Delay between stealing attempts.

[Anonymous]

Inspired by discussion
http://www.zalanthas.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=12667

To prevent spam stealing I propose to set a timed affect on PC attempting a theft.

I suggest:
- IC day for those who failed critically;
- IC "hour" for those who failed normally or succeed;
- none if victim was sleeping or otherwise unconscious.

If thief would try to steal again while affected then code will give a warning in regard of "You don't feel safe to steal again."

Also I'd suggest giving a timed affect to PC or NPC who were victim when someone failed a steal on them, be it critical or not.
If anyone would try to steal from them again for the next IC "hour" then message would be "They are too alert and suspicious to sneak up." or something alike.

[Gaare]

I personally hate OOC timing things (I saw those in a couple of MUDs), those show how those IMMs do not trust to their players.

Also, I can not think an IC reason for OOC timing.. Why a starving thief would not attempt another pick for hours, after making a failure.

[Anonymous]

Aforementioned discussion shows players don't trust each other. It's bigger issue IMO than immortal-player trust since players are whom you play with all the time. And reasons given there prove that players in general shouldn't be trusted.

I am not trying to make thieves unplayable; I know they are already screwed up enough. But OOC assumption "thieves are twinks" because of some certain examples hurts much more than proposed code changes. Take it as attempt to make pickpocketing less twinkable and thus more OOCly RP trustable. If I knew how to automatically kill characters who single out and accuse PC in a crowded bar of (V)NPCs, how to automatically rape their bodies and ban their player's accounts then I'd suggest it too.

As for delays being unrealistic, well, it depends on point of view indeed. From my point of view it's unrealistic to fish in pockets for a lengthy period of time, since it's much more suspicious when you hang around groping people ten times in a row instead of doing it once in a while. Not to mention failure, where at least victim is aware of someone messing with their belongings and quite often everyone around do and even thief knows he was not smooth enough and is about to be discovered.

Besides you don't bother your character with question of why you can't quit while pumped up after recent fight, do you? You don't accuse code in power emoting, no?

If IC day is too much for critical failure then make it three IC hours. And make a whole delay deal working for 'lawful' areas only. I am just defending the concept.

[The Dude]

To prevent spam stealing I propose to set a timed affect on PC attempting a theft.

I suggest:
- IC day for those who failed critically;
- IC "hour" for those who failed normally or succeed;
- none if victim was sleeping or otherwise unconscious.

If thief would try to steal again while affected then code will give a warning in regard of "You don't feel safe to steal again."

Also I'd suggest giving a timed affect to PC or NPC who were victim when someone failed a steal on them, be it critical or not.
If anyone would try to steal from them again for the next IC "hour" then message would be "They are too alert and suspicious to sneak up." or something alike.

I'm not sure where to begin so I'll just be as blunt and direct as possible.

This is completely absurd, so ridiculously pretentious that it goes against everything I truly expect and enjoy about ArmageddonMUD. This entire suggestion is the product of paranoia, distrust and negativity toward the mostly-responsible, mostly-competent players of a particular role and it disgusts me. Furthermore, this suggestion is so absurd that I don't feel any obligation whatsoever to explain my assertions. I just felt the need to express them.

Bear in mind also that this is coming from someone who has never used the steal command (well not on a PC anyway), and has had things gone missing from his PCs' pockets many-a-time.

[Anonymous]

This entire suggestion is the product of paranoia, distrust and negativity toward the mostly-responsible, mostly-competent players of a particular role and it disgusts me. Furthermore, this suggestion is so absurd that I don't feel any obligation whatsoever to explain my assertions.

Don't you think that for someone who does not feel obligation to explain his own assertions, you took a little too much responsibility explaining my motives?

[The Dude]

Absolutely.

[wizturbo]

Personally, if I were to play a pickpocket...I wouldn't go for things people would notice.

I wouldn't steal their fancy rare weapon, that their guaranteed to notice, unless the situation was just so perfect that i couldn't resist.  Why?  Because they're going to be -pissed- and send every resource they can muster to kill you.  You think your safe, well, your not.  Trust me.  If it was in a crowded tavern, SOMEONE noticed.  Sure, they might not have noticed you codedly doing it, but they noticed the suspicious dude lurking around them.  

