Why Open PvP with full Loot worked in UO.

Man, I leave to go spend some time on a farm for the weekend, and the whole place devolves into a crapstorm.

Templar and Seneth, disengage now. Just stop speaking to each other, entirely, for a least a page or two more, until you can address each other in a more civil manner.

Everyone else...strive for a moderate tone. And if you've maintaned a moderate tone thus far, keep being excellent.

 

Whoa now. Stop making sense! Crazy talk!


What if there are scry spells where you can automagically triangulate the position of someone. Oh man that would be pretty neat.

 

Hold on guys, the criminals need to have equal opportunity to not be instantly found and jibbed! Otherwise it's totally pointless to even allow PKs.

 

Just taking precautions as in real life would solve PK problem. But as required in RP, names shouldn't be colorized like red,blue, grey unless you are a famous criminal/murderer, or recognized by witnesses

 

Yeah, that's an interesting point. You often can't identify a thief until he steals your stuff.


Or until he's all over the news.

 

The issue of course being, if I steal from you, and am caught doing it, for how long do you think I'd be considered a criminal? If someone is routinely cought and suspected of stealing, wouldn't he get a lasting reputation? I'm hearing, on these forums, conflicting desires. On the one hand, there are people who want to be able to attack other players, who want to not be punished obsessively. On the other, there are people who want to be able to form a cooperative lawful society, and who would want some system of justice restraining the actions of the first group.​

​

Personally, I am all for people choosing their own fate and how they plan to face the future, as long as they are willing to accept the consequences of their actions. If you steal from other players you can get a new source of income, be it in coins and bandages or the theft of more valuable items. The risk you take to earn that source is the risk of being caught and punished.​

​

If you choose to kill and loot other players, you have a massive source of additional income, not to mention I expect you rather enjoy it. The risk you take is that one of your victims will turn out to be too much for you, but, since you will be the ambusher, and the other player will more often than not will be surprised or off guard, perhaps some sort of bounty, or enforcement patrols.​

​

The first key to these punishments lies in being caught, and I personally would like to see a system wherein a clever criminal had a chance of getting away undetected. Once you are known to be a criminal though, a fair ammount of punishment would be owed. We can go for an incredibly complex legal system as most countries have today, but if we want to not spend forever on it, then the key to simplification is that the ammount of punishment dealt out per crime stays about the same. What I think should happen, is that if you are caught commiting a crime inside a town, you get a player bounty put on you. Anyone visiting the message boards can take the quest, and anyone on the quest will not kill you when they attack you but will instead inflict whatever punishment was deemed appropriate and listed in the bounty notice.​

 

By the way. Do we even know if there are going to be thieves and stealing in SotA?

 

I've heard it mentioned in dev chats, so I think it's being considered, but like so much else, we have no details on how that might work.

 

Once upon a time there was a great MMO called shadowbane. It featured many races, the ability to fly and fight mid-air, guild castles, open pvp, looting and, iirc, stealing.

Sadly, the game was shut down and no free servers were ever introduced :<
The only thing in MMO genre that was playable after UO got trammelized.

 

Eve Online has open world pvp and full looting like UO. It is also based on player skill to some extent. A week old character vs a 3 or 5 year old character in the same ship same load out has a equal chance to killing the older player if they know what they are doing.

The reason PvP doesn't work in other games is that they are confined to battlegrounds that have no effect on the game world because its a bolted on feature that the devs put in place to keep a portion of the community happy on a hamster wheel. As for full loot rights no developer will implement this in the modern era because the players have been spoiled by the Themepark and WoW'esq mmo's. The horror of going into pvp and loosing that sword and armour you raided for in endless hours and some guy comes along and takes it off you. This is the problem when loot grind comes into effect. The reason full loot rights works in Eve Online and Ultima Online is that the crafted equipment is just as powerful and effective as that found in the dungeons and treasure chests.

