Nikita Diira's page

Whoa, whoa, whoa, a girl makes one little suggestion, leaves for a few days and comes back to see the whole thing has blown up... Sorry, I didn't think "Fleeced" would be so... controversial! It was just a suggestion to combat an issue others had brought up: namely, the dreaded "conga line".

I definitely see where immunity to further SADs would be easily exploited and I support finding an amicable solution... But, honestly, I really like Landon's suggestion...

When a traveler accepts a Stand and Deliver, the Outlaw starts gaining Reputation over time.

During that time, if someone else issues a Stand and Deliver to the target, the original Outlaw starts losing Reputation instead... until the new Outlaw is dead.

I don't know about needing to lose rep, though. What if the "Fleeced" flag held a short timer (time to travel at average speed across one hex?) and granted rep over time to the bandit(s) that placed it, slowly at first, then more as the timer runs out? BUT, as the "Fleeced" stacks grow, the amount of total rep granted fades. This way, bandits would be encouraged to either a.) protect their fleeced "clients" ie. racketeering, or b.) make certain there are no other bandits trespassing in their territory and snaking their marks. Of course, they can take the gamble that no one else would pick up their mark, also, but their rep gain wouldn't be as substantial--everyone has something to gain (merchant: protection; bandits: rep/loot) and something to lose (merchant: $/loot; bandits: rep). This also discourages conga lines because eventually the rep bonus is, while still there, just not terribly impressive.

I would consider this another way of encouraging interaction. Bandits can still have their SAD fun and can further that experience by guarding, if they want to, or they can simply protect their territory, thus making guarding their marks a worthless pursuit. Or, they can go play spoons or whatever exactly it is that bandits do when they're not stealing things...

Happy medium? No? If you disagree, I'd like to hear a point-by-point of what concerns everybody so maybe we can address each piece to come to a solution. I think I tried to hit on everything that I have read in the thread, so far, but I may have missed things!

What I foresee happening is people paying for the rep while in town and basically just buying rep without actually using SAD/Fleeced for its intended purpose. Maybe the stacks fall off automatically in "civilized" lands, thus no use in towns?

What do you think? I think Fleeced could have its place as a useful mechanic, but I think it's a matter of finding exactly where that place is.

LordDaeron wrote:

Another solution would be somehow allow CCs to join in a larger organization without necessarily building a settlement.

CC's should be allowed to BE larger organizations without building a settlement.

Or if not a settlement, some other player made structure:

Hideouts, Forts, Taverns, Towers, etc...

I don't see why a settlement has to have the physical affectations of a "city," if that's what you're concerned about... There are many different kinds of settlements both in lore and in real life that could work well for a secret organization such as yours. And, really, there are several benefits to having a central, physical location; the only real drawback is that your enemy may discover your location and make you vulnerable by targeting your settlement.

My concern is, it is all about the naming of the umbrella. I want my company name to be attached to all of my members. I don't want to have in the naming: UNC - A, UNC - B and UNC - C

The company maybe and was planned to be broken down into three or more squads or parties.

I'm not sure why this is a concern to you... I thought you wanted to remain hidden. Having "The UnNamed Company" flashing above your head wouldn't be exactly subtle...

Overall, I am feeling very positive after this most recent blog entry! I love the flags and how they have been fleshed out a bit. A few things, though:

To combat the concern about bandits abusing S.A.D. by asking for too much loot, have it be a bandit Sense Motive/Search/Spot (best) vs. trader Bluff/Diplo/Intimidate and based on who wins, the computer generates a percentage of the loot. That way, if the trader has a fantastic bluff and beats the hell out of the bandit's roll, he keep more of his loot. In converse, if the bandit has a great spot, he may get a larger cut. I don't like the thought of the computer advertising how much loot a trader is carrying; it seems dangerous.

Also regarding S.A.D., to combat the "conga line", perhaps, like the "killed" flag, there could be a "protected" or "fleeced" flag for traders that pay their toll.

Speaking of the "killed" flag, I don't think I get it. I agree with Imbicatus that it should increase penalty, not decrease bonus, as I understand it. Can someone explain why it is the way it has been laid out so that I understand the reasoning?

Regarding reputation (and this is a small thing, just personal preference, really), I think that the "poor" rep should be high and the "good" rep should be low, with penalties and bonuses switched appropriately. The reason is that doing nothing should not increase your rep, it should decrease it (a positive action) because you are not doing anything to be recognized for. Reputation is basically a way of us, players, judging whether our fellows are trustworthy and this scale just makes more sense to my brain.

