Shattered Kingdoms

Bump.
Looks like 2/3 of the old player base thought bounty NPCs were lame.

What do current players think?

Lame, but unless another change gets put in to prevent drive-by inn ganks, necessary.

My proposal way back when was to make gate guards more powerful and make all capital cities no-transport (So no summoning in or out, no gating in or out, but recalling is allowed) in addition to removing bounty NPCs.

I mean they just make pvp so much worse. What's the point of playing anything other than a harlie when there's no way to move through a city you're at war with?

Even when I played Aldric, who was supposed to be a badass magelord, I would routinely just turn myself in to the authorities in cities I was AT WAR with to avoid getting banished. It was completely out of character and just made no sense, but the only other way is to spend hours every day spam killing NPCs.

In fact, across all my characters, I have prioritized not getting banished over being successful in individual battles because there is just no way to pvp while bounty NPCs exist. This led to a variety of loltastic tactics like charming people and going somewhere else to kill them, mode stun loots, committing certain crimes during playtimes a faction's leader never played so I could serve my time before they logged in, or only healing my groupmates instead of attacking the enemy, etc. These are all examples of exploiting flaws in the lawlcode, but seriously, the code needs to be revamped.

Oh yeah, I agree. They're absolute cancer.

For the aggressor.

For the defender, however, they're also the only real "defense" that you get to people just gating 2 rooms away from your inn to get free kills in a populated inn. The problem is that I'm pretty sure inns are supposed to be a spot where you can feel moderately safe congregating at, and if bounty NPCs are removed without any other change to static guards, then inns will be literally the least safe place in the entire game to be. At least right now as things are you're guaranteed to have some measure of help if an outlaw runs into the inn to try and kill you.

Take away bounty NPCs, and you're going to have to either A) load static guards into each inn or B) make city sieging take more effort than a gate and two room movements. Loading static guards into the inn means that clutters things up and looks weird, plus means that newbies are likely to get caught in the crossfire of people running into the inn and brandishing aggressive staves. Just removing gate targets from cities isn't enough either, because it would still be really easy in most cases to just gate anchor a PC.

Option B is in my mind the best. Will it happen? I doubt it.

Why don't you write a well thought out post about why bounty NPCs hurt the game, while acknowledging the benefits they provide, and offering a different system that provides the same benefits without all the damage? Make it a poll.

Making cities no transport would be an inconvenience, but you could also put a room near the center of each city that was not an inn, but could be gated into and out of, and was filled with guards. So law-abiding people can get in and out of the city conveniently still.

Like this?

I mean, I guess it wasn't a poll back then, just a post most of the way down the page.

I believe that something like this was tried in Nerina, but was quickly reversed due to player outcry.

Make the thread yourself and be more comprehensive. You can do it!

Just because something has been written in an old posting somewhere, or an idea was contributed in a thread somewhere doesn't mean that the immstaff is going to necessarily remember the subject or the nature of that posting forever. Good ideas can easily be missed when a well-intentioned player could be sitting frustrated thinking "I suggested this a year ago and it got ignored!"

This topic is something we've discussed among the imm-staff before, but that may have been a very different staff at the time. If you have identified something you consider a problems (as appears to have been done here), and if you have identified a solution to it, please don't assume that we all remember your solution, and you hurt nothing by proposing your idea again. On this topic in particular, I'm not opposed to hearing good ideas/suggestions to discuss.