Recently I had fought my way to L11 as a newbie, and was quite pleased with my progress so far. Upon being asked to group with someone else who was L7, I was happy to do so--not only to help him out, but to get myself some exp too.

However, upon reaching the desired location and exping for a little my "teammate" became very belligerent and overly rude. He seemed to be VERY well-versed in the game and was getting impatient at my slow attacks and bad EQ; I advised him that I would be leaving and he could be rude to someone else. Threats followed, and he ran to the door of the building we were standing in. If I attempted to open it, he would close it with a trigger.

I attempted to look for another door, and was suddenly attacked by another player three levels higher than me. I fled back to the door only to be met with the same behavior from the L7. Eventually the L14 managed to chase me around the building and kill me. I couldn't fight, I couldn't leave, and I couldn't execute any commands without being pounced and subsequently tripped. Upon explaining this to the "Father of Anger" (an IMM, apparently), he tells me all is fair and good then goes invis.

I have elected to quit playing this MUD, and have put my character in the one-week deletion process as of today. I liked the general MUD atmosphere, and enjoyed the class-system but Father of Anger's advice of "learn from the experience" has hit home: don't play this MUD. The L7 veteran is CLEARLY abusing his noPK flag and DIRECTLY, INTENTIONALLY involving himself in PK. He prevents me from leaving knowing I can't kill him to make him stop, calls in another player bigger than me, and sends tells gloating the whole time that I'm being chased around and beaten. I don't see how his abuse of the "game mechanics" involving divine protection is any different than others who apparently drop their link during PK so as to avoid death (HELP PK).

This was a simple case of seasoned players bending good-intentioned rules to make someone else miserable for not putting up with rudeness. I find it hard to believe that someone could consider this situation and find that this is a "good" MUD environment. It seems to me that it just teaches players to find ways to abuse mechanics and bend rules to their benefit.

Newbies beware.

-Zurstorben

And just went and posted a ####ty review of CF on TMS. Since the guy bitching there brought up the exact same scenario. Kudos to the imms for trying. *snip after here*

I think you guys have done a wonderful job replying to this thread, been extraordinarily helpful in turning a bad situation into a good one.
This further emphasizes the fact that, in the past few months via the Academy and this forum, the MUD is getting increasingly more newbie-friendly. Congratulations and keep up the good work!

Splntrd

No message

Somebody should read what I had to say below about not being a jackass.

I blame my angry personality on Imperial Eastern Gangbangs.

I don't know if you were playing a 'goodie' , 'neutral' or
'evil' but i'll assume neutral or evil, since it appears
the other guy might have been evil. If you run into a similar
situation again, and someone starts being an ass, go ahead
and keep ranking, the moment he hits your pk range do your best to
plaster him. then tell him that's for being an ass.

Okay enough of that. This place is REAAAALLY violent.

the only 'hold barred' is the pre 11 no pk bit.
I've been beaten down with nearly every 'unfair' tactic
in this game (and every 'fair' one too) I'm sure there are
some cold whoopin's I haven't had yet, and dementedly enough
I look forward to it.
Why? because I can either learn and be forwarned next time
or learn and use that next time.

You had a really bad experience there and I can see why you are
upset but I swear more of the people who play this game actively
avoid doing 'below the belt' things than use them.
(take that with a grain of salt, I have seen diabolical
characters go and do something that is almost in line with
'good' and vice-versa and don't get me wrong you will die
ALOT
C'mon the game starts out with a skull and asks you how you
want to be mourned, you should come in expecting to die. )

So yeah we have more than one bad apple, dig through the pile more
it's really worth it. Some of the good apples have diamonds inside.

I hope you give it another shot, as you can see from the posts here
more people have decent things to say, or at least 'tough break man'
than blowing you off.

If you do come back, wait until you feel the thrill of surviving
a pk against tremendous odds, then actually winning one..Now that's
a rush. It took me what? 2 years maybe before I actually coldly
hunted down a group of three because one had some pants I wanted
killed nearly did in the others, and then told the survivors that
had they not been with the guy I was hunting I'd have left them alone
and asked if they wanted to go learn and of course they did.
for a whole hour I felt like I was on top of the world.
Then another group came along and bashed us into paste.

