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...
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.
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.