So first of all, I do sympathise with the spirit of what you wrote. Like yourself, I am complete balls at PK. I'd need at least a few hands to count my total, but that's only because I'm going on 20 years of being on and off connected to the game. Like you, I tend to take long breaks, for various reasons, but even then I stay connected through reading the forums and, more recently, the discord. Through pure intellectual osmosis I've picked up a lot of information, but when it comes to the nitty gritty my characters tend to be the ones breaking ankles because the other guy's foot got lodged too far up my rear end.

None of that is going to change by changing the very fabric of the game, though. You can say it would make it more friendly for newbies, and yes, largely due to the outreach in the past couple years we have been getting more, but if you take away what the game is then you're likely to lose the interest of a lot of the people who have stuck with it. So that 20-30 max count goes a lot lower, but...at least a couple of newbs stuck around? I dunno man, it's a hard one but I don't think it's the answer. A few years back they even took into consideration the idea of giving edge points to people getting railed. It's not a lot, and it's policed via code pretty heavily, but it IS there. And how it is now is as good as it's going to get for the same reason they took broader level PK related edge points out. People will minmax that #### all the live long day, whether it's sitting as a level 18 human warrior until you kill your way to 50 pks or deliberately allowing yourself to be killed as recommended by the detailed chart handed out to your favourite ooc group that shows how much lost con is worth the edge points received.

Anyway, title says I'm going to give my thoughts on how to git gud, so here we go. First step is training your subconscious and muscle memory to type where every ten seconds or so. Second is learning how to run away. If you managed to run away, you didn't die. Third is probably the hardest for some people. You need to roll a tankish character that you don't have an emotional connection to other then it bring a vehicle to help you become better at PK. Before you even choose a name, you resign yourself to con dieing and make yourself believe that it's going to be fun. Get full looted? Outfit at the guild and find another fight. You'll learn a hell of a lot more that way then almost anything else.

My personal recommendations are fire giant sword Imperial, defense/utility shifter, and above all village defender assassin. The latter has lag, good damage, debuffs, healing of both hp and various debuffs, sees everything outside of camo (mostly), hide and sneak, assassination, and whilst martial trance plus resistance isn't ABS if you've been stalking the guy you trance on then I wouldn't be surprised if it came really close. All of that without one prep needed. If you just want to go out there and fight people with the least amount of fuss, that's the ticket. You'll learn a lot and if your next character IS able to use magic, it'll be like someone taking handcuffs off of you.