You can be the worst pk'er out there and get lucky (my first hero vs the bard and orc horde) but even if you are on top of your game
someone's going to get a pile of people big enough to take you down.
(* disclaimer - but you just never know)

To everyone else : (Esp Nep who seems to react to the way I write
when I am like this as if he had sand poured into his eyeballs
- guess I'm just irritating that way.)

Yes I know, Once again rambling. another almost 60 hrs no sleep
I'm kinda futz'd forgive me. I haven't posted babble in a long time,
(nonsense maybe but not babble) so cut me some slack.


-Life has me permalagged, I fled a long time ago but
I'm still waiting, and praying it isn't a polearm spec with cutoff
and parting blow.

Welcome to your first PK death!

I enjoyed watching you from the start, as you seem to be an experienced mudder and learned the basics quite easily here. CF can be an intense and violent experience - both PK and RPwise.

"Recently I had fought my way to L11 as a newbie, and was quite pleased with my progress so far. Upon being asked to group with someone else who was L7, I was happy to do so--not only to help him out, but to get myself some exp too."

Choose your friends wisely. Remember that there are deceptive or evil characters that will try to take advantage of you. Some characters just want to kill you without any provocation. On the other hand, there are characters that WILL sacrifice their lives to help you -- so don't let these evil characters taint your view of the CF world. For example, a Paladin or elf healer would behave quite differently.

"However, upon reaching the desired location and exping for a little my "teammate" became very belligerent and overly rude. He seemed to be VERY well-versed in the game and was getting impatient at my slow attacks and bad EQ; I advised him that I would be leaving and he could be rude to someone else. Threats followed, and he ran to the door of the building we were standing in. If I attempted to open it, he would close it with a trigger."

This doesn't sound like a good group. Depending on the nature of the altercation, it is sometimes better to call things off. You may have made things worse by exchanging words with this person. A quiet and peaceful departure would probably have prevented this death.

The door-closing phenomenon is something you'll learn to overcome through experience. For example, it can be defeated in the way Nepenthe suggested. It could also have been avoided if you had a means of transporting yourself away from the danger.

"I attempted to look for another door, and was suddenly attacked by another player three levels higher than me. I fled back to the door only to be met with the same behavior from the L7. Eventually the L14 managed to chase me around the building and kill me. I couldn't fight, I couldn't leave, and I couldn't execute any commands without being pounced and subsequently tripped. Upon explaining this to the "Father of Anger" (an IMM, apparently), he tells me all is fair and good then goes invis."

What you experienced is quite familiar to most of us. Out-of PK assistance is part of the game (i.e. another character healing your opponent). Tripping is a way of disrupting your opponent's commands. Now you know better than to stay in a confined area without means of escape.

Don't take any deaths you experience at this phase to heart. In fact, you SHOULD be dying a lot. Now that you experienced this sort of groupmate betrayal, you are that much closer to becoming a seasoned veteran.

That being said, there are races/classes that are better designed to rank without depending on others, or are skilled at avoidance (hiding/invis/camo). For instance, had you been an arial warrior, you would not have been tripped so easily. Try experimenting.

"I have elected to quit playing this MUD, and have put my character in the one-week deletion process as of today. I liked the general MUD atmosphere, and enjoyed the class-system but Father of Anger's advice of "learn from the experience" has hit home: don't play this MUD. The L7 veteran is CLEARLY abusing his noPK flag and DIRECTLY, INTENTIONALLY involving himself in PK. He prevents me from leaving knowing I can't kill him to make him stop, calls in another player bigger than me, and sends tells gloating the whole time that I'm being chased around and beaten. I don't see how his abuse of the "game mechanics" involving divine protection is any different than others who apparently drop their link during PK so as to avoid death (HELP PK).

