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I'm not sure if this is General or a Suggestion (probably more of a suggestion, but I dunno...). I think it's worth reading, but I'm a little biased. 
I'm still something of a n00b (and my in-game name reflects this), since I haven't had a lot of time to play, but I've noticed a few things that seem to need to be looked at by the thievery community as a whole. They are not the fault of any one specific individual (nor guild), nor are they issues with the game (which is currently the only game installed on my HD). Well, I suppose that since one of the thoughts I've come up with could only be implemented via a game patch, that at least is a game issue. But it's not something that's broken. Not really.
Now, I know that this is only my observation, and doesn't really mean much in the grand scheme of things, but it appears to be fairly consistent. Each person has a preference/bias in the whole thief vs. guard issue. It may be a preference that swings to one side or the other depending on the level, or on whom else is playing, but generally you'll find some people are usually thieves and others are usually guards. I prefer to play as a thief. I don't mind being a guard, but given the choice, I'll choose thief 90+% of the time. Others (I'm sure) are the same way. I'm not saying that this is bad, but it can (and I think does) lead to some less than fun situations.
Anyway, as I see it, thievery is a game about teams. The thief team, and the guard team. Individual scores are greatly influenced (though not totally determined) by whether or not your team won. I'm not exactly sure what the score breakdown looks like, and I really don't care. For my part, I care whether or not my team won, and how I helped. I'm usually one of the lowest scoring players, but some of that is by choice. I don't know all of the levels all that well (but I'm learning), so I prefer to harass the guards when I thieve. If this leads to me having a lower score, so be it. If it gets me a lower score, but helps my team win, w00t! I don't know how others feel about personal scores, so I'm going to try and avoid any hint of a blanket statement in regards to them. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all for some sort of individual ranking system, but the current one doesn't really carry much weight with me.
I've noticed that some people don't quite seem to grasp the whole "team" concept though. Or, perhaps those people are placing more weight on individual scoring than on team tactics. I don't know.
For instance, suppose (in a purely hypothetical setting, I assure you) that I am playing a thief on Gerome. It's down to myself and another thief, and a few guards. The game has been going on a while, and there are more than a few spectators. I am on the roof, waiting for a chance to slip inside. Suddenly, a window opens, and a guard chases thief#2 outside. He manages to make it to the shadows and becomes invisible. I draw my bow, just in case. The guard either is out of flares, or perhaps doesn't think one necessary, as he's just walking around the roof staring blindly into the dark. I watch for a few moments as he and thief#2 walk circles around each other, not really doing much of anything that I can tell. Knowing that time is running short, I take aim, and put the guard out of my misery. At this point, in this purely hypothetical situation, just suppose that team play was the priority. Thief#2 would whisper a quick thank you (or perhaps prefer to remain silent, either is fine by me), and we would proceed with the objectives. Or you could look at things as they tend to happen in the Real World (tm). Spectators begin textually harassing me, going on about how "that was his BJ" or "that was cheap" or some such other nonsense. Now, in his defense, thief#2 had no part in the berating, but neither did I receive thanks nor textual defense for the "assist" (at least, that's what I considered it).
To my understanding, killing a guard lowers one's score, while a KO raises it. That's fine with me. I don't mind taking a point hit if it means that we win. Is this the wrong attitude? Apparently so. From what I've noticed, an attitude of "each thief (and occasionally guard, though the latter is much less common) for himself" seems to prevail.
This hypothetical led me to consider alternative methods of play. Perhaps I should try ghosting. Which leads to scenario the second.
Imagine, once again, Gerome. This time, there are two guards, and two thieves. I'm trying the whole ghosting tactic, and not doing too bad, managing to avoid guards with little difficulty. Then I see on my screen, in rapid succession:
Thief#2 has KO'd Guard #1
Thief#2 has KO'd AI#1
Guard#2 has killed Thief#2
Hmmm.... Apparently thief#2 is in a DMing mood. Well that sucks. However, I've not managed to collect much loot yet, nor have I made it to the book, so I head off to attempt to find the action, and see if I can be of any assistance (hoping to prevent us losing all of our lives, and, if we're lucky, actually win in the process). Unfortunately, by the time I remember how to see where thief#2 is and finally make it there, it's too late. I arrive just in time to see thief#2 lose our last life. Crap. So I'm on the roof, by myself, with none of the objectives accomplished, two guards plus a couple of AIs running around, and time quickly disappearing. So back to the original plan. I resume the ghosting. Of course, by this point, there's not a lot of hope for me, as I'm not really sure where the loot has been grabbed from and not, but I decide to try anyway. Surprising myself, I don't do too badly at all. I manage to get the evidence on my own, and make it up to 725 loot. Then the last of the time disappears. No big deal, I think. I gave it my best. Then the personal scores show up. As expected, the two guards are at the top. Then I see that thief#2 has way more points than I do. WTF? Bah. No big deal. I tried my best. And it won't stop me from playing. (It will, however, serve to keep me from playing as a thief with this particular thief#2 for a while.)
