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Building a Better Theft System
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Woman bought a cup of coffee at McDonalds, put it at her crotch, it spilled and burned her, she sued Mickey D's and won 3 million dollars.
Another woman I am aware of made her living by suing her neighbors for things such "emotional distress" stemming from them playing basketball at 3 PM.
In the legal justice system we live in, miracles of this sort are possible.
One serious issue I have with the current system of pickpocketing is that you don't see who's stealing your junk and the thief evades out, leaving who ever is unfortunate enough to be in the room with you the suspect. While it's humorous, it creates the issue of people who honestly didn't steal your stuff being attacked for stealing your stuff. Example: let's say I'm standing at NoT and forgot selfishness.. Vayne evades in, steals some gold, and evades out. I search and Azzae is revealed yet he can't pickpocket and I have no way of knowing this, so I attack Azzae. It also plays into the marks being underused as you don't really know who the hell stole it. So, who do you hire on should you take that route? I realize vigilance takes care of this but, it's a mana drain and who wants to walk around with that up, also I think most people who would hire have their skills in class things rather than vision.
So, let's not feed the troll, let's all get back to the "productive activity" of robbing people and laughing in their faces! Right, @Jarrel ? Or is popular sentiment of you deeply misguided and you only do it to feed your starving children or because your daddy beat you as a child? There's obviously complex socioeconomic reasons behind you taking that guy's journals and non-decay stuff and killing him for added fun. And that time you snapped me near the cave, you were just lonely and cast out by society and you needed someone -- anyone -- to have a cup of tea with and tell all your problems to.
I guess all those real life dollars people spent non-decaying their stuff that ended up in your pack against their will, that's all just "play money" that actually didn't cost them anything, but which you "worked" so hard to get. You're such a hero to have pulled off all your heists. So look, I hang around people that you do shit to, and we just plain don't like you very much. With the sort of "RP" you treat us to, most of us prefer you weren't around. Sorry you're morally outraged about it. And welcome to the world of taking shit that doesn't belong to you.
I myself am nearly immune to theft because literally everything I have that I value is resetting and I rarely carry more than like a thousand gold in my pack. Thieving from me is not very different than giving me 2 counts of free cause. Jordan once appraised my inventory with me calmly watching, and asked me about an item I had. I told her what it was, and did not leave the room. It's not myself I am mad about.
They target my friends, insult them, sell their stuff back to them, and half the time they try to rob them again and if they succeed try to sell the crap to them again. Some of them start playing sleazy rules-lawyer, telling my friends how we don't have cause, or talking trash to them because my friends become too OOC in their panic of trying to get the items back. What the hell do you expect us to say about these people? If you were mugged in an alley on the way to your car and lost your cell phone and wallet containing 200 bucks you'd be "butthurt" too. And this is not different enough from that for any of us theft victims to care very much about distinctions. Either way, it's real money.
It's legal by game mechanics. But it's not enjoyable by game mechanics. Tecton provided statistics of lots of people quitting after being robbed. You guys are so immersed in these calculations of what would make theft "better" without understanding that the basic premise of Achaean theft is really unpleasant and destructive for the community in this game that gets victimized. The human factor is that theft is the most unpleasant activity to be subjected to in this game. In theory it adds to game realism, but in practice it is sufficiently similar to real crime that the victim feels subjected to real crime, and seeing game mechanics support it, he quits Achaea, goes somewhere else, and we've lost another player for slighted Jarrel over there to get his Shield of Absorption. If thieves did real theft RP and gave back what they stole consistently and without making the theft victim lose a lot, I think a lot of people would regard theft differently. Wishing for that is the real pipe-dream here. For theft to become something everybody enjoys, the stolen goods need to go back to their real owner, either for nothing at all or for very little. That is NOT going to happen.
In regards to fencing, there are a few underground organizations who do this type of stuff, in regards to a black market exchange. Anyone can see the items available for sale, but not the source of the item.
Also, @Silvarien, it seems as though you were recently, or in the past, a victim of theft and lost something substantial. Either way, this thread is about how to make Theft better and more balanced, not for you to try to make it worse or use it as your platform to voice discontent at having been robbed.
Will IRE get sued if someone who bought $3,000 worth of credits, converted them into gold, and either got them stolen from an actual skill in the game that allows them to be Pickpocketed, or killed and the gold was on hand? I very highly doubt it. How is IRE in any way responsible for that?
