What made EQ pvp the second greatest MMO game ever...

[dusk883]

and how Rogean could make it the best ever: Make it like Ultima Online in the early days!

Spending time in this forum about how much fun EQ pvp fun is ...is like telling Noah that the Flood is coming so I won't bother. Risk/Reward, guild animosities, etc. Done.

What made Ultima Online, IMO, the greatest pvp game of all time?

• If you were pk'ed, you were enabled to contribute to a bounty. Any and all players killed by a player could contribute to this bounty. This meant that if someone killed you and you had a bounty on your head, when someone killed you they could loot your head and take it to town and collect ALL of the bounty placed on your head from your last collection. In town, you could check a board or NPC and see the Top 20 bounties on the server. Murderers would make it a goal to get the biggest bounty on their own heads, "anti-pk"s would bounty hunt. The game was ON. Someone was always standing in front of the board to mull over who was to be hunted.
  
  
• If you initiated and pk'ed more than 4-8 (number varied over time
  ) people in any 8 hour period, your name became RED and "Murderer" was appended to your name text. If you were RED, everyone wanted to kill you because you likely had a huge bounty on your head. It would take a full real time week to get rid of the RED tag, logged in or not. Any pvp deaths, you or the other guys, meant a reset of the week long RED tag. This wasn't a "punishment" to pvpers, this was actually PROMOTING it, IMO. I believe this was an effort to slow down the rate of slaughters on the Napa server, there just wasn't anything more cool than walking into an inn where 7 murderers were hanging out. The murderer brotherhood. Wouldnt be too long before a few guilds would show up to see about getting a 7x bounty however. Good times.
  
  
  
• If you were RED and then killed by players, you suffered "stat loss"... the eq equivalent would mean bigtime exp loss. As a murderer, when I died, I would lose 3 or so attributes from 100% down to 97 or so % which meant WEEKS of playing to get that stat back to 100% (grandmaster). The risk / reward was unreal in UO. The end effect was that you could be relaxed and pvp all day, sometimes spare someone's pathetic life once in a while because you didn't want to get nailed with the RED tag quite yet. Then, the thrill would hit just before you nailed some poor guy to the carpet because you were about to hit yourself with a self-inflicted red tag for a week.

I think most of the pvp'ers loved accountability more than anything else. This is why we love YELLOW text. This is why we don't want CC enforcement, even if the usual pvp forum clown is always putting it across like he's some god at pvp. Well, let's put accountability in the game and we see for sure, IMO.

I know Rogean isn't likely to import UO style pvp culture but I had so much fun in that world that it's worth a shot at bringing it up IMO.