Annoyed at mount stealing.

[flurry]

I sympathize over the issue of stabling being expensive, but I have to say that I think it -should- be very risky to leave your kank outside a shop while you do business inside.  There should be a substantial risk of it being stolen, even if you're keeping an eye on the doorway while you're doing your transactions (and think about how hard this would be...making trades in a busy market while trying to watch your kank outside the tent).

I'm not trying to defend poorly roleplayed thieving, but kanks left in the market should have a good chance of being stolen.

[Cavus]

Agent's suggestion, to me, is worse twinkage than anything a thief could do.

Let's look at this realistically: Amos is riding his kank and left it out just by a shop on Caravan Road, and he's inside.  Even if Amos really was running and rushing everything, he cann't go to the counter, possibly wait in line a little, and still look at his kank all the time.
Meanwhile, the street outside is BUSTLING with people and kanks moving here and there.
Suddenly a PC walks by and Amos drops whatever he was holding and immediately runs out to stand by that kank, which he probably couldn't see from inside the shop?

I somehow doubt the storekeepers would let him place in kank right in the doorway, since that would give customers a hard time getting in and out.


Realism is not to leave the kank outside unguarded.  Taking advantage of someone else doing something stupid is not always twinking.  Sometimes it's common realistic sense.

Nothing else can be added to this. Amin (Not amen for muslims:-) )

[Linedel]

After a couple days (and, mostly, not being able to sleep last night) of thought, I've concluded that:

Kank stealing in town is typically poor RP.

You Know(TM) that most of the time the kank thief isn't watching to see who the owner is, and whether he's paying attention, and roleplaying the theft out.. in many cases, its purely a H&S style ganking with OOC profit in mind, because the player knows there are no consequences.  (If staff has any data on this, such as the percentage of in-town mount thefts with no emotes or thinks whatsoever, until the thief is 10 rooms away...)

For some characters, it is poor RP to stable their mount.  If you're delivering 4 bags of branches to some shop, you're going to carry all that?  I call bullshit.

Shops that cater to people like that would be set up such that the mounts are an integral part of doing business, be it so you can bring the goods near the counter, or have some employees watching the pole.  Some shops already have coded NPCs standing outside their shop.. others, its probably virtual, but you know damn well, that, for example, the Kadius Jewelry mart has more than the one coded guard, so its a reasonable assumption that other shops have virtual guards as well, whose job it is, partially, to watch their supplier's kanks.

In places that don't have that resource, such as the tribal market, you could pay a virtual 8 year old 1 'sid to scream if someone else approaches the beast.  No, asking a player isn't a "realistic" option...

All of the above said, it would still be possible to steal a mount.  All you'd have to do is distract/bribe the guard/kid/whoever else is watching, and be off.

I propose the following.

Tie a ( 30 - ( ( skill_barter + skill_steal ) / 10 ) ) percent chance of being thief flagged to using the "unhitch" command on a mount that isn't yours in a populated/lawful room.  (This assumes the bug/feature of hitch not being disconnected when you use "enter" still exists, and that I have half a clue how mounts work... I think I forgot some.)

The logic for the above... steal generally represents taking smaller things, but it takes into account knowing how to distract people, or draw their attention elsewhere.  Barter represents your skill at talking, which is also used in distraction.. or convincing the kid that he should take your 2 'sid and go home instead of screaming.  Some other formula could be more appropriate.. but I think this is decent.

How does this solve the problem?  It puts a consequence on mount theft... sometimes.  It would still probably be far too easy for a new character with nothing to lose... but it would deter people from taking the quite OOC mount theft action on slightly established characters.

[jhunter]

Sorry Linedel but I completely disagree with you on this subject. If someone is stupid enough to leave their mount unguarded on a busy street then they deserve to have it stolen. There is -nothing- twinkish about it. In the bustle of the streets, unless there is someone specifically posted to watch mounts outside of a business you can expect that most others aren't going to give a shit or probably even notice if a different person leaves with the mount.

[Anonymous]

Sorry Linedel but I completely disagree with you on this subject. If someone is stupid enough to leave their mount unguarded on a busy street then they deserve to have it stolen. There is -nothing- twinkish about it. In the bustle of the streets, unless there is someone specifically posted to watch mounts outside of a business you can expect that most others aren't going to give a shit or probably even notice if a different person leaves with the mount.

[Maybe42or54]

It sounds good, but I'm all for the more harshness we have now.
Don't want your kank stolen? Stable it.
Just like everything else you own, kinda.

[Anonymous]

Then give us -some- options.. Make it so the stable in the elven market doesn't cost as much as the stable next to the most popular taverns.

