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What I feel is needed in new MMO's
Deepz42
Member Posts: 6
I feel that a lack in a few key features have really killed my enjoyment of MMO's. This is not meant to be a trolling post, I just wanted to get a conversation going about this topic.
Non-instanced Player housing:
This was your way of making your mark on the world. Without the player housing every shard/server looked the exact same.
Items existing in the game world:
This is something I never hear anyone talk about, but I am tired of not being able to place items on the ground. I want to be able to place my favorite piece of armor on the floor in my house to show off to everyone that walks by. In so many games I see items exist as nothing but a small square of a graphic denoting a spot in your inventory.
Relative item weight:
Why does a piece of grass take up the same inventory space as the Two-Handed Sword of God Slaying? If people don't want it weight based you could use a system similar to Diablo and it would still be preferred to everything existing as a symbol.
Skill based game play:
If you get rid of the common model of leveling and replace it with a skill system, with a skill cap so the game is not a grind fest I believe it would allow players to enjoy a more explorative style of gameplay.
Non faction based gamplay:
When you have an entire faction cast as your enemy it makes the hatred fake. Imagine being able to take revenge on yourr ex-guild master who did you wrong. He would become your enemy and if you got a band of like minded individuals together to take revenge on the guildmaster. That would evoke real and meaningful emotions. This I feel would be two fold, first my previous point, but secondly I feel that it would get rid of the need for instanced PvP. You would be hunting and fighting for honor and in battles that felt like they made a difference.
Criminal Systems:
I really think that if you had the offfenders punished through an ingame system it would prevent griefing to an extent. Some players will still put up with the punishments but it would at least seem more fair for the innocent.
Destroy all instances:
I think that instances and the heavy use of raiding/dungeons in its own little micro game is slowly killing MMO's IMO.
What do you think? I am curious to see if my views are a common thing.
Comments
- Non-instanced Player housing: I'm all for that.
- Items existing in the game world: What for ? House decoration, ok, but just dropping stuff into the game ? That just asks for trouble with too many graphic items.
- Relative item weight: I absolutely hate being bothered with this secondary game of inventory management
- Skill based game play: WTF if you want people to explore, JUST GIVE THEM A LARGE AND ENJOYABLE GAMEWORLD ALREADY. Dont need any specific rulesystem for that. Especially never force players to do things, give them options instead.
- Non faction based gamplay: I hate RvR and dont understand why its so damn popular. IMHO one should have player factions - you fight against the peeps of the other guild that wants, for example, control of the same country.
- Criminal Systems: Meh, thats a tough question and there is no general answer. Depends completely upon what kind of actions are actually possible in the game in question.
- Destroy all instances: I hate instancing, but it seems to be extremely popular and unavoidable now.
Indeed. But please, please, please include a "cleanup" routine for abandoned homes. No more massive tracts of empty slums with tumbleweeds rolling through.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
The world would have to be at least 10x if not more of current MMOs. Otherwise there will be no land left for mobs. The world would be full of houses and nothing else.
Just had a quick note on items in the world. It's been done before by some older titles (UO for one). The problem is that those items must all be rendered, and must all be networked. It's easy for griefing type players to create a garbage dump that will lag out other players. And there is really very little gain to be had, other than being able to drop an item on the ground and then log in an alt to pick it up.
https://www.therepopulation.com - Sci Fi Sandbox.
DAOC had (has?) a pretty good system for this, if a player left the game his house and all the items were removed from the game world and packed into a trunk for him. When/if he came back it would be all there for him to reuse, meanwhile the lot his house was on was put back up for sale on the market place.
However, they had to add special housing zones (about 6 or so per realm as I recall) to hold all the houses and make them navigatable.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Lineage 2 is an older game that permitted items to be dropped on the ground and I don't recall ever experiencing issues with items lagging out the game. Of course, most items had value, so there wasn't much that people were willing to drop just for griefing sake.
As to why permit it, well, if you're going to let people drop items upon death like L2 used to back in the day, its a very useful feature.
And many a person has had fun creating artwork in the game world by dropping items in the game world, and it adds an extra dimension to the game world.
Also many higher level players would drop items on the ground for people to discover, sort of a "be nice" easter egg.
