Hello everyone!
As we all know death is waiting everywhere in Fonline. This is annoying very often, but adds to the dark atmosphere allot.
Running arround and kill everyone without reason is not very reasonable from a rpg point of view, but it is impossible to change the fact, that allot of players are doing this, at least not with apealing to their conscience, or ethics or whatever. But maybe it would be possible to reduce the problem by apealing to their egoism.
It is not reasonable, because you make yourself alot of enemies, but more important it disturbes gameflow.
It is realy annoying to be killed and robbed even of a primitive tool/knife/hatched. Also it reduces the possible loot of the PKs.
Think of pirating in the past, or gangs of robbers. Killing all the merchants, sinking the merchant ships is something a robber/pirate won´t do, because he hopes to robb them off again (with as much booty as possible).
Also some robbers disturbing the trade between towns are annoying for the towns/governments officials, but slaughering them off, will result in beeing totaly cut of from trade. And this will make them realy angy, so they will take whatever action they can to kill/get rid of the murdering robbers.
Whereas just some robbing might be ignored, because the measures to deal with them are more expensive than the harm they cause.
And this will happen as soon as real trade routes and carravans are implemented in the game.
Killing caravans and slaughering everyone is a measure of WAR, when you realy want wo ruin a town/state.
Just robbing them out will bring the robber more personal profit and will also be less risky.
As stealing is possible, why not introduce a new action called robbing? (you don´t need to skill this),
it´s just an option to say: Give me everything valuable you have, or die.
If the robbed player succumbs to this, he is stripped of caps, armor, weapons, stimpacks, whatever valuable,
but he is not stripped of basic tools for crafting (so he can be robbed soon again).
Also the robber gets some XP for robbing the other player, but only when he leaves the screen without killing the player.
The ammount of XP should be higher than the one for killing him.
Also it should add time to a robbing cooldown counter to prevent this skill from beeing exploited.
Maybe, to deal with the notorious PKs, it would be a good idea to make shovels, hatchets, etc. unlootable (at least to the ammount of 1 piece each),
and be left to the player, even if he dies.
Maybe you could even make robber some career option (like slaver).
I´m sure a lot of new players leave Fonline because they are killed so often and have to start again without everything.
And this realy harms the whole game community.