Full looting and whatnot

The Vyvax thread has been an interesting read from a new guy's perspective. There's a lot of history behind the comments and community that many of us just haven't been around for, but there's two things that really jump out at me:

Multi killing (which it seems the imms will be addressing)
And full looting.

Ozaru has made some comments that I completely agree with, and I'm not on discord so I'll post some thoughts here.

There seems to be a long history of looting and saccing gear in AR, though I hope this is a trend that's dying. I imagine most of us are adults by now and only have so much time to play. Saccing someone's gear for "RP" or whatever is just an unnecessary dick move. If you see a piece of gear you want to wear, I think that makes sense. Even saccing rares kiiiiiinda makes sense to bring it back into circulation, but still seems harsh. But overall, let's respect each other. It's just a game and there's someone on the other side of the screen who is just as invested as you.

Ive been fortunate that the deaths I've had have been to respectful players that have helped me more than anything. I've had one character looted and I just stopped playing them. Truth be told, if I had a bad run and got looted too many times, I'd probably just leave and find a different MUD. I'm not going to waste dozens of hours so that someone can be a dick and then waste dozens more hours of my free time.

Let's not push people away. Most of the drama seems to be coming from questionable decisions. If you're not sure if what you're doing is a dick a move, it probably is. We can have fun and PK, I'm sure I'll be canon fodder for years to come, but push too hard and you'll be the ruler of an empty empire. Let's be respectful. Treat each other as if we're going to be grabbing beers after logout.

There was a post Dogran made which I agreed with regarding very specific circumstances in which full looting might come about/be acceptable. I don't know if you've been in any cabals yet, but the Knights of Valour have traditionally been ego lifts for any evil looking to score a PK since the Knights have no choice regarding the oath and they can fight back.

Also, the Justice cabal has not been very active lately, but within their mechanics after a criminal is apprehended, a certain number of items based on the individual's prior "criminal record" are automatically confiscated, an after that, all gold is impounded, and any wild items are also confiscated and I believe destroyed automatically. If the individual has repeatedly broken the laws to the point where they're a diehard criminal (like Ilromie was), all items might be confiscated upon an apprehension. But if it's your first offense and you're considered a model citizen, you might only lose two items. The number of items lost increases as you rack up offenses. The Justice is obligated to return the remaining items - there have been instances where corrupt Justices took additional items from looted criminals.

As for what Dogran said... If I'm in a group PKing situation (these are rare these days), and an opponent dies when I'm against two people in a hostile situation (the traditional Blademaster challenge in the Warlords would not qualify), full looting them so they can't get back into the fight immediately (particularly in cabal warfare) makes sense because it disables an opponent but is imo less of a dick move than killing them multiple times. Kind of like getting an opponent to be carried out on a stretcher rather than outright killing them.

But having said that, I get where you're coming from and wish to acknowledge that Xenyar and I have often been sparring partners over the years and aside from one of his characters (and I didn't see anything wrong with swapping things up once in a while), he's generally not taken much from me. Kryton killed Afales at least nine times (including once before I could challenge him), and typically he only took improvements to his own equipment or, if I had a weapon which was giving me a lot of power, he'd take that away from me. Which is fair to do.

I am curious if you guys would think about / consider if it is really a full looting issue, or is it just excessive ganking?

Ganking / gathering are interlinked. We could maybe also throw in hoarding as an interchangeable term with gathering, though I feel it does hit a little differently in terms of how much sympathy you feel. A lot for the guy getting his piles of 50 ore destroyed by sac 1., and not so much pity felt for the guy who has had 18 rares out of circulation since 2 years ago.

When a gatherer is actually ganked, there's a whole ton of reward for the ganker and pretty much nothing for the gatherer. However, having a pretty small amount of ganking (key word, small) does help add value to gathered stuff and in general the rares we have, it seems to have some purpose. and it can be fun, in the same way that a football player tackling an opposing player is fun for him.


What we saw recently was definite in the "excessive" category. You could call that multikilling but if it happened again the very next day/week/whatever (sustained ganking of same person), it'd be just as big a turn off in my opinion. I don't see how changing the multikill rules addresses the turn-off caused by excessive ganking.

