Like you say, there needs to be a cost/risk. Like in real life the further away from law & order you are, the less the risk. So the closer you are to a town the riskier it is. For example if you are in a town you might be attacked by NPC gaurds, flagged so that you can be attacked by other players without penalty to them and locked out of using any merchants in that town for a certain time period (logged in time, not real time). Possibly you may even be detained until you pay a fee, or even have to do community service (quests) to pay off your debt to society! | |
Yes well, no MMO game can simulate RL penalties for breaking the law (at least no game that would be fun to play), but the alignment system in DarkFall seems offer a fair risk/cost balance to make it hard for the mindless trigger-happy PK to thrive;at least the way it has been presented in words cause we don't know the actual game itself. | |
Hey now, I really am a moral degenerate, dont let my fancy words fool you. I kill players cuz I get off on ruining their day... Plus phat lewts make me smile in my sleep. ~Dreaming of your lewts | |
You mentioned that PKer's can hide from retribution by logging out. Taking away the ability to disappear from the server when logging could solve many PK/nonPK problems, while adding a realism than many would enjoy. A person who logs from the game could have their character start a routine, whether its simply walk around the space where the person logged, act as a merchant to sell some of their items, or perhaps loop through some crafting and training exercises. People who aren't flagged as criminals can log out in the safety of NPC cities, while flagged PKers will have to log out in their smaller camps or houses. Now a character won't be able to disappear by logging out. UO's interface allowed you to see the names of any character on the screen, even if the character were hidden away in their house. If you don't want this system in your game, a tracking skill could mimic it. Either way, the location of logged out criminals can now be found. The final step is the system of retribution. A criminal logged out in the wilds can easily be attacked, and if killed rez on the spot a few minutes later. Each death suffered can give some small penalty, which will add up if vigilantes camp his character's log-out location long enough. If he's within a building, allow a mechanism to tear it down, or to eject the criminal from the building. If the game knows a person has legitimate grievance against another, it can allow that person to put a mark on the criminal's house, or cast a vote to eject the criminal from a building. After enough marks have been made, the house collapses, or guards force the character to leave the building, and the criminal is once again in the wilds. | |
that is simply non-feasible, although a good idea; but can you imagine the load on the servers that would bring, if every PC became an NPC upon logout? | |
There are many people who are totally opposed to any pvp and simply want to play against the computer with no risks. These people enjoy WoW and Everquest. These people will never enjoy a game with any "non-consensual" PvP. They are known as "carebears" to PvPers. Many more people - who I would call "moderates" - would enjoy "non-consensual" PvP if there were accountability. In early UO, there was no accountability. It was the only (graphical) MMO at the time, so the "carebears" had nowhere to turn. Until Everquest came along, and all the carebears left UO. The moderates left too because UO was chaos. Fun for the hardcore PKers, not fun for everyone else. Carebears and PKers will never co-exist happily. Most people suggest a reputation system to promote accountability. The computer keeps track of your actions and decides whether you are good or evil. I never liked that. The first requirement for accountability is one character per account, and one account per person. The game would install some sort of unique encrypted key on each user's computer and verify that key at log-in to prevent one person owning multiple accounts. Each human player would only be allowed one in-game character. The in-game character's name could not be changed, except upon deletion. A second feature is a real-time purgatory phase after death. If you are killed, you can't log in for - say - 30 to 60 minutes. That way when the Anti-PKs kill a random PK, it matters. Obviously it would hurt the Anti-PKs too, but the point is that when one side wins, it WINS. As in FOR THE (real-world) NIGHT. A third feature is that magical transportation be extremely limited. In UO, PKers could gate to literally any spot on the map, slaughter all the noobs, and then recall to a safe location. There was absolutely no way the Anti-PKs could stop them, so they didn't even try. Because if they showed up, the PKers would just leave and gate somewhere else. It was a game of cat-and-mouse where the mouse could teleport, and didn't care if it died. A fourth feature is that there be NO PvP prohibited zones. This may seem counter-intuitive at first, but the random PKs can just teleport to the PvP free safe zone (i.e. town or their impenetrable castle in UO) and proceed to mock the Anti-PKs from safety. In my system, everyone is treated equally, no complicated (and arbitrary) reputation calculations need to be done, and yet there is true accountability. You have ONE name. You can't teleport to escape justice, and you are not safe in your home or anywhere else. And of course, there is no reason that race v. race or realm v. realm could not be added to this system. Now, I'm not suggesting that this would be easy to implement. | |
wtf? ya ok ur dumb | |
Ok, first, the reputation is a good system, if you kill enough people, your own race will attack you. | |
seriously? L2Read, I was quoted in there from a previous post, because I MADE A VALID NON DUMB (non flame either jerkoff) post, also, it was a joke as to ruining players' days, that is what everyone thinks when they get ganked, it is a PK joke, L2Play, kthxbai ~Lewting Talon Tortilleni | |
