How the mechanics for stealing in MO2 could be improved and balanced in comparison to MO1!

[Anabolic Man]

To balance the stealing skill we need

1. either an unsorted inventory, where you can freely drag your items arround as in Ultima Online or Life is Feudal, as you can see in the first screenshot. That would allow the player to drag items above a valuable item, that you not want to hide under rubbish, so that the thief is forced to steal the items dragged over your gold coins first or have to move them, before he can see your gold or valuable item.
This would give the players more time to determine that they are being robbed. That mechanic would force SV to add weight limits for crates and banks instead of item slot limits to not litter the database with useless items.




2. Or we keep the item slot based static inventory and make some of the slots highlighted in green randomly if you pickpocket someone.
The idea behind it is that you can only steal the items in the green slots and that they are randomly changing, so that players get more time to determine that they are being robbed.



Otherwise stealing will be too strong and annoying as in MO1.

 

[Melkhia]

To balance the stealing skill we need

1. either an unsorted inventory, where you can freely drag your items arround as in Ultima Online or Life is Feudal, as you can see in the first screenshot. That would allow the player to drag items above a valuable item, that you not want to get stolen, so that the thief is forced to steal the items dragged over your gold coins first or have to move them, before he can see your gold or valuable item.
This would give the players more time to determine that they are being robbed. That mechanic would force SV to add weight limits for crates and banks instead of item slot limits to not litter the database with useless items.


View attachment 5007

2. Or we keep the item slot based static inventory and make some of the slots highlighted in green randomly if you pickpocket someone.
The idea behind it is that you can only steal the items in the green slots and that they are randomly changing, so that players get more time to determine that they are being robbed.

View attachment 5008

Otherwise stealing will be too strong and annoying as in MO1.

These are some great ideas here.

The inventory system in the first proposition reminds me of the inventory system in Exanima where the challenge was to manage and optimize your objects placement almost as a skill.

Could also use that kind of logic of overlapping objects to protect your valuable item by adding some sort of minor trap inside your bag to protect you from being robbed.
It could use the engineering profession branch to scale if you wouldn't have any point in pilfering for example as an alternative against thieves.

I like how your concepts are Ui base, and I could really imagine some other feature like music, mini gambling games or environmental puzzles to take advantage of the user interface.