For all new (and old?) thieves: What to do after being a GM thief?

So, I regularly get questions like these: "Hey BE, I finished my thief. But I am guard whacked all the time for stealing a few regs in town from this afk players. I don't know what to do?! Where should I go? Can you help me?"
I just wrote a longer answer to another new thief on this shard and thought it might help many more if I post it here. Comments are welcome. And yeah, I know, it doesn't replace a big thieving guide. But I simply can't (dont want to) write one right now due to time limitations (laziness).

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Mh yes, the typical problems: Cities are pretty safe if NPCs have Line of Sight. Even without LoS, active players just have to call guards and succeed most often (except for the 10-20% perfect steals with no chance to call guards upon you).

So, cities kind of suck. When I start my day of thieving, I still start with all banks. I check which people are active, what are they doing, any events going on, any gates to take? So I check the general situation on the shard. Sometimes, you are able to track players further away from banks and guards. Sitting afk somewhere, for example with some BODs. Take these out for a start.

Either you have an idea what players are doing, or not. Depending on the gametime, you can do several things:

- EU times: Not much going on. I farm except I see something really good.

- US noons/afternoons: People start to hunt in dungeons and enter the game. Now is a good time, to check the houses of known players. Try sneaking in and house looting for example.

- US evenings: Busy time. Many things going on. Check houses. Check champ spawns. Check hotspots in dungeons.

General advice about dungeons: During my first year here, I always told thieves to go out of cities and hit the dungeons. I dont do that anymore. Back then, much more dexxers were around, with weapons to steal. Now it's 90% tamers and 10% mage bards. Very few dexxers out there. If you see a dexxer with a good slayer, it's probably me. I'd rather greet a lonely dexxer than steal his medium quality slayer. Or at least sell it back cheap. Their life is hard enough.

The problem with tamers is, you cant steal much from them. You can stalk them long enough, to steal a plat once it drops in their bags. Or a tmap. But while doing so, you will watch how they earn the 10k stacks and it's kind of frustrating to see that. And it's really difficult to steal in a dungeon. Escaping can be very tricky. Best time your steal until the pets are engaged in fighting or the tamer is low on mana.

So yeah, right now, the most effective, mean and cruel way to steal on UO:R is house looting. For that you would need to learn, which house belongs to what player. And learn their behaviour. Most players have routines. Times they log in. Procedures for house security etc. Once you figure these out, you might find weaknesses. Some really bad-ass looters even provoke players into doing mistakes. They camp their houses and call in Reds once there is activity. Reds can be very distracting, and player's drop their security when fighting etc and the thief can try to sneak in without being detected.

If you simply want to have some fun: Check cities, check banks, only steal valuable stuff, dont steal with NPC in Line Of Sight within 10 tiles of distance, check hotspots of dungeons for really difficult thieving, steal from red PKs (!), camp houses, camp player vendors(! works very well in Yew, when there are no PKs around that track you), try to learn player's habits, just run around checking front doors (happens quite often, that doors are forgotten to be locked), run around the world and have some funny odd adventures, RP in cities like Stormhold or Pawns (!), enjoy the events on your thief, think of new ways to steal stuff, try different templates (classical stealth thief/disarmer/mugger-fighter thief/tamer-thief, stun punch thief/bard thief), improve and learn from mistakes, have fun! When playing a thief, it's not about gold per hour, it's about fun per hour. Don't be cruel to fellow UO:R players. Rather interact with them and make their and your playing time adrenalin-loaden.

And read the big thieving thread in the Salty Dog Forum. There you can find alot inspiration from me and fellow thieves. Try to add your own tales! There is no necessity of big heists. Just make an entry into the community with a small lovely tale.

Oh, and did you join 5D already? You should! It's a fun thieving community for newbs and vets alike. Experience is shared, tales are told, glorious adventures done.

Fun facts about guard whacks:

- There is a chance that NPCs call guards automatically when they have Line of Sight (to the thief or to the victim?) and are within 10 tiles of distance (to thief or victim or both?).

- The chance that NPCs call guards increases with the amount of NPCs around.

