Stealing is so nerfed for any reason?

Did you even read my explanation on why this is. You cannot build a successfull server based on bad mechanics, nor can you justify bad mechanics by saying "well thats how it used to be, so it has to be that way here. This is not a certain T2A server I will not name. Now read what I posted.

I explain clearly why this was changed, what led to the change and why the change was necessary. If players had not taken it upon themselves to abuse the functionality as it was, it most likely would not have been changed. But once players realized this was an option it was open season on these players. Even criminals and murderers deserve common sense mechanics.

All that aside no one has provided a single piece of evidence that this was not how it worked on OSI. And one vein of thinking is that this is exactly how it worked on OSI because there is so little documentation on it. Stealing an item = perma grey. What everyone seems to refer to as a "nerf" is fixing what are most likely trammel/broken features of stealing built into the default RunUO that every server has.

Stealing in RunUO was primarily meant for the Doom Dungeon and Trammel rares. Not player vs player stealing.

I have laid out our policy for development, and the logic that has led to the mechanics we have in place now. It is up to the players to discuss things honestly or continue to complain about nerfs. I will make one thing very clear. No change will ever be made to the server because people on the forums complain about it being a nerf. That is not an argument, that is simply grandstanding. If you truely want to help then do it in a constructive manner, and take into account the the statements I have made in this thread.

Going forward I will be locking other "stealing is nerfed" threads and re-directing them here as the amount of time it takes to explain these same topics over and over is exhausting.

This is another of the "You should read what I have posted here claims."
http://uorforum.com/threads/stealing-is-so-nerfed-for-any-reason.24824/page-3#post-251817

The chance to steal items based on their weight is the same today as it was almost 2000 days ago. It has not been changed from the RunUO Default. This is a great example of players complaining about a nerf, that is blamed on the staff/server. When we have in fact changed nothing.

The guards were placed around the banks to match known era spawns, and also matches the spawn data provided in the UO Demo.

No NPC's will reveal a player unless they are order guards or NPC's with the detect hidden skill. Most NPC's that have this skill have had it removed unless they are related to training the skill (Thief Guildmaster) This was fixed years ago.

This has been explained repeatedly in the last few years along with this thread. Stealing is broken in RunUo and basically allows 66% of steals to be considered innocent acts. There is no skill check, no logic check, no check of nearby NPC's etc. It was simply 66%. OSI added the notoriety system explicitly for situations like this and using the common sense understanding of a "criminal act" successfully stealing an item would fit that logic.

Even if this was the most documented mechanic on 1000 websites from the Renaissance era it would still have been changed here to account for the expectations of players and the appeal of the server. Allowing a playstyle to have almost unlimited griefing ability and forcing players into complex decisions (is that a thief, why are they blue after committing a criminal act, will I be killed by the guards if I attack them, how does perma grey flagging work, etc, etc) While the thief can except almost zero risk while stealing from players with impunity does not work. We had these mechanics in place and we watched for over a year as thieves abused them and laughed at their victims inability to determine a safe course of action.

UOR works because we appeal to players who both know this era and are new to a server like this. Because they can use their brain and apply common sense and understand on a base level how the world works. If a thief steals something from me, they committed a criminal act, and while they might escape notice from the guards I can take matters into my own hands and try to recovery my item.

We have commited to refining this mechanic to add as many aspects of skill to the thief/rouge trade as possible in regards to how not be noticed by NPC's, fixing NPC LOS issues, etc going forward. But allowing players to commit a criminal act, and remain innocent is not a system that players will ever understand.

See previous statement on success rates, default runuo code, etc. Additionally anecdotal information is irrelevant. If you believe this, request the staff add debug text to test center, ask for the math so you can design your own formula to emulate 10,000 steal attempts. Don't complain about feelings, complain about raw data.

Misleading. The blessing/newbied tag has been removed from over 100 items. And in only rare special cases, that we have explained are items given special properties. Zero stone items like Bulk Order Books and Runebooks have special properties as the only two items that weight zero stones.

Event statues have weighed 10 stones since the beginning of their addition to the server. They were created by the staff and have always maintained that weight.
Commodity deeds once filled at non stealable items, as a trade off for removing their blessed tag. This is to encourage new players to sell their bulk goods to other players without the fear of a thief stealing hours of their hard work trying to get started on the server. Given that we will not ever allow these to be cashed in outside of your bank we feel this is an acceptable trade off (vs simply being blessed like everywhere else)

No other items have been modified with the intent of affecting the thief trade. If an item weighted ## stones on OSI, it has a similar weight here. To imply otherwise is disingenuous.

A. Stealing is disabled for young players, so they cannot steal from monsters without risk of being attacked.
B. The dungeons are for young players, so not exactly a target rich environment.
C. Murder is allowed to discourage non young players from seeing these areas as a safe farming zone.
D. Once the young player stealing issue is resolved that block will be turned off. (as we have indicated in the past)

Assuming that all players are aware of the last target, trade cancel steal scam is not the foundation of a successful server. We have, and will always, take a firm stance on scamming. This was fixed for months before a player even noticed it. The only people who would make use of such a feature would be someone tricking a player into a trade only to cancel it and try to steal an item that is randomly placed in the players backpack using a targeting feature the other player lacks (they have to visually find the item)

We want to encourage players to trade with each other and this change has supported that. We also want to discourage these types of players, who use tricks like this, from seeing Renaissance as a server suited for their playstyle. This is one of the reasons for the quality of our playerbase. This type of player quickly realizes this is not the server for them and move on. The code does the work of 10 staff trying to find and remove these people manually.

Line of Sight is simple to understand. If a NPC is within 10 tiles and can see you steal an item there is a chance that they will call the guards. That chance is based on your stealing skill. Would you prefer the old mechanic where they could see through walls? Is it technically a nerf when we removed NPC x-ray vision?

Side note: To put this thread in context the player complaining here, using the mechanics he seems to dislike so much, has stolen single items worth millions of gold from players. Contrary to what it is meant to sound like he has had more success than simply being dead at every bank in the land. There are players who have played here for a month who have not made as much money as this player has in a single day of stealing.

Plants was a common sense change, not an anti thief one. Its a potted plant . . that weighed 1 stone. Defied a bit of logic there.