Cloak‡1877264 said:
Well to be fair, I did not say I agree with the change, just the logic of your previous statement. On a side note why are you trying to reveal non-orange players on your orange character? I would assume you are revealing in bases....or you would be revealing red characters. I am not entirely for this change as I said will just make my faction revealer red, not like it bothers me to much, except only way to kill is holy light....But again I do not really see a reason to reveal blue players on it so don't matter.
Uh, I guess both Lore Denin, Poo and I weren't clear enough.
Anyone who has actually been involved in factions on a shard where more than one faction is active has certainly run into the situation where the enemy uses a second account to put a character into an opposing faction for the purpose of spying on and/or harassing the other faction. For example, say I belong to TB and SL is also active on the shard. It's not at all unusual for someone whose main faction is SL to put a character in TB (and vice versa) for the purpose of placing TB's traps in locations that are difficult to find, raising the portcullis during a defense, stam-blocking defenders or inconveniently dropping obstacles during a defense, recalling in with a stronghold rune and killing other "blue" characters during a defense,and just in general being a nuisance to other members of the same faction. In this case, there are definitely BLUE characters INSIDE a faction base that you want to put out of action. You know by their actions or because they flat out tell you that they are there to cause you trouble. With this change, it becomes impossible to reveal these characters unless the detector is red, or as Lore indicated, perhaps if the detector has somehow flagged.
I'll never forget when our guild made new characters on Legends to put into factions a few years back. We joined Minax because TB was already "occupied." First time there were sigils in play, we went to Brit and what did we find? Our Minax traps all placed inside one of the town walls (we didn't have runes to get down there, as we were new to the shard) and outside the Brit stronghold there were 45 traps lined up: 15 TB traps, 15 SL traps, and 15 CoM traps. I made some nice silver that day yanking out traps and immediately started working on a second trap remover to put into TB to be able to lift Minax traps the next time "TB" wasted them inside the walls. And whenever we saw unknown blue Minax characters, you can be damn sure they were "kill on sight." It isn't essential to use traps, but once in a while yes, they would be nice to have and killing the traitor who's placing them where you can't reach them just makes sense, especially after you've looked up the character and see that it's got GM tinkering skill.
As I mentioned before, I've got zero interest in artificially turning my detectors red for the purpose of being able to detect blue faction spies. My detectors are supporting characters that steal sigils, track and reveal stealthers, and remove traps. They have almost no offensive or defensive capabilities (other than being able to hide and stealth). And to boot, most of my faction characters like this belong to TB.
I don't have any problem with the fact that people are able to create spy/traitor characters, either. It definitely adds to the fun and challenge in factions. But this change just feels like someone implemented it without thinking it through and probably just because someone whined about being revealed by a guildmate and wants to play in "easy mode." Yeah, it is sometimes a pain to have to coordinate with your mates to make sure you don't detect them in a tense situation, but that's the thinking and teamwork part of factions that I always used to love. This change eliminates a lot of the thinking and teamwork. It also makes it difficult or impossible to deal with stealther spies/traitors in your faction unless you happen to have a red detector or mage, which seem kinda out of place in at least some of the factions. (Some people don't think reds should even be allowed in any of the factions.) It's also a bit unsettling to think that we now have a skill that requires in some cases that your character must be a criminal before the skill can even be used, instead of making your character a criminal after you actually use the skill.
I hope this makes sense and I apologize that it's so long. Just want to make sure you understand what some of us have been trying to say. I'm pretty sure you've mentioned in the past that you've participated in factions, so I'm finding it a bit hard to believe that you've never run into this situation. It's not really that unusual to run into "spies"/"traitors" in factions and even developers who don't actually ever play UO should be able to grasp the concept.