Shattered Kingdoms

Ok, we already have five pages, so I'm going to keep this as simple and short as my overly verbose self can handle.

Problem: Banishment is too much of a hands off, hard coded solution to what should be an RPed out event.

Solution(s): Stop the random spawning and add bounty NPCs that tribunal leaders "enroll" in the wilderness and cities and can command to be stationed in an area/city or set to roam around it.

Effect(s): People have a chance to avoid the law, creating strategy on both ends. Changes "see crime, banish criminal, feed bank account" to "see crime, banish criminal, make sure NPCs are placed on major traveling paths and critical areas, and move them around when being attacked." Overall, banishment becomes less automatic.

Problem: Banishment is handed out too easily.

Solution: Put a limit on the amount of crimes one or type of crime a person has to commit to banish them.

Effect(s): We will no longer see banishments for one attempted mugging.

Problem: Tribunal leaders only have the option to parole or whole sale pardon criminals.

Solution: Extend the pardon command to specifically target certain crimes by number and then wholly pardon without an argument.

Effect(s): Tribunal leaders can pick and choose what the battles they want to fight, community service RPs can be better played out, and exaggerated crime lists can be better managed.

Currently the banishment system and some of the law system only does to burn bridges and limit RP. Yes, they are punishments, and they should be served accordingly, but they should also be actively kept up on by tribunals instead of letting them sit back after only hitting one command. Often tribunal leaders need no more reason to banish people other than they were born in the wrong country and glow the wrong color. As it stands, it is used in any situation where a character is simply not wanted to be dealt with, which is, at best, lazy. This forces the process to become more active and helps for it to be more engaging.

*applauds*

Ardith, why are you trying to justify all of your deleted character's actions? This is about hard-code over a number of kingdoms, not Arsilan's reign over the Peacekeepers and why you were right. Keep it at that.

*applauds some more*

Thank you Gremlin. QFT

Yeah, Gremlin did a nice job, but the entire banishment system is terrible.

I'll give a specific example right now:

My character is banished in Zhenshi. He has no crimes in Zhenshi. He was banished for mugging Corathir once, after he fled into his city, losing a fight in Uxmal. In exchange for peace and a pardon, I won't kill in his lands. He tells me I can go to hell because he doesn't like me and he' s willing to sacrifice thousands of his citizens to my character just to enforce this if he must.

Now, check this out, he doesn't have to do a damn thing to keep that bargin, because he has hundreds of bounty hunter NPCs that he doesn't care about. Icly, if a lightie isn't concerned about life, that's just terrrrrrrrible RP, but why doesn't Corathir see it as him protecting his kingdom and their citizens? Because the bounty hunter/banish solution is a hardcoded, ooc concept, not because Corathir doesn't value life. They're just nameless, stupid NPCs the player pays for from time to time.

If he had to actually hunt my character down himself whenever I passed into his lands, he'd be more inclined to the aforementioned option. That's why I view tribunals as generally worthless. They don't actually -do- anything, the mobiles do. And it's because of this system. All it does is restrict RP and give players like Ardith a hardon about being 'ubar protectoerz'.


But, in essence, you can't do anything anymore because 'its a crime' and you should be evil, but not evil enough to kill someone or kill a NPC in another land. What weaksauce stuff is this? And as far as Thuban's comments, he didn't play years ago, back when tribunals didn't exist and cabals controlled the kingdoms, so I can't honestly say you know what you're talking about when it comes to city raiding. You really just do not until you've played where it was a common, tri-weekly occurance and involved multiple cabal coordination to defend.

It was more fun. *shrug* Anyone who played back then will agree it was far more epic than today's "I need to bring 9 into the city to attack, and then the defenders only having 2, will run away and hide while we just spam kill guards for a few minutes that mean nothing" Why? Because it was epic, you had all your citizens recalling into the city, dying left and right, and the attacking party didn't have to worry about having infinite, ratio-ally strong mobiles being thrown into them every step of the way. Cabals had to defend their homelands because they could not rely on mobiles to do it. Big 9 on 9 clashes, multiple cabals joining each other to defend/attack, and the guard NPCs were little more than knock over speed bumps from pretty much every kingdom.

One of the more epic battles was the Fist and Hammer of light vs. adepts and midnight council in exile, where the adepts busted out with the dracolich.


All that is now reduced to: outlaw list, t xxx u keeled a mobileszzz!!!, banish xxx. GG NO RE 4 EVAR BANISHED.

This is trash. Anyone who even defends this is just plain silly. Way to go at watering down the game into a series of pre-arranged fights, 9 on 1 ganks, and other assorted lameness. Hey, next, why don't I just emote my character fighting all his battles, hm?

I remember the dracolich fight. That WAS pretty elite.

When I saw 60 new posts in only the last 6 hours, I was like... holy crap! But about half of them were a three-people bitching at each other. I deleted all of those. I don't want to hear anything about "who started it". Any more of that and you'll get your forum account suspended.

Moving on...

1. Banishments are far superior to deathmarks. They aren't going to go away. If you feel otherwise, that's your opinion, but you won't sway me.

2. The current bounty hunters are no more powerful than they were in the days of old. What conceivably makes the system more powerful is that people don't serve their time, so they gather lists of crimes that are 5x longer than we ever had back in the day. This in turn causes bounty hunters to spawn 5x more often than they used to. So that's the "power up", but it's you own fault for letting yourself get broken out of prison. Given that these super long lists are not going away anytime soon, I could see reducing the spawn chances in the wilderness ONLY.

3. I could see putting a limit on banishment such that you are only eligible if you've been verified as having either a high number of crimes or at least a certain number of crimes involving high murder.

4. In retrospect, I don't like making it open season on tribunal members by allowing them to be killed or mugged without being outlawed. However, I would instead propose that you can't be outlawed simply for attacking them. This would stop the tribunal abuse problem, as you normally have more than enough time to flee before landing a final blow.

5. Picking and choosing what crimes to pardon sounds interesting, but that's really more time than I want to spend on this right now.

And Grakus, don't start again about how grand things were in the old days with a necromancer levelling a city. Back then we'd have 5 n00bs get slaughtered at the fountain by released aggro charmies with gas breath. It wasn't friendly to the game. Cities are heavily protected because we would rather you take battles to places where lowbies won't get slaughtered.

Where's the real Dulrik?