If you stole some sid from them instead, or some trinket they may never notice is missing...you get away scotch-free, and live to steal another day because by the time they notice its gone, its just too late to do anything or ask anyone if they saw anything.


Now, one more thing...if you try and steal from a noble with guards, you'd better expect to die.  It doesn't matter how good you are, slipping past a trained bodyguard and removing something from someone's possession is nearly impossible unless you have an accomplice or something to distract the guard.  Stick to realistic targets, and be clever rather than greedy as a pickpocket, and you have the potential to go far.  I'm not saying that a noble is off limits, but don't just go "Oh hey, look a noble!  Steal noble's pants; sneak north".  Robbing a noble should be done with real smooth planning, and cleverly executed.  Its your -life- at line, and while you the player might casually toss it away,  the character would NOT be so willing to die for that dagger you saw sticking on their waist.

[Bestatte]

Other than motivations and all that jazz that everyone's talking about, there are pragmatic code-based reasons why this would be a bad idea.

You're suggesting placing time restrictions on failures, and removing those restrictions on successes.

What if the thief is in one tavern and fails, then moves on to a second tavern? Sure, he might not want to risk being caught in the first place, but why not the second place? It isn't very playable, or realistic. You could change the code to account for this, but we're talking about a LOT of work just to help reduce poor behavior of a very few players.

Also, who fails the most? New characters. So in essence, you're telling new thief characters "Yeah we know it sucks failing all the time when you're new, and now we're gonna make it suck even more by making you take forever just to boost the skill a single notch." At the same time, you're saying to accomplished thieves, "And we're going to reward you by letting you twink, since you hardly ever fail!"

Punishing those who are the -most- likely to have a need to succeed, both ICly (new characters are usually prone to hunger more often and really NEED to steal that bone dagger so he can sell it for a sack of flour), and OOCly (the desire to actually BE the thief he created, rather than a bumbling idiot for 2 RL months) doesn't solve any problems, perceived or otherwise.

I'd rather leave things as is for now, and if you find that a player is overstepping the bounds of courtesy in an effort to twink, send a comment to MUD about it.

[Anonymous]

I am sorry if I was not clear or if you read GDB before your first cup of coffee, Bestatte.
I mentioned delays both for success and failure. And much longer delay for critical failure, i.e. instances where -you- have been caught, not just someone noticing something suspicious.

And please keep in mind, I am talking about 1 IC hour (10 RL minutes) delay mostly, I don't think it's too much to relocate yourself to another place and find another victim.

And I doubt it's immensely hard to implement new affect and add another simple check for steal otherwise I wouldn't propose it.

[Bestatte]

I am sorry if I was not clear or if you read GDB before your first cup of coffee, Bestatte.
I mentioned delays both for success and failure. And much longer delay for critical failure, i.e. instances where -you- have been caught, not just someone noticing something suspicious.

And please keep in mind, I am talking about 1 IC hour (10 RL minutes) delay mostly, I don't think it's too much to relocate yourself to another place and find another victim.

And I doubt it's immensely hard to implement new affect and add another simple check for steal otherwise I wouldn't propose it.

I was responding to exactly that. A critical failure, you wrote, should get a real-time hour delay before you can make another attempt. Who produces the most critical failures? New characters. So you would be punishing new characters who are the ones most likely to NEED to try again, and rewarding twinks (by giving zero delay for stealing from sleeping victims) and accomplished thieves (by allowing them only 10 minute delays for successes that they are more likely to make than new characters).

I had finished my coffee before reading your thread. Thanks for the concern though.

[mansa]

I do not like this idea.  Gaare summed up what I would say.