Lastly, I think that the natural alignment your character moves towards by doing nothing should be equal to the alignment of the territory you are in, with wilderness being true neutral. I agree with what many people are saying about not being able to become LG by doing nothing--unless you are living in a LG area, surrounded by LG people doing LG things, it's bound to rub off.

As in from Leadership? I love it, yes. Please, do.

One has to remember that modern concepts of jurris prudence, due process, legal burdens of proof or indeed seperation between law enforcement, judicial and correctional functions are pretty rare in Classical High Fantasy.

One of the most common meme's...perhaps THE stereotypical meme is that knights ARE both law enforcement and justice givers of the Realm. That they ride about dispensing justice and removing dangers to the Realm, answerable only to thier consciences, thier Liege and thier Diety....and the mere fact of being "Evil" (consorting with "diabolical powers", etc.) was of sufficient cause to be considered a danger to the Realm and therefor legitimately a subject for banishment or death.

Indeed, recall the Salem witch trials, the Crusades, etc. For an interesting perspective, watch Kingdom of Heaven in which the main character, who himself says that he has fallen from grace, defends a Holy city from a war started by the aggression of the Templars, real-life so-called paladins. Despite their purportedly good intentions, those that murdered innocents in the names of their gods were not good and the only thing lawful about their actions was the systematic fashion in which they executed their victims.

Of course, relating real-life to a video game is often so clumsy as to be useless...

Nothing helps a game become personal like a strong community, and a strong community comes from players having direct interaction.

Here, here.

I would like both PC run taverns and NPC run taverns and I would like PC run taverns to be cooler and have more options and assorted "stuff" as listed all up above by you other brilliant folks.

I would like to see titles, but I would like to see them be extremely rare and an actual achievement to have one.

Depending on how involved in the game the GW DMs are upon release, perhaps they could only be awarded by them, or perhaps there are only a certain number of them that are awarded for holding certain positions (for instance, if you have a Nation (important: not just a settlement) that is a Monarchy, ONLY the leader could select from a list of monarchical titles (King, Queen, Emperor, High Priest, Pharaoh, Reagent, etc.) to show their position).

I would love to also see extremely involved titles whose chains are hidden. Eventually, given trial and error, players might figure out what they did to receive a title, but I don't think they should be a carrot on a string...

Dear Dr. Feel Good:

I am a pious warrior of lawful neutral alignment. I don’t share a settlement with evil because of my high moral standards, and I am not yet ready to commit my blade to any deity.

When I used to share a settlement with a lawful good crowd, people assumed that I was a paladin.

I now have a very nice place of my own. However, if I have cleric friends over, I am still perceived as being a paladin. And, if I entertain a necromancer friend, people say I am a blackguard. (I just can’t seem to win!)

Why is it that a lawful warrior cannot have friends over for a simple Three-Dragon Ante game without people thinking there’s some alignment changing going on?

I am a fighter, and I am sick of all this ugly talk. What can I do to stop this vicious gossip?

Frustrated Fighter

Bluddwolf wrote:

Will it be possible to Reward a Bounty with something other than coins?

Reward: Items, Training or Other Services, Access to Resources, etc.

I could see using this as an initiation process for my company. "Hey Recruit, fulfill this bounty and you will get membership in The UnNamed Company."

Meanwhile the target of the bounty is one of our own, and we gank the recruit. If he holds his own for a bit and impresses us, we spare him and admit him.... Hehehe... Then he can look back on this, years from then and think "Good times, good times you bastrds", as he does it to some new recruit.

A Very good idea!

What I'm unsure about is how the game will be able to recognize if the reward has been given in your example. In the blog that mentions contracts they use an example of a player issuing a contract where they are seeking 10 rat tails. Unless rat tails are one of the selectable choices within the contract system, how would the game tell that 10 rat tails were delivered?

...

This seems like a difficult hurdle to overcome, but hopefully the Devs have already worked out a fix for these issues <wg>

Bluddwolf, I love that idea because it's just like gang initiation. It kind of creeps me out. Thumbs up.

Valandur, I think that would be pretty easy to do if the GUI basically had a box (or several) into which one could place items, gold, etc to be the reward. The difficult thing would be rewarding guild membership, training, etc. Those things are intangible and would have to be selections, as you said, in the GUI.

