Why "passive neutral" leads to senseless PK

[Davairus]

This is some food for thought, based on my experiences for the past.. year or so. But first let me state this. I'm not singling anyone out here. I've seen this an awful lot. I'm speaking in general here.

On AR I have noticed a trend that occurs in many, many players. They begin with a regular character, necro or something. It gets condeathed on pkills, they feel discouraged. They die some more on next characters. Sometimes, having given up, they try to make a character that's deliberately difficult to justify killing. Almost always some form of neutral.

Here's the problem. If you've designed your character to be difficult to come up with a reason to kill it, who's going to kill it? It sure as hell won't ever be the good players on the game, who actually put the effort in to RP things out (at least, not until extremely high levels). Its just going to be the dickheads that don't. And that's just about all you'll ever see. You're not going to get a good RP'ing PK experience out of it. Sure, you're going to be pked less - by vets. But when you eventually are, its going to be by the same kind of player you were hoping to avoid.

As for vets kicking around neutrals... when you go out of your way to bury any good reason someone can come up with for killing you, essentially trying to make yourself an "invincible" character via the game rules, you just leave these rather hundrum reasons for vets to do it anyway:

1) he has a nice rare item
2) my character is a fire giant (or similar sadistic rp)
3) to "test" him

See how being passive neutral actually feeds the problem? Sure, the complaint about senseless kills is always justified, but then, your neutral character doesn't exactly make it easy to come up with good reasons does it? You're making it far less likely that the good rp'ing pkers (who you'll learn a few tricks from) will come after you, as you're no longer an interesting target. If this was your goal, great. However, an opportunist is still going to do it no matter your alignment. And so you lose most of your deaths to the trashy guys who're usually just abusing the current worst problems in the game repeatedly, and build up an opinion in your mind that the whole mud's trash. (Newsflash: It's NOT.) At some point I see people start to blame the Imms for not being able to enforce the rules, and contemplating leaving the mud.


The rules may protect your character, but it doesn't mean there's always going to be an Imm around to catch things. To be frank, there's so many people who're do these sort of characters (passive neuts) that we just can't keep up with the problem. People get upset at the Imms about it. I feel bad about that, but we're all doing the best that we can do, and its not sufficient enough to stop people from doing it. Retroactive punishment is all we can offer to someone who's been pk'd as neutral by a good/neut for no apparent reason - by the time we've done that, you'll be pissed off anyway.

So my advice - Don't make a character to hide from possible pk reasons. That's going to harm your growth as a player. A better idea is to get into the high ranks and fight with some skilled vets, become a squire or make a dark-knight and go for Legion. If you don't fight the vets with it, at least you'll be able to fight those trash types back with a character geared for killing. You will learn from every death, you'll have a lot of fun, and you'll be breathing healthy RP into the game. And before you know it you'll be kicking those halfwits around that messed you up as a newbie. That is how it went for me. It took me less than 6 months of play here to get pretty competent, and that was basically by going aggressive on the people that had laid my old character out for no reason, with a new char geared for killin. Once you can actually pk level 50s, you're definitely not going to have much of a problem with senseless pks.

You are still going to get "senseless pk"-like attacks no matter what you play on AR. Its just that when you make a passive neutral, its pretty much ALL you are going to experience.

If you seriously don't want to ever be attacked by anybody but 99% dickheads, join the Heralds cabal. Otherwise, consider this post here, before you go berserk at the Imms because you find your neutral is getting "senseless pked " by a lot of players, and they don't seem to be helping you out. The Imms always try to do the best job they can, and will do their best to catch and punish any illegal pks. But we all have limited time to play and its not feasible to supervise things 24/7, so those senseless pks are going to happen. As a passive neutral who's hard to justify a kill on, it isn't surprising that your experiences of getting attacked almost all turn out like that.


I'm not saying don't play neutrals of course, its your choice, and if you do, the Immortals will do the best job they can to make sure that your experience is the way you expected it to typically be. Period. The information in this forum post is to let you know this alignment pick won't stop you getting killed by the dickheads we don't catch, it'll mostly just protect you from most of the people worth actually fighting. Which means you mostly just get killed by the bullies. Which means that you'll mosty have a bad experience when you get killed. Know what you are getting in for when you pick this passive neutral thing.

Final words... you could be making characters with obvious enemies you plan to make and gun for, and then mostly fighting / getting killed for perfectly fine reasons - it makes the game more fun and exciting, and there's perks, like joining cabals. Just look at Lightwalkers... you have 1/3 of your pk range forbidden from attacking you. And you can just "request" new items without even killing mobs. Its *fun* to be a paladin, fighting dark-knights and rescuing people. Its *fun* to be a good-align dwarf warrior, going after some necros. Its fun to be a shaman, picking on mages because they dabble in what belongs to the gods. All experiences you're missing out on.

Based on what I see, most people have a much less frustrating play experience when they dont make these anti-pk type characters. (And if you do, please do keep in mind, we still can't ensure 100% that you won't be killed, especially by evils that do that for fun. The rules are there, and we always punish when people break them, when people report it to us, but there's no code to stop someone poleaxing you before it happens.).

[Sethronu]

if you are a neutral, in my eyes that doesn't have anything to do with an evil's rp, an evil should be able to attack you for whatever he wants -- and since our policy is to rp your pks, its just a matter of whether the evil can get that across -- but still i think its justified. however a good should have a good reason as to why he attacks a neutral. and i think neuts can attack neuts too for selfish reasons, i dont see a problem with that unless its overly rampant (like a neut i once was tracking because he said he killed another guy for "experience" meaning for exp..)

though the one catch that i agree with is that it should be at levels 40 and up, since before that there are just a lot of people who dont understand the cutthroat nature of the mud and therefore don't fully respect or appreciate it yet.. so the trash no-talk straight up level 12 ownage pk will definitely be unappreciated (and i think thats the worst type of pk in the game)

[Davairus]

Figuratively. I'm going to be editing this post a bit because I kind of just spat out what I wanted to say, since I didnt have 3 hours.

[_Clifton_]

Must say, then what's the point? Why play a game just to rank and sit around. It'd be pure-pk and takes away 50% (more if you count rare/uniques) of the mud. Seems rather dry. As for the idea of neutrals, it's rather hard to find a good reason to kill neutrals, except for evils. Evil/chaotics can find reasons to kill you.

[Ronus]

Haha. If you don't want to PK, make an awesamo character then apply to IMM. That's what us gimps do, sit around, RP, and wish we could still PK...

Other than that, I truely don't see the point of a level 50 non-pk character. You basically remove yourself from all of the recent changes (combat modules), and all you'll do is sit around and rank people? I'd rather stay at level 1 and do that. There is no reason why you can't RP at level 1.