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Much steal. Very hide. Wow.
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
I really wanted to come to bat for theft as a mechanic - because historically, there have been tons of awesome opportunities that wouldn't exist otherwise - but reading that one dude's interaction with Profit really does show why we can't have nice or interesting things.
@Aodfionn Lyrin made some mind boggling errors leading to the loss of over a thousand credits worth of globes etc. to Profit. I guess he thought the globes would be safe in a chest or on the floor of his subdivision house because things like artefacts reset, right? Regardless, it seems clear to me that the transfer of over a thousand credits worth of stuff from one player to another via theft goes well beyond what most people would consider a reasonable game consequence.
Actually, Lyrin opted in to the theft of his items by logging in and buying them. Had he not done this, his items would not have been stolen.
Shop and other theft aren't even the focus here, just pickpocketing. Other than one suggestion that shops have shelves everyone seems to be fine with stealing anything that isn't nailed down if you get to put a door there, it is the stuff that you have on you that are is the problem.
@Ognog I wasn't being entirely serious. Honestly a thief could just drop the items in a house, ship, org property, give to someone else, etc, thereby denying a theft victim true recourse for reasonable return of items.
Honestly it seems kind of stupid to argue in favor when multiple people, new to Achaea, veterans, returning from dormancy, changing classes, etc have examples where they have stopped playing. I think any mechanic that bleeds players, especially new players, is a mechanic that, regardless of potential RP, needs to go out the door.
As far as org theft, specifically aimed at letters or journals, I think if that's the only reason to consider keeping theft in general around, we need to consider a different mechanic.
Inuad wrote:
Honestly a thief could just drop the items in a house, ship, org property, give to someone else, etc, thereby denying a theft victim true recourse for reasonable return of items.
@Inuad Just seal the items in "a package of ill gotten gains" which cannot be opened or removed from the thief's inventory while they are "on the run" for 10 minutes (say) except to hand directly back to the victim or automatically transferred directly to the victim if the thief is killed or the thief disconnects. If the thief survives being "on the run" with nowhere to hide and no instant distance travel, the "package of ill gotten gains" is theirs to plunder. Any letters/scrolls/manuscripts/journals in the package are theirs to read/transcribe (but not modify) for an Achaean month, after which they reset to the original owner.
I love all these great creative ideas, but you all are thinking too hard. The best solution is to just find where the pickpocket code is and just kinda...lean on the delete key for a while.
I still think permanent loss of a journal is an unacceptable consequence. We want journals to be used to record things in game. People are less likely to do that if they think they could permanently lose those records anyway. Either that or they use OOC means to back up everything they write in the journal, but we don't really want people to have to do that either.
Love the idea of information theft and espionage though.
Concept: A means of keeping letter and journal theft in the game for political intrigue while toning down the grief potential of normal pickpocketing.
Proposal: Books and letters now teleport back to their owners, breaking the suspension of belief even further. Regular theft given a short grace period to apprehend the thief.
Reality: Thieves still urn/duanathar/earring away from a level 31 player after evading until the grace period ends, political correspondance now takes place solely through messages, another thread is made concerning theft in six months.
Information theft only works if people are willing to let it work. Decades of history shows that the players of this game will go to great lengths to disallow the other side from having any sort of fun.
Gallida wrote:
Thieves still urn/duanathar/earring away
Not if the thief is "on the run" and prevented from using those instant travel abilities for 10 minutes (say).
You don't need theft to spy and generate intrigue. The game has and fully supports the following on purely mechanical levels:
Listen/Eavesdrop
Phase
Mind Sapience
Helm of Telepathy / Mindread
Whisperstones
The Membrane
Listening pets
Not to mention the classic tactic of "Join the organization or turn someone within it for information". If you have access to all of these things and can't do your intrigue against entirely IC communications, their security beats your tradecraft, welcome to espionage. If they're only discussing things OOCly, well, that's on them for being asses.