The way I envision mounts working best is to make them skill based. There could be two separate skills pertaining to mounts. Ridding would cover the use of mounts for traveling. Your skill level would affect how fast you could travel and over what type of terrain. The second skill would be mounted combat. A significant amount of training would be needed in the ride skill before a character could begin to train this skill. Training in this skill would allow the character to attack and maneuver while in combat. Perhaps at higher level the mount would be able to add attacks of its own.

I find it unlikely that they would expand the skills as mounted combat already has 2 skills associated with it (Ride (Dex) to ride and perform mounted combat, Handle Animal (Cha) to train and care for your mount), but I suppose it's always possible.

I am hoping for fairly realistic looking, but I need music or some kind of background noise. Also, I would love for the founding group to be able to set the music and atmosphere of PC settlements.

Per Ryan's post here, I think he agrees with you in theory... At least, that is how I understand it.

Paladins are not bounty hunters. They are not sheriffs. They are not enforcers of the law. They are not Delta Force commandos.

[...]

Paladins should not be engaged in killing other characters except in defense of Lawful Good Settlements. They should not be taking revenge for harm caused to other characters by 3rd parties.

[...]

Paladins should serve as an example to others of the power and the glory that comes from living a righteous life, adhering to a rigorous code of honor, and placing oneself - one's very soul - at risk to protect the weak, defend the Realm, and upholding the tenants of the Faith.

To me, that says that Paladins should not be actively hunting evil, but instead serving as a bastion against it and acting defensively, rather than offensively. One could infer from how he presents the information that he believes that acting preemptively is not worthy of the Paladin, perhaps because punishing actions that have not yet transpired isn't justice, isn't Lawful... and probably isn't Good. Does that translate to a fall towards Evil? That is only for us to guess at this point, but I think it should.

What if disguise mimics npcs?

Instead of disguise giving you a different name plate, which would still mark you as a PC. Why not have disguise give you no name plate or one that matches the look and nomenclature of an NPC?

Part of the disguise would obviously include the clothing of that NPC type, so that you would blend into the crowd as desired.

I personally hope that we do not have to have the floating tags. The reasons are the same that have been discussed here already.

Unless NPCs are going to be a lot more impressive than I have ever seen in an MMO (which I'm not ruling out), then those disguises would be almost immediately seen through by PC just from observing their movements. Don't you think?

I like the idea of being able to set up a number of preset disguises to choose from, but I think that looking like an NPC would not be terribly effective, unfortunately.

I do not believe that alignment is a single point on an x-y graph. I think it is better to consider the axes separately. The concept of a slider for each axis does have a neutral at the center, but the numerical value of maximums at either end may be irreverent from the point of view of the player. While I believe that a slider effect for each alignment axis is more appropriate, my reasoning for that I tried to portray in my post is based on how the two scales are role played by the character.

With due respect, this doesn't make sense... An x/y axis is just two sliders placed perpendicularly to each other. So, it actually is the sliders that you are supporting, just represented graphically together rather than separately. Each axis or slider is still calculated separately before plotting the measurements on the graph.

It would seem to me that mounts in PfO would be easily gimped by treating them like a real mount. Like a real mount, when you dismount, your horse doesn't just disappear. If you ride your steed off into the woods, you have to dismount to do anything out there and either walk your horse with you or, using the Handle Animal skill, you could teach your mount to stay, then go back to retrieve it when you're ready to leave. Like a real mount, if it is injured or killed, you are stuck walking. This way, mounts are still, obviously, a great tactical advantage, but they are both a skill sink and an inconvenience when you're not actively using them. Towns could have grooms and stables to care for mounts when not needed (for that matter, it could be profession), blacksmiths could focus in farriery to enhance mounted speed, etc, etc.

If you balance the benefits with the risks, I think mounts can be done effectively. However, I would also caution to mind the fine line between immersive and obnoxious. No one wants to play a video game where you are required to balance a checkbook. :)

I agree that super-specializing would make crafting more interesting, but I think the act of crafting also has to be interesting. As I have suggested for some other actions, such as burglary, I would love to see crafting not as "put part A in slot 1 and part B in slot 2, click button" but as a series of mini-game style craft checks. Obviously, it'll get annoying to have dozens upon dozens, but if it's a single mini-game or a series of 3 or so, I think that would go a long way to making crafting interesting, especially if crafting is available as a character archetype, as it sounds it will.

