Sleaze-Sneak Counterpart

There is a LOT of potential causes for this certainly but I do think (from experience) that at least one of them is not being able to sneak into a location with a door fee, which I believe was a consequence of the change making fee doors block sniping 5-6 years ago. This basically limits the options for approaches and I think filters for a very slight amount of conflict, particularly non-violent theft which could stand to be a bigger part of the game in my opinion.

There are two potential ways that I see to approach a change here: One is to have fee doors take a stealth action that is mechanically similar to sleaze with a different skill check (ie. the exit has a special sneak verb), the other is simply allow a fee payment while hidden. The former being more realistic, the latter being possibly simpler to implement.

As for other forms of conflict, I don't think catering to risk-averse behavior is going to do us any favors. If people aren't doing dirty work in bars because they're scared of consequences, that's their own fault. There are ways to avoid those consequences, but also, the game is way too addicted to chasing the perfect crime. There's nothing stopping you from walking into a bar with a disguise on, and that should be more than enough.

I don't see these as equivalent skillsets (and they aren't mechanically) and I don't necessarily think the game's over-reliance on disguise is particularly ideal and actually see stealth as more interactive and better balanced mechanic for 'hostile' actions.

That is to say if the solution to all hostile action wasn't just 'put on a poncho' but was also sometimes 'remain hidden', I think the outcomes are actually better because sneak is a more interactive and contestable gameplay mechanic than disguise is.

I don't believe automatic fee doors breaking stealth was actually meant as a balancing mechanism to reign in stealth, but rather was a consequence that was just not seen as a big enough issue to develop further on at the time. I have noticed however a difference, over several years since, and while it's not a big difference and can be sometimes worked around, it would be overall an improvement if the impediment wasn't there.

This is essentially true of combat for characters with underpowered combat skills. If players have neglected to build their own characters to account for stealth detection (combat focused characters are notoriously bad for stat dumping here), this doesn't make stealth itself overpowered it just means they left weaknesses.

There are no contested skill checks on disguise or disguised actions, so the counterplay is mostly metagaming oriented (ie. you know they're there as a disguised player and you focus suspicion on them).

Don't you think that is way more true of say, a weapon skill? I think the builds of characters strongly backs up that combat is far more powerful and seen as being far more useful than stealth is. I actually think characters habitually neglect stealth skills because they're less useful in practice, and this can seen in how adverse combat-focused characters are to stealth counters because they tend to know they didn't account for them.

Combat focused metagame is just flat-out untrue, as well. The game has a severe lack of combat-focused characters and the game as a whole has turned towards slice-of-life vastly more than it has ever turned towards a 'combat focused metagame'.

A whisper in the ear on the way out. A calling card. Ballsy broad daylight dips, sans stealth, in crowded places while having conversations with people. Shifting stolen goods to people that didn't do it then framing them because fuck you, why not? Ransoming gear back. Whatever. There's so much you can do with it to create RP, it's really kind of boring to just dip and slip out.

In short, and this is from my own experience, you absolutely can reach a point where you're practically guaranteed to not be caught a lot of the time, and that's why I think it's very important to inject RP into it when you can. Even if it's just leaving breadcrumbs to a dead end.

Now I personally see the reason for that as being those players not being as interested in the combat side of things, and therefore not having the knowledge to understand where the weaknesses, difficulties, and counterplays are against combat characters.

I believe some of the resistance here comes down to essentially the same thing, which is fear of the unknown skill. When players don't really understand how theft skills work (which is sometimes even true of players who have used them), the outcomes seem rote or non-interactive because the process to arrive at that was unknown.

Any character with extreme levels of specialization will have advantages against characters who have weak counterplays, this is by design and something that is often taken for granted by players pushing their weapon skill up to A.

However right now, even with fee doors, characters who are vulnerable to casual pickpocketing remain so regardless of how doors work and any changes to them would be largely impactful to other types of screwing around with characters.

But I think your whole post, batko, speaks to a larger issue of culture surrounding a lot of pickpocketing and theft of any kinds (of which I myself have been guilty) not having any clues or RP crumbs to pick up on to continue the thread.

