I agree with the development team and various others that do NOT want pking.

I played a few MMORPG (RO, etc) and some MUD.  I found that in most *free* MMORPG, there are always a lot of people who create accounts just to pk.  So what if you ban or punish the character.  they just create another one and go pking again.  It is very frustating to play game that way.  banning would have worked if it is not so easy to create new characters.  There are players out there enjoy making it others miserable.

In particular, various character classes have very different fighting characteristics.  Magic users are generally weak physically.  They are easy picking for phsycial fighters when they are low level and ambushed.  With death panelty, etc, and frequent pk\'ing, they are painful to play.  (*If you haven\'t picked it up, I like to play magic users. ^^)

In response to those who said this should mirror real life:  If I want real life, I can go watch tv, I won\'t be playing a fantasy RPG.  I play game to enjoy and to get frustration.  Arena is just fine if you want to test your capability with another player.  What advantage does pking have over arena other than letting those who wanted to pk attack someone else?

Thanks to the development team for standing the ground for those who\'d rather have a fun experience (that are not build on others misery.)

Tony

Hi, these are the problems that I have encountered.  I also currently do not have a solution but hopefully this might be the cause of the problem and a solution could be developed for it.

There appears to be a few problems together that makes up this particular situation.

Here is my setup.

Network: I uses a cable modem with a home wired/wireless network.  The router is a Linksys WAP w/4 ports.  The external IP obtained from the ISP is 10.64.5.247.  The internal IP assigned to my game machine is 192.168.1.50.

HW: 2.0GHz Intel P4; 1GB RAM; 160GB HD (20GB Free); GForce 4 Ti 4400 128MB

Configuration of psclient
800x600 window mode; open gl; sound on; music on; 32bit color;
I just downloaded the client tonight, verified md5sum checksum on all individual files.

Tried to setup my first character
Error 1: Character already existed on the server.  I took a long time (like 10-15 min on this char).  Tried three different names, all same error until the last one I got error 2 (link dead - type 1).  Please delete these characters if they existed (Clueless, Nightmare, Kagome) *AND* in an incomplete state.

Error 2: link dead.  On the 3rd attempt (Kagome), the system gives me the link dead error (but not the database corruption error).  Terminated application.  I restarted and tried again.  Failed with the same error.  It appears that I\'m not even able to talk to the server at all.  Checking the access log on the router indicates that I\'m attempting communication with the server at port 13331.  It is not clear if that traffic is tcp or udp since the linksys router does not identify it.  Read the web info and turned on forwarding on the router so udp traffic on 13331 will go to 192.168.1.50.  Doesn\'t help.  the router never logged any incoming udp traffic.

Error 3: read the above suggestion and turned on compitability mode to 98/me and got futher to the point the application will start to show a different screen and then abort. no error.  Restarted the application, this time I got the database error message.

I do some more checking and I found out that appearently, the internet does not see the 10.64.5.247 IP that my ISP assigns me.  Instead, it sees traffic coming from me as coming from 204.26.89.240 (another host in my ISP\'s domain).  It looks to me like my ISP runs some stateful firewall that handles the tcp traffics ok but obviously blocks udp there since it will have no idea where to send them (if your site identifies the client solely but source IP of the packet)  (I\'m guessing here so if I\'m wrong, don\'t flame me too badly. ^^)

From what I can gather, there are two problems that caused these, one is partly solved by using compatibility mode, the other I don\'t know if there is a solution unless tcp is used or allow some other method of identifying the client\'s IP (even that might not work since I think the 10.3.*.* are class B privates.)

Hope this might be what is causing the problem.

The sad thing is, at this time, I think I\'m out of luck. sigh.

Tony