What if it was offered as part of a risk/reward system? For instance, personal homes cannot be broken into when they are first established, however, you may purchase various add-ons, such as rooms or items or what-have-you, one of which is additional storage space. Once you have purchased/selected that option, you open your residence up to the possibility of burglary which can be reduced with traps, etc. The more extra storage space you purchase, the better the chance that someone may burgle you.

Now, burglary doesn't have to be a game-changer, either. It should be difficult for the burglar with minimal reward, perhaps only 1 or 2 random stacks from the player's cache. I would love to see the encounter as a series of various skill check mini-games based upon the traps the player has set. The mini-games will be more or less difficult depending on both your skill level and the level of the trap.

This system has incentive to steal, incentive to be open to burglary and gives players a different way to interact with each other. I would bet you would even find friends trying to steal from each other just to see who can build the better trap!

Edit: As fun as I think this is, I also don't see it being a top priority. I would expect a system like this would not be active at EE and probably not even at launch, but perhaps implemented later on when the devs have the time to dedicate to it. I just think it's fun!

This character, Nikita, would likely be considered LE by the standards of this realm (though, I would consider her survival-of-the-fittest-especially-if-it-favors-me attitude to be True Neutral with strong tendencies towards evil...) and I, as a mere private citizen, would be pleased to see a settlement of like-minded individuals.

Nikita Diira wrote:

Perhaps I'm being naive, but I don't see why this would be that much more expensive than the different animations for different spells or other attacks. It would basically be 2 stances (offensive and defensive grappler) with a very small number of additional animations for grapple-based special attacks. This seems very similar in scope to the active combat stances plus a wide array of additional animations for various attacks, blocks, spells, etc. Seems like an interesting niche market to corner in MMOs.

it would require not only special animations for the person doing the grappling and the person being grappled, but possibly a special user interface for the defended to be able to break the grapple, the offender to maintain the grapple, and what to do once grappled would have to be factored in, then they would have to try to balance it, figure out where it would fit in for army combat. there is a reason no mmo has a full one grapple system yet, it is just to difficult to implement in the scope of massively multiplayer games, or too expensive, or to imbalanced.

I don't see how a "special interface" would be any different than what happens in WoW when you go into stealth--same interface, really, just different bindings when you move into a grapple. Now, implementing it in "army combat," as you put it, would be interesting because there are rules for attacking a person who is being grappled by (or grappling with) a third person and they pretty much screw both parties versus outside attack, so if you plan to be a grappler, be ready to be ambushed.

Nikita Diira wrote:

What if "bot flags" made the player become trade immune? Cannot sell, trade, mail or drop items for other characters, but can sell to NPC merchants and move items to personal banks and that is all. Since a lot of botting is directed at farming materials for sale or trade, this should be crippling. But, also, if someone is accused wrongfully, they can keep playing in other facets while they appeal the flag without being completely hosed by being ganked every five steps.

No one gets flagged without a GM having looked at it, so very little chance of being falsely flagged. If they are ganked every five steps, they won't get to market.

Bottom line, we don't want bots playing... period! We also want to kill them, repeatedly... period!!

Why in the world would you want to waste your time? You know they don't care; they're bots. So, just leave them unable to do anything useful and they'll probably be more annoyed by the time wasted on product they can't move (ever again!) than the inconvenience of possibly having to run from a few players, depending on when and where they farm. I'd rather punish them with a method that ensures their punishment, whether I am there to dole it out or not.

In other words: it's not much of a punishment if they can just operate when no one's around and keep doing what they're doing and getting ever-better at it (skilling up). It's much more effective when you've now made their character forever useless and if they want to continue, they have to start a new character from scratch.

Richter Bones wrote:

LordDaeron wrote:

Bluddwolf wrote:

Making them open PVP flagged is an extremely limiting debuff and it rewards those of us that don't use bots.

I agree, I just would like to see those bots also with reduced combat capabilities being unable to deffend themselves. So they would be flagged and incapacitated making them like a "sitting duck" in combat.

Make it so we can loot all the stuff they have been gathering too :D

That could be the debuff that LordDaeron was talking about, but then, what gear do bots actually use? Bots are typically new characters as well, not very skilled, with maybe the most entry level harvesting skills.

Bots generally don't need to be made "sitting ducks", because they won't respond to your attacks even after you begin, or at least not beyond the most basic "response" to mobs that they might be set up for.

But I think a permanent "Bot Flag" is discouraging enough. How many player companies would want a member running around with both that flag and their company flag over their head?

