Originally Posted By: [LoD
Blazzen]I found the article in the post above linked in this article:
http://massively.joystiq.com/2014/01/17/...-pvp/#continued

I didn't play SWG at all. After reading this article I assume that there was a PVP flag that you could toggle on/off. If you're a republic player that attacks a imperial NPC during a quest, you get flagged for PVP for 10-15 minutes.

The problem with a system like this is that it's more of a RESTRICTION than a rule. People can choose to leave their PVP flag off and I am RESTRICTED from attacking them.

I think a better way (not perfect) is the whole blue/red system where everyone is blue until they kill enough people to become grey. If you commit a "red" action, you become "grey" for 10-15 minutes which means blues can kill you without consequence. This has it's flaws of course but is still better than a PVP on/off toggle that is more of a restriction than a rule.

One idea to counteract the whole blue jumps in front of another blue while fighting to turn him grey would be to have the first hit from a blue vs. another blue not turn him "grey". I'm sure it would be abused by having 10 guys hit the same guy all at once to kill him, but someone is going to get the kill shot and take an alignment hit for it. You could also put in place a system like Mortal Online had that once you are killed, anyone that did damage to you in the last few minutes you are given the option to assign an alignment hit to them as well. This of course can be exploited also by blue naked people who will jump in front of you, take damage, suicide, then assign an alignment penalty to you.

No real solid answer to an alignment system in a game with FPS style aiming at least. Tab target would be pretty easy.


What you're describing is pretty much what UO did. You would flag grey when you attacked a blue player (or stole from them). At that point, you could be attacked/killed with no consequence. Many players (myself included) would flag grey on purpose and then walk into town so people would attack me. The general idea was that you'd be outnumbered badly, but if you were smart, you could run and bait a player or 2 far enough away from their buddies to kill them. You could flag grey by healing a red player, which is what we most often did. We'd have the reds hanging out outside town, heal them, turn grey, run inside the city and draw out a crowd of attackers and then engage them with the reds. The good old bait tactic, still alive and well in MMO's today. smile

UO also had long term and short term murder counts. Short term was for stat loss and long term was for being red. I actually enjoyed stat loss penalty because it made you that much more choosy about your battles and you wanna talk about an adrenaline rush? How about running from a group that outnumbers you 3 to 1 or more and knowing if you die, your toon is basically toast and you'll have to re-roll. Also, stat loss only last 8 hours per murder count. So if you logged your dude in all day while you went to work, you'd tick off a stat loss murder count or 2 per day.