Pickpocketing level reset

Hello, I was pickpocketing level 9(?) this morning and it has suddenly returned to level 1. Is there any way to get that fixed?

If you critically fail a crime, you lose crime skill. Try sticking either to easier targets, or build crime experience by doing easier crimes first.

The principle of losing some skill makes sense, but that's pretty crap - how on earth does somebody's skill in something reset from level 8 to 1? Resetting current level progress or reverting a single level makes sense, perhaps a 50% cut at the most, but losing 100% of your progress feels pretty nonsensical and counter-intuitive.

You've got to think about how the behaviour scales - would it be okay for somebody's progress to be suddenly reset at level 15? 43? 87?

As a principal software engineer, I'd make the guy who wrote that take some UX training.

You don't lose 100% every time, you lose a chunk depending on the target. Your collected crime skill was just so low, that the amount removed was greater than could be taken. You will not experience that at CS15 and higher, personal estimate. 

Do easier targets and you won't have that problem. 

Start with easier crimes. Push them 1 by 1. Search for cash , bootlegging then graffity etc. Also read some guides to understand crimes better.

Search for cash crime guide

As much as I appreciate the explanations, this is no excuse for poor UX - how is the user expected to know what they stood to gain or lose? How are they supposed to know whether they're ready to tackle a police officer at level 5, 10, 15 etc. We can explain things away, but we shouldn't be excusing poorly thought out design. It's a bit like trying to say "it's not a bug, it's a feature", when it's pretty obvious that it just wasn't really designed properly.

i would put the question "which target is more reasonable for an inexperienced pickpocket, a homeless person or a cop" under common sense, personally. 

I didn't realise that question had been asked by anybody, Hemicopter.

The question I was more interested in was actually "how is the user expected to know what they stand to gain or lose? How are they supposed to know whether they're ready to tackle a police office at level 5, 10, 15 etc"

I'd been thinking that though it was obviously a stretch and would likely end in repeated penalties until it did, I just needed it to work once. Eventually.

Cutting 50% of somebody's experience is probably about as severe as a penalty should ever go for something. If you had pickpocketed 40 people in real life, there's nothing you could do that would set you back to zero experience. It's a nonsense penalty that only makes sense at higher levels - the lack of capping/scaling of the penalty at starting levels is a design bug. Or if it's intentional, it needs some more thought around the UX of that to make the risk clearer to the user.

Trial and error, 

I wish more crimes were like pickpocketing where I can take on the level 100 options at level one. 

Yeah, that in itself is pretty daft - it would be better if it hid targets that you have no chance against, or gave the user some kind of 'are you sure' prompt that could be confirmed through. Usually that's what games tend to do for high-risk options.

You seem to be under a lot of misconceptions, let me clear them up.

Upon a critical failure the user will lose x10 the expected experience gain from the crime done. If you get a critical failure when pickpocketing a homeless person, you'd have to pickpocket ~10 more to recover your experience (demoralization notwithstanding).

Pickpocketing has a mechanic where different targets have different multipliers to experience gain, this is designed so when your skill level is higher you start going for harder targets to get more experience. In a similar manner, more advanced targets become safer as your skill level increases.

What happened here is that you had a critical failure while pickpocketing a police officer, and police officers have the highest skill gain multiplier out of all pickpocketing targets (roughly a x3.5 compared to drunkards, homeless and the elderly).

Pickpocketing is also special in that all crime options are available from the start (so all marks can appear regardless of your skill level). In other crimes, more advanced targets become available as your skill level increases, while pickpocketing has this kind of trap where you need to use common sense to decide which targets are worth going for and which ones are going to kick your teeth in.

Your failure here was not realizing that, maybe pickpocketing a cop was a very lategame thing that should be done when nearing max skill, and instead tried it very early during your run. No shame in that, been there done that. You just learn from your mistakes and move on.

As for your question

how is the user expected to know what they stand to gain or lose? How are they supposed to know whether they're ready to tackle a police office at level 5, 10, 15 etc

The former is both a matter of trial and error and just using common sense. If you pickpocket a drunkard you may nab some junk they're carrying or a couple bottles of booze, if you pickpocket a businesswoman you may find a purse or expensive stuff but she may also mace you or kick you in the balls. There's no time limit here, you can take as much time as you need to figure stuff out by testing what works and what doesn't, and if you can't be arsed, plenty of people have done the "figuring stuff out" part already and posted their findings in the Tutorials & Guides forum.