I think the argument it could impact performance is overblown a bit.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Yes but can't the garbage truck pick it up?
WOW,eq2,Vanguard,WAR,LOTRO,AOC,Rift Aion, SWTOR, TERA.
Currently playing GW2.
Autoleveling skills and such, not... No equipment systems made for idiots.
Oh why, oh why can't I have a new game with system similiar to AO. If possible with "random" or such like item system where after basic items there every item would be unique have different stats and such effect them. Even more complex twinking and ultimate crafting, laddering items in and maybe nearly unlimited slots for items. Why can't I have 5 different gizmos for targeting, they could make things worse than only 2 or 3, but why not allow it.
Yes and also simlar world mobs should have slight variations in looks and stats.
WOW,eq2,Vanguard,WAR,LOTRO,AOC,Rift Aion, SWTOR, TERA.
Currently playing GW2.
There was usually a system in place that would delete them after 30 minutes or so. But if a player wanted to be malicious they could stack a lot in a hurry. If you limit how fast they can drop items, they can use multiple characters.
In Ultima Online's early days people used to stack furniture objects on new player spawns or popular teleport points, and they'd do the same outside of dungeons (where it required loading and you couldn't see the other side). Then they'd use these items to block players in with no escape so they could grief them.
Player Killing aside, take an example of a raid. In Everquest for example the Avatar of Water battle required 60-70 people to kill, and it was all out DPS. You basically had to kill it before its adds killed the whole raid. Even healers were full on nuking. Other guilds who wanted to block your progression (so you couldn't get into the Plane of Time) would show up with full raids at the same time that you tried to battle the Avatar. And they'd do it for the sole purpose of lagging players out to the point that there was latency and they could not kill the Avatar quickly enough. In the games that supported droppable items, raids weren't a big part of those games. If they were however, you could use a similar tactic by simply bringing 10 people with bags full of items and spam dropping/moving them on the ground someplace within network range of the raid.
It's one of those ideas, that I agree, it's cool. And probably most people would agree that it would be cool. But the reason you don't see it is due to the problems associated with it.
I agree with most of the rest of the post.
https://www.therepopulation.com - Sci Fi Sandbox.
I understand some of the negative aspects of items existing outside of your inventory but imagine the positive aspects. When I think of this I imagine Ultima Online, and hunting IDOC's (IDOC is an acronym for In Danger of Collapse, where a players house would fall and all of the items would be loot-able.
In a WoW esque inventory system everyone could grab the same amount of items, a stacks of 60000 Iron Ingots would only take 1 inventory space. While in a weight based game no one could take that stack at all. However in a game like UO you could effectively drag the stack of ingots away by dropping it on the floor moving it a few tiles at a time.
Another positive aspect, is the availability of rares. Imagine having a place to display your ultra-rare, 7 year old T3 Armor. If you had a safe place to put the items, you could drop them on the floor, or place them on a pedestal. But if not who cares about a square icon that has not existed in over 5 years?
Non instanced Housing? Yes please. But to be fair, the previously mentioned Dark Age of Camelot's system of housing was both simple and comprehensive in what it covered. I'd be fine with using what they came up with as a base.
Relative item weight? I'd like to see it, but here's the thing. In previous games with encumberance, strong characters initially carried more, which was offset by mid level play when everyone started getting % weight reduction holding bags. The current game market says "heck with it" and cuts out the middle man of weight reduction bags for how inventory is now in its simplified form. So yeah, I'd like to see it returned to an MMO, but all it ends up doing is expanding character items with various desirable bags.
Non Faction based Gameplay? I'd be willing to try, but I'm a fan of 3 way antagonistic character faction structures, like Dark Age of Camelot. My short answer is, I'd rather see Non Faction play if that was an option I could take over the stock 2 faction antagonistic play we've seen in like, wayyyy too many games (made popular by World of Warcraft).
Skill based gameplay? Sign me up! The days of character classes with locked assigned abilities and restrictions is something I've had far too much of. Let's head in the other direction with newer games, please.
