Some non SOTA mmorpg ideas I figured you would all be interested in.

Cross posted from a facebook note I made

It would seem that one of the reasons griefing happens is lack of consequences. You don't lose your character you worked hard to make into what they are, gaining reputation and knowledge and skills, to just throw them away. There are a couple of reasons the risk is so low. The three that spring to mind is there is a threshold point where some fights become no threat in most games because, whatever you are using for durability (and to a lesser extent equipment) goes up exponentially. It also makes combat tedious and something repetitive you do to crank out meaningless levels. Often, levels bear no benefit beyond some arbitrary restrictions that make no logical sense and being able to murder slightly stronger creatures. There's also that you can EASILY pick out a newb in a crowd, usually do to newbies having more practical looking armor. And lastly, but probably the biggest reason, death is not real. You just spawn in town, sometimes it's without your * or with a penalty to gold or experience. But some of these people have been playing so long they really don't need it anymore.

To deal with the problem of power escalation is simple enough. Just don't let the power escalate too far. You don't have to be a rocket surgeon to figure it out. But if you really want to shake things up you could look to the real world for inspiration. A wound is a wound, it has it's initial effects (pain based penalties too your actions) but if it's more than just a scratch, you start bleeding. If it's deep enough or in the right spot, you start bleeding out. If you're bleeding out you need to close the wound fast. If you do that, and take a more parry/attack style combat system like the Mount and Blade games then you've got a recipe for some very exciting combats where nothing is certain. Sure, skill will help you survive but it wouldn't guarantee it. It will also make fighting feel less like knitting with digital swords. You combine that with a leveling system not based on your capacity for genocide (think elder scrolls perhaps), then you have a cool setup for any kind of open world game. Combat should be exciting and not a slog of watching numbers anyways. Like speed chess that you have to make each move within a second.

Equipment is also kind of simple. Just have your equipment have a variety of looks that isn't a visual gauge about how bad ass you are. But simply doing that isn't much of a suggestion is it? So what if, instead of a falcata being more powerful than an arming sword, they simply become two different weapons with strengths and weaknesses of their own. A falcata would be a top heavy sword that has brutal axe like swings, no ability to thrust and is slower to recover from a miss or switch directions. An arming sword would be a middle of the road "bread and butter" sword. Blunt weapons would all be capable of doing more damage through armor but it's harder to cause bleeding (though internal bleeding is harder to take care of). That would also make the thought that went into weather you want the chainsaw or the flying guillotine a bit tougher and based on actual tactical concerns instead of DPS or whatever the kids call it nowadays. You could even integrate that into the crafting. Instead of recipe = item, you would take your steel and forge it into a sword YOU designed. The blade's weight, balance point and stiffness would effect it's stats. You could even go as far as doing simple machines like that, where the effect is based on a simulation run separately. You figure a way to time the wick to fall into the pot of explosives, you have a time bomb.

What if, when you die, instead of re spawning in town you spawn in Valhalla. You can still do battle with your character. You just can't go back to the world of the living (without devoting a lot of time and maybe even pissing off the gods). But you can still play your character, growing in strength and ability. You'd have an infinite and random dungeon to explore and an arena for murdering each other and the ability to make items you couldn't make on the living (and "donate" them to empty chests in dangerous ruins). You couple this with a 3 character a week/character at a time limit and then the stakes for PKing (which should be simply called murdering) would be particularly higher. It would also make it "hardcore" without completely losing your character.

* edited for language - Koldar

 

People who are trolls don't care about their characters. Consequences that penalize their characters don't dissuade true trolls or stop griefing.

I knew a player in a large LARP game who kept making throw away characters with the sole goal of getting other characters (particularly older characters that people were really attached to) killed in any means necessary, even if it meant killing his own character in the process.

Doesn't matter is this made no sense from a roleplaying perspective that every one of his characters were suicidal and had meta-knowledge of who to harass. He was a troll, and losing his character did nothing to dissuade him.

 

It would still reduce the amount. And even then it doesn't matter, the ideas would still make for a fun immersive game anyways imo.