The latter is simply common sense. If you try and pickpocket a cop, nine times out of ten it's not gonna end well, regardless of how experienced you are. At low skill you don't have the sleight of hand, the situational awareness, the dexterity to pull such a stunt and get away with it scot free.

Blaming these things on UX design when in reality you couldn't be arsed to think about these things before complaining is, in very simple terms, a skill issue. Get gud scrub.

After thirty years of playing games, common sense is expecting games to put sensible UX features in place around their features - We're not still in the 80s without any industry best practices. I realise some people have been here a while and may be desensitized to features you're overly familiar with, and are tempted to defend them - but this isn't normal.

If a game makes a feature available but restricts others (as is common in Torn's Crimes), the natural conclusion you are teaching the player (the learned behaviour) is that actions which are unrestricted are possible at your skill level.

The police officer is the only one I hadn't been successful with so far at level 8, so how was I to know it was impossible at this point - or should never be attempted.

I think you're working way too hard here to explain away lazy design and poorly thought through mechanics. As a principal software engineer I'd send the guy who designed this back to think about a few things before pushing to Production.

If everyone is affirming this is the only Crime that has this type of disproportionate repercussion, it's all the more obvious it's a flaw. If they all had aspects like this it would be more defensible. Being the only broken one doesn't make it "special".

You're entitled to have a different opinion, but you don't speak as if you've got any experience or interest in this field. Don't just accept what is - this is a blatant UX failure, and certainly ought to be improved.

Some players have succeed level one police officers. It’s not impossible but the risk is way higher than the reward for many of us. 

I want more crimes that give players the choice to do whatever options they want. I want my decision for who I pickpocket, or kidnap, or what I grow/smuggle to HEAVILY impact success rates. 
it’s lame when a game restricts where you can go or what you can do because it thinks your not ready. 

maybe pickpocketing just isn’t the crime for you 

It’s rich that you’re lecturing everyone on UX design while missing the mark entirely. If you really believe that games should mollycoddle players with endless warnings and confirmations, it’s clear you might be a bit out of touch with actual player experience.

Your argument shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how design works. If a feature is available, it’s not a flaw; it’s an invitation to engage and learn. Real players thrive on those challenges, rather than needing to be spoon-fed every possible outcome.

And as for your so-called UX expertise? It’s hard to take your critique seriously when it sounds more like you’re advocating for a glorified tutorial mode. If your idea of good design is to wrap players in bubble wrap, maybe you should stick to teaching kindergarten rather than critiquing game mechanics. Sometimes, the risk is what makes gaming fun - so perhaps it’s time for you to step back and reconsider whether you really understand the industry best practices you claim to uphold

Can we lock this one, CJ?

Sir nuttingham, I'm just pointing out the glaring inconsistency everyone including you are silently acknowledging - if one feature is behaving differently from all the others, that's a UX error, by definition.

User Experience is all about teaching the user how to use a product through consistent signals. If it's all about risk, great! Do that consistently. Everything you and the others are saying is silently affirming the inconsistency here.

I hear your petty dissatisfaction that other features don't meet your personal preferences - but if they're consistent with one another, at least that's a sign of good, intentional design.

Like the other guy, you don't really seem to understand what UX is. I'll forgive you the ignorance - but next time try asking a few more questions to better understand what you're critiquing. Being passionately ignorant is not a great look.

Also, setting a bounty on me would seem to suggest I struck a nerve? Chin up, bud - picking on noobs because they've said a few words you don't like is also not the most endearing look. If you don't think you can get a message across with words alone, perhaps you need to look more closely at your argument, just to make sure that it actually holds water.

Syncopate - please do lock it, I'm done with being targeted for trying to raise a bug. On any of the platforms I moderate I'd have shut this down already.

There's a very good tutorial banner that torn has implemented in other areas. Why not just the basics of each crime? 

Absolute bare-minimum, watered down versions of the details Ched puts when announcing the crime. 

For pickpocketing it doesn't need to be anything complex, just something like "choose your targets wisely, some targets are more difficult than others". Let common sense handle it from there, and if someone decides to pull the classic not reading in text based game you can point to the literal tutorial element. 

Seems to be a simple fix with no downside - most of us play with them disabled regardless, wouldn't even be noticed by the majority of the playerbase. 🤷‍♂️ just spitballing here