Thanks Huzke, your gentle attitude have softened my heart and given me courage to speak out. So... with the new patch it seems stealing just went totally pointless. You could actually earn a few thousands of gold and a couple hundred of regs before (which gave that little fun reward) but now the constant guard whack of doom either draws too much attention (onlookers or the macroing multi-clienting victim) or just gets too much of a pain to go through with. I said before the patch that it probably was too easy to steal without getting whacked, but I mean, now it just sucks blaise... Sure, a thief could steal the very seldom rare item or platinum coin, if lucky enough to end up at the precise moment of a deal going down or something (that is, if having the luck to not get guard whacked while attempting a theft at this occasion and also succeeding in running off) but such rarities couldn't be accounted for when looking to balancing a certain game style. It's rather the regular day-to-day reward that is important. (from internet Americans I've learnt these magical words that seem to legitimize mostly anything you say, so here goes!) Just my two cents...
Could you explain the changes for someone who doesn't have much to do with stealing? The only run-in with a thief I've had since the patch was one that stole a weapon and was able to immediately recall because he was still blue. Have the chances to be guard whacked from stealing been raised? Or is it the chance of going gray in general? Stealing is one of the skills I know the least about in UO, so how it determines whether you get away or go gray is something I don't have a good understanding of.
Stealing should always be turning you gray right now, AFAIK. Not sure how they pulled that theft off. I think the always-gray thing is a bit of a recent change, though. But yes, the chance of guard whacks went up last patch. There was a bug around stealing stackable items - the stealing check was only checking the weight of one item in the stack. So if you were stealing a stack of coins, it was only calculating the guard whack chance based off one coin. This made stealing items like coins or regs a virtually un-guard-whackable offense. This bug was fixed in the last patch. (I have no recollection of how stealing worked on OSI) Stealing seems to be a skill that a good custom UOR solution could do wonders for. It's "power level" waffles between too good and too poor, but I think the bigger problem is players not understanding how it works (aka: thief is gray, I called guards, but nothing happened, wtf?). My own personal ruleset would be: Stealing always turns the thief gray for 120 seconds. NPCs no longer call the guards on thieves, ever. Theft victims and other innocent players can call guards on thieves with a 100% success rate. This timer lasts while the thief is gray, or until... If a thief steals an item and successfully Hides or gets X tiles away from the 'scene' of the crime, the guards can no longer be called on them. The thief still remains gray for 120 seconds and can still be attacked. On a successful escape, both the victim and the theif get a message along the lines of 'guards can no longer be called'. (Invisibility spell may or may not work for this, up for debate) I think this would be a system that behaves more like innocents expect (e.g. calling guards and the guards actually come, and no more thieves snagging an item and then instantly recalling away). For thieves, it would do away with random guard whacks. It would also reward trickery rather than good luck with the RNG. My two cents... (post is now officially legitimized)
I think Huzke, once again, proved his good nature by answering this reply of yours! But some explanation might be needed. cA is not about the lootz. But when the Franz is wandering about these lands as a lonesome cowboy far away from home without his cA comrades, stealing stuff that has some worth is a way to have some fun. I mean, stealing 3 bandages isn't very fun when the victim wont care about it. Even master Pirul must see this! Thus stealing wealthy lootz equals more fun! Napo, Basoosh explained it quite well!
My two cents on this: - I would rather see that you _might_ go gray when stealing but not necessarily (you would however go permagray allowing ppl to attack you even though you show blue). - NPCs never calling guards would of course be thief heaven, but I think it would be too easy. Maybe even thief trammel! - People do call with a 100% success rate now as well if guards are "call-able". But maybe you mean that the thief should be call-able for the whole time he is gray, the 120 seconds (unless succeeding with your final point)? And not just the initial 10 seconds or whatever it is?
This. I feel like going gray automatically regardless of being noticed is the single most debilitating handicap that was introduced, maybe along with the higher likelihood of getting guard-whacked from the latest patch. I don't mind balancing out thievery a little (I think it's sensible that gray thieves can't use the bank, for one), so long as it doesn't mean that the thievery aspect of the rogue class becomes too difficult to be fun or worth using.
It's basically pointless to even attempt to steal anything in town now, unless you are in a death robe anyway and have nothing to lose. Which, I wouldn't think is the kind of thieves you would want to promote. It's certain death if anyone says the G word, and you almost never get away with it unless the entire city is AFK. The whole "noticing" part is what is silly to me as well. If you notice a thing vanish from your bag, you are free to attack the thief. Getting a message that you "noticed" it vanish is just silly, especially when the thief is automatically grey. This, plus the inability to steal any item that has been in a trade window in the last 30 seconds or so (You can now trade with anyone just like it's trammel!), basically means stealing is a worthless skill inside town. Maybe the "stealing stacks" thing was a problematic bug, but I think the real problem people had were not understanding the mechanics, as well as the prevalence of thieves that would steal and then immediately bank (in a death robe of course), which should have been easily dealt with by preventing such antics.
