[2019 Q2] PK Penalties Have Got to Go

[Nycticora]

we need to do something about the pk penalties, they are nonsense to me. I know you guys spent a long time on the system and I don't want to mess it up if it's working for you, but for me it just looks like garbage. I know for a fact Conundo had more than 1 kill but he's only credited for 1 and seeing a record of 1:16 up here just because of penalties is really not OK.

I think players have a system where they shame the behavior they're afraid of. Like they want to penalize people who are 50 for killing level 46es, for example. That comes out too strongly in places like this and ends up having a negative overall effect.

I would like to see the penalties removed completely and return to a 1 kill is 1 kill system.

If that's not possible, we should scale back the severity of multikill penalties about as far as we have scaled up the rare limit order to support the lower pbase.

[Davairus]

Well this is going to touch a nerve.


You're looking at a system which is intended to be of reward to the people who play conservatively on AR. It has flaws, but it does that successfully, especially because of the "efficiency" rating. It is not a "body count" system or even a "kills : deaths" system. It encourages a certain play style, which most of the best pk'ers on AR consistently share - that is definitely no accident.


When it was being designed we pretty quickly figured out there was potential to encourage abusive behavior. Low level pk'ing (not so much an indication of skill as just exploiting the niches in game balance), multikilling naked people, beating up heralds, etc. We weren't looking to publically promote a system that actually rewards those abusive behaviors. And actually, we were looking to it as a vehicle to encourage more of the kind of PK'ing that is exciting to participate in.

When I say "abusive" behavior here, I don't mean that in a shaming hostile way, I suppose what I mean is an exploitative behavior, like a level 17 that makes a career out of picking off newbies who don't have detect invis up. Its really easy to do that, and you might call it a meaningless exercise to continue. its kind of beating the same tired old dead horse after a while. I guess I won't call it abusive behavior. Its a certain kind of behavior, and I just can't find the word I want. Its coming from a place of fairness, for sure. Without what is in place, I could focus on PK'ing and looting the same newbie as a hobby all day with invis and he'll never know about magic dust. It isnt a level playing field.


All that said, what's been done is turn it into a system that ALSO discourages a certain kind of behavior via hefty as fuck penalties. I think that we'll probably all agree with you, if that is what you are taking issue with. Obviously nullifying some of these pk's makes good sense, but it has overstepped into backhanding people for it.

[Nycticora]

I don't understand how anyone can be expected to learn to PK without having a lot of trash fights at level 17. I would like to claim that every single top rated killer who has ever played AR learned to PK by trash PKing with zero exceptions. Those who claim to have not done this actually did it in advance on another mud that was similar to AR at the time.

I think this system may have the opposite effect. The players you want to protect are the ones who need to do the trash pking. Those players are also at a point in their careers where they need to look up to other players who are better than they are and emulate what those players do. These newbies are extra vulnerable to shaming tactics, while the people they are fighting are extra resilient to it.

This system penalizes newbies in favor of veteran players who are not yet elite and want to become elite. The newbie players are shamed into never learning to PK, while the veteran players' unfair pk skills are defended by the system.

What if we introduced a system like "hardcore" mode that shows up on your gravestone and identifies you as a battle-hardened motherfucker and opts you out of having kills against you penalized? If you have the mode enabled, instead of applying a penalty it could just modify the "toasted" message so imms monitoring the game will notice a multikill happened and can get involved if they think there's record boosting. I would always enable this mode, but it might end up being a bad idea if it got too popular and people felt forced to enable it. It could also be annoying if there's a warlord circle jerk I guess.

You should have to enable this mode by praying to Diocletian in his temple.

[Olyn]

I don't know if we even need that. I think we can limit the maximum penalty for 1 kill to 1 penalty so you're never penalized beyond a specific kill just not counting. We have a ton of pk info going into our db, so we should probably just write a function to give us reports in-game rather than having to look at the db directly if we decide to look at character or player's pk trends, i.e. 'pkstats Nycticora month' and 'pkstats Nycticora career' to see if action needs to be taken case by case. I expect it'll be rare that we need to do this, but it'll give us an easier path to the pk info we already have access to.

[Davairus]

Yes that sounds fine. Its definitely a baby out with bath water case.