Thread: RK Rules Poll
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Old 02-24-2008, 02:33 AM
Iron Iron is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2008
Posts: 47
Default Re:RK Rules Poll

I think relaxing the RK rules would be a bad idea. In the long run, I think it would end up running off the smaller players from the game. Here's why.

Smaller players are less likely to have a back-up set of equipment or alts with equipment etc. If they get RK'd they are probably going to be left naked with no real ability to get even decent equipment back as they probably had to buy the equipment they had to begin with. Consider how large and well equipped someone has to be to actually get decent equipment as a major (if they are solo) or how much plats they have to spend and how likely it is that smaller players are going to have 100k plats just sitting around. They certainly aren't going to be able to go out and get revenge or the like to get equipment back. So players who spent a long time (and probably real money) to finally get their first decent set of equipment so that they can run at a moderate level, can in a moments notice find themselves standing around with absolutely nothing.

You will end up with 2 scenarios. One, there will be a smaller player who (particularly just after 2 SU weeks) will have one or 2 pieces of good equipment that a larger player(s) wants. The smaller player will become hunted constantly until someone succeeds in getting said equipment. Two, you will end up with grief players who just run around trying to RK the smaller players and then ransoming their eq back for donations if the smaller player didn't have anything particularly useful. There will be some killing of larger players. There will be wars that break out and there will be lots and lots of drama on gossip. For the most part though, smaller players will take the brunt of the assault and many will end up leaving.

Nodeka is designed to make players work long and hard to build their characters up. Equipment is difficult to get and fairly rare. You can't just go out and build up your equipment to as good (or almost as good) in a week. When you add to that the fact that people just spent real money to get marbles to make that equipment essentially irreplaceable, suddenly changing the rules so that someone twice their size can not only kill them at will, but also have a good chance to take away everything they have spent long periods of time and real money to build does not go over well.

I will fully admit that I am one of those lowbies. I get slaughtered by the big players on a daily basis. That is part of the game, it generally doesn't bother me. If they changed the rules at this point to make RKing much easier and I lost everything because if it, I wouldn't ever be back. I would not spend months or a year and more money to try to rebuild my character when someone can just come along and take it all away again at will.

If the rules changed, someone who is Aug 5 would easily be able to find a way to RK a player with 10k-20k hps whether they are botting or not. People would quickly find a way to RK more or less at will. Not to mention how things like lag/prevent on ranged attacks and the such would become major issues. There would be constant calls for toning and changes (a.k.a the reason the rules were put into place to begin with). "Oops, we tried to improve class A, now they can RK in seconds". Does that become a bug that requires reimbursement or are you just SOL?

Just like there cannot be a pwipe because of the huge time and actual money investment that people have in the game, you have to consider the same things when you are looking to change rules that can dramatically affect players like this.

I do agree though that botting is a huge problem. Botting has resulted in so many of the imbalances that are in the game today or have caused major recoding to balance things in the past. Nodeka is a game. Games are supposed to be played, not a practice in how well you can write a script (or download one). Instead of changing the RK rules to prevent botting, which is casting a large net at a targeted problem, why not change the PK rules to specifically make botting a hazard.

Idea: When a player is PK'd, have it automatically trigger a botcheck with the standard retry attempts. Give PK protection until the botcheck is completed (pass or fail). Double or triple the reward for passing the botcheck, thus the helping the killee grow. If the botcheck is failed, take one item from the players inventory (worn or carried, containers take everything in them also) completely at random and give it to the player who PK'd them along with normal bot-check failure penalties. Don't allow storm crystals to protect from this. For majors, I would even go so far as to exclude items from the random selection that have a value less than 200k, empty containers, and definitely summoned items. This would keep people from being able to load their inventory with bandages or throwing items in order to weight the odds of losing a "real" item in their favor.

This would give a strong incentive for players to police themselves by PKing (suspected) botters. People would become very wary of botting because of the possibility of losing their "(phasing) Boomstick". What it doesn't give is an incentive for grief players to start a wholesale lowbie hunt or a reason for player A to try to RK player B all day long because they want that "(shining) a pink ribbon" that player B refuses to sell them. This also allows players to keep their storm crystals to protect them from the environment and encourages players to experiment with new areas/mobs without total fear or dying.


Idea 2: Add a possibility of losing and Augmentation point to failing a bot check. That is something you cannot recover from in a day or 2. While this only affects players who are already Augmented, smaller players are already much more likely to be PK'd or otherwise interrupted while botting anyway and cannot recover from the current affects of a failed bot check as quickly anyway.


Just my 2 cents on the topic.
Iron
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