How Devs Can Stop Kill Stealing with this Weird Trick

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Brontus, Sep 28, 2022.

  1. Brontus EQ Player Activist

    Kill stealing has plagued EverQuest since it's release in 1999. There's nothing worse than killing a "rare creature" and having a player or group of players show up out of nowhere and steal your kill. It's maddening and can ruin your play experiences. You and your group may have spent hours dungeon crawling and looking for a particular elusive rare creature, only to have an unsavory player steal your kill and steal your loot. In my books, this theft plain and simple.

    Our esteemed devs have had 23 years to come up with a solution to stop this, but for some reason nothing has been done about it.

    In the past, SOE and now Darkpaw had the Play Nice Policy to deal with this problem. Eventually, the Play Nice Policy was deemed too labor intensive to solve police this problem and kill stealing was made legal in Norrath. In-game gamemasters were removed and volunteer guides who used to assist with Play Nice Policy investigations were given other tasks.

    There is a simple solution to preventing kill stealing: who ever tags the NPC first, gets the kill. This is an elegant solution that was devised by former EverQuest players who went on to design the biggest and most profitable MMORPG of all time: World of Warcraft. This mechanic has been experience by millions of player since 2004 and has never been a problem.

    Whenever this solution is brought up, inevitably the purists come out of the woodwork and chant the common refrain:

    This is EverQuest, this is not World of Warcraft!

    Thankfully, the devs are immune to fallacious reasoning and during their tenure removed impractical mechanics such as meddling while reading spell books, corpse runs, prohibiting Spirit of Wolf from being cast indoors, and many others too numerous to mention.

    I do not consider DPS racing to be something that positively defines the EverQuest experience. I think it's an ugly, brutish, anti-social mechanic that has no place in any MMORPG. It creates needless frustration and acrimony. The only possible place it might be applicable is on a PVP server.

    Introducing this simple mechanic of "tag first gets the kill" would finally solve the kill stealing issue once and for all. I hope our amazing team of dedicated and passionate developers will hear me out and consider this solution.
    Dre., Andarriel and Yinla like this.
  2. KushallaFV Playing EverQuest

    This just leads to a lot of griefing.
    Brildon, Duder, Kialya and 4 others like this.
  3. ZenMaster formless, shapeless

    A wizard with a flux staff, a ranger with a bow, and a berserker with throwing axes would always win over the enchanter who has to cast tash.
    Brildon and Waring_McMarrin like this.
  4. Viper1 Augur

    kill stealing is a feature and considered emergent gameplay.
  5. Treiln Augur

    So me tagging all these mobs in a zone and training them onto your group and having you kill them for me so you don’t deal with dying and rezzing and losing your buffs is your solution?

    As a Necro, running around and putting a simple DoT or snare on any mob just before a player/group engages and getting the credit. Yeah no thanks:

  6. Cicelee Augur

    Here is another weird trick to prevent kill stealing-

    Bring enough DPS in your group/raid to do more DPS than other people who also want your mob.
  7. MmmmBop Wise Troll

    These examples that you posted are probably things that literally only you would consider doing. If you haven't played in recent times, you might not have noticed this, but there aren't typically more than one named up at a time (if you are doing this for loot). And if you are doing this for exp, then this could land you a ban for training. Also, in regard to named, they typically have kite prevention mechanics... like snare, root, dots, charm, mez, nukes... stuff that makes it next to impossible to kite them for indefinite periods of time while you search out groups to train.

    As for the dotting random mobs and then going FD waiting to take advantage of others about to make the kill... well, that's just incredibly pathetic. You might get away with it once or twice, but people will smarten up and not pull mobs in that are already dotted. In other words, you will spend far more of your time trying to scam others than actually succeeding - and thus, this will be why YOU are the only one trying to pull this off.

    OP's proposal might have holes, but they aren't the ones you are proposing.
    cadres and Dre. like this.
  8. MmmmBop Wise Troll

    So, you are OK if someone brings their automated 6 box crew into take the named that you have been camping for 6 hours, diligently killing ph's over and over with your 3 person group just fine. Do you seriously not see a problem with that or why the 3 people who were casually trying to spawn the named in their camp might not be really disgruntled after someone rolls in and just starts out dps'ing them?
    cadres likes this.
  9. strongbus Augur

    if they wanted to stop kill stealing they just make it so the 1st person/group/raid to tag the mob are the only ones who can cast anything (damage/mez/charm) until 1 the mob dies or 2 the mob wins.
  10. strongbus Augur

    someone coming in and taking a mob i haven't engaged yet is not kill stealing. its only kill stealing if i am engaged with the mob.
    Xianzu_Monk_Tunare likes this.
  11. Xyroff-cazic. Director of Sarcasm