Arguing that you need to be able to pickpocket important communications is asinine when the actual goal remains what it's always been: Greed and griefing.
I've always thought balancing theft was pretty simple:
make thieves have to opt-in to a permadeath mode before they're allowed to steal. They get x number of returns from the cave, and then their character is deleted.
With that, death matters again, and it makes the world a more dangerous place, which seems to be exactly what thieves and people who want theft are looking for.
Better yet, make all value (gold and escrow) that the thief has go to the person who gets the last kill. Really encourage that conflict that thieves keep saying they provide.
Okay so just some ideas I've had. My goal was to minimize the negative impact theft has on player retention while also increasing the RP opportunities.
-Make theft denizen only.
-Allow items to be stolen from denizens that can be sold to a fence for immediate gold. Balance gold amount.
-Allow the occasional theft of some "important" items from denizens. Give these items unique effects.
Examples of unique effects:
-One that can be turned into the fence with a target specified. The fence will take over from there and in exchange for the item bribe guards from that city to listen in on SAY's made in public by said person for X amount of time/says. The thief will later be mailed the details of what was overheard.
-One that you can secret to a specific target. It will mark them to a denizen at the next post office they visit. The next mail they attempt to send will have a copy made of it and delivered to the thief. Any items in the mail will still go to the intended person. The mail will be delivered, but its contents are exposed essentially.
-One that uses the assistance of secret denizens in a specified city. The city will be specified to the fence and the thief will be informed of the next news post made in said city.
-Etc.
Obviously unique effects like this would need to be polished and you would need to have more than 3. If anyone has any other unique effects feel free to let me know. I'm having fun crafting this even if it may never exist.
Some intentionally silly suggestions here from those who just want to burn it all down, along with generous servings of sarcasm (the lowest form of wit).
...but the highest form of intelligence!!
I'm being much less silly than you might think. For theft to be balanced, it needs to have the reward of stealing be balanced with a meaningful risk.
The primary risk in stealing is death, and the only way that death can be a meaningful risk is if it carries more serious consequence than it does now.
Not only is the premise that merely creating a character and logging in to Achaea equates to implicitly "opting in" to all potential forms of conflict within the game simply wrong, I find it difficult not to read from it an underlying sense of gatekeeping and arrogant superiority, saying, "This is how the Achaea I enjoy playing is; if you are unable to have fun in my world, then, too bad, it is not meant for you; we do not want you here, get out, leave." Clearly, this position is not exactly shared by the Administration, otherwise there should be no cityless rogues; no Virtuosi or Merchant organizations; no adventurers who are not members of either a pre-Order or an Order proper...
Furthermore, would deleting theft, which, as far as I understand, is now and has only ever been seriously practiced by a few players, really have such an impact on how dangerous and alive Achaea feels? Seriously, Elyon no longer being able to continuously harass novices, old returnees, and people he otherwise dislikes for moments of carelessness would diminish Achaea's atmosphere for you that much?
I find it extremely interesting that, apart from the thieves themselves, who naturally scream bloody murder in defense of the current status quo that allows them to act as they like, the other most ardent champions of "theft contributes to an inherent and desirable feeling of danger in the Achaean world" in this thread -- from the previous posts I read, Amranu, Eryl, Eurice, Kshavatra, and Ognog -- all seem to play Hashani characters.
Now, I do not know how the laws in Hashan operate, but if I assume correctly that Hashani are not permitted to attack one another, as is the case in Cyrene, at least, I have to wonder how much of this "existing in Achaea means opting-in to all conflict, full stop" attitude is privilege born of not having "opted-in" to potentially being subject to Elyon attempting to steal from them whenever he feels like it, when they might be daydreaming, shopping, hunting... or even engaged in meaningful character development activities?
