As you can figure we are covering the Avenger system and Divine Grace today!

AVENGER
Problem: Immunity. If you declare someone, are attacking someone defended, or attacking someone in territory you should be be able to be attacked. For example if I defend Illithoid and have suspect on you at no point can you touch me even though I hit you first.

Solution: Soft status. I think this has been mentioned elsewhere but the general idea is something like
"You waive your right of full protection and seek your retribution."
-This should stay soft unless the person dies, in which case the status is dropped. This also encourages people to try to fight back, while opening others to be able to defend themselves in some places.
-Status should return after 5 minutes if neither person dies. Require DECLARE to attack someone to prevent this dropping on accident.
-If the person who is waning protection dies status is restored to full.
-Attacking a mob you have amnesty to should remove the amnesty upon attacking said mob.

GRACE
Problem: Divine graces intent was to give people the ability to leave after death. It is used largely for hostile purposes or for otherwise not permitted reasons such as harvesting, calling ships, acting as a teleport target, and even debating for telepaths.

Solution: Grace should change its timer.
-On prime it acts as normal.
-On friendly planes (your planes) it should be 2 minutes.
-On enemy planes/areas it will begin to falter (below).
-Neutral territory you will be given a 5 minute grace.
-Upon leaving the prime plane (if gotten on prime) it begins to falter (below).

Faltering: When you go where you should not be or leave where avenger would protect you your grace begins to fail similar to the following.
*Leaving prime: "As you leave the prime plane you feel the grace of the gods begin to fade." (Drops in 20 seconds)
*Entering hostile territory: "The divine do not give grace for intents of war, and your grace begins to wane." (Drops in 15 seconds)
*Reviving in hostile: "As life returns to you, your grace begins to falter immediately, you are not welcome here." (20 seconds)

Something like those. This would prevent what is widely considered "abusing grace" as you do not need the grace on hostile planes or in enemy territory but gives you the ability to leave.

Thoughts? Ideas? We really have the most complicated PK system in IRE I think, but it also seems to have two sides, grace, and avenger.

Does this mean that if you're revived in hostile territory, you come alive without any grace at all? If so, I'd suggest changing it to 30 seconds, in order to allow you to leave the area. Otherwise Bad Things ™ might ensue. Why 30 seconds as opposed to the 15-second timer for faltering when entering hostile territory? Because when you enter, the exit is right there, unless you teleport in (and in those cases, who cares?). However, if you're revived in hostile territory, the exit isn't always nearby, which means you either have to teleport out (which is stopped by distort) or leave by foot (which might take longer than the 15 seconds, but 30 seconds should be enough).

Otherwise, it looks good to me (who, admittedly, is a complete noncom).

Forgot to add the timer.

Fixed!

I'm not really sure why you should get your status back if you try to kill someone you have status on and fail...

Isn't it the official position that, "Grace is not abusable?"

I'm not a fan of people having grace off prime. Since going off prime is pretty much an open pk area having divine protection from pk there is just asking for issues.

I think that if you get grace on prime that it should automatically drop should you leave prime and if you get it while you are off prime that you are instanly teleported to avencha in the peaced room there where you can have grace back on prime.

I know you were just giving examples here and there may be others, but instead of completely overhauling grace why not just make these actions require it to be renounced.

Wait a second here, harvesting while graced is not a permitted action? Says who? Harvesting sure isn't aggressive.

While I haven't done it myself, the Admin have for some unknown reason made it so that required herbs (ie earwort) grow on a Plane that can be locked down to hell and beyond via distortion. You including Harvesting here just points out to me that you're more interested in keeping a monopoly on certain things / enhance Magnagora's position, rather than actually wanting to go after any perceived issues in the system.

Maybe if you suggest Earwort grows somewhere more easily accessible... but while it grows in Earth, there need to be ways to get at it.

You're right, but grace being such a way seems a bit awkward. Not that it belongs here, but a change to distort is probably more appropriate.

I won't disagree that it's awkward, but it's now the only effective counter to Distort that there is (well, Grace & a combination of a transplanar artifact / ship whistle, neither can do it on their own) and Distort seems unlikely to change at this point.

