What you, and many others seeking to "balance" pvp in this game by limiting it fail to connect with (IMO) is that PVP IS the game.
The designers don't seem to know this yet, and the newbie players don't seem to know this yet. But I guarantee you it's true.
When you're maxxed, and at the top of the game, you WILL be bored by fighting the game. Right now, everyone is complaining about PVP because they just want to be left alone in peace to level up so they can max, and they don't want to loose hard earned stuff to cheap kills. That's FINE. But if your solution to allowing people to max without undue hassle makes it so that AFTER you max, PVP is still undesirable, then this game will DIE.
And NO, increasing the level cap is NOT the solution to keeping the game fun. When you're at 50, you're not going to want someone to push reset so that you have to climb another 25 levels doing the same boring crap you did to get to 50. You will have earned being king of the world, and you'll like it that way. Maybe 2 years after you max, you'll want more levels. Not before. What you'll want to do as a 50th level player is fight other people, role play, help others, found a guild. And you'll LOVE your time in game doing these things. Hell, you may even voluntarily start a new character and max it, but you'll always have your level 50 stud to go back to, and you'll love that fact.
But the problem with limiting PVP in ANY way is that everything about the game becomes less amusing if you can't at level 50 just go out and fight some damn battles! Who wants to found a guild and fight a war with it, or help a group of newbies, or go on a killing rampage is the results of any of those things will be a significant, time consuming game set back. DON'T WE WANT TO HAVE FUN HERE?
Limit PVP and this game will die.
It's a fact. Write it down so that if/when it happens, I can say I told you so way back when.
Everyone seems to think that the solution to solving PKs is to make PKing mean more, be more intense, etc. WRONG. The solution is to make it mean LESS! Take the profit motive out, take the loss of items out, and voila... pvp becomse a FUN aspect of the game rather than a chore.
Remember this is a game! What we all want to be able to do is to have fun and make progress. The reason that PVP impedes that right now is because it results in the loss of significant items, and doesn't involve enough skill. I don't want to play pass-the-potato with every good item on the server! I want to square off against people and fight them in a level playing field, and earn and lose BRAGGING RIGHTS! And if I lose, I want to get up and do it again. I want to do it in the context of my guild's role play, and I want to do it against people I know and who know me within the community formed by the game.
WHY DON'T PEOPLE RECOGNIZE THIS? MAKING DEATH INTENSE MEANS MAKING PEOPLE PISSED OFF AT THE GAME. IT MEANS MAKING PEOPLE PISSED OFF AT OTHER PLAYERS. IT MEANS MAKING PEOPLE AFRAID TO PLAY. And it's annoying. So stop it.
Here's a repost regarding the subject that presents other possible solutions from another game I played where all of this stuff WORKED and made a FUN GAME.
Hedron
The False Prophet
KAAOS
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