maybe you know the problem ... game designers spend hours and hours thinking of great concepts and even more hours implementing and testing them.

... just to see what hundreds of evil players make out of it when the game goes live. the following quotes are from a possible future of planeshift...

Azasello: \"anyone wanna come with me and explore death realm?\"
NoobXYZ: \"sounds cool! i\'m with u ... but what\'s death realm?\"
Azasello: \"some sort of dungeon! very huge, with strange creatures and good items!\"
NoobXYZ: \"great!! how do i get there?\"
Azasello: \"easy, just jump off some wall a few times till your hp is zero\"
NoobXYZ: \"erm ... u kidding?\"

Trapped: \"LFG to get me out of death realm! i\'m trapped here :-(\"

Leetxxx: \"dr raid begins at 20:00! join my cg! drops will be /random\'ed after the raid\"

Deathmule: \"WTS: Evil Greatsword of the Uberness (dr boss item), various dr drops, pm me!\"

NoobXYZ: \"LF dr group to farm gold & items!\"

Laggy: \"HEY STOP DYING U N00BS TOO MUCH LAG IN DR!!!!!11\"

(don\'t take it too serious...)

the idea I want to present here is not new. in fact, I first saw it in lineage 2. however the lineage system has its flaws, so I took some time to think about it. this is what came out of it...

the philosophy:
the goal of this system is to give all players what they want. that is, player killers should get a world with lots of player killing, and coop/pve players should get some sort of (but not complete) safety from player killers. in no way should player killers be punished for their style of playing!

the basic idea:
every player has a status which I call \"alignment\" (this term is borrowed from D&D and means something similiar). the alignment is a one-dimensional value which reaches from chaotic (lowest) over neutral (initial value for each character) to lawful (highest).
the alignment is affected by the way you interact with other players and affects the way the world (mostly NPCs) react towards you.

(NOTE: I am not a D&D fan. i just use the terms because they should be familiar to some readers)

how alignment is affected:
(1) your alignment always rises over time. but only very slowly.
(2) killing players affects your alignment depending on theirs:

if you are lawful:
 - killing chaotics increases your alignment up to some maximum (you are protecting other players)
 - killing neutrals decreases your alignment quickly
 - killing lawfuls decreases your alignment very quickly

if you are neutral:
 - killing chaotics doesn\'t affect your alignment at all (self defense)
 - killing neutrals slightly decreases your alignment
 - killing lawfuls quickly decreases your alignment

if you are chaotic:
 - killing chaotics slightly decreases your aligmment
 - killing neutrals decreases your aligmment
 - killing lawfuls quickly decreases your aligmment

(3) you can not affect your alignment in any other way! this is important! if it was possible to raise your alignment by killing monsters (as in lineage 2), this would mean that player killers who are powerful in pve can always restore themselves to neutral or even lawful by bashing lots of monsters

note that killing chaotics can not get you back from chaotic to neutral? why? because player killers often fight among each other. this doesn\'t reduce their status as player killers. should be obvious.

what are the effects of alignment?
as I stated above, player killers should not be punished.
my suggestion is that there are different zones with different alignments in the world. a lawful area (for example the capital city of the world) should generally be \"a bad place to be\" for chaotics. NPC guards should attack chaotics without warning and protect others from thieves and player killers. that is, if a player attacks another player within the city bounds, the guards will interfere.
chaotic zones should have all the benefits of the big cities (i.e. there should be merchants, quest npcs and all that), but there should be complete anarchy. guards don\'t care about fights between players, and there should be some (but not too many) unfriendly NPCs (thieves, robbers, bad guys of all kinds). lawful players who enter these areas have no protection at all from player killers. if they go there, it\'s their fault.

both kinds of players should have to go to neutral areas in order to do quests and get items. this on the one hand gives player killers a chance to get some non-chaotic victims. on the other hand, the only way for a lawful player to get a reward for killing another player is to kill a chaotic player. this should make it attractive for lawful players to protect each other. because lawfuls won\'t kill each other, they will usually be around in larger groups, so outside the safe bounds of a lawful city, they are usually stronger than the player killers who are usually more busy bashing each other than sticking together.

