The Criminally Inept and Viable Crime in Shadowbane

Just archiving this here -

The Criminally Inept and Viable Crime in Shadowbane - Zalaster (01-26-02)
Note: This Article originally appeared on Aerynth Atheneaum and is reprinted with permission from the author.

It is no surprise to anyone that knows me that discussions about rogue classes and specifically about thieves are of great interest to me. I have been known almost exclusively online as a thief character. I also will not try to snowball anyone into thinking I am unbiased about such topics. I am the guildmaster of what is most likely the oldest online thieves guild, I served as a guide and class advisor for rogue classes in a (ultimately doomed for other reasons and now defunct) MPORG during its beta and was a long standing Ring Warden for the Safehouse in EQ. I have a lot of experience and a lot of attitude and opinions about thieves and their skills. Some recent comments by Vosx on the official SB boards sent the underclass into an uproar. Worse though, is that every criminally inept player/character now seems to think they have license to spew ignorance throughout the community.

Don't get me wrong here. There are some folks that offer hope for the underclass. The Penshire Street Bakery being a prime example. Every class however has their bastard children and thief classes are not immune. Does it really matter if you can take an item out of someone's pack? To the thieves with no sense of professionalism I suppose it does. The arguing on the Shadowbane forums supports that. Take a minute however and look at things from a different angle. Shadowbane has been built with player accountability as a core concept. No one wants a game to be a grief-fest. In the end it takes little skill to 'clickpocket'. It takes even less ambition. Shadowbane is to be a game where epic tasks and battles take place. A glowing example of this through the eyes of a thief could be taken from the lore of the sword Shadowbane. The recounting of its theft from the dwarves is one of my favorite pieces of Shadowbane lore. An adventure like that is what I have been searching for in a game.

Unfortunately though it seems the current tidal wave of moronic outbursts about thievery may wash away that hope. The squeaky wheel may get the grease, but it is just as likely to be taken off and discarded as something that cannot be fixed. What I am saying is calm yourselves and make intelligent comments when appropriate. Be part of a solution and not part of the cacophonous whine. When I see people post things such as "Wouldn't it r0x to be able to pickpocket all that guys stuff without him knowing" it makes me want to make a minotaur warrior and find the little punk and stampede his toon into oblivion once the game goes commercial. Being a thief means weighing the risk to reward ratio in every situation. Thieves are not made to fight with. They may be the masters of the dirty tricks/dark lighting/close quarters/ambush type fight. This is great as WP has stated all along that each class will have a situation in which they should hold the favor in. Due to their general ineffectiveness in direct combat the thief needs to weigh his larcenous opportunities carefully.

There are three main thresholds in larceny failing, succeeding but being immediately discovered and success. Lets say that 50% of all thefts are foiled. Of the remaining 50% nearly all successful thefts leave evidence which may eventually lead to the capture of the thief. There is only at most a 2 in 10 chance of pulling off a theft that will be more beneficial than detrimental to the actual perpetrator. Is it any wonder that organized crime operates the way it does? The real money is in using the fear of future crimes, brutality or other loss to extort money from legitimate businesses... Keep this in mind you aspiring thieves guilds. Back to the point though, theft mechanisms in a game should have at least this rating of difficulty to discourage the amatures. That is the first mistake most games make. They make it far too easy to steal, and far too light a set of consequences if you are caught. Set the bar very high and you eliminate a lot of griefers right there. If it is very difficult and involved to steal, then it will happen infrequently. (Sounds like something I heard about sieges once.) Let the folks whining about pickpocketting chew on that for a while.

Pickpocketting has added very little value to any game. It is just another method by which to push a button and add to you inventory. It is not like true pickpocketting. Game mechanics can never match the intricacies and contingencies that a true pickpocket operates within. I deeply believe that pickpocketting is the single biggest reason for the plight of the thief class in MMORPG's today. It is far too easy to index levels and skills and perform a yes/no function (that is too easy and thus overused) to placate thieves or ban it outright then it is to build things that approach the reality of pickpocketting. The other thing that games do not take into account is the time/frequency factor of pickpocketting. Most games as soon as your button relights you can try again with the same victim. A professional pickpocket would never do this or overwork an area. Imagine this as if the game allowed you to attempt to pickpocket randomly up to 5 times per 24 hour period and not allowing you to attempt to pickpocket the same victim twice. (Better yet - don't tell the masses about autofailing after X attempts or multiple attempts on the same victim and let the foolhardy amateurs pay dearly for their stupidity.) Its too difficult to code and there are too many things for a developer/designer to think about to waste that many resources on an action that in general has very little overall beneficial effect in the game. So heck with it, keep pickpocketting out, I am fine with it.