What if "bot flags" made the player become trade immune? Cannot sell, trade, mail or drop items for other characters, but can sell to NPC merchants and move items to personal banks and that is all. Since a lot of botting is directed at farming materials for sale or trade, this should be crippling. But, also, if someone is accused wrongfully, they can keep playing in other facets while they appeal the flag without being completely hosed by being ganked every five steps.

As a different theme on the Roman Coliseum idea is the Knightly tournament. Different settlements at different times if year could hold a tournament of games, each settlement deciding what competitions to hold, and people would travel bringing not only warriors, but gamblers, and merchants, creating a traveling festival atmosphere, rather than having it at one spot.

This brings up a secondary question: will there be temporary settlements? For any kind of travelling troupe?

Rather than "here's a list of buildings," I'd like to see some thought on how buildings would be functional.

I'm fairly certain mention has already been made of buildings (garrisons? walls? towers? etc) that would be used to enhance defenses of settlements by spawning npc defenders.

I'd like to see barbershops, also, to change hair style/color.

I'd also love to see some kind of "secret" indicator that can be attached to any kind of building that marks it as a front for a rogue guild offering training in stealth, forgery, disable device, possibly use and making of poisons, etc. I suppose there would be less need for secrecy in openly evil/chaotic settlements, but I bet there will be more than a few neutrals in the LG areas that may be interested in pursuing some of these less-than-wholesome skills.

"Greenhouses" purely as decoration don't do much for me, but if they were linked to alchemical skill, then that's a different story.

Small side note: I don't see greenhouses affecting alchemical skill other than perhaps providing materials. Perhaps horticulture skill or "herbing," as we all called it in WoW.

I agree that crafters should spend the majority of their time repairing rather than necessarily creating, and I like the idea of crafting including some risk. As a smelter in my spare time, I can attest that sometimes you mess up and end up ruining your stock or just having to melt it back down and try again. But, for those who don't like the concept of accidentally making something "special", I can attest that that happens sometimes, as well, although, admittedly, it doesn't normally do +4 fire damage unless you grab it before it cools...

That all said, I would not be happy if I was trying to repair an item, especially someone's precious heirloom, and I accidentally destroyed it. Even if repairing an item must have some risk, I would hope that it would greatly diminish as you increase in skill.

Also, I love the suggestion that crafters can customize gear by reskinning it and that crafting should be more involved than just get two pieces of material and click a button. If crafting is intended to be a focus apart from combat, it needs to be equally intriguing, perhaps as almost a mini-game in itself every time you craft something.

It wouldn't be too hard to set up a version of this that was entirely player run, but I think to have the full effect of a Roman style gladiatorial arena, it would be easiest to have dev involvement.

Players could easily designate a place to be used for the games and could create seating from which to watch, preferably very close to a respawn point if we lack the ability to engage in non-deadly combat. It could be fairly free-style, with combatants challenging each other as they see fit, or there could be an announcer that would take names of the combatants and announce each structured fight. People could easily setup shop around the area to sell food, drink, equipment, I'm sure clerics of Kurgess would be nearby offering healing to combatants, etc.

Dev involvement could both simplify things and unlock more options. The pairing of combatants could be much more well-regulated through a function of the building, even matching people more readily by "level," if desired. They could also include as part of the building certain weaponry to be used in the combats that would flag you a thief if you tried to walk off with it. There could be both free sparring and paid matches that reward winners with the entrance fees of the other combatants. The most difficult thing to accomplish without dev involvement would be a system to bet on the matches--something that I think would be just as entertaining as fighting in the matches, myself. This could actually be a good money sink for the game if gold starts to get out of hand.

I guess my point is that while a lot of cool things could become available if the devs jump on board our band wagon, we can still accomplish the basics of an arena with or without them.

Given the conversation over here, I would like to see the ability to make an arena for "safe" pvp with available seating, gambling, perhaps supplies of equipment for the combatants, refreshments, etc. That does sound like a lot of fun.

Perhaps I'm being naive, but I don't see why this would be that much more expensive than the different animations for different spells or other attacks. It would basically be 2 stances (offensive and defensive grappler) with a very small number of additional animations for grapple-based special attacks. This seems very similar in scope to the active combat stances plus a wide array of additional animations for various attacks, blocks, spells, etc. Seems like an interesting niche market to corner in MMOs.

I would be averse to respec'ing skills or changing race through game mechanics (although, if you want to have it available at a RL fee, I would consider arguments in its favor), but I support resetting "class skills," or whatever mechanic lets you train certain skills faster than others.

