Protection & Ban

There are basically two threats a house owner must protect his house from: Violence and Theft. This section discusses both problems and informs you about the possible solutions.

Theft

As described in the stealing skill section, it is possible for characters with enough stealing skill to break into your house and steal items which are locked down or items from lockers. Vendors are safe from theft though. There is a limit of 5 items per day that can be stolen from any house to prevent theft sprees.

A house owner's only defense against theft is a burglar alarm. This is an electronic gadget that scans the whole house for burglars and if one is found, raises an alarm. The alarm is transmitted through the gryphons for everybody to hear. Furthermore, the thief starts to flash and can be attacked by everybody. Flashing times out 5 minutes after the thief leaves the house, so he can not wait in the house until the flashing ends. Furthermore all doors in the house are opened for PC guards. What that means is that PC guards can go through all locked doors just as if they were unlocked. This enables PC guards to enter the house and chase the burglar. When the flashing burglar enters another house, be it his house or any other, all doors he passes through are also open for PC guards.

Furthermore, when an alarm is raised, there is a chance that a stealing crime is generated, but that is independed from the alarm, it is depending on the thieves DEX and stealing skill and the house owner's observation skill and INT.

Violence

Violence can be a simple fight but it can also mean harassment by another character for example by just being in the house after being asked to leave. There are several ways to deal with it and all have advantages and disadvantages. We have decided to implement the following rules. Although not perfect from a role-playing point of view, they provide the smoothest game play and offer the least potential for exploiting.

Newbies and Casual characters can be put on a ban list immediately. By doing so, these characters can no longer enter the house until either a house owner removes the character from the list or the banned character becomes a full level PC in which case he is removed automatically. This was implemented because non full level characters can not really be attacked and therefore have a great potential of causing harassment in a house by coming back. With the ban list it is ensured that these characters can not come back. In order to unban a character, click the Ban List button on the Room Owner's Tab which brings up a list of banned characters and remove the one you want to unban

Full Level PCs however are a bit different. Since we want to encourage role play, even evil play, it would not be good if a character can simply be banned indefinitively. Instead the character can be declared an abuser from the Justice Tab. Every house owner can declare any character in his house an abuser at any time.

Normally, declaring somebody an abuser will make him flash red and allow anybody to attack him. This has been abused in the past, by malicious players who drag other characters in their house, declare them abuser and then kill them without punishment. Therefore we have chosen the following rule instead:

When a house owner declares a full level character in his house an abuser, he will not start to flash but instead he will be removed from the house. However, he can return anytime! The character will not be moved just outside the house but rather moved to a random room of the district this happens in, in order to prevent him from coming right back. This can be repeated up to 10 times in case a player is so persistent to come back every time. After being kicked 10 times from the same house in one day, the character will be moved to the house's banning list for the remainder of the day. After the next regular server restart however, the character is removed from the ban list and can come back.

This will not work with PC guards however, because then a criminal could simply hide in his house and kick the guards out. A PC guard will start to flash red when declared an abuser, unless the character declaring hostile is a criminal himself, as explained in the abuse section.