Infamy ideas and karma / investigation system?

[SkeletonPosts: 181]

This is largely based on non-empiric experience but based on what I’ve read and experienced I have a few thoughts about how Infamy could be tweaked.

As always, critiques and feedback welcomed.

To begin, those affected cannot change overworld zone, but can run into the UG. They cannot use doors or gates and world objects cannot be built whilst they are on screen – or used if it is harder to disallow their traversing of open gate and door tiles, although I can’t imagine that actually being the case.

This adds to the PK element and increases the danger of committing any acts as well as making it more of a hindrance whilst still allowing major aspects of play to be engaged and infamy to be spent.

Players are perma-logged and cannot drop items whilst infamous. On death they lose no skill experience but suffer a complete (or higher rate) inventory drop.

This stops them leaving their higher gear in a safe place and ups the cost of failure.

As a possible extra mechanic, any item dropped by a player killed by the infamous gets cursed with their name. This can be used as a trophy or returned to them for an increase in experience in a new skill or a possible karma system, which would then remove the curse. The curse could have some form of minor debuff for being equipped / in your inventory – lower attack speed, decreased myst or what have you.

The hunger drain aspect is great as that allows a play-time punishment for the actions. I’d suggest that automatic movement or actions do not count towards this though as that can be left running whilst a player is AFK.

The movement debuff taking effect only after a PvP or tower injury would help balance the diversity of play against removing all punishments and challenges.

Speaking of, towers should give infamy only after a few arrows (3 to 5?) have been fired to allow for honest mistakes, but the infamy is delivered in full accounting for those initial blows should it trigger. Whether the cooldown for this is time-based, steps required or a few varied skill experience increases can be left for whatever is simplest – as said this does help avoid those accidental mistakes, and can be applied to PvP as well, including missed strikes.

Infamy doubling the experience value of blue stars when calculating level differences will likely help avoid people reincarnating to sidestep the penalties. As would only factoring in combat skills when calculating the level variance – for infamy and the level differential mentioned in my balancing thread – which would be an alternative / additional check. Perhaps with the combat stats factored in (attack, precision, vitality etc.) to limit someone farming myst for low exp gain and high returns by only taking the last shot on a mob to artificially bloat their character via upgrades.

Having infamy only be gained if another player witnesses the act, or the target reacts, is another potential idea. Going that route would likely end with more subterfuge and a few tweaks – towers not recording names, some death announcements being unattributed – but would tie in well with an investigation skill or a karma scale. Even if there’s no one watching you still get the bad juju.

Short of adding what would be entirely unrelated game content I’m not sure where an investigation skill would lead but having karma affect your drop rates and whether mobs target you could be an interesting trade off. Perhaps even have it replace or encapsulate the current infamy system.

The more good deeds you do the better your response from altars and the chance for a rare return from them. A slight increase in procuring bonuses in crafting and questing, blah de blah, but you also become a target of Chaos and pull (some?) mobs more easily and for longer. The more bad you do, the more likely it is those mobs will ignore you, that you get negative responses from altars and that Mercy teleports will return you either to the Crossroads, first level or Deep Cave rather than your tile. I’d suggest no negative impact on procs and crafting, as that would break the balance too much I feel.

Good karma has a very low rate of increase – think diminishing returns –
whilst bad is easy to get and time-consuming to reduce to a null point.

Examples of bad deeds would be murder, dealing player damage, damaging neutral mobs, destroying another player’s base (the issue of ruins could be managed as an aside), using cursed items and so on.

Good deeds would be returning items – perhaps including bone pile drops in this – killing the infamous, and using bandages and healing on non-infamous players. Perhaps healing infamous people could be a negative act.

The minutae of it depends on if it’s a well-received idea so not much point going deep into it.

Do feed back.
For I am hungry 🙂

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