Things we DON'T like about AoC.

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Nope, I'd hate that. It not only removes 99.9% of non-event-based owpvp, but also removes a system that I think has great potential for both pvp and socialization.

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Just anything that the green player drops, but it wouldn't autostack with other similar resources in the Red's inventory and they'd definitely drop from the Red if the BH kills them. Ideally they wouldn't drop if greens kill the Red, but there's a ton of abuse potential with that kind of mechanic, so it would have to be tested and addressed properly, but I do think that with a proper design this mechanic would lead to fewer "greens gang up on a red" situations and would instead only support the BH system even more. And considering that the "greens>red" interaction has been complained before, I think this would be a way to address even that issue.

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EZ fix. You don't return the stuff you got from the PK - you lose the BH status. It could be just after one failed return or several, but still.

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This is just our difference in what we want from this system. I want BHs to be the proper white knights for the greens. If we assume some "sheriff" that gives out those bounties, all you need to do to justify the system I suggested would be just saying "the sheriff won't pay you unless you return the loots, because it's the loot of the people that pay his salary". Hell, add some reputation system to that where you can return some loot to earn some rep so that you could keep some juicier loot later on and you have yourself a more involved system rather than just "BHs, go kill reds or some shit".

And as for "there's too many BHs and not enough PKs", this is exactly why I said that my suggestion would allow for lesser corruption penalties, because the impact on greens would be also lessened. I had an additional mechanic to support it when I initially came up with this idea, but that's all just testing and tweaking.

In other words, I just want the system to be better (and it might already be, who knows) and I just think that it's possible to make it better for all 3 sides and not just either greens or reds.

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And again, we just disagree on that particular point. The main purpose of having fewer PKers is to provide a better gaming scene for the greens. But if you can counteract the PKers' influence on greens, you can potentially have more PKers in the game w/o completely ruining it for the greens. And I personally think that this can be achieved with the help of BHs.

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But you can still lose the resources in your storage through node sieges, so there's really no differentiation there. Which is why I think that as soon as you gather/pick up some resource - it's yours until taken or traded away.

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I think it's about the value of time more so than the value of the resources themselves. Or, well, at least that's how I see it. If I spent an hour or two farming some juicy location deep in a dungeon (be it mobs or rare gatherables there) and then I get PKed and lose a big chunk of the resources, my immediate reaction would be "a shit I wasted a ton of time". And while I'm a person who would immediately go and try fuck that PKer up, I'd assume most (or at least majority) of true greens would just feel bad about their, already limited, playtime being wasted by another player.

And with travel times being longer than just "tp here then tp there", if you tell all greens to just run to the city every time they pick up an item - they'll tell you "you're crazy" And that's not even considering that leaving your location usually means giving it up to someone else, so even if you do go to the city often you'll be losing out on more of the same resource (especially if it's rare and only has a few limited spawn points). Flagging up and fighting back removes that part of the equation and obviously lets you lose less stuff if you die, which is why I like this mechanic.

But I'm sure you've seen several threads where people complained about being constantly killed or having only 10 minutes a day to play the game or anything along those lines (or just not wanting to pvp if they're not in the mood like Dygz does). To those people the thought of "protect your spot and you'll get to enjoy the game more" seems to be as alien as "I want everything to be instanced" for me. And I feel like giving them some potential insurance for the time spent, while also letting the PKers kill a few more people a day, would go a long way. Though those PKers would still have to be caught first, so it's not a 100% insurance.

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This would obviously have to be tested. I would personally tweak the amount of corruption gained and corruption lost relative to XP gained. And then counterbalance that against the common distance between any given mob and the nearest node center.

And if the design of how the bounties get given out (if I understand it correctly that is) remains the same, then BHs would have to get their targets at a tavern or a certain NPC only in a lvl4 military node. At which point there's definitely some amount of distance that a BH would have to travel from said tavern/npc to the PKer. And the time of that travel would have to determine how quickly the PKer can remove their corruption through grind.

Military NPCs could give immediate info about any new PKer and might even make announcements in "BH chat" about a new PKer, so anyone in the vicinity of the NPC could quickly get the bounty from them and try to catch the PKer before they remove their corruption. Tavern-based bounties could maybe only work if the PKer was above some corruption threshold (or a PK count one), because taverns would most likely be closer to the killer.

And we could have that only a BH kill would drop the victims resources rather than just any kill, which imo would strengthen the BHs' reputation amongst the people and would decrease the amount of greens just attacking the Red (because some maniacs consider that a bad thing). And again though, the BH still gotta kill the PKer in order to get the resources, which is never assured.

This is just the surface-lvl first-thought kind of design, I'm sure it could be refined into something much better or there might even be able a better way to satisfy all 3 sides of this equation.

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It's not about appeasement, it's about the system itself promoting help to others rather than just being a basic bitch system that only promotes killing. You still get the thrill and you still get to fight and even compete against other BHs for the kill, but on top of all that you also get to help others.

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And I addressed this before too. All it takes to justify what I'm suggesting is saying in lore that BHs can only operate because those "freeloaders" pay your "salaries". And if you don't return their stuff - you're a shitty BH who doesn't deserve the rewards related to that job.

It's not like only BHs can kill a red. I'm sure that green victims will just yell in chat "there's a Red in this location", so if you're just running somewhere close as a random dude - you're always free to just go kill the Red and get all the loot for yourself.

But a "bounty" system supposes that someone's paying for that bounty. And the game could just say that the greens are the ones doing that. And it is kinda already the case. Taxes collected from those "freeloaders" support the whole system, so in a way what I'm saying is already the case.

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Yeah, except there will definitely be way more of those greens than the pvpers and most definitely more than of the BHs. So, if anything, we're the freeloaders. We need them to support the game in a big enough quantity so that we could just go kill each other for fun. Which is why I think that a single mechanic that supports them would be nice.

And again, I'm talking about this mechanic in the context of more frequent PKs, so even those greens do just never fight - they'll still die somewhat often.