I don't have anything against either ghosting or DMing.
As a team.
Otherwise, the entire team suffers. Especially from the DMing. I don't know that there's any solution for this, at least, not an easy one.
Back to the topic at hand, team play. If certain people strongly prefer thieving, others prefer guarding, and a third category can go either way, you end up with some unhappy players. Pretend that you've got a group of eight people. Now, pretend further that two of those prefer to play as guards. That leaves five people. If all of those people prefer to play as thieves, someone will be unhappy. When the level changes, and the game again decides that it needs to balance teams, you could end up with the very same people on the very same teams. This will lead to someone being very unhappy. The way that the system handles team balance right now, it is pretty much left up to the players to have some sense of "fairness" as far as making sure that everyone gets a chance to play on each of the maps. The system itself doesn't care. (At least, as far as I can tell.) So you end up with some people just sitting at the team choice screen, waiting for someone to become a guard so that they can be a thief. And while they wait, the other thieves can die, and come back, and die again, until the thief lives are gone. This could be remedied (in my mind, at least) if there were four options at the team choice screen, rather than the current three:
Thieves
Guards
Spectate
and my new, proposed one:
Random
This would allow people who wished to join a specific team be assured a spot on that team, and would permit those who don't mind to be used as a balance. Now, this in itself wouldn't solve anything. You would need some sort of thief queue. While in queue, those waiting could spectate a thief actually playing (or not). As guards killed thieves or more guards joined the game, players would be plucked from the queue. This would reward those that actually work towards objectives and (as long as there's users waiting in the queue) limit the damage the damage that DMers would be able to do. The spectating while waiting could be useful, enabling lesser thieves a chance to watch those more experienced without abandoning hope of being able to play that round. If the timer were set at perhaps thirty seconds, rather than twenty, before the start of the game, and people were allowed to modify their team choice during that time, I feel that there would be little room to complain. You could see how long the thief queue would be, and you could then choose to be a guard if you really just wanted to play. If someone chose random, and saw that they would be assigned to a guard when they really would prefer to be a thief, that would be their opportunity to change.
This probably wouldn't work, for a number of reasons I haven't thought of, but I thought I'd throw it out, in the hopes that it would spark someone to think of a better method.
Anyway, that's entirely enough rambling for now.
-me.
I'm still something of a n00b (and my in-game name reflects this), since I haven't had a lot of time to play, but I've noticed a few things that seem to need to be looked at by the thievery community as a whole. They are not the fault of any one specific individual (nor guild), nor are they issues with the game (which is currently the only game installed on my HD). Well, I suppose that since one of the thoughts I've come up with could only be implemented via a game patch, that at least is a game issue. But it's not something that's broken. Not really.
Now, I know that this is only my observation, and doesn't really mean much in the grand scheme of things, but it appears to be fairly consistent. Each person has a preference/bias in the whole thief vs. guard issue. It may be a preference that swings to one side or the other depending on the level, or on whom else is playing, but generally you'll find some people are usually thieves and others are usually guards. I prefer to play as a thief. I don't mind being a guard, but given the choice, I'll choose thief 90+% of the time. Others (I'm sure) are the same way. I'm not saying that this is bad, but it can (and I think does) lead to some less than fun situations.
Anyway, as I see it, thievery is a game about teams. The thief team, and the guard team. Individual scores are greatly influenced (though not totally determined) by whether or not your team won. I'm not exactly sure what the score breakdown looks like, and I really don't care. For my part, I care whether or not my team won, and how I helped. I'm usually one of the lowest scoring players, but some of that is by choice. I don't know all of the levels all that well (but I'm learning), so I prefer to harass the guards when I thieve. If this leads to me having a lower score, so be it. If it gets me a lower score, but helps my team win, w00t! I don't know how others feel about personal scores, so I'm going to try and avoid any hint of a blanket statement in regards to them. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all for some sort of individual ranking system, but the current one doesn't really carry much weight with me.
I've noticed that some people don't quite seem to grasp the whole "team" concept though. Or, perhaps those people are placing more weight on individual scoring than on team tactics. I don't know.
