There have been a lot of intelligent comments made in this thread. Early on it seemed like it was just going to be another "Let's restate everything that could work in a perfect world but has never actually worked in practice" thread, but then some real reasoning and ideas started flowing.
I've never been a fan of the murder system and I wonder how many kwh have been wasted on idling off counts and/or collecting plat. Consequences? Ok. Leaving my computer on all day? Nope. Edit: No, it isn't because of the environment.
You're going about it the wrong way. Everything you're suggesting is going to throw the balance off. Below are some ideas that should add more inconveniences to PKs of all type. On a shard like this, it's important to remember there are a lot of people who will take a murder count, but not actually go red or stat ever. These are probably the worst players and the ones you need to deal with because they are dodging all the current inconveniences that real PKs have to tolerate. - Any character who has a long term count cannot attend any third World events (CTF type events). - Any character who has -5 level karma cannot interact with NPCs outside of the banker. I believe this is how it actually was on OSI, but it's not the case here. - Any character with a long term murder count gets increased costs at NPC vendors. - Allow players to prevent their player vendors from selling to murderers. - Any character with a long term count cannot collect platinum from the welfare system. This shard has an incentive to stay logged in, so there's an incentive to acquire a murder count from time to time, knowing you're going to be logged in 20 hours a day anyway, a murder count here or there really doesn't impact you much at all and that's a real problem.
My two cents worth: PFR has some good ideas, which are based on OSI. He is also a top pker, who solos, thus he knows what reds go through. I don't enjoy pvp myself, but from years of playing UO, I know little about the play style. When you start adding things such as "can't gate after a criminal act", these sort of suggestions bother me. There are so many situations where a player might perform a criminal act without it being to murder innocents. Anti-Pker guilds. These can be tricky guilds, it all depends on the individual members. Some are great, will only go after murders for revenge or to assist other players who are being attacked by reds, while others have no qualms about killing innocents if it is to their advantage, such as killing innocents when the said innocent is trying to place a house where the guild wishes to place a house. I do kind of like the option that reds can't use player vendors, with the exception of Buc's Den. think Buc's Den and it's surrounding land should be completely open to reds. But even the player vendors, should be the owners choice. Personally, I think as far as PKers go, our server is fairly well balanced. Thanks for this thread. Some interesting posts. Marjo Governess of Wispfelt Westra on IRC
sure but as One said a murderer simply wouldn't attempt to do any of those things on their red character so it's somewhat pointless.
It's a culture issue. The problem here is that the reds are interested in opportunistic kills while taking on as little risk as possible. Even if you change the mechanics to deal with this, these people will always target the weak players and avoid the strong. The methods for doing so may change, but the theme of the behaviors will not. On OSI (at least on my server) there was a strong culture during this era of shitting on people who played like this. Reds were encouraged to be pvpers first and murderers second. This culture was perpetuated by the people at the top (on baja this was LoD) and reds that were not up to snuff were reviled by everyone and driven out of the community. On this server, the idea that a red should be a newbie targeting coward is perpetuated by most of the strong voices in the community (and these people are backed by the staff most of the time) and most of the newbies that get shit on don't even realize it's the "nice guys" like pax, fek, bart, blaise, etc that are the people shitting on them. Basically, the red community here just has no ethics. One of the most important rules for a red needs to be "don't shit where you eat" but there are a bunch of people here who didn't get the memo.
One, I see one recurring problem with your suggestions. Many seem to be either "Black" or "White" and UO has many grey areas. As far as Pkers killing themselves for the bounty on their heads; that is an example of the grey area. If a pker wished to do this, all they have to do is have a friend kill them, friend turns in the head and they split the bounty. Back in the early days of UO ( goes with what Napo said), Pker's were about pvp. But that slowly changed. I played OSI multible servers for years, the attitude of ganging or going after the weak was very prevalent. I don't think it's just this server, was happening long before ML on OSI/EA servers. Think those type of players just came here. But saying that. We also have many pkers here who are about the pvp and not go after just the weak or gang pk. Actually blanket statements, don't really fit a populated server, for the same reasons they don't fit in real. Gets down to people are individuals. And we have a lot of peoples.
I have a lone red character that I play once in a blue moon. I've accrued a measly 88 long counts in well over a year's time, the majority of them being solo kills and I res most of the time. Kane has twice as many long terms as me in the same time frame. The idea that I go around "shitting on newbies," let alone am a prolific murderer, is complete and utter horseshit. The fact that you threw Blaise's name into the pile truly reveals that you don't even have some internal "plausibility" filter in your brain when you make shit up. Yeah man, Blaise is totally out there on his PK BLaIsE Da ReD shitting on newbs every night. I get that you and your friends have some ancient hate boner for Bart that predates me playing here. But it would be best to be upfront about it, rather than trying to cloak your hate in hypocritical ethics -- "he shits on newbs!" (read: he kills people in dungeons) -- when your own guild consistently ruins resist events and wastes hours of people's time (read: actual shitting on newbs).
