[CF-Devel] Stealing Idea + simple patch

[crossfire-devel-admin at archives.real-time.com]

  Few quick notes:

  Realize that punishing the character (unable to get into the store) isn't 
really much of a punishment.  If that happened to me, I'd just whip a new 
character, with a really high Cha, and send him into the store with the cash to 
buy something if in fact I was going to buy something.

  Likewise, one has to be careful about making things more expensive for known 
theives - unless there is a counterbalance to that - well known/liked characters 
get discounts.  Otherwise, same thing happen - get a another character to buy 
your stuff.  If there is a form of good reputation, then stealing becomes much 
riskier - do you take that chance that your reputation may get lower.

  At a higher level, I really wonder if this would get used much at all - money 
seems to be so plentiful, I can't see much reason that players would ever steal. 
  If the item is relatively easy to steal (and thus relative inexpensive), what 
is the point?  And if you can steal items that are _really_ expensive, then that 
might suggest stealing is broken.

  OTOH, I'm not really against features that no one would use.  It's just a note 
that one should keep this is mind while developing (and certainly, abusive 
features are sometimes turned off, like polymorph for example).

  A few notes:

  Don't use the speed value for any thing other than object speed - to do so is 
asking for troubles.  Find another field in the object for your multiplier. 
level would seem to be the most obvious, but if you need a float, perhaps use 
expmul instead.

I'm not sure if it makes sense for a shop to get more difficult to steal from as 
it gets stolen from.  The reason I say this for one, is that in a multiplayer 
game, it could quickly be a case where all the shops quickly have very high 
stolen from counts, making the ability next to useless.  Second point being I'm 
not sure high realistic it is.

  If your going to have levels of punishments with stacked arch's, something in 
the arch should say at what level that object takes precendence, and not 
something like 'each one is 10 levels higher'.  hardcoded values in the code are 
very bad, and almost never stay around for very long, simply because someone at 
some point says I want finer control.

  I personally do think a force should be added to the player denoting how many 
times they have been caugh stealing, and have that act as a modifier of their 
stealing chances - a known thief is going to be watched closer than that person 
who has never stolen before.

  If one wanted to be more clever, the 'race' field of the shop steal object 
should denote the new name of the force.  Thus, all the shops in scorn could 
have something like 'race scorn_caught_steals', and thus all the shops in scorn 
would treat him as less than friendly (known criminal).  But if you go off to 
Navar City, they wouldn't know about it, and those shops would have something 
like 'race navar_city_caught_steals'.

  The new skill stuff, which will probably be checked in in the next week or so, 
probably doesn't change this that much, other than exp is no longer in 
experience categories, but instead for each skill.



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