That being said, would be good to see this get back on topic.
And you won't understand the cause of your grief...
...But you'll always follow the voices beneath.
First, in the example of Ruth losing 20 million gold, it would take a lone thief over 6 hours of constant pickpocketing to take all of that gold. If it were done, it would be 100% the fault of the player. IRE has installed plenty of functionality to ensure players cannot accidentally remain online for excessive periods of time. DCs resulting in removal from the server, and the existence of the TIMEOUT feature prevent super-afk players from sticking around. If someone overrides this with personal triggers and suffers for it, it is in no way the fault of IRE.
As for your problem with me personally, those shop thefts were -easy-. If people don't use the barest level of security when stocking their shops, then why should they be surprised when they lose everything? If you want to keep something, you protect it, and if you don't protect, you open yourself to hard-coded mechanics that allow other players to take things from you, in a world designed around conflict. In both of those cases, neither of the shop owners said a single word to me after the theft. Not one tell, not one message, not one letter, nothing. Don't pretend that I robbed them of some RP opportunity when they refused to say a single thing once they found out it was me.
In one of the two above cases, I talked to @Kaitali about it and she suggested returning it, since she knew he was pretty upset about it. I took the chance to talk to that shopkeeper and offered him his entire shop stock back for 50,000 gold, well under what it was worth if I took the time to sell everything. He talked to me, we met in a neutral location, and he bought his stuff back. He even thanked me afterwards for being reasonable and willing to sell it back. You honestly don't have a clue what happened in any situation, and feel entitled to talk about it anyways.
Cascades of quicksilver light streak across the firmament as the celestial voice of Ourania intones, "Oh Jarrod..."
Nobody forces you to play and nobody forces you to spend your real cash.
IRE frowns pretty damn heavily on credit scamming and things along those lines. What you willing choose to do with your credits once you've bought them is entirely up to you. Maybe put your gold in a bank? Every city has those.
Cyrene also has serpents. Serpents are capable of stealing. Perhaps they just choose not to, or it's frowned upon by city laws.
I know that I feel pretty violated when wanting to starve myself to death in a snowy field and some do-gooder comes along and forces manna down my throat. That totally stripped me of potential roleplay and wasted the time I spent getting that hungry in the first place.
Do I sound ridiculous yet?
Just like theft is a mechanic in the game, mechanics are in place to make it preventable too.
Yes it sucks when bad things happen. Some of us suck it up and move on, some of us make entertaining rant posts ( where IS Tagg? His rants are sheer awesome ), and some of us have a think about life, and then politely tell someone congratulations on succeeding and could you please have a break from being targetted?
You'd be surprised how reasonable people on the other side of the keyboard can be when you're not throwing giant hissy fits and threatening to sue them in real life over a game.
My character is a pirate, has been for a few RL years. In essence, yes, I steal from people, and I was once a thief by trade as well. This is how I look at it, much like @Jarrod has already mentioned: If you value something, then take the steps necessary to ensure its safekeeping.
If you sit around in public not moving for extended periods of time, someone is going to notice. If, as a result of that you lose all of your gold because you weren't paying attention, assume responsibility for your carelessness, and use it as a lesson to not see it repeated. It's not different than dying and having a lot of gold on hand, and someone else picking it up. It's not even considered stealing when that happens, and the person is under no obligation to return the gold. Should have had in in your pack.
Also as Jarrod mentioned, shop theft is easy only because people make it easy. I caught Jarrod in my shop the other day easily enough. I didn't bother throwing an eye sigil down or anything because I had just obtained the shop and it was empty, so I was just setting the totem and sigils up. If there's actually stuff in the shop, I always double-check before going into the stockroom. Most people don't bother checking at all.
Theft is a viable trade available in Achaea, or at least it should be. Obviously no one likes being stolen from, but if a book that was being worked on got stolen, chances are you can buy it back. We used to steal letters and journals from people in Shallam all the time, more than a few of which would have juicy little romantic tid bits that people were eager to buy back, and we were also discrete about it. We didn't sell them their sensitive material back then expose it to everyone.
I think the reason theft gets such a bad reputation is because people don't like being reminded how unprepared they actually were, how lazy they were being. And just because dying doesn't mean anything to you, doesn't make it so for everyone. A thief, iirc, is Free PK for up to 30 days, and the person they stole from gets cause, which they can use to hire within the first 3 days. If the contract is successful, they get experience.
