So I was thinking in the shower today and thought I'd put this out there since it seems like a pretty good way to both solve some problems folk have with NPC smiths and encourage more players to actively pick:

1. Have the NPC locksmiths give players a choice, they can either have their boxes opened instantly as they are now and for the same price they would be now or they could choose to have the locksmith hold onto it to allow their "apprentices" to practice their skills on for half the price and are given a ticket used to claim their boxes once they're opened.

2. Boxes of players that choose the second option get put on tables in a back room, sorted by lock/trap difficulty, for players with lockpicking skills to open. Traps/locks function normally, but players cannot attempt to pick/disarm boxes on tables containing boxes their skills aren't high enough to pick/disarm. Players also cannot leave the room while holding any boxes off the tables and are prevented from removing the contents of the boxes.

3. The bounty system assigns "lockpicking bounties" to players with picking skills, similar to the way skinning bounties are given, where the character needs to go assist the NPC smith work through a backlog of boxes of appropriate skill. Rogues with training in Lock Mastery could be given a separate bounty to open plated/fused boxes in the back room. Perhaps not assigning these bounties unless there are actually boxes in the backroom that the character can pick/wedge/etc...

4. If a player picks a box in the backroom (whether or not they have a bounty), they get the fee the locksmith charges and the character that dropped it off can pick up the box as soon as they return. If a box sits in the backroom for X hours without a player coming along to pick it, the NPC locksmith opens it themself and keeps the fee with no extra charges applied (OOC, the time the player waited for the box to be picked would justify the discount). If a box is destroyed by a trap, the player attempting the box is charged 2x the fee that the owner of the box was charged, which is then passed on to the box/s owner when they return to pick up their box.

This would be better for players hunting in areas where the cost of having the NPC often results in a net loss of silver and player locksmiths are hard to come by, help player smiths get right to picking without having to sit around empty picking areas for hours, folk that prefer the current system wouldn't lose a thing, and everyone still unload and get back to hunting without having to hunt down an illusive player smith. It would also, hopefully, encourage more players to pick up locksmithing.

Starchitin

A severed gnomish hand crawls in on its fingertips and makes a rude gesture before quickly decaying and rotting into dust. A gust of wind quickly scatters the dust.

didn't I post this exact idea around 6 weeks ago?

Overall I like it, although the implementation seems a little clunky (read: might be hard to implement).

I wonder about several points, though. Are the player locksmiths getting full experience here? The part about sorting by difficulty and limitations to what boxes a player can take to work on seems like a sort of freebie. How about traps that get set off and destroy the box?

In any case, the kind of concept looks like the right direction to me!

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>Daid: Pretty sure you have a whole big bucket as your penny jar. You never have only two cents. :p

This might be fun to talk about, but what problem does it actually solve?

I don't see people using this method over the town NPC. It requires them to drop off boxes, and then wait a variable amount of time in the hopes that someone actually picks their box.

Why would they choose to do that over using the NPC locksmith? I think I saw it would cut the cost in half, but is that enough of a reason? I don't believe so.

If you want people to use PC locksmiths, there are better ways to go about it. Reducing PC RT for starters.

<Why would they choose to do that over using the NPC locksmith?>

1. There are a lot of areas, esp near cap, that generate boxes that result in a net loss when opened by the NPC smith much of the time. The reduced price would help those that still wanted to get their boxes open.

2. I see a LOT of players commenting that they'd pick up boxes if player locksmiths were easier to find or that they have lockers full of boxes waiting for a player locksmith. This would be a way for those people to get their boxes opened by players without having to take up precious locker space.

3. Many people have either abandoned their locksmithing characters or fixskilled their picking skills away due to the difficulty of getting a decent supply of boxes, leading to a cycle that feeds on it's self (people have a hard time getting boxes so they stop picking and people stop using player locksmiths because it gets so hard to find them most of the time). Hopefully this would encourage people to either get their picking skills back or roll up a picker for the first time, which would go a long way towards breaking that cycle and eventually help those that don't want to use either option the NPC smith offers.

Starchitin

A severed gnomish hand crawls in on its fingertips and makes a rude gesture before quickly decaying and rotting into dust. A gust of wind quickly scatters the dust.

I think DMWCINCY has an excellent point.

I would really like to improve the benefits for smiths spending ungodly TPs to do what spell-casters get essentially for free.

But short of completely removing the town smith, I really don't know what you can do to move people towards PCs. The convenience comparison is completely imbalanced. And the silvers, while certainly more expensive for the NPC, is not really a lot of money.
A couple k is worth pennies. I wouldn't even slightly inconvenience myself (eg: bend over) in real life for less than a dollar so it's hard to ask people in game to do it.

I personally have a very strong fondness for the East Tower from my days as a rogue there, so I go out of my way to always look for PC-pickers first. But I can see that if I didn't have that upbringing, the allure of the NPC would be much harder to resist. Also in smaller towns, where you need to actively hunt down smiths, it's another added nuisance.

>didn't I post this exact idea around 6 weeks ago? -Goldenoak

I posted it 12 weeks ago!!!!1

~ Methais

As much as I support closing down the NPC locksmiths, I do hate the idea of losing my favorite place to clean pockets.

This reminds me: Audience reps need to die. For wtricks they are tedious at best and make for grouchy townsfolk. For lmans they eventually make for a room of dead townsfolk.

<For lmans they eventually make for a room of dead townsfolk.>

You only need an audience for the lock, not the trap.... and even the lock only needs to be difficult enough that you can learn from it with the pick yer using, not the top of your skill. I understand accidents occasionally happen, but anyone serious enough about lockpicking to go through lmastery really shouldn't have to worry about killing anyone during audience reps.