For instance, suppose (in a purely hypothetical setting, I assure you) that I am playing a thief on Gerome. It's down to myself and another thief, and a few guards. The game has been going on a while, and there are more than a few spectators. I am on the roof, waiting for a chance to slip inside. Suddenly, a window opens, and a guard chases thief#2 outside. He manages to make it to the shadows and becomes invisible. I draw my bow, just in case. The guard either is out of flares, or perhaps doesn't think one necessary, as he's just walking around the roof staring blindly into the dark. I watch for a few moments as he and thief#2 walk circles around each other, not really doing much of anything that I can tell. Knowing that time is running short, I take aim, and put the guard out of my misery. At this point, in this purely hypothetical situation, just suppose that team play was the priority. Thief#2 would whisper a quick thank you (or perhaps prefer to remain silent, either is fine by me), and we would proceed with the objectives. Or you could look at things as they tend to happen in the Real World (tm). Spectators begin textually harassing me, going on about how "that was his BJ" or "that was cheap" or some such other nonsense. Now, in his defense, thief#2 had no part in the berating, but neither did I receive thanks nor textual defense for the "assist" (at least, that's what I considered it).
To my understanding, killing a guard lowers one's score, while a KO raises it. That's fine with me. I don't mind taking a point hit if it means that we win. Is this the wrong attitude? Apparently so. From what I've noticed, an attitude of "each thief (and occasionally guard, though the latter is much less common) for himself" seems to prevail.
This hypothetical led me to consider alternative methods of play. Perhaps I should try ghosting. Which leads to scenario the second.
Imagine, once again, Gerome. This time, there are two guards, and two thieves. I'm trying the whole ghosting tactic, and not doing too bad, managing to avoid guards with little difficulty. Then I see on my screen, in rapid succession:
Thief#2 has KO'd Guard #1
Thief#2 has KO'd AI#1
Guard#2 has killed Thief#2
Hmmm.... Apparently thief#2 is in a DMing mood. Well that sucks. However, I've not managed to collect much loot yet, nor have I made it to the book, so I head off to attempt to find the action, and see if I can be of any assistance (hoping to prevent us losing all of our lives, and, if we're lucky, actually win in the process). Unfortunately, by the time I remember how to see where thief#2 is and finally make it there, it's too late. I arrive just in time to see thief#2 lose our last life. Crap. So I'm on the roof, by myself, with none of the objectives accomplished, two guards plus a couple of AIs running around, and time quickly disappearing. So back to the original plan. I resume the ghosting. Of course, by this point, there's not a lot of hope for me, as I'm not really sure where the loot has been grabbed from and not, but I decide to try anyway. Surprising myself, I don't do too badly at all. I manage to get the evidence on my own, and make it up to 725 loot. Then the last of the time disappears. No big deal, I think. I gave it my best. Then the personal scores show up. As expected, the two guards are at the top. Then I see that thief#2 has way more points than I do. WTF? Bah. No big deal. I tried my best. And it won't stop me from playing. (It will, however, serve to keep me from playing as a thief with this particular thief#2 for a while.)
I don't have anything against either ghosting or DMing.
As a team.
Otherwise, the entire team suffers. Especially from the DMing. I don't know that there's any solution for this, at least, not an easy one.
Back to the topic at hand, team play. If certain people strongly prefer thieving, others prefer guarding, and a third category can go either way, you end up with some unhappy players. Pretend that you've got a group of eight people. Now, pretend further that two of those prefer to play as guards. That leaves five people. If all of those people prefer to play as thieves, someone will be unhappy. When the level changes, and the game again decides that it needs to balance teams, you could end up with the very same people on the very same teams. This will lead to someone being very unhappy. The way that the system handles team balance right now, it is pretty much left up to the players to have some sense of "fairness" as far as making sure that everyone gets a chance to play on each of the maps. The system itself doesn't care. (At least, as far as I can tell.) So you end up with some people just sitting at the team choice screen, waiting for someone to become a guard so that they can be a thief. And while they wait, the other thieves can die, and come back, and die again, until the thief lives are gone. This could be remedied (in my mind, at least) if there were four options at the team choice screen, rather than the current three:
Thieves
Guards
Spectate
and my new, proposed one:
Random
This would allow people who wished to join a specific team be assured a spot on that team, and would permit those who don't mind to be used as a balance. Now, this in itself wouldn't solve anything. You would need some sort of thief queue. While in queue, those waiting could spectate a thief actually playing (or not). As guards killed thieves or more guards joined the game, players would be plucked from the queue. This would reward those that actually work towards objectives and (as long as there's users waiting in the queue) limit the damage the damage that DMers would be able to do. The spectating while waiting could be useful, enabling lesser thieves a chance to watch those more experienced without abandoning hope of being able to play that round. If the timer were set at perhaps thirty seconds, rather than twenty, before the start of the game, and people were allowed to modify their team choice during that time, I feel that there would be little room to complain. You could see how long the thief queue would be, and you could then choose to be a guard if you really just wanted to play. If someone chose random, and saw that they would be assigned to a guard when they really would prefer to be a thief, that would be their opportunity to change.
This probably wouldn't work, for a number of reasons I haven't thought of, but I thought I'd throw it out, in the hopes that it would spark someone to think of a better method.
Anyway, that's entirely enough rambling for now.
-me.
).
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