Shattered Kingdoms

Any policy that reduces the number of reports one person has to process is, ultimately, an efficient one. It would be nice if the game were as heavily moderated as the forums.

52% is a pretty mild majority to consider a general consensus.

I'm not awfully mad about anything, I just like representing things accurately.

Now are you contradicting yourself. If 54% does not represent a consensus then why were you arguing that 46% did? You definitely seem mad.

I would support this change.

I would prefer if bounty NPCs were gotten rid of entirely, though, or replaced with something that just told you where the enemy was but didn't engage them in a fight.

I almost want to change the poll question to include that, but it seems like it might cause confusion and skew the results.

Making it so that bounty NPCs didn't drain the coffers if trib members weren't online would make banishment much more frustrating to deal with. It would also encourage tribunal members to stay offline, and Dulrik has never been a fan of encouraging players to log out. It's surprisingly easy to get to the point of spawning 3 bounty NPCs per step in a city as a banished outlaw, which is the primary reason why I drained tribunal coffers: They made any sort of PvE trip in the area take over ten times as long as it otherwise would have. Surrit and Turon had to kill 50 bounty NPCs just to retrieve one item from the Taslamaran palace, and that's if they went by themselves.

I also would ultimately prefer to have bounty NPCs completely removed, or as has been proposed multiple times, replaced with a feature that merely reports on the location of outlaws, but I've got a feeling that simply isn't going to ever happen.

Gann: The general consensus from the posts, not the poll, is that if you think someone is cheating by logging out to avoid PK, then you should report that person to the staff, which is what I was talking about when I responded to Dulrik's post. The fact that you chose instead to use their alleged behavior as a motivation behind changing the code is a separate issue. If you really had the players' best interests at heart, as you claim to do, then instead of proposing a code change that would force them to be open to an ambush for 30 minutes every single time they logged on, you could instead simply accept the fact that maybe they just don't like to PK a lot and stop trying to lure them into PK when they're the only tribunal member online.

Not everyone that votes bothers to post, so what you are really arguing is that you know best despite the majority disagreeing with you.

If my character's enemies don't want to PK, why would they declare war? I've already explained this previously in the post. I don't offline bounty farm. Almost every bounty hunter I have killed has been with Legion members online and I have logs to prove it. I also don't hunt down characters that are not interested in PK. However, if a faction declares war that is a pretty clear signal they are consenting to PK, right? If not, why are they declaring the war?

Took a couple days. But I finally got caught up on the posts.

I feel like the op is directed toward me in some ways.
I'll admit that there are times that I often times do not go to fight when I hear the law npc's reporting. I'm not confident in my abilities to solo pk, I know I'll be outnumbered, and I'm playing a priest. I don't think they're too great for solo pk.
I have two solid cabal defenses under my belt on this character and I'm not in any way opposed to pk. I actually want to try and get better at it. But at the same time, I'm not going to make suicide runs every week and spend another week getting equipped again. My playtime is reduced and I'll pk when I can.

There was one instance recently where I logged out from inside Losache when a guard alert said the enemy was just outside the keep. I was an hour late going to sleep with work early the next day. I thought about sending an ooc tell informing the player hunting that I had to go to bed. Felt slightly guilty but it was an obligation. It wasn't done to avoid pk.

I don't know if people are actually using it to log out, because they could easily just run off somewhere safe like the wilderness and wait for the alerts to go away. I feel like most instances are just someone needing to log out for one reason or another.

I've actually suggested only depositing a small amount of coin into tribunal accounts. when you're getting ninja drained, it's dumb to keep maxing it out. That's almost just common sense.

If people were using the guards to log out, a time delay for spawning guards wouldn't help.
They would find work-arounds like depositing, logging out for 30 and then logging back in.
What about when people do have full accounts? Are you saying that they can use the guards as an alert to log out just because after they're gone, you can have fun and drain their coffers?
It doesn't solve the issue.

Some ideas proposed have potential.
No guards spawn when a trib member isn't online? I kind of like that. But it does take away from banishment and it also doesn't slow down enemies of they're trying to assault an ally residing in the city. Sure there won't be alerts. But it would make the city less safe? Idk. This idea has good potential.

The other idea about guard only costing coin when tribunal members were online. I like this idea but I think that there should be 'some' coin that is taken. Perhaps a cap on the amount of coin that can be charged while a trib member is offline.
Azoreth logged in and then logged out? The enemy can go ninja drain one black. Someone logs in for five mins to see what's going on? That "drain cap" is reset.

These ideas would solve the ninja draining of coffers. But wouldn't solve the avoiding pk log-outs. That is going to be tough to define and enforce. But a time delay wouldn't solve it.

A lot of rambling. But it's my thoughts on the matter.

This entire thread was started because you alleged that someone is habitually depositing money into the tribunal account for the sole purpose of logging off whenever you come to attack. You can't get much more "not interested in PK" than that, other than never logging in.

If that is really what someone is doing, it's against the rules and the spirit of the game and should be reported. You can't code perfectly to fix the spirit of the game, and there's a point at which adding code to enforce that spirit becomes counter-productive. Is it really part of the spirit of the game that whenever someone wants to PK, that you're obligated to stay online and PK them or die? Should someone be -required- to stay online just because one of their enemies aggro'd some bounty NPC guards? Should it be coded that someone who logs into an empty account is punished just because you allege that someone somewhere is using them as a way to log out to avoid PK?

My answer to those is no. You also haven't produced any evidence of someone actually using this tactic beyond that which you believe to have observed. If it's a big deal, it should be reported. If it's not a big deal (And I've a feeling that it isn't) then it should just be left alone, with maybe a forum post by the IMMs saying that tribunal guards aren't there to serve only as early warning notifications. If you're so hard up for PK that you're proposing code changes to make it easier for you to ambush people, maybe you should take a step back.

You have a bad habit of ignoring any post that doesn't fit the narrative that you want to spin. If they are not interested in PK, they ought not declare war then, should they? Or they should acknowledge they have been defeated and seek a truce, which has not happened. You can't have it both ways. I'm sure you'll ignore this post, too, because it doesn't fit the story that you are trying to sell. Keep trying to jam that square peg into the round hole, though.