Pumping up the danger factor?

[paxx]

Ok, I have seen many interesting and good posts on thieving and pking.

Some not so good.

But now I am going to ask.  How would you create an environment where the danger factor was extreme enough (without human intervention) that thieves and serial PKers where less then .05% of the population. Here I am not talking about banning and such.

Or even about player enforcement, but more of AI enforcement. The greatest thief would never get caught?and most would never guess it was him, but when there are magical means of looking into the past and such it is difficult to hide?and if people can magically track you?well you will get caught. Or won?t you?

But saying you might get caught, what would be a sufficient danger to discourage most people from PKing or stealing from players?

Again so only about 0.05% of the population would commit these ?crimes? with any regularity?

In short, what deterrent is sufficient knowing that people can have many characters, and having one thief just to ?find? stuff for the other characters, kind makes sense.  

[Xordan]

There isn\'t much you can do. Most of the things people are suggesting wouldn\'t make any difference if u had a seperate thief character. I suppose rejection from the community would be one. Most people wouldn\'t get along well with a thief. Although a good thief wouldn\'t let people know his/her other characters. Maybe if the account of the thief is logged into the server, so whatever character you play on the NPC\'s will know who you are. If you transfer stolen goods from your thief character to u\'r other character then that account\'ll be flagged as a thief.
(This needs tweaking alot.)

[Cyrioch]

Thieving and killing is different!
I am on of those who think PK is an important and inherent action of mmorg. Sometimes your char MUST kill.

No level restrictions, very few safe spots. No exp for killing, cause you want someone dead for some intention (material gain, territorial claims).

Really destructive is killing without any higher intention. f.ex. spoiling other players fun.

i got the experience, that theres only one thing which keeps players decent: permanent death, deletion of char.
permanent death is the ultimate danger.

My advice: When a char killed a certain number of chars he gets the flag permadeath. He dieing himself causes deletion. A char may lower its bodycount by spending lvl ups for it.
Doing levelups for no gain is the ultimate pain.

This leaves some options. When i kill some pickpocketer, my bodycount wont rise much. When killing the infamous baker, it will.
Leaving options is important! My char has the option to kill this baker and will do it if f.ex. some other baker is paying a reward.

[Xordan]

Unfortunatly although I agree with you, that baker who got killed won\'t agree with this at all. We\'ve been over this in about a thousand threads.   And we\'ve not found summin that made everyone happy.

[Wedge]

I already scattered my ideas around about this.  So this revolves around the sytem of marked players being caught by burly guards anywhere near civilized areas and being able to be brought in for bounties by other players.

Permadeath should never happen, some devs seem adamant on this as a fundamental rule.  But the system where the worse the differential of stats between you and the player/NPC you killed, the harsher the penalty is I think would work.  I.E. a very experienced player kills a newb, then the difference in their stats is subtracted from the killer; basically resetting them to a newb themselves.  Of course there would be a minimum stat reduction of something like 10-20%.  I assume death won\'t have nearly as harsh penalties, so the penalties for PK would be worse than death, but not permadeath.

Thieving is more complicated, since there are two ways you do it.  One looting a dead corpse, and two stealing from a live player.  I\'m not going to go into how the second one would work if it existed, that\'s not the point here.  Basically though any stolen good would be marked as so, and no NPC merchants (at least normal ones) would take them and pry call the guards on you if you tried.  So the stolen goods could only be sold on a black market system, you could add NPCs to it but I think it\'s best left to PCs.  Any player would know they were buying a stolen item though, and run the risk of being marked themselves then.

Unlike a PK\'er I\'m going to guess a non-looting thief may be able to get away with an item without being marked themselves based on stat checks.  But the more items and the higher the value of stolen goods the more likely it is the Theif will be marked at which point they may be treated the same as a PK\'er except their penalty will only be all the items they stole, and their items and money say on a 2-3x scale of the what they stole.  Also recovered stolen goods would be returned to the original owner.  As for looters, assuming they did kill the person as well then they have that penalty added when caught for killing.  Someone who loots a body but isn\'t the killer is treated just as a thief then.

[Cyrioch]

dont do it soo much worse than death, cause then i will delete my PK myself *gg*

One misdeed should not be punished twice.
If you get beaten for killing then you should benefit from the loot and other advantages.
Just making sure that noone draws profit from killing wont stop pk.

Back to AI:
Every char which is marked as pk got some NPC headhunters on his heels? They are searching the area the pk is in, warning other chars, forcing the pk to move constantly?
Why not leaving the headhunting to players? Just provide some noble paladins with info on the location of pks and they will start the hunt.
community is better than AI

[lostprophet]

Wasn\'t that the plan? I didn\'t read the post properly.

