How realism makes life hard for PKs

I was talking about this a bit in chat, I don't know if Sir Tim got was inspired from that <a href="https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/?topic=proposal-bandit-functionality-positive-pvping/#post-15538">here</a>. I thought I'd formally put up a post on it though, since he got part of my idea up.

* <em>Stopping to set up camp to sleep allows them to be targets.</em> If players need to eat and sleep, so do PKs. But because they'll be tagged criminals, they'll be outcasts and not allowed to enter most cities; unable to buy food at taverns or from grocers. Because of that, they'll need to live off the land and frequently set up camp, particularly to sleep, since they could still always steal food. While PKs are camping in the wilderness they'll be open to ambush, especially if their campfire gives them away. They'll need to band together and be especially careful not to give their location away. If they want to be outcasts, lets force them to role-play as outcasts -- they're the brigands, the bandits, who will always have to watch their backs.

* <em>Thieving for food may be more trouble than its worth.</em> If you're an outcast and have to find food to eat, you have two basic options. One is to just live off the land, hunt deer. One is to rely on killing and thieving players. The first option is probably easier; and being able to buy food in cities is even easier than that. But if they choose to be outcasts, the likelihood is that they'll kill deer more than they'll live off players' food, and this will give them something to do in their life besides PKing. It makes them get into the daily grind of life; and that, in turn, takes their attention away from lulz.

* <em>Hard winters and rain in the wilderness.</em> While being an outcast during a clear summer may be easy, it would be much harder during the winter or during the rainy season. They'd have to find some way to provide shelter for themselves. Life is not easy for an outcast.

* <em>More balanced, easily damageable equipment makes fighting riskier.</em> Lets say a PK manages to get a suit of plate to defend himself, he'll be slower than someone wearing chain or leather, and if his plate can get easily damaged by heavy blows, he'll be hard to defend himself against someone good with a weapon. Even if he wins, his armor is damaged, and he needs a blacksmith to fix it -- but, once again, he can't get in cities, so either has to train as a blacksmith or have an outlaw blacksmith with him. Or, even consider the situation where he's in light armor but just a master at swordsmanship. His sword will still break, and he'll need a blacksmith. He's in the same situation. Being outside civilization loses you friends, which loses you opportunities. You're on your own.

* <em>Less opportunities for wealth makes it harder to recover from failure.</em> If you can't gain riches by looting just anybody, you can't gain wealth quickly and can't replace your equipment. Because it'll be harder to recover from failure, you'll pick your targets carefully. A PKer will look for wealthy merchants, not everyday Joes -- just like a brigand is looking for someone with a big coin purse. Once again, you're forcing them to role-play as bandits.

 

As I've said before, I don't love the idea of PKs. There should simply be stories which encourage you to attack a warring faction. So you're a PK to them. But that still works in your case because the person in encouraged to go far from home and be basically in hostile territory. I certainly know the thrill of Aion or even early WoW when you're deep in the opposing faction's territory and anyone there can kill you.

By limiting travel options, so someone basically need to fight their way into enemy territory and fight their way out, you can achieve many of these effects. There's no where to vendor my loot, repair, etc.

 

@PrimeRib,

Right, that's exactly what I have in mind. Basically, my belief is there don't need to be any artificial limits on players if the natural structure of the gameplay makes PKing prohibitive.

Even with full looting of victims. You might get full loot, and it still might not be worth doing because of the trouble involved. And even with multiple characters, where you can log out and log in -- although in that case, someone could always create a "fence" character to smuggle goods in and out of cities, which might make things a tiny bit easier, but not completely.

 

I could of swore in Ultima Online Pkers eventually claim a city of their own because they couldn't really go anywhere else

 

@ChosenPredator,

Yea, and I suggested that they might be allowed in some cities, but the point wouldn't just be to emulate Ultima Online.

If they managed to have a city, they'd still need working farmers in that city, and a working economy. If they ventured out to regular cities, it would still require travel, and they'd encounter night and weather. Breaking equipment would still provide risk, and less wealth would still make it less worth it.

