bounties on thieves.

I suppose I could see balance in removal of the Recall restriction but that would blow fat goats in a dungeon or other setting when a thief can pick an item worth 100k+, hit one key and be home safe with no possible recourse at all for them. Not too mention, again, Global ID wherein they would simply have to wait for someone to ID a sweet item and clip it without risking anything but some recall reagents and a rune.

A bard would lose, in the event of total loss, their reagents, rune(s), mount, armor and instruments. Personally I carry a slayer of appropriate type, a GM instrument and enough regs to get around.
No, bards don't have to wear armor but anyone with any sense would, if they were barding any physically dangerous mobs.

There's no restriction on Teleport wherein you could run off on foot with Teleport pre-cast and if your victim gets close, target closer to your horse that you had parked outside. Getaway vehicles are essential for a proper heist, no?

Not really sure where the perfect balance would be, but allowing a thief to insta-recall after picking, for example, 10 platinum, from a victim would not seem very balanced to me. By the time they see the words of power, you're already gone.

It's great with a balance discussion for thievery. But would the possibility of stealing a 100k+ item (which I have yet to encounter in my career as a thief) be a good measurement to decide how stealing should be balanced? It could of course happen, but it would be unfair to let stealing be so hard just because of that possibility.

The equipment used in the case of a bard could also be for the thief. So they still are at equal risk and equal loss of items in value.

Pray tell, what such settings are these? Has anyone on this shard ever taken an item worth 100k+ into a dungeon?

Why is Nooby McNooberson just standing around with 10 platinum in his pack? Why did he see someone with negative karma walk up to him and stop and pause for a bit, while he had this platinum in his pack? And if he didn't see them walk up, because they stealthed over, snooped, and carefully timed the steal, why is this unbalanced?

If thieving was even remotely as profitable as you seem to imagine, it would be far more widespread. If I could pull a 100k item from someone, even under today's rules, I'd be more than happy to set up an alt gatebot to ensure I got away safely. That sure beats spending 2 hours killing gazers to earn 100k...

The settings where me or my wealthy friends are found afield with weapons of the highest order that are under 10 stones in weight.

Zagyg once roamed the lands with practically a rune library in a pouch on his character. That was stolen by ShadowJack and easily valued over 100k and I even purchased the set from him for 100k as evidence of that.

20 platinum coins are so easily stolen it's not even funny, based on the weight, and that is easily worth over 100k.

So yes, it is entirely within the realm of reason to suggest that such a score is possible. Yes, of course, that should be possible, but having no chance to reclaim your goods by vanquishing a thief because they immediately are able to recall away, is not fair to the victims. If all they can do is exact revenge on your naked self after you come back around, what justice is truly served.


You guys do remember that stealing is criminal, right?

Blessed, or unblessed?

Carrying something like this around is just plain stupid.

Ditto.

The best justice is to not get stolen from in the first place.

And, just so I'm clear... in over a year of UOR, there's been precisely ONE successful steal of 100k in value?

Unblessed, we roll in the field with lots of valuable things to be stolen. Hell, just ask some of the folks who have drylooted my corpse over the past year how much good gear they've come up on. I don't recall to the bank every time I have a plat piece in my pack either.
However, the relevance of value has practically nothing at all to do with the desire to have some chance for justice when you are stolen from. Personally, I don't care if you took an apple or 100 plat, I hate you for stealing from me exactly the same. One of those will take a lot longer to recover from the loss of, but it is entirely binary to me personally. You stole from me, therefore, I want not only my thing(s) back, but your head on a platter as well. If there is zero chance of recourse, the system is broken and imbalanced.
We're here to discuss the potential for recourse or justice for thieves. Yes, a simple person without proper security is easier to steal from. Trying to validate the need for such based on the potential value of hypothetical items stolen is stupid. So if you're done throwing stones and calling people stupid for getting stolen from, perhaps you've got some suggestions for proper justice for thieves that doesn't infringe upon their ability to be successful with proper work.

