Kingdoms as safe zones

[Undefined]

what you want is consensual pvp, not open pvp

Not at all, there has to be open PvP, the risk needs to be there, I need to feel like I could get jumped at any minute while transporting my resources. I need to feel like people could come and siege my home. I also need to know that if some miner digs into my mine shaft and starts digging out my precious I can kill him, raid his home and remove him. But what I feel is needed is a system that allows these things and all the other beautiful and essential aspects of open PvP, while at the same time mitigating the impact they have in certain situations.
It's by no means an easy thing to do and I don't claim to have the answers and solutions to a perfect system, but I do know that the current sprucecap slaying free-for-all system we currently have doesn't work the way I'd like it to.

[Myrgard]

Also, not directly related to the thread, but on the general topic of permadeath, I would like to emphasize that it has always been a goal (though not a particularly well-explored one ) to make Haven more about playing a "bloodline" than about getting attached to a particular character. Inheritance should be more of a part of the game rather than a consolation, and I would particularly like it if the pain of dying was accompanied by a feeling of "oh well, at least I can make a new descendant now".

Then why did you scrap ancestor magic?

You're already taking the teddy bear approach. I don't remember meeting a single person in legacy who didn't die to a boar at least once. Also with almost everyone in legacy being at full change with death you usually lost 90% of stats. Now you get to retain 90% in some cases. If anything then I'd argue for bringing back the more penalizing death rules from legacy when having a char that was alive for more than 6 months was something one could have taken pride in.

[Myrgard]

Separate servers isn't a good idea, the playerbase is already low as it is, spreading it is bad.
All types of players need to live in the same world, it's one of the main things that gives the world of Haven life, if you start spreading people out onto servers or adding silly PvP toggles etc then you kill the magic.
IMO the problem isn't that players can kill you, the problem is that players can kill you for no reason at all destroying your progress and crippling your future enjoyment and have no consequences for doing so.
I completely love open PvP as a philosophy, it's the single biggest draw to an MMO for me, in fact I see no point whatsoever in playing a multiplayer game without it, but I also fully believe that it needs regulation and structure to prevent the exact situation that we have in Haven.
Casual PKs have been present in every single MMO with open world PvP and there's a reason why every single one of them either shipped with or adapted their ruleset to account for them, it can be argued that they HAD to because of a P2P system and their paying customers were the ones suffering, but it's also because without regulation, rules or structure when it comes to killing each other, people will kill the weak purely because they can and it'll upset them, even people who would otherwise not do it, put them in a position of power and tell them there's no penalty at all, they'll feel that temptation, it's human nature.
Actual PvPers enjoy combat, they enjoy fighting other people and testing themselves, in general they don't bother killing the weak because there's no point to it, though if there's no penalty for doing so it's far more likely they could, they're not more noble or pious than a casual PK, but what they really want is player versus player combat, not player versus defenseless player. They'll work with whatever system is in place because they know their opponent is also working with that same system.

Slaughtering the weak is a part, a good part, of this game. There are already far to many mechanics that discourage killing others. If you can't be stronger than be smarter. If you're both weak and stupid than in my book you're a care bear and this game isn't for you.

[Potjeh]

Yeah, I'm not saying that PvP deaths are all that common, but I think this is mostly due to players learning to be paranoid rather than any lack of griefers. The problem with newb killing is that it tends to be like plane crashes - lots of people die at once. We have almost every incarnation of Brodgar as an example, and there'd be lots of other examples if forums didn't get nuked Anyway, like with plane crashes, the problem is the perception that this creates. And the fact that the best way to avoid this is dispersing, which makes H&H feel like singleplayer.

Now, getting players to not engage in newb massacres is a noble goal, but I think it's an unachievable one. I can't really imagine any mechanics that would do that that aren't prone to exploits and don't severely hinder killing when there's legit reasons to do it (escalating disputes). With my proposed system you can still remove kebab nuisances from your corner of the world, you just need to invest more effort and kill their realm claim first. I don't think it's unfair to require a day or two of investment to kill characters with months of investment in them. And it lets you kill troll alts that people spawn to block gates and shit, as long as you're the realm holder / have justice permissions. So I'd say this is a decent compromise between the non-permadeath and permadeath camps.

