[MUD-Dev] Summary of PvP attempts?

[Dave Kennerly]

Brian Hook:
Sent: Monday, June 11, 2001 01:40
> 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].

...

> 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?

In my opinion this is extremely difficult to balance, if possible.
As soon as players can pursue this style of play, groups of them can
cooperate, such as in a guild, for the lesser enjoyment of many of
the rest of the players.  It's an interesting idea, and I've
experimented with it before in a different model toward the same
end: player politics, in which players can vote to cast out some
players from the village.  I was careful in balancing the reputation
requirements (a political scoring system), but it is not full-proof.
While it is not player-killing per se, it has a similar emotional
effect and some customer service requirements.

Dave Kennerly


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