Stealth Problems -offshoot of proposed class change thread.

[Pariah]

I didn't want to detail off the threads the other topic so made a new one.

Stealth always bothers me because even at high level or scan, you'll see a hidden critter.

>kill shadow
You can't see that.
>kill shadow
You can't see that.
>kill shadow
You can't see that.
>think Did this fucker move?
>look
You see a shadowy dude here.
>kill shadow
You finally attack the shadow.

I think before we worry about the hider and the folks who see the hiders can or can't do we should fix the immensely irritating way the stealth system works in general.  Thoughts?

[mansa]

Typically, if I think I knew someone was hidden in the room, I would switch from looking to 'watching' them, so I would be able to 'LOCK ONTO THE TARGET'.

Remember: You can't scan and watch at the same time.

So it would go:
>look
You see a shadowy dude here.
>watch shadow
You can't see that.
>watch shadow
You can't see that.
>watch shadow
You start watching a shadowy dude
You stop scanning.
>look
You see a shadowy dude here.
>kill shadow
You attack the shadow.


To think about the problem with Stealth:

A) You cannot make someone "unstealth" without subdue/combat.
B) At certain thresholds, it feels like you can never fail / never be caught hidden.
C) You can steal multiple items from the same person without it increasing in difficulty / being detected.

[Inks]

Why do you keep making new topics? Just do a search, this topic has been done to death.

It always ends up like : Stealth only viable when high because failure can mean instant death.

Then a bunch of people talk about hating pickpockets and assassins.

Then people repeat these two opinions over and over.

Mansa, a while back there was a change that stealing from someone increases their security level, pretty positive.

I have played some muds with a point command, where you point out their location to the room, unhiding them. This would further increase the need for higher stealth, if it was a thing.

Threaten should unhide the target, in my opinion.

[mansa]

...
Mansa, a while back there was a change that stealing from someone increases their security level, pretty positive.

...

Threaten should unhide the target, in my opinion.

Do we have confirmation of the increased security level?

I also think Threaten should unhide a target, and that would be amazing!

[The7DeadlyVenomz]

I support the ability to reveal someone, but threaten is pretty aggressive. So while it should reveal a hider, I think that a command like "reveal", using the average of your scan and watch skills versus their hide and sneak skill, would be good too, in order to not have to go aggressive.

[X-D]

I am good with threaten being the tactic. You have the balls for it, let the other be the one to call the bluff.

[The7DeadlyVenomz]

I am good with threaten being the tactic. You have the balls for it, let the other be the one to call the bluff.

It's not the balls that worries me. It's threaten leading to you being arrested for pointing out someone that is hidden when they trigger your threat.

[Narf]

I am good with threaten being the tactic. You have the balls for it, let the other be the one to call the bluff.

It's not the balls that worries me. It's threaten leading to you being arrested for pointing out someone that is hidden when they trigger your threat.

Threaten: Bluff. Won't trigger crim code.

[mansa]

The thing I'd like to see, is that Threaten actually pulls them out of 'hide', so other people without scan can interact with them.

Maybe there could be some roll where if the threaten skill rolls something like a 16 out of 20 on the die, it pulls them out of hide, otherwise they just remain hidden and threatened.

[The7DeadlyVenomz]

I am good with threaten being the tactic. You have the balls for it, let the other be the one to call the bluff.

It's not the balls that worries me. It's threaten leading to you being arrested for pointing out someone that is hidden when they trigger your threat.

Threaten: Bluff. Won't trigger crim code.

Oh wow. I didn't realize there were options for threaten.  Nice. Okay ... objection removed.

[The7DeadlyVenomz]

OT: Add disarm and kick to the options for threaten.

[Inks]

Just make it threaten that unhides. Also if kick and disarm don't trigger threaten put a bug request in and it will be fixed asap.

[The7DeadlyVenomz]

Just make it threaten that unhides. Also if kick and disarm don't trigger threaten put a bug request in and it will be fixed asap.

Oh, nah, I meant add kick and disarm to the things you can chose to do when you threaten someone. Right now you have kill, subdue, bash, and bluff as options. It'd be neat to add disarm and kick to that, oh, and charge.

And shoot as well, using your ranged weapon and ammo.

[Ansel]

What if stealthy skills (and their related detection counterparts) ticked up as slowly as combat skills, therefore making the lower end of the range more useful, the upper levels more in tune with what they are now, and the max "ghost" levels befitting of a character that attained them?

