Shattered Kingdoms

Side jabs aside, I actually forgot about that: But fresh blood isn't always available at higher levels. But I still don't like the idea of having to choose between either mindlessly grinding your time away in jail, or mindlessly grinding your time away fighting NPCs over and over again, if you've already put the extremely boring time into that once already.

Compare this to the existing ways to lose experience.
Curses(Optimally would never happen)
Death-quest(At -most- one level, and that's after what, ten uses?)
Energy drain(Capped a long time ago at 1 tick every hour or so, at max; For the very reasons I am mentioning.)
Reincarnation(Almost always a bad idea, and one entire level)
And some quests may have failure XP associated with them, which is minimal at best.

You're suggesting putting something into the game that is FIVE TIMES as powerful as the -most- powerful existing experience loss tool. Whether it's optional or not, only a complete idiot would ever utilize it, or maybe someone at level 10, who can't commit that many crimes without getting caught anyway.

Think about the amount of time and how boring it is to level, please. It SUCKS. Taking one horribly boring in-game thing and replacing it with an option to do something else horribly boring another is a very mean and unnecessary thing to do.



If you did that, you would PK until you got caught. Then if you used that option, you'd be MUCH more useless in PK for at least a week, on top of having absolutely no gear or cash. And that isn't considering the fact that you'll be constantly ganked while trying desperately to get those few levels back while you're in red familiarity with all the high-level zones.

What I'm trying to say is: For the love of all that is good and holy, don't allow someone to lose EXP in exchange for jail time, which would also RP-wise not even make their crimes go away. I love this game so much better than WoW because it became blatantly obvious to me that WoW's main purpose was to keep me playing, keep me addicted, not necessarily to have fun. Don't make the same mistake.

And jail time is fun?

*Facepalm*

... No. That's the point.

So you want to be able to commit crimes without punishment that is meaningful? I'm all for reducing crimes vs NPC's to a degree, but at a point jail will be meaningless. I think this option is just that, your option. So is serving the time. If you choose to serve your sentence after every battle, I understand that's acceptable. That is the intention, to allow you to do so if you want. I'm just about offering options to people. You don't want to take the hanging route? Don't. Get broken out, serve the time, again, these are choices.

I don't want to have punishments that aren't meaningful, I want to have punishments that will not force the player to perform horribly boring and repetitive tasks. (By the way, I don't like Sal's idea that he stated in the first post, I don't like it at all.)

I've already stated what I think jail should be changed to: If someone has collected over 10 days in jail, then they stay those 10 days in jail, and afterwards they are executed (Or in Nerina's case, released) with some sort of carrying over debuff similar to SD, with a duration that is relative to the amount of crimes over 10 days they had, with a maximum IC time of 10 days. (As always, the numbers can be changed around) I hardly think that this would be a meaningless punishment, it would be in fact very debilitating. However, it would at least allow the player to do things other than be bored out of his mind, whether its sitting in a jail sending tells or grinding on NPCs.

You've stated that you don't want NPC crimes to be lowered because then jail would be meaningless, but one very hard-to-miss fact is that once you start getting broken out of jail, jail -IS- meaningless. Once you get broken out, your crimes stay, and the next time you get thrown in jail, you'll just get broken out again. With my suggested change, jail-time itself would not only be shorter, but also more excitement would be added to break even the hardiest criminal out of jail, because if you take too long, they'll be crippled for a time.

I don't want to try and initiate a complete revamp of the jail system, because I think it would take too much time away from other projects. My suggested change, however, is something I think would both help the game, and not take forever to try and figure out. I think that mostly, we're arguing for the same point, Achernar.