ArcheAge: Loving Jury Duty
I got called to Jury Duty and I’m so excited!
Wait… no. I mean in ArcheAge. Not in real life.
ArcheAge Justice System for Criminals
AA has a rudimentary justice system built into the game. If you’ve done something bad (murder, attacking same faction, uprooting, theft) and get reported for it, you earn crime points. After earning so many crime points, after your next death in PvP, you can stand trial.
You will stand before a jury of your peers who will judge you based on your crimes and sentence you accordingly. If you can prove that you are innocent (for whatever reason), the jury may let you off the hook. Or, they can choose your sentence and send you to jail for a certain number of minutes. After you’ve done your time in jail, your record will be cleared of crime points, and you are released upon the world again.
Unlocking Jury Duty
So how does this work for someone on the jury?
I unlocked Jury Duty through a questline, and have served about 4 different times already. I really enjoy the system (even if I don’t think justice is really served), and wanted to explain how it works in detail.
Once you reach level 30, you must have 0 crime and infamy points to have access to the quest that opens Jury Duty. You receieve this from an Honor Point Collector. He will send you to your faction’s courthouse – the Nuian courthouse is in Marianople, and the Haranian is in Austera. I won’t go into the quests because they’re pretty standard.
Serving on the Jury
Once you unlock the ability to serve on the Jury, you are placed in the jury queue. Yes. Another queue. In the game, this time.
You can see your position in the queue by pressing the “C” button to view your character profile. There, you will see a new stat called Trials Served. Next to that is a Standby box. Mousing over that box will tell you your position in the queue. This counts down over time until you are finally prompted to join the jury for a trial.
This will be a pop-up box. You have so much time to respond to the pop-up before the trial begins. If you don’t respond, or respond too late, you’ll be tossed back into the queue.
Once you respond to the prompt, you are teleported to the courthouse and placed up on the jury platform. Yes, you do get to see the other 4 other people in the Jury, as well as the criminal that you’re passing judgement on. The trial is carried out over the trial interface and the Trial chat channel.
The jury has 5 mins to look over the list of crimes. This gives you a record of what crimes were reported, who reported them and the reporter’s comments.
When you’re ready, you can click the Give Verdict button. Once all jury members click that, or time runs out, it will progress to the Plead stage.
The defendant is given one minute to plead the case. They’ve probably already been pleading since the case started. Sometimes, the defendant has good reasons for what they do, such as proving they were killing bots. Sometimes, the goal is for the defendant to charm or amuse the Jury into a lower sentence. Sometimes, I’ve even seen defendants trying to bribe the jury to an innocent verdict. Don’t know how well that works, though.
After the Plead stage, it’s time to judge the criminal. The interface changes, providing five boxes to click. The first is Innocent, while the rest are Guilty, with a range of sentence times. These can be anywhere from 2 minutes to over 100 minutes. I think this varies depending on the number of crime points and reports.
For example, the guy above had an option a max of 183 mins in jail. While, someone who threw a few assaults, a few thefts and had a much lower crime point score may only have a max of 13 mins in jail.
I’m not sure if everyone must come to a consensus of Innocent for the defendant to be innocent. That’s happened on on of my trials, though, so it’s not impossible.
Once all the judgments are placed, the Judge NPC announces the sentence. Then, you are transported right back to where you were in the world before the trial began.
Pretty simple! A neat system. A lot of fun!