I have read and been very impressed with the PSB's strongbox/safe idea. I have also made my own post on ways to lessen or eliminate grief from theft. I will not restate them here, but take the time to look at them if you wish. I admit that I personally believe that a thief without theft should not be named a thief. To me to have a thief class as opposed to a mugger or some other moniker, that class has to have a method by which to take goods, moneys or information against the owner's will without necessitating the use of force. Information theft is much more the arena for spies or infiltrators so I will not address that here. The theft of goods and moneys however have some traditional factors that are often overlooked.

The grandtheft of money is usually followed by the immediate self imposed banishment of the perpetrator or by the voluntary hiding of the jackpot until such a time as it is safe to access it. Those thieves that do not abide either of these are generally caught and pay a high price for their actions. The theft of goods requires the fencing of these items since you do not want them in your possession should the authorities or owners come calling. A fence generally gives no more than a small percentage of the items actual worth. The other limiting factor to theft is demographics. To take an example, in one of the old DMG's from D&D there were guidelines to how many thieves could operate in a area for a given amount of population. A corollary could be if the number of thieves in a world fragment, nation, town, etc. exceeded a certain ratio then all the guard/protector type NPC's (other than those directly owned by a thieves guild) could go auto KOS on thief class characters. Look at it like Rudy Giuliani's tenure as NY mayor only more lethal.

With any number of things such as demographic controls, required time investments to effect a theft, truly high difficulty thresholds, denied access to TOL's, denied access to funds, denied direct use of stolen items and NPC fences much can be made of checks and balances to theft. Anything less than Guild vs. Guild grand-thefts (The crime equivalent to sieges perhaps?) should not be pursued to my way of thinking. Another way to look at it is this: pickpocketting is the thiefly tradeskill. Since tradeskills are not going to be in Shadowbane why should pickpocketting? Who knows. maybe the fence NPC that the Thieve's Band is already said to have is slated to be a hireling that doesn't make a set type of item, but has the ability to 'produce' a variety of items to represent what normal petty crime would draw from the resources of the area and redistribute. Of course you could expect that there would be an offset in the maintenance cost of this kind of NPC. We could sit here and speculate all day like this though.

Many, many of us hope for a game where there is an actual 'thief' archetype, even though some individual's perception of what that entails may differ. Whether this is the game that finally gets thieves right is yet to be seen. Shadowbane is Wolfpack's baby though. I may make a suggestion from time to time, but I wouldn't tell them what they have to do. I suggest all you wanna-be l33t thieves don't either. Maybe then we thieves won't be seen as just griefers who don't kill. Then again, maybe I hope for too much from my fellow criminals and the community as a whole.

~

Talk it over with other 'canters' here.

The Legacy of NWN, Elvis and Human Nature - Zalaster (7-31-00)

I wrote this back in 2000 and I am just archiving it here.

The Legacy of NWN, Elvis and Human Nature - Zalaster (7-31-00)

