[MUD-Dev] Summary of PvP attempts?

[Brian Hook]

At 01:02 PM 6/10/01 -0700, Frank Crowell wrote:

> I suspect that PVP needs a whole book including the psychology,
> measures, and countermeasures.

That's my feeling.  Raph's GDC write up is a good taxonomy for types
of PvP systems, but beyond that is a wealth of information
(anecdotal, mostly) that involves how each taxonomic implementation
is routinely defeated by grief players using [insert phrase I can't
think right this second that involves PK using non-PK techniques
such as training].

Part of this boils down to "Why do you have PvP?"  There are many
varied reasons for having PvP: player justice, comparing character
power (duels), establishing a larger game framework, building
community by encouraging factionalization/tribalism, pursuit of
"realism", etc.  Until you really define why you want PvP, it's hard
to come up with a good implementation.

I know, duh, but it helps me writing it down =)

Anyway, I was tossing around one "PvP in a vacuum" idea, so I may as
well just toss it out there.  Let me start off by saying that a
fundamental problem with this idea is that it wasn't designed to
address any real function of PvP other than limiting abuse.

Assuming that you want PvP for player justice/defining "outcast"
members of society, such that certain individuals could be hunted
down and killed because of prior past behaviour, the typical way of
doing this is to implement some reputation system where either the
server tries to apply some objective criteria to determining an
individual's "evilness" (assumption: only evil/bad characters may be
killed).

Another way is to have player's flag someone's reputation, i.e. "I
like this person" or "I hate this person".  If enough people hate
you proportionately to the amount of time you've played, then others
can start hurting/hunting you.

The problem with this is that you can have bands of "reputation
killers" that just go around knocking down people's reps just to be
jerks.  So if you make this a net-loss situation -- knocking down
someone's rep costs you, say, 3x against yourself (lesson: spite is
never rewarded) -- then maybe this will encourage you to be somewhat
restrained about it.  Or you can have some other type of hard limit
associated with it (although I don't care for that as much).

One key element is that the amount of reputation damage done by a
group to a individual is way, way higher than the amount of damage
to any single group member as a result of flagging someone as bad.
Lesson: don't piss off groups of people.  Lesson #2: groups are
still more powerful than individuals, but at least "rogue" grief
players can be pinned and killed (while possibly not having the
ability to retaliate).

Thoughts?

Brian Hook

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