Shattered Kingdoms

Please list recent incidents of removed leader flags and highlight for us when avoiding PK was associated with them. I believe we'll find that quite the opposite is true: the only leader I know of in recent memory who unwillingly lost a flag related to PK was one who adopted an "all in, never say die" approach to PK for himself and his faction members. I don't have all the data, so maybe you know about something I don't?

Being on both sides of the tribunal NPC farm I can say that this is a stupid idea.

You're farming the bounty NPCs while the opposing faction is offline.

On the other side when you log in and someone that has a hardon for you and went through the trouble of killing hundreds if not thousands of NPCs for the surprise attack is going to be bound and determined to do it again and again.

I only dropped 2 obsidian in the bank account when Surrit would offline farm NPCs.

Honestly, I think those of us that farm bounty NPCs could probably benefit from another hobby, like watching paint dry.

You're assuming there was offline farming based on what? How you played the game? Most of the bounty hunter "farming" happened in A'van while I leveled my rogue with the help of Talcor and Erog. Azoreth was online for almost all of it and saw the alerts repeatedly. He did convince a necromancer to come to A'van to attempt to kill us once, but that didn't turn out like he planned.

http://pastebin.com/LPiWxM9S

He had many, many chances to do something about his bounty hunters getting "farmed" and yet we never saw him a single time in the many hours of leveling my rogue in A'van. If that is "offline" farming then I suppose I am guilty.

Logging out to avoid PK is already against the rules and is a separate issue from putting coins in your tribunal coffers. Depositing a few platinum into your coffers to make it harder for your enemies to ambush you is just common sense and has always been considered good practice.

As a side note, I'm opposed to bounty NPCs in general. I don't like them and don't think I ever did. That being said, if we're going to have bounty NPCs, and we're going to allow people to farm them while the opposition is off-line, I would hate to see this countermeasure taken away.

They are not separate issues when one is used to intentionally facilitate the other. I am also not suggesting that depositing coins (of any amount) into your tribunal account should be considered a violation of the rules, but only that there should be a reasonable delay between the deposit and the subsequent appearance of bounty hunters. You are forgiven for unwittingly abusing game mechanics, by the way.

Baldric's bragged about using the mechanic of follow before it was officially declared an abuse of mechanics, and he isn't saying that he'd proudly use what's been declared exploitative now.

To the matter of the thread, I seem to recall an incident recently where someone logging out to avoid PK was ruled justified, but I can definitely see it being punishable to purposefully put coin into the account for the express purpose of logging off as soon as bounty NPCs got attacked. If this is being done, it should be reported, and the person will likely be punished. It's not necessary to make a thread here about it.

To the OP's suggestion, implementing an arbitrary time limit on deposits being able to be converted to bounty NPC guards is a bad direction to go. All that would basically mean is that if you wanted to be able to login as a trib member without the risk of getting jacked, then you'd have to log in in advance, deposit coin, then log out for 15-30 minutes before you were able to play without risk of getting ambushed.

Or you could actually go confront your enemies when they attack your territory, guards and/or members instead of hiding in your HQ.

I disagree with the point you're making. Bash can be used to facilitate spam killing newbs, but if someone were using bash to spam kill newbs, the answer would not be to change bash, or when it could be used. The answer would be to punish the person who is breaking the rules by spam killing newbs.

What about the player who does want to defend against their enemies? If I logged on and a few enemies were running around in my city, I would want to be able to deposit some money so I could mount a defence with the assistance of bounty NPCs.

As a side note, when did the word we used to use for bounty NPCs start getting censored to bounty NPCs?

Also, please stop winking at me. It makes me uncomfortable.

This thread is TLDR but I'm going to post anyway:

I just want to say, I used and advocated this same tactic.

A) Draining is easier than filling. The natural 'draw' scenario is everyone having no money.

B) Saying that people are using this just to log off isn't a fair argument about the tactic. I used it, and advocated the use, in order to have my bounty NPCs swamp enemies while we PK'd them, instead of getting them drained offline.

C) Saying that the mechanism 'makes no sense' makes no sense. Firstly, it's a fantasy game- nothing makes sense, deal with it. Consider it in terms of game balance. Secondly, it really does make sense to order your men not to run out and get killed needlessly when you aren't there to support them.

If you want to argue against this, argue that it's unbalanced, not that it doesn't make sense or that your opponents are cowards.

When you go to make that argument, you will probably be wrong. Offline draining is already really easy, and denying players a way to mitigate that undermines an already unimpressive defensive advantage.

Changing bash would not prevent newbie killing, so it is not a reasonable solution to the problem. Your analogy is not valid. However, adding a delay between the deposit of coins into a tribunal account and the appearance of bounty hunters is both reasonable and solves the related problem of logging off to avoid PK without the need to report and potentially lose players.