[amoeba]

I'm sorry but I have to agree with the majority of the group. The idea is abitrary and hardly needed.  This is a roleplay mud.  Placing ooc restrictions like these makes as much sense as saying you can only hunt one animal once every two IC hours.  It eliminates the instance where someone may go on a pickpocketing spree, and hole up for a couple of weeks living off the gains.  Twinky stealing has a way of self correcting I suspect.  This all comes from someone stolen from both in a twinky manner and a responsible manner.   I have never played a thief of any kind.  Let people roleplay, in a roleplay mud.

[Anonymous]

I do not like this idea.  Gaare summed up what I would say.

[Angela Christine]

Hmm, how about 1 IC hour (10 real minutes) whether you succeed or fail?  A critical failure where the police are after you takes care of it's own "special" delay because you are too busy finding a safe place to hide to worry about looking for a new target for a while.  Ten minutes is short enough that most PC thieves would rarely or never run into it.  Even half an hour (5 real minutes) would stimulate the sort of realistic delay it takes to line up a mark.  


I've played on muds that use delay timers on certain skills, and I liked it.  Instead of typing "kick" and being unable to do _anything_ for X ticks, you type "kick" and then can do whatever you want but if you try to kick again before the kick timer is up it tells you that you can't do that yet (one MUD with a visible tick even told you how many ticks were left until you could kick again so you could count down, but I thought that was excessive).  The obvious advantage is that you can still talk and emote and stuff, even if you can't repeat the command for a while.

[Larrath]

I'm also against this.  It's simply not realistic, nor will it be very helpful to anyone.  If you see a mad stealing twink, get as much information as you can about them (sdesc and name in particular) and email the MUD.

Maybe there could be a penalty to stealing after already stealing once in the room, or from the same target again...even that might not be really needed.

[Ali]

Like most people have said, something like this would punish the innocent and reward the twinkers, which is the exact opposite of the OP's intent...and as amoeba mentioned, there could be IC reasons to go on one big stealing spree and then fade out of sight for a long period of time, until people forget about it.

You could do some crazy equation based on the thief's skill and how many times they've successfully or unsuccessfully stolen in the past X real-time minutes, but why would you? If someone's going around robbing everybody blind, he's going to eventually get caught, and probably blamed for all the thefts up to that point that can possibly be tacked onto his record.

The unusually careful one who doesn't get cocky and brag to his buddies or get seen too often fencing his wares might run rampant for a long time, but he'll mess up somewhere.

[cyberpatrol_735]

This would show distrust of the staff to the players because:

Hack and Slash muds use this because they don't trust their players to play fair.

It's not realistic, If I want to steal a coin off joe blow and a fruit off of jack one right after the other because they're standing by each other, then I'm going to do it.

IMHO, this is something that would turn me away from arm all together. When we start seeing crap like that on roleplay. It's like taking your opportunity to roleplay away because you're affected by 'steal'.

I don't like it, I don't vote for it, I hate it.

Done.

[Maybe42or54]

And then.. when you get a really well roleplayed thief you treasure it all the more and look back on it for months or eyars to come.

[Seeker]

I think a -very- skilled pickpocket should be able to dreeze through a crowded fancypant's ball and walk out the other door with his pockets stuffed with phat loot if he wants to take that chance.

I think a novice picketpocket should be able to take the same exact chance.  And fully suffer the repercussions.

Screw OOC timers.  ARM is all about Consequences.



Seeker

[wizturbo]

I think a -very- skilled pickpocket should be able to dreeze through a crowded fancypant's ball and walk out the other door with his pockets stuffed with phat loot if he wants to take that chance.

I think a novice picketpocket should be able to take the same exact chance.  And fully suffer the repercussions.

Screw OOC timers.  ARM is all about Consequences.



Seeker

I completely agree, but a -very- skilled pickpocket won't try and do so dressed like a 'rinthi scumbag.  They'll be sneaky, and dress like a fancy aide, or they'll dress up like the kitchen staff.  But this habit of people lurking around in some dark hood cloak and magically being able to get close enough to people to steal from them seems completely out of place.

[Agent_137]

I personally hate OOC timing things (I saw those in a couple of MUDs), those show how those IMMs do not trust to their players.

Also, I can not think an IC reason for OOC timing.. Why a starving thief would not attempt another pick for hours, after making a failure.