DisclaimerCan - is a term describing a group of players characterized by the lowest intelligence possible, so they find it funny to troll low levels, overkilling them. Technically, mindless PKs
I did think about it from different perspectives, finding and solving the weak spots.
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Preamble Okay, so the new season changes pvp. Makes it less interesting since now we don't drop crap, right?
Now this is an important change that makes the game more noob-friendly, which is vital for any game. I love encountering noobs that help me. Tbh, both pvp and pve are needed and there is a sweet spot in proportion. The more players get satisfied by the proportion - the better, regardless whether it's a veteran or a noob. Our s3 is A LOT closer to the sweet spot than any other fonline.
yesterday I went to Hub to get fibers. Tried to get some and failed cuz it was harvested.
A noob came by and apologized for taking all the fibres. Gave me half of it. Sooo sweet.
Or today I was doing lockers with my 21+ lvl melee explorer. I'm naked with a little jesus doing it RT.
I encountered a centaurus and decided to kill it. A noob with an lsw came by and offered a hand.
Intrigued, I agreed. He killed a centaurus and told me that I shouldn't hunt them with a knife.
Sooo sweet!
This never happened to me in s2.
PvP players on both sides (the less intelligent side (tin cans) and the more intelligent side(AAs/UVs)) deserve some added interest. On the other hand, I noticed that some more degraded cans don't give up and still hunt noobs even though those noobs laugh at cans upon death.
I think there is an elegant way to use cans' stupidity to add some interest to pvp for more intelligent pvp lovers.
The ideaSince we implemented Karma, let's take a few steps further with it, shall we?
Let's say, if a player Can kills another player Noob, Can gets negative Karma. Sounds simple, but it's not, here are additional checks:
- Noob's gear won't let him participate in a caravan (this caravan method can be recycled)
- Noob hasn't attacked another player with positive Karma in this location/recently/whatever is easier to implement (can be done via the temporary status aka poiston/radiation)
- This is not an active TC zone
- This is not an official Dungeon (like Ares, etc)
- Not a zone with a t3/t4 locker (Reno)
- Not a HQ resources mine (I think pvp there brings more joy than harm and we have private mines for those who don't like the thrill)
- Noob's level is lower than whatever. 24.
So then all these cans that spend around five hours a day killing noobs who try to do junking in shittown and boneyard are getting really negative Karma with no simple way of fixing it (they will find Karma fixing exploits, but those are easy to trace and fix).
But what's the point of it, you'd ask?
Let's implement another simple policy. If your Karma is lower than -100 (let's leave 100 points down for those who like to fck up quests), you start losing items upon death. You can implement gradual increase there, like every negative hundred increases the chance of losing every item on you by 10% or something interesting like that.
Now your Karma doesn't go down if you're killed. Nor does the Karma of the killer go up. Otherwise cans would exploit it and go wash it out killing technical characters or getting killed by them.
The only way to clean the Karma is to go to the Citadel and pay caps. The amount of caps would depend on the amount of negative Karma. It's really easy to implement.
ConclusionSome people argue. They say: how come we can farm cans but they can't farm us. It's unfair. What I say is it's around same unfairness as when cans kill noobs, so then why not channeling that unfairness further and get it balanced out.
- It will be more interesting for PKs, cuz now the process of trolling noobs is not as simple and boring.
- It will be more interesting for APKs and good PVP players to go hunt PKs
- It will be more interesting for noobs, who would not be killed constantly every five minutes and have to wait for two mins for the respawn (btw, respawn time for low levels could be cut significantly)
win-win-win.
And the server will become even better - another win for the server.
PS
Oh, cans, stop wining please. You know we love you. We know all this trolling is just to cover deep feeling of insecurity and fear or whatever, I'm not a psychologist rly. Anyway, it's ok. We value your presence and love to pvp against you.
PPS
I'm not bothered by PKs. But I remembered similar noob protection was implemented in older versions of Lineage when I saw Karma functioning in S3. And in Lineage they made it a lot of fun for everybody: PKs, APKs and even noobs cuz now once a noob gets PKed, he gets excited cuz he knows he can get a piece of that PK.
Just decided to lay it out. I know it would require some significant scripting and then even more debugging and hotfixing. And it's the start of s3, so there is already more than enough hotfixing. But I just decided to lay it off of my mind.
PPS
Guys, please post your comments, ideas and exploits of this. Thanks, folks!