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Old 06-19-2005, 04:06 AM   #1
Davairus
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1. "The staff ENCOURAGES people to PK without a reason. "

As a newbie, its easy to feel like a butterfly caught up in a whirlwind, and with there being all sorts of classes with plenty obvious biases (for example, drow dark-knights and elf healers) there exists situations where even low rank players get hammered by some apparently silent kills. This is a part of the game. It doesn't make the kill reasonless, it just means the players haven't needed to interact much to justify attacking each other. This is bewildering to newbies, but we have this explained in our roleplaying guide if they care to take the time to read it, as well as a description of what classes are hard to justify killing (human rangers, especially). We do try to dissuade our older players from killing newbies, and for the most part they have done so, but a few low-level bullies remain to give a different impression. This is frustrating, but its not possible to really do anything until they've caught red-handed, and if we watch them 24/7, we can't spend any time coding and discussing ways to improve the game.

Since we have busywork to do ourselves, we can't man the game every minute for people getting killed for apparently zero reasons. We are quite dependent on the players to report these, and in fact have implemented a complaint system to help us deal with them when we get time. This shows that we ENCOURAGE players to report it to us when they have been killed without a reason.

We do not require players to justify kills to each other, but if an immortal requests them to justify their kill, they WILL be deleted if they do not produce a good reason. That is a rule, and I have invoked it often when the reports have been from low levels.

2. they're very quick to say "Kill anyone for any reason as many times as you'd like".

A kill that has a GOOD reason behind it IS legal, not just ANY reason. In addition to that, we have a rule against excessive multikilling, but this applies to kills done in one session, not over the course of a week. Nobody on our staff would agree with the above assessment.

3. I was killed 8 times in a week, and was forced to get all of my equipment back about 5 of those times, since players can loot your corpse dry.

Since this player was low level, his corpse was subject to looting restrictions - looting players must take one item at a time, and they must target the items by name. Plenty time to get back and retrieve it all at once first. If that isnt enough, there is an outfit command that can be used in guilds, that gives you an entire suit of randomly-generated armor for free. Granted its not all wonderful armor, but it gets you back on your feet. This MUD is not brutal on getting looted in the low ranks.

What Monkey might have put some more thought into was how to avoid death in the first place, instead of just working on re-equipping seven times. For example, our hometowns have guilds with some pretty tough guardians, that can be sat in safety. Most classes (a few exceptions include shamans, necromancers, dark-knights, thieves) don't bother to attack people of their class, rendering a guildhall pretty much safe. Then its just a matter of using the "WHO PK' and "WHERE PK" commands liberally and venturing outside when it is safe to do so, going back in when it is not.

Guilds are just one method of staying alive in low ranks.

4. After about a week, I realized that 70% of the skills are stock ROM/Rot blah blah, etc.

Abandoned Realms has stayed close to its roots - because we LIKE them. We prefer to add depth to our skills than to rename everything and add a bunch of new confusing skills on top. We have reworked nearly all of our skills underneath the covers. But yes, they do look similar, especially to the untrained eye. The MUD is listed on TMC as a ROM for this reason, despite the substantial changes that have been made to it. I believe we began at rom 2.3, and later applied patches to bring us up to rom 2.4 to allow us to increment the version number.

For example, the dirt kick skill. In stock, dirt kick will last for a tick, and add a lot of -hitroll. In AR, dirt kick is more difficult to use while flying, and on flying opponents. This is not stock. In AR, dirt kick lasts by a round based system with a shorter duration that decreasea each combat round, and has a chance to be rubbed out. This is not stock. In AR, the duration of dirt increases when you flee with it, to promote staying in combat and fighting it out, instead of cheese fleeing to sleep ticks. This is not stock. Dirt kick is a meat and potatoes skill of stock roms, and we've implemented its idea in the way we think is perfect.

Not too recently, we have added "combat matchup" and "weapon style" advantages, and skills that capitalize on these advantages. For example, dual wielding beats shield blocks, and you can use a "barrage" skill to disable the enemy shield block for a few rounds. This is another example of how we've taken "stock" shield block and dual wield skills, and added further depth to them. Taking advantage of these matchups is a significant (non-stock) aspect of the muds gameplay, and it requires brains to be applied properly.

We apologise to Monkey for his unsatisfactory gaming experience, and wish him luck at his next MUD.
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Old 06-19-2005, 08:27 AM   #2
prof1515
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Well, getting PK'd by someone higher than you is always a problem because you stand something to lose with little chance of gaining anything. The PKer on the other hand stands little to lose and, in their insecure mind, everything to gain. Back when I used to play a H&S, I used to recommend that if a PC PKed a player of a different level, they either were raised or lowered to that PKed PCs level. Of course, this brought out cries of "NO" from all the PKers because with the rare exception, they amassed their PKs cowardly picking on lower levels (in fact, I recall getting PKed a couple times while in the teen levels by PCs well over a hundred levels higher than me).

As for being able to monitor newbie-killers, why not review logs of the game? If your game features any logging system, you'd be able to tell if a PC is a newbie-killer or not. If your game doesn't feature a logging system, maybe that's something to spend your time coding. Certainly helps cut through the lies that some PCs will tell to be able to review the logs of what happened and weed out the facts.

Take care,

Jason
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Old 06-19-2005, 11:41 AM   #3
Shao_Long
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While I currently do not play Abandoned Realms actively, I've spent quite a while playing there not that long ago. I can't recall a single time when I'd get "slaughtered" by anyone with no reason. Indeed there are players who play the game mainly for playerkilling aspect - after all it IS a PK MUD - but by no means this MUD is some sort of a bloody arena where all people do is run around killing each other endlessly.
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