Achaea never had the public part of the system, just a private version that showed how many player kills you had, how many denizen kills, and how many deaths (to players/denizens/misadventure).

In response to Estarra - Celina put it beautifully.

If IRE makes you put something like this in, they should finish it first AND it should be announced as an IRE-wide thing with some greater purpose.

Helping novices reincarnate ends up on my kill list forever.

Griefer.

I've only skimmed this thread so apologies if this has already been addressed, but wouldn't rankings based on some kind of ELO system be the best way to discourage people farming lowbies and non-coms?

What's ELO?

Yeah sorry I was thinking of FIDE when I capitalized it, it should correctly be "Elo" rating. Shiri linked the wiki page which summarizes it well enough. Essentially it provides diminishing returns for beating weaker opponents.

Oh, that'd be cool then. I thought it was some veiled reference to Elostian.

So if I understand it right, someone like Jozen with a lot of kills/points would get fewer points from killing me, who has no kills, versus killing someone like Thoros, who also has many kills/points? And if I, with practically zero points, were to kill Jozen, I'd get a huge boost in score?

It's not a bad thought, but given the many factors that the mathematics can't take into account, I'd rather we steered clear of making it a score and kept it as an informative tally.

For much the same reason, I don't want experience rankings to weight player level divided by time spent playing, credit investment and class advantages to give a relative score of how hard someone has worked to reach their level - because most of that is very subjective - and instead just report level information objectively. Player or mobile kill numbers are just objective observations, in themselves they aren't a score to beat any more than the number of people on your victim list or the depth of your administrative credibility level - if players are using it as an excuse to farm newbies, that's a problem with the players and anti-griefer measures, it's not inevitable that a kill count would force them to do it.

That's where you're wrong (mostly from a lack of experience with the playerbase, having been away for a while).

Take the following:
1) Competitive players who like to feel that they are winning at something, and
2) A rankings system.

I think the outcome is pretty inevitable. Hence this thread, even before it became an issue. And become an issue it did.

I understand what you're saying, but at what point do the players killing lowbies take personal responsibility for their actions?

I'd suggest that there is just as much incentive during an in-game war to slaughter newbies/lowbies of an opposing org, backed by roleplay, the competitiveness of winning your war and driving away new defenders. That's griefer behaviour that can easily be blamed on the incentives of the system, but surely you would concede that removing the ability for nations to engage in war would not even be considered in order to remove the temptation.

The correct answer here is "never". They never do.

And, given current game environment, their leaders aren't going to take responsibility either. You "need" the fighters to compete with the Big Bad Glomdoring!

Further, griefers can and have done as you've suggested, but they've never actually gotten specific incentive prior to this: That incentive being seeing their name up at the top of a rankings list. They -usually- (though not always) get tired of it after an hour or so. When this wasn't happening, it spawned Estarra changing the combat system for off-Plane raids.

In that case, wouldn't it be ideal to allow some time for the novelty to wear off and give our poor coders a chance to tweak the system so that it is as unobtrusive and unrewarding as possible, and only then evaluate the merits and problems of the system?

I just don't think the hysteria about excessive griefing and being forced into PK because there's now a temporary record of each death somewhere (which has always been possible through the creative use of deathsight and the public newsboards anyway) is very rational.

So, the ideal answer is to just watch novices and lowbies get mowed down to suit the ego of competitive players?

That doesn't sound ideal to me, tbh. It actually sounds rather destructive to the game's health.

There's also no doubt that this is creating more PK than there was prior to it. It is incentive. There is no way to deny that-- at least, not legitimately.

So, no, the ideal thing to do would be to address the issue it's created!

That's about the size of it. If you google you'll find plenty of discussion of the theory behind it, but it's an established system that's used in a lot of competitive games. There are some weaknesses with the system of course, but it's possible to minimise a lot of these with some tweaking of the maths. I'm not suggesting it's a perfect solution, but I do think it would act as a disincentive to those who would prey on easy targets just to inflate their rating.

You could even get fancier. You could have each player have a 'value' based on their level and how many kills they've had in the past 30 days (or whatever). The value could be determined not only on what your kill score is but on who you've killed, i.e., killing low level/noncombatants would increase your value. In other words, if you kill newbies/lowbies/noncombatants, your value could go up, making you a more attractive target. Further, your kill score could actually go DOWN if you kill newbies/lowbies/noncombatants, making it even more desirable to avoid killing those.

• Noncombatant = no PK in the past 30 days: -5 to kill score, +5 to value
• Newbie/lowbie = below level 20: -10 to kill score, +10 to value

Anyway, I'm sure we could come up with something but the question is if this would be worth it or if even any PK-related scoring would be acceptable to our playerbase.

I personally think that PK-related scoring (in the "real" game, not combat rankings which is just arena) is fine for people who are interested in keeping tallies, but it shouldn't be something that everyone is forced to be a part of.

If we were to consider your idea, though, I would like to request that people killed in your territory don't give you +value. And maybe dying could reduce your value.