Starchitin

A severed gnomish hand crawls in on its fingertips and makes a rude gesture before quickly decaying and rotting into dust. A gust of wind quickly scatters the dust.

> As much as I support closing down the NPC locksmiths, I do hate the idea of losing my favorite place to clean pockets.

Maybe someone can shed some light on this, but why do people support closing the NPC locksmith when PC locksmiths are so scarce these days, particularly at cap, and is 8427042x worse in towns like Teras than others?

What are people expected to do with their boxes then? Sit around hoping more rogues decide to give up combat power for a much slower method of gaining experience?

~ Methais

>Maybe someone can shed some light on this, but why do people support closing the NPC locksmith when PC locksmiths are so scarce these days, particularly at cap, and is 8427042x worse in towns like Teras than others?

I mostly support it out of indifference and personal infrequency of use, but closing it all together is not that high on my list of "best ways to improve the system." But I'm not convinced that the town smith should be the baseline for how PC picking should operate. Unless PC smiths start robbing their customers blind like some people did in the old days...

>Maybe a nice update since travel is changed we can get a list of people per realm to open up more possibilities.

I'm hopeful about this for the Landing at least, even if it has mostly nothing to do with me.

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>Daid: Pretty sure you have a whole big bucket as your penny jar. You never have only two cents. :p

The expanded gold ring system should help to some degree in tracking down PC locksmiths.

Question for any GM that may be watching: Was the SERVICE verb updated to any extent to take into account the travel changes?

<The locksmith shouldn't be closed, but there should be more incentive to go to a PC locksmith if one is available.>

In towns with lower hunting pressure, I agree that this is what's needed. In towns with greater hunting pressure (ex. the Landing) I have a feeling the problem is as much that people don't even bother picking up boxes at all due to the combination of PC locksmiths being hard to find and the NPC locksmith charging more then the value of the contents 9 times out of ten. My sorcerer that just started hunting the krag slopes/Minotaur area wouldn't even bother picking them up if he couldn't fall back on 407/125 if there's no one in east tower.

Another roadblock to locksmiths being able to exclusively pick, esp above level 50-60ish, is that most professions can safely open most of their own boxes via 407 and/or 125 with a bit of care. Both my empath and sorcerer do this to avoid having to pay the NPC smith, often times without even bothering to check for a PC smith. I'm not suggesting nerfing these spells since I think that most that do this would seek out PC smiths if there were a greater availability of them, but is has contributed to the current problem.

After many threads such as this, I think incentivizing players to become locksmiths via more attractive exp benefits. Removing the penalty to exp that 403/404 gives seems to be the most logical way, since it makes learning from picking inferior to hunting beyond approx level 70. Those spells are required to open the vast majority of boxes even for triplers in the top quarter of the game, forcing us to either advance at a snail's pace or reduce our picking skills to be able to hunt more effectively (which is the choice my gnome will have to be making very soon).

Starchitin


A severed gnomish hand crawls in on its fingertips and makes a rude gesture before quickly decaying and rotting into dust. A gust of wind quickly scatters the dust.

<403 penalties on like level boxes may start creeping in at level 70, though I'd put it at more like 75-80, but they are nowhere near the vast majority. Its only in the capped hunting grounds that a tripler gets really hammered by them.>

This level 75 tripler is having to use 403 on the majority of his own boxes.... though I also recognize minotaur boxes do tend to be difficult for their level.

Starchitin

A severed gnomish hand crawls in on its fingertips and makes a rude gesture before quickly decaying and rotting into dust. A gust of wind quickly scatters the dust.

>This level 75 tripler is having to use 403 on the majority of his own boxes.... though I also recognize minotaur boxes do tend to be difficult for their level.

Magus are 78 and are the ones with the tough boxes. The exact percentage depends on just how much experience you want/how much break risk you are prepared to take on your vaalins, but on my criteria I'd be using lore about 40% of the time on my magus boxes at level 78. Picking for a customer at level 75 and it would be close to 100%, but the extra training and not needing to worry about the time to caliper multiple measurements make quite a lot of difference.

40% magus, 0% everything else. I think starting to creep in 75-80 is about right.

The GMs would strike down any attempt at automated PC locksmithing harder than the fist of an angry god. If it wasn't done while the PC was AFK, then there likely already are lich scripts available to rogues for locksmithing.

.box name coffer trunk strongbox

Box:
Put get my %2
Put give %1
Waitfor offers you
Put get my %3
Put give %1
Put accept
Waitfor accepts your offer
Put stow
Waitfor offers you
Put get my %4
Put give %1
Put accept
Waitfor accepts your offer
Put stow
Waitfor offers you
Put accept
Put give %1 <insert tip amount>


Extremely primitive script but would still work in most situations, and I'm terrible at writing scripts but what you're talking about wouldn't even require Lich or even more than super basic scripting knowledge.

~ Methais

>>Eliminating the experience penalty will help and seems reasonable given that lore is required for higher level boxes.

If you want more rogues, eliminate the experience penalty for rogues. Keep the box related experience penalties for other professions.


(PS: what penalties?)



Clunk

(Buy your swords at CBD weapons in Zul Logoth.)

<(PS: what penalties?)>

When 403/404 are used to boost your disarming or lockpicking skills, there is a massive penalty to the amount of experience you earn while the spell is active when DISARMing of PICKing. This is why most locksmiths get annoyed when folk cast these spells on them without asking if they need them first.

Starchitin

A severed gnomish hand crawls in on its fingertips and makes a rude gesture before quickly decaying and rotting into dust. A gust of wind quickly scatters the dust.