I was there from the beginning of Ultima Online--the closed Beta. Ultima Online went through almost all the stages discussed in the article and tried many, many different solutions. Some of them were pretty decent, some not. When the game first started,it is true that everybody "could" PK. However, there were definite safe zones. In cities there were guards. On occasion people would die anyway (killed before the guard got them), but in general, the cities were pretty safe. Also, in many ways, the scale of the game was a defense. PKs would haunt certain places, but if you just avoided those, for the most part you would avoid the PKs. There were a number of skills that allowed you to escape or get around PKs. For instance, stealth allowed you to disappear. You could recall away, etc. There were also consequences for death. If you were killed, you could be looted of all your gear. You could also be chopped up and the body parts taken away (they stopped allowing that eventually, but I had a prized head or two of old PKs). That went for the PK as well as the intended victim. People could be tracked too using the tracking skill (but it took a while to work properly). Later on they introduced a reputation system. After killing a certain number of people, you would be designated a Murderer. Anybody could then freely attack you on sight without any repercussions to their own reputation. Also, any guard would attack on site so that you didn't have access to most of the cities anymore. (People would have to use an alt to get what they wanted). Then, finally, they copied the world and every server had a safe version of the world and a PK version. Everybody, PKs included, would go to the safe copy (Trammel) to level or whatnot, and only very occasionally go back to the PK server (Felucca). Of course, with that portion of the world vacant, there were good opportunities for uncrowded gathering of resources, etc. They also introduced limited arenas for fighting. You could fight freely in Faction Wars if your guild joined one of two factions. (I don't think you could be looted under some circumstances). You could declare war on another guild, and they could, by consent, agree. So this channeled some of the fighting. There was also a bounty system. When you died you were offered a chance to place a bounty on a person. This could be abused though when the Murderer allowed his friend to kill him. However, having a high bounty was another kind of notoriety, so it didn't always result in cheating, but still, it failed it's purpose. Some people WANTED a high bounty so they killed more! I played a merchant throughout all of this. I would travel around buying stuff from housing vendors (houses were spread throughout the world) in remote corners of the world and sell them at a profit at my well traveled location. Alliances were made for protection of my area. Myself and my friends created a trading town after the split that served Felucca (the PK zone) and everybody, PKs and Anti-PKs, would help to defend the place when somebody tried to harass us or our customers. It really worked well, and it was fun brokering the peace. I would often recruit new PK guilds to also try to protect us, pointing out that it would be tough to be hunted by most of the server, and there would be lots of opportunity to fight attackers in the future. Even though I traveled widely and had no fighting skills, I was very rarely PK'd. I just knew how to avoid that kind of thing. The people who die are the ones who try to fight back and aren't really prepared to do so. Or they are obstinate and insist on trying to go into known PK hangouts. And that guy that insisted on carrying all his valuables on him usually complained loudest when he got PK'd and looted. Eventually, I left, and that was because of the dumbing down of the game to attract new players (and thereby losing long-time paying customers in exchange for the phantom possible new player). The worst solution was offering an entire non-pk version of the world on the same server. Everybody ran to safety, even the PKs when they were "getting ready" to go back t the danger zone and PK. The best solution was the reputation system with pretty decent repercussions. Being a murderer was rather inconvenient (though had its own notoriety). | |
There are a few good systems out there that should be discussed as well. EVE in particular is a very unforgiving game that allows players to destroy each other's ships and lose considerable assets as a result. There are safe zones patrolled by police and dangerous zones. Yet because of player colonization and control of space by large alliances, you see considerable patrolling by players for enemies and trespassers. As a result, there's not quite as much PKing as you would think. If you want to fight, you can, but if you don't want to, you can usually avoid it and still get by in the "dangerous" zones (provided you are in a zone controlled by your alliance or corporation). I think that EVE has the most sophisticated system with regard to PKing of any game so far in that the system encourages player driven enforcement like no other. They do this by the concept of territorial control and unlike most games, players are actually able to limit the access of enemies into their territory to some extent. So not only are there boundaries, but they can be defended. Why? Because to get from one solar system to the next you have to go to a jump gate. This creates bottlenecks where enemies can be confronted. Further, the players WANT to defend this territory because they can build enormous and expensive structures that can be attacked and destroyed or captured by enemies. Control of territory in deep space also means access to the most valuable resources in the game So there is REAL motivation to defend your turf. I've left out a lot of the nuances about the mechanics. There are declarations of war, ways to fight in the "safe" zones, etc. But it is so deliciously realistic that you say corporations who are "mercenaries," pirate corporations, and large scale, desperate wars lasting weeks over territory and resources. It's a great pvp system, perhaps one of the best. That said, if you play alone you will have a tough time. You have to join a corporation if you want real safety in deep space. I strongly suggest you look at EVE, DAOC and review the history and development of UO to get a good feel on where PKing has been in the past and where it is going now. | |
Reply to Thread
or
or
Registered for a free account here
Steinhauer's Opinion: The PvP Debate, Part 2
Jonathan Steinhauer's bi-weekly opinion column resumes with the second half of his look at player vs. player (PvP) combat. He began the look last week with a look at the history of this hot button field. In part two, he looks forward at systems and what he thinks of them.
Read the article after the jump.
Permalink