How does a Care Bear survive?

[Cookie]

Recently Flame was killed by a character named Hermedicus. Flame was a valuable member of this community. He was an artist and because his drawings were so appealing I think he had become beloved to many. Nonetheless, someone killed him and it is reported that he has quit the game.

I'm going to go a little further. It's not despite his contribution to the game and to the forum that he was killed, but probably because of it. Once he became well-known, as Flame observed in one of his cartoons, he was at risk for death because of the ease in which he would become drawn into someone else's power agenda.

There are several posters on this forum who taunt others about rage quitting when their characters are killed. The implication is that any player who quits after losing their character is a weenie and a cry-baby and because they could be killed and because they cared about their character they had no place in the game, other than as victim to be driven away. My first point is that it is not realistic to come back for revenge after you are killed. First of all there is the major power imbalance between the people doing the killing and those who die. It would take months of grinding... and likely you would never catch up... and even if you did waste four months in gaming hard to get abreast of your killer there is every chance that before you got there they would not be playing anymore. Besides which, if you are a Care Bear you're not playing in order to become the meanest bad ass in the game, you're playing because you like trading and fishing and farming and crafting.

And role playing. Possibly if you are a Care Bear you are playing because you get fond of your character. It's easy enough to put down people for rage quitting when they drop the game after their character dies or is killed, but I think it is more a matter of discouragement quitting than rage quitting. The dev's solution to rage quitting was to make it possible to salvage more of your character's skills so that you don't have to start over from scratch. But if you are not competing to get the best skills in the game it's hardly a comfort. It's not the skills and lp that are lost but the community, the sense of ownership of a place and the identification with the character.

So what's a poor beleaguered Care Bare to do?

There is little point posting objections and complaints in forum. You'll get swamped in derision from the pvp'ers who will be all too delighted to get confirmation that you are sad or angry. The dev's have already made it clear that pvp and the social ramifications that result are an integral part of the game. Yeah, maybe quitting is the best option. Maybe you are playing the wrong game.

Only, H & H is a damn good game so my object now is to figure out another strategy, another way to go on playing without having to put up with the malice on the forums and being targeted by someone who finds making other people grieve a cure for boredom and a source of fun.

What would a small farmer/trader/craftsperson do if they lived in pre-Christian Europe and found that there were reavers hunting other humans for fun? They would take to the woods and hide. Any public forum becomes a place where you can be targetted. Any main trading center becomes a place ripe for raiding. The only alternative is an underground existance, like the stories of the Picts, living in hiding after the invaders came.

[Seizure]

Flame was killed in a random killing spree by a dick.

Best bet is to stay away from the main grid, and stay as far from any civilization as much as possible.

Do not go to the RoB, because if you do... Well, there are several dicks that pointlessly murder there.

[Potjeh]

You don't. I myself am on the verge of quitting, and will probably do it once I find a good home for my livestock (would be a shame to let a cow with q14 milk die). Nothing happened to me, but I hear about my friends getting griefed every day and there's nothing I can do to help them. For me that's more frustrating than shit happening to me. If I wanted frustration, I'd get a job as a teacher or something. And I'm really not playing much anyway, I just log in to feed my cattle, and even then I don't get any enjoyment from it - logging in feels like waking up at 6AM to go to work.

[Cookie]

Flame was killed in a random killing spree by a dick.

So I hear. He posted that information after I theorized that he was targetted deliberately. On the other hand, I stick by my point. I think having a forum presence is also likely to get you targetted. It's not just the center grid and anywhere else on the map that they can dominate, the reavers also dominate the forum.

I had another thought: A recent bunch of noobs was able to actually do some measurable damage to Wayneville. Inadvertantly and much to their own bad luck they reduced the local animal spawns to lvl 1 by starting brand new characters closeby, en masse. While I suppose some of the uber characters can easily enough destroy hearth fires, this is one technique that could be used to aggravate them cheaply. But again, this kind of stuff only is of interest if you like to play aggressive.

[Flame]

To reassure a little, i don't know if i'll quit. First i'll try to find a way to play peacefully and..if i don't,i have no choise that find another game. Is simple a matter of Time - What i Gain, and i fear that here i could gain Nothing in a loop of random accidents like yesterday. :3

My only suggest to avoid wrong death, is to do this.
I don't have the skill to attak you (murder) = I'm a pacefull people, i can only be stunned and stealed.
I have the skill murder = I'm a warrior, i Know that i can die and i'll play this challenge! Whoa!


-Or, else, LEAVE the permament death.
-Or Else again, do that if you stun, you gain lp. If you kill, you don't gain anything more lp. So no need to kill. <---Usefull? I don't hope that. people will kill the same, to avoid possibly revenges.

This game is ALSO a game of warriors. But in the old ages ther was the killers AND the warriors. Warriors don't attack normal paesant, they fight in wars. Would be wonderfull if a town can be conquered by the warriors against warriors and the paesant can't do nothing and can't be killed. It could create another kind of game and more locic like: " What you wanna play, man? If you take Murder Skill, you'll become a warrior. Is YOUR Choise."

No one more will cry for His Choise. (and i'll be really happy to play the risk, knowing it)

[Chakravanti]

AW was suposed to be comfort to console the dead and help prevent ragequits. It merely made death a part of characater development. SO that once a month or two some faggot is ready to die and instead of suicidal he runs out and kills everyone he can until he himself is killed.

Now, I'm not blaming that guy for being a prick. It's obvious that game mechanics ecourage this and are thus a design flaw in the game.

The answer is:
Hide and pray to god no one finds you in this tiny map.

[Jackard]

Investing a lot in this game at its current stage of development is a poor idea for most. Tinkering around with features and enjoying what gameplay exists is fine but just keep in mind that devoting a large chunk of your time and energy to skilling up in an unbalanced system that will inevitably be deleted several months down the road does not seem like the wisest course of action

its small consolation to know that you were eventually going to lose everything anyways but there it is

[Flame]

What could help is to kno what dev think about the situation. No my dead or the dead of someone unknow, but the "What type of game you'd like to create?"
If they disagree this kind of the kills without a sense and prefere a game where you can die for a reason, they'll work on this one day.
If they agree this situation and like that player are completely free to waste a game without think on what they are doing, better know it.

I know they love give free. I don't know what they think about the random killing spree with no rule.

[Cookie]

I think they want to see the players come up with a solution themselves, such as forming the army Josan is organizing, or forming a resistance movement and doing scorched earth so that the aggressive players are forced to spend all their time feeding themselves or something like that. They want surviving the pvp environment to play out realistically.

I have been told that their intention is for it to be possible to have a peaceful pastoral existence -but not been told they want to make it easy to have one. It is also quite clear that the pvp elements are essential to their design vision. They have never come down hard on the player killers and often have treated them with more sympathy than the less aggressive players. When people lose their characters to a bug or a misunderstanding or an accident, the devs don't ressurect. When WV exploited their bugged piece of coal initially, they could easily have simply deleted the character accounts or reduced them to beginner status. Instead they chose a fix that didn't remove all of the advantage they had gained, and which penalized other players who were uninvolved. (All items above q100 were reduced to q10 no matter who owned them and how they were gained.)

To be fair there was also dev involvement in establishing Xanadu, the village of top level players that was formed to oppose the player killers of that time, so I'm not saying they are trying to encourage pvp at the expense of the peaceable. I'm just very confident that they are dedicated enough to the project that they figure the reasonable response to a player death is to start decided on the goals of his descendant.

[Flame]

okay, then i can think how create my safe place without disturb no one and not be killed. Thx for the answer, i need to know where i play to adapt myself.