Vulturing, Fallen Strongholds and the relative safety of the Nexus

[Mousus6]

Possibly this would cause more discussion in discord but it feels like I'm probably going to write a wall of text so I'll put it here.

It feels to me like a major source of discontent in the Nexus is where there is a gap between expected safety of a situation and actual death rate; one of the potential biggest places where that shows up is sitting inside a downed stronghold. Below I've put my guesses as to how often I would expect to die in various circumstances so there is a sensible shared calibration of roughly how "safe" various activities are. Times to death are a very estimated average based on my vague experiences over the breath and trying to filter out most of what happened in the high density world of Freeport (though I'm sure my estimates are still a bit coloured by that).

Activity	Expected time to next death
Staying Dead	Unlimited
Invisible and hiding in the back end of purgatorio as a transcend	Until Invis needs a restock
Invisible on a font/gem harvest spot	14 days
In a stronghold	7 days
Hiding in a low traffic area	5 days
Hiding whilst leaving a corpse trail	2 days
Hiding in a resource building	1 day
Unhidden inside a lit building	12 hours
Unhidden outside	2 hours

This is definitely a set of my internal calibrations that are presumably affected by things like people actively hunting areas with Demon Tracker/Angel Hunter. People are free to argue how well or badly calibrated my scale of safety is but I'd be surprised if anyone thought I was vastly wrong about the general sort of order of the relative safeties. A major question to me is where, on that vague scale of safety, should "in my fallen stronghold" sit? Given that you will probably only be in a fallen stronghold for 24 hours at a time this one will always be probabilistic and people won't have a particularly large data set to calibrate themselves on. Equally I don't have enough calibration this breath to say where "inside a random tile with a pet wall hard enough to need a semi-prepared tank" sits having only played a petmaster in the dying days of last breath.

The major problem I run into is this:

1. Stronghold locations are, according to game rules, supposed to be secret.
2. I am not going to maintain, update, and constantly reference, a full per character list of what SHs each character knows about. Other than wandering way marks I let that information go in one ear and out the other (actively digging through discord logs if I need to assist with target picking for a raid).
3. When hunting using tools that would be adequate to catch someone hiding in a low traffic area (Angel Hunter/EoD) I will sometimes find people in a fallen SH that until I got there I hadn't realised was a fallen stronghold until I stepped inside (and occasionally not even then). I have already expended the resources on hunting them that would have caught them if they were invisible, should I now be backing away?

If being inside a fallen stronghold is supposed to be genuinely safe (or at least safer than hiding hidden in an out of the way spot) then there should probably be some actual game mechanics to back that up, requiring everyone to maintain a full personal list of stronghold locations in order to not break the social contract is going to regularly lead to bad blood. Options that occur to me:

1. A fallen stronghold isn't actually supposed to be safe. Anti-vulturing should be applied to anyone in the raiding faction and lots of people should be blocked from attacking via the don't act on alt knowledge proviso but if you find a bunch of enemy targets through random hunting you have found a pile of enemy targets. They are exactly as protected as their glyphs and petmasters can make them. The consequences for the raiding faction breaking it are only people will probably do it back to them. If things go this way there could want to be some freshly set stronghold additional defence/immunity to prevent easy captures before people have actually made their way back, could just be social but would want to be marked on the faction page that they were freshly reset.
2. A fallen stronghold gives some actual mechanical protection. Given the existence of the emergency bunker upgrade this should probably be tied to that. Long range hunting skills should also report the targets as being in a bunker to avoid the deep annoyance of "I followed your corpse trail half way across the straits and I get here and find out you're in a bunker". If things go this way it should possibly have an outside map icon and at least a tiny bit of faction ward that starts off down.
3. A fallen stronghold gives official social protection. Any flag capture should be announced to the whole Nexus with the location of the destroyed stronghold (in a mutable way for characters that know they don't do any hunting) or long term claimed strongholds should be listed in such a way as they are marked on an official map (the latter probably still catches me out as angel hunter wanders don't tend to involve me checking the big map very much). This one feels a bit weird to me but is the obvious other way of fixing it. Presumably that gets a lot of fallen strongholds attacked by factionless targets against whom there is no equivalent reprisal, possibly the announcement could be limited to factioned targets but almost every player will be informed of almost every capture whatever filter you put on that.
4. A fallen stronghold is genuinely sacrosanct. The emergency bunker is free for everyone rather than being an upgrade and gives an indestructible ward that forms when the first faction member returns.

I'm not sure which of the options I prefer but I don't think the current status quo of causing bad blood all round with regards to any interaction with someone in a fallen stronghold is great. Hopefully this is a useful point to start a discussion as I am not a fan of needing to spend a lot of effort on avoiding causing bad blood.

