Not all the time, half the time they just ignore it even if its a fail... Unless its a bug.
There are 3 options when failing:
1. Guards notice it and say
player name is interested in
player name's belongings
2. Closest guard says you failed miserably
3. Victim gets a red line saying someone failed stealing from you (not mentioning a name)
There's also a situation where the thief gets noticed without anyone saying it, for instance stealing from an npc, but does lose protection.
This is only visible by keeping an eye on your character sheet.
Ok, what about something like that:
Stealing animation disabled. Added possibility to temporary mark someone as a thief.
Scene1:
Thief is trying to steal something from player. He was succesful. No stealing animation, so victim realised that was robbed few seconds later. He don't know who was a thief.
Scene2:
Same like above but this time player is sure that there was only 1 player standing near to him so he know who is a thief but he cant do nothing about it at this time. But he know that he have to watch out that thief next time he meet him. So we move to ->
Scene3: Thief is trying to steal from his victim. He done this before, and he dont hide what he is planning to do. This time our clever player uses special tagging on that thief. We can imagine that as watching somebody. Thief is trying to steal something, but this time there is 100% chance that he will be cought.
Of course there are more scenarios, but i think it would work fine. And it will force some thieves to hide their plans or try to steal in crowdy area. What do you think about that?
(sorry for my english :-) )
Scene 2/3:
Bad idea.
You don't have 100% on hitting someone, 100% on succesful stealing, 100% succes rate of evading encounters, etc.
100% chance to get caught for a thief is bull.
This will result in multiple thief accounts as thieves at some point will be marked too much.
Besides, I can't tag people as PK, I can't tag them as tent follower, I can't tag them for acting like complete assholes.
Why should thieves be different?
IMO thieving is fine the way it works, with 1 exception:
Thieving and FA animation are the same which makes it possible to keep harassing the same player over and over without knowing if it's a thieving attempt or FA.
There are a few solutions to this, best are a thieving cooldown of a 3 minutes or no FA animation when using FA on a person with full hp.