Here's how you could make a fun workable full loot / pvp system...

The trick would be a working honor system where "ganking" is punished by a lowered reputation.

Attacking a player with higher reputation marks you as the "aggressor" and you get penalized (your rep lowered).

Attacking a player with a lower reputation would be "free" (no penality).

So gankers would find themselves targeted by the majority of non-ganking players.

Make it take a LONG time for reputation to recharge.  Weeks or maybe even a  month... All that time you would be a target for higher rep players.

If you really want to punish ganking... Make chance to hit a higher rep player be on a sliding scale based on the rep difference between the high and lower rep players.  In other words, if you are Godly and a scum ganker attacks you then unless they are 20 levels higher than you they are going to have a hard time killing you.

Since the gankers would have a hard time preying on higher rep players, they would instead turn to ganking even lower rep players.  This would make the really bad gankers life a living hell. 

You might allow someone to rebuild their rep by giving them back a little rep anytime they gank a lower rep player.  In other words, if you want to rejoin civilized society, you could get you rep back by going out and hunting down lower rep players.

A new skill called 'Intuition' would allow you to 'read' a players rep from an increasing distance as you added points to it.

A spy glass or binoculars would also increase the range at which you could 'read' another players rep.

Rep grinding would mean you would have to go out and track down lower rep players and kill them. 

Gankers killing gankers means they are not roaming around killing non-ganker players.

The rep system would probably need to be based on % of life damage inflicted.  Otherwise, you would have gankers almost killing someone for "free" then stepping back and letting the monster they were farming kill them.

The rep system might be 1-100 with 100 being "Godly" and 1 being absolute scum.

The rep hit you take from killing a >= rep player would be on a scale.  1st kill might drop you 20 points from 100 to 80 rep.  2nd kill might only frop you 10 points from 80 to 70 rep...

The logic being there's really not much difference between a mass murder who kills 50 people and one whose killed 49.

well a few things need to change for a full loot ffa pvp system to work.

- If it's a sandbox it needs a reasonable skill cap

- Loot drops need to mean RARE, economy should run off crafting

- Instances or dungeons need to be open

- Guards actually need to exist with GOOD AI, not exploitable buggy AI.

- World needs to be vast with purpose, there should be a reason to want to be 500 kilos in the middle of no where.

- Crafting should be easy yet valuable and limiting (by limiting I mean each player can only do so much making other players picking up the other aspects become valuable)

- One char per server

- One guild per account

- Player Housing, with a higher purpose than vanity ie... bank/storage

- Players should need to have a key to their property thats obtainable on death (Like UO) the player can go change their locks upon dropping the key

- Mounts are not storable in your backpack...

- Back Pack space is limited and the more you horde the slower you move and quicker you lose endurance

- A way to creatively oppose zerg mentality as zergs and alliances pretty much destroy the player bases of every sandbox ffa mmo.

-game needs to be hosted server side greatly limiting the ability to hack or cheat or dupe or any other game ruining things.

- Walls need to be solids... exploiting mobs for gold drops IE Darkfall could of easily been solved by making walls solid...

- ingame factions for PvE interest

- Factions give quest to kill players of opposing factions for pvp content

- Guilds are forced to have friendly factions to limit exploiting the faction system

I could go on for a month on things that need to exist... but some of these will remain in my game design document.

Originally posted by Railgunner

Since the gankers would have a hard time preying on higher rep players, they would instead turn to ganking even lower rep players.  This would make the really bad gankers life a living hell.

*snicker*

Is that really how you view PvP games? A bit of decreased accuracy will make it so that gankers don't attack squishy inexperienced players?

Not to mention the fact that the reason that people (well, a handful of people) want to play an FFA PvP game is because they want to be able to kill players who they shouldn't have to tolerate, like killstealers and trash talkers and members of enemy guilds. Your system doesn't stop gankers, it stops anyone from engaging in PvP without consequence.

What's the incentive for being the good guy and maintaining positive reputation? This seems like a way to discourage FFA PVP. It wouldn't make it fun. It would probably just devolve into huge blobs of lower rep players ganking higher rep players to harvest tears.

this sounds like a decent system.

it also sounded like a decent system 13 years ago when lineage the bloodpledge started using it.

The whole thing strikes me a little like trying to smash the round peg through the square hole.  Why not simply offer players what they want, and accept that full loot PVP is a niche thing?

Players are at both ends of the spectrum: niche players want ganks, normal players want no ganks.  No matter where you fall on the spectrum of Ganks All The Time to No Ganks, you're going to fail to satisfy one of those player groups.