't apply to theft.

Alyssea

Antonius said:

You won't convince me that people being at risk of losing items that they can't ever replace makes the game better in any way, and suggesting that people should spend 50/100 credits making an item resetting is absolutely ridiculous. Not everybody has them just lying around spare for things like that.

Well, then why don't we just remove every possible way for special items to be taken away? Got an expensive, custom ring? No possibility of it being destroyed while enchanted, now. 

Things shouldn't be completely safe.

Edit: Oh, and why not change house hall items, while we're at it? There's no reason a house should have to deal with enemies being smarter than some of their members and getting in and stealing special items. Anything stolen from halls should just automatically give the thief some gold and then reset to the hall the moment they leave.

Achaea may be "just a game" where everything's supposed to be "fun," but personally, I'd much prefer being able to lose just as much as you're able to lose irl if you aren't careful.

Vaehl

I like pickpocketing because everyone is so lax with their antitheft. I just use 1-2 tricks Profit showed me and I'm all good.

Trevize

Alyssea said:

Achaea may be "just a game" where everything's supposed to be "fun," but personally, I'd much prefer being able to lose just as much as you're able to lose irl if you aren't careful.

Permadeath? Destroyable housing? Stealable artefacts?

Zeon

yes please ^

Trevize

Oh, and let's open theft to every class, if that's the case.

Blujixapug

If there's a problem - which is subjective; it's too easy to say "things were better in the old days" because nostalgia - I think it's that mechanics have been nerfed/deleted and new ones have not been added to take their place. Theft, raids, icons, inferno. Those things all sucked in their own special ways, and the choice was made to nerf them or delete them. But where an avenue for activity was removed, a new one was not always added. Piracy is the only real conflict mechanic added in the last several years, and it's not perfect.

Theft sucked though. It was like a vacuum cleaner aggressively scarfing down kielbasas. You lose an item, you can't take it back because you don't have a force skill, you can't bully it back because phase/dash/warp/evade/veil, you can't extort it back because you can't out-extort someone who can steal and doesn't care about their level or have vulnerable affiliations, and you can't bribe or beg it back because you just tried and failed to bully and extort it back and the thief is feeling unmerciful. Its two positive effects on the game were "going afk is dangerous" and "playing a thief is fun", but the negatives outweighed that.

Naisar

Wanting to introduce a higher level of danger into Achaea is one thing, trying to bring back theft entirely another.  Theft's net fun is staggeringly negative and the interaction is weighted hugely in favor of the thief.  There's also no way (currently) to force thieves to face consequences along a metric most care about.  Furthermore, the people most heavily and negatively effected are new players, those we 1) most want to protect from vastly negative consequences they aren't used to dealing with in other games and 2) are least capable of enacting meaningful revenge.  If you want to change up how theft currently works, fine, but trying to justify bringing back the old system with complaints of 'Achaea is too safe now' will get you nowhere.

Nellaundra

Theft is/was stupid as hell for the reasons the other people mentioned.  If your stuff got stolen, the -only- way for you to get it back was to hope that the thief felt like giving/selling it back or hiring -another- thief which was finicky.  If you want the game world more dangerous, RP a dangerous person.  Get connections, start ruining lives ICly.  It doesn't all have to be bland ganky griefy mechanics.

Honestly, the game -needs- some magnificent bastards here and there.

Shibumi

I started playing Achaea only a couple of years ago, and it was far more dangerous back then as to theft. Just my opinion. As to player killing, I do not know. I started participating in raids with alternate fortunes, I have been harassed by an idiot for a bit...but honestly I do not know. Theft, however, is not so popular anymore. I wish the game will remain hardcore. Think about Dark Souls. It made the non forgiving mechanics a brand of the franchise, and it is very praised by the community and the critics. So please do not dilute Achaea, it will end my career as a gamer (after I achieve dragonhood, of course). It should be promoted as the most difficult game ever, not as a fun park for casual gamers.

Shirszae

Shibumi said:

I started playing Achaea only a couple of years ago, and it was far more dangerous back then as to theft. Just my opinion. As to player killing, I do not know. I started participating in raids with alternate fortunes, I have been harassed by an idiot for a bit...but honestly I do not know. Theft, however, is not so popular anymore. I wish the game will remain hardcore. Think about Dark Souls. It made the non forgiving mechanics a brand of the franchise, and it is very praised by the community and the critics. So please do not dilute Achaea, it will end my career as a gamer (after I achieve dragonhood, of course). It should be promoted as the most difficult game ever, not as a fun park for casual gamers.

Dark Souls is awesome x3

Nellaundra

Dark Souls != Achaea.

Achaea is a MUD.  Multi User Dungeon.  It uses text to convey everything and Dark Souls is a PS3 game with high-end graphics that's an -action- game.  Achaea tries to be an action game through sheer number of actions per second, but I'm not saying whether or not it works.

We quite frankly won't get the same crowd Dark Souls does no matter what we do.  Because we're a bloody text game.

