I think his point, which I share, is that you make a lot of claims about how PK operates as if they are definitive, yet don't hold up in practice. There really is a great deal of factual misinformation present, and stuff like:

"ABS is no necessarily for pk? Again, what are you trying to tell me here? Not alot of people use it for pking? They use it to kill really tough mobs? But, you in all are telling me that some do use it for pk? That's what you are saying to me, but you are also telling me that others use it for mobs? Good point? <--Sarcasm"

... undermines your point, and probably should stop.

Regarding looting: People keep claiming this is a great scourge, but there is less looting now than I've ever seen. (At CF's peak population, you got looted nearly every time you fell and it wasn't even questioned.) While our player counts are lower now than they were then, I think people hijack that statistic and claim that their pet peeve is causative.

Regarding preps: The vast majority cannot be maintained 24/7. They require a sacrifice (time, money, effort, and/or risk) to get, just like getting a better piece of equipment. Are you also for removing non-cosmetic benefits of equipment? Knowing where better equipment is (and being capable of getting the tougher items) also provides an advantage in PK. What about quest rewards? Many quests provide non-cosmetic advantages which can change PK.

The existence of these kinds of factors places a higher skill demand on the player-- it isn't just about typing the optimal commands during a relatively short engagement. The system accounts for exploration and area knowledge as well as strategic planning, rather than a narrow focus on tactical decisions. All of them matter, but the decision tree is much larger.

There's obviously a balance. If quaffing some potion meant an instant, easy win, then the other factors become irrelevant, the decision tree gets pruned, and the final product isn't very interesting. The question is how much weighting you give to each of these factors. My opinion is that you massively overestimate the impact of these preps in deciding fights.

Games exist with purely tactical conflict mechanisms (all characters enter combat more or less equal, and what commands you enter is the pure decider, beyond the RNG), but they tend to have shorter lifespans due to the limited decisions. Being "good" at CF takes a very long time, in part because it's a complex system where other players have a massive volume of collective experience. You can still learn new things here after playing for 2 or 4 or 8 years. A lot of games can't provide that experience.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com