Just create a skill that strips grace, put it in high and low magic and attach an equilibrium loss time to it that is equal to or greater than renouncing grace.

Make it impossible to strip grace in the first 10s that it has been granted.

You do not need grace to harvest earwort: ask Narsrim for some lessons in Earth Plane guerilla warfare. All you need in order to do the run-around on defenders in the Mountains of Madness is scale. It's a very hard area to defend.

Malarious, I can see why you've suggested soft status, but making the avenger system any more complicated is shudder-worthy. I wonder if there's a more elegant solution.

We sometimes say there's no such thing as abusing grace: if you can do it, then you're allowed to... which is a nice rule of thumb, but it's not something you can hide behind if you find and take advantage of a seriously abusive loophole. The things you've listed are allowed, although are arguably slightly shoddy behaviour - but are they really bad enough that they demand a coded solution?

This is seriously the best policy.

It's too unwieldy and unreliable for players to police themselves and there are always going to be differing definitions regarding what is and what is not abuse.

I think that "If you can do it, you can do it." is a perfectly acceptable policy and - in general - one that should be applied to a lot of - if not most - gray areas where legality hinges on player interpretation.

Remove grace on everything except arena event endings/village claimings, and let those drop in 30s.

Upon the first hit of a loyal to XYZ, flag as enemy status for 10 mins. (Hit Lanikai with amnesty/unenemied and you can be killed avenger free instead of kill Lanikai, oh NOW you can die? Wait damage is already done and expect person to get amnesty to repeat whenever they feel like) No more stupid issues debating if someone hindered so a loyal mob could get the last hit when they try to kill an org loyal. You attack something loyal = your ass can die.

PROBLEMS SOLVED.



Yes mts are hard to defend, 9 levels of scaling is absurd compared to 1 dive level.

Your point about grace does not apply to avenger as far as "if you can do it it's allowed."

I've always been irked by people who use grace in non-peaced villages.

I'd be happy if a non-vitae non-praying death simply kicked you back to your nexus with no grace.

Except something about that seems like a bad idea, I just can't put my finger on it.

The idea to strip amnesty (from influence) the first time someone hits a mob (not after it is dead) in enemy territory is a good one, and would close an irritating loophole. This would also help favorably with immersion, as it is difficult to put much stake in defending denizens who are too stupid to recognize an enemy while they are being attacked.

Things have changed considerably since those days.

1) Now Distort blocks Cubix exit. And transversing out.
2) You can no longer harvest on upper levels, you must be on the ground level to harvest.

Add in Shrine gravity for kicks on top of that if you really want, but those two right there are the killers to the tactic that he used.

On top of that, there are now the maps of mystery and such that can be used to pinpoint the exact room the person is in, AND you can just teleport to the person if they are trying to do the 2-minute cubix escape... yeah. It's not the same picture it used to be.

I'm not sure why you would need grace off prime for any reason.

Phoenix, praying, conglut all take you back to prime. Forms of death midigation really shouldn't protect you from death after you are brought back

This is actually unrelated to the issue as this is probably the most minor instance of issues. And having it here means I have seen it within the last 2 days or so, not that we want a "monopoly" on an herb you do not need much of.



1) You do no need grace no, but having it means you can threaten a raid the entire time and no one can do anything about it. If you want to harvest sure, dont be in enemy territory under grace.

2) I am open to ideas on elegant solutions, or even what you mean by more elegant. Adjusting other things? Like making whistle not work with grace and throw you off eq so you cant jump in/out all at once?

3) Using that rule of thumb is the reason this topic exists. We aim to change coding so you cannot do it, therefore you could not abuse it as we see it. Similarly as I recall you cannot conceal pits while graced now, but I believe the pits still fire if you return fast enough.

If you have nay specific things to adjust I can post it.

Also, forgot about the hitting something you have amnesty to, that falls under avenger.

@Whoever said it: The soft status is because sometimes you are attacking inside of say Illithoid (like I do). At no point am I attackable, but if I do not kill you I did not get my justice, so the status should remain. If you die (specially in enemy territory) I think I have gotten my retribution.

Do we need another topic to discuss distort? I am pretty sure everyone agrees it really screwed up alot of things to have discretionaries be free. Liveforest + distort? Gods.