Amranu, Eryl, Eurice, Kshavatra, and Ognog -- all seem to play Hashani characters
Well, Hashan's citizens tend to be a little more enlightened than most. :P
But seriously, my character was Cyrenian for a very long time and I've been the victim of theft on many occasions. It definitely gets the heart racing. It feels terrible, and it's an awesome rush at the same time. I've never lost more than about 50K gold worth of items though. I'm sure if I lost much more than that I would have a far more negative feeling about such an event, which is why I am arguing for the consequences of theft to be far more limited than they are now.
It is just a coincidence that they are Hashani, you get defence of thieves from players that have characters in every city.
@Accipiter @Ognog Fair enough! It was half tongue-in-cheek and not an entirely serious thought, anyhow (hopefully, that did mostly come across, although next time perhaps I will add some emoticons and such to make it more apparent). My position on the "logging into Achaea is inherently opting into all conflict" premise remains, of course.
Okay, here's how I see the whole opt-in argument since there's clearly difficulty going on:
When you log into the game, any number of things can happen. You can log directly into a raid fight and get caught up in the fighting and die. You can set out to bash your favorite zone and set out to find someone has set up a roleplay-supported initiative to defend it, and that you risk death if you do it again. You can find that someone has been distributing letters signed with your name to push a political ploy. You could discover that entirely unbeknownst to you that you've been set up to take the fall for something. All of these things have happened before - they're not hypotheticals.
There's numerous other things that could happen to you in a similar vein and precisely NONE of them require you to "opt in" beyond simply logging into the game. Your consent as a player behind your character was not required for any of these things, nor is it even relevant. You can sit at Centre Crossing and get breathrained and die by 15 people because someone in your city touched the Dawnlord's bottom inappropriately.
The broader conflict systems like raiding, skirmishing, shrine warfare, treacherous planes, seafaring etc all do require "opt in" via participation in their respective systems, and those all have generally established rules which dictate the scope and length of the engagement. People seem to be calling for theft to fall into a similar model as far as the rules are concerned, and even that is preferable to deleting it outright. This is fine.
Deleting theft entirely is not. Spontaneous conflict vectors are Achaea's bread and butter, removing them is objectively bad for the game. See examples like Aetolia for what happens when that line of thought is pursued to its conclusion.
Spontaneous antagonism in particular is important, it just needs to be handled a little better than it currently is to avoid griefing people with code burden requirements or unduly affecting the unaware. I think we can all agree on that much, if nothing else.
Only thing I've ever experienced I never opted in for in the past was what I mentioned earlier in this thread, with someone attacking me out of nowhere as a newbie just by sitting in Actar and them lying to everyone about what happened... Which I could obviously seek retribution for equal punishment again.
Unlike theft, where there's no equal punishment.
It's a coincidence that the faction with no actual morals or ideology beyond "Winning = good" is the one rising to the defense of the griefiest activities in the game, except when those activities are directed at them. Then it's unsporting, c'mon Eleusis, don't guardbash us.
@Eurice you seem to have an idiological problem with the term opt-in. People in this thread aren't asking for a flag that you can turn on that allows you to be stolen from, aside from one or two posts that have mostly been passed over. What people are asking for is either a set of behaviours they can follow that will allow the admin to step in if excessive loss has happened or the ability to cause like for like loss to happen in the case of loss.
Currently if you are the target of theft there is nothing you can do to replace the items and there is nothing you can do to not make yourself a target. If death was an issue to thieves then open PK on the forever like in the old days would work, but it isn't. If taking everything from a thief was possible then you could do that, but it isn't.
It is currently a one sided bargain where the thief always knows they are a target so they can keep up the defenses that stop it and are mechanically required to be a class with amazing escape potential and stalking abilities. Anyone who gets their power cut potentially loses everything. Anyone who has a child throw up on them and misspells write journal because their keyboard is sticky potentially loses everything. Nothing else in the game carries such a high potential for loss, and there is nothing you can do to alleviate the potential for that loss other than to have infallible triggers and constant attention.