Criminal systems? This seems to be a feature linked to a PvP centric MMO, and you appear to be focusing on griefing. An artificial system of a player being punished for killing someone over and over would be out of place, in my opinion. An artificial system PREVENTING some sort of gain (gear, experience, pvp faction advancement, etc. anything really) from someone killing someone else over and over in a griefing style would be pretty useful, though.
Destroy All Instances? Well, if you do that we're right back to where critical Boss spawns required for rare / hard to achieve quests are jumped or griefed by rival guilds of players. Everquest is an outstanding example of this with say, the Cleric Epic Weapon quest and the drop required from a dragon. I would like to see a game where the majority of playtime is held in open world, but instanced dungeons for specific purposes are there for a reason. If you shut out a huge percentage of players on a server from even attempting End Game PvE content for their characters because they're told to wait in line for perhaps weeks at a time, you lose paying customers. It's that simple.
Yeah... there really wasn't any performance hit by dropping a bunch of items on the ground. I've NEVER seen anyone do this for griefing. Having more players in the same area creates way more lag than items would. Besides don't games have advanced graphic sliders for number of objects to draw or their draw distance? It really isn't an issue.
What is gained? Immersion, fun?
In Neocron every item had a 3d rendered variation that could be tossed around. For some RP fun you would buy a few Warbot colas from the bar and drag them out of you inventory to drop it on the table. Sit down in the chair across from your buddy and suddenly to have created a cool vibe. Most of the time when looting a monster or pilfering a trashcan you would drop it's unwanted contents back onto the ground (there was a reason for this). Also on a few occasions you might buy too much construction grease so you can't even move from being overburdend. Thats ok, just lob it, playing catch with yourself on the way to the bank. Hopfully nobody with a lot of free carry space will nab it. Funny enough, there was one live event that was held with one part of the competition was to see who can toss an object off a mountain and land on the target.
btw items would disappear after about an hour and they were all non-colliable objects
Non-Instanced housing. The only experiance I've had with this was Vanguard which wasn't very positive. Plot snatching game quiters really ruined it. I do see the perks of it but I'm perfectly fine with having them instanced. I'd rather your player living space be functional, somewhat necessary to use, and a be place of social interaction. Whether it takes a chunk of the game world for the whole house or just front door matters less.
In all my time ive been playing MMO's theres been one mmo which was the greatest in my opinion. This was DAOC.
Now dont get defensive on me immediatly, let me explain.
Granted DAOC was the first MMO i played/addicted too. But the thing was, every time i would get home from school, or from being away for a week, i would boot up my game and see the status of the Frontier RvRvR. Did enemies get our castles and/or relics? Did my guild/alliance have any plans for the weekend? And if so, which castle to attack? (some attacks were really crafty, hitting one till a certain time, then skeet to another frontier and take another (intended) target down before the enemy mass could react).
Besides this unique, fun, interesting 3 realm Frontier system, there was also the harsh leveling (actually being afraid if left alone in a non-instanced dungeon, usually due to the rather quick respawn time), the non-instanced dungeons forcing people to enter together and give more social bonding and enviroment immersion. Getting to level 50 took a long time. Also housing was non-instanced and you could even sell your crafted gear in front of your home while you were offline. And talking about crafting..... It was HARD! getting a 99% or 100% item was very rare and could sell for alot (not saying DAOC crafting was perfect, but it had it niche, to get skill was HARD, to make good quality items was even HARDER).
So for the tl:dr people amongst us, let me sum up the things i feel which are needed in upcoming MMO's.
1) A game-design which would let people log in at max level, check certain statusses and react accordingly (like opening a newspaper). This would improve immersion and social bonding and actually have a certain end-game quality.
2) No more hello kitty mmo pve worlds. Make people think hard or let them fight together to achieve evenlevel quests.
3) Personal non-instanced housing is something im a big fan of. But please, dont do it like DAOC in which you had to travel 15 mins by horse to get to a friends house 5 blocks away. Appartments are ok with me.
4) No more standard good-evil 2 sides only approach, loved the DAOC 3 Realm system. Hell, remake and improve DAOC and i would honestly be hooked again for a small decade.
5) Good UI and HUD flexibility. To be able to at least use keybindings.
6) No macro's for spell-rotations. Playing Rift with only 3 spammable keys is really mindnumbing.
