What if you made it so corruption also stacked on the player that gets killed?

Yeah, I'd support that kind of design. Especially if Intrepid addresses the issues brought up in the "aggressive overgathering" threads.

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All of that assumes a guild or a well-meaning node. And while I'm all for pushing people to socialize more, any lowbie who's completely new to the game, doesn't know anyone and hasn't gotten the money for a citizenship would literally have no one to turn to for help.

They can obviously just shout in chat, and should always do that, but there's no assurance that anyone will come right away. And if that lowbie keeps getting killed over and over again, they'll most likely just leave.

Now I don't think this would be a very widespread occurrence, but the suggested system would also not influence any realistic gameplay in other regards. It only limits how much a single person can be PKed in a short period of time, that's it.

Abusing this mechanic by PKing your own characters over and over would be silly because you'd not only get a ton of PK counts on the killer, but would also generate quite a bit of XP debt on your character, so it would kinda defeat the purpose of avoiding deaths.

And if someone's trying to corruption bomb you - you should do better than just continuously PK them. If the only thing you can do to win out against such a griefer is PKing them - you should think of ways to become stronger or get help from others (which is also a way to become stronger).

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The gain is in fucking someone's day completely over. You might not see any pleasure in that, but even on this forum we've already had a few people saying they gonna be griefing people a lot. I consider such people dicks and gonna hunt them to the best of my ability, but who knows how many such dicks there are and how many "me's" there are.

I've seen quite a few PK alts in L2 that existed purely to fuck with people and do nothing else. I'm sure Ashes will have those too. And considering that PK count is not account-wide, those PKers can just do it again and again until they get bored (which I doubt they will).

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Death penalties already include lowered mob drop rates. What if those lowered rates applied to gathering too? This way it'd be pointless to do this workaround before going for some valuable gatherables.

High lvl gatherers would most likely have protectors or would just be able to defend themselves in pvp, so it's not like they'd be the ones PKed the most, while lowbies/newbies would care more about being griefed rather than gathering rates. The lowered rates could even influence high lvl gathering more than low lvl one. This would push high lvl gatherers towards socialization and protection (from both PKers and mobs), while it'd barely effect the ones who could be griefed the most.