Feature Discussion -- PVP System

[Ashi]

Kull logged in yesterday and tried to off some @'s, prompting a discussion on a new PVP system that would prevent malicious players (big or small) from ruining the game for whoever they attack. Crimson has proposed a system in which PVP kills do not cause you to drop items or lose EXP. Here are a few of my concerns about PVP and some suggestions on how to avoid bad situations.

Currently, Crimson is looking at a reward/penalty system for high level vs. low level PVP. The idea here is to prevent a big player from dusting all the newbies for fun. A concern that many people have about this system, however, is that Kull often creates a level 1 guy and throws himself at the sword of a bigger player. This could be abused to force penalties on big players. Another situation might be that Kull is terrorizing all the newbies and the only one who can stop him is a bigger player -- meaning a check for "who started the fight" would hurt those who are trying to bring justice.
Ignoring griefers for a minute, we must also consider the class advantages at certain stages of the game. Having just played a warrior, I can verify that most mages of level 20-40 can be easily beaten by a warrior 10 levels lower. The element of surprise is also a factor -- if you don't know that you are going to be attacked until he starts hitting you, the warrior is almost guaranteed to win. This makes it hard to tell which player is "bigger" based only on level.
My solutions to the above issues: instigate a reward system (no penalties), but you get no reward if your opponent was more than 5 levels lower than you. Also, PVP should be disabled in town via code. Kull was able to circumvent the "no killing in town" rule (since it was just a rule) by creating a new character, killing whoever he could, and when they complained that he was breaking the rules, he would just say "Oh, then I guess this character will get whatever punishment he deserves." After that he would just create a new character whenever he wanted to go on a killing spree. Warnings from the administrator should be enough to discourage high-level killers, however, because when someone has poured several days or weeks into a character, they are more likely to appease administrators and their ZOT staffs.

The other concern is that a fully geared ghost could play alongside non-ghost players, abusing monster AI. A solution to this is to make the losing player automatically float up 1/5 to 1/4 of his dungeon depth when killed. That would be enough to prevent anyone from AI-bugging Morgoth while still giving him the challenge of being in the dungeon as a ghost. It would also prevent his attacker from being able to kill the ghost right away.

[Warrior]

I know Crimson wants pk to be a part of the game and that the players are split. I also know (or think) that Crimson would remove any additions to the game that didn't work like planned.

I personally think the game should have room for and allow for all kinds of players, both those who like to play it slow and careful and those who just wants the rush of diving, killing and dying.

To allow pk'ing without a lot of restrictions would be to say  to the first group of players "you're not good enough, we don't care about you, if someone wants the results of your months of playing, they're free to kill and attack you and take your things".

To allow very restricted pk'ing would be to create more problems, people would hang around in the dungeon, waiting for someone to hit level 20 so they could kill them and people would be afraid to level beyond a certain level because they know they'd get killed. Other people will stay out of fights because of penalties or other consequences.

How about this:

> in town takes you to the dungeon
< in town takes you to a (virtual or "real") dungeon level, with or without monsters, of a certain depth (of your own choice, up to your max recall). The level would have monsters but no monster drops or floor objects.

This level would function like the Arena on Flambards server, one could pvp either for real, (like today) or for fun, (without any consequences). One could maybe also make bets or any other functionality. There could be a spectator option.

I think this would be a much more fun and challenging way to leave pk in the game than to just have random people like kull resulting in people leaving the game forever.

Then, it'd just be up to the admin of each server if he'd want to have "full pvp" allowed or "arena only pvp" (or maybe both).

[Big_Juan_Teh_Furby]

Talking seriously here for a moment...who pkills here besides Kull (and me, formerly?)

Realistically, the issue is quite easily solved by Crimson putting his foot down.  He says no pkilling in town, great, no problem.  He says no pkilling within a certain range, again, no sweat.

I personally think that trying to code something that can be dealt with by the admin simply putting down some rules would be excessive, given that our player base is (relatively) small.  If we had 200 players on at all times it might require a code fix...but with us...probably not.

For those of you who haven't lived on the dark side, let me tell you one simple thing:  griefing is *fun*, at least on some level.  Granted, there's no challenge in walking up to a level 1 character with your level 50 wielding Grond...but sometimes you just wanna splatter someone.  It's also fun to come up with new and inventive ways to irritate and annoy other people (fields of creeping mithril coins or baby dragons in town, anyone?).  Face it, any of you that witnessed the carnage (and hopefully didn't suffer because of it :p) HAD to at least get a chuckle out of seeing a player chased by a huge pile of coins.

There are two types of griefers...people like me who enjoy doing new and inventive things, and people like Kull who don't know how to do anything else.  People like me don't THRIVE on killing, it's just an added bonus.  We try to add to the game in one way or another...such as long-winded conversations in-game, or posts, or things of the like.

People like me, if/when told to stop, generally do.  Why?  Because we DO like playing here.  We DO like the fellowship of most of the other players, and it's people like me who should be retained.  People like Kull are told of the consequences and *continues* to behave in the same drool-in-your-oatmeal way every time.

