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Much steal. Very hide. Wow.
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Comments
Solution for theft: weight limits and no floating inventory.
Wanna clean out a shop? Hope you can carry 47thousand pounds of junk in your pack.
Wanna pickpocket that cool thing? Make sure you have a freehand and enough weightspace left.
It'll make combat rough but unlimited carry capacity has been a plague on combat for years. Who really believes you can float three pipes in front of your mouth to smoke, hands free, at will?
Problem solved kids. Thank me later.
I haven't responded to this but its long enough, may as well. I don't mind theft, and the mechanic has also given me solid rp. I've even had to pay thieves to test a newbies antitheft because Smoldor and we don't have a serp. The idea of it/espionage has been hard tied in, and has been a point many orgs have been founded on. Here's my 2 cents.
My idea: Have fences hold grab all items. Victim can coax the fence into a majority of gold stolen be returned, with a cut to the guild/thief. Benefits thief because more they steal-more on their cut, or they get it all if the victim doesn't go bribe it back. To provide retal, could implement someone here's idea on retal, or if we're aiming for rp list who has the chit for item retrieval. If you lose your bid, least opens up a chance to talk it out with whatever thief/mark has it. Still relies on people not being dicks, but thats Achaea.
Tldr: idea good. System bad. Make it rp and not just losing shit and frustrating people that take the time to help.
How I feel it might be, to be an Admin of Achaea.
@Kshavatra Yeah, I've had a ton of stuff stolen (and stuff that I stole first). I just think that is the highest credit item I have ever owned, probably. I also 100% enjoyed the RP with the SL house over that, and making me open PK / no constrained theft was a great way to deal with it. I know a few members of the SL house at the time had fun too with it.
Under that would be, I have no idea, probably a higher value forged whip (50ish cr) back in the day? My antitheft has always sucked, as a thief, because I figure if I steal you may as well be able to steal from me.
If any other company blatantly ignored their customers after this long they'd be roasted worse than the "Do you not have phones?" event.
I stole a non-resetting level two artifact mace that could be wielded and used by anyone from @Trey a few years ago.
I sold it to Makarios for 2000cr.
Me and Trey are BFFs now.
Forgot more benefits of weight limit and no floating inventory.
Mounts become more necessary thus causing more gold sink. Pack your mule with your extra gear, carry it on a wagon.
Speaking of gold too, can't stuff your pack full of it because that's heavy so it'll force banks to be used. This also solves the pickpocketing gold complaint unless thieves learn how to rob banks too.
If any other company blatantly ignored their customers after this long they'd be roasted worse than the "Do you not have phones?" event.
Have you considered that you're not being ignored and that maybe the admin just don't feel the need to reiterate an answer they've already given so that you can hurl abuse at them?
@Draqoom
Killed a person? You become over-encumbered after every two kills. This will drive sell prices of the instant-offer talisman up. Then from there you can add more mechanics that make bashing clunkier.
Solution for theft: weight limits and no floating inventory.
Between this and the permadeath suggestion, AchaeaRPI here we come!
I honestly didnt know promo items in a chest or house werent protected and find that to be stupid AF.
The last theft complaint thread was four years ago and the admins never answered then, either, except to lock the thread. Whatever this 'claimed answer' you have heard them give is, they haven't spoken it in at least half a decade now, so maybe they can refresh our memories by actually engaging with us and telling us what it is. A lot can change in four-five years and I'd like to verify that this is the case.
Ghosting the thread is the least appropriate response. Having to answer questions and have conversations you'd rather not answer or have is part of most people's jobs, including mine.
Can’t ghost a thread if you never open forums
A lot can change in four-five years and I'd like to verify that this is the case.
It's still the case.
Cool, I hope you can sleep better tonight.
It is just mind boggling to me that when I "stole" 3,000,000 gold from Eleusis due to a commodity pricing error it was patched up LITERALLY the next day to make it impossible for that situation to happen again....but thieves get to steal hundreds of dollars worth of promo items and it is just like "Well good luck with that".
About the same consistency we get with everything else I guess....none...