[The7DeadlyVenomz]

I dunno. The fact that combat skills take so long to get into the upper ranges aggravates me as it is. But I guess I wouldn't mind too much.

[Patuk]

The game doesn't need to be even more grindy, Jesus. I'd rather see weapon skills tick up at a normal pace than I would see stealth gains nerfed for no good reason at all.

[Dar]

Personally, I think the threshold of where a hidden person is noticed, but not identified should be lower.

Kind of like with another form of stealth. You know someone is here, but it's impossible to target them easily.

Ultimately, with numbers debatable.

A max hide/sneak with Exceptional or AI for Humans and +5 bonus to hide/sneak due to gear should give a roughly 8% chance for a person with maxed scan and EG+ Wisdom to be seen and vulnerable to having watch set on them/targeted by look, or attack.

A max hide/sneak with Exceptional/AI for Celves and a +5 bonus to hide/sneak due to gear should give a roughly 2% chance.


These two cases are the utmost perfection of stealth capability that not everyone would have. That 8% is very well worth having a maxed scan. Unlike how it is now where a maxed scan and wisdom unnaturally increased to beyond the limits of any sentient being would still make it impossible to catch a miscreant Celf.

But those are the best of the best pinnacle stuff.  The most important thing is to stop stealth from being make, or break.

Give people with lesser stealth ability to remain untargetable, despite being detected.  Instead of Strange shadow (targetable), give scan an ability to partially succeed and see a Vague Shadow (untargetable). 

Then have investigate command that gives significant detection bonuses to everyone in the room. Make that ability take 25 stamina and 25 stun loss per use and a significant delay. So people cannot spam it non stop without any kind of need, or price. Make the use of investigate costly and one that puts you at a combat disadvantage, so you use it only when you have a good reason to use it.


This way, lower levels of stealth skills do not invalidate the use of stealth. There are a lot of skills that are useful even at journeyman levels. Stealth skills are not one of those. Stealth skills you either use when they're at their peak, or you don't use at all. This only encourages grinding, min/maxing and preference to stay low key/uninteractable until your skills are maxed out.  Which is, in my opinion, a big detriment to the game as whole.

[creeper386]

For me most of what I've ready about stealth guilds one big problem is it seems the main counter to a maxed stealth guild is another stealth guild. Which to me I think could cause this snowball effect.

But it seems from everyones view though that currently maxed stealth characters just can't be detected. And I wonder if that's at all times or added bonuses of being in crowded rooms and such? Cause things like sparse apartments I think should pretty much always fail hide checks.

But if it's most places that normally see player interaction ... It might be too powerful.

[Brytta Léofa]

Terrible idea, please discuss: synergistic scan bonuses to groups.

(A "group" means: any person who is being followed and all the people directly following them.)

Give people in groups a scan bonus based on the highest scan level in the group (of people who are actively scanning)...or, shoot, make it cumulative: the more scannin' stalkers/scouts in the group, the higher the scan bonus to your raiders.

This would work much like direction-sense does (where following a storm-savvy person helps you not get lost), except it wouldn't require your best scanner to be in the lead.

[Greve]

There are three core problems with stealth:

- You can become effectively undetectable. With high enough skill and agility (and potentially items that boost the skill), hide can completely defeat scan. You can reach a level of stealth that no character can spot with scan. Even if you don't quite reach that level, it's pretty easy to get to where the best scanners in the world have like a 2% chance to spot you. At those levels, you also never fail the stealth skills.

- Scan is trash. The bonus it derives from wisdom is much smaller than the bonus that hide derives from agility, and there are no items or environmental bonuses for scan. You also have to be standing up to scan effectively, and unless you're looking for someone who's crap at hiding, you probably have to look twenty times for a decent chance to spot them. Given how unattractive it is to prioritize wisdom on most character concepts, whereas anyone playing a class with master stealth skills is probably prioritizing agility, scan is just at such a huge disadvantage. Plus the whole "haha you get -10 stun when you're scanning, because fuck you." I wish that would go away, and the same goes for listen and watch. Listen and scan should frankly be passive skills. There's something fundamentally wrong with "I'm worried about someone maybe ambushing me while I'm at 80/80 stun, I should TURN OFF MY STEALTH DETECTION SKILLS FOR MY OWN SAFETY!"

- Your stealth is unbreakable unless you choose to do something that breaks it. It's too binary. Once you're hidden, you're perpetually as hidden as your character is able to be, until you're no longer hidden at all. Noone can pull you out of stealth unless they attack you outright. Someone can spot you with scan but has no way of pointing you out to someone else. Any action that doesn't break hide can be performed as many times as you want.