- The chance that NPCs call guards increases with the difficulty of the steal.

- The difficulty of the steal depends on the weight of the item. And whether a direct or indirect steal is done. Nothing else.

- You can break the Line of Sight with the help of a spell of the Third Circle. Go figure out which spell it is!

(DIsclaimer: These facts come from experience and research on OSI thieving mechanics, Stratics etc. I have no official formulas from UO:R staff)

I really need to write a good and big guide about thieving. And it's on my projects list. However, playing this game is so much fun, it keeps me away from writing things down properly.

I didn't read this thread but figured it was the best time to suggest standing around at a bank in a death robe with an empty pack getting guardwhacked over and over.

Great ideas BlackEye! I find that most of my better adventures and thefts come when I'm not out looking for them.

One thing to add, if you're not carrying anything too valuable, there's no harm in jumping every gate you see (obviously hiding first)! You never know where you'll find yourself

I figured this was the time to suggest you didn't play a thief in era or now and this is a topic you should stay silent on.


Then I will restate again for the 100th time, just make stealing Era accurate. It was good right up til the Item Insurance/ninja/sam crap that came in. That's how it should be here. We'd steal appropriate weights, fail about 75% less, not fail on stacks, not always go grey on every steal so we can get supplies out of the bank and fight/have chases, be able to carry supplies because we'd be playing active players as opposed to a game system that auto guard whacks you due to hyper npc site and horrible fails because of weight, etc...

So all you have to do to fix it is make it Era accurate.


Then if you want to "perfect it" add in some ways we can add in quests, ways to get plat with the stealing skill, earn gold with the stealing skill (trade in system, something) and give us some clothing/house deco for thief themes.

I've failed on 1 stone items at GM level skill 2 times in a row. That's completely fucked.

And eliminating town stealing and nerfing it down to near useless is moronic, not era accurate, and so trammel it's not even funny.


There's also the dumb stuff like locked boxes not working properly


And I'm willing to give a rough guess that the thieves didn't fail on items under 7/8 stones, and never failed on stacks at all. The skill would reflect the 10 stone weight limit of the GM skill.



You guys know I don't want to drive people away and that I steal for fun. I don't want to class to be overpowered at all, but I do want it to work correctly and like it used to. IT'S THE RIGHT THING TO DO!

I also failed two times on 1 stone items, especially stacks of platin and holiday coins that just recently dropped into player bags. But that is not a design of UO:R. Tests on the test shard have proven that fails only start with 8 stone items and this seems to be in accordance with OSI mechanics. The problem with plat drop steals must be some kind of bug... everything else are probably human mistakes
(except when the item in question was traded, which is bullshit, see below).

Still, I don't think it's very productive to demand the same things over and over again from staff. I'd rather keep the brutal house looting mechanics of UO:R than see total era accuracy. Because then, you couldn't enter any house when you are not friended. It's just an example how much more is possible here than on OSI during the renaissance era.
So yeah, there are overall too much guards around banks. And you can't steal stacks of regs and gold properly. It's either way always 1-500 gold pieces and 1-100 regs, independent of success rates and guard whack rates. I understand, that you want to do all day long these peanut-steals in cities, but I totally can understand, why Staff here decided to make banks relatively safe. And I think it's not THAT bad, when people are relatively safe near NPCs, though it would be cool if there was a difference between guard NPCs and normal NPCs.

And yes, it really sucks...
...that items are automatically safe from stealing after a trade,
...and that green event gates are open all the time,
...that defacto Trammel is provided out there with instances and gates to the event center,
...that weight of some items is too large still (Staff already promised a drop of weight for platin trophies, what about monster statues?),
...that you go grey all the time even for the smallest/easiest items.

There is much one could complain about... but this thread is about all the alternatives that UO:R has to offer, and not it's perceived differences from OSI mechanics.

I would love to hear an alternative to the trade-window theft delay that is reasonable and as effective at preventing straight up trade window scams. Trade window cancellation scams should not be possible and this system ensures that.

The alternative is to make it safe from stealing ONLY for the both involved traders.

