Well if someone isn't well known that why would someone even hire an assassin to go after them?
as for noble's keep in mind that you need to spend story points to inhabit an npc who has titles/fame and what not. If that person didn't get enough story points then they wont be able to take over their heir. so for example if a king has no story points and dies 5-6 times in one day then he will only be able to take over an npc who doesn't cost any story points, like a peasant.
I agree with OP. I think assassins are being way overblown in discussion. Assassination literally has no lasting impact on the world. It is all risk and no reward.
F0942E
It hurts the bottom line.
If you were doing anything and you die, whatever you were doing is put on hold. If you had stuff on you that was valuable it is even a worse loss.
Not even looking at spirit lost, or sparks of life that is enough to make paying someone to kill someone you don't like worth it. Well depending on how much you don't like the person.
It would be imbalanced if assassination were more effective than other forms of PvP conflict.
A queen could die a couple of ways -- she might be murdered by a single stealth operative, or she might lead her troops in open warfare and fall on the field of battle.
In an RPG, there's no expectation that a single lost battle will bring a guild or monarchy to ruin. We would assume that losing a PvP fight is one chapter in an ongoing conflict that is really more about the glory of the fight itself than achieving regime change.
It's appropriate that successfully assassinating a queen would be about as effective as striking her down in battle, which is to say -- not all that effective.
Why bother, then? For the same reason that the two armies bother to ride into battle in an RPG: for glory, for bragging rights, for fun.
How cool would it be to slip back into your castle room, blood still fresh on your stiletto, and pen a cordial letter to your longtime foe: "Dear Queen Rowena, I was shocked and saddened this morning to learn of your recent demise. Who can that hooded miscreant in your chamber have been? And however did he manage to slip past your highly competent royal guard? Looking forward to continued warm relations between our great nations...."
But -- these deaths, however inconsequential to the game's balance of power, would have a real sting to them, because they'd cost real-world money. The next time Queen Rowena (now Rowena the Ninth) sees you, she's going to be thinking about that $20 she had to shell out for her premature Spark of Life renewal, and thinking of ways to make you pay the same.
I don't know...seems like a pretty big risk and a lot of training just for bragging rights and to force your foe to pay to play the game (which COULD be construed as griefing).
I guess it would be cool to loot a high profile target but without a large impact to the world at large I just don't see it being worth it. But maybe someone else might...
F0942E
I think that the function of assassinations would be more symbolic in nature. If an assassination is successful, the community sees the failure of the individual who died. Even if they aren't dead forever- it shows weakness.
Especially on a monarch, assassination will show others that the monarch is weak. It will show the barons under the influence of monarchs that they may be weak enough for that baron to overpower them.
In times of war killing a leader through assassination would be massively useful. They would lack leadership and make it easier to defeat them without having to deploy anything large scale.
There are merits to assassination, just not how we would think of them.
Posted By Artax at 2:26 PM - Fri Jan 20 2017
to force your foe to pay to play the game (which COULD be construed as griefing).
Well -- it is griefing, and oddly enough it's built into the structure of the game.
One of the startling things about Elyria is that the devs have chosen to actively embrace some of worst plagues of the MMO genre -- griefing and "pay to win" -- and make something very different out of them.
Frankly I'm not certain it's going to have a happy result, but I'm interested in watching how it plays out.
Did you guys forget? You can assassinate a players entire NPC family except for their under 15 year old children.
If you know that a player is about to perma-die from age and you kill all his family then his entire dynasty dies with him. Even if he has a 5 year old grandson, he can't take over as that grandson until the grandson is 15 years old and unless the player perma dies on his grandson's 15th birthday you can still target the grandson before he's taken over.
Anyone that wants to keep a dynasty going has to pump out potential heirs like a baby factory, so much so that it wouldn't be reasonable to ask an assassin to kill the guy's 15 possible heirs.
I'm pretty sure that most assassination attempts are going to target player's heirs once they are close to perma death.
