I have been impressed by how intelligent and knowledgeable the GoblinWorks employees are in terms of MMOs and game design.
We as a community could easily share thousands of years of experience from hundreds of different games for their consumption.
Please stick to game mechanics, exploits, design, bugs, community and game play relevant to Pathfinder Online
Game: Ashen Empires (MMORPG)
Time: Played 8 years
Personal History:
Played a single character hardcore for 6 years on a PvE server until i was max level with best equipment. Moved to a PVP server when the opportunity was presented due to server merging from low player population. Joined a PVP evil criminal guild.
PVP:
We would join a ventrilo voice chat server, meet at a criminal town, gear up and then proceed to do a tour of the game world. With about 7 or so of us, we would hit all the popular hunting spots and block bridges or try to surround players we caught traveling or hunting in the wilderness. We would change up our route all the time so the lawful divines wouldnt know where or when to expect us. We did it mostly for fun, sometimes for loot, and I personally did it out of spite of how inept, greedy, mean and political most other lawful divine players were.
Looting:
If a corpse had good loot in it, we would guard the body for about 15 minutes waiting for the body to decompose so the equipment wouldnt be flagged as stolen (which prevented us from banking it, and would always drop on death until returned to the owner).
If one of our team members got killed, we would try to move the battle away from the corpse or create an opportunity for the recent deceased team member to run back to his body and try to loot his own corpse as fast as possible(some were so fast and skilled, it was a drive by loot that required less than 1 second).
Criminal corpses only had a 5 minute wait time before they decomposed, which required the criminal to run extremely fast without pause to reach his corpse, as the run normally took about 4 to 5 minutes.
Criminals had 50% chance to drop items they were wearing and all contents of backpack
Divines had a 5% chance to drop an item they were wearing and all contents of backpack
Re-Spawning:
there were only 3 criminal re-spawn portals in the world, compared to the dozens of others that were available to everyone else. This made it harder for the evil pvpers to get back to the battle, as lawful re-spawn spots were always close to popular hunting spots and lawful cities. Which would result in the recent murdered victim to run into town screaming for help with evil pkers. This would normally cause half the town to empty out to go find us. 30 to 40 lawfuls vs 7 of us.
PVP Combat:
When confronting the overwhelming forces while waiting for the corpse to decompose, we employed several tactics.
Using player collision exploits to stand in the same spot as everyone in our 7 man team. This allowed us to name targets over ventrilo to focus fire on, while preventing them from effectively focus firing on us, as our characters were overlapping each other.
Or we might create a rotating blockade on the inside entrance of a dungeon/mine. When they clicked to enter the dungeon, there was a 1 or 2 second lagg as their character was placed inside the dungeon. Where we would effectively murder them quickly and prevent them from moving forward, while preparing a teleport spell or transferring equipment to one character so he could do a quick log.
Another skill we practiced often in our criminal towns were sparing a timing attacks to land and then move out of the range of a receiving attacking. This was completely player finesse with the keyboard and mouse.
NPC Guards:
The Guards were mid level fighters, who could move 4x as fast as normal players. They would defend anyone they saw getting attacked from monsters or players. The evil city also had Guards(but fewer) who considered lawful divines as enemies but enforce the rule of whoever attacked first was the criminal in town, amongst criminals.
They respawned every 2 minutes after killing them all.
PVP restrictions:
The Developers and GMs were receptive to the lawful divines as they were the majority and most vocal on the boards. After constant complaining, the developers continually made PVP harder and harder. To the point that criminals had 100% drop rate, and divines 2%. More lawful spawn points. Special lawful only powerful equipment, and large spaces of land blocked off by lawful castles, so we couldnt explore or play in half the world.
They also added a prison system to the game, where depending on your crime reputation, your character would be stuck in the prison for a set amount of time, normally thousands of minutes. The only way to get rid of the minutes was to stay logged in, and or drag heavy rocks in the prison to a grinder to break them apart, each rock reduced your sentence by 1 minute and was very tedious to do.
Despite the criminals being some of the most dedicated, intelligent, skilled and resourceful players I had ever met, they just stopped playing as the game stopped being fun.
I would later visit the community boards and see the divines lamenting about how the game has become boring on the pvp server and i laughed to myself.
Mounts:
Because they waited so long to add mounts, that it became technically unfeasible from the years of changes made to the game engine and updates.
So we never got horses which made most players sad.
Banking:
was basically infinite, which lead to lots of hording and inflation.