PKing ins and outs.

lordtwisted

 Well to begin with let me just say, you will not ever avoid PKing in a PvP game. It is part of the excitment in most PvP players opinions.

 I started online gaming in the day of BBC's and MUD's and continued on into one of the first graphical online RPG Meridian59, I then continued into Ultima Online where hacking and botting built uber PKers that I could not keep up with. At this point I melted into the PvE games such as EQ and such. I then worked for a couple of small companies as a tester/customer service.

 This is my take on PKing in general along with a little history of how I had dealt with it, in the hopes that it might help some people that are not experienced with PvP games. I am sure following this post many people will chime in and either correct me or my mistakes, or to add their own experience and opinions on the subject. As I mentioned, these are mainly my opinions alongside a small amount of fact. With that said I will begin...

 Back in the day... The online gaming community was more or less the same as an IRC channel with a dungeon master involved. This may seem stupid to a lot of todays gamers but it is what we had. Then it evolved with AOL bringing out Neverwinter nights, Disney brought out a graphical almost cartoonish online RPG called "The Realm", and 3DO bought and published "Meridian 59" I never played AOL, or Disney's game so I can not input on them.

 PKers are broken into a large variety of groups. Random PKers, casual PKers, RPPKers, disgruntaled PKers, Ganksters, and plain old Stupid PKers.

 Random PKers hit a point in the game, usually boredom, or things have gotten to hard, or they are ready to move on to a new game, in some cases..it is just their personallity. Random PKers are the ones you will usually run into, most of the time they are fairly low level, they carry crappy equipment to avoid loseing anything of value. Random PKers will usually pick on easy targets, ones that are almost dead from a fight, or just a lot lower.    In some games they will do this to loot the corpse then transfer anything good over to their real charachter and gain equipment and loot for themselves in a "questionable" way.

Casual Pkers, these are pretty uncommon, and usually are people that have hit a rough leveling area in the game, or hit end game and have nothing to do. Casual Pkers are usually mid to high level, and usually fight on fairer grounds, like waiting until you have finished you fight and healed before attacking you, they will tend to go after the loud mouthes in the ooc chat that like to talk bad about the people or the game, and usually won't loot anything from your corpse unless it is something prized in the game.  

RPPKers, ahhh the Role Playing PKer, this is one of my favorites. They are usually just role playing a bad guy. They vary anywhere from a lone murder, or bandit, to an entire band of role playing highwaymen, pirates, etc... These guys tend to be able to make getting PKed fun, and hunting and killing them even more fun.

Disgruntalled Pker, this is the guy who had an uber charachter get hit with the nerf bat, or booted from a guild, or just seemed to get in a bad spot with the community...what else does he have to lose? Nothing, so he turns around and starts killing everyone. He is usually scorned, so is completely ruthless, has no boundries, and will attack anyone he sees, whether he thinks he can win or not.

Ganksters....well, some people refer to the Random PKer that targets wounded people. I consider ganksters the very rare group of random PKers, you would be amazed at what a full group of low level PKers can accomplish. They are dangerous, but usually not tolerated for long, most of the time a band of higher levels will group together long enough to eliminate the problem.

Plain old stupid Pkers...These are the lamest, the ones that claim, I just did it one time, I won't kill anyone else, I swear. Or my favorite, I was hacked, someone hacked my account logged on and killed all those people, then changed the password back. yeah, okay.

 In Merdian 59 PvP was fun, a lot of duels, and full out guild wars occured. A lot of random, and role playing PKers lurked about. A great community of people that hunted the Pkers. But the schools of magic were always unbalanced, and the someone figured out how to hack the game and cast hold spells that will not let go, etc...

Ultima Online: it was the hacking and botting that ruined the PvP for me.

How to avoid PKers? Well, you can't short of going to a PvE game or server. You can limit your deaths in many ways, a lot of life potions, fighting beast in a little traveled area, or playing in groups.

It just occured to me that this sounds like it was written by a PKer, let me correct that. I am not a PKer, in the usual aspect. I am what some refer to as a Hunter. I hunt down and attempt to kill the PKers. As did all of my past guilds. Since I quit playing PvP back in the second year of UO I can admit I am rusty, but it's all comming back now.

I hope to either start, or join a guild soon that has the same goals as I do. Feel free to contact me if you are interested in forming such a guild or are recruiting to  a guild with these goals.                                                                                        

Suitepee

A pretty thought out post lordtwisted,but this should belong in the General Discussion forum to be honest.

Archlord will have PvE servers on release; so I'd imagine them to be the most popular as it seems people already do not like the seemingly constant/unacceptable griefing.

lordtwisted

Well, currently I am playing Archlord is why I posted here. But this post is a precursor to a more complete post on the subject. And it seemed that there was a few topics on PKing being addressed I thought I would test it out here.

 I am so tired of regular PvE games, but after so long away from the PvP games I am having a hard time setting my minds to the workings. So in fact I guess the post was for myself too.

I am looking forward to a good PvP game, but not sure Archlord will be it. Perhaps Age of Conan will be more to my likeing, or maybe Archlord will become a bit better by release.