Shattered Kingdoms

You are making incorrect assumptions again. My play style is to attack my enemies when they are actually online. Your well documented play style was to offline drain tribunal accounts. I am all for fair play and if there is going to be a delay on bounty hunters spawning after a deposit is made, it seems reasonable there should be a change to prevent offline farming, too.

I suppose I could modify the poll question, but that might cause more confusion than it's worth.

This game is hard to PK in. I remember in 1998 my veteran swashi killed exile guards like it was nothing and Hammer had to take action to throw me in jail to get things done. This was a time when we had fountain RP and it wasn't hard to PK one another. We just needed a reason to kill each other by forming bonds or enemies. Its unfortunate that we have to have big groups in order to bypass guards to kill one or two people or resort to other tactics that make it unfair.

In short, there will always be changes to the game and we will have accept things the way they are. Whether the changes is a good thing always gets lost in the matter. There will always be a way to exploit the game with any change. I personally liked the game back then because it was more simpler that promoted more RP/PK/FUN. The blood wars were all up to our imaginations.

I recommend trying to PK people that want to fight back rather than trying to hunt people down unsuspectingly that aren't in the mood to do it. Popping a tell as a necromancer to an elf saying your my enemy Pew Pew Pew got me killed a few times but it was a challenge. Insult his tree and suddenly hes hunting me down with arrows. Some people just want to play the game to RP and PK when they have a safety net.

Azoreth plays on a cellphone which makes it a challenge to PK with him. I remember he died because he failed to cast the most basic cabal skills that prevented sight. I told him he needs to do this and that to get an advantage on the landscape and then he told me he was on his cell lol. I had to ram like 5 guards and cast 5 word of recalls to try to get his things and somehow we ended up in a victory loot wise.

The only substantiated claim in this sentence is that your request was responded to by the staff. Everything else in this quote is riddled with insinuation and subjectivity. Do you have evidence demonstrating otherwise?

That is a difficult proposition nowadays. Even when an enemy signals their willingness to PK with a declaration of war, they will often still hide, avoid fighting or log off altogether. I suppose this is indirectly connected with factions and players refusing to concede or admit defeat. I am not going to hunt down a character that doesn't want to engage in PK except in extreme circumstances, but if you declare war and then refuse to fight...something has to give.

It's typical practice to farm bounty NPCs when all members of a faction are offline.

However, I don't really care. I've always been anti-bounty NPC. It puts an unfair burden on factions that are on the defensive, especially if they are with lower numbers. It also puts an unfair burden on team goody two shoes in that it creates the moral imperative to save idiotic guys that go after the worst war criminals. Evil people don't have to care about some halfwits that are dying for coin. It also defeats the stealth game.

There was a golden age when there were no bounty hunters. During the time that I played Destrivai there were no NPCs at all to deal with. It was a really good time.

I find it strange that the vote turnout for this poll is larger than the some of the who lists I've seen but it is what it is.

I guess the question isn't whether its meta-gaming or not. The real question is why certain players are using bounty NPCs as an early detection strategy that leads to them logging out to avoid PK. If your sworn oath is to protect the lands of your kingdom, logging out the moment you hear screams of your guards should be treason.

There needs to be clarification on whether or not this is a punishable offense. In the end it probably can't be since anyone can just say, "I'm on my lunch break" or "The wife was calling me to bed"

This. I was about to finally post since no one had brought up this argument in the first 5 pages, but jreid finally nailed it. This is the kind of thing you should be thinking about when role-playing instead of just meta-gaming.

I think that's pretty much been the general consensus: The solution for this alleged problem should be handled for this particular case, instead of seeking to change the nature of how bounty NPCs spawn as a kneejerk reaction to it.

No, the general consensus (based on the results from the poll) is that there should, in fact, be a 30 minute waiting period after depositing coins in a tribunal account before bounty hunters start to spawn. You seem awfully mad about something.

It stands to reason it is also the kind of "thing" that you and the other imms should be policing then, too, right? I would rather see a coded solution, like the one proposed in the poll, than to have players get cursed and potentially leave the game over it.