Sparhawk
Grandmaster
One blue pvp newbs take on fighting back against pkers
So, youve made the decision to jump into the anti pk deep end. The fabled blues vs reds. likely your a tamer, mage, dexxer of some combination, and youve no doubt faced more than once the deathly burning sensation of a flurry of corp pors, or the sharpened poisioned bite of a reds deathly blade.
so where to start? as much as this game seems to attract solitary minds, id dare say the majority of the population is either guilded, or has been for a reasonable time. so lets use this scenario. your doing your thing, the singlehanded slayer of Dragons/Demons/Giant Spiders, and a plea for help goes up over the guild/alliance airwaves. unlike before a single voice cries out louder that he/she will help. virtually shaming his/her companions to incite action. we should all help. a unifying voice echoing a shared need to fight back, yes!
now youve been there before, trying to help. that lack of coordinated effort thats been talked about is a real thing. how could it not be. a collective of individuals and small groups each fulfilling different agendas. many adopting the farming playstyle because it appeals additionally to the obsessive multitasker of todays society. you can eat a pizza, watch a movie and farm alot easier than doing the same and chasing players down for the kill. drink beer, die stupid deaths. farming is so much more forgiving.
deciding to go jump from pvm confort to pvp is arguably the first step in fighting back. to many it will be the hardest. unfortunately the odds are against you that this will be the last hard decision of the night. quite the contrary.
dropping off you pvm loot quickly, you go to join in the battle. you find a pair eqms attacking a fellow guildie, for a couple of small idoc houses, all falling at same time. his cries for assistance rally a couple other new companions, a pair of tamers now, a dexxer and a mage. in initially 4v2 farmers vs assassins, this could work you think. well now heres the crunch. the main protagonist of the two is a blue. while the red seems to break off one of your farmer friends luring him for the chase, the blue is harassing the remaining.
some will fight back, some will hide and wait it out, one or two may flee back for a restock, or truly just to get out of the mess.
heres where your problems start. for one, your farming client suddenly seems to turn against you. that useful gump stopping you from becoming a criminal inadvertantly, by looting another kill or misdtargeting for insance, now needs your permission just to fight back, unfortunately for you, your new targets run like mobs on perma fast forward. you are unprepared and by the time you accept the warning, your quarry has offscreened. in the course of the next few minutes you go through this drama. almost insidiously most your party has become grey, including pets, and likley some of you still havent even managed to capture their healthbar let alone fight back.
these are only the game mechanics portion of whats holding you back. after all, mommy didnt raise you to be no red murderer. you now have the moral quandaries associated with your newfound actions to contend with. originally you were willing to kill reds in the name of justice. now you have to start playing out the likely conclusion of this. if you and your farming crew come pk hunter party are successful, some if not all of you are getting counts. i saw this played out a few times, and i have to say its not an incidental chance side effect. this is a direct manipulation of mechanics. i say this because its my belief as glorious as our sandbox is, it is not appropriately tuned for this type of conflict. like life, its no black and white (red and blue) but a mixture.
both the protagonists are in the same guild/group/party/side of the conflict. they are working in concert and understand a farmers nature very well. if some of the resistance doesnt peel off for fear of turning red and breaking their pvm character (likely main avatar), at best they have turned you grey, possibly will give you counts, and over time as other new players come across whever the battleground is, introduce more chaos as confused blues or simple opportunists wade in against the easier targets, or youve been flagged grey for future enemy blues. each of these new developments will force against your newfound descision to be a killer in defence. do you kill this new blue attacking your grey meta, or leave him be, or flee? and if you attack him, is he morally in the wrong or are you? he doesnt even know what has occured up until now, or why you had to go grey. suddenly the mechanics of two conflicting parties, one player killer in nature, one, passive, force a choice on the blue defenders to see how far they are willing to slide down the path of red corruption, or not. Fight, flee or falter.
it is my belief that these game mechanics in this instance restrict and erode genuine blue defence attempts.
likely reds will always work with blues to achieve more favorouable outcomes in their griefing/killing. this wont be changed suddenly, however it neednt be so convenient to manipulate either.
if you are in the same guild as a red murderer, and are also in his presense outside of a town, you should be flagged grey from the beginning. you are not two random strangers. you are brothers in arms, and your choice in bedfellows should most deffinately impact how the world percieves your moral stance. working with criminals while they commit crimes makes you an accessory and guilty. this is what our out of game society tells us. there is deffinately a problem with the red blue system, and how it interacts with the guild system. my hope is kingdoms changes all this. a more applicable red/blue system would be guild influenced as well as individually set.
uo still gets people addicted because of their ability to connect and immerse. this immersion certainly involves and illicits emotional and moral conflict and sympathy towards other people and situations, and poor immersion will break us from the game.
uo is arguably the best game for getting most of it so right, most of the time. but not in this instance.
all this talk of stopping the flow of the red tide should be viewed in a similar fashion to our out of game culture, for it certainly is an experiment in virtues and sins. the fact that our 'townspeople'/uof countrymen and women' are voicing such concern suggests the multitudes see an imbalance in this in game trend or possibly many of us see the disturbing trend changes out of game, and wish to not see the same outcome played out on our pixelated homes away from home.
i have not had the pleasure of the last decade and a half of uos transition, separation to trammel fellucia etc, or many of the game mechanics changes derrived from a evolving player base.
for me in the inception of uo, the laws in repect to crime were absolute. right from the beginning. a red running through town? what nonsense. surely theyll be instawhacked. they are a murderer. what civilised town other than the pirates of buccaneers den or wind would allow it? lord british had a very clear understanding of the virtues. have we lost the spirit of what was such a major part of the ultima games? if you wish to playout a virtual murderer that is absolutely your choice. however you should expect to have to roleplay the appropriate consequences of this choice, and they should be restrictive to your social gameplay options as opposed to that of your law abiding countrymen. in my original uo time, infamous reds were campfire talk, raising the chance encounter into something more exciting and feared than hated. nowdays, like salt in wounds, so many murderous protagonists can be seen in one simple stroll to the bank, protected by the system (not unlike some of the bullshit going on irl today). so much has changed. So how did we end up here?
discussion keeps centering around is it fair to change this, its not fair to all reds to change that. well i dont believe its right that society now provides murderers in jail with pool tables and internet. the same as i dont agree at all with this trend of applying greater social equality to those of proven to be amoral, roleplayed or otherwise. own your choices reds. you are playing the social scourage and should embrace this, consequences and all.
i would love to hear some constructive feedback, and of course these are only my opinons, however many or few share them.
