Crime and Punishment

One of my issues with most PvP in Online RPGs is the concept of The Gank. In short it is when the attacker has such overwhelming odds that the victim has no chance of winning. In addition, most of the time the Gankers suffer no retribution for their actions. Effectively this is similar to assault and battery in the real world. It is a criminal action with in the context of the game.

Now to be a bit clear, there are two basic types of Gank.

First, there is the Exploit Gank. This is doing something outside the intention of the game design in order to hinder the victim from responding. In Ultima Online you could set up a trap such that the victim would have to load in 1000's of objects to his client thus freezing them in place. During that forced lag, the ganker attacks the victim.

On the other end is the fairly general Ambush Gank. Either a lone powerful character is out sniping victims, or a gang is out terrorizing people, it is all about the same. You over power the opponent so much that it is no challenge at all. This also include those who wait and watch one group of people fight then go in and attack the winners while they are still damaged and weakened.

There is the hybrid Spwan/Load-in Gank. This is similar but not as bad as the exploit gank. The idea here is that there is time between when your character loads in to a new area that the character is there but your client is not ready to respond. From a design perspective, all that is needed is some level of immunity timer to cover that difference. This does not prevent the Ambush Gank, the victim is at least in control of his character before the attack begins. This type of ganking may or may not be an exploit depending on what the developers have done to allow the victim time to respond.

Exploits need to be addressed by the developers themselves to limit the ability to cause such lagging by the players and to punish via account suspension and removal any and all perpetrators of this activity. Using tactics outside the scope of the game world should be punished out side the game world.

Non-exploit ganking should be allowed to happen with in the game to a certain extent. A weaker character or potential victim should be able to have a few options to avoid or run away. In the case of a Spawn camp, the victim should have a window of opportunity to get away before the attackers close in. This should not be guaranteed, but still possible.

But what about in-game consequences for ganking?

Ultima Online had a feature that if you attacked and killed too many people you would be flagged as a murderer. EVE has it that you loose security status and eventually hunted out of some areas of the game. The basic idea is that the more "criminal" you become the more Kill on sight you become in NPC controlled areas.

There are two flaws with this. Death in most games is really just a minor annoyance. Anything that you would lose is replace in a matter of some time. The "good" criminals know how to hedge their losses such that the recovery time is negligible. Death is all the same in most games. So being KoS or even Hunted is just a mild annoyance. To be a punishment, the death as a result of being a criminal has to be more severe than a normal death in the game.

The other flaw is that it punishes the character and not the player. It is still very easy for the player to create another character to take care of any business in areas that the flagged character can not get to. So aside from another minor inconvenience, there isn't any lasting limitations. Any punishment placed on the character is bypassed by the player changing characters. There is very little stopping on character having a host of alts terrorizing the world but never enough by any one of them to get serious in-game sanctions.

In order to get around this, developers and players have to give up the idea of independent alts on an account. There are things that you share among all your characters. For example, you have a global player/account based criminal record. On the flip side you should be freely able to move goods and items between your characters. This will not stop multi-account players, but at least they have to pay something extra.