I would make these changes:

- Look into wisdom's perception bonuses versus agility's stealth bonuses, and adjust them. Particularly elven agility which is so insanely high that the bonus alone can be as big as the difference between journeyman and master in the skill. Why are huge, gangly beings that are hated in most societies that good at blending in, anyway?

- Make scan less of a hassle to use. Its long delay, its stun penalty, its ineffectiveness when you aren't standing... it's too much. And it also sucks too much pre-master. A bunch of classes and subclasses get journeyman or advanced scan, and it's just useless. You can barely spot a rat until mid-advanced.

- Certain actions (e.g. steal, movement, psionics) should decrease the "power level" of your hidden status, making you easier to detect with scan, until anyone who's paying any attention will spot you after enough such actions. You shouldn't be able to sneak into a room, steal three purses, psi your buddy and climb up a wall, and still remain as safely hidden as when you started. If you're already hidden, hiding again makes you briefly visible while you search for a hiding place, so with this change you'd have to decide whether to risk being less well-hidden after doing something or briefly exposing yourself to find a new hiding place.

- Make a 'point' command. If you point at a shadow/blur, it becomes revealed to anyone in the room for a short while.

[Dresan]

Lets not propose solutions that make people feel they need for low master/master stealth all the time because being noticed is a complete liability.

1. You should not be able to look at someone shadowed, you should be able to watch them.
2. I am okay with a point command to expose someone as long as it has significant before or after delay as you pinpoint someone who is actively trying not to be obvious. This will allow the shadowed person to react accordingly, like sneaking out of the room before you succeed
3. Otherwise threaten shadow, subdue shadow, kill shadow should be the commands you use if you have the ability.

Outside miscreants and elves stealth is kinda crap already and the the number of people playing infiltrators/enforcer pretty much proves that. In the wilderness stealth is less of a concern in comparison to a raider rushing in with threaten. Also scouts have healthy numbers despite lower stealth/skin/utility. 

The most annoying thing a miscreant thief can usually do in a city is steal your virtual stuff and steal is about to be nerfed on them.  The most valuable thing a new character has that is easily stolen is often their mount ticket, allow them to wear it (if they can't already).

i sincerely believe even if you remove stealth/steal, it wouldn't really improve tavern attendance. Open up fighting pits for a fee from just dusk to dawn in taverns and see if people don't routinely pop in there to participate,watch and gamble.

[Veselka]

A few ideas --

I think the search command should be repurposed into a 'General Look Around'. You might think of it as the immediate scan, whereas the current skill 'scan' is more of a passive toggle. It could be included with more scan heavy classes (I'm thinking it makes sense for Soldier, Scout, and Adventurer).

You might find a hidden stairwell. Or you might find a hidden elf! Or a hidden box! (More below)

It should lower your defense and reaction time considerably. After all, you're looking around for hidden things and not paying attention as well to your immediate surroundings (Like an arrow flying in from the west!)

If someone is searching for that assassin Taffer...Wavin' 'is torch around...He should be more susceptible to a backstab or combat openers in general.

What it does:

>search room
Has a chance (based on your skill in search and in scan) of revealing something or someone that is hidden. Certain rooms should be easier (Indoors) than others (Outdoors).

On a success, the item is revealed with asterisks around it, so *a small box*. A person or NPC is seen as *a strange shadow* or whatever their modified sdesc would be. In essence, it prevents the 'look shadow' spam nonsense. It allows someone to more clearly pinpoint that SHADOW PERSON. People who do not have active scan or who cannot normally see shadows still see nothing.

On a failure, you search the area and find nothing. It should be the same echo return as a success (much like 'you try to find a place to hide...' does not tell you if you are actually hidden). So something like 'You search around the area...' and then 'You finish searching the area'. I honestly think it should ding your scan and listen abilities too, for a time, making it harder to keep searching in the hopes of turning someone up. If you searched and couldn't find anyone, sorry Officer McClusky, you aren't going to suddenly have a moment of genius.

>reveal <item/NPC/PC>

The one who searched and found the <item/NPC/PC> can now reveal that <item/NPC/PC> to others in the room. It should come with an echo like 'SOANDSO points out <item/NPC/PC>'. There should be a chance of failure here as well, where 'You lose track of the <item/NPC/PC>'. Might better apply to NPC/PC.