This was a simple case of seasoned players bending good-intentioned rules to make someone else miserable for not putting up with rudeness. I find it hard to believe that someone could consider this situation and find that this is a "good" MUD environment. It seems to me that it just teaches players to find ways to abuse mechanics and bend rules to their benefit."

You should not play something that fails to provide enjoyment for you. CF has been around for 10+ years and has been constantly improving itself to make for a deeper, more intense, and more challenging experience. If you cull through the message boards, you'll see a concerted effort by the IMMs to make things harder for veterans to abuse, and newbie-friendlier. However, good old fashioned beatings are here to stay. We could certainly try to prohibit cruel behaviour, but the game wouldn't be called Carrion Fields anymore. In fact, there are many characters that will do far worse things to you.

If you strongly believe you are the victim of harrassment or cheating, you can pray like you did. Based on the IMM's observation, there was nothing that indicated cheating or harrassment had taken place. If the characters were sending you tells like "I'm gonna multi-kill you, newb," that would be a different story. Or, if a good-aligned character committed the above acts, an IMM would probably take a closer look.

I am sorry that your experience was so negative. However, don't let the actions of the few reflect upon the whole. Characters like the ones you mentioned rarely survive, as people catch wind of their schemes. With experience, you can learn many tricks to help turn the tables. Don't be afraid to die, since death doesn't matter. Take pride in the fact that it took TWO to bring a newbie like you down!

FYI...

Closing a door takes more time than opening it precisely to limit the effectiveness of such a tactic. Even vs. spamming or a trigger you always have a reasonable chance to open the door and get through it before it's closed on you again.

That said... while it's certainly not inappropriate to sass a groupmate who's being rude to you, it's also not necessarily inappropriate for that groupmate to try to get his revenge. It's expected that there will be players outside of your PK range that will be your enemies and try to assist in your death. If you continue to play, I think you'll find that in most cases the effect they can have is minimal.

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.

----------------------

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.

I'm serious here too by the way.

People that are not in your pk (or without a pk range at all, like you describe) will and do get involved in pk matches all the time. Whether it is a hero healer giving sanctuary to a level 15, or a level 1 picking up a disarmed weapon, it happens. It doesn't happen in every fight, or even most fights from my experience, but as far as I know it is fine by the rules and spirit of the game. If this kind of thing doesn't sound like your cup of tea, then CF may not be the place for you.

As for the rudeness, it could be his role. It could be his real-life personality bleeding through. I don't know. It isn't against the rules to just be rude though, as long it feasibly could be his role (i.e. if a good aligned character is being a total and exceeding prick without cause, you may want to politely point this out to the Imms).

As for the situation itself, without knowing your particular character's role, I will say you could have simply walked away and not given him the opportunity. Having a potion of teleport or return is always useful for escaping sticky spots, but is understandably more difficult for a newbie. You could stick to grouping with good aligned characters. Seems like you are more concerned with the out of pk affecting your pk fight though.

CF isn't for everyone, but I hope you do reconsider.

Hutto

You know what I had a whole speech ready for you here but being as this is the "Official" website of the game I will not turn it into a Dio's pissing match. The thing is there are evil / good / neutral in carrion fields, this you know since you've played other muds. Now the RP is strictly enforced and the seasoned player base takes it very seriously since this is "everyone's" mud. Evil character should play evil point blank! Its quite sad when you have evils hold hands with other evils and being all touchy-feely. They should be ruthless to everyone. Now if you dont like the way evils are played then I suggest playing only good aligned characters. Not neutral or evil just straight up lightwalkers. Until you can get the hang of the game.

But DO NOT come here and or complain to the immortals when you are defeated by others. Perhaps you should learn from that lvl 7 who found a way to get you killed because he obviously found a way to do it without doing it. Sounds like solid evil tactics. You should take notes. Deal with it and drive on.

He's not pissed about dying, he's pissed about dying because of an out of pk.

However, what he didn't know is:

- had he tried to open the door twice he could have been out of it before the other guy could shut it again, because shutting doors lags you.
- it's acceptable on this mud to offer that kind of help, given the limitations applied to it
- personally if I suspect a group might turn on me, I just leave and explain later, rather than put myself at risk
- it doesn't happen often anyway. Maybe once to me in 4-5 years or something.