7) No more loot spam. Modern MMO mobs all drop insane amounts of junk. Either drop something usefull or not at all.
Sigh, i just miss the old DAOC days, feeling dangerously alone when you ventured a bit too deep into a openworld dungeon. Or fighting a famous players/guilds in Frontier PvP areas (anyone remember Rambo the infiltrator? God i miss those days.....)
And lastly..... I just wanna do another MMO in which the pve-pvp world are so dynamic again that when i come home, i can crawl into my second (virtual) skin/persona again and have fun with my buddies and make new buddies. Nowadays its just too focused on logging on and seeing how you can improve yourself again with hours of mindnumbing raids or grinding lots of mobs or repeatable quests...... Just like the real world is nowadays, nothing communitybearing or upholding, only selfish behaviour (sorry for the small rant).
On "items on the ground":
Tthat's what this used to be called and this is one of those old things that people wanted but has fallen by the wayside because so much more has been taken away from "Sandbox" designs in MMOs over the years.
It is a problem. In UO, in the early days there were a few PKers who actually dropped thousands of things on the ground so that players would freeze up when they approached. Making them an easy kill. This was hours worth of work, not only to drop all this stuff there, but to tote it out of their house (usualy close by), and then to keep going around picking each thing up and dropping it again so that it didn't decay in time. Unbelievable, but some players actually did this just to be jerks. Raph Joster told about this on his blog.
In UO's 2.5D "over the shoulder" fixed view, this took thousands of item to have this much effect. But in a fully 3D world with adjustable views and landscape viewing, it is vastly increased as a problem. It would take a lot less. If anyone read it, even Skyrim (a single player game) commented that they made armor pieces that were one piece instead of 2 for tunics and legs so as to reduce the items loading on screen. Of course, I think making it also for Consoles had a lot to do with that.
There are ways to address this issue though. Taking it in stages, depending on the art quality of the game, you can:
an obvious one, not show things on the ground until players get closer. This is commonly used now with scaled mountains and trees and whatnot. I'm just pointing out that this can be done here too, only to a much closer effect.
Same thing for the scale of detail. Reduce it to a "generic" simplified version. A short sword, bastard sword, and claymore would all look alike until the player "views" it and see's the description or a pop-up view, or perhaps the item being "viewed" can sharpen into focus.
An old answer in old games...when quantities of items are dropped on the ground, stack them into a containor that looks like a generic pile of stuffs. A game can have 20, 50, 100's of examples of these generic containors so as to generally mimic what's contained in said pile/containor.
As the last, except the game can take anything within a short radius and pile it all together in one containor.
This leaves players with the ability to at least drop one single item that doesn't replace itself with one of these generic containors. Or a larger limit might be allowed, maybe 3 individual items laid out on top of eachother before they are replaced by the single containor that looks like a pile.
In UO we used to have feasts, parties, festivals where we'd set out tables and chairs in the grass. We'd place plates and silverware settings, put food and drink on the tables, and everyone would sit and feast.
We would cut logs from trees, then stack them on top of eachother to build log walls out in the forest for a makeshift fort for friendly PvP events. Of course, the attackers could run up and take these logs, one at a time, but the defenders would have extra logs and replace them as fast as you took them, meanwhile their archers would be nailing you. Great fun.
We'd also sometimes use particular items as a sign or symbol of recognition. This was because UO was a highly social game, and working secretly around other guilds sometimes required a bit of a secretive aspect.
Items can be used to mark trails for others to follow, leave a notice that you were there, run player run events using books (you could write your own books in UO) dropped in key locations with clues. There were and are loads of ways you can use items placed in the game world, if it's allowed.
This is why sometimes us old timers feel that you "newer" (not so much anymore) players don't quite appreciate what we used to have. What's been removed. What we want back.
Once upon a time....
I've been playing MMO's for years(mostly f2p, supposedly) like RuneScape, Knight Online, Conquer Online, LOTRO, a bit of Allods, Maplestory, Crowns of Power, Runes of Magic and Forsaken World.
Yes, they all have the same type of goal to get the best gear, highest skillsets/crafting, get every achievement, and with free MMOs the key is spend more $$ to get things faster.
