If Planeshift intends to be original...

[Karyuu]

I said PvP, Valorius. Not combat entirely. PvE would still exist Don't hold yourself to such a narrow mindframe that all combat means attacking fellow players.

[LigH]

A common rule being made is: Duels should have a reason. To avoid challenge spam, the decline penalty was introduced.

For the Dwarvesbane war, a story got created around the reasons and the threats, with a final showdown. This is quite different to challenging anyone in sight!

[Feline Prince]

Its the other players that pose the challenge, you always know how a mob will react, cant say the same about players. But you'll find the mind is sharper than the sword and can deal much more damage.

[Valorius Rageway]

If you as a collective group of GM's/Dev's wish to eliminate PvP that's your choice. Entirely.

TRUE STORY: In europe (and really all accross europe) and the occupied new world right up until the (IIRC) late 1800s there was a class of dueling professionals who fought at the mere drop of the hat (and often provoked fights for no reason as the more people they killed the greater their reputation became, and the more prestigous their training academy or services became) or as champions for someone else's 'honor'. Certainly so much as insulting a gentleman publically could -and regularly did- spark challenges and fights to the death.

There are a great many very famous examples of such.

I think that the contention that people did not regularly kill for little to no reason is entirely unsupported by the ole' historical record. People STILL kill for little to no reason on a daily basis, even now. (there have been almost 200 murders in my city alone since the start of the year now)

[Draklar]

Well, the discussion got stupid again.
@Karyuu: I think you should drop this argument with Val. You're not going to convince him and we all know he's just being silly anyway.
Or actually you're both being silly. Both of you make some good points (that the other side won't acknowledge), but it's not the right place to discuss it.

[Karyuu]

If PlaneShift intends to be original as an MMO, Draklar, I would love to see people stop killing each other It's all combat, combat, combat. But as you wish.

[Illyria]

If you as a collective group of GM's/Dev's wish to eliminate PvP that's your choice. Entirely.

Sure they wanna eliminate it! That's why they made it possible in the first place 

EDIT: "With 'it' I mean PVP"

[zanzibar]

If you as a collective group of GM's/Dev's wish to eliminate PvP that's your choice. Entirely.

TRUE STORY: In europe (and really all accross europe) and the occupied new world right up until the (IIRC) late 1800s there was a class of dueling professionals who fought at the mere drop of the hat (and often provoked fights for no reason as the more people they killed the greater their reputation became, and the more prestigous their training academy or services became) or as champions for someone else's 'honor'. Certainly so much as insulting a gentleman publically could -and regularly did- spark challenges and fights to the death.

TRUE STORY:  Such individuals were seen by society as idiotic young men who were incapable of resolving problems without violence.

TRUE STORY:  Such individuals are still seen as idiots.

TRUE STORY:  The people who behave in such a way in Planeshift do so for OOC reasons.

[Raleigh]

PvE is usually much more interesting in single player RPGs, that's all I have to say about this old discussion brought back here...

But the way PvP combat works now, well. I don't know why people like it. As I said, some other games have much more interesting PvP options that would make me more interested on combat than on the typical MMORPG.

Planescape Torment almost had not much combat compared to a "Hack and Slash" like Diablo, but to make an immersive plot like its on a MMORPG... quite a challenge.

Permanent removal of PvP isn't something I would agree with.  However I agree that the current PvP system is somewhat flawed, as only a very large Death Realm and/or Intelligent guards NPCs would fix a part of it.

[bilbous]

Getting back to the original topic, the problem with trying to be original is that there is very little that hasn't already been thought of before. An MMORPG is an MMORPG is a Halloween Parade is a Masquerade Ball is a Passion Play. There is very little difference between an FRPG and a SFRPG, A first person shooter is a reduced instruction subset. The main differences amount to nothing more than set dressing. We know the play will be Shakespeare because of the Elizabethan look of the set, we know it is Beckett due to the sparseness of the set.

How is it any different if I shoot you with a flame burst spell or  a flame thrower pistol? Is there a difference if we have demorians, stonebreakers and enkidukai or we have their equivalent with different names?  They are all humanoids in form, if you want something different make Tefusang the player characters. Try developing some kind of system with real challenges built in.

I really don't see what the fuss is about.

[Induane]

Good points bilbous.  I think you can make strong arguments that originality is impossible except in very extreme circumstances.  Ideas like Einsteins relativity took the world by surprise and were fantastically original.  He wasn't even a great mathematician, but he had a knack for thinking outside the box and using thought experiments.  That kind of originality is hard to find, and gets harder and harder as time goes on.

There are other aspects to the originality of PlaneShift settings that do feel borrowed but that is not necessarily the point nor is it really that important.  Sometimes creating a nice atmosphere for imagination to take root is good enough, even if you borrow from others good ideas along the way. 

Other things though, like using medieval paintings photo's from online for ingame paintings says to me lazy dev   Those things are not that common though so I think they do an ok job, and so long as people have the freedom to imagine and create then the possibilities are endless.

[Parallo]

They should not be in a guild that will expose them to a condition of such flagrant vulnerability then. Once a war starts if you can't fight, you are a statistic waiting to happen (again and again, hehe).

It wasn't the guild I was in. It was the race I was. It wouldn't be racism if it was against the guild, would it?

[Raleigh]

My last words on the questions of this thread: Linux, on what it became now, isn't an "Unix clone" anymore. 

Offtopic: For the one who said sci-fi is less popular because it has less clichés and follows a less predictable model...

The Grand List of Overused Science Fiction Cliches

Note that some of the marked items are considered as not bad, as long as they receive a special treatment on the plotline, the same goes with fantasy.

@Aendar: I didn't mean most fantasy works are LOTR clones. What I meant is that the definition of "fantasy" isn't simply "things that look like more or less as Tolkien's books". There are original works, unfortunately LOTR elements overshadow attemps at originality because they "seem popular, why risk something different instead of using the tried and tested formula for profit?". That's why I drew a comparison with FPSes, originality is risk, and the goal of profit predates the goal of being both unique and interesting, as long as the customers are satisfied with having the same thing under a different clothing.