Is wrong. I was one of the two characters. This guy is crying like a little girl because he lost and everyone is playing into his hand and trying to make him feel better. That is sad and pitiful. I'm not going to say any more, but I will after my character dies.

Based on the information we have right now? It kinda looks like you're a jackass. Rules-breaker, no. Jackass, very possibly yes.

If you want to keep your side of it to yourself, that's certainly your prerogative. I might in your shoes, too. You just shouldn't be terribly surprised when people think you're a jackass because of it.

But here we fall back to the topic of being evil. Which I know is like beating a dead horse with 3/4 of the CF playerbase. So why come up with new twists to defend it? And say its the player showing through and not the characters role? Anyways there has been and never will be a point to argue with you Nep. No matter what you always win. So have a coke.

But here we fall back to the topic of being evil.

Feel free to defend your IC actions that way. It's a valid argument, and as other staff members have already pointed out, none of the three characters violated a rule. Thus,m it's an IC matter, and up to respective roles.

However, on an OOC forum, you then posted:
"This guy is crying like a little girl because he lost and everyone is playing into his hand and trying to make him feel better. That is sad and pitiful."

This makes you a jackass. You'll note that this quote is the post Nepenthe is replying to.

The other player explained his viewpoint clearly. He has a different opinion about how the rules should work. We disagree, but at the end of the day, I've read his posts on the topic, I've read the replies from the staff, and I think "Hope that guy comes back. There was a disagreement there, but I don't think there's any fundamental problems."

I read your post and I think "Wow. Another Internet Tough Guy. I really wish we had less of those."

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

Actually, I'm not really interested in arguing about this. I'd rather give you something to think about and hope you decide there's some validity in it.

First, you almost had to be aware you dealing with a pretty green newbie. That doesn't have to change the essence of what you do, but it probably should change the style in which you present it. It's possible to kill a newbie if your role demands it and yet still leave them with the feeling that it's a character, not a player, that wanted them dead. It's possible to leave them with the feeling that their death is a matter of their mistakes, which can be corrected and will result in them having more fun with the game, rather than feeling that their death is because you're a super cheese whore.

Let me give you an example. A few years ago I created this fire warrior, with whom I was an active hunter/killer at all the levels on my way up, even the lowest. As part of his personality/story, the character thought he was a tactical genius (in some ways concieved of as a parody of a certain kind of player mindset, but that's another story) and wanted to go out and beat people down to prove it to them. Now, sometimes I would come up against someone who obviously didn't know what they were doing. Did that stop me from killing them? Hell no. But afterwards, I would tell them there was no shame to losing to the prowess of the great fire warrior tactician. Then, I would give them some advice on how to fight better to further lord my superiority over them. "You know, from the very start of our battle I was inflicting many more wounds and more grevious wounds upon you than you were upon me. Surely you must have realized that. Trying like crazy to bash me wasn't your best option. Perhaps the disarming techniques taught by your guildmaster would have availed you better."

Still evil. Still staying within the character, and still smoking the newbie with extreme prejudice. But compare that with what you did, and then coming here and calling the guy a crybaby.

If you were new here, which of those kind of behaviors would make you want to stay and keep trying? Which of them would help bring the new player up to a minimal level of competence where, probably, you're still beating them but it isn't as ridiculously one-sided?

That's all I'm saying.

One of my earliest cf memories is getting ganked by 3 evils and them leaving me my junk, telling me that the dark gods frown on weakness and that I needed to use my things to grow strong.

I quite often use that sort of argument to allow me to go easy on a newb I've just killed, because they are a newb. If you have a character whose role is to kill as many people as possible, that can best be achieved by multi-killing newbs, unless you choose to put a twist in your role that rules this out. Ultimately, role is flexible and down to you as the player to apply as you see fit. If you want to beat on newbs, don't blame it on your role; admit that you chose to have your role force you to beat on newbs.

nt