Things I want to see in a game would be:
Out of the list of games I listed Crowns of Power has(still does) have a cap of lvl 50 and fairly easy to reach cap in under a month.
-Fast lvl cap, skills easy to cap
Continuing with Ideas from Crowns of Power would be gear can only be upgrade/enchanted using 1 method only. Either by plussing it up or adding runes/gems to it, and it was affordable and attainable without deep pockets($) and a bit of hard work ingame by selling a piece of gear.
- Equal gear, and easy to upgrade
This next idea would be fun, but depending on the games population could be a mess.
- Open world Instances where you enter from a certain area and the bosses are locationed there, at certain times.. lets say 24hrs timers, BUT anyone is able to enter the area so you need to coordinate when is the best time for you guild/clan/faction to enter this area. You can send in a couple scouts to see who is camping what boss and their location and plan a massive assault just before the boss is about to spawn.
Creating you own gear (no recipes, no certain materials)
- Ok, lets say you have a bunch of spare ore in your storage and had to use for it at the time, but were bored and wanted to created a new beast piece of gear. You simply take the ores, create metals from them, use NPC-bought molds to make, lets say, a chestpiece. This chestpiece was made of up 3 iron bars.
Ok, now you have this simple iron chestpiece, BUT we want to take it to the nest level(well say for iron the max level is 5) we want to make it level 2, so well make some iron shoulder guards to add to the chestpiece, not its lvl 2. You can also use different metals in combination to make a superb piece of gear.
blah blah ok now to achieve lvl 5 armour you need a bottle of elemental energy(fire, wind, water, poison, darkness, light or whatever) and the final upgrade will give it a bonus damage attribute like (burn when attacked or bonus to fire slash, say for a warrior or knight)
Just thinking about it now it would be pretty cool to see some1 with a full poison gearset and when touched the enemy gains 2-3 poison damage over time, BUT if some1 has light attributes they can counter it by being healed and cancelling it out overall..
Not sure if any1 will like this idea, but trying to think of some new stuff i havent seen in the games ive played.
Last idea..
Dungeons that reduce your level to the actual recommended level of the dungeon itself
- Lets say your at lvl cap, bored and wanted to run a lowbie instance for fun. You would enter but your level would be temp reduced to(well say 35 because thats the recommended lvl for that area) and as for your gear it would be reduced by a certain amount depending on your level. It will give you a challenge and be able to help mentor new players by showing what to do/not to do to be able to defeat the dungeon.
Err what ?
Vanguard has non-instanced housing and even in the heydays there was never a problem with space.
The game world has about 10,000 or so house nodes, and a single server cant handle more than maybe 10,000 players, anyway, so there really is no issue.
It will always happen unless the programmer does some precaution (such as silently dropping items if too many are there).
L2 though has very low hardware requirements nowadays.
"AO" ?
What is "AO" ?
From the list of this site, this could be:
- ACE Online
- ARGO Online
- AGE OF ... ? (4 choices)
- AiOn
- Allods Online
- Anarchy Online
- Atlantica Online
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy_Online
First arrival (oldest game) gets dibbs on the abbreviation, in practice.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Anarchy Online, the concept is a bit special, maybe even work it to classless system with more trade-offs and such.
Basicly, all bores down to skill and ability based system where you can get better stuff with other stuff which you use for better stuff(as items and buffs can boost skills and abilities) , with lot of skills and items it's very intresting, no easy way of just level/class/some arbitary stat(faction standing...) and equip, but with better items would require more skills and with right gear you could reach a lot better gear than others in same level.
- Non-instanced Player housing
Yes, but unlikely to happen unless you want an incredibly ugly and incredibly confusing world like Second Life. If you have a million people playing, you have to have a world large enough to house a million homes. Won't ever happen as a regular feature.
- Items existing in the game world
No. Well maybe, it depends how it's done. For player housing it's perfect. For anything highly contained or anything in the world at large, it's fine. Anywhere there's a large gathering like towns, then no. You'll have big groups of people intentionally dropping multiples of a single item just to annoy everyone else and cause frame rate drops and lag for people that don't have good computers.
