Shattered Kingdoms

Although j-looting is pretty [REDACTED]. It happens, people can't help but manifest who they are through their character. Either way its just a game and if you throw such a huge fit over losing your stuff, then maybe you should take a break. I'm not saying its a bad, or good idea though. It'd be nice not to be able to get my stuff stolen, but then again, its just a game.

Seems to me that instead of turning it into some sort of wait period, you could just disable "get all" on corpses, period. After all, realistically speaking (reality, hehe), corpses don't turn into containers when people die. Make it as inconvenient to full loot, and prevent the corpse from being destroyed easily, and people will just take what they need or are roleplaying.

Maybe.

That's probably a bit much to hope for.

I think you should have to get each thing one at a time and corpses can not be skinned or butchered for a certain amount of time after death.

So, you are agreeing with me?

One of the things that has driven a great deal of the playerbase away from the MUD through rage deletes or just outright quitting the client has been the killing with lack of RP and the full jloot, especially given the consideration that the description of Shattered Kingdoms in the first sentences is Roleplay required and roleplay is rewarded. Also, new players are directed to read the rules when they first play the game, but the first rule of the game is the least enforced and the players that flagrantly abuse it the most, use the completely irrational argument to simply pay the misery forward for what they claim people do anyway. They then use the argument that the IMMs have more important things to do than babysit the players who break this rule, so they automatically get a free ride by absolving the IMMs of the responsibility to enforce this rule.

While logs can be altered to false incriminate some players and because of OOC tensions between players, I could see how obsessively policing this could also cause a counter effect to improving things through false reporting. It's extremely disheartening that a solution is presented and the first two posts are people against the idea and they're the ones who break this rule the most. Coding a solution to this isn't even a feasible possibility without an extensive amount of work from Dulrik that could better be used for more important projects. I've never been an IMM and don't know their rules for what they have to do to keep the playerbase happy for everyone, not just the people who want new things built in. In our world people do things to others because they're selfish and want to make others suffer for their own pleasure. The problem is, in the real world, there are law enforcement officers just for this reason, but in the SK world, no one takes on this responsibility unless a code violation is exploited or OOC knowledge is utilized for some gain. This can be extremely disheartening for people unfamiliar with the SK world when they show up here and see the first and primary rule broken.

One of the things that was implemented in terms of code to prevent illicit "ganking" was that a player couldn't be summon killed without the summoner having to toggle off auto summon and causing them to experience input lag for a great deal of time after summoning. The primary thing I've noticed from the people who do the pking without RP and full jloot comes from the people who've never greeted the victim. This usually means the victim has to ask around who the murderer is from people who know who the murderer is and then attempt to RP with a person who literally committed an OOC violation of the rules. There are only three plausible solutions I can think of to the problem off-hand that would work, the first of which would be designating a specific person as an IMM in charge of enforcing said policy. It would have to be a person with a lack of bias against against other players and with sound moral character. The other would literally be that it be coded that a player can't pk another player's character without knowing that character's name through the players greeting each other. This would mean there would have been some deal of RP to have occurred between the two characters, even if it were minimal, which would indicate that RP existed before the incident happened. The only issue with this would be an open-ended excuse for players to pk and jloot others without RP in future interactions. The third solution is Muktar's, where RP-wise a person could only be stripped of their things slowly, as if someone was literally stripping their corpse. Also, it's a great solution that PCs can't be skinned or butchered, because that's always been an exploit that's never been fixed, considering when a PC corpse is attempted to be junked, it clearly won't let you. People have just used the excuse that they should be allowed skins as trophies because they want the exploit to exist.

It was a great step forward to have players be able to report that their corpses are looted in law areas, but with the law changes, an exploit of this could be literally stealing all the person's coin or carrying around large amounts of coin yourself to get around the jail requirements for theft. Or people would just steal/jloot anyway, go to jail, pay whatever fines and log off for however long they want and get away with it. The problem with all of this has been the victim still remains a victim and no restitution is offered to them. Of course another code solution for a future update could be the implementation of a restitution system for law violators that compensates the victim with money to replace the items they've lost, even if they're store bought. This would also require that the person be pked in a law area, the reporting of the murderer and not to mention more coding on Dulrik's part.

