Shooing Off unattended mounts

[Vazbol]

Probably one of the more annoying aspects for recovering a dead player's body is doing anything about mounts. There's little one can do to move the mount away while moving a dead body. You generally ahve to either leave it behind to get mauled by the local denizens of the area, or the dead players has to hoof it back to the area and grab their horse.

Or uh, the player getting the corpse can kill the horse...

However, there should be a less barbaric way to tell the horse (hey, you should go back to town." If a mount's owner is logged off, or dead while they are still spawned on the game, PC's should be able to shoo the horses, sending them off back to the last stables they were in. maybe have the owner a retrieval fee by the stables. However, this is better than running back or having to pay the fee for healing a heavily injured mount. Would be a lot less annoying for everyone involved.

[Lemuel]

I agree with this idea. Some variants to fix the problem would include instilling a sense of horse loyalty to the steed, where when it sees the owner's body, it follows the body as it is brought back to town; and have the fearlessness of warhorses disappear at the owner's death (in other words, when the owner dies, the warhorse behaves like a riding horse and flees at any attack).

If we go with Vazbol's Shoo idea, we could have any NPC attack on a mount (with the owner in a dead state) function as a Shoo as well and send the steed back to the stables just as it does when we log out for a long time leaving our steed unattended.

[Jirato]

I'd really only consider adding something like this if it made the mount MIA for an hour before it eventually wound up to the stable, in addition to the usual 150 riln "We found your lost mount" fee.

I kinda feel like people wouldn't want to wait an hour for their mounts to become available again after dying though.

[Shainar]

when [a mount] sees the owner's body, it follows the body as it is brought back to town

This one gets my vote. It seems like a pretty practical and believable solution.

[Vazbol]

To be fair, where mounts sometimes end up, people do wait about an hour or so for their horse to recover from being murderhoboed by a player thinking it's faster to send them back that way. Especially when the location is very far from any nearby revival points, or in very difficult to navigate locations that a horse constantly fleeing might end up lost in a maze.

but right, currently it's just really awkward where the best thing to do for someone is murderstomp one's horse for them to flee and be restabled before dragging the body back.

[Lemuel]

I'd really only consider adding something like this if it made the mount MIA for an hour before it eventually wound up to the stable, in addition to the usual 150 riln "We found your lost mount" fee.

I kinda feel like people wouldn't want to wait an hour for their mounts to become available again after dying though.

The way to implement this as an yes/no option for players would be for the character to be able go to a stables and buy a 'recovery service' where they pay the fee up front, and are told by the NPC that someone working for the Stables has been sent to locate their horse and to come back in an hour for it. Players that don't like the fee or the wait can foot it themselves to find their own mount.