First, let me say that I genuinely understand what a daunting game CF can be from the perspective of someone genuinely new to it. I understand that everyone else seems to know their way around better, seems to know the interplay of the various character abilities better, and seems eager to use that knowledge to wipe the floor with you.

If you have an agile mind and a competitive spirit, this also makes it a very rewarding game to succeed at, once you improve to the point of being able to do so.

A friend of mine used to explain the appeal of CF this way: imagine you're this freedom fighter and you concoct this elaborate scheme to assassinate the emperor of the land by poisoning him. In a normal roleplaying game, your success or failure is almost wholly dependent on the gamemaster. Depending on how he feels about it or how he interprets reality your plan could succeed or fail. But let's say the emperor is a powerful priest, a soul favored by the divine, and he could easily call for his god's assistance to purge the poison from his body at a moment's notice.

If your plan succeeds under these constraints in a traditional RPG, you pretty much know it's because either the GM forgot that the emperor had that ability, thus effectively underplaying the strengths of the character, or because the GM decided to throw a train full of mercy your way.

In CF though, it's a whole different story. The emperor is another player, just like you, and probably just like you, he sure doesn't want to die. It's not likely he's going to forget he can purge poisons if he can. Or, if he has that ability and doesn't use it to safe his life, it's because you engineered a situation where he couldn't, or because you put such pressure on him he made a human error.

Everyone out there is trying their best to survive just like you are. Each person is focused on the strengths and weaknesses of their own unique character, unlike a GM who must manage many. Each of them wants to live, and will beat you if they can if you come up against them.

That's why, win or lose, this is such a rewarding and challenging game.

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A little bit about the 'abuse' of PK ranges:

The philosophy of the PK ranges in CF, in part, is that they are supposed to be essentially hard-coded and self-policing. Anything you can do towards the death of another player is, with few exceptions, fair game.

You can only fight other characters close to you in experience points. What this means is that everyone you are able to fight should be roughly on your level of power. Too much stronger or weaker than the basic ability of your own character and you can't fight them.

In a sense, what the level 7 did to you is in line with how that system is meant to work out. There was someone he wanted to kill (you) that wasn't in his PK range, so he needed to recruit someone else closer to your level of power (level 14 guy) to do his dirty work. But other than that recruitment, the aid he was able to offer in the battle was minimal. (I know closing doors seems like a lot right now, but in the grand scheme of the game, I swear it isn't.) Now, if he had been a healer it's possible he could have healed the wounds of your assailant as he fought you. If he had been a transmuter it's possible he could have offered greater strength or speed to your assailant to fight you. That's okay by us. It's possible as a member of any class he could have tried to grab weapons disarmed from you. That's okay by us too.

In practice, you don't tend to see a lot of out-of-range characters massively swinging PK battles. They'll have enemies of their own all too willing to make a grease spot of them while they're busy trying to shut doors on you.

Now, obviously this distorts a little bit with characters levels 1-10, because no one can PK them, and there's no one you can recruit for help against them in the purest sense. These low level characters can to a degree be ####s and there's nothing that anyone can do about it. In terms of coding how PK works, we had to make a choice between giving the greatest freedom of higher level characters to beat down annoying newbies, and giving newbies more protection with which to get their feet and learn the game. As you can imagine, we chose the latter. It's not a perfect choice, and there are cases in which the spirit of the choice can be abused by players, but we feel it's better than the alternative. However, we aren't especially interested as a staff in trying to enforce the spirit of that rule. The coding and letter of it comes pretty close to the way we want things to work 99.44% of the time, and frankly it's a better play experience for everyone if we devote our time to making the game more fun/fair/etc. for you in other ways.

I'm hoping once you have a little distance from your death you can appreciate that there are things you could have done to prevent even what you might see as an unfair death. If you had known the area better, you might have known an alternate way out. Certainly, a potion of return or the like could have conveyed you to safety. If you'd understood how closing/opening of doors works, which you now should, you might have been able to make a break for safety. And, of course, as your knowledge of the game increases, you might have just been able to flat out win that fight with the level 14 character.

So there's my $0.02 in some greater detail.