(Deleted) Ahvikari the Grand Mistress of Larceny

And yes, the "oh no, I don't want to get blackjacked by a thief in town" is completely OOC and nothing to do with an Executor of Valor refusing to defend his hometown against a Drow who's knocking down his holy sanctuary. I can not find any joy playing with people who are so full of hypocrisy.

Show the logs to prove it, or you're just spitting in the wind.

I can tell you that an Executor in the Halls of Exalted performed better because they defended against another guy invading and took a blackjack to the face from *my* long-standing thief (who I abandoned because it was too easy to create conflicts of interest).

But, it's your choice to leave. I am indifferent regarding you specifically because of our interactions while I was playing Afales.

Sorry bro, I fucking hate thieves, I will quit out on thieves anytime because of the hide, blackjack and steal mechanics, unless I am playing something that can detect hidden... It's bullshit. It's just a class that is designed to grief other players.

Haha just to be clear, I never had any executor characters before.

I did not bother to copy/paste my scrollback because I realized I've stopped caring. You can yawn and boo all you want, but this is an actual issue with the game that should be enforcing RP but people abuse OOC to save their precious eq, k/d record and reputation. It's kinda pathetic. Especially if it's coming from a "brave Knight" who should be berserking into battle not hiding and cowering when there's a Drow Anathema in his hometown that he's supposed to protect. How does that not break immersion for you is beyond me.
And BlackWidow, we fought several times with Afales and it was fun and I did not care if I died because there was fun involved, but for vast amount of people selfish OOC reasoning is more important than committing to RP and providing fun for everyone else besides only them.

tl;dr too many wimps in this game who forget that defeat can also be fun and a learning experience, not just ducking tail and quitting out at every threat.

I loved you, and I hated you.

You knew where he was, you even said it, but decided not to engage because your goal was only to grief. Land the blackjack, get an item, run if you didn't land it. If you wanted a fight, you could have invaded, or engaged him at any time. You didn't, because you didn't want a fight, you wanted your tingles from griefing him. Yeah, thief as a class is in a weird place, because even you wouldn't really have a chance in that fight. That you expect someone to put themselves in that situation but you wouldn't yourself speaks volumes to me.

I always advocated for you as a strong player, someone who brings a challenge to the game, but its hard to keep doing that when your toxicity comes with it. Your crowning achievement to me was your slith warrior, because you dominated but you weren't toxic about it, until you were. You had a custom race background and description set up, you roleplayed it to a tee, then you just went schizo one day.

The toxicity you present outweighs the value of having a big bad like you in the game for me. A couple of examples:

-You had four level 50's geared out at once, and you would rotate between them to clear out your pk range. When people started logging off on you, you would sit on a lower level character to spy them out OOC, then immediately log on a 50 to kill them.

-You got wrath nerfed through your elf paladin with 15 aff break shoes clearing through your pk range justifying it with the flimsy rp of eradication.

-You dominated on your pre-nerf Jotun dk. Pre jotun nerf, pre dk nerf. This in itself was fine because everyone likes a big bad. But you deliberately looted people knowing you had an unfair advantage at the time. You caused me to delete my wishlist gnome monk out of frustration because you were abusing the unlimited hp/mana superloop of recently introduced siphon strike/spiteful strike and then took my best items to circulate them elsewhere(you didn't even need them). You made being a warlord an untenable and terrible experience for me because you could just solo the cabal AND me and then send clearly incendiary tells because you knew I couldn't do anything about it. I literally fought you on and off for six hours straight trying to wear you down and still couldn't touch you. I believe this led to the change where gates were introduced just to slow down what you were doing.

-I killed your ranger and looted a few items, you immediately unghosted trying to get them back, sending angry ooc tells about how terrible I was.

See you soon, though. People who feel the need to cry gone for good never are. Its the people who silently walk away that stay away.



-

As I detailed below, its not a cowardice in my analysis. This is obviously getting into psychologic territory neither of us are properly qualified for. but I think the odds are on me being right, because it just does not make sense to sign up for Knights with an oath of courage, gain cabal powers and then not apply them when it comes time for cabal duties. you're essentially telling intelligent players they're playing the game wrong because they didn't "roleplay" a dumbass that walked straight into headsock. Anyway there's a solution offered below, can like it or not like it, but it does eradicate the problem for sure.

PK avoidance is common. It has been happening, but usually with the newer players.