- Relative item weight
I'm all for this as long as it's done in an organized fashion... but I haven't seen it done in an organized fashion. I don't think even Skyrim does it in an organized fashion. I'm not a fan of the grid system in games like Diablo and STALKER. I think someone needs to try and create a hybrid of the two, a bag system and an inventory by weight system.
- Skill based game play
Yes and no. I think Skyrim has the right idea in terms of gaining skill as you use them, but I still think people should be somewhat locked into classes, at least loosely. It would depend on what skills are available and how you level them up. Let's be realistic, nobody wants to sit there chopping wood 24/7 just to get your lumbering skill up, that's why Runescape is bot heaven because that kind of thing is not fun at all. If you can skill up in interesting and fun ways then it'll work well.
- Non faction based gamplay
Yes and no. No in terms of not getting rid of factions entirely. Horde vs Alliance for example. You're either or... I guess there are groups that are neither and that kind of a thing I think would be good if you could be neutral, but I'm all in favor of being able to turn against your own faction. You can't tell me that people in the Alliance or the Horde don't fight with each other at times.
- Criminal Systems
This works into non-faction based gameplay. If you're Alliance and you're killing other Alliance, Alliance soldiers would be after you. The reason there's no Criminal system in WoW is because you can't attack your own faction, and so there's no crime in killing members of the Horde.
- Destroy all instances
Absolutely not. I'll be honest, the only thing I do on WoW now is raid. Log in, hop into a raid instance, raid, log off. Rinse repeat. No dealing with world PvP(I'm on a PvP server because of a friend), can't stand it. No dealing with no-lifers who camp a dungeon at all hours of the day and having 'progression' stuffed by them. Raiding is very quick. In and out, 3 hours of fun with friends on Vent, everything is gravy.
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To be honest, I don't like ANY of the features proposed by the OP. But this is the one that I disagree with the most, and feel compelled to comment on it whenever the topic comes up.
PEOPLE WHO BREAK THE RULES OF THE GAME SHOULD BE SUBJECT TO SUSPENSIONS AND BANS, NOT IN-GAME PUNISHMENTS. Making the punishment part of the game carries an implicit endorsement to go on doing it.
Let's hop over to another genre and take a look at some behavior that is frowned upon. For example, zerging in an RTS: massing a huge number of weak units and sending everything at your opponent very early in the game. For developers who acknowledge that their playerbase doesn't want this to occur, they can do three things about it.
They can discourage it. Design the game to make this tactic less effective. Make units more expensive or less powerful if you make too many of them too quickly, or put in a cheap AOE tower designed to stop zerg rushes. Give buildings increased regeneration for the first several minutes of the game. If someone overcomes the handicaps and still uses this tactic successfully, they're doing nothing wrong.
They can disallow it. Just make it impossible for people to do it. Put a barrier around bases that prevents enemies from entering until some time limit is up. Put a cap on the number of cheap units that can be produced. If someone skirts the edge of the handicap (by attacking 1 second after the barrier falls, or building units up to the cap), they can't really be considered to be using this tactic and so they're doing nothing wrong.
They can punish it. Make it a reportable offense and ban or suspend the accounts of people who do it. Players using this tactic are doing something wrong, and bans provide both a disincentive to doing it and a means of making sure people who have done it in the past can't continue to do it.
Most forms of MMO griefing fall squarely into category 3. The players are doing something wrong, so it just doesn't make sense to just make the activity harder (by including jail time or stat penalties or whatever). Discouraging the behavior with penalties means that someone who overcomes those penalties and continues in the behavior is 100% justified, just as someone who successfully zerg rushes past the AOE tower is justified. For behavior that truly hurts the playerbase—mob training, abusing bugs, use of bots—you don't WANT the other players who were wronged to feel that it was fair! Stopping the behavior from occuring should totally take precedence over any form of justice or fairness.
And by contrast, behavior that doesn't hurt the game shouldn't be subject to punishments. If it's a factionless PvP game, you shouldn't be penalized even a little bit for killing other players, so long as you are not doing it in a way that breaks the game's rules (harassment, bug abuse, etc.).
I think he's referring to a game mechanic being designed in that punishes players for committing certain acts such as assualting/killing another player. Sure it's allowed, but part of the game is to punish you.
It's completely different than exploiting bugs or using bots....