The opt in you are so against is present in every other situation and the potential for loss is much much smaller. You can't have your reputation ruined unless you have spent time building that reputation. You can't have a murderhobo follow you around and murder you at every opportunity unless you refuse to issue. But you can not interact with anyone at all and be sitting in the wilderness and lose everything on your toon.
[R]eading that one dude's interaction with Profit really does show why we can't have nice or interesting things.
I'd like to chime in here just to add some additional context to the situation. Yes, I stole some very valuable things from Lyrin by breaking into his (supposedly inaccessible) house and forcing him to open a (supposedly inaccessible) chest. In the doing of this, I didn't break any theft rules, as per the issue he filed against me.
Now, as to whether or not keeping these items is 'morally' or 'ethically' correct, I don't know. I'm not going to argue for or against that. I did feel bad about it and wanted to find a resolution that worked for both of us but, if you would, please look at the conversation Lyrin included at the bottom of his Pastebin:
You tell Profit, "Greetings - what would it cost to return the items which you stole from my house and pack?"
Profit tells you, "All I stole from the pack was some gold, wasn't able to get anything else."
Profit tells you, "Give me a moment to look at what was in the house itself."
Profit tells you, "Okay, so this is some pretty valuable stuff and... lots of it. I can't begin to value it in a reasonable amount of time. So, I would like to keep the Black Boar card, the rest I can live without... what would you offer?"
You tell Profit, "A list of the items would be helpful if you don't mind."
Message #5505 Sent by Profit
2019/7/14/7:18 // https://pastebin.com/yPic9N8M -- Sorry, there's no other way to do this. :(.
You tell Profit, "How does 50k gold sound?"
Profit tells you, "I couldn't even consider it at that, I'm afraid."
Profit tells you, "I could easily sell this haul for hundreds, if not thousands, of credits. I would like to return it to you but we would need to come to a mutually beneficial agreement."
You tell Profit, "It is only credits you will take? many of those items only seem to have a credit value."
Profit tells you, "I think it's likely the easiest way to handle the transaction. I can, of course, sell items from it piecemeal, as well. If there are items of sentimental value in there, I can return them at a much more reasonable price."
You tell Profit, "Alrighty, how much in terms of credits do you think?"
Profit tells you, "I couldn't begin to guess... All told, the whole lot (minus the Boar) is probably worth around 800. Obviously, I will sell to you for substantially less than that but I don't know what you are comfortable with. I could also trade for other cards, as well."
I was very clear that I was willing to sell the items back to him for substantially less than their value. Lyrin owns a moving, out-of-subdivision house and had a chest full of legend cards. In game, he appears rich. As a thief, why would I accept 50,000 gold for items valued at 10,000,000 gold from a target known to be rich? I was willing to negotiate far less than 10 million gold but I needed more than 50,000 gold.
Unfortunately, Lyrin stopped talking to me immediately after the last tell and filed an issue. I attempted to negotiate and engage with him on the return of his items several times but my tells were never returned. What happened is this: he made an unreasonably low offer, I countered with the actual value and gave him a chance to make a reasonable offer, he didn't want to make a reasonable offer, he filed an issue hoping it would result in the return of his items. So now, months later, after the issue didn't result in the return of his items, he posts a partial log that doesn't show any of my subsequent negotiation attempts, attempts that he ignored, and instead makes it look like I asked for 800 credits to return his items.
I did not: I offered to negotiate a substantially lower price and he chose to issue.
When you choose to issue, you are foregoing other forms of resolution, just like with PK, so it is no longer my responsibility to work toward in-character resolution after I've been issued and when I'm being actively, repeatedly ignored.
"I stole more than $255 worth of stuff from someone in a single instance and he went to the admin and didn't want to deal with me even when I offered to sell back for a little cheaper" is not the slam dunk argument you think it is...
I wasn't making an argument, I was providing context.
Thank you for the additional context proving that theft is stupid.
No problem, thank you (and others) for clearly illustrating that you're not really participating in this discussion in good faith.