if this system is successful (just assume this for a while before you tell me why it is crap;), then the community will consist of three major groups of players:

1. player killers and thieves. mostly chaotic players who kill and rob each other, and sometimes the other groups of players too. some will stay in the chaotic (player killing) zones most of the time. others will try to ambush pve players and steal their loot. these players are unlikely to form large groups because they don\'t like each other that much... (experience from other games shows this)

2. pve players, archievers, socializers, mostly lawful players. these players will spend most of the time near the lawful cities. if they have to go far away from safety to gain experience, hunt for items, etc, they will usually do this in large groups to protect themselves against the player killers. sometimes they might even go on raids against chaotic cities, maybe to get back some of the stolen loot. this will (hopefully) force the chaotics to stick together at least for a while and lead to big army vs army battles between players (which can be a lot of fun)

3. solo players. we must not forget about these. perhaps most of them will be neutral, only defend themselves against player killers and avoid the \"hot\" areas where lots of player killers are roaming. this is the typical behaviour of the explorer type of players.

I often read about radar tools in other MMMORPGs. most of them have been written by reverse engineering the game protocol (a difficult process which is NOT necessary in an open source game) and exploiting \"extra\" information that the server sends to the client.

what do I mean by \"extra\" information?
for example the server might be too lazy to do line-of-sight tests in all cases. so it might send position information for objects that a player can\'t see. if the object had been visible until a few seconds ago and might soon become visible again, it is an optimisation to safe a few line-of-sight tests. if a player is using a radar tool, then this can be fatal because he can see the object all the time.

this means that the network protocol has to be much more resitrictive in planeshift. this is good on the one hand, because it reduces traffic as a side effect. but it also means that the server has to do more calculations. i hope that the devs will or have already thought about some clever strategies to handle this.

I think this is the only way to really cheat by hacking the client. beside that, a hackable client can\'t be that bad. people can design their own user interfaces (for example if you think a ranger is hard to control with the standard interface, you might want to modify it. open source makes it possible!)
I don\'t know what the planeshift team\'s attitude is toward using modified clients. I think as long as people won\'t (can\'t) use this for cheating, it is a good thing. it\'s like having the choice which window manager to use, or which web browser.

sounds like the system from \"Secrets of Mana\" is training based. you improve a (weapon) skill  by using that skill. such a system is used in one of my favourite games too (it\'s nethack *duck*) and its has its pros and cons:

+ you can\'t \"push\" a skill by using a completely different skill
(this was extremely annoying to me in \"Dark age of Camelot\" where people trained the PvP skills of their characters by using PvE skills that were totally useless in PvP)
+ use of a skill is an indirect measure of successful use. if you weren\'t successful, you wouldn\'t use that skill. therefore training based systems reward for successful use of a skill. seems realistic
- you can fool the system by using a skill without need
(example from nethack: casting \"Identify\" skill repeatedly improves your \"divination spells\" skill. even though you have nothing to identify. okay, this can be easily fixed...)

so you see neither the training based, nor the point based skill system is the holy grail. so are there any alternatives?

a friend of mine and I once thought of a system which combines the training based skill system of nethack with the point based system. the basic idea was that you have to spend points to raise your skill, but you can\'t raise a skill if you haven\'t also trained it. that is, your training limits the amount of points you may invest in a skill.

example: if you kill a dragon in a long fight with a two-handed sword, you gain points to spend on skills, and you get training points for using the two-handed sword. you may then raise your two-handed sword skill.

another example: you kill a dragon with one well-aimed bowshot between the eyes. before you got to the dragon you have used your lockpicking skill a lot of times to open doors. you have never used your bow except for killing the dragon. although the dragon earned you a lot of skill points, you may only invest it in lockpicking.
and it\'s realistic - your lockpicking skill killed the dragon. you wouldn\'t have got to him without it.

what do you think about this?