    I like it. This way instead of needing to bring a bunch of DPS to win contested named, I can just keep rolling level 1 clerics and DA pulling them on top of groups to do the work for me! Really sounds a lot easier. Plz implement.
  12. MmmmBop Wise Troll

    We agree on that. If I am sitting in camp with my low dps group, I can split the camp and tag much quicker than a group of people who aren't at my camp... however, if my disciplines aren't up and my group consists of a cleric, shaman, and pally, I won't be able to compete with a 6 bot crew of a bard, shaman, SK, and 3 zerkers. They will get in 20 seconds after me and still beat me on the total damage delivered. That's more where my problem is than them taking the mob from underneath me (though that's really bad too). OP's suggestion is certainly helpful for the first problem though.
    cadres likes this.
  13. Cicelee Augur

    I don't think I have the patience to sit in one spot for six straight hours, mindlessly killing PH and hoping for a named. Goodness gracious.

    And on a TLP, yes if I really wanted the named I would bring six players so that I can ensure I out DPS an automated six box group. Which is why I don't play on TLP, because I don't want to play with scum of Norrath. On Live servers, you don't get that kind of scum (or at least I have not encountered that kind of scum).
  14. MmmmBop Wise Troll

    And then enjoy the impending vacation you get for training. Please share what legal methods (or even legally questionable methods) to grief you think will take place that make his idea bad.
  15. MmmmBop Wise Troll

    It happens, not often, but it does. Typically only during the first few weeks of an expansion thankfully.
  16. Treiln Augur

    Problem is, his proposal affects more than just the 1 mob every so often he’s going after. It affects all game play. Kill Stealing and grieving are common on TLPs more so than the live servers. So I don’t think his proposed change would be a bad thing on live.

    But on TLP where it’s a race for a lot of things, and certain keys/flagging/camps are locked down for long periods of time, this would bring out the greedy nature of people (especially Krono farmers). The ideas I posted had nothing to do with how I’d act. Just a few things that came mind that I’ve seen complained about in my past play experiences.

    I’m not saying I prefer the DPS race style of game play, as I enjoy the tag and go style that is in WoW. But there are issues with tag style play too. Especially at bottleneck points in the game. I recall reading up on people needing to kill specific mobs for a task in ToV (the dwarves for some reason), and people keeping them all locked down even though there was like…12 of them?

    At least with a DPS race, the other group would have a chance to come in get their task completed and move on. Neither one is perfect, but a tag style does allow for a lot of grieving. My examples may have been to the extreme, but it is still an example that could happen. I’m not the one who coined the term train, so it has happened before my suggestion of it just now. And people sniping in with an instant cast ability (or just ranged from someone else’s example), could easily hop around and tag mobs as they respawn in a dedicated grind group. You’d never notice a debuff or a thrown axe/arrow a second before pulling. And what are you supposed to do if you see someone waiting to snipe in on your camp? Just not pull because you don’t want it to be a wasted effort? I’m not sure really

    How many times do we have to hear about Enchanters doing charm warps with mobs every time a new TLP is released? Or pinch points on VP keying. Epic mobs being killed upon spawning for no reason. If there’s a way to abuse/exploit things, people will do it.

    Does this apply to everyone? No definitely not. Most of the people I’ve met in game are fairly considerate people. But I’ve had people come in and KS my Named mob before too so I’ve seen both sides.


    Pulling a single mob isn’t a train though. And it’s not grieving anything. Nothing you can do about it really if you pull your mob into a group and that group has AoE going off and they pull aggro and now it’s their problem. But your reward
  17. Svann2 The Magnificent

    It actually was a problem.
    The issue with that is that people stood at the known spawn point firing off quick attacks over and over till when the mob finally spawned they got the first hit. It was not better it was worse.
    Rijacki, Windance, Genoane and 3 others like this.
  18. Xyroff-cazic. Director of Sarcasm

    How will I recover from my level 1 cleric vacation on a free account that I can just roll over and over indefinitely?
  19. MmmmBop Wise Troll

    I like this post... I'm legitimately curious of ways this idea can be exploited. I was hoping to read some of the comments here for a couple days then posit whether there were solutions to those problems. As you stated, I'm certain this is much more of a TLP issue than live, but if there is a way to make things better on both (without breaking things even more) then I'm all for it.

    I'm a little biased towards giving the kills to people who tag first too. Though, I think you would need to alter programming to hard reset credit if someone drops aggro, but make the aggro drop last for 5 seconds or so to prevent mem blurs. As for people tagging just before you pull, I don't think this is a big issue (maybe it is on TLP), but if someone mistimes their tag - and can't kill the named, they will die. If someone debuffs and FD's, you can see who cast the dot and call them out. Just some things I have thought about... but I'm interested to see what other methods people could use to exploit and grief that I haven't thought about.
  20. kizant Augur

    how does one steal that which one does not possess?
    Brildon and sieger like this.