[Wedge]

My plan anyway, was to have AI hounds around civilized areas, whereas out in the open, yes it is up to players to take care of someone like this for a bounty.  I didn\'t put that specifically in this thread, more of my idea is in these two threads:

http://www.planeshift3d.com/wbboard/thread.php?threadid=5400&boardid=21&styleid=3&sid=f5dcbc78ac9adbca758827b9eaaeb82c


http://www.planeshift3d.com/wbboard/thread.php?threadid=4872&boardid=21&styleid=3&sid=f5dcbc78ac9adbca758827b9eaaeb82c

[sashok]

I really like my solution to Theiving personally, please paxx, tell me what  you think about it, I posted in here
http://www.planeshift3d.com/wbboard/thread.php?threadid=5105&boardid=21&styleid=3&sid=15df333786576c14e4308582e3b83a1f
it\'s 3 posts down at the bottom.


As for changing characters in order to steal then to give the loot to the \"clean character\", I think that my way could minimize this, just because it would be much harder to steal.
Another thought I had is if a character of a player becomes a theif, just freeze all other characters of this user, but give him an option, whether he agrees to only have this character or have an option of deleting this character now in order to allow any other characters of this user.  

Of course there are flaws and it might seem too harsh, but this issue is very important to just not allow theiving and PK

[Abemore]

When a player has many characters, risks go down for that player.  A temporary character can easily be used to take these PK and thieving risks, and then pass on the the benefits to another character.

So increasing risk is not a sufficient deterrent.

The alternative is to decrease reward.  Rewards for PK\'ing and thieving could be made so low that they are not worth the effort.  Many people just wouldn\'t bother at this point.  But still others might just enjoy griefing people regardless of the rewards.

So decreasing reward is not a sufficient deterrent, either.

But a combination of these 2 things may be enough.  I\'ve suggested this before, and I have not yet heard a good counterargument.

------------------------

PK:
An important thing to remember when a character is killed in the game is that death is merely an inconvenience.  It is not permanent as it is in real life.  So we should not be too concerned when a PC is killed.  However, we should also make sure we do not encourage it by giving rewards for PK\'ing (such as exp and loot (well maybe a little exp)).  

The killer character will then have to deal with the repercussions of his actions (ie. bounty, unfriendly NPC\'s, etc.).  It\'s not likely a temporary character would be used for PK\'ing due the time requirement to build stats and the lack of reward.  It would more likely be done for roleplay.

(also consider increasing PC to PC equality to increase risk)
(I believe we logically gain experience from everything.)

Bottom Line: PK - Little to no reward (some exp, no loot), and considerably high risk.

Thieving:
Thieves want to steal, but nobody wants to be stolen from.  I think a system for this is not nearly as difficult as PK.  I\'ve suggested a system in another thread already.  The solution is the same: high risk, low reward, and people wont do it.  But because thieving is not that bad, the risks don\'t need to be that high.  However the reward must stay low (at least when stealing from PC\'s) so as to not grief other players.

Should only be able to steal: a small percentage of gold and maybe insignificant items (like apples).  No equipment or high value items, as this causes grief.
There must also be a pickpocket indicator so players have a way to avoid being pickpocketed.

[Wedge]

Sounds good to me.

[paxx]

On, Pking?not the thief stuff.

Getting Pked is more then an inconvenience, lets say early on?it is 10 minutes out of your way?later at the midcareer, it may be a half an hour or more just to get back to the location where you where, not to mention all the other stuff. And at the high end, not such a huge deal, but annoying.

The issue is early on and in mid career you might get hit again and again, making it really annoying and a total turn off to the game.

As far as equality?this will be very hard to do in the game, it will be easy to say, this mage and this mage is equal, but not this mage and this fighter, even at equivalent numbers, some might be made to take damage and dish it out, other to avoid damage?.the list is endless the variations we will have, one on one will not be fair and I don?t think anyone plans it to be.

A player who specs for PvP will rule there and at soloing?.or even worse, we can have a large 40+ group pf PvPers clearing an area over and over.

I really do not see it getting changed too much from what has been stated in the past because I have not seen an idea that shines beyond the negative aspects of Pking.

Example:  I?m with my team of mages, we are resting after a tough battle, a group of marauders (pvpers) comes through our camp and whips us?30+ minutes later we finally get back to the spot  and it is now saturated by 4 other groups?

What does this do to the Players point of view?I just lost half an hour of my 2 hour playing time through no fault of my own, because I trusted that the group was not a group of Pkers.

Same situation?but everyone knowing the PK ropes?
You are resting under a tree, and see a large group approaching, they seem to be all melee types, none in any of your guild or alliance guilds?your group nukes them all before they can get to you?just in case.

Same situation?but more caution.

Large group stops clear of spell range, a single person comes to your group and says they would like to hunt in the area?you say fine?they kill you all anyway.

