Hey everyone! o7 o/ :slightly_smiling_face: I have been playing this game since 2013, and it's where I met my wife. And while I see PVP as a legitimate part of the game, the uptick in griefing...
That's why I think you need to be marked as a "criminal" and take further negative consequences. Not just in killing you but in the things you can physically do being limited until your criminal status effect as a result of the action has worn off.
This gets more serious of a problem in full loot loss games though, which is not strictly what I was thinking about.
I don't agree that those are the only two options. I've seen it work fine in the rather short-lived Revelation Online with pretty much the above mechanics, if you got "player killer" status you were free to kill by other players and would lose your equipment on death whereas you don't lose equipment normally. It was a significant enough deterrence for this issue to be a minor thing, and because players all fly and there was no air to air combat you could opt out of fighting people by just getting off the ground. It all worked rather well. The game was killed by being the most horrendous translation I've ever seen by My.com and by p2w shop content, it was a good game mechanically though in my opinion. Pvp was entirely decided by gear though which is not really how I picture proper implementation.
The thing about pvp is that it should be a threat that exists but ultimately be so unlikely to happen that players barely see it other than major world events. The existence of the threat adds tonnes of texture to the world that can't be replaced by anything else, it needs to be negative enough to engage in that griefers simply don't exist though. It also lets players kill anyone botting to resource farm which is a neat side-bonus.
In Ultima you had stat loss on death if you were a murderer. Griefers didn't care. They'd grind up their stats to whatever they could get in an hour then grab the highest damage per hit weapons and the cheapest armor, tame horses, and ride around in big gangs overwhelming and slaughtering non-combat players. The only way to counter it was big teams of pvp specced anti-pks, and they could only control the immediate area. And the situation was still ridiculously unbalanced in the favor of the player-killers. To reliably kill them you had to have enough players to negate their advantage in numbers and you needed enough gear to reliably kill them. All they needed to grief non-combat players was some grinding and the cheapest gear in the game. It was like trying to counter an insurgency of immortal suicide attackers and worked about that well.
In Eve huge alliances would outfit hundreds of players with cheaply fitted out suicide ships and then assault economic systems. They'd only fet a handful of hits in before they were destroyed by security forces but the ships were so cheap and there were so many of them that they could destroy non-combat players from sheer volume of fire.
The only mmos i know of where unrestricted pvp actually works are games that solely focus on unrestricted pvp. And even those are extremely hit or miss, tending heavily towards miss, because skill + numbers + teamwork can provide and overwhelming, insurmountable advantage that leads to the smaller, less well equiped, or just less skilled side getting massacred over and over again until it's just farming.
That's why I think you need to be marked as a "criminal" and take further negative consequences. Not just in killing you but in the things you can physically do being limited until your criminal status effect as a result of the action has worn off.
This gets more serious of a problem in full loot loss games though, which is not strictly what I was thinking about.
I don't agree that those are the only two options. I've seen it work fine in the rather short-lived Revelation Online with pretty much the above mechanics, if you got "player killer" status you were free to kill by other players and would lose your equipment on death whereas you don't lose equipment normally. It was a significant enough deterrence for this issue to be a minor thing, and because players all fly and there was no air to air combat you could opt out of fighting people by just getting off the ground. It all worked rather well. The game was killed by being the most horrendous translation I've ever seen by My.com and by p2w shop content, it was a good game mechanically though in my opinion. Pvp was entirely decided by gear though which is not really how I picture proper implementation.
The thing about pvp is that it should be a threat that exists but ultimately be so unlikely to happen that players barely see it other than major world events. The existence of the threat adds tonnes of texture to the world that can't be replaced by anything else, it needs to be negative enough to engage in that griefers simply don't exist though. It also lets players kill anyone botting to resource farm which is a neat side-bonus.
In Ultima you had stat loss on death if you were a murderer. Griefers didn't care. They'd grind up their stats to whatever they could get in an hour then grab the highest damage per hit weapons and the cheapest armor, tame horses, and ride around in big gangs overwhelming and slaughtering non-combat players. The only way to counter it was big teams of pvp specced anti-pks, and they could only control the immediate area. And the situation was still ridiculously unbalanced in the favor of the player-killers. To reliably kill them you had to have enough players to negate their advantage in numbers and you needed enough gear to reliably kill them. All they needed to grief non-combat players was some grinding and the cheapest gear in the game. It was like trying to counter an insurgency of immortal suicide attackers and worked about that well.
In Eve huge alliances would outfit hundreds of players with cheaply fitted out suicide ships and then assault economic systems. They'd only fet a handful of hits in before they were destroyed by security forces but the ships were so cheap and there were so many of them that they could destroy non-combat players from sheer volume of fire.
The only mmos i know of where unrestricted pvp actually works are games that solely focus on unrestricted pvp. And even those are extremely hit or miss, tending heavily towards miss, because skill + numbers + teamwork can provide and overwhelming, insurmountable advantage that leads to the smaller, less well equiped, or just less skilled side getting massacred over and over again until it's just farming.
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