What of the sneak in this game? Would anyone out there want the ability to steal/pickpocket other players? (Mind you that it's a two-way street.) Or would some prefer that the only use of stealth is in combat? I, for one, love playing as thief characters and would very much enjoy the ability to turn a profit somehow off of my talents. I also would like to see the effect of a higher agility helping me avoid damaging blows in a fight. Maybe a higher agility equals to a further or quicker jump/roll. This would serve as a viable balance of power on the battlefield, as melee specialists should over-power them in terms of strength and close quarters fighting. I'm thinking of this in relation to the classic warrior/mage/thief choices. Beyond those classes are many combinations and I don't know how diverse they plan on players being able to develop their skills. It would be nice to own a character with max every-skill-out-there. Though I would dislike seeing that in the game.
I would also hate to see an over-load of players choosing to be, lets say, battlemages. Simply because they seem over-powered. Are the characters going to be all inclusive demi-gods, with the possibility of thieves running around in mages gear? Or are the classes being restricted to such a degree, that only a thief can sneak or steal stuff, maybe with the exception of a mage using the illusion skill to cast invisibility. It's nice to see a guys gear and simply know what his strength/weaknesses are. Hard to do if everyone late-game is running around in daedric eveything. Maybe they should make sets of armor with class and level requirement, even race maybe, to illustrate the part of Tamriel it came from...

Stealth, I imagine, is going to be/was very hard to balance properly.

It would definitely be great if your original post was less of a wall-o-text than it is, but I'll try to read it anyways.

Mmm. You're talking about quite a few different things in the same block of text, with no space in-between.
That's true. However, pick-pocket could be balanced if you were only allowed to stealth a small amount from players, and only in gold form. Sneak attacks in a multiplayer are quite hard to balance as well... First there's the problem of a thief never scoring them. Then, if you fix that, there's the problem of a thief scroing them even when other players know he's there (which means it's no longer a stealth attack, but the game language thinks it is).

One major problem.

Game is in third person, remember?

@whitedemon22, you really need to write more accurate thread-titles.

As far as stealth goes, it's too early to say.

every play teh game fire emblem? the rogues in that game are next to impossible for most units to hit (their agility is their highest stat and unless the attacker has high agility not much will happen) i would love for rogue combat to be like that in TES:O (maybe toned down a bit though, the rogues in fire emblem are almost never hit), and i think stealth would be rather hard to create for an mmo...

p.s. your last idea about level, race and class requirement should not be implemented at all, we should be able to wear whatever we manage to get

Stealth characters could be rendered invisible to other players when their sneaking, only becoming visible when another player successfully passes some sort of detection check.

what does tam! rugh! mean? i keep seeing it all over the place...

Is the "detection check" active at all times?

Imagine a monkey man trying to say Tamriel.
Either that or it occurs at regular intervals. It would be a passive ability derived from the player's stats, requiring no initiation on the player's part. Sneaking would be dependent on being a better sneak than the other player could detect.

Save for the initiation of being able to raise or lower your Sneak detection "skill."

Indirectly though. You wouldn't have a detection stat you choose to raise, it would instead increase when you raised it's "parent" stats.

Which would/could be?

And, could the Stealth stat, at anytime, ever extend past the cap placed, if any, on the the Detection stat?

Given we have no idea what stats characters will actually have, it's a little hard to say, but it could be, say, WIsdom, or something to that effect.

no, but that's more of a fine-tuning issue. The way I envision it, the detection check is a dice roll. Your "detection stat" increases the likelihood of success, a thief's stealth stats oppose the success of the dice roll. Even if the detection stat equals a thief's stealth stat, the thief always has a chance of being undetected. Also, it's not like every character would or even could have a maximized detection stat. I'd imagine only a certain range of builds could afford to fully invest in the detection skill's parents, as other builds (say a tank, for example) would be ruined by investing heavily in stats they don't otherwise benefit from.

Almost guarantee that if Detection is tied to a parent stat or even its own stat, a large number of the populace will invest in it and ignore other stats just to avoid being stolen from.

Also, if only certain builds... like say other Thieves, or Archers, were the only allowed classes to maximize Detection then a large portion of players will stay those two classes because they want to avoid being stolen from.

Last but not least, you come to the problem of having a 100 Stealth. Does this mean you have a 100% chance to stay hidden, a 90%? Does it mean it reduces people's Detection stat by 90 on the random dice roll?

It's going to be damn hard to balance.

If detection has multiple parents, it's unlikely that players would do that, since stat increases are a limited commodity and most builds only use a specific range of stats. Players would certainly try to give their detection skill some increase, but a tank can't afford to ignore their core stats, for example, their not going to choose detection over stats that improve their HP, damage resistance, and ability to resist stunning, knockbacks, and pull aggro.
Actually, I envisioned mages as being best suited for detecting thieves. The squishy mage gets smashed by the warrior who get get's stabbed in the back by the thief who gets set on fire by the mage.

