Since a certain player brought the whole looting strategy to a new level and his level 11 looters sit on the eastern road for hours and terrorizing everybody else...

I've came with an idea:

Make it impossible to loot a level X corpse by characters below X-20(25) level? So a hero corpse can be looted only by level 30+ (or 25+).
It should make cabal camping less useful, as it is more dangerous to hang near cabals at middle ranks.
And it should balance thigs a bit for low levels reducing the number of newbies in hero gear stomping their ranges.

There is one guy that seems to have gone famous for this as of late. I agree, he does take being a vulture to an all new level, heh. I've seen him waiting literally hours just to get that loot and I think his presence alone is a deterrent to people wanting to fight.

I'm not sugesting any change or anything, I just wanted to state I have noticed as well and the guy is known in game for it. He is a legend!

Since a certain player brought the whole looting strategy to a new level and his level 11 looters sit on the eastern road for hours and terrorizing everybody else...

I admit I'm tempted to code vulture-riding kobolds that are inexplicably drawn to the smell of carrion from this one particular griefer. Twist would probably buy me season tickets to the baseball team of my choice.

Make it impossible to loot a level X corpse by characters below X-20(25) level? So a hero corpse can be looted only by level 30+ (or 25+). It should make cabal camping less useful, as it is more dangerous to hang near cabals at middle ranks. And it should balance thigs a bit for low levels reducing the number of newbies in hero gear stomping their ranges.

In general, you're going to slow down equipment distribution a lot with a hard cap. I'm hesitant to tweak the whole system over one very determined griefer.

Toning up corpseguard a bit might be helpful. I'll kick some ideas around with people.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

Boo! Why not just kick the one guy in the junk and leave everyone else be.

Hard caps on this sort of thing will almost always backfire.

However, you do already have distention code in place. It would probably not work to tie in looting to distention (i.e., how do you differentiate between a griefer and a lowbie grabbing some things from an ally's corpse so it doesn't get looted?). But if you identify a person who is obviously griefing (but not technically breaking rules), couldn't the Imms force-distend them?

And more importantly, does anyone else think the word "distention" looks really, really wierd?

You could do it temporarily, where the corpse looter's PK range gets extended upwards based on the level of the corpse he looted. So if you loot a hero, for 24 hours you're in hero range. Something like that. They could still run up take something, then run off, but they're not going to stand there spamming "get 1. corpse" if the person who made the corpse is likely to splat them for it.

One other idea:

Make characters take "fairly small, but not insignificant" damage when they try to loot a corpse and get blocked by corpseguard. That would prevent people spamming it, effectively placing a cap on the amount of stuff they can loot before they run out of HP. It also makes them weigh the benefit of the gear vs. the risk of leaving themselves potentially very wounded and out in the open.

nt

Get all corpse attempts to take everything, and you get one little hit for pieces of gear, potentially killing lowbie looter! Hah!

Could look something like fighting a cabal guardian where when you get hit, or kicked and go sprawling you take an evicerates or dismembers for each attempt. Cause I mean this only works if the person who killed them sticks around anyway, so it would be a nice touch.

Add in a yell from the character who is guarding the corpse...

So let's say I kill Isildur in Market Square:


look
Market Square

(Exits: north east south west)

The corpse of Isildur is here, fallen victim to lengthy equations.

Lowbielooter the human is here.

<100%hp 100%m 100%mv>
Lowbielooter reaches towards the corpse of Isildur but you catch him by the wrist and force him away.
You yell 'Lowbielooter is trying to rob the dead!'


Of course this is an evil...eeeeevil thing to do when a Trib is around. Still, it makes sense, and its effectiveness is very conditional. However, if you are a class that can hide in some way this particular yell should not pull you out. Like, if you have another enemy walking towards you but you want to guard the corpse, it would suck to get pulled out by Lowbielooter's attempt and then bashed down.

That would also "out" the yeller as the person who killed the guy in town, since he's the one doing the corpseguarding. People might not want that.

Work out some formula where your current levels of distention (guessing this is 0 for most characters) goes up based on the rarity of what you loot as well as the level of the PC being looted. Maybe even gear level?

Let's say, legendary items have the greatest point value, and then slide down the line down to uncommon gear.

The idea here is that if you're gonna have that sweet, looted gear pre-level 30, you are graduating yourself from the pond and jumping into the ocean with the sharks.

I think that, if nothing else, it'd be pretty funny to see Griefer Dude's level 15 duergar hack n' slasher to find himself wearing pwent and fighting level 30 elf dagger specs. Hah. Joke's on you, sucker.

While I'm proposing a hard cap I don't think it's a bad thing in this case.
In general, eq distribution is fine but when a hero set comes to 10-20 levels it more hurts the game than contributes. I'm proposing a wide enough window for eq distribution X-20(25) level or even X-30 level, it should cover the majority of cabaled characters and significant part of all other characters except newbies. Also eq still may end on a level 11 char in two passes: middle ranks loots a hero and then level 1 loots the middle rank.

We already have hard cap for 1-10 levels (who are unable to loot) for the very similar reason. They are protected from PK and can loot everything that moves.
The same applies to 11 level looters: with invis and good gear they are almost invulnirable to PK so they can camp near cabals safely.

I generally hate having lowbie looters around to steal from my kills, but what's worse is having no descernable way to bite back until they come into someone elses PK range.

Then you stack them up on preps, and report on the looters position like a gps to a satellite.

I think preventing looters from grabbing other peoples stuff should be held off until you can realistically see someone else in their pk range coming to hammer them. The fact is, we know they'll all delete before hero (because once they hit lvl 43, I'm betting even the Maran and Imperials will team up to gank them )

Thanks for taking the time to consider it all the same Valg.

Yhorian

Similar to distention...

Instead of the looting being what makes you distend, make it the average weight of the items' level with the cap being level 30 or 35. So if I'm level 15 with a bunch of level 40 gear, it may bump me up 8 ranks in range, regardless of how I earned that gear (looting, killing, pit looting). Sliding scale, so the closer you get to 35 or so the less impact it has.

>Toning up corpseguard a bit might be helpful. I'll kick some
>ideas around with people.

Corpseguard will not solve the problem because near cabals in raid situations (where looters usually camp) often it's impossible to stand over a corpse for several ticks guarding it, players have other things to do.

"Since a certain player brought the whole looting strategy to a new level and his level 11 looters sit on the eastern road for hours and terrorizing everybody else..."

***I admit I'm tempted to code vulture-riding kobolds that are inexplicably drawn to the smell of carrion from this one particular griefer. Twist would probably buy me season tickets to the baseball team of my choice.***

This seriously made my day. Much like Dwoggurd (and apparently you) I noticed this certain griefer and almost rolled one of my patented fire giant bash specs to multi-kill him. But then I was like "Do I want to work that hard?".

But it's great to know you still watch players and stuff Valg.

In the past four months, I've seen three people who specifically sat at level 11 (or close to it) with only one intention: follow around the well-knowns and wait for them to kill someone.

It is beyond annoying, and seeing that you realize that, makes me smile.

Not for nothing but from what I've experienced Corpse guard does the job pretty damn good. If you turn it up even more might as well just make them unlootable.

That which does not kill us,
makes us stronger.