Thievery ability (and some stuff about game economics)

[The Crazy Animal]

I was hoping that perhaps while fixing the thieves something could be done to make the thievery ability worth using perhaps increase the ability to do a few other things like, shoplift from stores, rob shops and banks, rob monsters of items and or cash, and of course the normal robbing of users.

TCA

[DeathCow]

Ues it can........and AND,,,,its a very powerful ability...which it needs to be..Its gonna take alot of thought as to how it can be worth its exp value......cause te classes that have it pay out the ass.

[Bong]

Make it more minor, and have it give a percentage increase in cash from each mob? Maybe correlate it to stealth, to provide incentive to race & class stealth chars? Eventually it will lose it's usefulness, as perstealth and more money roll in, but so do kicking and bashing (debateable).

[The Crazy Animal]

To really make thievery worthwhile it has to be tied to the general economics of the area that the thief is stealing from. If it is a poor village the reward is small and the risk is small. If it?s a nobles castle then the reward is high and the risk is high.

I really think thought that thievery needs to be a skill that stays current and useable for characters that have it. Like DC said the classes that have it pay out the ass for it. I agree partly that it should lose some usefulness but I see this more from the perspective that each area has a targeted character level range that that area is designed for and the economics of each of these areas needs to affect this ability?s usefulness. At what point in the game does stealing from poor villages become useless because the amount paid for services and good that are useful to the characters no longer cost within that economic range. Players with skills like this should be guided to bigger targets over the course of the game as the pay out grows so should the risk involved.

I think some of the ways that you could have thievery on monsters work is that they have 2 items lists stuff that drops and stuff that they have that is just able to steal. This way you could have a quest to say steal pardon the mmud reference thrag?s gold teeth. This is an item that normally worthless to most people to have drop but in the context of a quest could make a thief a necessity. What types of things should be on these steal lists: rare keys, potions, jewelry, extra weapons, money? the value of these things should be on par with the risk associated with trying to get them.

Shoplifting ? I always thought shoplifting should be in the game I would say if it went in the difficulty of stealing an item should be based on its value. This would logically depict how much attention the shopkeeper pays to potential customers when they are looking at them.

Robbing shops ? while this currently can?t be done I think this could play into the economic model of the realm. In majormud shops had an unlimited amount of capital so they could buy any items the players wanted to sell. I think an improvement that could utilize this would be to give shops a budget that is refilled by a slow regen and or refilled by players buying items. While robbing a shop the system would slowly give a portion of that max budget to the thief each round he stood in the shop. With each round that the thief stays in the room the higher the chances that the shop keeper will attack and or guards would be summoned. Depending on the budget of the shop would depend on the difficulty of the guards and the number of them summoned.

Robbing banks I was thinking that this could be worked similar to the way shops could work but budget would be matched to the amount of capital in accounts in the bank. The chances for guards to appear are larger and quicker and tend to be more dangerous.

TCA

[DeathCow]

Its a good idea, but before I could commit to any sort of shoplifting or the such I really need a better grasp on how in realm economics will work.  I could try to plan this but, I'd likely fail...so instead I intend to build the realm in ways that require more money than majormud.  IE more things to spend money on, more expensive upgrades...so on then I'll look into ways to create new money based on the outcome of the realm.  By the time I have the realm nearly done it should be more clear exactly how commerce will work, and the role items and their value will have on the game.  Personally I think that there should be lots of really nice, but extremely expensive things to buy, and dozens of ways to create cash.  Many of these ways should require special skills, such as theiving preaching and maybe even taxation.

[The Crazy Animal]

Your right with that there definitely needs to be a sound economic model that supports all the nice features in the game. It would definitely be easier to give you ideas if I knew more about what you have planned. I'm going to put some thoughts into some economic system devices that might help out but I'll post them in their own thread since it really doesn't have much to do with thievery other than figuring out ways to remove capital from the players :)

TCA

[DeathCow]

Honestly...I haven't planned that much about economics.  I know how i generally feel about it..but other tyhan that I figure I'm going to have to address these issue late term...other wise I'll fail miserably at it.  It a very complicated math problem with dozens and dozens of varibles.  I don't even know everything that will be involved with it yet.  Once I've delveloped things more then I'll have a beter idea and will be able to think of these things more.

[The Crazy Animal]

Have you thought about making a material driven economy? Where the costs of goods are partially dependent or offset based on the amount of materials of the individual types the players as a realm buy and sell. The other portion of cost of items is then explained by the quality of the item and the quality any enchantments on the item which both could be set by additional demand tracking variables. Then all the variables are set against an inflationary/deflationary model of ideal consumption based on class, level, and number of players. I?m not sure if you?d be interested in a system like this but I always thought it would be cool to have a system that changes based on the size and tastes of a realm. I guess technically if you had a system like this, you could calculate a shop or areas profit and maybe determine some of the types or quality of the things they sell in that area. I don?t want to continue spouting off about this though if it isn't something that you?re interested in since it would be a very long post. What did you have in mind for how the economics would be handled?

