Cdls wrote:Think about the ripple effect though, maybe those 14 were tied up with other characters who now are paired with a player who is no longer interested. Those characters could then become disinterested and then the loss increases. You are killing off more than that character when you commit that act.
This, exactly. Everyone is always pining for the old days and all the conflict and politics, while ignoring that the player base would drop significantly after massacres. Nothing quite like having a character you invested months or years in dragged off to a murder room in a matter of seconds to make you take a step back and have a sudden epiphany of what a waste of time this all is.
People have talked about things like how tragedies have to be possible, I guess for realism's sake, but the fact still remains that this is a game, and people play it because they enjoy RPing their characters and becoming emotionally invested in their stories. There's nothing enjoyable about another person randomly, instantly taking that from you, any more than there is in painting a portrait or pouring out your heart in your diary one day only to have a stranger grab it from your hands and throw it in a fire. It's a sick, ugly, helplessly frustrated feeling, and most people don't play games, let alone ones as time consuming as Cantr, because they want to be made to feel that way.
Killing in this game is just not implemented in a way that makes it balanced or even interesting. There's no positive results your char couldn't get just as easily with NDS, and the negative ones are far reaching and permanent in ways that are frankly, bad for the life and atmosphere of the game as a whole. (There's a language group with only a tiny handful of characters, for instance, and I know of a character who very casually murdered one, which just leaves me going...wtf? WHY, and what was the point except to potentially cause the loss of half of an entire language group?)
In the past I've killed before, only rarely, and only when the other char completely refused to cooperate or accept any other alternatives, or was obviously a sleeper. With my current account I've only killed one, and even then it was a case of the victim's player clicking the button themselves, which I take to mean losing the char was the preferred outcome for them.
But Cdls, I feel it would be helpful if you defined 'scouting areas' and how the PD even determines that? Because obviously most players in the EZ have multiple characters spread across a good chunk of Treefeather and Cantr. Is the rule then that they can't ever have a char visit a town they've recently had another in? And what's the definition of 'recently' there? And of course there are many, many situations where players have two of them visiting the same town, often at the same time. This is explicitly permitted as part of the CR and even with (what we now know are incredibly misleading) suggestions for how to handle it on the wiki.
I've actually killed off one of my more prominent characters now as a result of the recent mess, in large part to avoid a situation where they ever cross paths with my other on the same island during a trading trip. Because I just have
no idea what the rule there even is anymore or why, like so many other rules it's so unevenly applied, and no one on staff seems in a hurry to clarify anything there.
And frankly, there's more than just the loss of character through another character's actions that can make one lose most of their interest in the game. That 'what a waste of time this all is' feeling can be caused by other things too, one of which is the realization that a player can be abruptly forced out of their account for trivial reasons, as in literally the exact same thing other players do every day with no repercussions at all. And that creates a far more significant 'ripple effect' than a single IG murder, believe me. :/
It also seems like you've implied that a player can't have two of their characters interact with another in anything but a completely neutral way. Having two characters trade with Coventina, or have a friendly conversation with Elyos, for instance, wouldn't be allowed if one of them might ever, at any point in their lives, have IC reasons to drag another char or use a weapon on their behalf? How is anyone even supposed to know when or where their chars might be put into a situation where they may have to use violence?
I'll be down to four characters soon, and with the entire EZ feeling like a mine field at this point I certainly won't ever be spawning any more just to throw into it.
