Dear derwoodly,
Originally posted by derwoodly
Ionas,
First off let me say it is good to have one more pro pvp player.
Count me three... in a way...
Second, I did not think you were taking credit for the Mob-for-a-day idea.
The idea is very old, I\'ve seen it at least ten years ago on MUD-dev. I really like the \"MOB-for-a-day\"-idea, how you call it, it would be a good gamedisigners tool to allow non-griefing PvP. In former days, it has been called \"play-the-monster\", or \"Player-NPCs\", or \"GM-assistants\", and many more.
And Thirdly let me say the bounty hunter thing has been beaten to death, well actually all of the issues have been beaten to death, but they just keep respawning. The problem with the bounty hunter idea is that it does not stop the PKer from griefing. Sure they now have a tag on their head, but most serious pkers actually want a bad rep. So the roleplayers will leave the game and you will just have the old Pker vs Anti-pker game. In addition the players who hunt the \"bad guys\" would get tagged as bad guys themselves if they happen to kill a pker that just did not have a tag on his head that day.
You have resumed all the important agruments within one paragraph, which others aren\'t able to in their whole life... :-)
The goal is to make the game as griefless as a carebear server. I am not sure I will enjoy this type of game, but if I understand Paxx correctly that is the goal.
...but what do we - including Paxx - know intuitively? Something is seriously missing.
My thesis for PS is: The game is NOT griefer-resistant, it just avoids PvP. Griefing can be arranged in so many ways, that PKing will appear as a light from the better days of the past.
What is important, is to separate two things:
- PvP
- griefing behaviour
The first adds content to the game, the second subtracts players from a games community. So what PS needs (and then could add much more PvP, including thieving), is a griefer-resistant design, which is something completely different from a non-PvP-design.
I think the major problem is, that many people - and this includes Paxx unfortunately, despite this bright intellect - view and treat game-rules as one monolithic block, instead of separating the layers, as gamedesign-theory suggests:
- rules of simulation (lowest layer, defines the game)
- gameplay-rules (mid-layer, defines how players can adjust their level of fun)
- participation-rules (highest layer, defines who can or must not play, and how to enforce this, and/or how to motivate appropriate and discourage unappropriate behaviour)
Disallowing PvP, flagging \"you may kill me if you want\", etc. is on the gameplay-layer. But this does not discourage griefing, it just makes griefers more creative.
But if you affect griefers on the highest level - participation - you can really strike back. Griefers must be caught, expelled, and coming back from exile must *hurt*. If a griefers account is publicly deleted, and if there were anything, that made coming back a bad idea, *that* would make those people leave, and stop their actions.
The knack against griefing is, how to make griefing unattractive by gamedesign, and that means: Serious punishment.
PS does not have such, and so, griefers will be a fact of life. And as long as this is so, forbidding PvP won\'t help roleplayers in any way, it will just make the game less interesting.