Shattered Kingdoms

Several issues:

Many guards who do not spawn as bounty hunters do not report having engaged enemies over TB.

Crimes are not reported by NPCs who are uncoded, but part of the room description. That is, when one is wandering through the streets of Exile, or Zhenshi or whatever, it is assumed by the game environment that there are non-scripted NPCs all around that are just part of the room description, and that there is absolutely no privacy.

In reality, someone can walk through a populated city, in which most of the scripted NPCs are guards, and kill those, and the occasional little elven girl / freeman of exile / other scriped NPC, and never get reported for their crime. NPC Witnesses are notoriously stupid, in that they wait for all the crimes in the room to be completed.

Here is how witnesses work IRL:

1) I see a group of people beating the stuffing out of someone.
2) I run away before they finish.
3) I call the police and report the crime.
4) The police respond.
5) They arrest the criminals.
6) A magistrate charges the criminals, after they have been arrested.
7) Based on my report of 'attempting mugging', the criminals are charged with 'mugging', the thing that happened when I left.

Here is how they work in SK:

1) I see a group of people beating the stuffing out of someone.
2) I wait around for them to finish, so I can have witnessed the whole crime.
3) They beat the stuffing out of me and kill me so I can't testify against them, because I didn't run away when I saw the crime.
4) If they let me go, I run to the magistrate.
5) The magistrate charges the criminals.
6) The guards begin to attempt to arrest them.
7) If they are arrested, they are only charged with attempted murder, even if the person whose attempted murder I witnessed was then murdered a few seconds later. They must have had a great lawyer.

Public places with ambient NPCs in their room descriptions should just auto-report crimes that occur there, at least in the daytime. My suspension of reality is totally violated by imagining that someone can attack a city so brazenly and not be reported for a single crime, such that they could just walk in the next day and chill in the inn, acting all cool.

Of course, if one single thing could be done to make the law code more effective, it could just be modified to make it so that crimes cannot be reported which are committed against criminals, banished people, and/or deep-elves in Ayamao.

The law code has been dysfunctional for many years, now. Without having a hyper-active leader (which you have now for the Guardians but which all tribunals will not always have) it's impossible to guarantee that people aren't outlawed for defending the city. The code itself does not support any recognition between allies and enemies. Who gets outlawed really depends on whether the defenders or the attackers manipulate the law code better, that is, who gets to the Judge first, since both sides are guilty of crimes.

Also, without an active player around who understands the non-intuitive functioning of the law code to witness crimes, it's pitifully easy to run through a city, kill your way from one gate to another, and walk out without anyone knowing that it happened. The only law-protected room is the room with the Judge in it, the rest is anarchy without player reporting. Not only does this create the afore-mentioned 'race to the Judge' problem, but also creates the problem of staying online, afk, for hours and hours, so you can return to life and report your murder.

So, let's review problems so far.

A) Non-spawning guards do not always report crimes across the TB channel.
B) Scripted civilians do not immediately run away from violence and report it, and so are ineffective as witnesses.
C) Room description (non-scripted) civilians do not report crimes at all. The invisible throngs of people, in rooms with descriptions that involve throngs of people constantly moving about, do not report crimes.
D) Attempted mugging and murder are not written down as mugging or murder, if the attempt is witnessed, it succeeds, but the success is not witnessed.
E) Enemies (people in warring factions, banished criminals, deep-elves in Ayamao) can report crimes committed against them, and get allied defenders wanted, and put in the ridiculous lose-lose situation of choosing whether or not to kill guards to be able to protect the kingdom from attackers.
F) Stationary guards do not respond to crimes by trying to arrest the criminal, or reporting over TB. They respond by trying to report the crime. (I'm actually not sure about this one. Does it work like this?)
G) Logging out wipes outlaw memory.

I think that some improvements on these problems could help players stop fighting the code and start fighting each other.

Personally I think the law code should be revisited to make it LESS effective.

I hate that you can get banished from a kingdom so easily, effectively eliminating any interactions that could have been had by visiting that city.

In which ways?

In which ways, what? I get that banishment spawning law NPCs is cool when you've got a warparty going after the city, if it's just one guy, it's really tough to make Anything interesting happen--banishment pretty much means you don't go there solo anymore. Limiting populated areas from being accessible in a game limits player-to-player interactions, and doing that in a game already having issues with too few random PC encounters due to lack of players just compounds the issue.

If you're a lawbreaker then you clearly have to face penalties. But in a world of good and evil people, I think it would be far better for the game as a whole if it didn't mean that someone breaking the law can no longer cause trouble or have encounters in that place.

Have I got a cabal for you...

I don't think he likes the Hammer.

Couple problems here: deep-elves cannot effectively report crimes in Ayamao without engaging guards to do so. It is actually easy to get outlawed when you are killing people in a city. You gotta work and pay attention to make sure you don't get outlawed.

Technically, if you aren't a member of the local tribunal, you shouldn't defend the city. If you do, you are a criminal.

Also, Drewbag, I disagree that banishment stops interaction. It doesn't stop you from going to a city solo. I've gone to places in which I am outlawed solo. I've done it with multiple characters. I'm not sure what the problem is.

Deep-elves can always report crimes in Grahme and Elisair.

At Opey:

Technically, bollocks.

Zhenshi is the only country I can imagine acting like this. Empire and North are too authoritarian to follow laws like that, and Ayamao and Taslamar are too idealistic to do the same.

Imagine. Deep-elves attack Ayamao. An elf who isn't a Guardian attacks the deep-elves. The Guardians arrest him and throw him in jail. Wut?

You fail to realize that Ayamao isn't just elves. Do your history they have more than just elves in Ayamao, it's why the Leaders of the Alliance are three seperate races.

Like someone said before you wanna defend your Kingdom then join the Tribunal.