Your basis for keeping the recall restriction was the fact that a thief can steal something worth 100k+ and recall away. I just thought I'd point out that (a) this takes a lot of work and is not as simple as it sounds, and (b) it's happened ONCE in the history of this shard. If we can agree that such oversimplifications and exaggerations are not solid rationale for arguments on this topic, I'm happy to end this sojourn and move back towards more constructive ideas.

My .02, I would love to see a bounty gump arrive 5-10 minutes after a successful steal. Would be a great surprise to someone who was stolen from but didn't know it.

It was not the basis for the comment, but an example of the extreme end of the situation. The basis for recall restriction is an opportunity to exact player justice in the event of a crime. I'm sure you can understand that. Also, yes, it is as simple as it sounds, it has happened multiple times in the history of the shard. Shit, a guy got his bag of bod books stolen probably worth a half mil+. You think it was HARD for a thief to snatch a pouch weighing 1 stone? I didn't think so.

If you can understand that examples of the worst case scenarios are just as fitting for the discussion as the best case, then we can carry on discussing how to make a viable system of justice for these miscreants.


A bounty gump once the flagging wears off would be great! I'd love an opportunity to bounty a thief, however, knowing they are thieves and we have multiple accounts and friends. The fact that they would just cash in their own bounty makes it pretty moot.

This is all rather silly and you are trivializing the effort that a thief must put in. Sure the occasional bank thief will nab something good with no effort (cough, beverly and rand..), but you don't see the work that goes in on the bank end of most steals, you just see the guy pop out and take your stuff. It sounds like you guys have a problem with bank thieves, in which case, simply not carrying valuables on you would fix everything. Or simply make a bank thief not able to pass off the item or bank it for some time after a steal if still in guard zone or something. Besides, the shard already has the ultima thief-trammel in place, making items recently in trade windows unstealable. Bounties on thieves? Really? Because that system works so well for PK's...

I don't have a problem with bank thieves or thieves in general, so long as I am provided a window of opportunity to exact justice. This thread was long since dead and got An Corp'd recently. It was a neat idea but really not feasible just as PK bounties don't really do a great deal considering players could just bank their own heads to help pay for stat loss correction.

If thieves can immediately stash my items and I can't even call guards on them in town or get my item back killing them myself within a couple of minutes, wtf is that? That's what I call thief-Trammel. The trade-window drop was an exploitative scam/trap. No one should be subjected to losing their gear because some thief is a prick and asks to 'see it in a trade window'. Yeah, sure everyone should 'know better' by now. Unfortunately that's why this old game has such a small subset of players. Too many shitty mechanics like that and not enough people teaching before they shit all over someone for not "knowing better". It is effectively cheating in my mind to take advantage of something like that knowing full well the player may not be aware of the 15 y/o bug that is the perfect setup for a thief to set a Last Target on for a steal attempt. If someone steals my things and escapes after making me as a mark and seizing a normal opportunity, they are a well played criminal. There's nothing well played about abusing mechanics that put people at levels of risk they couldn't possibly have assumed without having experience.

In a vaguely similar example, Mobolin and I totally slaughtered these two n00bies in Moonglow a while back, because they were in an opposing faction. Based on how fast they went down, we realized what had happened and told them to run and res then ask a GM to pull them from Factions. Factions shouldn't allow characters without a long amount of play time and subsequently mastered skills of a certain degree, but they do presently. They obviously didn't understand the mechanic but we didn't use it to come up on gear, we used the opportunity to teach players. No one wants to spend all their time teaching everyone who logs in that you shouldn't ever show anyone something that can be stolen, in a trade window, because they can set you up for a trap to steal by way of cancelling the window. That's the whole damn point of the secure trade window in the first place. Having a window of opportunity to secure your items that you literally just had in your hand, seems completely logical to me.

