In the next few minutes I'll be rolling out a number of updates to the Justice system. The intent is to place a heavier burden on chronic offenders while leaving minor criminals largely untouched.

Your criminal history will now decay over time. This was part of the old system (That was replaced in 2007 or so) and was intended to be part of the new system, but the reduction was only being applied to a single fine instead of permanently removing charges from your history. Remember that each justice area tracks your record separately - so if the heat gets too high in one city it might be time to move to another for awhile.

Prior crimes will drive you fines up notably faster than before. This means if you have a long criminal record you will see your fines spike up across the board, but they'll fall over time now that decay works.

Murder, Endangering the Public, Forbidden Practices and Crimes Against the State will all carry much heavier fines than before.

Paladins will no longer see their fines modified (up or down) based on their soul state.

Plead Innocent has been nerfed. The size of your fine is now a much larger factor in your success rate, prior petty crimes are a slightly larger factor and prior felonies were notably lessened (due to a bug fix). Necromancer with high Social Outrage are exceedingly unlikely to be found innocent. If you are found guilty after pleading innocent your fine will be increased much more than before.

Characters below 10th circle have had their fines capped at one gold per fine.

-Raesh

"Ever notice that B.A.'s flavor text swells in direct proportion to how much one of our characters is getting screwed?" - Brian Van Hoose

Sounds great other than it being harder to murder someone and walk away with no fine :(

This also sounds like a whole bunch of awesome, aside from the Endangering the Public fines coming from while using an AoE during a town invasion. I'm kinda at the point of not even using them to fight in that situation due to the difficulty of seeing whether or not they've been OK'ed by the guard during a given invasion. Maybe at some point a command could be added to JUSTICE to check the status of harmful AoEs in such situations? JUSTICE AOE or JUSTICE ENDANGER or something like that.

But thanks for the updates and the decay and all that!


> hum tuneless
You hum a tuneless tune.

Too bad thief pretend titles don't open up a second justice pool for them. 'That wasn't me, it was my twin. Those moonmages can't be trusted I tell ya!'

When you are doing research and attempt to cast a spell, it gives you a warning that it'll interrupt your research and tells you to repeat in X seconds to continue.
Could a similar check be added to casting a spell that would endanger the public to see if you are in an active justice area, and have a similar warning telling you to repeat the action to continue?

I'm not sure how often people purposely cast AoE spells in justice areas, if that extra prompt would get annoying..
Just seems like it would help against people who might accidentally cast an AoE not knowing the effect, or casting it during an invasion seconds after justice is restored.

Heh.. so yeah, the system's quite a bit harsher than it was.

My recall warrant said my fine was gonna be like 1.5 gold (I think I got caught twice in shops and once by the sailor in Haven)... even with pleading guilty they got me for like 7.5 gold.

Is/could there be a way to tell how bad your reputation is? Don't mean it to be as descriptive as "You should expect your fine to be 5x your warrant amount with a guilty plea", but something like "recall/warrant reputation" returning something like.. "You are considered at large/an uncommon criminal/a disturber of the peace/a lawless SOB in the city/province of <blah>".

Segmere Freat

>Is this going to punitively punish thieves?

>It was specifically intended not to. In the short term? Yes. They're going to have a ton of priors and that's going to blow their fines up a fair bit. In the long run, once decay is able to smooth things out it'll be much better for them than the current system.

My question was kind of angling to 'thieves are forced to steal to circle' combined with 'it is unreasonable to say steal without ever getting caught' given the current stealing mechanics. So thieves will (almost always) have a lot of priors?

>>While waiting for things to reach equilibrium

I can't speak to how fast decay happens, but if a lot of people are in the "critical" range right now, could having a spontaneous fire at each province's record halls (clearly not organized by any guild of Thieves) but a fair/reasonable way to wipe the slate clean and get things rolling with a fresh start?

---

Uzmam! The Chairman will NOT be pleased to know you're trying to build outside of approved zones. I'd hate for you to be charged the taxes needed to have this place re-zoned. Head for the manor if you're feeling creative.

You're thieves. Go steal your reparations.

I considered a mass amnesty and, at this time, I don't think it's the way to go. It shouldn't be that hard to work around and for the people we don't want to hurt (thieves) the penalty didn't go up that much. Meanwhile, giving amnesty to a mass murderer would undermine a lot of these changes.

As mentioned this bug was particularly unfortunate because it works directly counter to what I was trying to do.