The problems are a) people not wanting to admit that a majority of thefts are successful for reasons they could easily be prevented b) eventually a thief will come along that is a jerk.
Don't be a jerk. Take responsibility for your possessions. Problem solved.
I use eye sigils. Search. I triggered unlocking/entering/leaving, have everything ready to change before I go in, so I'm only there a few seconds. Keep the important sigils in the shop. Somehow someone still managed to get in as I left, without me even seeing. Blackwinded, I supose. This is why I won't rent shops anymore. The payoff can be nice, but it's not worth it if you can take every precaution, and still be thwarted by someone sitting there and spamming 'down' in astral/blackwind, losing a good 300k of stock.
Honourable, knight eternal,
Darkly evil, cruel infernal.
Necromanctic to the core,Dance with death forever more.
Totally on me and the first time I'd ever been stolen off. I have some hilarious logs of theft attempts from over the years too.
Was it Daeir's fault for using his abilities on me? No. I was standing around in a public area, not paying the level of attention I should have been. When he turned up a month or two later while I was forging in New Thera, I was ready for a theft attempt but he tried to assassinate me instead ( love you too, Mhaldor ), but I got away. Hell, I went back as bait about 10 minutes later to see if I could get him killed instead. Didn't quite work out, but the conflict and interaction were quite exciting, and we discussed it afterward.
I think theft is the only aspect of the game where people actually have something to lose and that makes the fantasy more real. It's great.
Before I played Achaea, I came from a mud that was open pk. When you died, you lost stats, levels, and dropped all your equipment. If you pissed someone off, you could lose -everything- in five minutes. Event items could be lost forever. In comparison to that, even old theft was okay because there's always measures in place to protect yourself.
You're proposing that someone's character literally lose their hand if they ever get caught in a theft attempt, or even admitting to it after being successful. How exactly does that help Theft as a system? That is the point of this thread, after all. Such a proposal is pretty silly and I don't see how it helps to balance Theft.
The proposal itself seems very passive-aggressive. "Steal everything you can! But if you get caught, you'll literally lose a hand." Also, new players can't be stolen from, if they're unranked then it is harshly punished and the items are returned afaik. At least with the old theft system, Houses actually Taught anti-theft, and it was required to pass evaluations of your understanding of it for a promotion. Now it's: Keep Selfishness up.
If you buy credits, convert them into gold, and use the gold to buy things that are later stolen, or the gold itself it stolen, that's theft. It's not a different kind of theft because you payed real money for IG currency; that was your choice. You'll notice how if you buy artefacts, they reset to the owner. If something is that valuable to you, have it made resetting. Journals can also be made resetting by the bookbinder in Thera.
@Katzchen, I'm not entirely sure how Blackwind/Astral works. I thought Eye sigil forced them out like it does Phase. If not, I would consider that something to recommend changing, as such states should have something that everyone can use regardless of class to negate, such as the Eye sigil.
Once a thief decided that they did not care about exp - and you could rob someone as effectively at level 15 as at level 90, so there was no mechanical value in exp - then there was no risk/threat/danger in death. Experience is easy to regain, unique items are not.
The only real discouragement in being killed was that you couldn't hypnotise someone if you were paralysed/webbed/etc because someone was killing you at that very second.
This was what made thief-hunting so intensive, because you had to be chasing and killing a thief literally every single moment that they were logged in, if you wanted to prevent them from robbing people. If you stopped for 30 seconds (no exaggeration) then they'd have found some lowbie's name on QW, warped to Thera, and hypnotised remove pack;give pack.
The "cut off their hand" suggestion is obviously excessive, but it would provide a real consequence that can't be easily negated. It's an extreme progression of Vayne's "hot items drop from the thief's body when they are killed" suggestion from the original post.
Honourable, knight eternal,
Darkly evil, cruel infernal.
Necromanctic to the core,Dance with death forever more.
@Katzchen If thats how it happened, then simply evading down would have down the trick as well, since doors don't close automatically when you evade. Also, as far as I remember, eye sigils don't work for blackwind/astral, only phase. Blackwind/Astral I think is negated by flash or some such ability druids have.
And you won't understand the cause of your grief...
...But you'll always follow the voices beneath.