We could just add "Excessive ganking" to harassment policy and that way its open to interpretation because thats what harassment is (i.e. in the eyes of a reasonable person)

Although I would love to see an in-game mechanic to deal with this, obviously the contract system isnt helping or HGOD (low pbase), or Keepers, making a shark a huge force rather than a small one. Quite striking how many social systems we have tried that do not properly work (although they were built and worked when we had greater scale). Even a wanted flag doesnt slow 'em down much nowadays. We could also curb class ganking power in general I guess, it doesnt seem very fun to do that, BUT, ganking depends on having defenseless victims. We've often see gankers tell their victims to just stop whining and get better at the game, but there is no challenge in these kinda kills - as I mentioned myself earlier, I went from 800 to almost dead in 2 rounds from some full zombies necro. I think we have a little of that left to address

Now heres a new idea though.

Allow the ganked player to declare their ganker an outcast to society. As in literally, outcast them. Social outcast. gankers being labelled outcasts makes it very easy to identify them, lets us obligate Keepers to hunt outcasts to thoroughly cover that + other social consequences. that would have an oversight process that could be handled by player goverment / religion instead of imms.

I appreciate the perspective there, BW. There is more complexity to the conversation than I realized during my initial post, but also each of those situations kind of make sense based on the scenarios described.

For Dav, I don't mind dying. It sucks, but when people are polite about it, it feels like just part of the game. Multi-killing is a dick move and some of the fun of the game gets lost so that the killer can feed their ego, but as long as I'm not coming back to an empty corpse, it's something I could deal with. The skill disparity between the real killers and us newbies is staggering. I expect to get smoked and just hope I can bruise their fist with my face. It's not even close. I can see where a larger player base can help keep the real killers in check with a group mentality, but you're right that those social systems aren't in place anymore. What Justice? What Keeper? I don't even know if outcast would help because a lot of them are already not caballed - they're strong AF loners and I've seen maybe one or two justices ever and the only Keeper I've ever seen has deleted. Again, though, I've been fortunate that most of the killers that I've come across have been polite professionals.

Now, for gear, the loss of rares has a reasoning behind it - getting them back into circulation. It sucks for the loss, but I can understand the goal. Hopefully it's not ALL of them, but a couple of lost items isn't the end of the world. Like you said, someone holding onto a full inventory of rares for a character they're not even playing sounds like a weirdo hoarding issue to me (I've sacc'ed items on characters I stopped playing because it felt gross just holding onto them for no reason), but I understand that people do it.

But non rares... The rest of the stuff, that's the part that hits the hardest. I'm hesitant to spend the time forging gilded armor or gambling hundreds of thousands of gold because, knowing myself, if it all got sacc'ed, I would probably just delete and take a break. I'm not about to watch someone destroy dozens of hours of work (Maybe less for you more experienced folk, but it's a damned grind for me) and then go about my merry way. I'm really impressed by those of you that do, or expect it, and someone even mentioned spending their free time preparing for that to happen so they can just re-equip and move on. Maybe I need to get better about that, but I'm having trouble even keeping up with the equipment I need NOW, much less the equipment I'll need in the future.

I don't know if there can really be a physical system in place because there's so much nuance to it- it has to be a social one. But there's obviously a lot of passion behind the subject - since I've been here, I've watched quite a few deletions in the graveyard from someone getting looted and saying f-ck it. And then we all suffer the loss because of it.

Perhaps allow the ability to lock x amount of gambled/forged gear from being able to be looted/sacced, or the ability via quest to provide that ability to 1-4 forged/gambled items based upon level? Just spitballing.

Yes that would allieve the looting end. The game is presenting high stakes PVP and adding forging/gambling (at smuggler) to the game has raised those stakes much higher. So yeas that would be a remedy for the looting. It doesnt change your character from being ganked because it is pretty much a defenseless speedbag. Vets treating newbs like that will get banned btw.

As a newbie, I actually really like that idea! Not sure how the vets feel about it, but it would take a lot of the pressure off of getting stomped on.

Ganking is just dying? It took me a while to realize that there is nowhere to hide and you will get found eventually. Early on I just panicked and logged out as soon as I could. I've gotten over that fear after realizing that this game was designed that way to encourage fighting and if I don't want to fight, I need to find a different game. With that comes death. I think that's just an inevitable part of being new here.

One thought just occurred to me as a result of reading this...

If somebody says they're new to AR or MUDs in general at character creation, part of the text that we show them might be a point about how it's against the rules for our players to grief newbies, so if you are the victim of griefing early on here, report the player immediately (I would assume under the rule for harassment but I'm not sure what the most appropriate rule is) or send up a pray telling the Immortals what happened, even if you decide to leave, so we have a record of what happened.

That is in the rules BW.