Penalties for PKing and Looting. (Suggestions Only)

If you don't have an idea to contribute to the following, Please don't post.
(Please don't comment on other posts. Only your ideas & suggestions. Feel free to like other posts of course.)


In an open PvP environment with full loot... *Gulp* What kind of penalties would you like to see for:

A) Murder (PKing) - Murder without consent, reason or justification, within the established game laws (Your ideal game laws I guess)

B) Looting - Someone other than a 'friend' or 'Guild Mate' looting your body.


Go.

 

Murder should result in a persistent Murder-Flag that permits any player to identify a murderer at a glance. If your murderer flag is set, any player may attack and kill you with no penalty. Duration of the flag should be significant, at least 8 hours in game per murder committed. Death does not reset the flag.

Criminal acts (included stealing, not just looting, such as pick pocketing) should also result in a persistent criminal state that can also be easily identified by other players, and criminals are subject to attack by any other player with no penalty. The duration should be at least 8 hours time in game, but not for each criminal act. Performing an additional criminal act before the current timer has expired will refresh the timer to the full 8 hours. Death does not reset the flag.

Timers are my suggestion, but could be made longer or shorter as the community thinks is best.

With respect to looting, after a period of time, if you have not recovered the loot from your body, it eventually becomes found items free for the taking. How long this would take depends upon how persistent items in game are if left on the ground.

 

None. If you want open PvP, just make it FFA. You have the choice not to participate.

 

In a game based upon Virtues, it would be ... odd ... if there were no consequences for criminal acts, and downright stupid if there were no consequences for murder.

 

No comments! Ideas only.

 

I think that is your preference, sure, but in an open forum? Please.

 

Alright.

 

I am going to post some rough ideas on these two key issues:

A) Murder - The penalty needs to be harsh, this may seem obvious in hindsight but I do indeed recall a time in early Ultima Online where this was not the case. A murderer should be a character who has accumulated some wealth in the game and has a resource base to operate from. Murderers should be sought out in any town they enter and appropriately dealt with. One extreme penalty for murder could be that your character is permanently dead. This enables the ability to murder but at the heaviest consequence available. Most people will be opposed to permanent death, but lets leave it on the table for now.

A less severe consequence can be a heavy tax when the murderer is killed. This tax can be paid at a shrine or to the victims who were killed (There could be a roleplaying element involved such as the compensation is to the families for the murderer's heinous crimes). If there is no compensation for the families of the ones murdered the guardians of the netherworld do not deem the murderer's spirit worthy of redemption and the murderer is permanently killed. This fine has to be quite significant and generally only guilds would be capable of paying it off or very wealthy players who have played the game for a long time.

Lastly, there can be some sort of curses for murderers who have just been resurrected. Upon resurrection, the character's spirit has been ravaged from the innocent souls the player has slain residing within the underworld and has returned only as a partition of his former self. This curse should significantly impact their gameplay, but not make them unable to play. One of the problems with an Ultima Online free server (IPY) is that they restricted murderers from playing the game if caught by detectives. The first option does the same thing essentially as prohibiting a murderer from playing the game for a thousand hours or so, but at least they are not simply rotting in a jail cell unable to do anything with the character.

B) Looting - I do not think there should be a timer before a corpse can be looted. Upon death a character's corpse can be chopped up, mutilated, or looted. These actions will have severe consequences and further serve as a method of reducing a murderer's karma. The penalties upon death mentioned above can be associated with karma level. A murderer with the lowest of karma will be not be capable of resurrecting him/herself.

 

putting a bounty on his head seems cool to me!

 

I'm stealing part of Owain idea here and develop it some.

Murder should result in a persistent Murder-Flag that permits any player to identify a murderer at a glance. If your murderer flag is set, any player may attack and kill you with minor penalty (perhaps extra cost to resurrect?). Duration of the flag should be significant, at least 12 hours for the first murder, 24 hours for the second murder and if you have committed more then 3 murders the flag will be constant. This will serve at a warning if you somehow accentually kills someone you get a 12h flag but if you repeat your actions you will become forever hunted. As long as you have only committed 2 murders there should be a way to repent but it should ha really hard and nothing you just do to reset your killing count.