This was focused on Tynidas because he's the leader of a cabal. You can see it as "picking my battleground" or you can see it as cowardice unbecoming of a cabal leader. I took the Anathema flag thinking I can choose my battleground, but Tynidas disagreed that he should follow an Anathema to his chosen battleground. I didn't make a fuss out of it but it is what it is. I didn't really care much about it since I would rather choose to fight anywhere else instead of me staying in my battleground and him staying in his battleground and we stare each other down for two hours which enters the psychologic territory described by davairus. I hate this psychological wargames where we stare each other down and see who eventually breaks. That's not what I played the game for.

That's why I have always been an advocate to remove terrain based skills. It causes this problem.

Basically, this is just an expectation mismatch between players. Most people think a knight has to pursue an Anathema even if the fight is disadvantageous to him.

On the other hand there are others that thinks - no, that's stupid for a knight to fight a disadvantage battle despite him being anathema. Wait for a good opportune time.

That's the summary of what's happening. It's up to the cabal imm to set the guidelines and Lumubella has already said her view, so that should be it. Move on guys.

From RP perspective, I just can not fathom an Executor of Valor, Storm Berserker cowering outside of town when there's Drow Anathema on the loose murdering citizens and attacking his cabal. I can only see OOC reasoning behind it, which does not align at all with the perceived image of the character, that was my main grievance really. Not only do Giants have low INT to figure out 24 int drow tactics, but the berserkers should be charging at their enemies, not literally cowering at distance and only peeking in every now and then. Executor of Valor should purge Anathema from its town at all cost etc. Just too many contradictions between expected RP vs OOC reasoning.

And the result is that, I always go schizo if i play this game long enough because shit like that accumulates to the tipping point.

That's all fine and dandy saying a Knight MUST chase the roll sheet, chase anathema etc. Not that I am the Knight imm here, but its the exact same thing people do to Warlords. "Ohhh he deathmarked me. soo he has to chase me everywhere even though I'm a halfling thief and I'm gonna just steal from him and quit out. Why should I do the work? he can walk right to me as his rules say". and we know whose the winner in the story. Its a story that ends one way and its the same way every time. You know who doesn't have an outcome like that? Legion. Legion will say stuff like 'evil always flees' or 'bad guys break rules'. Trashy characters that celebrate multikilling and put self-preservation above all else. Ohh but we all love our evils don't we. pffff. I don't think there's a problem if the player chose to make you work harder to kill or steal from players who are bound to doing honorable things.

also uncaballed "billy badass" shouldnt be calling anybody a chicken at all.

I mean he was checking town and heading back to sit in water in river wood, when i killed his gates and made way to guardian, he quit out. That's just obvious and blatant OOC playstyle, not something you'd expect from an Executor of Valor. And yes, I believe I was #1 or #2 Anathema on roll sheet when I checked whilst in town.

don't think we have the playerbase for that anymore. I know a lot of PKers have quit because it's a bit of a waste of time chasing tail when it's so easy to avoid in-character consequences these days thanks to low population and ever-expanding game world.

OK - I've currently got a thread going in the patch forums about the in-game toxicity. And by that I didn't just mean like, some silly noodle saying americans are stupid idiots or whatever the latest fotm edge stuff is. I'm talking about the kind of in-game interactions where both guys walk away feeling pissed off. You're taking this one as far as saying to leave the game and never return, right? Meanwhile, ivindel is saying, if I see a thief online I will just logout and not play.

So this is exactly the type of interaction I made that thread to talk about. The kind of stuff which can turn the mud into a ghost town which is also what you alluded to has already happened here. I think we are not too late to turn this around but I 100% think we have to prioritize this for the next few months to year of development.

Ivindel already gave a solution for his side, that's to "have detect hidden". an expensive consumable could actually be introduced to provide. It could be stripped on logout to encourage staying logged in with it once used, maybe killing two birds as we would have introduced both a strategic layer of defense against the thief and also a commitment mechanic.

I think we had also discussed before, squirting a vial of squid ink on people who are hugging water trying to avoid a dirt kick, that way you can retain agency of being able to use your ability. There is also squid ink in the game so we would just have to jerry rig something up so that i can be used for it.. I dont know how we would explain you have to have skill in dirt kick to use squid ink but thats the thing it needs somehow.

That being said, I think the most important point of toxicity you were getting at is players being in cabals, but being unwilling to follow their basic mandate to defend the cabal against any intruder. Its a really bad look and feels lousy for everyone. I think in this case, that's so intertwined with the thievery of blackjack/steal, the Knight player is making a judgment call, i.e. this looks like a guy looking to abuse my mandate to force me into a trap to delete my items with little (maybe zero) combat. In other words, they're recognizing the system is rigged against them and appears like they break character by declining to engage in it. In my opinion that's clearly protest rather than cowardice. The cabal invasion encounter is intended to begin combat not thievery, so, I think it should be very straight forward and easy to implement that raiding a cabal would make the defenders immune to blackjacks steals etc for the next couple ticks. and then they would have no thievery excuse for not showing up.

