[...] “persistent world” depends on who you ask, and what definition of the word you use. It has been up for [...]

But see, PKers had all the advantages. They could scout and go when they knew they would win. It was the rare surprise when something bad happened to them. They had learned well the tactics of success. So everyone else also learned, that if you fight there’s always another PKer around, or something else such as blue healers, or whatever. And it was exactly this hopeless scenario that made it so bad. Sure, getting PKed and losing what you were carrying was bad, but if the game is good otherwise, that one situation isn’t going to cause anyone to quit. It was this repeated loss, and the hopelessness of it all that cause players to quit.

Now turn the tables on the PKers. Make it so that players can actually stop them. Not this one time, but for a long time for each character.
Now you have happy victims. Revenge is sweet. You also have few players PKing, because they can’t succeed that way. Eternal newbdom is no way to play an MMORPG. Nor is jail time.

So, yuo may be thinking who will even do it at all? Extreme jerks who think they’ll quit anyways because they can’t have it their jerk way. But that’s pretty few, and the fact is that the “good guys” have won. What’s left? Roleplayers having fun, that’s what’s left. The kind who do it to make an interesting story. This is a good thing.

There will also be the sort who enjoy an extreme challenge. It would be very challenging to play PKer and last very long. If one or a few do, think of the fame. Wanted on posters in every city in the realm! Who’s going to get them? And when they finally do go down, as they will, think of the fame, the story, the news. Again, this adds interesting story to the game, and can only be good for it. Hell, I’d expect a few players to even brag about being PKed by “Mongbat the Merciless, the most wanted man in the realm.”

The only time there can be a real problem for any player is if they are a target of repeated attacks, unwanted, abusive grief. And it would have to be someone who can be good enough to escape, so it’s not like every jerk in the game is going to last long at that sort of grief. But if it were to happen, a rare situation, GMs can take direct action.

The best part of it is that the players are empowered, they are a part of it all. Even if they only support their city or guild through trade, and especially if the game makes use of city assets to allow building of defensive assets to help. If trades people feel like they are needed, then they will also feel like it is their right to expect protection. So it won’t bother them that someone else is doing the dirty work for them.

It’s social, it’s natural, and it can be part of an immersive game world experience.

Of course, I was never part of the anti group either, and the general response for most people when they came across a pk was to recall. Immediately.

Oh no, blues didn’t attack you. Reds did, but they had blue friends who healed them, and you couldn’t attack them (the blue healers) or you’d go gray, then the blues could all attack you too. The red was very hard to kill under such circumstances.

I was PKed an estimated 15 billion times. I estimate this because I became completely lost on any semblance of numbers at some point or another. I joined an anti guild and fought. I fought allot. We made a difference in Rat/Orc valley where we defended players hunting spawn there, had a castle there along with some houses. And we did it with extreme prejudice. We took no prisoners. We went hunting PKers in dungeons and anywhere they hung out. We did guard duty at PvP tournaments. One of our guys earned so much respect that he was mentioned along with only a few others by BoneDancer on his guild site, if you know who that is. We were feared, hated, and respected by PKers.

There are players who will do this. Give them a community to champion and they will have a home. Then the rest of the players who don’t find that appealing, they will have a home and community too. They can then enjoy a different play style than “the grind”. They can make a name for themselves as merchants, librarians, collectors, or whatever play style they like, in a worldly game that makes their play style matter.

It screwed the entire picture for open PvP as well as worldly systems from that point on. Every producer was afraid of “worldly”, every player was following the standard play call that open PvP “cannot work”, and the EQ clone became the gold standard.

The blue healer situation was a bug. They may have tried to fix it once before Trammel came out, but if so it broke instantly. But it was most certainly not fixed before Trammel.

From there, everyone went to the path of least resistance. Even the PKers on their “blues”.