In UO a player with a full set of GM crafted gear was just as capable as a player with magical equipment, in Eve Online a faction battleship and equipment looks and sounds nice; but it can still be destroyed by another player using tier 1 equipment in a battleship. I know this from experience in both games.

The problem lies with the loot generated by raids rather than the players, making a "its mine." culture in MMO's Meaning that players now a days feel they have earned that shiny sword and will moan and quit if they loose it in pvp.

Equipment needs to be near worthless for full loot rights to work. So crafted euipment and found equipment needs to be on par with each other and can be easily replaced when lost.

 

@Chakra: Sounds good to me. I second keeping gear "value" near worthless and not catering to pixel mongers. Gameplay is everything! I don't want to go anywhere near the quagmire of a WoW-style MMO.

 

Which removes a lot of potential for using equipment in interesting ways in the game, as well as not completely solving the problem; it's human nature to hate losing things, even worthless things.

Enjoying a game where you can lose your gear, IMHO, takes a specific kind of player, a kind that seems to be somewhat rare.

 

?????

 

Making gear "near worthless" removes most of the meaning behind gear. Which in turn throws away, for the most part, any chance of adding interesting gear-based gameplay to the game. Things like gear upgrading, heavy customization, gameplay based on using gear in interesting or unusual ways, etc, become far harder to do when gear is "near worthless", as the post I was answering to suggested.

 

Ооооh you mean like gear with special "fireball resist" and "dispel paralyze" trinkets that can be activated once every x minutes?

Lol, t2a had a ton of these - wands with spells, even weapons with spells (fireball on hit for example), magic armors and weapons, MAGIC JEWELRY - ring of invisibility, hat of blessing, necklace of teleport and so on. ALl this stuff was also expandable. Yes, a wand of greater heal used to cost more than a simple sword, but anyone who earns cash daily trough pvm or pvp could afford it. So it was also "near worthless" and expendable.

-armor upgrades

Sure, why not? If I kill you while you're wearing this armor, I'll take it and I will have it, with all its upgrades and whatnot.

And if you dont ever want to lose anything, you can play the game like single player, or with a couple of freinds, or in the MMO setting but only with PvEers. So you won't lose any items.

When he said "near worthless" he just meant expendable and easily (somewhat) replaceable. Weapons of vanquishing were rare, but still used in PvP on daily basis. Good pvpers knew that altho vanq weps were rare and expensive, they added greatly to their chance to win a battle.
Same with the highest tire of magical armor - it was rare and expensive, but with a full set of such armor you used to have literally impenetrable defense.

 

it still didn't remove the meaning of "eminently accurate halberd of vanquishing with demon's breath (40 charges)" in T2A. whiners removed the meaning of them. because they were trying to powerfarm in UO completely alone, not in intention of making friends and die alone finally and lose items.

 

Gear strength would need to be tamed down a bit unlike most game with no looting where gear continually gets better and better and the best gear in the game in year 1 is now worthless in year 2.

The idea of continually increasing the strength of your gear has to be thrown out the window. That is pretty much the only end game other games have. (get best gear for your character, wait for expansion and get the next best gear)

In a full loot system you can't have such a huge difference from having no gear and full gear to where the majority of your characters abilities and strengths come from gear.

 

Exactly.
A sword of Fireblasts and +10000000 damage is only useful if everyone has 1000000000000000000000000 HP.

If everyone has 70-130 hp, a sword of +9 damage will do just fine, and will be as l337 as the former example.

 

The meaning behind gear is the utility you derive from it. I don't take gear for the meager coin it provides, I take gear to deprive an enemy of the use of their gear.

 

I think UO99 was the best balanced without needing ********-lands... If a PK kills 5 newbs for 50 sheep-wool total (because ppl would farm almost naked) then he turned red and was screwed for a while. That mecanism really put the shards in good shape, I dont even remember getting PKed once that patch (and the rubber-band effect patch) came into action... Unless I was actively seeking fights.

So grieving wasn't all that bad. PPL nowadays scream hell at literaly nothing.