[sohdbrimks]

I've never liked the whole vulturing complaints tbh, but it is a kind of "gentleman's agreement" that a lot of factions have
Being factioned has pros and cons, and one of the cons is having to follow some rules even if you don't agree
If you're feral you can 100% ignore it though and have the freedom to do whatever you want

The weird/funny thing about anti-vulturing to me, is that you're actually safer in your fallen SH than hiding 1 tile away, since people can kill you there without being accused of vulturing. To me this just cheapens the value of hiding skills or shadow wrap etc and looks very lame

[Mousus6]

I think the bit that my brain is failing to wrap round is that it's quite likely that people's expectations of safety might actually be higher in a fallen stronghold than a standing one which feels obviously absurd.

Most of the problem I have is the sheer level of effort required to properly follow the nebulously defined gentleman's agreement. The sense of "you should know better" about hidden information.

[snurpt]

I‘m going to out myself as not being part of any faction discords. I so rarely open my discord that it just doesn‘t make sense for me. Maybe I‘ll eventually get back into the mood for raiding like in the NW days, but I highly doubt it given my real-life responsibilities.
With that disclaimer out of the way: What is the bloody problem? This is a game of getting killed. That‘s literally what it is. There‘s even achievements for dying a whole lot!
This is not a game of hamstering everything you can carry and then building your very own McMansion to show off how rich you are. Quite the opposite: Even items die (decay)! This is a game about death!

Yes, strongholds offer a bit of welcome respite. Until the stronghold dies, which probably means you‘ll die, too, if you were „home“ at the time.
Going straight back home without the means of raising the walls is a lousy idea, unless you have some means of defending yourself. If you‘re a crafter without any combat or evasive skills, spend a few days at a neighbor‘s (read: ally‘s) house.

I really do wonder what people expect playing a game like this. Yes, there‘s a bit of a social contract. I enjoy reading a bit of character role playing with all the combat spam. I don‘t enjoy being hacked to pieces by someone with a faster connection while I‘m playing on my phone riding the train. It happens. Move on and maybe do a bit of cathartic role playing when you run across the murderer in their sleep.
But please, don‘t expect the game, humanity or the universe to bend over backwards to soothe a slight you suffered on an internet game. For crying out loud, have you never had to wait your turn at the swings on a playground???

PS: yes, all my characters are in my signature. If you feel I have tragically wounded your pride with my post, knock yourself out griefing me. I really don‘t care either way.

[Kandarin]

I've said this on Discord as well but it's important to remember that anti-vulturing is a social convention, not a game rule enforced by devs/mods. If a faction gets in the habit of vulturing, all that will happen is that the community will gradually get the idea that that faction doesn't care about anti-vulturing conventions and thus is not protected by them and thus it's A-okay to hunt that faction's stronghold site when they're down. If enough factions do this, the community tone on this will change and the social convention will go away.

In my experience, there have been conflicts in which everyone generally understood that anti-vulturing conventions had been abandoned for the duration of the conflict - the OS vs RP/IB Elysium land war in late B5 stands out to me as a pretty obvious example. And in general, if you're waging war on a faction to get them to move away from resources you want for yourselves, you should feel free to push harder than in random raids. Factions should not feel entitled to their stronghold sites indefinitely, and there are always "safer" lower-intensity locations you can back off to as a faction.

As a player (not a dev) I have complicated feelings on this and on the question of what (if anything) the right "intensity" of Nexus conflicts is. Personally I am comfortable with high-intensity wars with real stakes and build my characters accordingly to (eventually) be hard-hitting, useful in multiple situations and logistics-light, with long-haul storyline motivations to keep going even if the cause seems lost. But as a faction member and faction leader, I share a lot of factions with a lot of people who play much more casually, many of whom are going to read getting raided by the same people every day for a long period of time as an OOC attempt to push them out of the community instead of an interesting challenge to figure out how to fight back against. When most of your faction sees a prolonged conflict that's going poorly for them as the game not being fun anymore, even a faction member who sees such conflicts the way I do is going to feel the pressure to back down to keep people from quitting. It's easy to say "everyone just needs to get more comfortable with dying way more often" and hard to convince people of that if that doesn't segue with what they log in to play the game for.

We don't want people to feel punished for aggressively playing to win the grand conflict that the game tells you it is about! At the same time, a substantial majority of our players have not geared their character builds, play style, login frequency and faction participation around maximally playing-to-win and will feel totally out of their element in a conflict that goes to maximum intensity. It's a hard balance to strike as a community.

[darkwingstalker]

Honestly, the anti-vulturing stuff is just nice because getting killed again and again is frustrating. A couple weeks back my Nexal Crusader got killed in a raid twice and then vultured making his way home over the course of 2 days, and it just kills your enthusiasm for logging in / playing. I see anti-vulturing as a way to ensure people can at least get their ward back up before getting rolled again.