In essence, while it creates a more realistic concept, I do not think it is worth it in any way. Here the reward is not having to watch your back while you hunt in the area. Yes often that is a good enough reward for killing PCs, this does not even account for the people who just enjoy pissing in your corn flakes cause you did not help them early on in their adventuring careers, and they now want to mess with you. Or players that kill all dwarves (cause they are staying in character). When it comes to justifying a kill, I can come up with many?that gives me an idea, but that is for another place.

In short to have this type of game would be nice, but it will not be Planeshift as the developers currently envision it.

Now, what risk are we talking about??? And give me something that would keep a guild dedicated to Pking from just doing it as often as they could?...and does not include Devs or GMs slapping them around.

There is plenty of stuff not covered yet (all of it has holes) but you still have avenues to travel.

[paxx]

In short, people are thinking of the lone Pker?I am thinking of legions of them coming to this game and playing it in mass?and while they are at first a minority, they become the majority cause it will be PK or die anyway. If we allow certain actions, it is as if we encourage it. In fact it is that way.

If we see some type of exploit we will remove it, if we see an error or some incredible advantage to certain races, we will correct it?.this is the same in most MMORPGs and I don?t think is different here.

-Paxx

[Abemore]

The risks.
There have been many posts discussing results/punishments/repercussions for those that PK.  

- the bounty system
- NPC\'s that raise prices or don\'t do business with you
- being marked as a murderer (see bounty system)
- being killed instead.
- banishment from towns

The specific risks are not really important at this time.  Different risks can be brainstormed and added at any time.

But you did see my point: the cost/benefit ratio must lean heavily toward cost.

The only benefit is the clearing out of the undesired PC(s), and maybe the satisfaction of causing grief for someone else and potentially yourself.

Example System
3 Statuses:
*good - default; has not PK\'ed anyone in a very long time
*questionable - status earned from a single PK (Ex. Penalty: NPC\'s raise prices)
*PK\'er - 2 or more PK\'s (huge penalties: NPC\'s don\'t do business with you, bounty on your head, etc.)

The only cure for a negative status is lots of in game time as the status slowly decays.  PK guilds (if any existed) would be kept under control by the RP guilds.   Those marked as murderers can then be PK\'ed over and over until the status wears off... free of charge.  Another penalty for 3rd level PK status could be that stats decrease as you are PK\'ed or you begin to drop money or equipment, or not; the possibilities are endless.


In this system, us law abiding citizens can PK a PC when the time comes for such a thing to be done, but it is done with control.

[paxx]

The main issue with all that you have come up with, is that a good group, can out weight most of the penalties you mentioned. A guild can have  ?buyer characters? that get supplies, ect.

Also I see these guilds, doing PC raids at times??everyone clears their PK record? and they invade an area till their all ratings are all messed up again and then they logg in with their other characters to wait till people forget, repeat.

I am of course thinking worst case concepts.

Here is my current list of ideas I am mulling.

1. no PK on players who have only been playing 20 hours or less.
2. large none pk areas, towns and such.
3. as a player goes up in murder count?he gets limited in the way he can interact at all?once the NPCs stop selling, players can not give him stuff, he can only loot, not pick up off the ground?
4.   eventually the character cannot benefit from support, (healing and buffing)
5.   character cannot enter in groups larger then X (proportional to his PK rating)
6.    character cannot be part of any game organizations (guilds)

Now the bad of all of those, is if I happen to logg on another persons account (for whatever reason) I can truly destroy their character in only a few minutes.   So then we would have to limit it to one or 2 a day.

But this would prevent mages from protecting themselves from melee types they know are about to kill them?

In essence I have still not seen an elegant solution, for all that is spoken about past threads. I think guild wars and such will provide enough for those who want it.

And in the benefit/cost ratio, the trick will be more to make guild wars largely beneficial to be part of at a low cost?

But the issue of shutting up the loudmouth idiot who is yelling insults at you, remains.

So some type of harsh penalty for PKing I would like, but one that I could take to shut that little XXXX up with.

Or we might have a Guild Enforcer (a title Guilds can give officers) who has the power, regardless of level to have huge powers, and PK with almost total immunity?but while this power is used.
It costs the entire guild some type of guild exp, that is also used for other things.

And if the power is deemed to be abused, the entire membership of the guild is penalized. The members as of the date it happened, online or off. So in essence the enforcers can snap some idiots neck if necessary, but it is generally not used, and PKing for any other reason I think is a moot point, since there will be areas where it is allowed as many people want, it just won?t be all places. And even further there are guild wars that are even less restricted.

The more I think on it, the more I like the simplicity of geographical limitations, and allowing guilds the ability to shut people up if necessary, is nice. This gives the players the ability to police themselves (big benefit of PKing) yet also requires responsibility in it?s use and holds groups accountable.

All in all I do think it is a good compromise and leaves most people happy, except the PK anywhere anytime crowd.

But I?ll continue to read others ideas as I mull these over?I would still have to figure out how to sell this in any way to the dev team. So I?ll give it time to age a bit with me and hope that something better comes along.

-paxx