Eld

Shibumi said:

I started playing Achaea only a couple of years ago, and it was far more dangerous back then as to theft. Just my opinion. As to player killing, I do not know. I started participating in raids with alternate fortunes, I have been harassed by an idiot for a bit...but honestly I do not know. Theft, however, is not so popular anymore. I wish the game will remain hardcore. Think about Dark Souls. It made the non forgiving mechanics a brand of the franchise, and it is very praised by the community and the critics. So please do not dilute Achaea, it will end my career as a gamer (after I achieve dragonhood, of course). It should be promoted as the most difficult game ever, not as a fun park for casual gamers.

No one's saying that theft wasn't more dangerous a couple years ago. Just that the kind of danger it offered wasn't good for the game.

Shibumi

Danger is good (misquoting Gordon Gekko). I got more excited back then than nowadays.

Eld

Shibumi said:

Danger is good (misquoting Gordon Gekko). I got more excited back then than nowadays.

I was going to respond, but then I realized that @Blujixapug and @Naisar already said it better. So, what they said.

Xenomorph

Oh don't feel cheated yet, the show is just getting started.

The biggest con job in Achaean history is in progress. Just wait and and see my friend, wait and see.

I mean, if we are guessing, I mean. That'd be mine..

Blujixapug

Pretty sure Dark Souls is good because it's well-made, not because it's hard. Nobody is calling the Battletoads speed bike level the pinnacle of gaming.

Kresslack

Here's my issue with the current theft system, and part of why I switched from Serpent: I think it might have been rushed, because the only thing I ever got from theft after it was gold, keys, and some sigils. If they weren't holding those three things(and a few others like letters) on hand, you got a message stating that you could find nothing of value within reach, despite you being able to Appraise their inventory and see that wasn't the case. 

At least with the old theft system, the thief had to be clever, and the potential victim had to be aware of their surroundings, even in their own cities. The thief also had the chance of their efforts being wasted as soon as they snapped the victim, and they just ran off and made sure to empty a tophat before it reset or keep selfishness up so they didn't drop anything.

Houses used to have full novice requirements dedicated to Anti-theft, because it was teaching people to be responsible and attentive with their possessions. If you lost something because you never put up selfishness, or failed to put fist sigils on weapons, etc, then you were the one responsible for that happening. You know what Houses teach about antitheft now? Keep Selfishness up. That's it. 

I think if the original theft system had been modified to be more balanced, along with the ability to Pickpocket Denizens, that it may have worked out better. All the change did was make focus significant more attention on shop theft, in which people have Far more invested to lose than individual theft.

Shibumi

I was not saying that theft was great back then, I just wanted to share my point of view as a newbie. I simply thought it could have been interesting for more experienced players. I am 40 years old and started gaming since my childhood. Games were extremely hard in those days and as, you all know, mainstream games are fare too easy now. That's the principal reason why I love Achaea and made the reference to DS. I am aware about the difference in the audience as to Mud vs graphical games. The fact is that I also do some teaching at University, and just yesterday discussing a software agreement I became aware that 60 students (20 years old) did not know what a beta tester is. That's scary. Maybe this is quite off topic, but I am not sure which audience should be targeted at this juncture.

Nellaundra

Honestly, a big reason why games were harder back then are the following:

You were tiny.  You were a -child-.  You -sucked- at video games. You're much better nowadays than you used to.

Less fake difficulty.

More mainstreaming.

Only the latter has really led to 'decline' and even then, there are still hard as balls games out there if you look for them.  I recently went on a nostalgia binge and played a lot of my old SNES games that I remember kicking my sorry ass.  I didn't really see any -noticeable- difficulty.  It wasn't difficult because I am not an awful gamer child anymore.

Jacen

I disagree. I -still- haven't gotten past the first level of Super Ghouls and Ghosts

Shibumi

@nellaundra I was thinking more about The Bard's Tale and other unforgiving old schools RPGS. I would love to talk about videogames with you in the appropriate forum section. Anyway, I am really not a marketing guy, so I was not suggesting anything to any professional out there. I simply think that the harder the better in the long run. I mean, maybe in a couple of years we won't need keyboards anymore. Who knows? I got stuck in Achaea because it is something really out of the ordinary, and I find its difficulty very challenging and appealing. I really would like to help, but I do not know how save for contributing with my opinion.

Xenomorph

Jacen said:

I disagree. I -still- haven't gotten past the first level of Super Ghouls and Ghosts

Do you mean regular Ghosts & Goblins for NES? Shit yeah, that was an impossible game. I remember opening it up for Christmas as a kid and playing, ten minutes in, I looked at my parents like WTF, how am I supposed to beat this shit?! They put  another cigarette butt out on me for backsassin', and thats the last time I talked about Ghosts & Goblins.

So yeah, I'll give you a big plus juan on that, Ill throw in a pedro while Im at it.

Kenway

Nellaundra said:

Honestly, a big reason why games were harder back then are the following:

You were tiny.  You were a -child-.  You -sucked- at video games. You're much better nowadays than you used to.

Less fake difficulty.

More mainstreaming.

Only the latter has really led to 'decline' and even then, there are still hard as balls games out there if you look for them.  I recently went on a nostalgia binge and played a lot of my old SNES games that I remember kicking my sorry ass.  I didn't really see any -noticeable- difficulty.  It wasn't difficult because I am not an awful gamer child anymore.

*Breaks out SNES and blows into Secret of Mana and Link to the Past cartridges repeatedly*

Kenway

Nope. Secret of Mana - still hard as dicks. 

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