[Silirrion]

Originally Posted by Vandalia You expose a flaw in the system. Its ok for a lower level or several lower level characters to attack you with no criminal penalties where as you have merely defended yourself. This leads to a very large opening to be exploited. Unless the higher level has attacked FIRST there should be no crime in defending oneself

This will be accounted for by the system. We have gone to lengths to ensure that we have closed off as many of the obvious roads for 'griefing' with this system as we can. Lower level players will have to be actively targeted by a higher level target to have them generate murder points. A lower level actively attacking a higher level players first will flag them as 'free prey' for the higher level player and they can kill them at will without fear of gaining any negative impact. The team have done a lot of work to ensure this system is as smooth as we can make it.

As to the original poster, this isn't a system to reward this kind of behavior. It is a system where someone who consciously chooses to be 'that' type of player isn't disallowed from doing so, but has to live with the consequences of doing so without having his normal game-play completely removed. We do not wish to reward that kind of game-play. It's about choices for the player, if they choose to be notorious rather than a good citizen they are allowed to do so (Hyboria is a brutal world after all!), the results are negative though, it's up to each individual whether they can live with that life as an outlaw and murderer. I am sure some will!

[Veebsman]

Thanks for the Clarification on that. I'm actually looking forward to seeing it!

[Melkorus]

Thanks Silirrion! You bring a lot of confidence to AoC players. Keep the communication open and keep doing what you are doing, because its working.

[worgpest]

Originally Posted by Bloodscythe NO, i don't want that. But I'm curious why would anyone bother becoming one and risk losing thier stuff? Maybe I'm just too logical of a person to comprehend this. But to me being a murderer is a lot like making a bet. Lets both 1v1 and if you lose i get your T2 epic armor and if I lose you get 120 pvp xp which you would have got anyways? So why would anyone do this if there wasn't some small incentive?

Probably for the same reason that highlevel gankers would kill a low level Noob even though he is not getting XP. You can't have reward for killing lowbies, that would screw up everything. Murder system is supposed to clean up the act of gankers, not visa versa.

[greenjellosucks]

From my experience with other MMO's, I will have to say it is the most unique system I have ever seen...

EQ players were completely unable to damage anyone out of their level range.
(Though a nice way to keep people from "greifing" or "ganking" lower level, and even higher level players. It makes no sense?)

For that, I applaud you guys, very nice system, and has a good feel of "Realism".

[jojo19]

Originally Posted by flakjakett You want rewards for being a murderer. Holy crap what is this world coming to?

I agree , people are becoming very weird these days .

[Rhaeldric]

I'm hopeful that this system will mirror EVE-Online's "security" system, whereby people can indulge in indiscriminate or unstructured PvP, but pay the price of not being able just to show up in town and buy stuff from the merchant without getting attacked by guards. (Hopefully there will be no CONCORDOKKEN out in the wilderness, though.)

There's an entire community of players in EVE who do gank others and still get to play most of the rest of the game. They're limited in what they can do, and the safeguards that are there for high-sec characters just aren't present for them, but the game doesn't end as soon as you pod your first miner.

The one thing I really think this thing needs to make it work is for the road back to be a grind, but not too rough a grind to penalise people permanently who make one bad decision. People can stay as murderers if they like, and play that way, or they can try to work to get back to civilization. If that grind to redeem themselves takes an hour or a day, it's no longer a deterrent. If it takes a month of constant grinding to make back the impact of one kill, it's punitive to the point of effectively rendering the character useless.

Realistically, a week of casual gaming per murder should be enough to make the prospect of lowbie ganking unattractive to the casual player, but not remove it from the equation entirely. On the other hand, someone with 50 or 100 lowbie kills under their name really should be looking at months worth of exemplary behavior and grinding to get back to civilization.

The problem is going to be the level 20-30 alts who sit in White Sands or Khopesh and exist purely to res-pad gank everything that moves. Simply penalising them by preventing access to services isn't going to provide a deterrent, because those characters are never intended to go sit in Old Tarantia buying and selling via the Trader anyway. The only way to remove that sort of lowbie ganking is either NPC elite guard patrols or worldwide-wide automated broadcasts of the names of murderers so bored level 80s can go relieve some boredom.

tl;dr version: The murderer/criminal system needs to be a deterrent, but shouldn't be the end of a character's usefulness or enjoyability. Paths back to civilization should be moderate, but not extreme. Lowbie gank-heavy areas need some mechanism to avoid throwaway alts turned into murderers.

[ehnrho]

Originally Posted by Silirrion This will be accounted for by the system. We have gone to lengths to ensure that we have closed off as many of the obvious roads for 'griefing' with this system as we can. Lower level players will have to be actively targeted by a higher level target to have them generate murder points. A lower level actively attacking a higher level players first will flag them as 'free prey' for the higher level player and they can kill them at will without fear of gaining any negative impact. The team have done a lot of work to ensure this system is as smooth as we can make it. As to the original poster, this isn't a system to reward this kind of behavior. It is a system where someone who consciously chooses to be 'that' type of player isn't disallowed from doing so, but has to live with the consequences of doing so without having his normal game-play completely removed. We do not wish to reward that kind of game-play. It's about choices for the player, if they choose to be notorious rather than a good citizen they are allowed to do so (Hyboria is a brutal world after all!), the results are negative though, it's up to each individual whether they can live with that life as an outlaw and murderer. I am sure some will!

And you're still missing a lot of problems that are obvious to us because we've dealt with these sorts of systems in a half-dozen games before.

For example - no criminal flag if you don't target the player (and hit them with AoE, etc.) Congratulations! Now people can grief by engaging in a fight without officially engaging in it - by AoE'ing people withhout targeting them to damage them, root/snare stun them, or pop them out of stealth. Or legtrap them, search them out, or track them... a number of hostile and deadly acts are not going to generate any sort of flag.

There is already a long list of "I told you so's" dealing with the PvP XP system - you didn't freakin' listen to us then, either, and you've proven yourselves unwilling or unable to do anything to solve the problems that we TOLD you were going to happen. Sometimes I wonder if you guys have ever even played any other games.

I have to say I generally approve of criminal sorts of systems - the main issues I have with this one are the unresolved flaws and the application of looting to only the "murderers". I like the general way the game is heading but... *facepalm*

Originally Posted by Ragar How so? Do you normally "initiate PvP" by killing players 10 levels below you?

Funcom previously stated that the cutoff for criminal flagging (which is not turning you into a murderer, but is still opening you up to attack from others without penalty) was 3 levels, not ten.

But, yes, there are plenty of times when you see a bunch of people lower than you which you're going to have to kill, perhaps even preemptively. 10 levels doesn't mean that much.

[Xbar]

I think to divide direct actions, Funcom needs to not put player lvl when you target them. It will provide a much more understandable experience. And not just '10 lvls below cant kill....9lvls ehh... 8lvls..yep here we go!' Leave players guessing on others lvls and make the players think about what they are doing to a much greater point with the murder system.

[fluorineAOC]

XP farming from deguilded guild members is the most important thing they need to fix.