Muzzy

Ah, the friend feature in Wurm. Actually, the first few months in Wurm I refused friend requests from all the neighbors because I was afraid I would be unknowingly granting them some permissions by doing so. To be honest, I still have no idea if being a friend actually has any effect on in-game permissions other than the places where it's explicitly stated. Anyway, unless I've misunderstood your intent, apparently you propose that the friends list should override some of the default ownership rules? Or maybe it already does and I just don't know about it? Or maybe this thread has already descended into random banter and you weren't implying any of that...

I believe you may have missed my point, but thank you for the award regardless.

Theft is pvp? Well, economy is also a form of pvp really. How about we get rid of traders and marketplaces because they're a tool for economic pvp? Or is it enough to make undercutting someone's business count as griefing? It's an act where you gain something and the established market loses. It's almost like stealing something... stealing their profits!

Unfortunately, server software does not have this thing called "common sense", it operates on cold logic alone. Formalizing the logic for ownership in a way that doesn't get in the way of casual teamwork might get a little bit complicated. Cista was simply answering to Sarcaticous's proposal of having the game logic take care of the ownership issue and presented a counterexample where such a mechanic would be somewhat undesirable.

Looting possessions left behind by short lived players is a somewhat central part of the Wurm culture from what I've seen. However, even if the players quit, their possessions are technically still theirs. Most people don't consider taking those things as theft, after all it's a victimless crime unless the victims later choose to return to the game (and they usually don't). Sometimes even long time players are away for 3 months or more and their deed expires, and they'll come back later to find some of their possessions gone. When the victim returns to the game, there's no way to tell who took the stuff or when, but isn't it still a theft? Or if it's not, when does the ownership of abandoned items become public domain, exactly? There's nothing obvious in this, unfortunately, except what the game mechanics allow and what they do not. The GM practices around theft cases seem to be highly random as well, i.e. from what I understand they will sometimes act if it's not too much of a hassle to investigate and to deal with it, or if something of reasonably high monetary value is involved.

Why is it necessary to start insulting the victims of theft in these threads? Especially when it's obvious this discussion is happening right now because of a recent incident that was not caused by stupidity or negligence, but rather a lack of understanding of the undocumented and invisible game mechanics. You guys are just being rude.

Real life locks have to always be opened and the owner knows they exist. Not so in Wurm, you can't always differentiate between having a permission and the lack of restrictive mechanisms. Even when the lock works perfectly you never see the lock open, the experience is exactly the same as if it wasn't there at all. Real world also treats everyone with a key the same way. The real life lock won't reject you just because you're not the actual owner. Real life has no special permissions or capabilities for the "genuine owners" of things, no such concept exists at all in the natural world. And finally, real world doesn't have magical protection areas like deeds. Look, these people thought they were being protected but in reality they were not. They actually took the measures to protect their possessions but it failed to function since they didn't fully understand the precise limitations of the invisible magical lock system. Are you really REALLY going to blame the victims for that? It wasn't their fault. When the protection is always invisible, it's impossible for a novice to detect the lack of protection. The ONLY real solution is to change the game so that the protection becomes visible. This is the ONLY way to actually prevent these incidents. Educating users is futile because there will always be more new users and they all need to be taught about the working details of the invisible.

There needs to be an in-game indicator when containers are unsafe. Please let the dev team know about it, so that when the permission system is revamped it shouldn't be a big hassle to add some huge lock icon with text "The cart is UNLOCKED" with bright red, or "The cart is LOCKED" with gold, or whatever color choices the devs find to be good to represent the states of unsafe vs secure. Make it show the safety indicator every time the cart is hovered too, so that nobody misses the damn thing. Do the same for house doors and boats and bsbs, etc. This is a massive usability failure and it cannot be fixed by educating the users.

But the GMs might still interfere if you know who took the stuff... there seem to have been some cases where GMs returned other people's belongings after they were stolen because the victims saw the thief and the GM could verify what had happened (maybe screenshots were taken). AFAIK the only reason they don't usually do it is because it's too much hassle to prove who stole the stuff so they just let it slide, or maybe different GMs treat it differently, who knows. Funny, isn't it, how the current rules about thievery seem to be so very unclear.

