Should Noise Arrows affect Stealth Score?

[chakkman]

Meh, voted for no, but now i read the posts in this thread i'm leaning more towards a yes. Can i change my vote?

[Jonathan1247]

If you leave them behind, then yes, you should be penalized. The act of using them however should not affect score.

But... That's something that is a bit too unforgiving. So I'll say no.

Edited July 16, 2013 by Jonathan1247

[Bastoc]

As Sotha said, I think people shouldn't restrain from using their equipment, and have fun with it, that's why I voted no (at first). But after reading this topic, I realised this thought is irrelevant, and changed my mind. Couple of comments:

 

- stealth score should be as HARSH as possible, since it's meant for ghostling challenge (NB: though in Mark of the Ninja f.i., a different approach is used, you get points when you "distract" an ennemy or kill them in spectacular way, that's also a valid point)

- the most FAIR way to count is counting alerts raised BECAUSE OF the player

- even if they are NOT SURE it's because of you (might be rats, other guards, whatever). Still they are alerted, and as a matter of fact, by you, so it should count.

- I don't see any way a guard could be alerted without you being the cause

- there are some rare cases in which guards are alerted when in real life they probably wouldn't, but then it's about AI, and technically really hard (if not impossible) to fix

 

Personally, I prefer to avoid save/reload style and try to play until I die or get stuck, and don't pay much attention to stealth score (but that's off topic).

Edited December 10, 2013 by Bastoc

[demagogue]

- I don't see any way a guard could be alerted without you being the cause

 

Well technically a guard is alerted according to their Team relations, so an AI will be alerted by another AI from an enemy team and that's going to count against the Stealth Score. And as far as the player is concerned (only seeing the world, not the mechanics behind it), they might understand the world as having other enemies for the AI than the player. But for the most part these are relatively rare cases, so even though I'm biased in favor of not making things always count against the player for reasons like that, I don't mind too much since they are sort of rare.

[Bridge]

I really don't care about stealth score under normal circumstances to be honest, in fact I'm in the habit of making daring and quite noisy escapes once all the objectives have been completed, just for kicks. As has been pointed out, the people who are ghosting the missions (and hence aiming for 0 stealth score), especially the people who follow the old ghosting rules, will never use them anyway. I think having it tied to discovery of the noise arrows is a neat idea. It makes it so that if you cannot use any objects in the environment as as a distraction you can simply activate the arrow and then pick it up while the guard is en route. This would obviously entail creating at least a rudimentary outline to a plan, and stealth, at least Thief, is all about strategic traversal right?

Edited December 11, 2013 by Bridge