Shattered Kingdoms

If someone did not want to risk getting ambushed, and they could not rely on bounty NPCs to alert them, they would just go camp at their HQ or go into the wilderness for 30 minutes. I do not see how your proposed change would work to get these types of players to make themselves vulnerable.

This is subjective, but based on my experience you have this reversed. I could fill a tribunal account in an hour or two by myself. It would take much longer to drain an account by myself.



Not intended as a flame, but you also murdered good-aligned guards on your elf mercenary so your judgment about tactics is questionable at best.

Actually, it would help against it, in that they can run away. Baldric's point is this, punish those that are logging off, not the one logging on. You want to be able to make an easy 9v1 gank with very little ability for the person to respond. If they are logging off, once again, report it. If you don't report it, that is your fault.

IMMs, do you have the ability to look at login/logouts vs when bounty NPCs are engaged? If not, I implore you to talk to D to get that metadata.

in other words, catch the person doing it, don't punish the entire trib.

Which they can and do. That is another thread altogether, though: HQs and why they are bad for the game.

There is a lot of hyperbole in this response. I can't recall the last time I was in a group with more than two other characters, so a full group of nine would be quite the feat. Changing bash wouldn't prevent or curb newbie killing in the slightest because typing kill is more than sufficient to kill a newbie. Baldric's analogy is invalid. You can argue that adding a delay to bounty hunters appearing after a tribunal deposit punishes players that don't hide from PK, but I simply don't agree.

As a tribunal member, you still have access to a guard to help you in your own kingdom no matter your tribunal balance.

That suggested change isn't reasonable nor does it solve your problem. Adding an arbitrary delay between depositing coin and having tribunal guards take effect will actively reward spam draining accounts when tribunal members are offline, because that means that when the tribunal players do login, they'll have a 30 minute window where they can be ambushed with complete impunity even in their own city.

It also won't solve your problem. Your problem is that people don't want to PK against you, so they log off. What you want to do is make it easier to PK them before they get the chance to log off, which is why you've proposed this change. That's going to drive them away from the game much faster than reporting them to the staff.

There's no reason for bounty hunters to spawn if tribunal members aren't online. Or make it so that bounty hunters don't drain the tribunal account, if no tribunal members are online. Dulrik can code that along with the tribunal deposit change. Much like Ardith did, you are mistakenly assuming that I offline bounty drain. I suppose that was your play style and therefore you attribute it to others?

That is not the case. Almost all of my bounty kills were done with at least Azoreth online. I am perfectly agreeable to changing it so that if bounty hunters are killed with no tribunal members online, the tribunal account is not drained.

All three of the things that you just suggested would have profoundly different impacts on the game. All of them might be worth proposing separately, but isn't what you approached this thread with initially.

The first would cause banishment to have a much lesser impact on a character. If you managed to PK all the members of said tribunal into the ground, intimidate them into logging off, or simply played at different times, banishment wouldn't be as big of a deal as it is now.

The second would make it so that breaking the law or getting banished would have even deeper impacts on a player than it does now, because all PvE in the area would progressively become impossible no matter how many bounty NPCs you killed.

The last one, again, doesn't actually solve your problem, which is that in your eyes someone is going against the rules of the game by logging off to avoid PK. Changing bounty NPCs isn't going to change that person's mindset in the slightest. If that is your problem as you've stated, then changing bounty NPCs will just adversely affect the game while having no impact on the real issue.

I disagree. You are coming at this from the perspective of someone that meta-gamed as hard as possible when it comes to tribunal accounts, so I am not terribly surprised we don't agree.

I'm coming from the perspective of someone who has played on both sides of the tribunal war fence, before and after bounty NPCs. I didn't like them when they were returned to the game years ago, and I don't like them now. When they -were- implemented, I was primarily the defending party as a Peacekeeper, and I noticed that instead of people bringing 1-2 PCs to attack cities, they were forced to bring huge groups even if they only wanted to kill one person, and city-based PvP instantly became much less fun, even in defense. I don't like being forced to fight NPCs in order to have a shot at some PvP, and I don't like people bringing huge groups to kill one or two people. Bounty NPCs cause both of those things to be much more commonplace.

However, they are now part of the game, and I'm the one that proposed a change which was implemented to make bounty NPCs much less expensive to replace than they used to be, which I proposed back when I was farming them on Turon, and the peacekeepers were complaining about how much money they had to spend replacing them. I know what it's like to have your account drained and the feeling of powerlessness that comes with that, and I know what it's like to spawn 3 bounty NPCs a room and the utter frustration that comes with that. The change I suggested still made it possible to drain accounts, yet was still less oppressive to the people that logged in to an empty account.

Unlike you, I possessed the ability to notice that my playstyle was being oppressive to other players, and I requested a code change that made draining tribunal accounts less impactful on the defending tribunal, and that change got implemented. Your suggested change would make draining tribunal accounts more oppressive against the defending tribunal, and that is why I think it is a bad idea. It also, again, isn't going to magically make people want to stay logged in when you're trying to PK them. That's a separate issue.