I'll bend rules six ways from sunday if I can until I'm told not to (or it's an OBVIOUS bug, like finding a way to clone speed rings reliably).  I'll work with Crimson (or whoever the admin is on the server I'm on) to identify what it is I managed to do, because often times, admins and coders don't think in the grey area that some players play in.  Which is fine...they're good at what they do, I'm good at what I do.

So...the long and short of it is that we shouldn't require a code fix.  If anyone...myself included...can't follow the rules, it's a small matter to delete and/or ban players.  What's the name of that group that hacked Angus' character(s) passwords again?  ;)

[Fink]

There definitely is a broad spectrum of perspectives on PVP, which runs the gamut from all-pvp-all-the-time to no-pvp-at-all.

Historically, and under our maintainer, there does seem to be a stake in the sand that mangband will currently contain some degree of PVP. While many of you will of course know that I stand firmly in the "no pvp at all" camp, we do need to work within the design goals for the game as they currently stand.

I'll avoid diving into particulars about what the default PVP setup should or could be (I think we have a good library of discussion on that topic, and are probably all pretty aware of the options), and instead bring up a few comments I had on the other side of PVP: accomodating different server operators personal tastes on the issue.

We chatted about this briefly in this thread, and Ill copy here a few ideas I had about some configurable options that we could consider having present, so that tweaking PVP for a server is easy (from a cfg) and allows the operator to get just the desired setup they would like without any mucking about in the code.

• 1. Global: turn pvp on/off server-wide.
• 2a. Level range clamp: set the maximum number of character level difference between two players that are allowed to damage eachother. For example, a value of 5 would mean that a level 10 and a level 15 player could attack eachother, but a level 10 and level 16 player could not.
• 2b. Percent range clamp: similar to above, but treat the range as a percent. So, a value of 10% would mean that a level 10 and a level 12 player could not attack eacher (10 perecent of 10 char levels is 1, so the max range here would be 1 level difference). However, a level 50 and a level 45 could ( 45*.1=4.5 rounded up to 5).
• 3. PvP in town On/Off: to make town as a safe haven or not.
• 4. PvP in dungeon On/Off: to force PvP to town only or not.
• 5. PvP target warning: When the hostile flag is set, warn the target of the hostility.
• 6. PvP global warning: When the hostile flag is set, notify all players on the server of the action and the target.
• 7. Duel mode: Require that two players each set hostile flag on eachother to be able to damage one another.
• 8. PvP Safe mode: Killing blow does not kill target. Instead they are teleported away (PernMangband has this I believe).
• 9. Sanctioned User flag: allow an individual player to be flagged as always able to attack other players, for use with a sanctioned admin type of user (ie, so a senior 'admin' player could squish problem players if needed on a PvP-limitted server).

[Berendol]

Allow me to point out that time spent leveling is not a concern for a dedicated griefer.

It takes me days to get to level 20, playing a few hours a day. I'll admit, I suck at the game, but it's still fun.

It took Kull an hour to get to level 20. It would probably take him a day to get a level 40. If I'm lucky, I can get a level 40 character in a month.

That basically means he can create an army of throwaway characters in the time it takes me to hit level 20, and prevent me from getting anywhere fast.

Therefore: it hurts the victims more than the griefer to just zot the griefer's character after the offense. The griefer probably has a small army at his disposal, and is undoubtedly better at the game than the person he killed. (I refer you to the part where Kull killed a level 14 with a level 1 in town yesterday.) There has to be a better way.

There is only one admin. There have been multiple griefers from around the world. Griefers can wait for the admin to be unavailable due to work, sleep, whatever. Then the server is theirs to abuse for hours and hours, effectively shutting down the server until they get booted out, which rarely happens before they have caused large amounts of damage. This is an absolute PR disaster.

My proposal: Give trusted characters revocable DM-like invincible invisible ghost characters that don't do anything other than PVP. This is something I was getting to in BMAngband - note the character type flags. This will allow the honest players to self-police the server in the absence of an admin.

Until there is at least some solution, I won't be playing again. It's just not worth my time if someone like that can play freely and cause all of my efforts to be lost in a split second. I can and will spend money to play a game that's policed, where I don't lose all of my hard-earned success when someone feels like taking it away for reasons beyond my control. Game card for WoW, yes!

[Ashi]

We could always just disable PVP in town and Kull won't be able to hurt nearly as many people, since he would have to hunt them down each time. Also, since PVP won't cause any loss, he'll be just an annoyance rather than ruining the game for people.

For the record, I side with Bigjuan that wreaking havoc is FUN! I can say this even after he's killed a good many of my characters in the past, although I don't support the idea of killing off newbies and scaring them away from the game.

By the way, does anyone know who Kull is? It seems as if he's an old time player who's back to wreak havoc, since he seems to know the game so well (although he does seems to have a few dumb moments as well). I think he is someone lonewolf and elvira knew in real life, or there is the chance he could be one of them.