EDIT: I know, Telamon told me once in a IRC chat that this is not possible easily. But I think, he wasnt really creative here: One could disable stealing on trading toons for example. You could add 30 secs of skill delay, for engaging in a trade window. Something like that.

And yes, with our super mega 3 account system, it could be exploited. But 1) you can counter that with reveals, 2) then only trade with people you trust, 3) three accounts are so cool, why u mad bro!?

And for the really paranoid people:

I feel like if you got ripped off during a trade by one of the persons doing the trading (either by the character or another one of his/her accounts), word would spread pretty quickly about that person being a trickster. Casting reveal before a trade seems easy. It also seems easy to pick a bank area that's hard to sneak into. Like a roof, in which the only way in is to recall or just inside any of them where you're surrounded by 4+ NPCs!

So there's no viable alternative.

Thanks.

Don't whine that much, if there REALLY is no reason for it. There are many ways to counter that trade scam method. I don't want that to happen here (again), too.

So just because people would have to take a few measures to ensure safe trading, we are content with a 30sec safety buffer? If you're trading high value items and not revealing or going to a safe area... It's your fault if another toon steals from you. BlackEye's solution seems very reasonable to me, even if you have other accounts I don't see how it would be "exploited" if you're careful.

Deleted cause I was wrong and I don't want you all to make fun of me

Hey CW, you sure there is a time delay for buying stuff? I haven't witnessed that when stealing. But I also haven't camped player vendors very much in my career.

Blackfoot, you could still stealth houses in era, that was another change that came along with custom houses.


However I do support keeping the trade window protections in, things like this are what I consider a proper balance, but I wouldn't support the same protection for people who just bought an item from a player vendor.


my biggest beefs are the fails, weights,npcs, and the always go grey stuff


house looting is fun, but unless you steal a key from a player, most of the time that's a stealth skill area, so I don't really have such strong opinions there.

I want to relive the fun of town stealing and fights and chases that were such a great part of prodo which with the current mechanics is nearly impossible here.

combine failures with stealing and crap weight stealing with fails on disarm and it's that much worse

Haha, you play the thief in a completely different way than I do, that's why you find other things bad from what I do.

The trade window protection is a customized UO:R system. And it's cool to stop the trade scamming. But it influences the life of many thieves that stealth their marks properly and without detection, even if you don't experience it.

The fails are era accurate in my opinion. They start with 8 stones. The tests prove it. You are right with weigths (of customized items though), too many npcs/guards and the always go grey thing. Staff obviously decided, that they don't want every trader/citizen to be ready to hunt a thief around town.

Really, it's even hard for fighter/pvp templates to catch a good thief in a city. Any other template couldn't safely use cities anymore, with much less guardwhacks/guardcalls. I wouldn't like that, to be honest.

@BlackEye i could be mistaken but the few times I tried stealing weapons that were recently purchased from a player vendor, I failed to steal. This could be due to their weight so I should hold my judgement until I can confirm.

Let's find it out! I am at the HQ. *puts on the batcape*

As someone who played a thief about 16+ hours a day on prodo for years, I can 100% say that the fails on stealing and on disarm are wayyyyyyy harsher here. On prodo I was more surprised when I failed, here I'm more surprised when I don't fail.


The trade window thing I agree is very inaccurate, but I tricked moblin and stole a Halloween hair dye (a mil+) after trading it to him (I gave it back, I was just joking) so having been on the thief side of this, it is just too easy to set people up with trades and get million + items. The scam factor is so high and the profit so great on this, I don't know if there would be a viable alternative that wouldn't affect stealing.


And with fails, think of how crowded the banks were on prodo, if we failed as much here, we'd of never been able to town steal, esp with folks constantly opening up bank boxes with guards in the hot key line.

Also on prodo we didn't have guards on every single bank corner. Thieves have been intentionally nerfed here, it's wrong.

They have been nerfed in cities intentionally, yes. Considering the trade scam, read the first posts! I want the trade scam abolished too. But it sucks, that third parties cant steal either.

@The Crooked Warden , we did the test on the player vendor stealing delay: There is no delay when stealing from players that bought from a player vendor. *thumbs up*