While items have never been even the slightest concern of mine lately, contrary to the opinions of the violators of the rule, losing time and effort from the work of training and gaining experience to level a character is literally the most frustrating part of the whole experience. When a player gets pked without prior RP and there isn't a priest available to resurrect the player's character, they not only lose 5-10 minutes of the time they'd rather be interacting in the game, they also potentially lose experience from death questing, or if they don't know the riddles, they end up having to sit in the afterlife until a priest appears or reincarnate and lose a whole level of experience, causing them to work harder while the instigator gets to have fun.

So, this goes out to all the IMMs and Dulrik. I appreciate a great deal for all that you do for the MUD and all that you have done, you've done so much to try to attract new players and retain them, but you really need to stop beating around this issue and sort of pretend that it doesn't occur or act like it's going to happen and there's nothing you can do about it. I'm not trying to flame you or say that you're doing absolutely nothing, because that's not it at all. I'm just saying that this needs to become a first priority and serious brainstorming needs to occur and I've made an effort to get you started, because this is going to be the hugest factor in player retention and I don't need to provide a mountain of statistics or posts to prove this. The code update recently was a slight indicator that something is starting to be done, but someone really needs to step forward and make a statement about what's going to be done for a solution to this problem. It's great that you want to know what makes players happy and frustrated with new things, but this is the oldest issue that causes the biggest amount of unhappiness and the lack of player retention.

I've never had another forum name and I don't like to just post complete crap that's a waste of people's time, as evident by the lack of posts made by me. This isn't a long-winded rant, but rather a significant response to the one infection that's been treated, but never completely cured. I would really appreciate the opinions of the current IMMstaff and especially Dulrik, considering this is game is the product of your time and effort and this is an open forum for people to see improvements.

Thank you to any who read this and take careful consideration of this, because it's not a waste of your time. I would hate to see players leave and post negative comments about this issue on TMS and other sites about SK because this is an issue that's never been fully addressed to the public which is the playerbase. That's not a threat from me, but a concern for those who may become disenfranchised in the way I described. It's very important for people who come to SK because they see the description that attracted them in the first place as the actual state of the game and not just an issue that's ignored and pushed to the wayside. That's all I have to say for now and this came directly from the heart due to my love and admiration of this game.

Kevin

A little long-winded (and I have no right to comment on anyone else's lack of brevity) but well said nonetheless. I would be interested to know an immortal's thoughts on this thread, or at least that it's being read.

I was considering that as I was writing it, but I also made the realization that we get a lot of short posts that don't say anything at all, so I figured a long one that says something meaningful would be acceptable. There really shouldn't be any redundancy to it, and I'm hoping people actually take the time to read the whole thing and consider the entirety of it when they respond, not just respond piecewise and utilize straw man arguments as diversion tactics. Thanks for the comment though, I generally try to take careful consideration in the things I say lately, because someone has to be willing to set a precedent, even if it may be at the sacrifice of their desires relational to their emotions.

I'm not reading an essay on jlooting. No offense Dayamin.

The new code update just implemented a penalty for taking items from corpses. This is the solution. We'll see if it works. If not, let the QQing continue.

Okay, just cut my hand off and I will move along. That is a joke of a crime.

If you'd read the post, then you'd have noticed that I covered how the code update could be exploited to the point that people wouldn't even be punished for looting. Also, the update only covers when people are in law areas, so it doesn't help for areas where there's no law code. Finally, my post wasn't centered on jlooting, it was centered on pking without rp prior to the act, which in turn leads to jlooting. That's the central issue at focus, even though the title is about jlooting. People can jloot all they want as far as I'm concerned, so long as there's significant rp before the pk, as stated in rule #1.

I expected your response, because you seem to care the least about other players on the MUD because you're disenfranchised as much as anyone else getting "picked on". People aren't going to develop stellar pk skills overnight, or necessarily in the course of however many years of playing. It doesn't take away from the fact that RP should be a strictly enforced requirement before any pk between two players, whether that be through code or immortal involvement. My post was directed most specifically at the immortals, Dulrik and people who are most concerned with developing constructive solutions to the problem. People are tired of hearing the QQ more argument about it and aren't going to listen that anymore, because it's counterproductive in retaining players. If a group of players once championed a campaign for nerfing loot with success, then I'll champion a campaign to improve the quality of player enjoyment with RP.

I'm not giving up until the status quo sentiment is changed from a viewpoint of "QQ more because it's going to happen anyway" to a sentiment that people committing the actions are in a very small minority and will have to face the punishment for their actions. This will be done with the hope of weeding out the players that are destructive to the game environment and build a base of players willing to make the effort to provide a solid environment to encourage player growth.