ok I''ve been working on idea for an online rpg... instead of hundrededs of games running at the same time like diablo instead I''d like to do it more like Ultima Online... a single game that everyone is in... I''ve been thinking up of every problem I can think of that will a rise in a world like that... well I think I''ve got solutions to most of them... the problem is what to do with high level players running around attacking/killing all the lowlevel characters... well I thought about segragating them so that as you progress your character forward in the game you move from one section of the world to the next and can''t go back... ok well that works... but I don''t want to do it like that... I want the players to have the fullest range of chouses... yea I know there will be a limit because its would be imposable to write code to handle everything thats posable in a world... still thats more restriction than I want... an alturnative I''ve come up with is kinda like a 3 strikes your out type deal... ok let both high and low level players walk side by side or go face to face... well when someone kills a player that is so many levels below them the get a blackmark in the private data records on the server after they get so many in a month say like 1 give them a warning 2 lock them out for a few days... they do it 3 times they''re locked out for a month or something like that... whats your opintions on it?

There was a post a little while back about this. Some of the key concepts were auras, reputations, and notoriety. Other ideas included justice, lynching, and self governing bodies.

Well... I think you should really start by laying out what will be the dynamic of your world before starting to decide how people will cohabit. Maybe that way you can come with a more realistic reason why it is not permited to PK.

You could enforce some sort of real law against PKing, Say you kill a person native from region X, you are then KoS (Killed on sight) in that region; kinda like the faction system in EQ, but also applied for player killing.

Furthermore, you can implement a bounty system (I think UO has that) that will reward players who hunt down PKer''s...

OR you could simply do like AC or EQ, make it so that players CANNOT PK at all except in very special circumstances.

Just create your world, your kingdoms, the laws, the gods, the bestiaries, the political plots, the powers and all the dynamics between them. THEN you will certainly find a way to implement PK in your world in a satisfactory manner

My 2 cents...

Ultimately, though, if you could do it like in real life, that would be nice. So if you killed law-abiding players, FBI equivalent will punish the killer by heavy fine or reduce his level by 10 and so on. Much like in real life. But the problem there is that those "FBI" people would also be players (kind of GMs). And you will need LOTS of those people... Police is hard enough to train humanely in real life, this might be an overkill for a game... but if you are THAT serious... you might be able to do it.

I guess an easy alternative is to use faction system. So if you kill a player, you lose faction with that guy and his race (or community or whatever). So all NPCs with the same faction will forever turn against you.

The bottom line is, if you were to allow PK, you will need a system where the CONSEQUENCE of killing a player is not favoured. That way, you can encourage people not to PK. It also gives those hardcore players a freedom... should they choose to kill for no good reason. Either that, or make the game entirely a PK based game, much like EQ PK servers. So the whole game experience would be about Race vs Race massive killing war.

Hay thanx for the input... I particularly like the bounty idea... I was thinking about maybe making some thing kinda like that for taking care of clans that where get way to powerful... create a quest that would be give to other clans or a large group of players... I think I might use that... I like the region idea... think I might combine the two... the other idea where great but they don''t realy fit with the game... I''m a PK my self for the most part, so naturaly just about any game I come up with I want it to have that in it... I just want to keep it in check... because with out it I could see some real problems with it... look at diablo... true they where cheaters( nother problem I''m working on... but I think I can keep this one semi-under control =) but they would have these characters that where nearly(or completly) impossable to kill... and they would spend all there time lurring lowlevels into traps and kill them... basicaly forcing others to cheat just to stay alive... but anyways thanx for the help

One of the things I''ve always felt is that PKing should be reserved for the characters who are truly involved in the game.

In one design I was working on, each event/action/quest/etc.. had an alignment value associated with it. As you played the game, your alignment would shift (or it could remain neutral if you played it that way), and hence the quests and things that were available to you would slowly become only those that were applicable to your level of alignment and some quests would only be available after you had become more aligned in a certain direction.

Where is this going you ask? Well, to handle PKing in our design we simply said that only players who were in the extreme of one alignment (Good, Chaotic, Evil) could attack other player characters, and they could only attack other player characters who also fell into one of those alignment categories. The idea was it would take many hours of playing and many levels before you were that aligned, so only higher level characters had anything to worry about.

It fit nicely with the gameplay structure also, since if you were so rightous, always performing good deads for the church, or whatever, always saving the children, blah blah blah, wouldn''t you also want to help remove the evil scum from the world? At that point in the game, the player should want to battle with highly evil characters.

Just though I''d toss that out. I really liked the idea.

thats a realy cool idea... this game will have alignment to... it will also have a points system in regarges to fame and what not... just about everything the play will can do will affect one or the other... there would be penaltys in sertian situation if they vary from what there alignment would predict them to do... but anyways thats a realy interesting idea... I like it but I don''t think it would fit this game much...