Having the hot items pinned on the criminal until the flagging wears off would suit just fine, so I know if I'm going to spend my time trying to kill a thief that I might actually get my things back, not just an empty corpse window with recall reagents and a rune in it.

Thieves should not be able to immediately bank stolen goods. Agreed.

Trade window-trammel has other side effects, like now I can't rob two people who I catch trading? That is trammel. Additionally, what if I have something that blaise-the-thief wants to steal, and when he comes pandering up to up i just drop it in a trade window with him. Now it's unstealable for quite some time. This change was added in without a patch, and just oozes with trammel.

This "problem" could additionally be curbed by making a player unable to bank an item right after stealing, rather than make stealing impossible. Heck you can always trade in the duel pits where stealing is 100% forbidden, and while you can use stealing outside and run in, you cannot stealth in with steal in-use. There is very little of any worth that actually gets stolen, it's just that people make such a fuss over it on the few times that it does happen.

This I agree with. Making stealing impossible, I do not.

Stealing in the duel pit area is a temporary thing I thought.
I didn't consider the full implications you've suggested regarding abuse of the trade-window change.

What if while trading at a bank, or trading from other secure containers (player vendor/private house) having items snap back to their last location, if the trade-window is cancelled? At least then people would be able to prevent others from forcing items into their backpack, that may not have been there in the first place.

Yes, the items are often negligible and we don't often hear about it unless it's a good score. Much like other criminal acts, no one's going to brag about house looting 300 bandages or killing a random newb in the woods....well...almost no one. That doesn't mean it should go unbalanced and disregarded in the grand scheme of things. I most certainly want thieves to have the chance, I just don't want it to be free. Hell, I might just stand around with platinum in my pack for sport if there were at least a chance to take it back by force or otherwise, if these ideas were fleshed out and implemented appropriately.

Let's do it! I just made a detective (untrained as of yet) and this sounds like a great way to kill boredom... and thieves! I don't have the time or energy to run a guild but if someone else makes one (solely for hunting thieves) I'll join. I've provided some free guild name suggestions below

Sosaria's Sheriff Department (SSD) or Sosaria Sheriff's Department (SSD)
Detectives to End Thievery (DET)
(more to come) ... wife is rushing me out the door.

I'd have to agree with snap dragon, for the most part. Stealing items which dropped from trade windows is not an exploit, in my eyes. It opens a _window_ of opportunity that would not otherwise exist. No one's running around with rares up for grabs in the backpack.. and even if there were people doing that, a thief would have to be on the tile next to them at that exact moment in time to capitalize on it. And then sacrifice a goat to the almighty RNG.
Just about every valuable item I ever stole was obtained during a fake trade, and I think that's a fair means to an end. However, my thief was sporting complete gear each time, from armor to regs to pouches to pots to teleport jewelry. In order to escape as much as the opportunity to dispatch disgruntled "customers" careless enough to underestimate a thiefling. Due to guards and being at the mercy of the RNG, it was a high risk / high reward endeavour.

In my opinion, the exploit starts when the thief has to gamble absolutely nothing, and can simply bank (or trade?) stolen goods immediately. He should have to risk at least enough resources to make a conventional escape. That adds further gameplay elements to the profession and is an all-around positive thing, while also providing victims with the chance to retrieve the stolen goods.

So yeah, as soon as stolen items can no longer be banked, traded or sold for 2 minutes after the deed, everything ought to be working as intended, I believe? Perhaps thieves also shouldn't be able to recall during this time. Make it a proper fox-hunt.

That's how it is now, thieves miraculously loose all their recall powers while they still have magical powers to cast fire, lightnings and magical gates.

As a general rule, or for a period of time after a theft? 'will have to admit either sounds a bit odd.. no Recall at all is a little harsh and puts dex-based thief templates at a disadvantage, while the regular aggressor flag should prevent you from casting gates as well, unless I'm totally off now? 'forgot that option when writing my own post, actually.

Oh just for a short period, like 2 minutes or so.