Now your just inventing tangents that have nothing to do with what I said.

You're forgetting one major factor of a community: They don't want to be stolen from. People may gladly give up being a tank if it meant that the new Daedric Sword of God Killing Awesomeness they just crafted can't be stolen.



No, I'm not. We're speculating how Stealth will work. What I said certainly fits into that category. It also fits perfectly well with this:

That has everything to do with "what is pickpocketed" and not "how the pickpocketing is done." The system can easily be designed to only allow gold to be stolen, for example.


Yes you are. You're attempting to create a problem with a maximized stealth skill that does not inherently exist in anything I've said. So suffice it to say, none of the above in regards to 100 stealth. Having a 100 stealth means you have the greatest possible opposition to a successful detection check that can be mounted, which would be weighed against the other guy's detection skill, and nothing more under the system I have proposed.

Again, the players are being stolen from. That's the key problem. Many players will, almost guaranteed, spec in a specific way just to avoid being stolen from, whether or not it's just gold is irrelevant. It's how community works.


Darth, you specifically said

So how is this

"Making stuff up?" My Detection Stat is A, your Stealth Stat is B, how do they play against one another? Is it simple subtraction when the situation arises of A - B then the dice roll? How does the Stealth Skill level translate into B? Is it a straight 1:1 ratio or is it a different ratio? How is that unrelated? It's completely related.

But not to the extent that they can't function as anything else. People will take precautions against being robbed, true, but avoiding being robbed is merely one need among many, and players will balance those needs.
The whole idea that there is a problem is making stuff up. I've explained the means by which the system works, yet your concerned about "Does it reduce detection stat by 90." Your chance of staying hidden depends on the interplay of your stealth skill to another person's detection skill, so that when the two skills equal, you have a roughly 50/50 (or whatever chance, it doesn't matter) chance of avoiding detection.

They can, yes. But please remember however that there is no player housing to speak of, so currently we are only aware of one place in which to store your belongings: on your person. If that remains the case (which I hope it won't and doubt it will), having Detection maxed out would be a very high priority.


And that interplay is what I was asking about. Is Stealth a 1:1 ratio? Is it a 2:1 ratio, which would mean at best you could make it a 50/50 chance. Is Detection even a 1:1 ratio? Is it actually just a dice roll or is it A - B? This is what you are talking about, I'm just throwing potential numbers at it based on what you have suggested.

If they include an alignment system where you gain/lose reputation within a faction that has repercussions (like becoming KOS to that faction) I can foresee pickpocketing working on a NPC level. Basically allowing you to pick-pocket NPCs but with the chance of being caught having much greater impact on your ultimate character's career (there's no save scumming in MMOs)

As for sneaking, in order to not turn it into a WoW-like invisibility spell, they should just make it environment based, in order to do that though you have to not allow the disabling of shadows in the game, which is one of the big things that makes graphic performance go down, and if stealth was based off actual game lighting you'd see a lot of people turn off shadows and turn up gamma just to spot stealth characters easier.

Assassin's creed style pick-pocket?

The problem with Pickpocketing from other players in an MMORPG, was pretty clearly shown in Ultima Online 12-15 years ago. Butt naked thieves would swarm the banks, and snoop into every passerby's backpack. If they saw something they wanted, they tried to steal it. If they got caught and killed, no biggie. They didn't have anything on them to begin with to lose. If they stole the item and got away, they just scored some loot. it was All Reward - No Risk, since they didn't risk any of their own items for the acquisition of another player's items. It was clearly a flawed design.

The problem with pseudo-invisibility Stealth in MMORPGs, is that surprise and landing the first blow are such important factors in PvP. When combined with CC capability, it's utterly ridiculous. Another problem with Stealth vs Detection that Ultima Online showed, was that most passive Detection systems are proximity based. The stealther has to be so close to you in order to passively detect them. The problem is, when it's a Stealth Archer or some such char, who is able to sneak into bowshot range of you while remaining outside of your passive detection range. The best "Stealth" system i've seen in an MMORPG so far, was Darkfall's. There were no spells or skills that could turn you invisible, stealth was entirely real-world based. Use the shadows and terrain/trees/buildings/etc to cover your approach to an unsuspecting target, crouch walk to reduce the noise you make and also to make you look smaller, don't wear metal armor that shines and makes noise when moving, etc.

Well that is clearly a pick-pocket system that hasn't been properly thought of. Adding a bounty they must pay if they fail, no matter what items they are currently carrying, would elimnate the no risk - all reward you described. For example, as long as a player has an unpaid bounty, he isn't allowed into market places to sell his goods, or even to banks where he can grab some money from his vault to pay the bounty.