Shattered Kingdoms

As it is, locate object has become the end all be all spell of tracking people down to pk them. One single spell with low mana cost and relatively fast cast time effectively enables a priest/sorc/necro/paladin to know what most of the players logged on are doing at this time.

For those who are thinking... how the hell?

When you cast 'locate object' sword the game returns to you a list of all the items within your level range that have the keyword sword or has sword in their short desc or something of the like. However, when you cast locate object without any arguments the game sends you a list of the last (if you're gm) 101 items loaded into the game. I.e. all the items of a character that logged on in the same second as the spell was cast, and all freshly cut off limbs, freshly loaded coins on NPCs in leveling areas etc.

This enables the aforementioned classes to, by spamming the locate object spell without arguments, keep good track of what areas NPCs are respawning in, what areas with aggro NPCs people are traveling through (by limbs on the ground in that area) and thereby knowing more or less exactly where people are leveling, walking, picing their nose etc.

Now I have a strange feeling that this isn't exactly the way this spell was intended to be used and I propose a change so that the spell can only be cast with arguments, i.e. c locate sword, c locate fish etc.

As it stands, sorcs, priests, paladins, necro's are the ultimate bloodhounds of SK, is this intended? Or does it perhaps warrant a change?

I feel I should add, that as the spell works now, it effectively makes it impossible to level if there are anyone able to locate online who might want to hurt you. Or anyone who wants to hurt you and knows people who can locate objects.

It makes it so pk is much more common in this mud than you would think. I always wondered how it worked until I played a locater myself, but be prepared to lose a significant amount of pk if locating is gone. The four aforementioned classes would also suffer a huge wimp if this was changed.

Perhaps it is an unfair spell in some ways, but it causes a great deal of pk now that 'scrying' is a great deal more difficult than it used to be.

I actually sent various logs to the IMMstaff a couple of years ago, and also buglogged it in the game. I never received a response, which made me think that this was tolerable and/or intended to work that way. I fully agree with the fact that using it this way is extremely overpowered as it gives you a list of the latest happenings.

You can find out the exact location of people, you can figure out their names in combination with the who list command, you can see when areas repop, you can find out what objects the most recently logged in person has and numerous other things. Locate with a target is already a very useful spell, there is hardly a need for this.

You're right Algon, definitely, I think I am just hoping to spur some discussion moreso than getting an insta-nerf of the spell.

Although, finding people would still be possible with locating coins, locating arms, legs, guts etc, just a bit harder to do.

Wow. I had no idea that you could even cast that without arguments.

I'm generally alone on these sorts of things, but I've never been a fan of the random and sporadic PK that scrying creates. I prefer the sort of PK that occurs naturally, whether due to organized and intentional events , or random encounters that happen when neither party was expecting it.

I'd support a nerf of this. Even without no-argument locates, there's still plenty of room to track people down.

Let's be realists. SK is a huge world with a rather small playerbase. If it wasn't for locate, there wouldn't be that much PK really as Algon stated.

But then again, I also think this spell is not working as intended(and I think I know how easy it is to locate everyone who is actually doing something by just spamming c lo). Making it not working without arguments won't change a thing, a persistent locater will still find anything and anyone he wants as JVJ said(I know I will - coins, limbs, herbs, steaks, anything).

An idea that will increase lag/cpu cost of the spell but will fix that problem is not to return the 100 more recent objects, but 100 random objects in a random order. If there are only 20 for example(c locate amulet for example), it will return all 20 objects, but not in the order they are loaded in SK but randomly. But that's probably too big of a change with too much cost, so I doubt it will be implemented.

EDIT: I'd also like to add that locate is a very funny spell when spam used also. I have seen so much lameness in SK with that spell, I felt I was doing better work than any Imm spam snooping PCs.

I agree with DA on this matter.

HOLY [REDACTED]!

I never knew that about locate.

There will be less PK if we debug the spell? Why? Because you no longer have the ability to exploit this one bug? Oh, get off it. You know you will just find another bug to exploit eventually. Until then, you'll just have to whine, [REDACTED] and moan.

Opey