Technically, scamming is also just a method to gain something for oneself at expense of another. If the motivation is personal gain and not to hurt another, then why would scamming be any different from any other kind of theft? There used to be a code of conduct for PvE but it was removed along with the enclosure rule, with the explanation that the code of conduct "interferes with the intended sandbox aspect of activities in Wurm Online". I am interpreting this to mean that as a sandbox, Wurm doesn't enforce honorable behavior of players even on PvE servers and players are responsible for consequences when they decide to trust someone, with some notable exceptions (such stealing an entire deed from the mayor) specifically listed in the game rules. Since scamming is not mentioned in the rules and the code of conduct was intentionally removed for interfering with the gameplay, why do you consider scamming (for personal gain) to be a form of griefing in Wurm? I once tried to make a thread to gather people's experiences about what exactly is allowed and what is not, how the rules are interpreted in practice. For example, lockpicking someone's off-deed fence gate is a bannable but destroying it with a catapult is OK, things like that. A GM locked the thread and explained that he doesn't want anyone to get any ideas that the players won't get into trouble for doing something that GMs earlier didn't punish someone else for... Notably, the GM didn't give corrections to any of my examples, he stressed that everything is decided on a case by case, i.e. rules are indeed made up on the spot and reflecting on past GM decisions in similar cases would only hurt GM team's ability to function in the future.

For the same reason why some people don't build roofs and floors in their houses. They don't want to waste time on things they believe to be unnecessary.

Heh. I'm pretty sure most of the Wurm players don't understand how permissions work right now. And I'm also fairly certain that >95% of those that DO have a grasp of how it all works, do not know the full details, e.g. how long the proximity ownership will remain on dropped items etc. The game has no in-game indicators for many of the things so it's not going to be easy to figure out that stuff on your own...

Real world has these things called laws, and there's police whose job it is to investigate the laws and prevent them from being broken, and then there are the courts to enforce the laws and to determine if they were broken. In real world, theft is actually written down in the penal code along with a definition of what it means. In Wurm, there are only vague rules that are intentionally left unclear so the GMs don't have to waste time arguing about the rules, they'll rely on their authority alone to resolve conflicts and the rules are only guidelines, they are secondary to the absolute power that GMs wield. GMs are not the cops of wurm, they're the judges. Think of judges as in Judge Dredd style instant justice, that's roughly what GMs are like. GMs are the law. In Wurm, if you try to make a forum thread to discuss what EXACTLY is actually against the rules and what kind of things affect the outcome, the GMs will lock the thread for being harmful to their ability to pass judgement. The players aren't supposed to have confidence in the rules, they're supposed to be afraid of them. More accurately, the players are supposed to be afraid of GMs, constantly insecure and unsure about what they're actually allowed to do. That's how Wurm's "justice" system is designed. So yeah, please compare Wurm to real life all you want. It's quite interesting to compare and contrast, it's truly fascinating! And do you know why it's so different? I'll tell you. Everyone has the right to life, among with a bunch of other rights that (most of) the governments all around the world are committed to protecting. But in Wurm online, as a player, you have no rights whatsoever. The game in its entirety is a mere privilege. If you don't like the rules, you can just walk away and take your business elsewhere, that's the only power and the only right the customer has.

And yet the GMs refuse to write rules that explicitly state that stealing is griefing. The GMs don't want the definitions to be discussed lest someone think the GMs aren't allowed to interfere with everything whatsoever, it's intentionally vague so that GMs have the maximum amount of freedom to do anything whatsoever. Due to the ambiguity, people who get griefed sometimes refuse to make support tickets because they blame themselves for what happened, not realizing the offender actually broke the game rules. GMs want to have a feeling of ultimate power that cannot be challenged. It's inconvenient for them if clear rules actually exist and they'd have to argue with the players about whether the rules were actually broken or not. It's so much simpler when the GMs can just do whatever they feel like doing, so much simpler when they can just punish whoever they don't like, no matter what's actually written in the rules. The best part of it all: If you don't have a deed, theft of your property is never griefing and it's always the player's own fault. Well, with the obvious caveat that GMs can always consider it griefing if they want to interfere for some reason. It reeks of protection money and racketeering...

Rolf, does the server keep death logs? Like, whenever a player dies, save a log of the last 10 damage events received with timestamps, player coordinates and the damage source listed. Deaths due to bugs should usually stand out in such logs and it would make it super easy to investigate the cause of death. With enough information saved in the death log, it would also be a valuable tool for debugging.