Great topic. Is there a stealing mechanics guide for this server so we can all review to help facilitate the discussion? An educated discussion is a better one. I couldn't find one with a quick search. -Theives should be able to bank and recall at all times, this is a ridiculous rule (as if banking and magery are impacted by stealing irl, half of all bankers are crooked) -Trade windows delay is also ridiculous -The circle of distance for NPCs to notice you stealing should be much smaller and not 100% and or they should only do so if caught (maybe this is in play now? If so I don't notice I got caught in the journal when getting g'whacked) -When I hide or use wizardry to go Invisible I should be safe from g'whack -The weight restrictions for stackable items seems to have gone in the extreme opposite, It seems like they need to be adjusted, up to 4 stacked regs = 1 stone? What is the weight mechanics? I have successfully stolen large stacks since the patch however that is rare. I will begin logging the experience in a controlled manner.
Well, I still think you shouldn't be able to immediately bank any stolen item, or bank while criminal.
Ill cover a few points along with the reasoning for each. Flagging grey on a successful steal There is nothing more detrimental to the playerbase than seeing someone steal an item from you and still be protected by the town guards. This resulted in a great deal of situations in which players were discouraged from playing due to bad and confusing mechanics. While everyone has a different opinion on this, I do not ever remember a thief successfully stealing an item and remaining blue in town. Our research is currently ongoing on this issue in order to determine correct Dec-1999 mechanics. Expecting a player to risk a guard call attacking a blue player to attempt to recover their items by killing the thief is not a good or approachable mechanic. Before this patch was applied the staff was responding to 10-20 pages a week about "blue thieves" or "someone stole from me, I attacked and guards killed me". On this change the common sense argument came into play. Stealing is a criminal act, and common sense would dictate that you are flagged as a criminal. The server does not send a invalidate packet on the successful steal. So the players around you will not notice the color change unless they send an all names request. This however allows the victim and other players, when they notice a thief, to see an understood mechanic. Criminal Act = Grey Player. This also addressed a secondary issue of banking the stolen items which was an equally common complaint. A player would steal something, be killed but have already banked the item in question. Again in the Renaissance era on OSI, the most common method to launder stolen items was to use a pack horse or a friend that you handed the item to. If you were not criminal, why were these steps necessary? Trade Cancel Stealing/Scamming This is another change that was made to address a common problem for new players. Players involved in a trade receive an extremely brief protection from stealing immediately after the trade is cancelled(not 30 seconds). As the trade can be cancelled by the other party and the items dropped into your pack, this gives the player that cancelled the trade an extreme advantage when attempting to steal the item in this manner. As other player in the trade has to find the item in their pack and re-initiate the trade or return the item to their bank. This does not protect the player before or during the trade, only after. It is not our desire to maintain mechanics that encourage scamming of players by making false promises of a trade. As this type of scam is almost always targeted at new players it can be extremely damaging to the playerbase. Coupled with most players not being aware of this risk it is even more damaging. If all of our players came to UOR knowing in detail about correct stealing mechanics, this would not be necessary. Since this is not the case this resulted in a massive amount of frustrated players, ruined holiday events, and staff time taken to address the issue. The easy fix for this would be to send all the items back to the bank, even a common shard a lot of us played on enacted this change for a while. You could conduct a trade in the middle of no where, cancel it, and the items were magically transported to the bank. Instead we went with the route that was more applicable to felucca, and provided the players involved in the trade a small window in which to bank the items they had just attempted to trade. As a volunteer server with limited staff we cannot spend all our time trying to address issues with players upset over this scam. And no server can survive by telling their players to "get good, lurk more or play elsewhere". Each time a player paged or messaged about this issues we took the time to explain to them how it happened and how to avoid it in the future. This takes time that could be otherwise spent on development. If you want to see more felucca stealing mechanics, then help the staff here develop systems to teach our players the Renaissance era mechanics, not exploit new players for fun and profit. Eventually I would like to see this mechanic changed to just a modifier making stealing without being noticed extremely difficult in this situation. Guard Detection By default in RunUO the guard/npc mechanics are a disaster. 66% of all steals allow you to remain blue, not perma grey, and unnoticed by the guards. When you are noticed by the guards, you were never grey, because the NPC's had superman vision and would see you steal through the walls. This was assigned to one of our admins to resolve and he wrongly assumed the mechanics functioned like his previous server. This led to a great deal of thieves that enjoyed the ability to steal 66% without having guards called and being able to bank items easily. Once a full review of the system was undertaken we worked to resolve the problems with NPC's noticing thefts. We based the chance to be noticed on the weight of the item being stolen and removed the NPC's ability to see through walls. So if you wanted to steal and item, and no NPC's were within 10 tiles, even if you were caught guards would not be called on you unless a player called them. Before this change guards could see 16 tiles through walls to see a theft