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Notoriety
Note from the editor: The Notoriety System has been replaced by the Reputation
System. For old times sake, you can read about the now defunct Notoriety System
below.
Notoriety is OSI's attempt to curb anti-social behavior in Ultima Online. Basically,
if you do bad things, it goes down. If you do good things it goes up. Or at
least that was the plan... In reality, you can do very noble things and be punished.
You can also do very evil things and be ignored (and in some cases, even rewarded).
And to top it all off, the whole system had major bugs and loopholes that make
exploitation simple for even novice game players.
Let's look at some examples of the system in action. First, noble deeds that
are punished:
- A Great Lord gets bored and attacks a member of a adventuring party. The
other members being loyal to their friend attack the now Noble Lord. Each
and every person drops two ranks in the notoriety system for DEFENDING a player
against a player-killer.
- A player is killed by a monster. His partner stands over the corpse to guard
the equipment. A looter runs up and starts grabbing stuff. The partner does
the right thing and attacks the looter to save his partners stuff. Unfortunately,
the looter was neutral and so the attacker is penalized.
- A "honorable" rogue steals from a player in the wilderness. He
runs off trying to beat the criminal flag. The victim gives chase and tries
to attack the player, but double clicking a moving target is next to impossible
(which makes sense since in reality, hitting a moving target is incredibly
difficult). After several minutes, the rogue becomes to fatigued to move and
the victim attacks him. Unfortunately, the criminal flag is reset and the
victim is penalized.
- A known murderer is tracked down by a group of players. The murderer is
nuetral because he does a good job exploiting the notoriety system. The PK-hunters
all become dishonorable for killing the killer. They also become the targets
of every self-righteous PK in the game.
Now, a couple examples of evil deeds that are ignored
- A player traps another player into an area with no escape. He demands the
player hand over his gold or die. The player is greatly outmatched and doesn't
want to die, so he does. The system sees the victim as voluntarily handing
over his gold, so the highwayman goes unmarked.
- A wizard comes upon a fighter battling an ogre. He quickly puts up energy
fields to block the fighers escape. He then casts reactive armor and healing
on the ogre. This allows the ogre to kill the player. Because energy field
and healing are seen as non-offensive spells, the mage gets away with murder.
- A player suprises a group of fighters by charging into their midst in combat
mode and using the bow action or lumberjacking skill to feint a strike. The
members of the party all attack him and he is now free to kill them at will.
- A player runs into a house that is not his when the door is opened. He immediately
starts looting the chests. The owner of the house checks his paperdoll and
sees he is honorable. He cannot defend his property from the thief without
penalizing himself.
These are all things that happen in the game fairly often. The bottom four
are all tricks I use myself very successfully (feel free to copy them--chaos
is good for business). They also point out something that should never happen.
The game system interferes with the game play. People should not worry about
what the computer thinks of their actions, they should do what they feel is
right or wrong. However, because notoriety has such a major impact on a few
details (or a lot of details if the latest proposed changes come to pass), every
player considers what the system will do rather than what they think is right
or wrong.
The final nail in the coffin of the notoriety system should be the reality
of the game. Rogues are running rampart in the cities, player-killers are wiping
out fifty to sixty players at a time, and no one even remotely trusts other
people (the last one is a major plus in my book--vigilantes groups have to trust
each other--no trust--no one hunting me down). Obviously, the system ain't cuttin'
it.
OSI is now proposing to give this flawed and abused system the ability to do
real damage to players. This scares me, and I am one of the few players who
know how to maintain my reputation (even though it is getting more and more
tedious and time consuming). Even if the system had zero bugs (which it doesn't),
and could track all possible human actions (which it can't), and was at least
limiting some of the anti-social behavior of players (which it hasn't), giving
it the kind of teeth OSI has proposed would seriously damage the "fun value"
of the game for EVERYONE.
The first thing OSI has proposed was stat loss when people choose to play as
a ghost instead of instant resurrection. If this is the case, why have two options?
Option A: I lose my equipment and stats. Option B: I lost stats. Stats take
forever to rebuild, so the players don't bother, they get frustrated and quit.
Players also die a lot due to things like lag, getting caught in brambles they
can't see while fleeing, the insta-kill drakes, and the homicidal guards. This
means that players will prolly lose stats at least as fast as they gain them.
And since you lose the most from your best stats and skills, with long term
implementation, this will push everyone to mediocrity.
