Backstab Spam

[The_Last_Good_Dragon]

6) Preventing backstab spam.

Injured parties will no longer be backstab-able and injured mobs will heal
over time.

This was done on a PvP Mud that I played, and it was an awful change; players realized they could make themselves immune to backstabs by walking around with 99% of their HP. Eventually, staff chose to implement the idea by making backstab apply an "Alert" affect that lasted about 30 minutes; the affect prevented more backstab attempts and was removed during logout/login.

[Rothgar]

+1 to Dragon.

If I cannot be backstabbed when I'm at 99% HP, why wouldn't I simply inflict one damage to myself on login, RP that I've stubbed my toe, and be completely immune to it. At this point you might as well remove Inflict as well, because that'll be nearly the only use for it at this point. This seems like a needless change in lieu of punishing or speaking with someone who used it improperly.

[Kinaed]

I think people will be having a policy discussion with me if we see that behavior.

[Percival]

Or cut out the middleman and have a policy discussion with the people spamming backstab.

[Taunya]

Setting aside policy matters, I'd third that a time-based affect would be a better way to implement it. There's plenty of reasons someone might have been hurt, they could have an injury from an OOC week ago, but they should still be susceptible to being stabbed in the back.

[Kinaed]

I'll ask Azarial to have a read of this and a think.

[Starstarfish]

- With regards to people being suspicious OOCly and taking that IC - I really prefer people didn't play the game OOCly and openly announce that they plan to do so. Similarly, I lose respect when players say 'Well, I'll just inflict of damage on myself to avoid being backstabbed'. All of this treats TI like a hack and slash game with winners and losers instead of a roleplay game where the idea is for everyone to tell a good story, even when it comes to playing with the 'opposite team'. I'd like to entreat players who feel this way to reconsider.

I think there's a tongue-in-cheek aspect to some of this. I don't think mentioning that someone somewhere sometime might do something is an admission of guilt. The same as any bug report it's pointing out that something might be done and implying it should be considered.

But for example, I as a Physician type might encourage people who get the pvents about various injuries (stubbed toe is indeed one) to consider actually inflicting themselves and coming over to the Madison for a bit of RPs about it. This person now as is stated even with no intention to abuse the feature is protected from backstabbing. There's a dozen small ways arguably during daily valid RP people might get a bruise. IE - that when you do "safe" combat and don't actually get coded wounds but might to RP some.

It also means that mages who mess up spells or thieves who fail climbs or there's a million various ways you might get wounded that would make you invulnerable to backstab ... so I'd say this might want a rethink of some kind, but I freely admit I am not the most combat oriented person.

That being said, does that mean that NPCs (like retainers) will automatically begin to heal without being treated?

[Kinaed]

I'm happy to accept it as tongue in cheek. Hard to tell with text, but also not something I think should go uncommented should new players read things like that and believe it's the player standard.

I promised Az I'd respond to this thread earlier, but got sidetracked. He's reviewed this post and says he agrees that we should modify the implementation of the !backstab spam, so he will do so based on what we see here. Thanks for the input, folks!

Oh, and to answer the final question - apparently not since we're changing the implementation so mob healing isn't required.