Punishment

[Swiur_Yngwi]

To clear things up and letting focus on one topic, as suggested by Devs, a new thread for punishment idea. Lets talk about it!

Punishment

Therefore I hardly recomend introducing system of punishments for killing other players. Let it be a skill of „negative influence” for killing others, based on the level of the player (tech tree). Now, for every player executed,  u get some X negative skill points, counted for example like this
Agressor – Victim (opposite the same way)
T4 vs T4 – X points
T4 vs T3 – 120% X points
T4 vs T2 – 150% X points
T4 vs T1 – 200% X points
When a killer gets enough X points, then a game  will choose him randomly a „mental disorder” that will affect his gameplay till the end. My proposals:
„Selfdestruction” – feeling quilty for his bad behaviour player wants to hurt himself or even commit a suicide -  reduction by 90% 3 most advanced skills
„Addiction to alcohol” – simple, u dont drink regularly, u loose hp faster than u can heal it with meds
„Aversion to blood” – u hate the smell and view of blood. From now on u cannot equip weapons and hunt for animals.
And more.
Then the X counter resets and all starts all over again. So, imagine a player who likes to eliminate others and does it stubbornly – triple selfdestruction and aversion to blood combined with alco bottle. Nice combo?
Addictionally, when attacker kills a player he will loose his LP points  - lets say 50 LP per death.
And when an offline player is killed – he keeps his inventory. No acccess to the attacker.

[Swiur_Yngwi]

I allow myself to insert this post by Devs here to keep the discussion tidy and clear to follow by the readers.

So, first about PVP, marking of PK, consequences, etc. It may seem like a trivial task, but in reality it is something that cannot really be solved
Please read this article: https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaphKoster/20180627/320893/A_brief_history_of_murder_in_Ultima_Online.php
It will give a good overview of why this is much more complex thing than it appears initially.

And now let me comment your reply.

I dont know the UO game. Never played it. But as described in linked article, the game mechanics of UO and CryofAll are quite different. And in my opinion, a logic mistake was born just in the deepest core of the judgmenet/punishment system introduced in UO.

First of all, there are many more "illegal" actions to make (like stealing from players, robbing NPC's, etc). Including PK (player killing). So, logically there should be a more complexed system of prevention (Laws).  In my opinion their problem was in that they left the "justice" in the hands of players, supported by imperfect notification, but yet, it was players who did the justice.
So, killing neutral (innocent) player was a bad thing, but killing a criminal was a good thing (sure, in the name of justice). In some way the game allowed you to do PK with no conseqeunces. Or obbey the rules where possible.

In CryofAll you cannot steal anything from other player's inventory unless you kill him. No other way. So, there is only one crime - murder. And it should be punished, but not by the people (gamers) based on their judgement. This judgement should be done by the game itself. And so does my proposal. You introduce one basic rule - PK is bad and will be ALWAYS punished. Period. Rest is the in game system. No people involved.
If you think my proposal over, u will notice that what i suggest will affect the player till the end of his game. Even friendly kill will not erase his "mental disorders" - like lifesentence. Of course the X counter will be unknown for player, so there will be no calculating (I still can execute one T2 player before my madness turns on). Lottery. You do bad things, you get bad things.

Breaking a base is not a crime in my opinion. Because player has an opportunity and means (stone walls, iron doors, etc) to prepare and protect his "safe house". It is his choice and his time management strategy what to do first in the game. And how much risk to take.

But killing other players just like that? NO!

With all the respect to CryofAll team - I just don't accept an argument "there will be no punishment for PK in our game because it never worked in other games". Try harder guys, it can be done! It is your game, your engine and your rules. In game rules.

[Lurler]

First of all, it's neither CryofAll, nor Cry of all, it's CryoFall, from Cryostasis and Fall

And about PVP. This is a natural part of the game. We do not want to prevent people from engaging in combat and raiding. Otherwise we would have introduced hard limits which would have made it impossible.

But saying that, we also plan to introduce pure PVE servers where people won't have to be afraid that they will be raided. This way everyone can choose which type of server they prefer. Purely creative play with no combat or free for all.

[ai_enabled]

The article about UO is a chapter from the book https://www.raphkoster.com/2018/05/31/new-book-postmortems/ which is a brilliant book for any game designer. Raph Koster proved himself as a talented game designer and he provides a comprehensive description of various game systems, exploits, and solutions (not only in this book but in the free articles on his website). The history of murder in UO (and other MMO games) suggests there is no viable solution to PK as there are always ways to abuse the rules and many players are super smart and share their ideas quickly (personally, I found some exploits described there surprising and hilarious!).


I understand the purpose of the proposed change is to discourage PK.
However, the proposed solution feels too artificial - it's hard to justify why PK loses skill points or getting any kind of status effect (a "disorder"). We try to be logical and keep everything simple and don't want to implement extra rules when we don't feel it fits the game naturally. CryoFall is also a sandbox survival game - which means we don't want to break the established genre rules such as full freedom to act as you wish and only reasonable common-used limitations (such as the land claims system) are implemented to ensure the better gameplay for everyone.

I believe the proposed solution of punishing PK will also lead to abuse and unfair frustrating moments. For example, the proposed system will discourage players from self-defending as killing other players might mark you as a PK. The game might have some sophisticated algorithms to determine who is the victim but smart players will always determine how to exploit the system as "History of murder in UO" describes how all their attempts to fix the situation were abused and innocent players suffered. So developers of UO settled with PvE when players are unable to hurt each other.

For now, we've already decided to implement PvE and release the server software - the community will be able to host custom servers and configure them as necessary. The modding support is also coming so every game mechanic (such as what you've suggested) could be implemented as a mod and installed on the server (and it also could gain popularity and be widely adopted!). Basically, we're thinking to make PvE mode as a mod to the game server to also demonstrate how to implement mods to the game.

PvP mode will be left as is and it always will be a harsh survival simulation for people who prefer this kind of gameplay (as other popular multiplayer survival games proved).

Regards!

[Swiur_Yngwi]

First of all, it's neither CryofAll, nor Cry of all, it's CryoFall, from Cryostasis and Fall

I know, just messing with You guys. Sorry for that.

And about PVP. This is a natural part of the game. We do not want to prevent people from engaging in combat and raiding. Otherwise we would have introduced hard limits which would have made it impossible.

But I don't ask You to make it impossible or prevent players from engaging in combat. All I ask for is to make a player calculate a pros and cons before pulling the trigger.