What this shouldn't do is make opting out of PvP an optimal choice. Death protection means the realms are gonna be crowded, so going out in the wilderness to forage and hunt should be a lot more profitable than staying safe. It just moves the gamble further out from your walls, and replaces the risk of leaving the walls with a lesser one. Escalating risks vs escalating profits is a staple in gaming for a good reason, and it's frequently used in games with high death penalty, such as roguelikes (do I delve deeper? / do I raid that Njerpez camp?) and MMOs (system security in EVE). Lessening the potential cost of just leaving your walls should if anything make the game more bloodline oriented - as it is now people play a clan rather than a bloodline, with farmers/crafters that never leave the wall, and there'd be less need for that if your crafter just gets disabled for a week or two rather than completely lost. And when people don't need separate characters for just leaving the walls, they're likely to get lazy and just use one character even for leaving the realm borders.

The fluff of getting ported to hearth is kinda lame, sure. I guess you could draw Valkyries descending to snatch you from jaws of death and return you home. It doesn't really make sense, but games rape mythology all the time, you should try it too, it's probably fun But seriously, I guess you could make it so you simply can't hit a downed character, but the newbies wouldn't know that and they'd just get up repeatedly instead of logging out or porting home :/ Making it a chance to not die though isn't gonna work, people will just keep wailing on a "dead" character for 20 minutes or so to be perfectly sure.

[Undefined]

Slaughtering the weak is a part, a good part, of this game. There are already far to many mechanics that discourage killing others. If you can't be stronger than be smarter. If you're both weak and stupid than in my book you're a care bear and this game isn't for you.

Fair enough, that's your playstyle, opportunistic PK. You should be able to play that way if that's what you enjoy. The weaklings you killed rather than being devastated by their total loss can rebuild elsewhere and will have taken away a valuable lesson, which to use your example, helps make them less stupid and more suited to the game, which is great for Haven because you might get to kill them again later and the game has retained them as a player. Should you die however, being a more developed character who indiscriminately slaughtered a bunch of people, believing that the weak and stupid don't belong in this game, you have a much longer "time-out period" on that character before you can once again begin your rampage on the sprucecaps of the hearthlands.

Where's the issue?

[spawningmink]

its already stupid enough that red handed is in here, from the start of the world its annoying of leaving a scent by mistake and not being able to teleport for an hour or charter for a week i think the timer should be greatly decreased

[VDZ]

Also, not directly related to the thread, but on the general topic of permadeath, I would like to emphasize that it has always been a goal (though not a particularly well-explored one ) to make Haven more about playing a "bloodline" than about getting attached to a particular character. Inheritance should be more of a part of the game rather than a consolation, and I would particularly like it if the pain of dying was accompanied by a feeling of "oh well, at least I can make a new descendant now".

In that case, why not add an 'ascension' mechanic like in Kingdom of Loathing or some similar persistent bonus? In Kingdom of Loathing, after completing the final quest, you can choose to 'ascend' at any time. By ascending, your level is reduced to 1, your stats become those of a beginner character, you lose all your skills and your quest progress, and you can select a class (i.e., you're practically creating a new character), but in return for all that you can select one skill you had when ascending, and all of your future characters will have that skill (even if it's not normally possible for your character's class). (In addition, you can select additional challenges for your new run, such as not having access to your items (which are otherwise kept), which in turn grant you better awards like unique, untradeable items.) Having the "death" of your character as your goal would encourage playing multiple related characters.

lets say, if you aren't outlawed you get a "Righteous" buff that stacks the longer you dont commit any crimes, increasing your LP gain?

Absolutely not. A 'bonus for everybody except certain people' is in practice a 'penalty for certain people'. Never during w5-w7 did I ever think full peace/change was a bonus; it always felt like a penalty to new characters because the 'normal' situation was gaining 360% LP. And I think the game already directly punishes criminals way too much with the 'no charter stones' debuff (even for something stupid like stealing from an inactive but not yet expired claim). Punishment should be a task of the players, not the game, unless we actually want certain styles of play to be officially deemed 'wrong'. (Furthermore, penalties like these would have a good chance of causing people to go 'well, now I'm fucked anyways, might as well go all the way and keep committing crimes'.)

I dunno, but the magical teleport home after being knocked out was one of my least favorite features of Salem, but as I said, mainly for aesthetic reasons. It just seems so inexplicable other than for purely out-of-universe mechanic-legalistic reasons, and it feels like a bit of a cop-out. I shan't hate on it all that much, though, I just think it's kinda ugly, but if there's some really good reason to do it, I guess I could suspend my disbelief. I've also gotten the feeling that Jorb likes it more than I do.

Just a lot of brainfarting here.

Another idea to coutner Perma-death without having all these metaphysical shenanigans and also far easier to integrate I imagine is just to give an ancestor character a full refund of Stat/LP/Exp for the previous character but also any character created using the ancestor system enters the world wounded and weak for an amount of time related to various factors such as stat/LP/Exp refunded amount, number of characters his ancestor killed, number of HORCRUXES created, length of bloodline, number of SOUL_SAFETY quests completed, etc...

We could combine this with the 'bloodline' idea; the descendant technically inherits all stats of the ancestor, but due to being young has a large, slowly decreasing penalty to them until he/she's 'grown up' (i.e., a certain amount of time has passed).

[Sevenless]

Honestly, I think the biggest consequence of permadeath is the concept of uncapped loss (working under the assumption of no stat caps, I realize that's changed since I last played). Every time you set foot outside of your safe place, you risk everything, or a percentage of everything, that you've done since the character was born. This differs significantly from other open pvp approaches. Most games that have a similar lawless combat system with full loot cap it at that. Not even skill loss. You decide what you lose in a fight by what you choose to equip. Any system that haven employs to this regard while keeping % skill loss will either run into the traditional problem to a varying degree, or the penalties will effectively be trivial and you might as well have a full loot no character skill loss system. So while I agree with the general concept of safe zones and giving realms power over this, I don't see this pvp contest zone as solving the issues of Permadeath lowering pvp. PvP would be more focused and less griefing based (in theory), but I couldn't say it would be significantly more frequent. Losing your best fighters over a border squabble = no defense for the next fight.

Unless we generally agree that pvp as a thing shouldn't happen frequently, I still see this as a notable notch against the concept of permadeath in Haven. Honestly the wounding system as a source for death penalty sounds like an avenue worth exploring. This would allow you to gain the edge in a war: Fighters are notably weakened by being downed, either depleting their numbers in the next engagement or weakening their combat abilities. However, at no point does it allow someone to knock the competition out of this world (an issue with end game stagnation due to lost opponents), merely out of a region or out of a war. Permadeath continues to exist in the form of base death, which if refocused development wise could be a notable thing (thinking along the lines of border forts or the like).

I'm not too sure the haven community feels favourably about this viewpoint though. We've spent so long culling people via permadeath, that most of the active players tend to be permadeath favourable.

[Potjeh]

We had stat caps, and then they got removed I guess the main reason is that there isn't much of an endgame beyond grinding stats, so people had nothing to do when they hit the cap. I'm hoping my idea could create a more favorable climate for return of the caps. Fighting over borders would be a fairly fun endgame, and losing capped characters would create the food & curio drain for large factions which is needed to drive the game's economy.

[VDZ]

Speaking of stat caps, I had an idea about bloodlines and 'ascending'.

What if stat caps were re-introduced, starting at a low number (let's say 100), and once you hit the cap in, say, four different stats, you get the option to retire/ascend/whatever by paying a certain amount of LP (so it'll require experience, meaning you can't just feed an alt to get there). After 'ascending', the cap is permanently raised for all of that character's descendants (but not that player's alts) until the end of the world. The descendant can go up to 130, and if the player wants to go higher, they can 'ascend' again to get an even higher cap. (Note that in this case, ascension does not necessarily have to lead to the 'death' of the character, as there is inherent incentive to play the descendant now.)

This would encourage playing on your main, as your 'crafter alt' will screw up the quality of items if the materials are above q100 and your 'fighter alt' has inferior stats to players using their main as their fighter. Loss of a character would also be less severe, as the raised cap would persist and be the main indicator of progress. It would also lengthen the end-game and make end-game crafted items more valuable (as they would need to be crafted by ascended crafters).