Make getting detect hidden have some large combat-related downside(temporarily) for whoever is using it to give the thief some combat relief. Like a huge hit to accuracy/damage, or a hit to defenses. Like what you see for using accupuncture, but more severe.

removing water as the only means to block dirt is a crazy knee jerk reaction, dont do this. This is coming from someone who plays warriors as a main.

Agreed. A) spice exists, so there already are very accessible mechanics to address blackjack/backstab/steal/etc. B) Ivindil just wants to hoard gear across all his characters (which is far more negative and impactful than the blackjack and pry skills) and is anti-anything that threatens that goal C) As Lumubella has demonstrated, the player behind Ahvikari is constantly guilty of the things they accuse others of and is consistently looking to stir up trouble. Don’t feed the trolls.

Spice is useless. I got blackjacked by Uldhyme with it WITH adrenaline.


Uldhyme yells 'Help! I am being attacked by Eira!'
[** ] Uldhyme dodges your palm strike.
Your dragon talon *** DEVASTATES *** Uldhyme!
Your jump kick MANGLES Uldhyme!
Uldhyme has quite a few wounds.

Uldhyme has fled!
Uldhyme walks west.

Uldhyme walks in.

A sudden pain erupts in your skull.

*** and he was gone *****


I removed my prompt but this was what happened with spice.

Yeah last few times I used spice, I got blackjacked anyway.

Lol? I am guilty of things I accuse others of? I don't accuse Xenyar of being OP or abusing game mechanics (that fit the char RP), I accuse people choosing OOC over RP in order to excuse their cowardice and pussying out. And I've basically never done that, no matter the odds. So don't bullshit me. This is exactly the shit I talked about when I talked about ignorant takes by ignorant people that I can't stand.

I don't have a problem admitting what Lumubella said, because I played the game too much and needed something to do, so I come up with creative ways how to be more efficient at what I do. But at least I provide fights for everyone who wants to take any, even against odds.

I want to point out oI had a thief for several years (Dzuela iirc? It was a very similar name to a current character) but I eventually abandoned her after one incident where I had a failed blackjack attempt on a Warlord and got transferred very quickly since I had a Warlord in my roster at the time. Even though I was planning to delete the Warlord (and I pointed that out in the conversation I had), a point was made clear to me that I had just created a conflict of interest between my characters. It's also why I don't play thieves any more, because I recognize that it's too easy to create conflicts of interest with your other characters if you do the stuff a thief typically does while playing a thief.

Xenyar, I had no plans of stealing his shit and running away, I was ready to die for some fun fighting. You can ask Blackwidow/Afales if I ran, hid and quit or did I fight until death each time...

i.e. I was not going to gimp myself further vs storm berserker as a crap geared thief, but I was willing to steal his weapon or two and then fight him so i could use weapon advantages properly. If I would have died (most likely) I would have no issues with it, because unlike some, I play to PK regardless of outcome.

I know you want to fight. That's why I love having you around. I was talking about most other thieves.

I already detailed this below and probably elsewhere but Knight, if they thought you were using the cabal invasion to lure into city for a quick bj and gank a bunch of goodies, would be leaning on decades of prior precedent. When the eq takes 2 hours or longer to attain, they will just choose safety over "bravery" as you put it. Its actually just smart play. And i will speak from my own experience as the leader of Knights. I had a thief came after my Knight just to steal crap. I put a polearm in Gwidry, thinking its not any use to him, then let him dick me over. this guy stole everything else in inv I had kept, he stole sack with a bunch of ore and smugglers gear, etc. He erased days of grind in seconds and then still wrote a note to imms saying I broke rules by hiding gear. This note said my character had broken the suicide rule by dropping eq to retrieve it later. Said it was terrible RP on my part, should be kicked from cabal after already destroying a ton of stuff. It was thoroughly vindictive and it was just some whatever halfling thief that I had never even saw before. So I know exactly how hard this kind of forum post hits the player of the Knight you are complaining about. Its a special class of BS to be both griefed and then reported. I will say a bit much to sit on water as well but using the forest is typical, and kinda your own fault for somehow allowing them to know a thief is prowling. Burroughs seemed to always get his pound of flesh, dont recall him ever complaining life was too hard. Anyway. There's a certain irony in complaining about a lack of "valor" when the class being played is designed to bypass it.