There's just no good reason to respec your skills or race from an RP/immersion viewpoint, but if you wanted to pay to do it as a player, basically "killing" your character and creating a new one, I suppose I'm not particularly opposed. I just don't really see it as a necessary option, at least not right away.

I do think you should be able to change which skills level quickly for you (however that is maintained) to reflect a change in character focus, but this should require some kind of effort to accomplish.

Sounds like a spell component pouch will just fall in line with other equipment on your character; i.e. should have a rarity, a cost to make and sell from base materials, a time to degrade (and be repaired/replaced), and have the ability to be threaded (if it is a very powerful component pouch).

This, pretty much--but not quite, I think.

What I am hearing reminds me a lot of the specialty bags from WoW, but a little different to work with the PfO mechanics. Spell component pouch could be a threaded bag that allows all the items inside to also be threaded, however it only holds spell components. It could hold, perhaps, 4 (spell component pouch, thread cost:1), 8 (full spell component pouch, thread cost:2), or 12 (bulging spell component pouch, thread cost:3) different component stacks at a time, but needs to be refilled occasionally. Perhaps some high level, rare bags have some kind of special ability, like a percentage chance to cast the spell without expending the component, or some kind of metamagic, or something...?

I think it makes sense that spell components are kept in the game as a way of balancing consumption, as in, melee combatants need to pay to repair/replace equipment periodically, ranged combatants need to purchase ammo, spellcasters need to purchase spell components. Also, for me, at least, it lends to immersion. And, I agree that it is a cornerstone of the difference between sorcerers and wizards. Side note: perhaps instead of Eschew Materials, sorcerers would gain an ability that allows one component pouch to be threaded to them for free (at no thread cost).

I would love to see something like the following:

At character creation, you select your characters' starting alignment, either arbitrarily as a player, or through a sorting quiz, or perhaps even "starter quests." Each alignment is represented by two measurements, reliability (law vs chaos) and morality (good vs evil). Neutrality on both scales would be considered a balance of both, measured somewhere in the middle. Some races (evil/good outsiders, undead, etc) or classes (paladin, assassin, etc) may provide an additional bonus or penalty to one or both of the scores, providing base alignment scores that become a stat, just like strength or charisma. These scores can be temporarily adjusted by a number of events, including hostile spells or personal actions (see below). After resting (read as: every 24 hours, or reset like spells), a characters' alignment "normalizes" by a set number of points back towards the characters' base alignment score. If a character's alignment shifts away from its base alignment significantly enough to warrant an alignment change more than 3(?) times in a month or remains for 3(?) days straight, alignment normalization ceases and the character gains the Soul Searching debuff for 7 days . At the end of the duration, normalization resumes with the current alignment scores being reassigned as the character's base alignment.

Actions that may impact alignment: breaking contracts (chaotic), unprovoked murder (evil), maintaining good guild standings (law), destroy undead (good). Some personal actions may be intentionally elicited by game mechanics. In example, a band of goblins are attacking rural settlements and you have accepted a contract to destroy the band. When you attack them, they surrender and throw themselves upon your mercy. You are faced with two obvious choices: if you kill them, you move towards evil on the moral scale, but if you spare them, your failure to complete your contract moves you towards chaos on the reliability scale. Or, perhaps, when you attack them, they surrender, claiming to be persecuted by the local settlers, only defending land that is being encroached upon. If you ignore their pleas and complete your contract, you move towards evil on the moral scale. If you take their case back to the settlers in an attempt to broker peace, you move towards neutrality on both scales. If you go back and attack the settlers, you move towards evil AND chaos. Et cetera.

Alignment normalization may effect certain races or classes differently than others. For instance, to reflect the stringent requirements of the paladin order, once you earn your first paladin award/achievement(/thing), you may normalize more slowly, therefore needing to control your actions more carefully than others.

This blends the idea of earning your alignment, which I think is a great mechanic, and setting your alignment, which I think makes the game a little more accessible for people. It also allows people to change their alignments fairly quickly and easily (10 days) if they want to change and grow as characters. Thoughts?

Edit: I want to clarify that the "alignment stats" would be a hidden stat, not known to other players--or, perhaps, even to the player themselves. Players could see their own alignments (LG, LN, LE, NG, etc.), but perhaps not their alignment score/stat, and other characters can only see your alignment with the use of appropriate magic or abilities. This is meant to be a guide, not a hard rule, so I don't think advertising the stats would be helpful, personally.