Sleuth Home - Message Boards - Newbie Questions

Aug-30-2007 08:52

Hello :-)
As a newbie, I to my surprise experienced to get a contact. Unfortunately it's not the contact that I wanted, so I wondered if you could make it possible to loose a contact.

In real life, but may be also in this game, having a contact is based on a mutually agreed situation between me and my contact. I behave nice to my contact, and my contact is very nice towards me.

So, I thought the reason why I (in the future) lost my contact, was that I just dropped by his/her place, and robbed some money.

This is a non-good action, so in order to NOT make it too attractive to do this, I thought that the consequences could be about like this:
* I lost one contact (by my choosing)
* I lost 10% of my skill points and an corresponding amount of experience points (so that it will be possible to rebuild my character)
* I got $10 000 (the money I robbed)
* I am not able to do any favor, or get a new contact until I have solved 100 cases after the "robbery"
With theese harsh consequences, especially loosing of skill points (as when a character is "degraded"), I would guess that only neewbies would like to go for this (which is desired).
I also thought that there could be an option for loosing all your contacts, and I thought that the consequences would then be:
* I loose all my contacts.
* I loose 20% of my skill points and a corresponding amount of experience points.
* I get $50 000 (because, since I "took" more money this time, word is spreading throughout to all my contacts, and that's the reason why I lost everyone).
* It takes 200 (or more?) cases with no favor or possibilities to get any contact until my "name" has been re-established as someone it would be able to trust.

I am looking forward to getting some response on my wish. :-)

Aug-30-2007 12:12

I'm sorry, I'm kind of missing the point on dropping a contact. Why would you want to?

Aug-30-2007 12:46

Trust me, there's definitely times when people would like to 'lose' one or more of the contacts they have. As a charming woman in a sea of female P/E contacts in London, I go through hell every time I travel there cause I have the Barber (only male P/E contact there). I'd almost sell the cat to get rid of ol' Edmund and make friends with someone else. Almost. :-/

Aug-30-2007 14:11

Well, I did not want to kill myself and create a new character. I like the one I have created, and having subscribed, I really apreciate the situation of not having to re-subscribe for the new character(?) and also be kicked out of the very attractive Agency I have been allowed to work for. (It would be the killed character that's a member in the agency, not the new one.)
The problem is that there are things you do as very new in the game, that you would like to change, but the contacts last forever, even if it was a result of a mistake.
It might also be that one consequence of cutting of a contact makes you unable to re-establish a relationship with that contact. (But if that's implemented it could be seen as something positive, and I don't think there is a need for making it attractive to become a criminal for a short time).
Also, it could be that you would have to pay a penalty of say 3x the amount of money you robbed from the contact, in order to be able to establish any contact after you comitted the crime. The reason why being that you need to confess the crime, and become justified by paying the fine before anyone would accept you.

Aug-31-2007 08:41

Hello Huglover,

It sounds like you may have missed Woody's suggestion to check out the reactivation feature for retired detectives. Once upon a time if you retired you had to create a new detective, but the Sleuth gods had mercy on our pleas and granted us an option for another chance. They implemented many of the suggestions you have offered up for the contact loss as well.

From the Sleuth Update section in City Hall:

"Retired detectives are assessed the following penalties when reactivated:

1. Loss of 25% of their Experience Points
2. Loss of 90% of their Money
3. Loss of Skill Points commensurate to Experience Points lost. Since no skills are lost in the process, this usually means the detective will start with negative available skill points.
4. Loss of one randomly selected piece of Equipment
5. Loss of all Contacts
6. Loss of most of their Political Standing Points"

You don't have to start over with a new name and face anymore.