Easy to say in hindsight that you would have actually fought m1co. Your high skill ceiling actually lets you get kills against players as a drow thief. The problem with hashing things out after a delete is that we'll never know, will we?

I agree with the prespective that avoiding a thief griefing you is an OOC decision. Its also impossible to engage the thief properly because the thief can just hide. As a reasonably intelligent player, a skilled player, you won't open yourself up to that, regardless of situation.

Dav already alluded to a very simple solution to the problem of cabal characters not engaging their enemies due to this. I'll do you one better. My idea would be anyone bearing an Anathema, Wanted, Threat, Deathmark, or Invader is visible to the members of the associated cabal as long as the flag remains. Its a very simple solution to the RP gap issue you've brought up. I find it very easy to censure or punish someone who can see their established enemy and refuses to engage them. More importantly, it makes it actually possible to engage which is the key. Rather than sitting around waiting for the headsock. I remember when I deleted this character due to a thief doing thief things the response was "you're an idiot, why would you sit out and just let them hit you." They weren't wrong.


The problem with that solution is you won't get a lot of support for that from players who play thieves. You don't roll a thief to engage in cabal warfare, those days are long behind us. Most people roll a thief because they find enjoyment in making other people miserable without having any consequences. There are exceptions, but why else would you play it if you cant stand toe-to-toe in combat with most people with it?

Im curious who would support that suggested measure.

clicked wrong reply button, include below message and this: I rolled a thief because alacrity+envenom was/is pretty badass if you can play and press advantage properly. I've not had any inspiration to roll any other char anyway because the outcome is usually the same: it's either a gimp char that takes a beating regardless or it's OP char that people will quit out from. I tried Jagar Ranger Warlord and it sucked ass to the point where even when playing it properly and keeping weapon advantages etc. still lost me fights because it was just not "strong enough".

I died to Afales with this thief only because of my own stupidity and assumptions (trip instead of sidestep etc) but thief was a pretty strong and fun fighter. I even wanted to make a Duergar Thief Warlord at one point but all the effort to train, gear etc. and have nobody to fight made me discouraged to even bother. You have to realize that the only time this mud has active PK is when its 2am-6am in my timezone and i'm done staying up all night to even get a fight.
That's why losing a chance to fight when there's so few opportunities if at all for days is especially discouraging.

“ there's very very limited amount of players who actually are willing to take a risk”

You knew where he was for a full hour. Why didn’t you take the risk and go attack him? I know what you WANTED to happen, but you could also, equally, have just walked over and typed “murder Tynidas.” You chose not to because it would have been a risk.

But I also get it. I quit out on people that I know will loot me. I’ve died a lot to the ones that I know won’t loot me. Risk vs reward. I can understand why you were afraid to go attack him when you knew where he was for a full hour.

Judging by what VEntana just said, you're a hypocrite, Mico. meme like this could easily be created:

"Whines about people not taking risks
Doesn't take risks"

I’ve also noticed, in my short time here, that after you pillage and upset a bunch of people,, make sure you let everyone know that you’re not coming back and try to call out one or more people, accusing them of various wrongdoing - double points if you can accuse them of the same things you’ve been caught doing.

yup there are a couple of drama queens. you get to notice its the same couple people after a while. top drama queens and forsakens of legion are very strongly correlated historically for whatever thats worth.

That kinda makes sense - the real bummer is that these players are all phenomenal PKers. Their skill and willingness to fight make the game so exciting (and terrifying), it’s a bummer that it also seems to come with such big emotions and big reactions.

Yeah this is getting heated, but another way to look at that is that a lot of people are passionate about this game. I think you would be hard pressed to find a player who hasn’t “rage quit” at least once.

and then there's Rothak who approaches slaughtering people as dispassionately as someone just doing pushups. He just runs through all these guys

it's futile, the people who moan about RP do not actually understand RP. It's just stupid excuses that excuse OOC behavior in-game.

These takes are absolutely illogical, like claiming I am not taking a risk...I am in Valor, attacking Knight gates as a Drow Thief, making myself clearly a visible target. That's taking a risk. Going to River Wood and throwing myself to die at Berserker is not taking a risk, that's suicide and that would not align with Drow Thief RP that's supposed to be cunning in comparison to int 17 Giant, who's also a Berserker and also a protector and leader of Valor and Knights who just happens to forget his duty when it's beneficial for OOC reasons.

They will never understand the point nor problem that's why I will never play again, because I really cba to deal with idiots.

