UO Second Age

PKs who return your gold are not doing you a favor. The most important virtue of this, aside from though related to the freedom to do what you want, is the existence of genuine danger. With such an element, you not only get a rush from escaping, failing to escape, or standing up to such danger, but you also lose a lot of the interesting aspects of making friends whose friendship matters and enemies whose enmity matters. The game is all the better for PKs, griefers (within reason), thieves, etc.!

Consider, for example, Brules. Brules, after being rejected from cA, went on to join $$$ which soon had its famous battle with cA. Brules, to this day, keeps a signature image that recalls that battle. No doubt, Brules dislikes cA, but I would still argue that we've made his UOSA experience better paradoxically by making it worst. When he looks back to his days on UOSA, he'll remember all the defeats and victories he had with us. He won't remember his 5000th trip to the elder gazers. No doubt he won't look on all of it and suddenly like us. But the events themselves will be some of the best gaming he ever had!

So, in sum, be sure to thank your local thief, PK, etc. for helping make UOSA great.

I value both kinds of interactions, and I think you're both doing us a favor
variety is the spice of life.

chumbucket wrote:PKs who return your gold are not doing you a favor. The most important virtue of this, aside from though related to the freedom to do what you want, is the existence of genuine danger. With such an element, you not only get a rush from escaping, failing to escape, or standing up to such danger, but you also lose a lot of the interesting aspects of making friends whose friendship matters and enemies whose enmity matters. The game is all the better for PKs, griefers (within reason), thieves, etc.!

Consider, for example, Brules. Brules, after being rejected from cA, went on to join $$$ which soon had its famous battle with cA. Brules, to this day, keeps a signature image that recalls that battle. No doubt, Brules dislikes cA, but I would still argue that we've made his UOSA experience better paradoxically by making it worst. When he looks back to his days on UOSA, he'll remember all the defeats and victories he had with us. He won't remember his 5000th trip to the elder gazers. No doubt he won't look on all of it and suddenly like us. But the events themselves will be some of the best gaming he ever had!

So, in sum, be sure to thank your local thief, PK, etc. for helping make UOSA great.

I agree completely. It's the emotional charge which can make gaming memorable. Trammel is the death of the soul.

Niceness? Is that what you think it was? You just weren't properly packaged in order to be PKed for REAL.

Kraanan wrote:It's the emotional charge which can make gaming memorable. Trammel is the death of the soul.

Trammel is when you don't have a choice, though, right?

Trammel is the most boring because there is no freedom for players to act as enemies. Everyone is blue.

In a free-er world, but a heartless and polarized one, every red is a silent slaughterous dry looting death cannon. So is every blue that has an opportunity to get away with it - say, if they find a grey or a thief, or they can take the counts. This is much less boring because now you have enemies to interact with, and you can profit or lose by those interactions, which provides a source of that emotional charge you're talking about.

In a truly free - and, consequentially, diverse - world, anyone can act any way. Desire for wealth and thrills act as motive forces for people to PK and steal and loot houses. Guilt acts as a motive force for people to return things when they feel they've taken too much from the wrong person. Empathy acts as a motive force for people to leave behind recall materials after a kill or maybe even offer a rez. The UO equivalent of bloodlust, whatever it is, acts as a motive force for people to quest for tears.

I would rather play in a universe that is the product of all the countless complex human motive forces than a universe that is the product of a general encouragement for PKs to be as cruel as possible and for thieves to have no consciences. Luckily for me and my preferences, UO happens to be a universe that is primarily the product of human motive forces, a trait which can't be changed by any amount of general encouragement. And those forces do reliably produce, among many other things, cruel PKs and thieves who have no consciences.

Speaking specifically about interactions between strangers, I have encountered no less greed or bloodlust while playing this shard than I remember from back in the day, but I have encountered more empathy and thrill-seeking than I expected from other players, and more guilt, in small instances, than I expected from myself. That observation was what prompted me to post this thread. My own personal guess as to what is happening is twofold: 1) there is a higher average player age for this game in 2012 than in 1999, and 2) for those of us who like this ruleset, this one moderately populated server is literally the last place left on earth to play a good game of UO, and most of us are therefore aware that we are, to some extent, stuck with each other and all in this boat together, whether we like it or not.

Since my short version apparently read as "I think PKs are nice to people now, how cool."

Brymstone666 wrote:You just weren't properly packaged in order to be PKed for REAL.

Maybe I'll have something better next time. Come get me.

kuki wrote:In a free-er world, but a heartless and polarized one, every red is a silent slaughterous dry looting death cannon. So is every blue that has an opportunity to get away with it - say, if they find a grey or a thief , or they can take the counts.

Did you just say thief? I like to smash thieves with big hammers of Justice.