It is acceptable (and perhaps worthy of praise) to take what you want by force.
Muwahahaha. :D
Goblin Squad Member
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Yeah, I already edited my post to change "killed" to "murdered". A murder is an unprovoked unlawful killing. Deaths of PCs in wars are neither, so they won't have alignment penalties.
RyanD
Tread VERY carefully with such a system. In Darkfall the primary griefers of newbs were a lawful clan called "Goblin Preservation Society." These players would declare war on every clan in game and run around killing all of them. The war system even allowed them to attack players of warring clans in town (HORRIBLE idea. Please NEVER allow killing of lawful players in lawful territory for ANY reason.) so they could run around killing newbs with no consequences as if there were no war system.
Adventurine saw the problems with this changed the system, and even ended up banning Goblin Shaman. The leader of GPS. (He was actually a fun character who I kind of missed aferward. He was no saint but I saw him spare newbs multiple times, and wasn't as bad as many of the members of his clan who deserved the ban more.) The new system only allowed clans to declare war on one clan a day, and those wars could only last one week. Plus they costed money to declare. They also made it so that if you ever killed anyone lawful ever, you had to pay money to get your alignment back and you could only gain a small amount of alignment per day.
The new system was WORSE. Before all the strong clans who had many blue members were at war with GPS too, and would help the new players against GPS. But in the new system most older experienced PVPers were red from when they had to kill members of enemy clans who they were not at war with, because of the limitations on the war system.
Fallen Lords, on the other hand, kept all their members blue. They declared war on any major clan filled with new players and relentlessly hunted them down and griefed them as much as possible. Vet clans could do almost NOTHING about it, because they often didn't have war decs to spare for Fallen Lords, and had no lawful players because of the crappy alignment system. Fallen Lords owned no holdings so they had near immunity.
Sometimes developers are too wrapped up in how "perfectly balanced" their game designs are, or who think that "letting the players develop the world" excuses any degenerate behavior. I've decided after watching these games for a long time that you have to have a steady, controlling hand on the tiller in the beginning so that the game forms productive and fun play patterns which become strong enough to act as a real check against degenerate behavior.
This could solve some of the problems with the system but I don't want to see this game become something like the Discovery Mod on Freelancer. There they have many admin enforced rules instead of game mechanics. It leaves the player always wondering if they are breaking a rule and destroys the feeling of freedom you have in other less restrictive servers.
Besides banditry is a legitimate form of game play. Even as a character who like to play good aligned I need someone to fight, and would hate to see too many bandits stamped out by admin enforcement.
Where are you going to draw the lines? Will the lines be clearly defined to the players? I often take up a clan of griefing griefers in most games, where if someone is running around camping random newbs when they clearly are not a newb, I'll hunt them down, kill them, and spawn camp them / camp their body until they log off so that they can't continue to harass people. How are you going to deal with that?
How will you deal with people who kill a newb because the newb is talking crap in chat or something? How is talking crap going to be defined? If someone calls me a newb and insults my mother so I start killing them when I see them until they apologize, will it be handled differently if someone says "Man your beard reminds me of a muskrat" and I kill them, everyone in their party, and anyone who tells me that I'm acting irrationally every time I see them.