@Otha > Also not everybody gets as upset about this as the vocal minority you're seeing on the forums. Some people get stolen from, learn a lesson, make changes and move on. Others screech and make threads over and over in an attempt to browbeat the admins into changing something they don't like.
@Profit > I think this is my big takeaway here. A few people are yelling very loudly and assuming that the whole playerbase is standing behind them. That's just not my experience. For every, 'I hate you, eff you, I hope you die, I'm quitting, this is terrible' reaction that I get there's probably forty or fifty good interactions that are fun for everyone involved.
>I'm not really inclined to be bothered that 5-6 people are screaming into the void of the forums that there's a huge problem.
I've been trying to stay away from this discussion for the reasons I'm going to discuss below, but as a theft victim, I feel like I have to say something if my silence is going to taken as assent.
I'm a newish player (Salko is 24 years old), and I can't speak for everyone who's been stolen from, but I really hated it and wasn't sure whether I wanted to keep playing.
I think my theft experiences have been a lot more typical than e.g. what happened to Fairweather or the nightmare that was inflicted on Lyrin, which, horrifying as it is, is a bizarre edge case and a very noncentral example of theft. I agree with Otha and others who have argued that it doesn't really illuminate the question of whether theft in general should be changed, but rather raises questions about how dollar-purchased should behave.
My thefts were just gold and sigil losses, with the gold losses in amounts that I'm sure seem modest to experienced players but felt quite substantial to me and represented hours of grinding. But the gold and item losses aren't really the source of the misery, at least for me. It was more about being forced to confront the reality that my ability to progress in this game was subject to the whims of hostile opponents. Citymates have rushed to compensate me for the stolen gold every time, but that frankly made it worse, because now my ineptitude wasn't just stopping my own progress, but was making me a financial burden to my city.
So I had to do a bunch of things that were difficult, time-consuming, unpleasant, and detracted my enjoyment of other aspects of the game. The main thing I do is quest, and almost every quest involves giving items, so it's pretty inconvenient to quest with selfishness up. I did eventually, with a lot of help, figure out how to make an alias that lets me give items while exposing myself for only a short period, but it's still very clunky, doesn't work for denizens with apostrophes in their names, and is very spammy and makes it hard to parse substantive game text. I'm sure there's a better way to do it, but I doubt I'll ever figure it because I have no talent for this and barely even comprehend the popsicle-stick-and-bubblegum trash thing that I put together. (And here come the personal insults about how I'm an idiot and deserved to have bad things happen to me because of my lack of computer prowess; fine.) Playing the game with all of these theft protections is significantly less fun for me that just being able to type "give leaf to meheszi" and press enter.
But I haven't quit yet, because the rest of this game is so much fun that I'm willing to accept this unhappiness as part of the cost of playing. The rest of this game is really, really good. High-effort RP interactions with other players are very fun and satisfying. Learning about group combat tactics and how to contribute to raid defense is fun (though I've been drifting from even that a little bit lately as I've learned how difficult it is as someone with no talent for computer programming). Watching my numbers go up is fun. Balancing the unfun of theft against the fun of these things, playing is still a net positive. But that doesn't mean that I'm fine with theft. I hate it! I just don't hate it more than I like my citymates.
And I haven't complained publicly about this, though I have indulged in a lot of private griping. Why no screeching? At least two reasons. One: I view screeching and forumsposting about a longstanding game mechanic as pointless and futile. This game has existed for more than two decades. The inclusion of theft seems like a conscious and well-considered design choice (see the abundant warnings about theft embedded in the new player experience). It appears to me that, if it were possible for players to persuade the developers to remove theft, it would already have happened. I do not think one more forums post complaining about theft is going to be the decisive blow that tilts the balance and finally convinces the developers after 20+ years that, wait, theft really is bad after all. Even threatening to quit is meaningless as a noob F2P player. Who would miss me? All I do for IRE is provide content for paying players, and there are exactly 0 paying players who would give IRE even one cent less if I left, so what exactly would I be threatening? Nothing.
