Stealing and mmos

I think what you can pickpocket in real life makes a lot of sense as to what you can pickpocket in a game. It would take some real skill to steal someone's belt without them noticing...let alone a sword. Maybe if you could swap it somehow without them noticing...but once again skill.

It depends a lot on what is your target audience, but many people will probably perceive stealing as a bit harsh.

If at all, stealing should only be permitted while the victim player is logged in and there should be a reasonable risk (not like breaking into apartments while players are offline in one well-known game). Stealing equipped items deprives reality somehow, and the mere possibility of losing the the super-godsword to a thief is a major downturner.
You'll have to be very careful, or your customers will be pissed off, and you'll go bankrupt.

Im not a fan of MMOs but in the short period I tried WoW I always asked my self why I cann't steal items and gold from the corpse of dead players. As long as there are banks available in game and guild members are not allowed to steal I think its a good punishment for deth.

In all honesty how could this been seen as anything other than griefing?

Could you give a bit more background on where you are going for this? If your goal is to say "because you can steal in real life you should be able to steal in an MMO", then will you have penalties since stealing is after all a crime?

If your goal is just to add "gritty realism" I wouldn't expect this play mechanic to go down very well. I personally wouldn't want to play a game like this. Remember we play games to escape reality and if I have to worry about another player being able to swipe my swag off of my toon I'd rather just pass that game along.

If you have a well thought out system and have stealing integrated into the play mechanic then possibly it could work. However I still think that no matter what you do a system that actually allows players to steal from each other probably won't be accepted very well.

Stealing seems like it would be major turn off if it's allowed for high value items or ones the player is currently using. Even more so if you do like some MMO's and allow player to buy (legally) gold or items with actual cash. I know I wouldn't be to keen to continue playing if I spent hours playing to get good armor etc only to have someone rip it off in a heart beat.
There will no doubt be a subset of players who do little more than steal from other players.

I think stealing stuff out of the player's inventory is fair game. This includes anything not equipped right now, but should have a downside of making detection of said event easier based on the weight of the object (stealing the spare sword would be harder than stealing a few herbs). I also think Kambiz has a good point that looting a corpse is a very good mechanic, so long as it has some mechanic to attempt to protect someone killed by a rat vs someone killed in pvp or even one pvp corp vs another pvp corp. Because it would upset many new players if they died and had their wreck looted by some random passer by who had no reason not to loot.

Though, depending on how "hardcore" you want to make the game, there might need to be a mechanic to return stolen items if the player detects them on the thief.

It has to be a game. If you go somewhere and someone starts robbing you, are you going to be willing to play that game? Will you be able to win? What if you do? Do you get to take their stuff? Kill them? Send them to jail? Debuff them? Demand a boon?

What's the point, other than to let elite player's rob newbies blind, and guarantee that a level 7 guy walking through a crowd will come out naked on the other side?

Well I was thinking that if caught stealing you would get a bounty put on your head to let other players hunt you down. Also if you get a high enough bounty you cannot go near guards or talk to merchants or else they will throw you in jail. So if you do decide to start stealing from people you have to accept the consequences such as people hunting you down, cannot talk to honest merchants, and have to be aware of guards.

To prevent people from picking on the lower lvls you could always make it a tier thing. Where when you reach lvl 30 thieving you can only steal from people lvl 15-45(although experience will vary depending on the level).

And also your equipped items (usually the best) cannot be stolen. How do you manage to take off someones plate armor without them knowing about it?

Any problems with this set up?/suggestions

EVE Online (MMO) has a system sort of like what you describe (with the difference being that you have to destroy their ship or forcibly convince them to jettison their ship's goodies). I guess some people like it. I didn't really enjoy EVE that much, unfortunately.

In Ultima Online, you could steal from other players and their corpses. I was a big fan of stealing and looting. It gave the world a real sense of danger. Additionally, it was fun ushering well-equipped adventurers into a certain death.