Build a stable that's as far as possible to the market areas of major cities, like a smaller stable with poor service, but where you can rent it for only 5 'sids, the stable at the elven market for 10 sids and the one next to the tavern for 20 sids, just to give some examples..

You people are not realizing that it's -very- hard to manage your money when you just start out, especially for new players.. Maybe you are too used to the game and know every tricks to make sids faster than some of us, and you're laughing at our "20 sids is a major problem" woes, but the reality is that most new players don't know how to make money, and if you play any races or guilds where you cannot have free stabling, free food and free water, then that 20 sids might be a huge difference.

[Anonymous]

Then give us -some- options.. Make it so the stable in the elven market doesn't cost as much as the stable next to the most popular taverns.

20 sid just doesn't seem like an unfair amount.

Maybe 10 sid for 'holding stables' or something where your kank doesn't regenerate any stamina, but really if you aren't coming out ahead by 20 sid from every hunting trip I'd be shocked.

[jhunter]

Make having that 20 sid to stable your mount while your in the city a -priority- it really is that simple. The only things I see as being a bigger priority than keeping your mount safe is keeping food and water in you. Alot of newbies make other things that are realistically unimportant when your considering survival a higher priority than keeping their mount, their fucking livelyhood safe.

You need your mount to work to keep yourself fed and watered? Your mount is your best fucking friend and it had better be a priority because if you lose it your as good as dead sometimes.

[Linedel]

Nobody is talking about "most people."  You're right, "most people" won't care.

"Major" shops (salarr/kadius/kurac/delann, etc.) will likely have a guard, or at least more than one person working there.   Shops have windows/doors, as evidenced by the fact that "look out" works.

It is bad for business for mounts to be regularly stolen from a shop where out of towners generally bring beasts laden with things to sell to that shop.  Therefore, if a guard/employee actually wants to receive his pay, yeah, he will care enough to pay a little attention, or at least say something to the customer if he sees something inappropriate out the window/door.

Some shops (not the house run ones) are even "stands" or "stalls", which are lacking at least one wall..., they're just separated code-wise due to the "enter" command to avoid cluttering the room that the stall is within.  The character could be within arms reach of his mount in this situation, but code wise, is inaccessible.


I find it amusing that virtual NPCs only seem to exist when players want them to, and as the specific type that suits their coded action.  If you're a thief failing a steal on someone, there are virtual NPCs that it could have been.. so they can't blame you.  But if you're going to spam run some kank stealing.. oh, that virtual guard that most definately is at some shops, he doesn't exist, 'cause it wouldn't be convenient for this "harshness" that the person leaving his kank out should be feeling.   At least, since there is something to gain with no code or provable social repercussions, it is time to happily make it "harsh!"  Woot!

Adding a chance at a criminal flag chance also takes into account the player glancing out occasionally, noticing something, and having the people in the shop get a look at the guy, which, even if you disagree with VNPCs catching the crime, is completely valid.

Remember that a player should not take an action based on using "watch out" and seeing "soandso arrived from the east", because 10 other VNPCs arrived as well.  His trigger to take an action would be when soandso types "emote walks towards ~kank with a purposeful stride."  (does that show up on watch?)  Unless some staff posts that they've snooped a dozen of these events and half of the dozen actually emoted or otherwise roleplayed the theft rather than just typing very fast, I'm sticking with that most in-town mount thefts are utterly twinkish.

There is another way someone could be caught.  In-game kanks with the same vnum all look alike.  Real world ones, however, do not.  (If there were real world kanks.)  You're going to recognize yours.  You might  be able to describe it to others.  And you could definately carve property markings into the carapace...  By the miracle of nature healing things, if a thief removes them or makes his own, the wounds would be fresh, but original markings would be scars.


I'm in full agreement that someone is probably foolish leaving their mount in the street, considering most of the game's population seems to support OOC actions that make the game "harsh." I'm mostly addressing that the game does not support a chance of failure on this action, and thus implicitly condones this non roleplayed theft.  Is not failure "harsh," too, or do we only want other people's experience to be "harsh," since we know how to exploit the code to avoid that "harshness"?

I call bullshit again.  "Harsh" in this thread is just being used as an excuse to skip roleplaying when there is easy profit to be made.


And one further point...  if OOC motivated spam-run kank thefts are being caused by having to haul ass due to OOC motivated spam-selling, and vice versa, it's pretty clear that both actions should be shut down.  The message that tolerating this sends is that half-assing your roleplay is acceptable if someone else might half-ass you if you don't.

[Xamminy]

A couple quick things, Linedel.