Two, beyond being futile, complaining publicly might actually be actively detrimental to me by making me a more attractive target for future thefts. My life experience has been that people who do mean things are motivated by their victims' reactions. The most effective way to get a bully to leave you alone is not to react, and the most effective to ensure that you continue to be a target is to give them a big reaction. The kid who cries and runs to the teacher is the one who's certain to get pushed off the slide again. So I've been trying to keep my mouth shut and fly under the radar. Even making this post might be counterproductive in this regard. I do feel like I'm making myself a target by doing so, and putting my ability to enjoy this game at risk. Not only have I broadcast the fact that getting stolen from in-game hurts my IRL feelings, which is like catnip for griefers; I've also revealed that my anti-theft reflex system is homebrewed and most likely leaky and weak. But if people are going to claim that victims of theft not complaining vocally means that they're okay with being stolen from, then making this post to clarify my feelings might be the less bad of two bad options. Or it might not be, in which case I do have a plan for giving the rest of my stuff and gold to Salko's IC friends and finding something else to do with my free time.
So, for at least some victims of theft, the lack of outcry isn't because the theft didn't hurt. It's because it hurt so much that we're doing everything in our power to avoid coming to your attention again. Just because we're not posting about it or sending abusive OOC tells to the thief doesn't mean that we're having a good time or not suffering. It just means that we're trying not to break the rules of the game.
Interestingly, almost every time I've discussed theft in-game, people have broken or quasi-broken character to make OOC or quasi-OOC suggestions about setting up reflexes. The reason for this seems to be that there is no IC recourse against theft, so OOC protections are the only helpful way to respond. There really does not seem to be any IC way to respond meaningfully to theft. No one even bothered to suggest the Ivory Mark to me, and since pursuing it on my own volition, I've come to realize why. Best case scenario is one death, and even that doesn't seem like it happens very often. Far more typically, the contract will just sit unclaimed forever, because it's just too hard to catch a thief, even for the skilled and experienced PVP players in the Ivory Mark. So more experienced players don't even bother advising new players about the meaningless IC options, and just skip straight to trying to teach us about OOC ways to manage selfishness. This seems bad to me!
@Kshavatra - you expressed a willingness upthread to share anti-theft information with anyone who asks, so...here's me asking. Will you please show me how to avoid theft? I consent to OOC tells or messages in-game about this topic, and I think the forums have a message function as well.
So, this is really long and I guess I need a TLDR for Archaeon, so here it is: just because theft victims are RPing back at thieves and not complaining on the forums doesn't necessarily mean they're okay with being stolen from. Please don't mistake basic decency for consent.
gandhi is going to march to this thread here in a minute.
the nightmare that was inflicted on Lyrin
I'm going to see if I can make this my new title in game.
@Salko Why am I tagged? That isn't my quote, you mean @Kshavatra?
I think you have an elegant response, but you didn't reach out when I stole from you (from what I remember). You didn't seek interaction. I did, however, have great interaction with your citymates who did reach out - and in fact I mailed the whaterver amount of gold (~130?) to them to give to you.
Honestly, I pickpocket out of boredom and am probably part of the problem in that regard. When it does lead to RP, it is fun and I enjoy it. When the victim turtles and doesn't do anything, I don't really feel bad and move on. It should be noted that when I pickpocket I literally don't even drop selfishness - I just pickpocket from people that have it down. You don't need triggers to counteract that.
As for being a new player and having these feelings, you 100% can send me ooc tells (if you don't want to try IC) explaining how you feel. It is a part of the game I enjoy, but I'm not going to drive someone out of the game over a mechanic that I use when bored. I also wouldn't mind it being changed mechanically. It isn't the main reason I play, and I can see how it would suck for others.
edit: I also generally go by age as a limit for theft. 22+ (and a decent ranking) is enough time to know that you should have selfishness up. Not even re-selfishness, just have it up.
edit: And I never go after specific items. And by posting this, you let me know that it feels like it is driving you from the game. I 100% won't target you any more because of it (you already were on my do not target list, because of that IC interaction with your citymates explaining what was going on).
Like are you actually proud of fucking over Lyrin and others? I’m confused.
Salko makes a good point that I hadn’t really considered. At its core, Achaea is a roleplaying game. Salko IRL is roleplaying as someone who hasn’t switched to mudlet so I can help him make complex anti theft triggers. This means that he’s roleplaying as a degenerate and everyone around him now has RP justification to steal from him whenever they want.