In contrast to WoW, UO had a fundamentally different philosophy about items and gear. In WoW, people work days and weeks gathering equipment sets. Improving your gear is one of the main ways that the characters grow and advance, especially after hitting the level limit. Stealing and looting in WoW would very much ruin the game as it would mean crippling the characters and wasting months of hard work.

UO, on the other hand, did not have such a huge variation in equipment. For example, the best warriors used mostly the same swords as beginners. Losing your whole battle gear was common. You just went back to your bank vault or local shop and got new swords and spell reagents.

In my opinion, both ways work well. Just don't take things from the players that they can't afford to lose.

I'm a Eve player and I like the game a lot, so maybe my opinion is biased: stealing/looting other players adds a lot to the game.

If you can steal from another player then PvP/Pirating is made a viable work (as pirates can get money stealing or ransoming their victims). Also, it makes logistics important (as moving things around is a risk) and makes to play as a group important (some people move the items in freighters while some other people do the escort work, exploring for ambushes, killing the pirates,...).

When players can be looted, people tend to play in a more intelligent way and you avoid the mindless zergs that happen in other games (like WoW Battlegrounds for example). If you can be looted you have to change your mentality and use only what you can afford to lose (or be prepared to the worst and know there's a high risk in using what you can't afford to lose).

My 2 cents.

Yeah. I'm a crazy biased EVE player. And my other 2 cents is that looting works best with an economy built around it. If you can loot your 1000 herbs for potions vs harvest your 1000 herbs, all is good. If you can loot your Vorpal Lightsabre of the Sloth just as easily as get it off a drop, all is good. BUT, if you can loot said Vorpal Lighsabre of the Sloth just as easily as 1 herb, something is wrong.
The point of looting in a game should NOT be to make it easier for a player to get something. It should be a way for a player who likes to do stealth to aquire an item as easily as someone who makes an all damage build. Because classic gameplay require stealth players to have really light armor, possibly really high burst damage, and thus dead if they don't oneshot something from the shadows, it is hard to get kills on larger creatures in the same time as a damage spec character.
if it takes X time to get a 1% drop item, then based on how long your pickpocket skill takes to go off (Y), you should have a ~Y/X * 1% chance of snagging said item. Thus the average time to get an item via either way is about the same. But that still isn't fair, because the mission runner has to get 2 of the item to insure maybe he has 1 in the end. Or is it? a common item should be easy enough to get that if you lose a few, oh well. A less common item should take enough tries to grab that you shouldn't worry too much about moving it short distances without it equiped.
This rewards people who play (and don't just sit around AFK in town with all their loot in a bag). It rewards the lucky steal of a good item, because it should be harder to ever get a chance to even try to roll a steal. And it isn't any better (posibly still worse) than trying to run for the item itself off whatever drops it.

Quote:

Original post by Shadowwoelf When do you think that stealing from other players is acceptable? Should you be able to steal everything on him or only what hes holding in his backpack? For example should you be able to steal the Armour he has equipped with his "godsword" or just the gold in his pouch or should you only be able to steal certain items like gold etc.?

I skimmed the post in the time it took to load the reply button. I already saw EVE mentioned, but I my instant reaction was every penny, every ounce of loot, every thing that a player owns should either be protected (ie, he goes through lengths to see to it that it isn't lost) or lost (ie, he does something stupid and gets it taken away) just as it is in EVE.

The capacity for unrequested PvP (not RvR, which I consider far too carebear) is one of the first things I consider when downloading a new MMO. The second is "is unrequested PvP worth doing?" I don't see it being so if you don't get loot from it, and not just pittance. If I put forth the effort required to kill someone with a "godsword," I should get a reward that's worth the work and he should be penalized for this defeat... but I think I'm something of a hardcore gamer (at times, EVE even felt carebear - though it certainly wasn't).

Also, I love the feeling of getting looted, "growing up" and stumbling across my looter now that I'm 20 levels (alright, a T2 frig or something) above him and back with a vengeance. I think the ability to have such a situation enriches games.