Conflict, Death, Consequences and Decisions

[Jadzia]

Sounds good, but I have a couple of questions:

If you are defending yourself from a good or neutral player does it still count as having killed a friendly player? I wouldn't think so, but I want to make sure.

If you do kill a good/neutral player and turn evil, how do you become good again. Will it be time based, do you have to kill a certain amount of reds, etc. I think this is important because mistakes do happen and it shouldn't be a permanent banishment from the forces of good.

This may have already been covered and I just missed it. Thanks in advance.

Good questions, but there is no information about them. Would be nice to know before launch for sure.

[Niburu]

Isn't the stat/skill loss abit annoying. You already lose all your items isn't that enough ?

[chaosegg]

Exciting inside look from the dev team; thanks for that!
I am quite impressed with the obvious thought put into this game so far.
I daresay that within this PvP structure I see influences from several other games I have played....

As to the ongoing walls of text being spammed into this thread...
I've seen this "PvP philosophy in online gaming" discussion played out time after time in so many games over the last 10 years,
and it rarely reaches a solid conclusion, but I'll throw my two cents in.

No matter what, it's still a game, and people are always going to play for fun,
as well as realize that the consequences of their actions are virtual (unless they aren't).

For example:
In real life people would generally not do any of the ganking, stealing, random harassment, or smack talking that goes on in the male-dominated online gaming arena.
If they did, there would be a set of consequences that would be orders of magnitude more harsh from what happens if they did it relatively anonymously in a game over the internet.

So ramp up the penalties in-game to deal with the over-zealous little bastards you say?
That makes sense, but at the same time the level of fun must be maintained since it is a game and supposed to be fun.

Then you have the realism issues and other things...
all I know is that I don't like bound items. I liked how Darkfall had only crappy bound items that allowed you to not be completely screwed, when ganked,
and there wasn't a race for badass bound stuff (I'm thinking EQ 1 PvP server gear being completely different from the PvE server gear).
I also don't like the idea that someone can grief and not pay a significant price each time they do. Somethingawful goons are a perfect example of groups of players who become notoriously good at sniffing out opportunity for getting a bit more grief than they get consequence, and using the leverage in the difference to find humor in ruining the play experience for others.
The world has plenty of these types of pathetic creatures, but they are generally vastly outnumbered by "nice" good folks... but if you are not vigilant on the internet, the ignorant, immature sociopath, and/or jackass can band together with others like themselves and find that they not only outnumber, but overpower everyone else (who is used to being the majority, and not having to deal with all sorts of bullshit, so they say F-this and leave).

/end tiredbrain rant