If you are a mass murderer, lets say 50 murders, you will not be able to resurrect again.

 

I'm sure it would be hard to do, maybe not....

I would make a jail, after the first kill, you get sent to this jail for a certain time. 2nd kill 5min-3rd kill-10min etc etc. But i would make the jail a whole community in it self! Going to jail would not be such a bad thing
if there was some 1 vs 1 5 vs 5 etc etc going on 24/7....Maybe even a jail bird bank? Just make the jail one huge open underground room. Allow a pvp slider in Jail, so you don't have to worry about be'n dry looted every trip (if you choose)
Make going to jail fun! Call it a hang out-get to know each other-community. I can see pk's making a kill to go underground, and duel the jail birds for a few mins' each day. I would.

Hell make a guild, call it The clink 'Cnk' The devs could even use the community for in game event. The clink have escaped the jail!

 

@KillingJoke:

That is an interesting option. The biggest problem with IPY was that there were no horses. The only horses were on the "police" or whatever they were that came to seek you out once a detective supplies enough clues as to who the murderer is. This was the problem, not necessarily the jail itself. It should be the players who are responsible for bringing down the murderer, not some super powerful NPC creatures with beefed up stats. Players will team up and work together to bring down a notorious murderer.

 

A: Player becomes attackable in all areas for of the game for 'x' amount of ingame time or until killed. The murderer receives negative karma of some sort. Anyone who kills the player will receive positive karma. Players with negative karma possible have a harsher consequence of death.

B: Player is branded a thief for 'x' amount of time, the player becomes attackable for a shorter period or until the player successfully escapes (possible not flagged for a 3 minute period).

 

Agreed, murderers can lose an initial amount of karma for the act of killing an innocent player. The amount of karma lost can have a modifier such as +10 for looting corpse, +20 for cutting the corpse up and taking the player's head. This total karma loss will be subtracted from the murderer's current karma. The lower the murderer's karma is the greater the penalty will be.

 

Excellent idea! I support the idea that the timer be in game time so that the criminal can't just log off for the night and come back fresh and clean in the morning. Eight solid hours of play time as a criminal with all the penalties applicable for the full amount of time, plus any resets for further naughty deeds.

As a side note, there should be a way for the criminal to confess and pay a fine or some other major financial measure to reduce their time. Depending on how common gold is, a good amount of gold to reduce your criminal time by an hour. This amount of fine should be based on the overall economy, so that it continues to rise as more gold is introduced into the game.

Just my thoughts.

 

Pay to win? I thought this was frowned upon.

Not only that, in a game based on Virtues, this seems to be about the most corrupt idea possible.

 

I look at is as more of an optional punishment. The wealthy buy their way out of trouble all the time in the real world. If a baddie has a large enough pot o gold, why not drain it based on their bad doings?

I consider pay to win an entirely different animal, all about getting ahead of other players with RMTs. This would be in game gold that was drained directly from the wrong doers coffers. In fact this type of gold could be what forms the pool of money that they are thinking of selling in the RMT store, that way no new gold would be introduced into the game. Just that same old gold redistributed....

P.S. - What are you, the virtue police? Let the bad guy worry about his virtues and you worry about yours! Being greedy doesn't necessarily make you a criminal, and accepting fines is a standard practice in almost every legal system in the world, past and present.

 

Penalties for murder?

Well if your good at covering your tracks there ought to not be any I would think right? >=-)

 

Entirely true... I wonder if they can work that out somehow. The problem is that in a fantasy setting, the victim gets resurrected and can tattle on you. No way to avoid that, right?

 

We are talking about game design here, and in a game based upon the Virtues, I think designing in corruption is not a good game design choice.