Some suggestions.

[Strafe]

I'd like to make a few suggestions, and would greatly appreciate if you could at least consider them. All suggestions are open ideas, and anyone who posts may offer their own two cents on these suggestions.

First, of all. When a player successfully steals something from the store ( successfully meaning they haven't been caught ) the item continues to have the red "high light". From what I'm told, selling or trading it doesn't get rid of the red "high light" thus, giving away your secret.

To me, this makes no sense. Realistically, when you steal something ( and not get caught ) and then try to sell it, there's no way anyone could distinguish it between a purchased item, and a stolen item.

Now, here's my suggestion.

# 1 - First of all, when you steal something successfully ( meaning you don't have an army of guards after you ) the red "high light" should disappear.

# 2 - Some one might try to go back, and sell the item back to the store they stole it from. To prevent this, each purchase comes with a receipt. If a player has a receipt, his or her money will be returned in exchange for the item. If a player does not have a receipt, he or she can exchange the item for something of equal, or less value ( store credit ) This prevents players from just turning right back around, and selling an item they just stole.

# 3 - Clothes should play a bigger role here. When I don a masque and cloak (hood up), I should be unidentifiable, or some what unidentifiable. Lets say I rob a store, but get caught. But, I'm wearing my masque and cloak, meaning that without them, I'm a completely different person, and thus, guards don't want to butcher me when they see me. How ever, if I'm caught wearing that same outfit again, the store owner will recognize me from before, as the thief, and I'll be attacked by a guard. Pretty much, hood and masque on, guards attack you, hood and masque off, you're in the clear.

I'll be adding more later. But for now, here it is. Comments and suggestions are welcome, as I mentioned before.

[Lord Raven]

Even when you successfully steal something, the owner will notice the item went missing, so when it turns up, they'll assume you took it (if you hand the flagged item off to someone else, and they try to steal it, the crime will transfer to them).

I know it doesn't make sense for all shops to magically know that an item is stolen, but realistically, even if you unsuccessfully steal an item, other shops probably wouldn't know about it, so the stolen flag should never be needed. The problem is that if stealing were so easy that you could steal an item from one shop, walk down the street, and sell it to another, the game would be absolutely ruined--there is no good way to balance that.

Right now, for balance purposes, I don't want stealing to be truly profitable; it is currently only good for acquiring items you actually want to use. The eventual goal was to add some channel for fencing stolen goods, so there would be some means for artificially controlling that market. In this case, successfully stolen goods will remain flagged. If anyone has a good alternative system, feel free to voice it, but know that I can't make petty thievery a lucrative endeavor without screwing everything up. Your receipt example also does not address the shop-down-the-street problem.

The clothing issue has been brought up a few times. I do eventually intend to make appearance matter (not only clothes, but skin tone, eye and hair color/style, etc), but that will be a pretty complex system, and I can already come up with all sorts of problems it will generate. At the very least, I will add stealth and discretion bonuses and penalties to existing items. A dark cloak and masque might help you blend into the shadows with a stealth bonus, but anyone dressed like that in a store is going to be treated with extra suspicion, so your discretion skill will suffer.

[Edit: Sorry I have to sound so negative about your first post, but I hear a lot of questions in this vein that sound, to me, like "crime should be easier" or something, and that's crap. I am all for having crime and player criminals in the game, but it should be a challenging gameplay experience fraught with pitfalls and low payoffs. I definitely don't want players choosing to create a criminal just because it's an easy way to make money.]

[Ponystar17]

Hmm, you have a point. However, the idea of 'fences', really just a way of offloading stolen items for a small amount of money so you're not caught with them but don't just lose out and let your enemy pick it up for free, seems to me like an interesting concept.

[The_Imperial]

I do think stealing should be a bit easier than it is now, but with the current combat system setup, the last thing we need is more people running into the vein with a stockpile of goods crashing the server. Something like a alley merchant to pawn off stolen goods for low prices might be cool though.

PS. Pony, I haven't seen ya on Dream Forge in a while, you should stop by

[Larek Dolevic]

Maybe discretion can give experience for -close- failures (close to prevent massive stealing just to grind), but I'm against successful stealing being easy. If anything, there should be a way for devs to alter the stats of their NPCs and perhaps make less observant shopkeeps. Or, y'know, more observant.

[Lord Raven]

I think that the game makes a straight-up awareness check for each character in the area (eventually, it should probably consider distance and facing direction, at least), but this means you can already adjust your shopkeepers if you care to mess with their basic stats.

I don't think stealing should be any easier, but I think we can do what fishing does and give XP for reasonable failure early on (up to proficient, probably). "Reasonable" meaning that you actually had a chance at success; the more reasonable, the more consolation XP.