Shattered Kingdoms

So would you be in favor of making these areas work like duels? If you die or are stunned you get teleported to the duel hall?
This would also increase pvp activity in these zones.

that's not pk. that's just another version of pve.

Fighting other players, in a zone that would send you to the dueling guild if you die, would not be player vs player?

This idea could also stop the need for filling coffers. Guards will always be present unless the tribunal does not hold any of it's territories.

More pvp with less risk. No need to farm coin for coffers. A way to get rid of bounty guards without draining coffers.
I don't see what is so bad about this.

If you want to get the real gank, then take control of the territories, then find your enemies within the city. That's when you'll get the full loot.

Whenever a balance change or a gameplay change gets suggested like this, I always run it through a few questions.

A) How difficult would this feature be to implement?
B) Is there a different approach that would solve the same problems, yet be easier to implement?
C) Are there any other foreseeable problems that this would introduce that are similar to the reasons for implementing it?

Ultimately I feel like while Trosis' original points:are valid, I think that his suggested change is way too difficult to implement, and on top of that doesn't provide a solution to most of the problems that it's supposed to solve. I also think there are other much simpler approaches that would solve most of those problems better.

The two facts that most PvP and tribunal warfare consists of spam-killing NPCs and/or looking for cheap ganks are the worst current offenders of city-based PvP in my book. The fact that the side with the greater numbers online at any given time have the upper hand is simply the nature of the game, and I'm not sure that it's worth even classifying as a "problem" because that seems to imply that people logging onto the game is a bad thing.

We've already seen in the history of SK an example of how adding in NPCs to allow for some way to "win" for a side merely led to the game losing flavor and becoming stale, and that's CRS.

I've already suggested, multiple times, approaches that would remove the spam-killing of NPCs and also provide much more safety to PCs than is currently provided. Simply put, it would involve removing all gate targets from within capital cities, making inns no-transport while placing a small bastion of true-seeing law NPCs between the inn and the nearest transport room, and equalizing all gate guards to be groups that would typically require 2-3 people to beat, being costly if not impossible to assail solo without expending a lot of resources doing so. It would also require removing bounty NPCs so that once you actually broke the gate guards of a city it really meant something, as opposed to right now where you have to roll a Harlequin if you want to have a prayer of tracking down someone in a city once you get outlawed.

The fact that there are still gate targets within 3-4 rooms of the capital city inn with no guard NPCs in between them in 2 of the 3 major cities means that even if every single one of your enemies on the who list is banished, you're still offered very little safety all in the most heavily trafficked areas of the capital cities. That's completely backwards. If someone wants to attack you while you're in a city, they should have to go through the gate to do so, giving some reasonable timeframe to prepare and respond with a defense.

I remember the days back when there were no bounty NPCs. I joined the Peacekeepers and even led them on my first character, and I saw a lot more engaging PK back then than I do now, because now bounty NPCs place you at such a ridiculous disadvantage when attacking that most people don't view it as worth attacking a city unless you grossly outnumber your enemy.

I'd push this a little further, while we're brainstorming great ideas that will never get implemented.

To encourage pk:

(1) First make ALL non-wilderness areas no-transport in their entirety. It would be a sweeping change but it wouldn't be a tragic one like the "recall costs xp" change. It would seriously encourage tactical thinking and PK because if you isolated your enemies outside of the wilderness you could block them off at choke points without them having the completely assured escape of recall/teleport/gate. Newbs would get got a little more, probably, but they get got a lot as is. More importantly, loaded up veterans, when confronted by a newb gank squad doing a smart job of blocking, would have a MUCH greater chance of falling. This change would incentivize actual area knowledge, which is something that is very unimportant in SK compared to other tactical games of the same genre, in large part because of the prevalence of magical transportation.

(2) Did I say first before? Sorry, first, remove bounty NPCs. They are awful for many well documented reasons. Whatever their purpose they fail at it, whether that purpose is protecting newbs by making cities safe, encouraging meaningful PK, evening out odds for defenders, whatever. Bounty NPCs suck. Farming gold to fund them sucks. Fighting with and against them sucks. I would 100% of the time as a defender rather have an empty bank account, because with a full one my enemies don't want to come and certainly if they do come won't stick around once I start moving. There was a log Syn made where she ordered around a ton of law NPCs in Sith'a'niel on a warlock she played a few years back, and that's what city defense should look like - active manipulation of stationary non-respawning law NPCs. Bounty NPCs are awful!

(3) Edoras' gate guard idea is good and would need implementing if the above two were considered. As he says it would make cities much safer than they are currently. I'm not sure I love the idea of making them powerful enough to take 2-3 people to defeat, I'd almost just be happier with them being super beefy but low DPS NPCs that give the people inside the city time to organize or move around without actually being a real bar to a solo invader pushing through. The one caveat I'd add is that these NPCs need to be on a very long respawn timer, to encourage raiding.

So you would have to head outside of a city to gate.

And you also cant recall or quaff inside the city?

Let's look at the great pk that never happened last night.
MC met up, expecting an attack since there were quite a few lighties logged.
We couldn't go to Exile to hunt, because lol bounty hunters.
The lighties never showed up to fight in Menegroth, even though they have no current crimes, because lol Taran. So with all thes pk-able pc's online, nothing happened.

So if trib wars were real, darkies could have started hitting up territories. If lighties come to defend? Great! Pvp! If anyone does, go to dueling guild. Doesn't matter. Had Pk.

If they don't come to defend, then we cap the territory. We cap all of taslamar's? Then darkies can hunt exile.

How would that be a bad thing. Last night's "no pk stand off" was boring af.

Correct. Not a hassle at all in terms of adventuring, especially if gate targets get moved around to be in the wilderness outside major areas - just walk 10-20 rooms outside of the city and you're good to go. Really though, walking is not that big of a hassle. SK's wilderness just isn't that big, and that's a good thing.

Some factors to consider regarding sweeping changes such as prohibiting magical transportation and recall in non-wilderness zones:

- Dark auras are affected more than light auras because dark auras would lose the ability to set up rift networks in cities;
- Dark auras are also affected more because one of the major benefits of the curse spell becomes devalued;
- Classes capable of etherealform become more powerful, since that can still be used as a means of escape in a lot of situations where word of recall is currently used;
- All room-affecting cabal abilities go way up in value, some to the point of being entirely OP, both for stealth and for trapping people;
- A certain cabal ability that allows for disguise also goes way up in relative value if gate shortcuts aren't possible;
- Spending time in the wilderness as opposed to gathering in cities would be further incentivized;
- PvP confrontations ultimately become less frequent because they are harder and more dangerous to initiate.

If you do away with the no-recall component, some of that gets solved. If you just make it so that you cannot open gates and rifts to targets in non-wilderness rooms but can still make gates and rifts out, some of the dark vs. light imbalance in the proposal is rectified, but then that just starts to make the magical laws that govern gating/rifting too complicated.

i'd rather deal with bounty hunters.

this system would make it way too safe inside of a city.