Goblin Squad Member
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If you engage me in combat, I can try to run, fight, negotiate, call for help, etc. I feel like I have choices and can affect the outcome.
If you successfully pick my pocket, by definition, I had no meaningful choices or interaction with you - I just got screwed. This elicits as I said a response of anger and sense of loss disproportionate to the likely value. It rapidly degenerates into paranoia and breaks socialization in a game designed to be driven by socialization.
This effect is related to why people have such a strong negative reaction to being ganked.
What if it had no ill effect on the victim, as Hardin suggested, but still gave the Thief something in return (ie the attaining of an accolade or building up faction standing) and a nominal return in coin.
This way pick pocketing would achieve several objectives:
1. It is a meaningful interaction for both the Thief and the "Victim". The victim will still have the opportunity to detect and respond to the attempt, even though he actually lost nothing.
2. If the victim decides to respond with an attack, he is getting the PvP opportunity,mwithout the attacker flag. The thief will either have to defend or attempt to flee.
3. The victim can instead decide not to engage the thief, but report and let the NPC wardens deal with the thief.
Without some form of crime, what kind of socialization in the settlements will there be? The settlement of the Smurfs will seem more dangerous or edgy in comparison.
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Pickpocketing as a faucet doesn't create meaningful interaction from the "target", simply because the target doesn't have any skin in the game. Offering an opprutinity for the "target" to open meaningless PvP doesn't make the interaction meaningful.
How would you make thievery interesting to someone who has a trivial chance of winning an engagement? In Darkfall I have several times had interesting engagements where I had no chance of winning, but there have been few cases where someone has attacked me and then won, as opposed to winning first and then attacking.
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Goblin Squad Member
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In the "High Level Gaming" session at Dragon*Con, Keith Baker and Jason Buzmann brought up items that had unknown (to the player) properties or events that would draw players to find out why that stuff happened. This was to get the players to recognize that they did not know everything in their world. I think that creating a lore/mechanic of wonder into play instead of frustration and anger could be possible. Something is missing. Was it a pickpocket? Or was it something else?
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Goblin Squad Member
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...a nominal return in coin.How does one avoid the exploit of creating coin "for free" by pickpocketing one's friends? Coin faucets, as GW's said repeatedly, need to be carefully controlled and monitored.
The coin faucet could be 1 copper piece at a certain level, maybe 5 at maximum PP level. Far lower than the coin faucet of killing a Goblin or two.
The coin is not the real reward, th faction standing and accolades are.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Wouldn't it be cool to be a pickpocket? (*)
Means:
1: You get within 10ft of me, I try to kill you or run away (our world becomes massively distorted due to this effect)
2: Nobody carries anything worth pickpocketing
3: Spending XP on pickpocketing skills is something only clueless newbies do
4: All the time and resources spent implementing this feature is wasted
(*) The rage of being a victim of theft in MMOs is vastly disproportionate to the real loss of value. For a very very large part of the community it crosses an invisible line into "being cheated"
If you can only lift money and not items, point 2,3 & 4 become moot. (assuming money is still held in a 'magical bank account' and is not actually carried in inventory).
The amount that can be lifted can be limited both by a set number (e.g. 10 coins) that can be influenced by character skill training as well as by a percentage of total owned coin (maybe 0.5%). Whichever limit turns out lowest decides the maximum yield of the pickpocket action.
After an attempted pickpocket, the target can be shielded from new attempts for a set time (prolonged cooldown if pickpocketed more than once in a day), thus preventing the scenario with a gang of pickpockets stealing a target dry.
The argument that some just hate being pickpocketed still stands but if the amount that can be lost is limited it might soften the blow of being 'cheated', especially if thieves can be severely punished.
Making pickpocketing require some gear that can't be threaded and is automatically lost when killed or apprehended by a guard means that naked pickpocketing (as in Mortal Online) can't happen, there is something to be lost for the thief as well.
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Goblin Squad Member
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It rapidly degenerates into paranoia and breaks socialization in a game designed to be driven by socialization.
This effect is related to why people have such a strong negative reaction to being ganked.
Paranoia, and massive distrust of every other player in the game is rampant in most Open PvP MMOs. It's certainly rampant in Darkfall.
I am very hopeful that I'm correct in believing Ryan is trying to create a game where this is not the case - where the general assumption when seeing another player out in the wilderness is that they won't attack you, or that you'll already know they had a good reason and what that reason is if they do. Naturally, there will be instances where this is not the case, but if the general assumption when going into the wilderness is that you will be killed and looted, then I think Ryan will consider PFO a failure because the social norms and the game mechanics will have failed to create a game where the PvP is meaningful.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think there is room for crowdforging Pick Pocket and Thief mechanics that allow characters to steal from other characters and from those characters' homes.
Pick Pocket should probably function something like Assassinations, where there is an Observed (Cased?) flag that gets put on the Mark, thus giving the target choices and options to interact with the other player.
Thief should probably function as a drain on whatever Maintenance Costs are associated with Settlement structures. Whoever is paying those costs would see reports of losses due to theft. Again, a mechanic similar to the Assassin's Observed flag should be placed on the structure, and whoever is responsible for maintaining that structure should have choices and options for interacting with the Thief. This might even be a reasonable way to harry a Settlement structure short of actual Warfare or Sabotage.
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Goblin Squad Member
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It rapidly degenerates into paranoia and breaks socialization in a game designed to be driven by socialization.
This effect is related to why people have such a strong negative reaction to being ganked.
Paranoia, and massive distrust of every other player in the game is rampant in most Open PvP MMOs. It's certainly rampant in Darkfall.