[Kusma]

[quote author=Ashi link=board=Version1;num=1189631336;start=0#5 date=09/13/07 at 02:39:06]
For the record, I side with Bigjuan that wreaking havoc is FUN! I can say this even after he's killed a good many of my characters in the past, although I don't support the idea of killing off newbies and scaring them away from the game.
[/quote]
Killing characters below clev 10 is something I find distasteful, but killing characters above clev 30 is plain evil.
I can't think of any reason why I would want to play a game where I have to develop my character for months just to get it killed by some random griefer. The Mangband community is currently far too small to allow players to piss others off so much that they will leave. Can we disable playerkilling until the server is getting overloaded by too many players?

[Big_Juan_Teh_Furby]

The problem...at least from my point of view...with turning off PVP entirely is one of policing.  In doing so we put the policing directly on Crimson.  If someone's being a general prick, with PVP turned on, we CAN take care of him/her ourselves.  Sure, Kull could kill someone big with someone small, it's all a matter of knowing the mechanics of the game.  It happens *everywhere*.  Trust me, there are people who do the EXACT same sort of thing in WoW.

With PVP enabled, we can take the law into our own hands.  I suspect that Crimson would FAR rather grep the logs to see if one person was right in killing Kull in town than have to parse through 15 people complaining about him being a dick.

As far as the DM-like ghost...I kinda like the idea.  I'd add a goto ability (if possible and not already there, so you could instantly recall to the player) to make dealing with punks like that even easier.

That's just my $.02.  It's not my server, so it's not my call.  I've stopped pkilling however, so turning off PVP doesn't affect me in the slightest.

[Fink]

I'd say turning PvP totally off would be taking something away from the game.
Being one of the victims, I'd also say that no-restriction-PvP would also take something away from the game.
Obviously, people who pk anyone for fun and kill people much higher lvl then themselves are better in the game then us slow players, however, it should not earn them the right to play gods in any way they want.
I'd say Mangband has too few active players to lose any (Though there are more players online these days then what I can remember).
Games like WoW or even Runescape are MMORPG's, hundreds of thousands play the games every day, if a player or ten (even hundred) quits, barely a few other notices...
Mangband can't be compared to them...
I like some of the above ideas for restricted PvP, but since I have no interest in killing others (though I must admit it sounds fun), I don't have any ideas of what would be a good system, just don't turn it off, and don't leave it all free-killing-spree...

Just another opinion from one of the slow players...

[Big_Juan_Teh_Furby]

Everyone starts out slow.  We all have sucked for a little while.  Some people take to the game like a duck to water, others are a little slower to pick up on it (or may not EVER pick up on it).

[Steel_Dragon]

I'll just throw my 2 cents in.

I spent 3 months getting my first lvl 50, who promptly got killed and raped in town by jube for an item he wanted.

I just hate the idea that its possible to do that kind of thing.  I do really like the arena idea though, pvp is fun, and I know I'd do it a lot more if there wasn't a horrible drastic penalty for losing.

anyone remember that day that mangband broke and the game wouldn't save?  It was mass pvp carnage in town because dying had no penalty.  That was one of the most fun times I have had playing this game.  The only downside to it is that jube found out that I had dor lomin during the carnage and then killed me after the server was fixed.

that aside, I had a lot of fun, and I think, even if you don't stop pvp outside of the arena, that there should be a penalty free arena for pvp.

[Berendol]

Let's take a page from World of Warcraft. Check this out.

On PvE (see note*) servers like the one I play on, you must type "/pvp" to toggle your PvP flag on and off.

When it is toggled on, you are immediately considered targetable, and can attack other PvP flagged players.

When it is toggled off, it takes several minutes to deactivate. This prevents abuses like flagging, attacking once, then deactivating; or just turning it off when you feel like you're about to lose.

* PvE = Player Vs. Enemy, which means you must activate your PvP flag to battle other players. On a PvP server, you always are flagged for PvP and can be attacked at any time by anyone, no matter what level. This is similar to our current system on MAngband. I realize this is a gross oversimplification of WoW's PvP rules, but these are the parts that would be applicable here.

[Kusma]

I think we could simply have a birth option that allows every player to turn PvP on or off. Players with PvP on can attack other players and can be attacked by other players, and players with PvP off can never attack other players and never be attacked by other players.

That way, those who want PvP can get it, and those who don't want it never have to worry about it. People can choose safety or freedom once per character.

[Fink]

The last few comments center around what is the key issue or decission to make about PvP: choice.

The starting point is to answer if we want PvP to be a choice between involved parties or not.  The answer to this ends up pointing to the different options that could be used.

Thus far, Crimson seems to have been in favor of the "no choice" mode. If this continues to be the case, then the ideas we come up with need to be focused largely on that type of regime ( not, of course, that theres anything wrong with talking about the broader topic )

I mentioned above that I am a strict "no pvp" person. To be more specific, Im a strict "choice" person (within bounds - for example, I like the idea of there being some senior players who act as limitted admins, who can kill when needed to deal with problems that arise).

[Warrior]

I just did a new count of the results in the PK Vote thread.
Out of a total 19 votes:

   * A: No PK = 4
   * B: Restricted PK = 14
   * C: Free PK = 1

We need to agree on exactly how to restrict PK so I've made another Vote for the restricted PK options.