Darkfall – Proposal for Enhancement
I was thinking about the new player system revealed yesterday and thought I’d write down a few ideas for Darkfall.
Goals
Disclaimer
A lot of balance and adjustment would be needed to make sure this system wouldn’t be abused. Consider the details below as a rough guideline of the concept, not hard rules for implementation.
Concepts
Add both stationary and patroling city guards to NPC cities.
Attack or kill a blue player in an NPC city within sight of a city guard and you’re now wanted by the guard. Assisting such a player with buffs or heals would confer the same status to the assistant. ‘Attack’ could be defined as the same conditions that would normally turn you grey.
The city guard goes after the attacker and assistants. This may involve one or more guards. The guards should be very difficult to kill.
Your options at this point are: Fight the guards, Flee, or Bribery.
If you are killed by the city guard, you have no tombstone. They take all of your inventory.
If you manage to flee the city and escape the guard, you’re now on a wanted list and considered to be an outlaw. The city guard in all of that race’s cities will attack on sight. For a higher fee than before, they could still be bribed to leave you alone and remove you from the wanted list.
Players can review the wanted list, hunt those players on it, kill them, and receive a small reward from the city guard. The balance for this component would need careful adjustment to prevent farming abuse. It might not be workable, but I like the idea of a bounty system…
The more offenses you commit without being killed by the guard or clearing your name from the list by bribing them increases your bounty. You become more of a priority to be hunted by other players as your value to them increases.
A system similar to this would offer several benefits:
If the guard CAN be killed, what’s to stop a large enough group of players to all head into a starter town, lock down the guards, and kill every last player inside, over and over? Since access to an NPC is not a must (player cities cover all the needed functions), the price those players would have to pay off is a non-factor, and if anything, they can just all get killed by one friend who then collects the bounty on them, rinse and repeat.
I’m interested in making it unappealing for the solo griefer or small groups of griefers in NPC cities. A large, organized player effort to take down an NPC city would be pretty exciting, but it shouldn’t be easy. Finding the right difficulty for the guards would be key. Too easy and they’re worthless. Too hard and then you might as well just make it so no one can hurt anyone else in an NPC city. Finding the sweet spot is a real challenge.
Bounty system abuse is a definite issue. As I mentioned above it might not be workable, but if it’s possible to construct a bounty system that has little to no abuse, it could be fun and provide some additional motivation for players to go after griefers either for cash or some sort of in game recognition (achievement history, titles, -virtual carrot of the day-).
Like I mentioned in the disclaimer, the implementation details would need some work, but the general concepts of a city guard and bounty systems are appealing to me if well designed.
Don’t you acknowledge that it is high time to get the mortgage loans, which would help you.