No no, there’s only one way to have open pvp, by definition. And it seems like I’m not at ALL expressing myself properly. ><

There are many ways to attempt to deal with the problems that open pvp causes, but by definition, open pvp means that you can attack anyone at any time for any reason. Anything else is not open pvp. This would be a tautology, except there’s no argument involved, open pvp is a definition, it’s not even a system. You can put up a safe zone, or a justice system, or penalties for murderers, and those are all systems designed to deal with the consequences of open pvp. Those can all be tweaked, those can all be done in a million different ways, but open pvp itself can only be done as described; it’s not really a system, but more of a concept.

I’m also not saying any of the things you’re implying in that second paragraph. VWs definitely *can* be improved, I dunno why I’m coming across as if they can’t. You must be missing the parts where I’m saying it does work, under certain conditions, and that there’s a band where all these systems function. But the systems that you can build are inherently fragile, and they can’t scale past certain points. There are limitations that are likely inviolate, due to the nature of the medium. That doesn’t mean you can’t improve within them, or push those limitations to their absolute maximum, but you can’t get around them entirely. You can widen the band in which the population numbers work, but you can’t scale infinitely. You likely can’t even scale to WoW numbers, but you definitely can scale to extremely profitable numbers. Ignoring those limitations is a particularly bad idea. Besides which, I dunno how we got from “open pvp is probably not the best idea in the world” to “there’s no way to improve the state of virtual worlds”. There are so many other vectors for improvement, so many other systems that can be developed, so many other aspects of a game world, that I don’t understand why we need to hold onto certain ones that have thus far failed to work and that have substantial problems behind making them work and that have extremely questionable benefits besides. You can get most of the benefits of open pvp without actually having open pvp. And doing it in those ways vastly simplifies the systems that you’re developing. You do lose a few things here and there, but the pvp system is less fragile. As a system compromise, you gain more than you lose. But, if you do absolutely have your heart set on it, you just have to accept the downsides attached to it, and plan accordingly.

And, though these were in posts directed toward Amaranthar, I *have* been asking what the goal was, and even presented alternate systems to deal with the most common three. His response was effectively that it made there be a constant low level amount of uncontrollable risk and that it was more realistic. I’m not sure I can support either as intentional gameplay mechanics, but there’s probably a big enough market for it to turn a profit if you don’t throw WoW like money at it.

If this were a discussion about social game play and how to better integrate community structures into the game world, we’d have a lot more to talk about. If, on the other hand, we were talking about permadeath for everyone in the game in a traditional mmog setting, my response would be much much more dismissive. These are all very small portions of what can be discussed, and being against certain ones of them is like being against certain social theories. You can look at it like this: trying to explain why communism doesn’t work outside of the tribal scale doesn’t mean that the person believes that world governments can’t be improved. It simply means that they don’t think communism is particularly the right way to go about it.

Now granted, open PVP isn’t quite that level of broken as it’s got somewhat more tolerance toward less than ideal conditions, but it does break under stress. Ignoring that means that you can’t see the rocks in the water, and thus cannot avoid them.

@Amaranthar,

You must’ve been playing a different UO than me. The blue healer exploit, if it functioned on reds, was squashed very quickly, because I have no recollection of it ever working that way. What you’re probably thinking about is how blue healers worked in guild pvp, as guild members could fight warring guilds without flagging, and attacking those characters *did* flag you as a criminal. But healing a red flagged you grey. What happened was that attacking a grey turned you into an aggressor, and then the grey could fight you without worrying about gaining a murder count. Their blue friends couldn’t jump you though, you weren’t a criminal, and the aggressor flag only applied to the grey you were attacking. But even despite that, blue healers were in the minority. And yes, the PKs could work off those murder counts by putting their character out of action for 40+ hours. That in and of itself destroyed their ability to function with any level of proficiency. After 40 hour timers went in, the number of active reds I saw dropped to maybe one or two attacks every few months, rather than one or two attacks every day or so. What I did see a rise in, was people taking advantage of the justice system and killing people that were legitimately using it for it’s intended purpose; jumping on people who flagged criminal accidentally, because they were trying to help a friend (looting a blue corpse that was about to decay so that other players couldn’t swipe all the stuff), or who were set up to do so (walking into aoe effect abilities, harassing someone till they finally attacked them, etc), stealing from someone so that they’d attack them and then be able to kill their target without worry of a murder count. A number of those exploits were fixed; insurance, aoe effects not working on unflagged characters unless you specifically target them, etc, but some can’t be fixed without gutting the pvp system or removing thieves and things like aggravating a player into attacking you can never really go away. So while you can make a more perfect justice system, you’d have to restrict available activities a lot, or turn it entirely over to the players and hope they don’t abuse their power.