There weren't that many demands on players in Ultima Online.

 

When they talked about towns in the catacombs i thought that would be an awesome spot for a pker town

 

I think that would work actually

 

@redfish: I agree with all of your points for the single player offline experience. However, I am not going to punish every type of player in SotA just so I can make PK less enticing. My preference is that the virtue system, and more importantly, the consequences of your actions driven by them, will take care of both death and killing equally. If Richard is true to his design vision about the 'avatar is you' and that the game world will react to your actions, then I believe that he will ensure that evil deeds will be punished in meaningful ways.

*Stopping to set up camp to sleep allows them to be targets.
Yes, it does. But it makes *everyone* targets to NPCs and MOBs. If PKs have negative karma in-game and are more likely to aggro MOBs who are more attracted to negative karma -- who's to say that the lore doesn't also requires that there are evil MOBs who are more attracted to positive karma (and avoid negative ones)? Making this eating and sleeping a requirement for *all* players in the games also punishes the pure crafter who will never play PvP, or the pure social player who only likes staging players in-game, or the pure shop vendor who never leaves the city. While I personally like making eating and sleeping as a requirement for my gameplay experience, I'd like that as an option and would never impose that on the entire gameplaying community in an MMO. In an MMO, it would act as a buff, not as a debuff.

*Thieving for food may be more trouble than its worth
It's a false assumption. PK will simply target people for their food. That's what they do. They have no desire to PK MOBs. Never have, never will. They like to PK other players, plain and simple.

*Hard winters and rain in the wilderness
*More balanced, easily damageable equipment makes fighting riskier
Same comment as above. I like it, but this style of gameplay is not for everyone, be they PK or not.

*Less opportunity for wealth makes it harder to recover from failure
As a future shop owner and non-PK, thanks for making me the best target for PKs. Why should these types of players be singled out as the only viable option for PKs to gain wealth from? Personally, I don't mind it since I support hardcore open PvP permadeath. But that's just me. Not every roleplaying shop owner cares for PvP or PK in any way shape or form. I'm sure they're thankful that you're saying they should be the targets for PK, not you. The targets of PK should be others who play in that mode via venturing into PvP zones, taking PvP quests, are in PvP giulds, regardless of their social or economic status.

While I agree with the spirit of your OP as well as some of the ideas - especially for offline play -- I think we can find more ways to encourage different styles of play while not punishing everyone at the expense of going after a small group of players.

 

@smack,

Ultimately it will be up to the devs in deciding what to do, and what will work for all of the player base. I'm just trying to make the case for it, and keep people's minds open.

Presumably, players who aren't criminals will have much more opportunities for safety since they'll find more safe harbors in towns, and don't need to go out into the wilderness. Part of my argument is also being a PK might just end up being a drag because they wouldn't be able to go out for lulz all the time, they'd have to actually play the game to upkeep their characters. In my ideal MMO, I'd also suggest players could also hire protection in towns, so they could have some safety going out at night. Possibly also patrols of roads during the night, to keep the roads safe.

 

Looking back on UO with Pks.

A red could not enter a city without being whacked.
A red could not purchase anything from an npc vendor.
A red went into perma statloss if they died.

If you take a few of those concepts and then throw into the mix that a pk is likely only to have one character.......i'm sure with a little imagination you could see how life as a pk in SoA could be very difficult.

Might be something worth thinking about.

 

Imagine if you're a Pker and you kill someone who isn't as skilled as you your whole body becomes loot'able' and there is a map to where you hide all your stash lol that would really make people second guess.

 

@Redfish: Agreed

@Midian: I think if they tie those in with the game's story, lore, and especially the virtue system, it would work itself out. Perhaps not exactly like those, but in the same spirit such that evil deeds have consequences. Having said that, if the game's story, lore, and virtue system rewards evil actions in some ways as well, we need to be supportive of that and not cry foul if there turns out to be evil cities where they can go about freely just like in good cities for good characters.

If it serves the story and lore and virtue system, I support it -- for better or worse. Most things in-game needs to tie back to those things to make it meaningful.