@Otha I didn't want to interact with you directly because I was terrified of you! I considered trying to defend myself but as soon as I WHOIS'd you I realized there was nothing I could do and that I was completely helpless and at your mercy. I stood there processing it for a while and eventually ran away to cry and vent my badfeels to the city. Then Reonna, on her own initiative, got in touch with you and secured restitution for me somehow. As I tried to explain above, this didn't actually make me feel any better, and actually made me feel worse because now my ineptitude was causing problems for the city, I was afraid of provoking further retribution, and all the other reasons I stated above. I appreciate you clarifying here and I feel better and less miserable after getting a clearer understanding of your thinking.
Some people think theft is unbalanced and needs further work, some thing it has been nerfed extensively already, and still others think it should be removed entirely. From their own perspectives, these are all fair points in their own ways, but I'm sure we can all agree on one thing: If this at all affected the in-game economy, the response from both players and administration would be considerably different, it not more immediate from the latter.
There's a really low chance you'll ever be a burden on a city financially, basically ever. If you happen to get to the level where you potentially could be, you're already doing things the right way and shouldn't be in a position to cause any kind of burden in the first place.
Little bandaid.
The fence system already records what came from who. If the victim hires a mark on the thief and the mark succeeds the package at the fence should automatically return to the victim.
If stealing is permitted, forceboarding should be permitted. Lose one or bring back the other. That is all.
zGUI 4.0 - A Free GUI for Mudlet 4.10+
I've been stolen from a couple of times by Elyon, which was my fault because I was mindless. I've set up things as such that it won't happen anymore (Elyon please continue to leave me alone...), plus just ensuring that if I need to step away from the keyboard as a player, I open a journal and I can't be a target of theft (am I allowed to say that?).
Joke response to thread: What I'm getting from all of this is that everyone should be allowed to be thieves, so that everyone is a thief, and then no one is a thief.
Serious response to thread: I've only been playing since August 2020 and recently had to step back from the game in a major way. I don't know if the theft mechanic adds immersion value to the game the way it currently exists. Was it adding value to me to be continuously mindful of all of my belongings, checking for hidden or phased individuals before I enter various places? I err on the side of - not really.
I feel like value could be added if, as some have said, there was a thieves guild, a proper community or group of people who have the sole purpose of invoking change in the game, the politics, the power holders, by bringing them down, causing mayhem and lowercase chaos, protection rackets. If there were high value target thieving items in denizen run shops, or on mighty denizens, that could only be obtained if you bought them for a ridiculous In Game price of gold, or if you stole them. Yes I realise I'm basically describing something out of The Elder Scrolls. But as a player who once considered what theft could be in a Fantasy RPG, I thought that would be pretty cool.
As theft exists now, I don't know if that is possible. Or if players or coders/admins even want that.
It is just mind boggling to me that when I "stole" 3,000,000 gold from Eleusis due to a commodity pricing error it was patched up LITERALLY the next day to make it impossible for that situation to happen again....but thieves get to steal hundreds of dollars worth of promo items and it is just like "Well good luck with that".
About the same consistency we get with everything else I guess....none...
If I was Lyrin, I would have quit on the spot and never came back when that issued got dismissed.
I like these two quotes :)
I think you have an elegant response, but you didn't reach out when I stole from you (from what I remember).
@Otha can you help me understand why you think it's reasonable to expect someone you just stole from to 'reach out to you' in order to see if maybe you'll consider returning the shit you stole because, as you said, you were bored?
like for all the talk about being robbed being 'a generator of interesting conflict', i'm very curious what interesting things come out of someone whose been playing for a few months asking a complete stranger for their shit back. also, what is he supposed to do if you say no? hire on you, and spend more gold after bad, probably piss you off, and potentially get harassed even more?
@Profit why are you so scared of an admin response? @Namino says it has been almost half a decade since the last response and one of those years was 2020 which really counts for like 3, so it doesn't seem out of place to address the issue. Serpents as a whole are long overdue for a rework so this would be the perfect time to announce it.