Note: This Article originally appeared on our Shadowbane Affiliate Site, Aerynth Atheneaum
This morning I was chatting online with Greyden Winter, member and former GM of PRoW. (Which used to be called the Pirates of Neverwinter back in the day.) At one point in our conversation he asked me, "Why is everyone so determined to hold onto NWN?"
My reply, with little real thought, was: "Not to hold onto NWN the game, but a community of like-minded folks, friends." It continued on for a length after that, but you understand the general direction I took.
While what I said is essentially true, throughout the day I kept coming back to that question. Then it struck me. Many of the attitudes of oNWN’ers (to borrow a term from another development company’s message boards) mimic those of the fans of rock stars who died in their prime. It seems human nature to want more from a good experience. Let me take Jim Morrison as my first example.
Denial
While I was in the Navy, I had a friend that was a devoted Doors/Jim Morrison fan. He would quite convincingly argue that there was no evidence beyond the death certificate that Jim Morrison was dead. He would continue on to say that the only people to see Jim’s body were his wife and the coroner, and that since his wife disappeared a few years later, it was probably a cover up and that they were living together somewhere in South America. While I have no clue whether any of what he said was true, he went into so many elaborate details that it sounded plausible.
When NWN initially was shut down, a common outcry was that AOL would rue their mistake and welcome us back soon. Then when it was clear that this wouldn’t happen; some thought of bringing legal action, thereby either forcing AOL to reopen the gates or imposing punitive damage upon AOL. Both were the products of the denial that the fate of our beloved game was not under our control. In some corners of the now far-flung community, denial still runs rampant. Denial and its close cousin Anger are often the first emotions to surface.
Anger
The conspiracy gurus have it in for Courtney Love. Quite obviously, I presume to their way of thinking, since Kurt Cobain was bopping along quite nicely and screaming out the songs they loved while single, that once he got married and died from a shotgun blast to the head it was his wife’s fault. Depending on the source, she did everything from driving him to it to actually pulling the trigger. She is the target of a great deal of misplaced anger.
The NWN fan-base expressed many corporate conspiracies (though not nearly as outrageous as the Courtney Love theories above)that ‘proved’ how AOL, TSR, the game staff, the CIA, or whatever group the particular mouthpiece was angry with, were using this as a ploy to further their own nefarious ends. I’ll let you all in on a secret, 99% of the companies/developers out there are looking to make some kind of profit. (I love those ForgottenWorld folks though for bucking the trend.) This kind of anger is understandable, up to a point. When people are faced with the loss of something beloved, they naturally seek out someone to blame and vilify. In time signs of the wound may remain, but it is usually covered by something else.
Unadulterated Nostalgia
Look at the fans of Elvis. They don’t care that their idol had gotten fat and old or that he hardly ever performed anymore. They don’t care about anything but the memories they have of days gone by and the experiences they had. All the oddities and bizarreness that were part of Elvis are either forgotten or enshrined. He is on their walls, in all his oil on velvet glory, looking how they want him to look. He is and always will be the King to them.
This is the category that most of us oNWN’ers are in nowadays. Nearly forgotten are the memories of not being able to get in because AOL went unlimited and the game held a mere 500 at a time. The drac lines, being passed hacked items and landing in jail, long queues at events and any other number of frustrations that just drove us crazy are fast becoming fuzzy in the collective mind. The ability to look objectively at what was going on with the game and where it was headed has become more difficult with each passing year. I say this nearly three years to the day from the closing. What is vivid in the mind is the death matches won, pearl items earned, whom you slaved, the first LS+3 (long sword +3 for the uninitiated) you stole, or whatever is fond to you. Lets take a look at what the interim has taught us though.
A Legacy of Nerf
When AOL went unlimited it strained the seams of the entire network. The influx affected NWN greatly. It was increasingly difficult to get into the game. The game was besieged by newbies, and I'm not talking about people just new to the game. I mean the people who would never learn. The game could not have survived as an 'everything for everyone' enterprise without changes. There was already the institution of no jumpers allowed on certain quests, even though the quest was in a PvP zone, and a growing trend towards nerfing.
I believe that had the game continued it would have become spoken of as many speak about UO and EQ today. The mushrooming of the number of players and the collective cacophony of whine that is generated by those numbers has had that effect in most every game that has tried to be everything for everyone. I know of only a few graphical ORPG’s that have had the balls to not try to live up to the mediocrity of this model: Shadowbane and ForgottenWorld, two entirely different games, both of which are still in development.
Acceptance?
Because NWN was cut down in its prime, so to speak, we are left with our nostalgia intact. NWN will always be more akin to the legendary Jimi Hendrix than the graying (and frequent victim of comedians everywhere) Keith Richards.
Now, please don’t misinterpret what I am about to say. If I had the option, I would play NWN just as it was when I started, minus the $200-$300 monthly AOL bills of course… In the end, I will steal a phrase from Def Leppard and add my own twist to it. I say about Neverwinter Nights: "it’s better to burn out, then to be nerfed away."

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