lol

My take on MUDs and player theft:

Theoretically, playing the role of a stealthy thief who lurks in the shadows, chooses her targets, and relieves people of their burdensome excess belongings is an exciting prospect. It's a perfectly legitimate and desirable role to play, in and of itself.

In some multi-player games, theft is fine and doesn't cause too many problems. MUSHes, perma-death MUDs, MUDs where equipment is shared amongst a guild, not saved on exit or just not a big deal to lose, and graphic games like EVE Online are examples of these. Indeed, theft can enhance a game for all players by adding a real sense of danger that gets the adrenaline going, although whether or not this is beneficial overall depends very much on how that particular game works.

However, MUDs like Lusternia are different. Lusternia is quite like World of Warcraft in that your stuff belongs to you alone, you keep it until you sell it, drop it or it decays, and you work hard to accumulate more and more stuff as the months go by. Loss of this stuff, even through carelessness that is deemed that player's "fault," can result in their quitting, a slightly smaller player base, and less money flowing into the admins' coffers. In MUDs in this year of 2010, losing just one active old player is a significant blow.

Now, I still wouldn't have a problem with theft (even "they can strip you stark naked" theft) despite the above factors, if not for one little hitch: The fun of thieves being thieves is not worth the onus of the entire rest of the player base having to make a bunch of anti-theft triggers and aliases, write huge help scrolls about anti-theft procedures, paste sigils all over their stuff, only carry the bare minimum of what they need when traveling, and log out immediately if they need to AFK for five minutes.

No, Lusternia is clearly nowhere NEAR that bad, but it's still in that same "realm," so to speak; the principle is essentially the same, if quite subdued for us here.

One idea I'm having (which should probably go in the Ideas section, but I don't think it will make it into the game anyway) is that thievery could be made somewhat similar to influencing, except your targets would be players, and the rewards would be scaled up to reflect this added difficulty, as well as taking into account to the target's circles and lesson strength.

If you remain undetected and successfully "steal" from your target (who doesn't really lose anything too substantial), you get experience and gold. Perhaps the game would automatically remove 10% of the target's carried gold (in a container or otherwise) and a few random, non-tradeskill, non-runed items as well. The thief would get those items, but the gold and experience he or she receives would come from the server. After stealing from Character A, the thief could not steal from Character A again for half an IG month. Other thieves can't steal from Character A for an IG day, to prevent packs of thieves from looting too much gold and cheap items from a victim.

This way, the target does lose something (but not everything), the thief gets a substantial reward and a thrill from the risk, the economy is not unbalanced (after all, you could as easily bash or influence instead of stealing; just make them all comparable in reward), people get their sneak-thief roleplay, victims get a sense of danger but don't have to bend over backwards protecting everything all the time, et cetera.

Of course, Lusternia doesn't even really have a true "thief" archetype. Monks with Stealth seem the closest thing. It's just an idea.

No, a static mechanical system isn't as exciting or hardcore as "real" theft... but then, clearly, you don't get to do "real" theft on any sort of regular basis anyway (even though it's possible in Lusty), due to the restrictions placed on it. So nothing of value would be lost, if you'll pardon an irony.

Stop necroing dead threads.

This "dead thread" was on the front page here before I posted. I generally don't start a new thread about a topic I want to weigh in on if the exact same topic is still right there on the front page. This might be the first forum I've ever visited where someone became angry that I posted in an existing relevant thread that's on the front page and well under a month old.

EDIT: Okay, maybe it's older than a month... ah well.

Your observational skills are also questionable.

EDIT: Also, it wasn't on the front page. February's threads are halfway down the second.

Yes, thank you for both the backseat moderation and the uncalled-for condescension. I had thought I'd read March 25th for some reason, it was simply a mistake.

Your face is questionable.

Have you launched the ring over Sauron's defenses yet?

You're right, but I really wonder how I found it then (no sarcasm there), since I generally do not check past the front page anywhere on this forum, unless I perform a search... which I have not done today.

I checked the date of the last post to see if someone might chew me out for necroing before I even posted. I don't know why I thought it was March 25th.

Anyway, I really hate rocking the boat and stepping on people's toes, and there are no forum rules forbidding people from weighing in on "old" topics. So if someone can tell me the criteria for a thread to be considered necro here (front page? under a month? a week?), that would be great. I'll just start a new thread from now on if I really must.

10-14 days is safe, but most threads that don't get posts after 3-4 days are done.

People normally get angry when threads are necro'd after more than 3-4 weeks or so. After that, if you feel like you've an opinion to be stated (without seeking opinions/answers - ie, not a question) you can always go to the Twits thread, or make a new one.

If you don't feel like it merits a new thread, Twits is probably a good place for it. If it's a question, Simple Questions.

Lusternia robs me every time I'm hit with vestiphobia /nerdrage