Sagona's page

Thanks for the update Lee!

I think its kind of unreasonable to expect a guild to maintain 24 hour player surveillance of their settlement to defend against siege and for law enforcement. This means NPC defenses are pretty much essential.

I agree that 24 hour defense is unreasonable. They could have it cost gold per hour to use the NPC defenses. This way it encourages you to defend on your own during prime time. But it isn't critical to have 200 people online at 2AM. I think that would be a great way to keep the players involved without encouraging midnight raids.

What I worry about is a big guild scouting the an oncoming army and deciding that even though it is prime time they've got the money to blow on calling up the NPCs to do all the work for them. Or a small guild keeping a few people on for scouts and waiting to activate the NPCs until the last possible second before the attack. To prevent this it could be setup so the NPCs have to be scheduled X hours ahead of time and have a minimum duration. Maybe you pay once per week and you pick a week of midnight to 9 AM guards. Then the next week you can pick more or less hours starting at different times of day. After all those soldiers want a shift schedule and don't want to be woken up for a 30 minute shift.

I guess I can be the first to actually propose a time :)

I would recommend a Saturday afternoon, either in the next two weeks or after Christmas and the New Year.

This sounds pretty interesting. Everything is always up in the air for me, but Saturday afternoons are usually better than the rest of the week.

I'm still reading through all the blogs and these forums trying to make sure I understand everything. So far I am really liking what I see. I've stayed away from or left other games in the past due to very bad griefing. For a long time I swore off all games that allowed PvP because of the experiences I had. I've since learned that PvP does not always equal griefing and I've learned to love it when done right.

One thing that I'm not seeing is anything that would expressly exclude the possibility of a lawful/neutral evil assassins guild.

Killing other characters is not griefing. It will be a commonplace, accepted part of the game. Enabling someone else to kill other characters is not griefing and will also be a commonplace, accepted part of the game.

One of my favorite PnP characters is an assassin and I've wanted to roleplay her as part of a guild in an MMO for sometime. How I picture an assassins guild is similar to what I have read here about bounty hunters, except they wouldn't limit themselves to contracts based on the official in game bounty system as described so far. An assassin would take care of that rude guy from the next guild over, teach a lesson to the leader of your rival guild or infiltrate that rival guild with spies. It would be a risky proposition for the client, but say someone had a rare item they wanted stolen, an assassin could trick a mark into carrying that item into a medium security zone and then kill them. This would be risky for the client, because it would be possible for that item to be destroyed instead of looted if I understand correctly.

The assassin would have to be very mindful of the wrath of the marshals. Since there are penalties for this type of behavior the assassins would have to select what contracts they accepted carefully. If I was running the guild I would have strict policies on the number of contracts per day and no repeating a hit on the same character within some set number of days or weeks. The point of this would be to fulfill a role that exists in almost every real society, not to harass any single player. The guild would of course have to police its characters closely to make sure griefers weren't just using it to justify their activities.

I just hope that the system will allow this to be done as a lawful evil or neutral evil act and not punish the guild as being chaotic.