For example, you want to remove some asshole duke. This guy only has 5 possible heirs that he can directly take over because if they all die, another player inherits his duchy and this player wants to keep it. So you wait until this player is close to age permadeath, then you hire assassins to kill his 5 heirs during one night. You'd be lucky to get all of them, but if you do, then there's nothing this player can do to give himself the Duchy title anymore. Even if he has 2 months of game time left he can't adopt any NPCs to then take over, even if he makes a baby heir, that heir will only be about 8 years old by the time he perma dies and he won't be able to take over that 8 year old. If you kill all 5 possible heirs in the next 2 months as well. then he still won't be able to inherit his title.
Assassination will be useful and it will bring down dynasties, but you can't do that with just 1 kill, you'll have to wipe out every possible heir the player could take over. You have to kill the entire family to wipe it out. It'll be hard, but doable.
Well I agree with OP assassination seems pretty useless. It just kinda seems like a tool used to get revenge on someone your salty about and can't fight against.
Also remember that there may be mechanics in place surrounding the "kings ring", or maybe even something like getting access to the management tables. It could turn out that you need to kill the king and take his ring before you are able to accomplish much, but if you manage to you'll have a fair amount of bargaining power, assuming you aren't caught. (This could probably apply to all leaders, but I see it effecting the kings the most substantially) Either way, I assume SBS has some ideas that will keep the deviant parts of the game enjoyable and story-driving.
Posted By Steevo at 4:49 PM - Fri Jan 20 2017
Well if someone isn't well known that why would someone even hire an assassin to go after them?
as for noble's keep in mind that you need to spend story points to inhabit an npc who has titles/fame and what not. If that person didn't get enough story points then they wont be able to take over their heir. so for example if a king has no story points and dies 5-6 times in one day then he will only be able to take over an npc who doesn't cost any story points, like a peasant.
Just by doing your duties as a title holder (interacting with the management table) you earn a good amount of story points to inhabit their heir. Doing that should get you enough points to actually continue playing, it'd be the bare minimum but it's enough. Plus if we're talking Launch, the King will have accumulated more than enough to inhabit his heir, for players after the initial backers who step into royal roles, well they have to work harder at it. If they're lucky they start within an NPC noble family if any are available in the Kingdom/Profession/etc they choose.
I think there will be 3 main reasons for assassination.
Hiring an assassin to steal an item like a relic or the kings ring as already mentioned. A thief could do this but obviously killing the person first works just as well.
Killing off someones heirs.
famous people like a king have a much higher spirit loss. So if they get killed like 5 times withing one week then there's no way they would have gotten enough story points to inhabit their heir, this would force them off the throne.
1.) Dunno how viable it is to take the ring, we don't know if they can be recreated (like Design Experiences you have a pattern to recreate), whether you need the CB regardless in order to actually claim the throne or any other title so the game knows you are the one taking control.
2.) Depends on the age of the heir, anyone 15 and under cannot be killed. They are as invincible as Skyrim's children without mods.
3.) After so many deaths (dunno time frame) the loss is dwindled so if you spawn kill them somehow they won't loss the same amount each death, instead it stacks against you the killer, making it so when you finally die your spirit loss is like almost x2 times as bad as their if not close to half as much.
I think they should increase the time lost from lifespan of important characters, I've read somewhere it is max. 64 days you can lose from your lifespan depending on your status, i think it should increase up to half a year, so assassination can have an impact, making the target change his/her political decisions, rather than following same methods since 2 successful assassination would mean 1 spark of life=money, and reward for assassin is not the ultimate outcome, it is whatever written on contract, most probably gold/silver depending on the level of difficulty. But after this point some sort of p2w element would be in game since one can buy as many sparks of life as they wish, assuming that it will be something like 30$, it wouldn't be a big deal to get assassinated for some people, but sure it would be annoying as hell.
Posted By Lunaus at 6:39 PM - Fri Jan 20 2017
2.) Depends on the age of the heir, anyone 15 and under cannot be killed. They are as invincible as Skyrim's children without mods.
3.) After so many deaths (dunno time frame) the loss is dwindled so if you spawn kill them somehow they won't loss the same amount each death, instead it stacks against you the killer, making it so when you finally die your spirit loss is like almost x2 times as bad as their if not close to half as much.
If their under aged and cant be killed then they also wont be a viable candidate for that person to take over. when someone gets killed they get a 2.5 hour grace period before any more deaths would have a spirit loss, so if a king dies every few hours then that would result in perma death after 5 or 6 deaths.
