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This is a blog for informal commentary about the MUD - where it has been, where it is going, and where it is now.

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PK Reset, posted on Sun Jan 3 21:32:30 2016
Posted by: Aristophanes
Category: Special
When we carried out a general PK reset at the start of the New Year, the natural question on everybody's lips was: why?

There are actually several reasons.

It has been more than twelve years since the last PK reset, and in that time the game has changed a great deal.



The PK community and even players themselves have changed a lot. Some people have gone PK and enjoyed it, but others have subsequently grown to dislike it. Other people left the game for years, only to be killed minutes after their return, lose all their achievement XP and leave for good after that.



In short, there were a lot of PKs around who didn't really -- or really didn't -- want to be PKs at all, and even though we can say that they signed up for this when they applied to be a player killer or joined a PK guild, they are now PK in a game -- and a PK community -- that is potentially very different to the one they joined originally.



The presence of these reluctant PKs has a negative impact upon those of you who do continue to enjoy these aspects of the game -- do you really want to kill, rob, or loot someone who gets frustrated and upset by it rather than in the spirit in which it is largely intended?



Ultimately, the PK community here can thrive only if the members of that community want to be there.



Thus, it seemed like it would be appropriate to offer these players a way to lose their PK status again. But how best to go about this?



The natural thought -- simply offering a way to leave PK -- was highly open to abuse. Somebody might get some last-minute revenge killing or looting in before permanently hiding behind an NPK status. Typical suggestions to get around this -- such as a check that a PK-going-NPK hasn't initiated any player killing for a month -- are either very hard to implement, or also abusable. And besides that, we do want this to be a one-time thing: the intention was never to create a tool for PKs to go back regularly.

Thus, the simplest idea seemed to be to do a complete reset, and to avoid abusability it was necessary to tell no one beforehand.

Originally, we intended to do this as part of the combat changes. When many things change at once, we could throw in a PK reset as people re-evaluate how they play. However, as the changes progressed, three things became clear:

* Most of the changes can be done individually, rather than as one big package;

* It's going to take a long time before we're done;

* These combat changes are highly unlikely to make people who previously enjoyed the PK game want to become NPK as one of their major purposes is to ensure that every combat playing style has strengths and weaknesses.

Thus, as we had been planning the PK reset for more than a year -- and as it really isn't related to the combat changes -- we decided we'd simply do it as a Christmas present, and due to reasons of timing it became a New Year's present instead!

Pit and Aristophanes.

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