@jules
Also, sometimes prisming to someone in a house is a perfectly legitimate option to hide away while you try to brazier someone who's #afklife at... kins crossroads for example. Maybe someone wants to prism into someone's house and yell at the citizens until they get attacked, lovingly known as the Kryss method of conflict generation. The point is, by giving people these hideaways, another few methods of conflict are chipped away at.
Sarrius is also right about certain noncoms or sometimescoms hiding behind the label, taunting or insulting a combatant, then using noncom as something to cry about in the issue when someone kills them because they took offense.
@teravi
Know why there are a lot of conflict generators in Imperian? It's because Imperian is a combat driven game, arguably moreso than any other IRE mud. If Lins had a reason to kill Teravi, I'd certainly try to catch you with your pants down too. (Someone else can make the joke about that being the primary function of these rooms.) Where you call it being a jerk, others call it strategy. Sun Tzu called it "The Art of War."
However, this would be a major amount of work to add as we do not have any kind of way to track when a player is in combat right now.
The self-harm setup does something similar to this; you can't attack yourself within a minute of attacking another player. A restriction like that would work, since the main objection is people using the room to hide while attacking.
I will take a look at that option.
I guess the coded in a function for that while I was not paying attention. So that may be an option in the future.
Teravi has not done anything to kickstart conflict. At all. Kryss' 'method of conflict generation' is one that actively targets people who are not participating in combat (which is different than conflict, btw) so she can rile up people enough to get a fight. That, my dear, is not good for the game. We, as Wysrias and others have pointed out, have a small playerbase. If we want to keep players, we should not harass people into participation in aspects of the game they have no interest/capability in. Further, if you WANT more PKers, you don't want people who aren't yet PKers to think of it as a group of turds. Because who wants to play with turds?
If you want more people to kill, you have to fix the pk-conflict-generators to make them engaging and find ways to ease more folks into combat. The second bit is sort of happening, with the autocuring and whatnot. Iunno about the first bit. It doesn't sound like the caravans are especially exciting for PK generation, nor do shards seem to be working well.
Either way, a few houses safe from endless prisms isn't going dramatically shift the state of PK in Imperian.
That's 100% why I liked that this was a pre-meditated move rather than a knee-jerk response, as @Eoghan pointed out. It means the administration know that this 'feature' is a gold sink and nothing more (and therefore should be maintained as such). Thumbs up all around.
This is a great idea. You already can't kill 90% of the afk population at KC, wherever Celidon's afk is, Shuk, Wendigo Catwalk, Monarch square. You just can't. The only change here is someone is able to afk, rp, or get their freak on and you can't kill them (which you couldn't anyways). The only change is a huge buy in cost (that should fade after x in game timer).
(Top combatants break into houses to provoke you into defend so they can justify killing you in a city).
I understand the concerns better now. Iniar's post, in particular, gets right to the heart of it. There's a deepseated worry that if you have too many people who aren't mostly focused on PvP, that group will eventually call the shots, at least to some degree. It makes a lot of sense, but I do think you're safer from that than you might think, and those people can be good for the game because they do spend money and they fluff up WHO.
Achaea does have sharply segregated "PKer" and "everyone else" player bases, but I think that has absolutely everything to do with the PK crowd's insistence that losing XP builds character, and the horrible infamy system that has helped ingrain a "kill people who are infamous until they're newbies" mindset into the people who do PK. Over there, even if you're somewhat interested in combat, unless you feel confident about learning to code, you're actually forced to carefully avoid it nonetheless. There are amazing systems, but even those won't save you from many, many painful deaths at the hands of very competent people who can and will kill you over and over (not that I was ever stupid or brave enough to put myself in that situation).
We have a few avenues for the relatively clueless would-be fighter to get involved in conflict, but frankly, nothing like shard falls or obelisks. We had icons (technically "have")... which I now know are a far crappier version of obelisks, but which I thought was the most amazing thing ever because everyone could be involved in the fight. Obelisks are awesome because the conflict keeps on giving. Icons... didn't work like that.
Imperian's mechanics and player base are unbelievably more friendly towards the casual fighter, and provide far more of an "upramp" than Achaea could if it tried, so really, all but the most determined pacifist is going to come into your fold to a large degree, and even if they didn't, the fighters over in Achaea still call the shots, which I hope is some comfort. They really do. Everyone else is just there to spend money, frankly. They are catered to, in the sense that so long as they don't cross someone in the PK crowd, they're allowed to buy shinies and generally go about their business without being attacked. They certainly can't get away with "starting something" and get away scot free.
Comments
If you want more people to kill, you have to fix the pk-conflict-generators to make them engaging and find ways to ease more folks into combat. The second bit is sort of happening, with the autocuring and whatnot. Iunno about the first bit. It doesn't sound like the caravans are especially exciting for PK generation, nor do shards seem to be working well.
Either way, a few houses safe from endless prisms isn't going dramatically shift the state of PK in Imperian.