What happened to the guards?

[violator]

I noticed that some of the guard posts no longer have guards, and some of them have town guards. Is this permanent?

[brin]

Yeah, the in-game message board says that Lord British has pulled all of his troops from the guard posts throughout the land and they've been replaced by mercenary warrior guards. I guess we shall see what future event(s) this has foreshadowed. Maybe it has to do with the recent invasions of demonkind and, more recently, grumpy Christmas folk.

[violator]

Thanks, I didn't notice that in the announcements. I hope the come back. They're a good source of income for me.

[Kaivan]

From a technical standpoint, the guards at the outpost were never supposed to be order guards, nor were they supposed to be combative with aggressive mobs. This, in part, is a correction to that which is permanent.

[nightshark]

From a technical standpoint, the guards at the outpost were never supposed to be order guards, nor were they supposed to be combative with aggressive mobs. This, in part, is a correction to that which is permanent.

What is the reasoning behind that? In the demo the guards at these outposts are aggressive (and kill, with no rewards), anything they see committing a criminal action. Though I'm not too sure how accurate the spawn is on the demo I've played.

[Kaivan]

I don't see how that's possible, given that the code for guards explicitly requires the criminal action to take place within a justice region for them to react, and outposts aren't guarded. What specific version of the demo did you play?

[nightshark]

I don't see how that's possible, given that the code for guards explicitly requires the criminal action to take place within a justice region for them to react, and outposts aren't guarded. What specific version of the demo did you play?

I PMed you the version I played, it's a somewhat fully spawned version of the demo. Dungeons are not really spawned, they only have basic things like rats. How it was spawned, I don't know.

My observations of guards in the demo is that whenever a guard witnesses a criminal act, they will chase down the target and kill them, not like a normal guard whack, they actually chase down the target. This happens regardless of whether the act they see is in a guarded region or not.

One of my tests was this, I set up 2 characters A and B at the border of a town region:

• A stood outside town and attacked B who was inside town. B got guard whacked, as expected.
• Then I resurrected B stood about a screen away from the guarded region (neither character was in a guarded region). B was no longer in a guard callable state.
• A and B are now about a screen away from any guard zone. B attacks A (criminal action). Normally, this would not be a guard callable act. However, the idle guard witnessed the act and immediately attacked character B. This didn't work like a normal guard call (calling guards would not work in this situation), it was more the AI of the guard itself deciding to attack.

The same thing happened at guard towers in the wilderness (eg the ones south of Yew). The guards there would attack both monsters and players when they witnessed them making criminal acts.

[Kaivan]

I replied to your PM, and I also have something to note here:

A and B are now about a screen away from any guard zone. B attacks A (criminal action). Normally, this would not be a guard callable act. However, the idle guard witnessed the act and immediately attacked character B. This didn't work like a normal guard call (calling guards would not work in this situation), it was more the AI of the guard itself deciding to attack.

This is the type of behavior that seems to be at odds with some reports of guard activity from newsgroup archives, which explicitly talk about players who are attacked by other players or mobs, with no reaction from the guards. Two such anecdotes can be found within the original thread on the subject on our forums. On the flip side, there are reports, typically from early 98, of the guard towers being virtual "death traps" for players as noted by these three newsgroup posts, which details the reactions of outpost guards sometimes reacting like town guards and killing players.

The important distinction is that from a timing perspective, the posts about players getting killed at guard outposts all seem to be dated during the old notoriety system, and that adds a layer of complication to the situation. The demo, which is dated as a test server from May of 1998, has the reputation system enabled, but excludes several fixes expected to be seen in the next patch. This suggests that if your results are from a properly working demo copy, the behavior must be embedded in the core AI for the server, as there is no indication that outpost guards will react to any criminal acts within the scripts itself, and that their behavior may still be tied to the older notoriety system within the demo core. This points to changes to the underlying AI for guards between the time of the demo and the later reports of inactivity at guard outposts. Evidence to support the fact that changes undoubtedly occurred to the behavior of the guards exists in another post detailing certain guard functions regarding the reporting of their activity that were accidentally left in a debugging mode. This code, namely the guard_activity variable, doesn't exist as a variable within any of the scripts, the core, nor as the name of a script itself, which provides reliable evidence that at least some kind of change was made to the guards, and possibly changes to the way they react to player behavior in their surroundings.

Beyond that, I can't provide any more explanation for why player reports deviate from what you experienced, but at least one consistent point is that real guards should exist at these outposts, and even if they do react to creatures in the area, they shouldn't leave a corpse behind. The main issue is determining what they should react to, and under what conditions.