The whole dynamic of forced RP + different races/classes ONLY works if people adhere to their roles. A thief will never be able to function if people just choose OOC decisions over RP.
If you make a Knight and become cabal leader, you should have some responsibility to uphold the highest RP standards and not shit yourself on the presence of drow in your town.

Whatever, at this point I only argued because I used to care about the game, but these players who are justifying such behavior need to reap what they sow. Good luck but I am 100% out.

Last attempt to clarify my take on RP:

When you play Tynidas, the Giant Berserker, Executor of Valor with your description and background, role and talk saying one thing, but you are doing the opposite this is why:

* You're still Joe Brownpants, who makes decisions and thinks like Joe Brownpants would do IRL
* You only become Tynidas the Executor of Valor when you are TALKING, but not when it demands action

This is highly immersion breaking and does not align with character's perceived RP and role in the game when the CHARACTER's thought process is NOT what the character would do but what Joe Brownpants would do, on all of his characters.

I give you an example:

m1coftw would gank people and lol, use dirty schemes for easy wins.
Szrevan the Warlord would play the opposite, he would fight naked to turn easy win into a challenge, he would fight toe to toe vs someone against whom he would never fight toe to toe as non-Warlord. Why? Because you have to forget OOC reasoning and give people what they expect from your CHARACTER.

If you want to do whatever the fuck you want, play Chaotic Evil.
Taking on specific roles require specific behavior even if it contradicts your survival instinct and reasoning.

Read Tynidas background. Look what his words are saying ingame then compare it to BEHAVIOR. It does NOT MATCH.

In any fantasy setting, a courageous Storm Giant Berserker, with a heart of iron, an esteemed Executor of Valor and leader of Knights which virtues claim the highest form of courage and bravery is actively avoiding his hometown when there's a notorious Anathema Drow there pillaging, spreading evil, attacking his holy cabal. That does not make sense from his character AT ALL.

One would imagine int 17 giant that's driven by rage (berserker), heart of iron etc (background), courage and bravery (knights), protector of town and its denizens (executor of valor) would swiftly charge at the Anathema Drow not sit on water for 1 hour waiting for the Drow to come to him. None of that makes any logical sense from any fantasy setting perspective. This is purely OOC driven interaction.

And the sad part is that literally nobody but Merlandox actually gets this. That's how fucked this game has become.

My problem isnt fighting disadvantaged. If a group of people were to invade, I'd expect the Knight to make good faith attempts to repel, or if the item was stolen and secured and defended by a group, i'd expect good faith attempts to recover the item with real risk involved.

The problem with thief as a class is the fact that it can avoid any consequences with the hide skill. You can't imprison what you can't see, you can't engage the thief on a competitive(even if disadvantaged) level. You have a very good chance of just having your gear deleted with no recourse. I've experienced it myself repeatedly. I've petitioned for that to change. The problem is the playerbase overall rejects that idea of changing that because they want that aspect in the game. An aspect you pointed out is pretty much dedicated to griefing.

I'd expect a Justice to go after a wanted player even if it was in a risky location such as Dal Kadar. Thats the duty, same as if an Anathema was in there for a Knight. If its a hiding thief, not much either is going to be able to do about it, the thief can just hide until the cows come home.

I suggested a very easy way to prevent this complaint from coming up in the future, that no one commented on. Based on my previous experience, it'll be wholly unpopular because of why people roll thieves. Even the counter, spice, has been nerfed into near uselessness because people complained about not being able to grief. We can keep hashing this out forever if you want, but none of us are really going to change how we feel about it.

I'm not saying your arguments are invalid or even wrong, but
ask yourself why you are arguing, so vehemently, to force someone into a situation where they have no recourse and are just forced to accept the loss of that hard earned gear. A situation that those arguing the point would never put themselves in, but expect others to do so.

Yes at the end of the day we are playing a game where the founding Imms made a great game with some rough edges and left it to us. It falls to us to discuss, fix it. There are so many things we could do to have a fun thief class that is the envy of other muds. Not going to happen if we just argue.

Lumubella, we discussed this with private and yes, the issue really is that the current playerbase just can not cater to thief that can cause permanent damage with no consequences. That will just make people break their character as in this case because the issue lies in the archaic mechanic.

The positive about this is that there will be much needed changes to keep the cunning playstyle of thief that requires planning to gain the upper hand ambush but will achieve that by permanent loss of equipment that becomes especially frustrating when the thief won't even engage in combat later on, so I guess this topic can now be considered done.

I logged on once with a char that was as old as Kragn. Surely I can leave but it doesn't mean i can't visit.