But even despite that, there’s a core flaw in having any system that promotes that sort of behavior. If your justice system is not good enough, you bounce your innocents, if it’s too good, you bounce your more legitimate murderers and all you end up with are griefers who’ll grief as long and as hard as they can, and most of them probably will find a way to completely avoid the justice system. The tolerance at either end is fairly low, and trying to hit that equilibrium point is like trying to have a tea party on the back of a rampaging elephant.

There’s only one way to have an open pvp system too

This is precisely the kind of statement that exemplifies my inability to understand your posts. You aren’t talking about anything. Maybe you’re stuck in UO land, a game I never played and thus can’t use to understand all of your commentary, but you’re moving to the point where your only argument is, “The world will burn, and you can’t do anything to stop it,” which, quite frankly, is starting to get aggravating and knowing myself, your lack of valid argument is going to push me over the line into actual ad hominem, and I respect you more than that.

I suppose I could accept your argument: virtual worlds cannot improve, they will remain as they are, perpetually self-destructive and deservedly maligned: but I have been characterized as a hopeless optimist (and a cynic, so I know one when I see one), so that acceptance isn’t really an option for me.

You’re not saying anything. You’ve been showing how the resource of air can be exploited because people keep breathing. If you really have seen so much, I recommend actually sitting down and writing a book documenting all of these examples. Don’t pretend to generalize unless you can lay out the example, event by event, motivation by motivation, player by player, and then show how it is valid to apply those scenarios to completely different systems and games.

All you’ve really managed to say, this whole time, is “I just know it won’t work. Whatever you do.” You don’t even ask what the goal is.

As a thief, if you have jail time, that skill set is sidelined for the duration. Throw another character at it and they too can be sidelined, once caught. Of course there could be the rare player who’s so good at it that they escape not only normal capture, but those on the justice side who also become “very good at it”, on their side of things. And there’s some excellent game play for the participants with this, which is also pretty interesting for the rest of the player base. True fame can be earned, not some point calculations based on mechanics. But most importantly, the number of incidents keep going down, thanks to the player’s own efforts.

And of course, the same for the PKer. Fewer characters with the skill sets to use, only the best last, fame, and the best from the side of justice, fame here too, game play, stories, news from within the game world, interest in the game, and low incident rates from player policing activity. Community awareness.

I don’t think that UO’s system ever worked. It did slow down PKing, even quite a bit. But not enough. But there were two very important ingredients lacking that were the reasons it didn’t work.

1) The players still felt helpless. There were tricks and escapes from the penalties for PKers.
-Blue, unflagged characters could heal the Red, murder flagged characters. So PK guilds ran in mixed groups, and if you attacked a blue character for healing a red, you got a criminal flag yourself. Then all their blue characters could attack you with no penalty.
-PKers could pick your pockets blind, and if you attacked them they could kill you without getting a murder flag.
-PKers with murder counts could use macros to work off the counts. They did this before the stat loss penalties started to kick in due to reaching the magic number of murder flag killings. If by chance they killed more than that number, and if they died before they could work off the murder counts (with time played), they could stay as a ghost and work it off so that when they finally resurrected they didn’t have the penalty.
2) There was no community to the self protection/justice system. Yeah, you might be in a guild. But there was absolutely no faith in justice working, and no one tried after realizing the escape tactics the PKers were using. The feeling of being alone in a game full of people abusing you was absolute.