Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
use by their resurrected avatar. You might as well include this feature because, if
you don't, the players will create a second character that they never play with,
known in MMOG parlance as a
mule
, to hold their primary avatar's things for them.
The Player-Killer (PK) Problem
No aspect of the design of persistent worlds has been debated more than this one
simple question: Should players' avatars be allowed to kill one another? The next
few sections summarize some of the issues so that you can make an informed deci-
sion for your own game.
Most designers offer persistent worlds resembling role-playing games in that players
advance in skill and power through combat. It's generally more interesting if this
combat occurs against another player rather than against an NPC, for several reasons.
First, another player's avatar is more likely to be carrying interesting and valuable
objects worth looting (if the game permits looting) than a randomly generated
NPC; unlike an NPC, another player will have kept only valuable items and gotten
rid of anything not worth keeping. Second, fighting another player is a social expe-
rience, which an NPC cannot offer. Finally, a player can use his human intelligence
to put up a better fight; an NPC has to use AI, which is seldom as sophisticated.
THE ULTIMA ONLINE EXPERIENCE
The designers of
Ultima Online
initially permitted players to kill one another
without restraint (except in towns), hoping that players would establish their own
justice mechanisms within the game. Unfortunately, the world quickly began to
resemble present-day Somalia: unremitting random violence, feuds, continual
victimization of the weak by the strong, and petty warlords or gangs of bandits
controlling areas of turf. Players engaging in this behavior became known as
player-
killers
, or PK players. No satisfactory solution arose from the players, partly because
the software did not offer any genuinely painful punishment mechanisms for them
to use against offenders. (In real life, we either lock murderers away for a very long
time or kill them permanently, neither of which any for-pay persistent world can
afford to do.) Designers then tried a variety of different automated mechanisms for
encouraging justice, but players found ways of exploiting most such mechanisms.
In the end, the developers threw up their hands and divided the world into
shards
(separate, independent versions of the world) with different rules for each. Some
allowed player-versus-player (PvP) combat, and others did not. Approximately 80
percent of the players chose to play in non-PvP shards.
JUSTICE MECHANISMS
Koster offers the following summary of approaches to regulating PvP combat,
whether fatal or not:
