For Great Justice!

Archeage is far from perfect. When I quit, it was sinking further and further into the pay-to-win category, which is pretty much the death knell of any game that wants to be popular. However, it did have one feature that I really loved, and wished were a bit more fleshed out than it was in the release of the game.

A little background about Archeage first. In this game, nearly the entire economy is player driven. All the crafting, and all the crafting materials are gathered by players, and farming is a major way to gain resources. However, farm land is a finite resource, as there are only certain parts of the world where you may place a farm. However, to maintain your farm, you must pay taxes every week, so eventually, players will fail to pay their taxes, and that land will become free again (or so you hope). You may also buy land from other players, but the cost of land as the game goes on becomes pretty far out of reach for most people who don't have farms as a source of money!

If you don't have a farm, you may use public farms, which are limited in what you can plant there, or do what players term "illegal farming", which is to plant crops outside of farm land. The benefits of planting on farm land is that your crops are protected, and only you, or anyone you give permissions to, can harvest them (public farms only grant protection for 24 hours). If you plant crops illegally, anybody can harvest them - so most people try to hide them.

The interesting thing is, if someone does steal your crops, depending on their larceny skill (how good they are at stealing), they may leave footprints (the higher the skill, the less likely). Players can use those footprints to report the theft, and leave an eyewitness report if you happened to see what happened.

Once they get enough reports, they become wanted. They remain this way until they are killed, at which point they get sent to court to await trial. I'm not entirely sure how long the wait is, as I've never committed a crime in the game, but given the queue for jury duty is quite long, I can't imagine the wait is very great.

The actual trial is public, and anyone in the courtroom can speak in Trial chat. The judge is just an NPC and the verdict and sentence is left up to the five jurors for that case. However, Trial chat can be a bit messy, as multiple trials go one at once, which is a bit silly.

The jury has access to the last 100 reports for the defendant - along with the eyewitness reports, however, the length of them tends to get cutoff, which is also a bit silly.

Each juror anonymously gets to select their verdict. They can ask the defendant questions, to try and clarify things, however, there's a timer on how long they have to choose a verdict, to avoid people just griefing the legal system and never choosing anything.

Once each jury member has voted, a verdict is passed.

What I love most about this system, is that because you are judged by a jury of people from your faction, your reputation actually matters. I've seen a few trials where the jury has remembered the defendant helping them out with a quest, and they'll convince the other jury members that the defendant is a good person and shouldn't go to jail.

You can also get reported for assault and murder (attacking and killing players from your own faction), and there was a guild on my server who was notorious for faction-killing. So a lot of the time, in the eyewitness reports, you would see people say, "Killed Addiction" (the name of the faction killing guild), or "Stealing from Addiction", and the jury would let them walk.

I've also seen people offer bribe players into giving them an innocent verdict, only for the defendant to end up back on trial a few days later, and one of the jury members from the old trial said the defendant never paid the bribe. Unlike WoW, where GMs will investigate fraudulent trades, like someone running off with the crafting materials instead of crafting the item, Trion believes that a fool and their money are soon parted - if someone scams you out of your money in the game, then it's your own damn fault. It's up to the player community to punish them, via the legal system, and same-faction killing. Probably explains the "free-to-play" model of their game. They will, however, ban people who are using exploits in the game, like using scripts to automate parts of the game, or falsifying client data.

Oh, I forgot to add, if you are found guilty, you will acquire criminal points. If you get enough of those, you get booted out of your faction, and end up a pirate, where any player is allowed to kill you. There are many pirate guilds which roam the seas looking for weaker ships to raid for their cargo.

I really love this system, it's actually what drew me to the game in the first place. It's a pity the rest of the game isn't worth playing.