CLOK BBS

Around noon on Wednesday, I went to the cottage I have -- a small rustic pine cottage (No. 5, Old South Road) -- and discovered that the door was unlocked. I knew that was odd because there's only one key, and it has never left my possession since I received it, and I didn't invite anyone into my house who stayed there.

I mentioned the unlocked door on chat, and a player told me that he had unlocked the cottages a week ago but that he wasn't responsible for unlocking my cottage today. Vinz got in touch with me and told me that the door lock had not been set properly and could be opened by anyone with any locksmithing skill. He set my door so that it should be set to the proper level.

Another player told me a little while ago that her cottage door was also unlocked and that someone had taken belongings from it. I'm now wondering if someone had taken things from me, and I simply haven't looked around enough, yet. Could you make sure (1) nobody took anything from my cottage and (2) all of the cottages have locks set correctly?

I'm pretty sure it was changed a while back so that not only could you not get gains in locksmithing if you didn't recieve the basic training for it, but you can't even use lockpicks at all anymore without some skill in it. So at least you know it wasn't just anybody I guess.

As for stolen items, I agree all cottages should probably be looked at and fixed, but any stolen items should probably be discovered IC. Sometimes stuff like this happens (been there done that) and you just have to roll with it.

I think the stolen items could be returned to their owners. The person who stole them got them because of a bug that they most likely abused.

You can't just unlock a house. It requires skill.

Well, if you can't even tell if things were stolen, is it really abuse of a bug? Abuse in my opinion would be if they went in, ransacked the place, and then moved on to other houses and did the same. And it's likely the person didn't even know it was a bug. Aren't houses set on a scale? Or are all house locks just insanely hard to crack? I'm assuming the former, since I've seen someone get the locks replaced on their house, amd had them instantly cracked by someone with a decent locksmithing skill, unless the GM controlling that NPC at the time messed that lock up as well the first try.

In the future, it would be wonderful to email (clok@contrarium.net) this kind of thing instead of posting about it. The concern being that if you post about it here, others could be made aware of and thusly make use of the bug before we get it fixed. There's also the matter of a personal request (checking if any of your items were taken) that doesn't need to be addressed in public.

Happily, we have a nifty tool now that autmagically spiffs up home locks, so we can fix it en masse with ease, and had already done so on this particular issue before the time of the original posting.