[MUD-Dev] Re: WIRED: Kilers have more fun

[Koster]

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	S. Patrick Gallaty [SMTP:choke at sirius.com]
> Sent:	Tuesday, July 07, 1998 2:27 PM
> To:	mud-dev at kanga.nu
> Subject:	[MUD-Dev] Re: WIRED: Kilers have more fun
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Koster, Raph <rkoster at origin.ea.com>
> To: 'mud-dev at kanga.nu' <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
> Date: Tuesday, 07 July, 1998 11:10
> Subject: [MUD-Dev] Re: WIRED: Kilers have more fun
> []
> >Just for the record, UO does in fact now have good-vs-evil distinct
> from
> >pkillers. However, we don't have players judging those "gray cases"
> >simply because the manpower load is way way way too high. So we coded
> in
> >some recognition of the concept of "self-defense" that your wife
> notes,
> 
> 
> Raph, do you think the UO system is too forgiving to antisocial
> behaviour
> to provide the sort of restraints that are ideal?
> 
Well, the question there is of course, "what is ideal." Is it enough to
make Marian and Dr Cat happy? Almost certainly not. UO is aimed at an
audience that includes a large amount of killer types. For what we're
going for, it has thus far been a GREAT solution.

If you have a fairly unforgiving system, you'll be spending a lot of
time on appeals that go to admins, which becomes prohibitively
expensive... if anything, based on the number of people now saying,
"there aren't enough pkillers to make the game exciting!" I am worried
about the system being too strict...

> In another system I've seen doing antisocial things like stealing
> would earn you permanent persona non grata status, like a
> permanent criminal flag until you performed a quest to clear the
> criminal flag.
> 
Stealing in UO flags you as permanently criminal *to the person you
stole from.* But stealing is, in our opinion, on a lesser plane than
murder...

> If you murdered someone you were a permanent 'murderer' until you
> performed an even bigger quest (sacrificing a rare treasure).
> 
Quests to get out of this flagging seem way MORE lenient to me,
honestly... there's obviously no puzzle element to them after the first
iteration, and they become a matterof "pay the rare treasure fee and
then kill your victim." Given that most games have a faucet->drain
economy, no treasure is THAT rare, usually, and it's not a big deal to
clear your flag.

> In one case you got three murders to accumulate until you were
> considered a 'Murderer' and suffered greater penalties at death
> (you basically went to hell and had to escape butt naked :)
> 
What we do specifically: when you are killed, you have a chance to
report those who were involved in your death, IF you were not an
aggressor in the fight (eg you didn't start it) or if you hadn't
committed some questionable act right before (like looting a corpse, or
causing an earthquake). When you report, you also have the option of
adding money to the bounty for that person. After five people report
someone, they are flagged murderer and any bounty money is applied to a
public bounty posting. A report ages away over 8 hours of play time but
the bounty remains. At death you suffer stat and skill loss that comes
to minimum of 10%, rising up to a max of 20% based on how many reports
you have. You also get killed on sight by city guards, lose access to
your bank account, and get charged more by your hired NPC vendors if you
run a shop. (The increased costs there are in fact permanent).

> The clever thing was that the items that you had to sacrifice were
> rare
> enough that one usually relied on a stranger giving the item to you -
> in other words it had a social context.
> 
How did they ensure they were that rare?

> It seems that adding a warning to the other players would benefit
> people as it would infer a social cost for antisocial behaviour.
> 
Not sure what you mean here.

> >and we made it a five kill buffer zone, and now very few people cross
> >the line into "pkiller" accidentally. (Instead, what happens is that
> a
> >killer tricks them into being the aggressor, so his murder is allowed
> >under "self-defense" rules... ah well, no system is perfect...) We
> rely
> >on the administrators now only for cases of harassment, which I don't
> >think code is ever gonna be able to judge.
> >
> 
> One thing I don't understand about the UO system - it's very
> forgiving.
> A career thief will be 'blue' to people in general even if they steal
> all
> the time...
> 
As I said above, we don't really count thieving as being as severe.
Thieving's penalty is that you can get killed anytime by anyone, and not
get to report it, because you are a crook. This means you die a lot.

-Raph