1 These shops do NOT exist to buy things.  They exist to sell things to make money for the owners.  They probably don't care that much about the people that want to sell them things, at least not compared to the people that want to buy.

2 The guards at the shops are to defend the shop, its operators and its contents.  Noone else.  Do you think these are some sort of police simply because they enforce some sort of peace?  They are enforcing their employers right to keep their own stuff...nothing else.

3 Kanks all look different even the similarly-colored ones?  Go observe a bunch of ants and tell me you can tell them apart.

4 Don't assume that just because you can't find the person that they spam-walked away.

5 Don't blow all your starting cash so that you can learn how to make enough profit to stable your kank while still having money to do so.

[jhunter]

2 The guards at the shops are to defend the shop, its operators and its contents. Noone else. Do you think these are some sort of police simply because they enforce some sort of peace? They are enforcing their employers right to keep their own stuff...nothing else.

Exactly, that guard is there to protect the merchants who work there and the goods, anything else is not their fucking job. Linedel I call bullshit to pretty much everything you've said, your stretching for reasons to make it twinking because you personally don't like being stolen from. Guess what? Noone does, but it does not make it twinkish just because you don't like it.

Ever notice how the victims when it comes to theft are the first to cry twink but the fact is, more often than not it is the victims themselves who twink against criminals. I've only played one criminal pc and the number of times I was twinked against by victims or potential victims was crazy, not only making being a criminal hard ICly but adding more difficulties that there shouldn't be for OOC reasons.

[Anonymous]

I call bullshit again.  "Harsh" in this thread is just being used as an excuse to skip roleplaying when there is easy profit to be made.

You're crazy.  I've never had a PC steal a kank ever, but why would an opportunistic PC pass by an unattended mount?  Thanks for assuming that everyone arguing against silly constructs to protect people against ingame consequences are doing so out of a motivation to keep being able to steal kanks.

And one further point...  if OOC motivated spam-run kank thefts are being caused by having to haul ass due to OOC motivated spam-selling, and vice versa, it's pretty clear that both actions should be shut down.  The message that tolerating this sends is that half-assing your roleplay is acceptable if someone else might half-ass you if you don't.

Grabbing a kank's reins and running, even with emotes, shouldn't take half as long as working out a deal with a merchant for a pack full of junk.

[Linedel]

1 These shops do NOT exist to buy things. They exist to sell things to make money for the owners. They probably don't care that much about the people that want to sell them things, at least not compared to the people that want to buy.

2 The guards at the shops are to defend the shop, its operators and its contents. Noone else. Do you think these are some sort of police simply because they enforce some sort of peace? They are enforcing their employers right to keep their own stuff...nothing else.

Right.  And when that kank gets stolen, he tells his 10 friends, who go to other shops, whose guards give a shit.  That shop's costs go up, because they have a smaller set of people to buy from, sales down, and their profit goes down proportionally.  Simple econ.  You need suppliers to have goods to sell.  If your suppliers get mugged on their way to your shop, you won't have any.  Their customers safety IS their job, when the customer is on their premises.

I mean, if there is a bank, and someone comes in packing heat...  but rather than rob the bank, they go for the customers, are the guards going to just let them do it?  Exactly the same situation.

The argument "The major merchant houses have their own gatherers" will come up...  and the response to this that I've been given is that they don't have enough VNPC gatherers to supply all the VNPCs, thus the coded shops buy.  Therefore, the above applies.

3 Kanks all look different even the similarly-colored ones? Go observe a bunch of ants and tell me you can tell them apart.

Well, I don't live with any ants, but I can most certainly tell my wife's two Chartreux (sp?) cats apart, and they're pretty close to identical.  I imagine if I did live with ants, and they were scaled to be of size to be useful, I could recognize their features.  The same will be true with Zalanthians and the beasts available on that planet.

4 Don't assume that just because you can't find the person that they spam-walked away.

Sure, but you can't do anything to them, nor can you prove that yellow kank is your yellow kank.  And that assumes that they haven't already turned it into a mount ticket before you even noticed, which I speculate occurs most of the time.

5 Don't blow all your starting cash so that you can learn how to make enough profit to stable your kank while still having money to do so.

Decent advice... shitty for a game openly trying to gain newbies, but decent for the game's incarnation...

Grabbing a kank's reins and running, even with emotes, shouldn't take half as long as working out a deal with a merchant for a pack full of junk.

And if you suddenly run with an unfamiliar beast, you're making noise and drawing attention to yourself.  Holy crap, crim flag is legitimized, which is what I'm arguing, at some small chance (10-30%, depending on skills).

