Jail and bounty hunter as punishment for corrupted players

I haven't played AA, so what exactly did you do in prison? Was it literally "you can't do shit in the game for some amount of time"? Cause that sounds like the literal worst mechanic to me. Yes, punish me for doing a bad thing in the game, but don't stop me from literally playing the game.

And as for BHs, yes, I'm waiting for them to reveal more about their mechanic because I definitely want them to have more impact on the overall system.

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Does that work give you any benefit or is it a glorified minigame just to pass the time and shorten the sentence?

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You're being "punished by the system" for not fighting back too. You'll lose more stuff if you refuse to fight, while a potential harassing "criminal" would lose less if they were to die. So the whole system doesn't quite work by the logic of our real lives.

If the prison work gives you benefits - you're rewarding killers. If it doesn't give you benefits - you're wasting people's time, on top of having already punished them by the current system. And if you suggest replacing the current punishment with the prison - you're just wasting their time instead of having a tangible punishment. And depending on how prison's gameplay is designed, I'd assume most hardcore PKers will find a way to automate that gameplay and won't even see it as a punishment at all.

And then, if you decide to have something like a "3 strikes and you're out" system, where the more kills you have - the higher the prison time, you're pretty much removing owPK potential. Especially if the jury can be controlled in any way (which, I assume, is the case).

In the current system, becoming a PKer means you'll either have to grind mobs while being on the run or die 1+ times and just do what you would've been doing either way to remove the XP debt. It doesn't take you out of the game and, for those people who enjoy living on the edge, it even gives more depth to the gameplay. Having a prison system would either not influence PKing at all, while just annoying people with meaningless non-gameplay tasks (if the prison time is short), or it would lead to potential removal of PKing for some people, while others do it w/o any punishment (depending on how jury is selected).

As I see it, a system-based arbitration of punishment is much better than potential abuse of the system.

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So you want to waste people's time instead of just punishing them. Doing mundane shit in the game is not really a punishment. Definitely not to me or any other L2 (or other grindy mmo) veteran. Especially if I can just go on a complete genocide until I get caught, because there's no system-based prevention for that kind of thing.

Or does the criminal get auto-caught the very second they're done with their crime?

Also, how long does the jury process take and how random is the picking of said jury? What about afk people who get caught by the system? How are witnesses chosen?

To me, those all sound like a waste of my in-game time, no matter which side of the issue I'm on.

• I did the crime? I'd rather just go immediately to jail, quickly do the mundane work and go back to killing people.
• I was a witness and don't know the criminal? Why would I waste my time on dealing with that shit, when I have other things to do. And if this is done through chat, my hands would most likely be busy with mob killing so I wouldn't even be able to say anything.
• I was a witness who knew the criminal and was on his side? Does the game tell that to the jury? How does the game even know that? And if it doesn't, then what's stopping just 5-10 dudes to run around with their designated PKer and always be on his side during the trial?
• And if what stops them is non-random jury, then how do you know that the jury themselves wouldn't just be a part of the same group and would always forgive the criminal?
• And if the jury is randomly picked and I happen to be on it, then it's back to 2nd point - it's a waste of my time trying to figure out who's at fault in some little squabble 200km from me.
• Also, does the whole server see all trials? Cause I'd assume you have to see them, otherwise randomized jury would just not work. And if everyone knows all the criminals, it would be even easier to avoid the punishment. You just say "whoever votes "innocent" gets some money/resource/etc from me". And now the criminal can kill however many casuals/lowbies w/o a single shred of punishment.

Overall, this system seem so much more flawed to me, than a simple "you did the crime and didn't get away with it? You're fairly severely punished". And if the BH system is well-designed on top of that, then you won't even get away with your crime.

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Potatoh potahto, Dygz. It's about the pov. The point is, you're punished for dying. A "criminal" that attacks other people gets less of a punishment than a non-criminal does and a murderer gets an even bigger punishment - and that is not how irl works, while this prison system tries to imitate real life.

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A huge guild just registers as jury (upwards of multiple hundred people potentially) and can pretty much control the entire process, just based on the statistical possibility of their members getting picked to be the juror on any given case.

At that point you're literally giving those "mafia" guilds the power to control who gets punished and who doesn't. The "RPers love this mechanic" is cool and all, but when a huge hardcore guild is abusing said mechanic it's no longer just an RP thing.

And I know what exactly Steven is talking about in that quote. I've been on the both sides of the "big guild crumbles under its own weight" situation, but that usually happens when there's limited resources in the game or if some party in the guild feels like they were fucked over. But I really don't see how a "sign up as a juror and keep saying everyone's innocent" order from the GL could destroy a guild But what that order would destroy is any casual's existence on the server, because the whole system would be flawed.

Afaik AA had a faction-based pvp system and you could only PK people on your own side in particular circumstances (correct me if I'm wrong), while in Ashes literally anyone can kill literally anyone else. It's not like you'd be going against your own people, but instead you could just kill whoever and then walk free because your huge guild took up the majority of jury signups.

As for time wasting, going to jail for 30 minutes is literally nothing to me if it allows me to kill dozens of people w/o any punishment. The current system is in place to minimize those exact situations, while this prison system doesn't seem to do that at all, unless you somehow control who exactly gets on the jury instead of it being purely random. And the "witness" part is still flawed because, as I said, the criminal's friends could just support him always.

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Except guilds do not control or own nodes. The best they can do is take up as many citizenships as monetarily possible and be "effective" rulers, but unless someone destroys the node, I doubt they'd just leave it.

As for removal of exploitable systems, we don't necessarily need to remove them, but we should minimize the potential of those exploits. Or at least decrease their severity to the minimum. The currently proposed system already has a fairly low number of exploits, which can be minimized even further with just a few balancing touches.

The jail system seems to have much greater potential for abuse and exploitation, while providing much lesser punishment to the criminals, on top of the punishment itself being bad. The current punishment is just a multiplier on the death penalty. It doesn't change gameplay, it just provides a deterrent against those who want to go on killing sprees. The jail system would put a complete halt on any meaningful gameplay for those who PK rarely, while not being strong enough against those who want to PK often, on top of being way more abusable.

Both systems "waste" PKer's time. Except one does it in a non-gameplay-changing way, while the other just removes the player from the game. Though in the case of the latter, the removal would most likely be way more lax than the former's. Depending on balancing, the current system could set the PKer back by days worth of XP and potentially remove some of their gear, if they had enough corruption. If you had days' worth of jail time on a character - you've effectively banned a player for doing smth that the game allowed them to do. And if you give them a way to shorten that punishment greatly - you've now hasn't deterred them from doing such a thing again, because the punishment wasn't big enough.

My main point here is this: removing a player from meaningful gameplay is bad. And if you don't want your players to do smth that would warrant removal from gameplay - just don't allow them to do that thing at all.

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It was L2 (maybe even L1) and not BDO. BDO took L2's system and bastardized it.

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I find that a bit ironic