happen. After they needed line of sight and to be within 10 tiles. This patch however led to a mistake that allowed stackable items to be stolen with a .01% chance for detection. So for almost 2 months until this was reported and detected thieves had easy mode. While they flagged grey, they could steal stackable items all day without being noticed. This was fixed in a recent patch so that the weight of the total stack of items is used to determine the chance to be caught. This chance can be between 10 and 60% depending on the weight of the item, and the amount of NPC's that notice the theft. So compared to the incorrect mechanics this can feel like an extreme change in function, but only due to a mistake on the staffs part in testing the previous patch. This also showed a clear difference in the mentality of the thief as in 2 months not one thief reported that they were able to have 100% success when stealing stackable items. The staff was inundated with complaints about thieves being able to steal items without repercussion which led us to track the mistake down. In Closing You will see from each of these 3 issues we have gone with a system that your average UO player from a neon, OSI, trammel, felucca, or customized server can understand. This allows us to avoid newbied and blessed items whenever possible, and as the server evolves we can revoke the protections given to certain other items such as commodity deeds, holiday items, event statues and the like. If players understand the mechanics of stealing then classic stealing mechanics can be an integral part of the world. UOR History to this point has shown that this is not the case and that we have a great deal of work to improve the education of the playerbase (new and old) in regards to stealing. Down the road we are working on a tool tip system that will provide players with information the first time that certain actions happen to them ingame, allowing us to resurrect more classic mechanics. So the first time something is stolen from you, a detailed information gump is provided allowing you to educate yourself on this aspect of the world. We also have plans to greatly improve the system in which NPC's notice a player stealing to incorporate the direction the NPC is facing along with other factors to reward the skill of the thief by stalking their prey properly and avoiding being noticed by the town guards. Also adjusting the distance in which a NPC could notice you stealing based on their trade. Allowing a guard to be more adept at noticing a theft, than say a nobleman. Remember that we operate with limited resources as one of the only servers to not accept donations for items. This means we have to work much harder to attract new players compared to shards that can sell islands for $1000 or neon sandals for $100.
Stealing is a criminal act, but there should be a meaningful distinction between noticed and unnoticed theft. It seems logical and common sense that some theft in game should go unnoticed (akin to pickpocketing in real life). I understand the resource scarcity + attracting new players argument, but I feel that the mechanic is not so difficult to understand at all. Yes, it's vexing to get stolen from without knowing who did it or getting immediate repercussions (although you could probably induce who the thief was, much like in real life) but getting stolen from and learning how to guard your possessions better seems like an integral part of UO, much like PKing.
There is a meaningful distinction between a noticed and an unnoticed theft. - When a theft is noticed guards can be called on you for 15 seconds and you are flagged as a criminal. - When a theft is not noticed players have to take justice into their own hands in order to recover their item. This goes back to my statement that you cannot attract players with the "get better, lurk more or play elsewhere" argument. Once the server reaches a point where the resources abound to educate players on how to protect your items then we can revisit some of these changes. In our first year players were much more likely to encounter someone who would scam or steal their first platinum coin, or rewards from the current holiday event. Rather than meet someone who would educate them about how to protect their items. A server cannot thrive when the mechanics encourage preying on the ignorance of others. We want players to last long enough on the server to learn and appreciate the mechanics, not be frustrated by them. This is something the staff works endlessly on to improve the quality of information we have available. Also PK'ing is something that every single UO player understands. If you kill someone there are consequences. Stealing mechanics not so much.
That, to me, is still "noticed theft"; players can notice that you went gray. What I meant was genuinely unnoticed theft - I guess like the status quo system of "blue thieves". It seems logical and even common sense that a very skilled rogue should be able to steal without anybody knowing about it. While irritating (again, so is getting PK'd), I don't feel like this is a difficult to understand mechanism once you've been made aware about it. Like the folks above, just my 2cents. I respect and am grateful for all the great work you've done on this server. Edit: like I said, I do understand the resources/attracting players rationale though. I wrote this before your edits. I will be hoping for this:
I agree with you this is a valid point, I am just unable to find any evidence it was possible on OSI. Most of the assumptions that this was possible come from RunUO/Pol/Sphere servers which all have the same odd mechanic. As for being noticed, criminal flagging was deemed a good mechanic because your name does not auto display to all players as grey once you steal an item. They have to notice that you turned grey via all names or a click. The thief can still hide, stealth and sneak off. Also related to this we do currently allow players to snoop while hidden. Most servers, even T2A ones, make this a revealing action. The changes I mentioned in my above post allow this to be possible. Everyone should keep in mind that OSI's response to this was bless literally everything and eventually add item insurance. We want to avoid this at all costs while creating an approachable server for veteran uo players, trammel players and players new to UO.