But I do think there's also a discussion, but probably not for this thread, about the hateful debt you speak which is spewed towards low pickpockets who are caught. And does that create a self-fulfilling prophecy, a cycle which never ends, of people who were once lowbie pickpockets and received overreactions moving on towards silent theft when they can't be caught? Because they're fearful of the times they were and the overreaction?

- Door fees do make up a large portion of club proceeds, and the recent trend towards making door fees extremely cheap has been damaging altogether. I won't put numbers up, but door fees used to be three or four times higher than they are today for Red clubs.

- Sleazing, as far as I am aware, narratively has an ambient NPC pay your entry fee, so there is no damage there, unless I am mistaken. This would likely not work the same way since you are simply sneaking past the bouncers (somehow).

- People exit bars the moment they are in danger of anything at all. If one person gets dipped, many will scatter. Bars in Red have already been quite sleepy for a long time now.

This can be seen any time an idea of deckers doing something damaging comes up and they revolt over the idea of the combat meta being distributed away from them.

Anyone who is familiar with both skillsets will know they pretty much have the same numbers of counters, counter skill checks, character skill requirements, and player skills needed to be successful with them. I would argue casual theft is sometimes hilariously overexagerrated in impact by players who will then freely excuse total murder.

The essential different from their perspective is they had the ability to counter one, but lacked the ability to properly counter the other and so then saw it as 'unfair' even though it is usually the much more limited hostile action in practice.

It's sort of immaterial though because this sort of change wouldn't impact the types of pickpocketing that seems to bother people so much.

In any case, I don't think a change to fees is necessary for the outcome. I only offer sleaze as a similar ready-made function that could be adapted but the idea is not really to dodge the cost, and I'd be just as happy to see leaseholders compensated like usual.

I don't know how else to reiterate the fact that while combat is abusable, it is never done from a position of total undetectability. You cannot sneak into a bar and kill someone without someone present witnessing it. You can sneak into many bars, currently, and dip everyone's phone without anyone realizing it even happened before you're long gone, let alone having even a slight clue such as a short description, which was going to be disguise anyways.

I don't like it when anyone overreacts to pickpocket characters, I don't think it's fair to new players to be stomped out for the sins of the ghost-like oldbies that conditioned people to see red when they detect any trace of the thievery skill. I also don't think that's something that has even happened with any frequency lately, but it is tragic when it does happen.

However, that doesn't change any of what I am saying. I don't think this is necessary in the slightest as it would be an undue buff to an already extremely powerful set of skills.

The thing I'm seeing here is applications where you want to have something in your hands upon entering, and don't want people to see you with it when you do. That's really the only benefit I can see from allowing stealth through club doors. Beside that, it doesn't change anything except the cost of getting in.

But yes, it still offers a measure of protection against some dips, in that case. I see your point. In any case, I'm find keeping it as it is. My stance hasn't changed.

It is metagaming to know that there is only one pickpocket player good enough to dip you and then assume it is them whenever you get pickpocketed. That is completely different than using the actual game cues and messages to investigate an issue.

How is this argument any different than it being metagaming to pickpocket someone standing in a crowded bar? Is that not isolating players from the ambience? If the game displays that you saw someone enter the bar, you saw someone enter the bar and if you choose to ignore that then that's your personal preference. If you notice a connection between someone entering the bar, your shit going missing, and that person suddenly disappearing after wordlessly standing in the bar for a few moments, that is not metagaming, that is reasonable suspicion.

Player facing 'visual cue' feedback is not necessarily known or understood or seen by the character. For instance with disguises, players are given many types of feedback that can, in effect, circumvent disguises but them actively doing so and having their character notice a disguise is metagaming in the same way because it's parsing player-only feedback to arrive at a character side conclusion.

In the prior example the metagaming would arise in two places:

1) Comparing entry messages versus glance to track who is absent from the pRoom listing; plus,

2) The player-side understanding that an entry message with a missing pRoom entry meaning that character is stealthed, and may be making a theft attempt.

In both these cases the player is circumventing the spot check their character failed to make, by analyzing player data their character could not reasonably have.

This is actually a very apt example of a metagaming counter in the wild that is highly comparable to some of the past counters to disguise, where disguised characters had very slightly different entry/exit message that was used to circumvent disguise itself and also to avoid using the mechanical tools for identifying characters and their disguises appropriately.