Linedel I call bullshit to pretty much everything you've said, your stretching for reasons to make it twinking because you personally don't like being stolen from.

(Warning, highly controversial opinion approaching.)

The time I create a character that actually cares about this code is when I shoot myself.  Solo RP wilderness characters are a rather stupid thing to play in a multiplayer online game, in my opinion, so believe me, this would never affect me.  Tavern sitters with no mount for life; that's where the human interaction is.

(Opinion alert complete.)

If you're stealing kanks without roleplaying it, you're cheesing.  Period.

I will drop this argument immediately if anyone posts legitimate evidence that half of these thefts are actually roleplayed in any way.

A small chance at a consequence will force some care to be taken, and some thought as to whether the character would actually do it, in the same way it does with the "steal" command.  I see no problem, leaving it easy but not 100% safe.

Most characters wouldn't even think of stealing a kank just 'cause they happened to see it outside a shop.  Can anyone on this board honestly say they'd steal a car that was left running with the keys in it?  (Yes.. Zalanthas is seedier than the real world, but most Zalanthians also fear the arbitrary hand of the law more than we do...)

[Maybe42or54]

Tell your 10 friends.
The shop owner still wont care.
10 more people will take your place.

[Marauder Moe]

Right. And when that kank gets stolen, he tells his 10 friends, who go to other shops, whose guards give a shit. That shop's costs go up, because they have a smaller set of people to buy from, sales down, and their profit goes down proportionally. Simple econ. You need suppliers to have goods to sell. If your suppliers get mugged on their way to your shop, you won't have any.

Alright, then go tell ten of your friends not to shop at said shop.  Tell the staff what you've done.  We'll see who's business suffers.

And if you suddenly run with an unfamiliar beast, you're making noise and drawing attention to yourself.

Kanks can't yell "thief thief!"

Most characters wouldn't even think of stealing a kank just 'cause they happened to see it outside a shop.

Pretty much all of my characters would have thought about it.  Most of them (at some point during their lives at least) would have actually tried it.

Dude, someone stole your kank.  Things get stolen in Zalanthas.  Get over it OOCly, deal with it ICly.

[Bestatte]

1) If you're carrying so much stuff that you can't even hold it between two hands, then you probably have too much stuff. Next time you go out foraging, or hunting, or raiding loot, or whatever, don't take more than you're capable of carrying on your own without the kank's help. Sure, you might be so loaded down that you lose 20 stamina points with each move, but at least you can walk.

To me, *needing* a kank to hold the stuff you've just acquired reeks of major overhunting/overlooting/overforaging. You could even use that as a yardstick to measure when it's time to stop and return to town.

2) The shops only buy five of each. So what exactly do you expect to do if you load up on pygmy skins, turkey feathers, and oyster shells, only to find that the shop doesn't want ANY of them because they're already full? This goes back to #1: Stop carrying around so much shit, then you won't have that problem.

3) Telling 10 friends is irrelevent because of #2: the shop only buys 5 of each anyway. He'll tell your friends to bugger off and snicker as he watches them drag their asses out of the shop, exhausted.

4) For the looting corpse types who complain, Kadius and Salarr shops do -not- exist to buy stuff from you. They exist to SELL stuff to you, stuff made by THEIR houses. They buy things from you as a courtesy, not as some genius marketing strategy.

5) You currently have a choice: risk losing an almost-400 sid animal, or cough up 20 sids. Pick one. I'm sure you'll figure out a way to come up with the sids, like, for instance, selling some of the stuff you brought to the market to sell. Whether it's branches, logs, stones, shells, hides - no matter what it is, if you don't have 20 sids worth of stuff, why did you come back to the city? 20 sids worth of -any- item in the game won't fill up a pack so heavily that you aren't capable of walking it around the market while your kank rests in the stables.

6) Stop relying on the NPC shopowners for your currency needs. Do you know how many times I've had a character who would stand in a shop looking at a list because I was hoping to find something I needed, watch a PC walk in there and spam-sell their shit to the NPC without even giving me the 10 seconds it takes to type out "tell spammer WAIT!"

You can make MORE money selling to a PC than you can to an NPC. Not to mention, you get a chance to interact with other people, like, you know, how roleplaying games work and stuff.

So in summary: Stop carrying around so much shit. Stop relying exclusively on the NPCs. Stop relying on your kank to be your personal wagon rather than primarily a means to get from point A to point B.  Stop carrying around so much shit. Oh yeah - and stop carrying around so much shit.

[Adhira]

The kank was stolen.

If you believe that someone is abusing code to become the great kank thief then please email mud@armageddon.org