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.