TCA

[DeathCow]

Agg, I can't say that I had thought about doing that.  I thnk your trying to give me an tumour.

[The Crazy Animal]

<Grin> well maybe not a tumor but certainly a rampantly growing mass of ideas that could congeal into a self-expanding system. So I guess technically you could call it a tumor?. Think about it though because it does have some advantages over the standard method of designing a MUD economy as it brings in a few more dynamic aspects to the game that are basically unheard of in MUDs.

TCA

[DeathCow]

Well.  It would be very difficult to actually go through and attempt to make a supply/demand econmics system based on whatever material an item was made on.  Well, maybe not difficult, but certainly time consuming.  It is something I wouldn't mind adding, but it would take alot of beta testing and debugging as I'm certain that it have abusable traits to begin with.  It be even more complicated when/if I tried to make that model based on number of players.

[The Crazy Animal]

I think in the beginning of creating the system it would be more time consuming than anything else but luckly it could be added in stages. I?m sorry this is a long post I cut it down as much as I could with out cutting out the good bits.

As for any of the market traits that are abusable would only be that way until the market rebalances it self. I would suggest making the shops do the following to combat any abuse: buy at a markdown price that is below market price, sell at a markup price that is above market price, and have a max budget to buy user goods and have item slot have a max stocked amount. With these precautions set in place, it becomes a little harder to corner and individually affect the market. If you also have supply/demand working in the shops for item quantities then that also creates a secondary layer that will help deceive users that are attempting to abuse the system.

As for how buggy it might be I think this would, largely play on when and how much of the supporting system goes in first and exactly how it is implemented into the game. I would think that the backbone of this system could be used to fuel a few other interesting systems that you would probably will like like too.

Thinking more about the inflationary/deflationary model based on players it would have to be secondary anyway as you need a fair amount of variables that wouldn?t be available until after the supply and demand portion is done. At any rate you probably can get around with out using it or maybe find an easier way of setting the rates. It might be enough just to set the inflationary/deflationary model based on the total liquid assets in the realm. So say for every x above y that exists in the realm prices go up by z or something to that effect. This would make it so that players would want to pick up money or otherwise remove it from the realm to keep the prices down as the game goes on.

As for some of the extra benefits one of the bigger ones is based on having the materials as integral properties in the game you could set up item creation so that it uses inheritable item schemes. I?ve seen this done in a few concept muds and it?s a very interesting idea that makes a few things possible that normally isn?t like walking into a blacksmiths shop and getting the blacksmith to make you any weapon you have the cash and materials to make. The other neat thing it does it allows you to make a single item and have a version compiled out of each material so you end up spend less time imputing items that have multiple versions like broadswords. Which you know from mmud we had iron (normal), fine, silvery, golden, and glowing among the most common.

How this works is there is a materials list that contains the properties of each material. Then the items are classified into schemes describing the properties of the items. The last lists needed are for quality, magical enchantment, and a final list for special modifiers like serrated or poisoned. Finally, each of these individual data sets then effect the base item model in the scheme, resulting with an item that has xyz properties.

From the user view, all of this happens in the back end once the proper coding and scripts are set up. After that they can walk in to a blacksmith shop and get a custom weapon that is user unlockable and then go have it enchanted. Hell you could even have it set so the blacksmith and enchanters get better as they make more items so cool stuff would appear to be released between content additions.

TCA

[DeathCow]

Npcs that can level up.  :p 

I know eventually I'm gonna go for the 'item material'+'item enchantment'+'item type'=item kinda thing, but certainly not to start with.  I have been working out the values and such but that was more boring than I had originally hoped and I moved to spending my time on creating specific NPCs and a little reading.

There are lots of different ways I could make players directly involved with the market prices, but atm without having a whole game to look at I really can't tell which one will suit the game best.

[Bong]

I can see it now:

"Would someone PLEASE pick up all the silver in Duergars, because I can't afford this bone amulet anymore :("

The whole item thing has been done in mmud, as well. I forget the name of the board, no wait it was operation mindcry. He had at least 2 NPC's who could make items if you brought him the right materials. You could start with a longsword, then get it to +2, +3, +4...then use that item as a component for something better. While it was annoying at times, it also provided a good waste of a day, which I believe is all anyone who plays MMUD is really looking for, somewhere to waste down time.

[DeathCow]

Sounds good to me.