People are also widely misquoting/misremembering things Henrik has said and are being willfully ignorant of SV’s stated intentions for the game.
Henrik specifically said this year (in Discord) that the goal for the penalty system is that most people will not kill blue players, he hasn’t been hiding anything. That should tell you all you need to know about what direction they’re trying to go with MO2. Think about how much work they’re putting into PvE, how they’re prioritizing safety and security in many more systems, how Henrik said that PvP’s been built up a lot in MO1 and while they do plan to still work on it that they want to focus a lot more on PvE elements this time.
Even way back when MO1 was first released we can find interviews and posts where the devs aren’t saying “this is a PvP game” and even reject that title and say “this is a game where you can PvP, and yes it has a lot of PvP focus, but it isn’t a ‘PvP game’.” They talked pretty consistently for all of these years about wanting a game that’s essentially a fantasy world simulator, and not just a rolling death match where PvP should be “the point” of the game and that’s it.
I’d been telling people this for years, and I didn’t just come up with that idea on my own. But people didn’t care about the vision, and understandably that really wasn’t how MO1 worked anyway—so why would they? It really was all about the PvP, why play it any other way?
Henrik has since said that MO1 was too hardcore in many ways and pushed away many more players than intended—and while they do intend to keep plenty of hardcore elements, a very basic reading level lets you understand that it means MO2 is still intended to be less hardcore, then, in the ways that scared people off.
MO1 was not a success. It specifically maintained only a population who liked it the way it was, and for those people I do feel sorry because they essentially had their “perfect game”—but it isn’t a sustainable model from all evidence. Henrik’s openly talked about struggling for money, and we only have to think back on how at one point it was quite literally 3 of them in a little office basically fighting to keep the game afloat while some people were purposefully ruining the experience of all the new players they could and laughing about it. MO2 following the same exact footsteps as MO1 would just doom it to the same fate, so of course they’re switching it up. Can we blame them for not wanting to struggle again?
Even just in MO1 alone, they did a lot of things that pointed towards this outcome. Many major changes had to do with things like adding a switch for criminal actions, or adding a “can’t attack, can’t be attacked” gold flag for new players, or creating an entire instanced island to keep new players out of the mix and allow them to learn the game, or making a trinket system where those items don’t drop (would that ever have happened in early MO1?), or creating an arena system full of extremely powerful guards to keep people from interfering, or adding more guards where people were frequently getting PK’d in some towns. SV was obviously doing what they could to protect players from the actions of other players.
Because they clearly had a vision, and they had clearly identified what was keeping them from achieving that. They never said the game was only a PvP game where PvP was the primary focus, just *a* core focus, and if anyone advertised it as a “PvP game”—It was the word-of-mouth from the players, because SV has historically rejected that statement about their game. Even just googling “Henrik Nystrom PvP” will lead you to numerous interviews where he’s saying things like there should be more to the game than PvP and how they want to support multiple communities of players and not only hardcore PvP all the way back in 2012.
People are expecting housing to allow them to ignore the rep system. Look at the years-long pattern, and Henrik’s quote on the intention for the penalties, and tell me with all honesty if you think that once it comes to their attention that people can entirely bypass the penalties they’ve put in place that they’re going to say that’s fine. I don’t see it happening. Follow the pattern, follow the quotes. Do not be shocked when they do what they say they’re going to do. That’s all I’m saying.
I think lawless zones would be great, I’d even love to see all of Herabalter be considered one, and I think maybe it’d make sense if dungeons and the areas immediately around them (except the ones in cities like the Tindrem sewers I guess) specifically lacked MCs to highlight how dangerous they are. But we cannot expect things to be as off the wall as they were in MO1 when SV has specifically said that’s what they don’t want to happen again.
