I'm basing this argument on my experience from MO. This is not regarding playermade towns with walls btw
This is just my opinion from my experience and I'm not trying to state this as facts. I am happy to change opinion based on other people thoughts.
I think many would call me a "carebear" by heart since I never really embraced the full PK playstyle and always tried to fight it. Sometimes I feel I am in the miniority here hehe
I call you heathen. You're a majority.
Anyway...
I believe that when players have no restrictions regarding a flagging system you will more often be killed when meeting an unknown player. However, this might change with a healthy population and a new start - but I could imagine this would change over time and become more similar to what I experienced in MO1.
I don't have a feeling on this one way or the other. The risk calculation of killing someone in a reputation based system is more complicated. It might happen more. It might happen less. Some may see an easy kill as risk free, however, I don't think those players would last long on their own. A few encounters that lead to them being mercilessly driven from their area are powerful instructions.
I do not believe that a controlling guild would be efficient enough to garanti safety for crafters, solo players, new players, traders etc. for the full duration of a day without these players being at risk most of the time. Lets call this group "casuals"
Guarding a town requires a lot of work -like many already stated in this thread regarding the A-PK playstyle - and only a small margin of mistakes are allowed before these players would move on. I could imagine they would try to find a more secure place (like Tindrem if it still had guards), a player city with walls, some would adapt and change playstyle or join the controlling guild, but i believe many would quit.
A controlling group that can't rely on guards for their own weaknesses and weakest members would inevitably desire numbers, especially to combat rival groups. That creates a demand for players in the region to join rather than fight. That leads groups to develop more "fair" practices towards strangers. I think this is demonstrated in the Alpha. The assumption is you're cool, until you show otherwise. It is precisely because of guards that guilds can afford to be reckless with their justice, they don't really "need" numbers unless they are in a war or to accomplish some other task.
(Groups of people tend to populate in sizes that match the task that needs to get done. If the task is protection and safety, we can assume that if there is no system impediment, the size would grow to meet that need. In other words, I would expect much larger guilds, or at least larger coalitions of guilds that form to meet safety requirements in a region. This is also consistent with MO1, where we had 200 guilds on a server of 300 people.)
What MO1 taught me is that the typical player is always looking for the easiest way to achieve their goal.
No argument there. Heathens are always looking for the easiest path.
- The people who want to kill other players for loot are not looking for a fair fight or a fair chance to kill their target. They want to minimize the risk of getting killed themself. So they visit these towns when they know its not guarded. Or they would make a new playstyle out of harassing the town while being hunted down by the guild (like we see with thieves)
Agreed.
- Same goes for the raid group who is looking for a fight. "Let's visit this town and kill all the players inside and maybe that will force the controlling guild to react so we can get some PvP". This is a better tactic than to wait outside of the town and just hope the controlling guild will respond.
Agreed.
- The casuals will strife to find relative safety so they can do their activity in peace and take the nessesary risk when they want to (aka leaving the town). If they need to make a ton of preperation before doing an activity in town just to minimize the risk, this game will quickly become boring.
I'm might be missing some context here. I think you're saying that it will be impossible for guilds and groups of residents to create a relatively safe environment. Again, I think groups and guilds grow to the sizes needed, so I don't think that's the case. Key being relative safety. One way to think of this is that if the perimeter killers begin to outnumber the residents, the town basically has new leadership, the casuals switch sides, and there is a return to equilibrium. A group that remains small and murders everyone will not be able to hold the town, without guards and horrible flag mechanics. Ask any guild that attempted to keep the peace, the flag system worked against them. Guards worked against them.
Also, we agree that casuals will go to the safest towns possible. This is part of what I mean by player regions will compete for the best rules and justice. There is no competition for casuals when every town with guards is roughly equal.
When I visited the unguarded towns in MO1 they were ghosttowns. I could imagine people using scout character before logging into their crafters so they didnt end up getting killed with valuables on them. Now we only have one character and this would result in that you always need to completely empty your character before logging out. If the town you're living is dominated by a player or group killing everyone - and the controlling guild is not there -, you cannot do the usual stuff and is kinda "force" to leave the game for now. The same argument can be seen with the "dark" nights atm
Unfortunately, unguarded towns in MO1 say very little about a game with guards and flags at default zero. The baseline of safety was a guarded town. That is the relative comparison no matter where you went in Nave. Casuals, as you pointed out, will stay in safer zones. That creates a selection bias for killers and risk takers in lawless regions that isn't a sustainable economy and not a reflection of a general populace.
I think you're again pointing at another reason why we would see large sustaining guilds. There would be a need for numbers and people to watch your back rather than a macro. The one character thing is pretty cool, lots of unexpected things will happen.
So to sum up:
I believe people are always looking to minimize the risk of losing their stuff. This creates a lot of complex systems and these systems are not always for the casual player. To learn this complex system you need to have experience and will often fail multiply times as the "enemy" will evolve too.
There needs to be some kind of "safezone" for the casual players where they can relax. I am not talking about a 100% secure safezone but I do not believe that playermade systems can provide enough safety for the greater good of the game.
To be clear, I think very limited and expensive guards that align with controlling guilds, and some sort of regional designation for people that are perpetually naughty are fine. They just shouldn't be default. It should be something a guild works to establish and maintain to supplement their reign, not replace it. If they are doing a good job, residents will support it. If not, they shouldn't last long.
As far as I know, they are going through with Haven. A horrible waste, but regardless, that's a safezone. The main game doesn't need any default safezones. Any system they create will be gamed and exploited to make things worse rather than better. In the loading screen the game used to instruct players to get to know the controlling guilds in their region to ensure access. That's good advice in a game without flags and default guards with a silly justice program. In MO 1, a naked blue could endlessly harass people and force murder counts that led the protecting guild to become exiled from the guardzone. That's an obvious issue that can't be avoided.