However that can't be extrapolated that a character can know the exact person contents of a room at all times, especially when the player is cross-referencing enter messaging versus the glance persons count to deduce omissions. That would be explicitly metagaming, because your character cannot reasonably know to the individual who has entered and left a crowded location at all times to the point of being able to detect anomalies... and if they have the aptitude to do so, they would have the stats to have noticed the stealth attempt pretty much by definition.

You can notice the absence of a character you're actively engaged with, but not all characters at all times, universally everywhere. If you were able to do that, the game would provide feedback to that point.

In any case as I mentioned, I think the protest is kind of misplaced because the concern over advanced theft being too powerful is not really effected one way or another by what I'm proposing, and simple theft has an incredibly simple workaround. Virtually all of the circumstances I've seen come out of feeless doors are other types of interactions, because the best pickpockets don't work in the situations you're describing to begin with, for reasons unrelated to the doors.

1. Enter through paid entrance

2. Mill around for a while

3. .wave my hand in parting, and .head for the door.

4. hide

5. wait a while as people forget I was there having had the visual cue that I was leaving from my pose.

I wouldn't go so far as to pose the exact message someone automatically does when they leave the room though, as that would be meta.

Also, please keep in mind just because you can't sneak in to a place doesn't mean you can't sneak out. So it is not a guarantee that someone is still there just because you can't see them anymore.

On top of that, stealth is a roll, as is detection of someone who types 'hide'. Anyone can get a bad roll or a critical success at any time, so it's always a roll of the dice and is never a guarantee. The person hiding gets no indicator if someone has seen them.

Also, there is a 'pointout ' verb which allows you to point a hidden person out to everyone in the room, if you happen to detect them.

I don't see a big problem here. I personally don't have an issue with there not being fee charging entrances on most places, but I also think the reasoning for it (reducing sniping, fixing issues with people camping and pickpocketing resulting in people not going out in public because they don't want to get dipped as often) are fine as well.

I come from a time where these changes were already in place and Red was a constant warzone regardless, including with dips crawling all over the place stealing everyone's everything everyday, regardless of door fees.

You're right that conflict has declined, and while I do usually support code changes to try and inform cultural changes, this isn't likely to have any impact. The issue with lacking conflict, from my perspective, is that the game is addicted to perfect crimes; players do not want to take risks unless they know they can get away with absolutely no retaliation or consequence. Gone are the days of loud personal feuds between mixers or even gangers, gone are the days of gangers insulting corpies without getting pasted by a solo five minutes later, gone are the days of bickering on SIC beyond dogpiling the latest entertaining spiral.

This is also partly due to the tendency for people to involve half the game into any small conflict that crops up. The mark of a good endbie is to sit back and watch to see what happens instead of taking sides and instantly winning things for your favorite immy. Or, to thumb the scale a bit from afar.

The current playerbase also needs some serious coaching on not having panic attacks when they get vatted, and not perming out after a realistically small setback.

There's not any concievable benefit I can think of from reintroducing sniper firing lines (as much as I think sniping being nerfed in other ways is unfair) and silent bar entries. Slither's post is exactly what I think of when I think of a good dip, roleplaying and using misdirection instead of relying solely on invisibility to shield them from consequence.

I would find that very difficult to believe unless the time frame is a few months and the differing levels are just noise. If the total number of attacks made with long guns in a given year has increased since the fee door change than I would readily abandon this argument; but I'm very sure it hasn't.

My experience was there was a very slight uptick in the general usage of firearms after the reskin on them (cool names have underrated effects on weapon usage), but these skewed heavily towards small arms and declined again afterwards. I also believe that firearms skew massively towards objects that are owned and skilled into, but never used, and that the actual total number of attack actions made by players skews massively towards melee attacks overall.

Likewise I am very expectant that the number of theft actions per year has gone down in the last six years, and not up.

Of course this is all arguing in the dark since we're simply stating our own observations against one another, and it's possible I am very wrong on these and senior staff have data that says otherwise, but every discussion had about conflict and players engaging in it leads to believe there isn't.

If there is a considerable and continuing trendline upwards that staff have noticed of players shooting one another and stealing from one another, then I could probably be convinced this type of change (or changes like it) is not necessary right now.