 

I love the realistic ideas, not just for PK annoyance, but to actually have a differentiated game. There are many shallow MMO's that hand-hold players. Rather than trying to be 'the same but different', let's go for a game that targets a different market. This isn't going to be a 'mainstream' game anyway (not, at least, in the way that WoW is mainstream.)

I say eating, sleeping and item breakage should definitely be in the game.

 

The problem with open PKing and not as part of the story is that if you succeed, and kill me, all my stuff is gone. Forever. The end. You have it, I don't get it back.

If you fail, you respawn somewhere nearby and try again. The only thing you lost is a little time.

The risk vs. reward isn't balanced fairly for the victims. Most of the time they're ambushing people not trained to fight other players, so the odds are already in their favor. Then on top of that they lose nothing for the attempt? Yeah... not a big fan of putting that kind of pvp back in the game.

So, consentual pvp is cool, anything else is ultimately flawed due to the nature of gaming. If you tried to PK someone and had some real loss/inconvenience if you fail to the point that you give it some serious thought before making an attempt to whack someone... then I'd be all for it.

 

If the PK dies, he is subject to the same situation. His stuff is gone. . Forever. The end. You have it, he doesn't get it back.

It is a symmetric arrangement.

 

Symmetric arrangement? I may miss part of the context here, so apologies in advance if I bark at the wrong tree. PK'ing to me is quite asymmetric in favour of dedicated reds:

Extreme example:

You're a PK'er on the hunt, aiming for maximizing your win chances and minimize your losses in case of losing. So you:

a) skill your char for PVP, gear your char for PVP, take initiative as an aggressor / actively pick fighs at opportune moments. Like when that PvE'er (they're known to carry good items as PvE'ing requires them to have) is already engaged with a mob. As for your opponent, the worst foe you can engage is one equally skilled for PVP, so that'd make it equal. Since you min-maxed however, you'll on average engage someone with a worse skill-set.

b) Since as a PK'er you know you'll be engaging in PVP, you can limit your losses gear-wise - no need to take more than some bone armour, a bunch of reagents, a cheap weapon of choice and a rune remotely near your basis. You could easily restock after a failed attempt.

Analysis:

a) makes sure your win/loss ratio is way positive - asymmetric.
b) makes sure that in cases of win you'll (on average) win more than you'll lose, when you lose - asymmetric.

One condition alone would already suffice to make it profitable, but in my book both of the above work in favour of reds.

 

@Calem beat me to it.

The reality is no PK is ever walking around with a bunch of stuff. It's bare minimum to risk. Where a PC is often jumped comming out of the dungeon, near a moongate, at a mine, just outside of town, or somewhere that they're likely to be transporting large amounts of goods.

There's also the fact that most PK's are going with the gang vs 1 system. If you die, one of your friends will probably get your stuff back for you. The PK is in control of when, and where, the fight happens. It's all advantage them, and unless they happen to choose poorly and the person on the other end has trained in some PVP, the risk is so one sided it would be laughable if it wasn't so sad.

 

@Freeman and Calem,

Actually I agree with all of your points about PKing, its part of the reasoning behind my post. I'm usually a solo player and don't like dealing with PKs. Even if I could beat them in a battle I don't like dealing with them. But I also like the idea of freedom, so if freedom could be kept while still finding ways to reduce PKs that would be ideal.

I think a lot of what I'm arguing for would take away a lot of the asymmetric advantage that PKs have. And one more thing.. why does a criminal outlaw even have access to a bank?

 

@Calem, for those who will be PvPing full time, as I will, we recognize the risks of the environment and plan accordingly. For us, the situation is perfectly symmetrical. For those who wish not to take part in PvP, then I think the devs should follow my suggestion and have the server filter exclude PvP players from ever appearing to you. That way, you never have to worry about being PK'd.

 

If people are getting ganked in an area, there should be a way they can report that at the nearest town. An anti-pk group could form a militia and clean up the area. PKs loose all their stuff, need to find a new spot to hunt, and lose access to that town. The community should have the ability to keep their area as clean as they want.