-Raesh

"Ever notice that B.A.'s flavor text swells in direct proportion to how much one of our characters is getting screwed?" - Brian Van Hoose

Have you tried another area that you don't have as much history with?

-Raesh

"Ever notice that B.A.'s flavor text swells in direct proportion to how much one of our characters is getting screwed?" - Brian Van Hoose

Not to sound unsympathetic, but I don't consider it a design failing to not make every area primal to train every skill at once. Even setting aside p4 and teleportation, high level players can get to anywhere in for provinces within a few minutes. Thieves more so than most.

Now if there are no other viable cities at all at that skill range, that is a legitimate concern.

-Raesh

"Ever notice that B.A.'s flavor text swells in direct proportion to how much one of our characters is getting screwed?" - Brian Van Hoose

How often are you getting arrested?

-Raesh

"Ever notice that B.A.'s flavor text swells in direct proportion to how much one of our characters is getting screwed?" - Brian Van Hoose

I get arrested every other day depending on how much I play. Stealing is the one skill I actually like training so I train it whenever I can. But it really just comes down to how lucky I am at any given time.

>I have to steal from Haven, Dirge, Arthe, and Crossing to just hit 24/34 in stealing experience. I can't just up and move since there is really no viable places to move stealing anymore at 700+ ranks. I should not have to relocate to the abandoned wasteland known as Muspari to lock stealing.

>If I want to lock stealing outside of Muspari I'd pretty much have to steal from every shop in Theren to Shard and I'm just not willing to do that. I dont even consider Shard since the dumb place closes at night.

>Where do I move to when I already steal from the better part of the world? And what about in another 100 ranks when I lose even more places to steal from?

All of this. I bought JJ to travel to muspari for stealing runs, simply because spending an hour to train 1 skill (okay, 2 if you count the pitiful stealth you get shoplifting) to get not even mindlocked. When I do Shard, wolf, arthe, haven, rossman, dirge, leth, shard (sneak in the east gate isn't too bad), and hib, I don't mindlock. There is no other place to go to let some city decay. Now, I think this update would be fair if you adjust shop inventories to carry higher tier items, making it possible for people who steal to mitigate their priors by shifting between provinces. I've capped 15 shops between Crossing and Arthe. It gets really painful.

Jalika

>>adjust shop inventories to carry higher tier items

Or maybe some way to make the existing shops/items harder to steal from? Sort of like a chaos symbiosis for stealing.

It used to be if hiding was higher then stealing it would help. I think it was only lower ranks though. No idea if still applicable. That was pre-3.0/1.

[20:11] Chatter[Arathael] Usually only get skill when it's successful.
[20:13] Chatter[Morpion] Thats why Arathael has 0.00 ranks in Getting Girls
[20:14] Chatter[Arathael] =(

The rule is (or was) that hiding bonuses the attempt unless your hiding is worse than your stealing, in which case hiding is a penalty.

Im unaware of any changes to this being mentioned, especially since 3.whatever didn't touch stealing, except to rename the skill so maybe to encourage development beyond a shallow one-off and one day it won't fail the "should even be a skill" test.

---

>Forgive my snark, but welcome to the life of a warrior mage.

I think much of the discussion here is not a dislike of the new changes, but identification of another problem. Stealing experience really needs a boost. The same amount of experience from pilfering is applied from before the expansion of pool sizes we saw in the late 2000's (I'm talking way before DR 3.0, when your mindstate could still get frozen).

Nikpack

>I think much of the discussion here is not a dislike of the new changes, but identification of another problem. Stealing experience really needs a boost. The same amount of experience from pilfering is applied from before the expansion of pool sizes we saw in the late 2000's (I'm talking way before DR 3.0, when your mindstate could still get frozen).

Seconded. I don't have any problems with the fine or 'heat' system, etc.

Just...it really does make stealing even worse for the people who are flat out forced to train it to level up. Fixing the root (stealing, exp, etc.) makes that a moot point.

I'd like to see player stealing teach better. If it locks you open why doesn't it do anything? I realize you could compare to PVP combat which doesn't teach but combat is something that is much easier to train compared to ste...thievery.

[20:11] Chatter[Arathael] Usually only get skill when it's successful.
[20:13] Chatter[Morpion] Thats why Arathael has 0.00 ranks in Getting Girls
[20:14] Chatter[Arathael] =(