Developers Corner

Just a little bit of info about the game i'm designing so you guys can have a idea of what i'm talking about:

- world is FFA PVP

- cities and villages are well guarded and have defensive measures installed to deter player killing inside or around them. rest of the world is pretty much open pvp combat.

- pk'ers get npc and/or player bounties on their head and are hunted down by both player and npc bounty hunters actively. Killing them doesn't remove the bounty on their head automatically, so the people who like to kill people alot for their entertainment will always be running from the law so to speak.

My question is that you have PVE rewards for better gear , money, other items, craft supplies but there is really nothing on the side of the fence for the pvp crowd, so how can we fix this? Most people who want loot pvp want to loot the players items and gear directly from them which seems logical but doesn't really appeal to a lot of people. So how can we add in looting to the pvp game whilst keeping things moderately fair for the pve crowd?

idea #1: the only 1 item they can completely lose for dying is their money. They are given a choice beforehand on how much money they carry on their person so it is a fair decision for them to lose that money if they die and somebody takes it. Money when people die stays with the corpse, so for them to get their money back they have to travel back to the corpse.

- players will also drop various ingrediants that composes of their bodies which is used in crafting recipies. These can only be obtained by killing other players in the game and thus it further involves the pvp crowd in the whole great scheme of things.

- when players die they will be spawned at the nearest friendly cloning bay in a city that they previously visited. So players can spawn far away from where they died. When resurrected players will have to travel within the city to the Item Recovery/Bank building and get their gear.

- players gear will only be hit with a durability penality based on how much damage the gear sustained whilst in combat. So if they fall victim to a lucky head shot then they don't have to fit the repair bill seeing it didn't take any damage. any gear that is taken from the player will not affect the players gear, it will only give their killers a copy of 1 piece.

- players who kill the other players will not only be able to loot the crating ingrediants but will also have a chance to loot a broken version of a piece of armor the player is wearing. Items drop rates will vary by the rarity of the item. Super rare items will be very hard to obtain through pvp kills but it is possible. When getting their broken item they will have to reverse-engineer the piece back into shape or they have the option to break it down into materials used in other building/crafting professions.

so what do you guys think? (y/n)? feel free to add to this if you wish.

Really it depends how item based your game is.

If items have minimal impact then let the players loot away.

If your game is heavily item based then its a good idea to only let players take the other money, so players have to make sure that they use banks.

Personally i dislike the current rare item based games, and would love to see a game where items are easy to manufacture and easy to lose, but their only real impact is on how you approach situations, much like any current FPS game.

You still need crafting to make the equipment for players to use, but having good equipment is not the goal for everyone.

I agree with Vindicore.  Items should come and go.  Each is useful in certain situations, but none is really better in all ways than anything else.  What we first need however, is a game with a diverse enough number of situations.  Right now there is only one thing to do, and that is kill stuff to power up.  Naturally gear has to level with the player as well.  Once the players are setting their own goals, they will just use their stuff like equipment.  They will gather what they need for the strategy they intend to enact on this particular occasion.

Also there should more logical restrictions on what can be carried, so players won't take more than what they really want from you, lest the become overburdened.