I've never liked karmic curses and always enjoyed the good old days of pvp on prime, when stuff was dangerous and people ran around the roads fighting each other! So here's a simple idea for turning karma into a buffs-only thing which I expect would bring that back .

1. Take out curses, making karma blessings only.
2. Increase karma loss for killing someone on prime.
3. Further increase karma loss if the person you killed has significantly less might than you.
4. Decrease base cost to get a karma blessing.
5. Have the cost to get a blessing increase based on the size of your suspect list (similar to how the cost to curse/lift curse increases).
6. Have people who have no one on their suspect list generate karma at a small rate, because they have good karma.

The goal of these factors would be to have people who don't do prime PvP find themselves with an easy time getting 2-3 blessings, while those who do kill some people on prime might have one blessing, and those who kill a lot of people on prime would rarely have any blessings.

From there, a possible change #7. which I always thought should be in the original Avenger system, is if someone gets a large enough suspect list, the avenger stops protecting them entirely and they become open PK on prime.

Who uses curses?

And who has a hard time maintaining three blessings? If I generated free karma, even as little as 5% an hour, and could get blessings for 20% a pop, I'd put all nine up for combat events. If anything, I think it's a bigger shame that some of the blessings are bad and there's no reason for me to try to see if I could generate 64-81% karma an hour.

1. You want more prime PK.
2. To accomplish this, you want to increase the karma penalty for killing on prime.
3. You want karma blessing costs to increase based on your suspect list.
4. By your own logic, this means that people who kill on Prime a lot (which you want) will hardly have any karma blessings.

So wait... what was the point of this? You're turning karma only into buffs to encourage Prime PK while systematically excluding them from the very idea that you're trying to encourage.

Although, since it's been mentioned, I don't disagree with an excessive suspect list giving someone an unfortunate line in their honours and making them open PK on Prime in lieu of automatic vengeance.

Well, your ability to generate karma and maintain blessings does scale a lot based on the strength of your character. I guess a level 100 person doesn't have any trouble maintaining 3 blessings, but my main has difficulty maintaining more than 1 and my alt is rarely blessed to begin with.

Ideally, I would even out karma gain so that stronger characters don't gain it more quickly, but that would require some extensive changes.

My level 70 alt pulled 70% in about an hour.

EDIT: And has an esteem stockpile.

Does aetherhunting give karma or are you doing quests? I've never gotten near that much karma per hour while bashing or influencing.

That 70% was almost purely questing. (EDIT: But the sort of "questing" that is actually bashing, but with a turn in.) I don't know how sustainable that rate is. I had to stop because I was coming up on 1000 mob kills and want to save that for when I have time for a good ol' Lusty marathon.

I think people that want to pk on prime should be able to make themselves not protected by avenger by their own will and not suspect list and can only get back protected by avenger after a set amount of time though I've said this before.

That makes sense too Prime is pretty suited to PK flags.

I foresee most people who participate getting jumped by hordes (especially if implemented as written, when any of the Avenger-protected people can join in on the zerg), complaining about getting zerged, and then this mechanic going on Shamarah's list of unused mechanics.

lrn2fite so you can lrn2notbeazergnoob

Doesn't matter, the zerg is going to happen. From every org.

I don't ask for a zerg to help me.

Like I said, doesn't matter. It happens, for every org. People will just get beat on by zergs until they decide not to use the flag.

..what

The asymmetrical design of the smiley face. It looked fuunnnyyy

Bad ideas.
These aren't always avoidable situations (especially 3).