I am very hopeful that I'm correct in believing Ryan is trying to create a game where this is not the case - where the general assumption when seeing another player out in the wilderness is that they won't attack you, or that you'll already know they had a good reason and what that reason is if they do. Naturally, there will be instances where this is not the case, but if the general assumption when going into the wilderness is that you will be killed and looted, then I think Ryan will consider PFO a failure because the social norms and the game mechanics will have failed to create a game where the PvP is meaningful.
Hang on a minute, you take a quote about pick pocketing and turn it into Open World PVP?
As for the rest... You know what they say when you assume?
I doubt there will be any wilderness areas in the game where you will not constantly have to be on your guard, ready to fight or flee,We know that some players would like to have the ability to opt out of PvP altogether. We are not going to enable that kind of functionality, because we feel that PvP is an intrinsic, critical part of "meaningful human interaction".
Blows that general assumption out of the water.
PVP for loot and experience is meaning... It may not be meaning you like, but it does have meaning.
Smurf it
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Goblin Squad Member
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The way I read it is wild hexes will have CE's and low reps. So anyone you meet can range from instant threat to anything safer than that extreme alert. By contrast high sec hexes of high lawful are reversed - you still might get the odd blood thirsty but they should be headed off already by guards etc and are more likely an ally.
Ie islands metaphor.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The way I read it is wild hexes will have CE's and low reps. So anyone you meet can range from instant threat to anything safer than that extreme alert. By contrast high sec hexes of high lawful are reversed - you still might get the odd blood thirsty but they should be headed off already by guards etc and are more likely an ally.
Ie islands metaphor.
That is how I have seen it as well. Islands of every type of security level. I like that over the donut that Eve has. Gives plenty of room for all play styles.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Wouldn't it be cool to be a pickpocket? (*)
Means:
1: You get within 10ft of me, I try to kill you or run away (our world becomes massively distorted due to this effect)
2: Nobody carries anything worth pickpocketing
3: Spending XP on pickpocketing skills is something only clueless newbies do
4: All the time and resources spent implementing this feature is wasted
(*) The rage of being a victim of theft in MMOs is vastly disproportionate to the real loss of value. For a very very large part of the community it crosses an invisible line into "being cheated"
I just caught this tidbit from another thread, so necro here we go.
1. Make stealth be involved, nobody trusts a rogue sneaking around anyhow. Generally they are likely to be assumed to be up to no good.
2. Nobody is going to never carry anything of value. You have to transport your own goods in this game and there is no Hearthstone. If anything, people will carry an extra amount of junk just to foil pickpocketers, corpse looters and the death penalty. This is what happened in UO.
3. Some of the best tricks use the simplest methods. Sure, it may fall into disuse for a period of time, so will most other newb skills.
4. If it gets used in the early game it is not wasted. If someone, just occasionally, gets away with using it at other times, it is not wasted. The only thing to say for this, is that the truly great uses of such a skill will probably not have songs sung about it.
A couple of points besides:
The fact that thievery was rampant in UO, and many MUDs, and people simply dealt with it rather belies the severity of this threat.
Occasionally someone has the guts to pull off a feat the leaves everyone open mouthed for the sheer ballsyness of it. Like using a skill that only newbs use to nab a legendary blade from someone that got distracted on the way to the vault without thinking that they would have to worry about it being stolen, because who does that!? These are the things great stories are made of!
There are many ways to limit this from becoming an "everyone robs everyone" kind of situation.
Make it easy to detect; require the thief to be stealthed, nobody trusts a rogue sneaking around anyhow.
Make it require the thief to remain undetected, that is not spotted, not even looked at, for the entire duration of the theft process. Otherwise they become hostile to the victim.
Only let the thief have access to a small fraction of non-equipped, non-threaded goods and coins. The only way to get access to a slightly less small fraction of goods and slightly less chance of detection is to practice, which is dangerous to the thief who is always at a moderate to high risk of being caught.
If you have to, add a short [Red-handed] flag that the victim can see if they happen to catch the thief skulking away in time.
If a thief is not able to literally rob a person blind with ease and the player knows that the odds are in their favor, they will also know that the thief was either very skillful, lucky, or both. They are also likely to realize what they may have done wrong and be less of a target in the future.
Players would likely keep a better eye on other players, not because they thought that person might rob them, but because they could potentially prevent a robbery simply by being watchful.
Most of the points you brought up are circular. If the threat of thievery makes people paranoid about their gear, and theft becomes much more difficult to pull of to the point that people stop using it, eventually people will become complacent again because nobody is stealing things. At which point things start getting stolen again and people get to relearn those lessons.
The meaningful interaction of thievery may not be as straightforward as combat where you can react with instant gratification to the threat, it does not change that you are very likely going to die if all you try to do is run from the wrong character. So what if you can fight back, when you could end up losing all of your non-threaded gear permanently, how does this compare to possibly losing a much smaller portion of your belongings that are drawn from an even smaller subset of items being carried, [i]if[/if] the thief does not botch their attempt? Either way, both scenarios encourage people to carry around junk, not have an empty inventory. Plus it gives players more of a reason to improve their perception.
Neither of these even carry a candle compared to the damage you can do to a player who is naive to politics though. They may never see it coming, but they could end up far worse off than missing a few items and coins.
I believe that the type of game you are bringing to life would be a sadder place without the threat of theft. There are many ways you can make it non-threatening enough to not cause people to never trust each other, while still making it possible for it to be fun with a touch of thrill.
Keep this in the "we will do our best to make this happen, later" box. It deserves a lot better than to be tossed.
