I\'ve been playing a mmog (not an rpg) called utopia for a number of years now, and i thought they have some good idea of PvP. The structure of the game is totally different, as it\'s a text based strategy game, but their methods to prevent big players wiping smaller ones off the map is very effective. The setup of the game is you have a province, instead of a character, and you manage it and war other people etc. The point is there\'s 35,000 provinces on one server, and anyone can attack anyone else unless they just started the game less than 4 days ago. Your first thought is probablly OMFG huge griefing with the big players totally detroying the little ones and taking their resources. However this dosnt happen, because of two simple ideas. The first is diminishing returns. This means 1) If you attack someone who is bigger / smaller than you, you get a lower percentage gain than someone else attacking them would get. To put this in rpg terms, the bigger the difference in levels between the players, the less Tria the victor would take. So say a level 20 person defeats another level 20, they get maybe 10% of their trias. If a level 30 person defeats a level 20, they only get 5% or so. And a level 35-40 gets aboslutly nothing.
2) It takes 12 hours for your army to recover from battle, and you can only have 4 armies out at a time. The effect of this is, not only do you get a huge amount less for attacking smaller players, but you cant even do it over and over again to make up for it.
Utopia has been running for 8 years and counting, and had about 130,000 players at its peak. So it\'s hardly a new or small game. The fact remains their system works amazingly well for limiting strong players killing everyone, in a world where any player is free to attack anyone else as much as they want.
Obviously some tweaking would be needed to work this into PS- foremost the ideas of levels. You would have to produce a value approximating a player\'s relative strength- maybe a sum of that player\'s levels in key areas such as combat skills, armour skills, and magic skills, plus some value added for the items that player posseses. I know the devs dont want \'levels\' in the game, but this isnt a level system its just a number reflecting approximatly how much fighting potential that player has. Also for it to work there would need to be something like you can only PvP without asking someone 2 or 3 times in a 12 hours period, to stop people making up for the diminishing returns by doing it to lots of people.
