Instead of discussing the investigation of crime, there seems to be a great deal of bragging about successful crimes on this forum. As someone with over 45 years of role playing experience, I understand how much havoc stealing can wreak and I’m not laughing. If I knew more about the game, I would like to create a thief taker.
What exactly are you looking to discuss? What do you want to know? You can start with putting forensic eval, tracking, and detect hidden on your character. Forensic eval will tell you if a player is in the NPC thieves' guild which you need to join to steal from other players. It is not required to "pick junk up off of the ground" or steal from monsters. Thieves' guild members cannot give murder counts so you can freely kill them anywhere. Your main problem is going to be finding thieves, not only because they are sneaky, but because there are very few of them left. If you are playing on a low population shard (Siege Perilous comes to mind as the only shard to even attempt this) you will quickly figure out who's a thief and who isn't, at which point you can stone off Forensics.
Once you have Detect, Forensic Eval, and tracking, I would go with magery. The Reveal spell works hand-in-hand with detect hidden but without the 10 Second delay between uses. Also, a thief's first instinct upon being revealed is going to be to run away, so paralyze is a must. You're not likely to catch him without it. At that point, you already have 4 skills used up, might as well finish it up with Eval, Med and whatever else you want. Not only are you going to have to brush up on your PvP skills but you will need to understand your game mechanics very well. I have found few who understand how the more obscure game mechanics work better than most thieves do and they will use that against you quite effectively.