This should be a somewhat lengthy process, meaning that crafty people who are good at hiding may also be able to slink away. Unless they were stupid enough to paint themselves into a corner (a locked room, for instance, or a place difficult to escape from). On the other hand, it provides a realistic way for someone to point out a sneaky character who's malingering in a tavern, for example, or shadowing them down Merchant's Road.

So -- To Dresan's point -- It's a two part process. Searching the room yields a more stable 'Shadow' to look at and and to then attempt to reveal. In that intervening amount of time, the stealthy person can ostensibly escape. Or their hide is good enough to remain unnoticed.

--

What is this 'HIDE ITEM' you speak of?!

It should be a modification to the 'Bury' code already in place. Instead, this is using the 'hide' skill, and can only be used inside cities/city rooms.

You could 'hide <item> room'. The item will be hidden from sight unless searched for.

You could 'hide <item> container'. The item will be hidden in the container unless searched for. It can be left open-ended so RP can come into play, regarding hidden compartments or sewn pouches.

The person doing the hiding of items always sees a success. To them, the item is well hidden! However, it takes another person to see if the item is really that greatly hidden. Or, you have to trust your instincts.

[Inks]

I would call the command conceal item, but I like it.

Just make threaten unhide PCs. Rawr. I already think it is an oversight that it doesn't. In a tavern, allow hit to be used on a shadow to reveal them. Hilarious if you just punch that edgelord in the corner licking knives in the face, or try to.

In fact, make hit city wide (in public areas), and reveal stealth, but give it a much longer timer so it can't be spammed. Make it a minor uncoded crime that people can be fined for, or worse if they hit the wrong person (but not provoke crimcode).

Just brainstorming here. Not saying these ideas are 100% good, but maybe they are something.

Or just leave it as is, and type kill like a big boy/girl/whatever. Then just tell the soldiers they stole from you. If you are upstanding they will believe you.

I don't really think stealth is broken in its current iteration. I have seen some nerfs over the last couple of years which made sense. I would say invisibility + stealth is stupid broken though. As well as drovians and whirans in general (Sorcs too but they are sorcs).

Nerfing stealth hurts mundanes way more than it does magickers, and is a very bad idea unless mundanes want to be more lorded over by the magocracy. (Although the hit idea above is really growing on me). It would just make magickers more popular, as stealth is one of the levellers a mundane can bring to bear against a more powerful foe (or a mundane can use an allied mundane assassin/ ranger type pc against a foe).

TL; DR: Whirans, Sorcs, and drovians wouldn't really care about a stealth nerf, mundanes would be the ones who got weaker, even non stealth mundanes.

[X-D]

Sorta like the hit idea....It has issues mind you. I mean, It would be cool if it did NOT invoke crime code verses armed...But did verses unarmed but did not start combat...anywhere if both parties unarmed.

So, l shadow, shadow is armed, hit shadow, starts combat but shadow is crime coded not you. You are taking a certain risk going in unarmed.

But I also see ways this could be REALLY abused so...Meh.

[Dresan]

In terms of mages and stealth, the only thing that needs to be addressed is the ability to cast hidden mage buffs outside a magick protected city and being able to sneak inside without affecting the spell.

This should be changed and the buff spells on a person should be reduced as if cast inside the city which is still better than nothing and useful from a mage perspective, keeping rogue mages relativilty dangerous even in cities. On top of that I might even suggest that the more dangerous offensive-capable spells should either have a more visible effect when you look at someone, after all the more potent defensive spells all do. (eg. A mul is dangerous but you can tell its a mul) or perhaps multiple buff spells causing the person to glow or something which significantly would hinder being hidden and sneaking walk around the city.

If you live in a place without the protection of His light or His shadow, or choose to ride out solo without byn protection, well that was your choice to make, its dangerous out there.

Other than that, the difficulty of succeeding sleight of hand on doors should be significantly reduced especially with master skill. It fails way too much making magick based spying much more effective in cities half the time. This should really be changed. The fact that there could always be a miscreant listening to your coversations or watching your burly fighter mudsex in apartments the size of a closet stealing you undies on the way out is really not a problem in my books.


Just to let this sink in though:

• Infiltrator and enforcer stealth is already terrible. Unless you play a city elf (lol)
• There are more scouts then there are infiltrator and enforcers combined
• Infiltrator low master backstab is not going to OHK anyone(max backstab rarely did), let alone someone who has endurance as their second priority.
• The worse miscreants can do is steal the stuff in your pack and their steal is most likely about to get nerfed

Other than the theft of the stuff in your backpack, I am a bit confused on how else stealth is making the game terrible.