Dealing with random player killing in an open-world PvP MMO.

Paradise2

For such an ambitious player-driven MMO as Ashes, the presence of random player killing (RPK) poses a challenge.
How do you allow for player agency while protecting new / weak players?

On one hand, giving players the agency to dish out justice in blood makes the world much more interactive and unpredictable, as your reputation and behavior may have dire consequences.


However, the challenge is that this level of PvP-interactivity, typically also gives rise to RPKs. Some of which intentionally grief, and others who just PvP indiscriminately.


The corruption system is already a great safety mechanism against this. However, with player-interaction at the heart of Ashes it would be great to see additional counter-RPK mechanisms that are driven by the players themselves.
Bounty hunters as planned, are a great first step.

However, bounty hunting only taps into monetary motivation. It'd be great to provide tools by which guilds and players may establish a reputation of benevolence and fairness. If Newbie Joe can report a RPK or griefer to the local guild, then it puts justice back into the hands of players. If the game tracks and incentivizes such player-driven justice, then guilds may want their territory to garner a reputation as a safe haven with just proceedings.

If Anti-PKing or peacekeeping is made worthwhile in this sense, we'll be encouraging the community to respond to griefing or bad behavior organically.

Hurf Derfman

This imagined army of griefers spawn camping newbies is kind of hilarious.

If the starting zones somehow get over run with higher level corrupted killing lowbies for the lolz they could simply disable PVP in 1-10 zones or what not.

But the thing is since everything in this thread worried about a theoretical system (that's apparently harder to grasp than thermo dynamics) you could in THEORY be a level 50 kill 3 level 1s and suddenly have the stats of a level 5 and in theory, get rekt by an angry mob of level 2s. That's of course IN THEORY.

The point is de-leveling is not a THEORY. Sure you can uh, "die off" your corruption but the penalties are four, the number 4, that's F-O-U-R times worse than if you die from a NPC mob.

Now, according to the wiki they're suggesting that player's killed by another player still suffer xp loss outside of corruption and to me that's not ok. But since it's only an idea at this point it might not be that big of a deal. In theory.