Currently, when I die I choose to play as a ghost. Most experienced players
do as well. It's the simple fact that replacing equipment is not as tedious
and time consuming as replacing skills and stats (although visiting half the
blacksmith's in Sosaria to find all the pieces of plate armor in black is very
time consuming). It also costs me about 2000 gold in equipment, reagents, and
loot when I die (what can I say, I have expensive tastes). This to me seems
like a good reason not to be killed (plus the fact that I just plain hate for
my character to die). It's not necessary to add any more penalties to death.
The next major OSI suggestion was great lords keep everything when they die
(except stats), and dread lords lose everything. At first glance, most players
think great, stick it to the bad guys. Unfortunately, the bad guys will all
be great lords. After all, the majority of them are powergamers and know more
about how the notoriety system works than people who just play. (and if they
don't, I'll teach every last one of them who is willing to at least consider
role-playing rather than just mindless killing everything that moves). This
means the already way powerful PK's won't even have to pause to re-equip themselves,
just resurrect and go to work. (I won't even mention how completely unrealistic
the idea of ghosts tromping around with their full backpacks on is...)
Finally, and worst of all, evil players can only resurrect at the chaos shrine,
their mage buddies, or evil NPC healers. This one will effectively ban player
killing within a week of implementation. Here's how:
- Anti-PK guilds start camping at chaos shrine and kill everyone who resurrects
their. After all, killing bad guys is one way to boost your notoriety
- Evil NPC healers last all of 30 seconds currently. This will get even shorter
as good players make it a point to hunt them down instead of just killing
them when they run into them.
- Evil characters will disappear in the frustration of being killed constantly
by self-righteous PK's
- Without evil characters around, people will have only other good players
to kill, and with the guaranteed destruction of any evil character, no one
will risk attacking anyone because of the notoriety hit.
- Player killing is gone for good. UO becomes Furcadia. Everyone moves on
to the other online CRPG's.
The one thing I will say is that without teeth, notoriety cannot accomplish
its goal of reducing anti-social behavior. Unfortunately, the system can't properly
track what is and is not anti-social behavior, so giving it teeth will do a
whole lot more harm than good.
So what will work to meet OSI's goal? Well, to answer that, you need to look
at why players kill each other, how to pacify as many players as possible, and
how to keep the few hard-core murderers and rogues from taking over.
Players kill each other for a variety of reasons ranging from boredom to wealth.
I have broken down PK's into groups based on their motivation:
- Opportunity PK's. Player X sees a neophyte tailor in a full suit of bone
armor. Player X kills the tailor and takes the armor since he has a much better
character but not as nice of eqiupment.
- Bored PK's. Player X gets tired of waiting for monsters to respawn so he
starts killing the most plentifiul targets around, other players.
- Diabolophiles. The stereotypical PK who kills purely for the fun of pissing
off his victims.
- Powergamer PKs. Currently, the fastest way to build skills and make money
is to kill other people and take their stuff.
- Role-player PKs. The one group of PK's OSI actually wants around. These
people actually add to the whole gaming experience.
Now, there are some very simple fixes to most of these groups:
- Opportunity PK's. Eliminate titles. If Player X doesn't know the guy walking
down the road is a neophyte tailor, he isn't sure he can take him. And after
getting bar-b-qued by a few adept mages, he's prolly going to seriously considerer
a career change.
- Bored PK's. Fix the spawn problem. Like the first one, OSI is promising
this change. Combined with the first, this will make about 20-30 percent of
current PK's return to the boring, goody-two-shoes path.
- Diablophiles. Let the true nobles and do-gooders attack them without fear
of the notoriety system doing them in. Hell, I've even killed a bunch of these
annoying fools. After all, they aren't that bright, and the don't have a whole
lot of friends...
- Powergamer PKs. Time will balance this group out. Plus, if you put together
a very good system of REWARDS for being good (not punishments
for being bad), you'll encourage a number of them to play nice.
I put together my virtue system
as an idea of a good system of rewards.
- Role-players PK's. These people make the game fun. And even if the rewards
for being nice are better than the rewards for being evil, they will still
be around because they are willing to play a character who will never be the
absolutely most powerful around (like Xavori, his skills are way too generalized
to ever be the most powerful anything in the game, but he's a whole lot of
fun to play with because he's so flexible)
Notice how tracking actions or forcing virtues down peoples throats never comes
up in any of these ideas. Also, if you think about it, they all make sense and
don't take anything away from people's ability to choose how they play. Yes,
PK's and other anti-social types will still be around, but not in the numbers
they are now. In fact, a solid reward system for good behavior will do more
to reduce the number of theives, murderers, and other anti-social types than
any other system OSI could ever dream of.
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