archlurkerchad

I can imagine bots would need a reputation system.. but not humans.
If someone steals from you ingame.. he loses reputation with you.. because you dislike him now and know hes a thief.

True. This works if the game world is small enough, or takes effort to travel in. Keeping track of people in-game and their reputation on a piece of paper quickly gets tiring once you've bumped into over 100 PKs, and spreading word of them is an effort as well.
Now if characters have a territory of sorts, home ground where they hang out and rarely travel beyond you can familiarise yourself with the somewhat established players in that area and keep track of them. Same goes if the game server only hosts a few number of players, but that's not really an MMO then.
But if all the tens of thousand of players they all can teleport, gate, fly or somehow very easily navigate the game world you probably want an easy way to keep track of players.

Mercs are available in all games.. just that most games have made it so its either not worth paying someone to guard/fight for u or that you cant get paid enough to make it worth fighting/guarding someone else. But theres always anti-pks that will do it for free.

I was primarily thinking of player-run merc-corps, and some kind of advertisement or contract system or channel where you can easily get protection.

PKs should not be auto punished thru some killing penalty system for killing someone.. or else whats the point? just to grief? I thought you didnt want griefing.

This is true as well. Ideally no artificial punishment system would be needed. If it's done in spirit of your wild west it could work, just give players the tools they need, and they'll make their own laws, and band together.


I reckon games like this in itself would work, provided they make it easy for new players that don't know the laws or faction, to get into the these factions and become part of them.

I think the real problem is to attract players in the first place like you said.
Sheep friendly mmos like WoW will get the people that just want to have fun with friends in dungeons, while pvp-people will search out pvp-dedicated games.
It takes a certain personality and attitude to want to expose yourself to danger in a non-pvp focused game; I imagine it's the same people that would roll hard-core characters in diablo
And as you said it's rather niche.

So, closing though. While doable, it wouldn't be as profitable as an MMO could be. Or so I believe.

Well, there have to be a price for their actions when they kill players too.
WoW again is a poor example of world pvp since there's nothing to stop higher level players to prey on lower level players in starting areas.
Also their actions as you say has little consecquences in the world. But they don't get any loot either, their just being bastards, griefing players out of spite. That's the tricky part to get rid of.

EVE does this better, but not perfect. There every character have a security rating of sorts, visible to everyone. If it goes into the negative (for destroying ships and killing players) they get a red-flag and a flashing nametag warning players around them.
Players can also equip their vessels with gear specfically designed to escape these attacks.
Also players can put bounties out on them to attract bounty hunters to them to make their pirate lifes less enjoyable.

Just slap some kind of reputation system on the game or even justice and law system and make sure there are a price in one form or another to pay for the wolfs.
Make mercenaries readily available to defend players during journeys to further discourage attacks.
And so on.

Thing is that this in my head comes rather close to real life, where thiefs are less common than normal folk, because basically everyone that can avoid stealing don't simply because it's not worth consequences in most cases. It's much more comfortable to be able to make money from a job and buy stuff you need, rather than stealing everything.
But maybe that would work. Given harch enough consequenses for stealing/looting and killing players only the most motivated players would want to engage in that kind of behaviour voluntary. Maybe they don't respawn instantly if they have bad karma/reputation or something. They'd then be a minority in the game.
Sounds more plausible?

Aye, don't get your hopes up. You seem to have high standards regarding open world pvp and given the general market and the casual gamer era I doubt well see anything like what you want.
Much like in real life no one wants to live in constant fear of being preyed upon in an MMORPG either, especially if they could lose their stuff.

I could see it open world pvp work if the gear was second in importance and easy to come by and people were given unique enough rewards for playing the role of the sheep, something that the wolfs can't get, not even steal or loot from them.
The wolfs can't have the sheep and eat them too so to speak; they need to make a choise about their playstyle; they need to pay a price.
Just playing a merchant character and being able to make money that then can be stolen isn't a good enough carrot for players to play sheep. It needs to be something more awesome, maybe to be able to influence NPC factions or something, as long the wolfs can't get it. Period. They'd have to reroll sheep if they want it.
I think that could motivate the players playing sheep and thus in turn giving the wolfs something to do.

Then I'd say you should try out EVE online.
It's the only MMO that I know of that comes close to what you describe; it's like ultima by the sound of it.
It does'nt have no-pvp zones, but zones guarded by NPCs that discourages players from pvp, but if you're far enough away from the guards you can do hit-n-runs and be gone before the guards have time to respond.
But it's a sandbox game alright, and there are no servers with pve only since there is only one single but huge server where every player plays; sheeps and wolfs alike.
You can chose to play as the pirate, hunting for targets and ambushing lone miners or cargo transports and destroying player ships drops some of the equipment mounted on them, not all, so there's no full loot.

Isn't minecraft in basics a survival game?
All sheep seem to love and enjoy playing the survival game against the monsters (npcs).
Same thing in Terraria.. and in terrarria there can even appear uber flying omgwtfbbq boss monsters that teleport into your base through all your walls and fart doom missiles out of their asses chasing you around... sheep love that... playing survival against monsters.
But if it's a player that tries to kill them they shut the game down lol.... I really don't understand how these players are thinking.
It's also more fun playing suvival against players because they're all unique.. thinking differently... doing things differently.. not like bots.
Some players are bad... some are good... I'm pretty sure that some sheep would even be able to kill the PK if he had the guts to defend himself

Are you trolling glhf?
You need to recognise that there is a huge difference between playing (co-op) survival against AIs and players. The players know they're just having fun playing a game against AIs with little consequence, it's just how the game is played. But to know that there's players out there stalking you with malicious intent puts a certain amount of pressure on the player. Players that play games to relax and have fun don't enjoy that pressure.
If you add the ability to loot slain players that's going to drastically increase that pressure by adding consequences if they die.

If you're not trolling here's a more elaborate answer.
Reckon it could work if done right and you're willing to compromise; you can't have the cake and eat it at the same time.

Only MMO's I've played are WoW and EVE online. EVE comes rather close to what you describe in my head at least, aside from the full loot thing. In EVE it seems to be working because you can change roles, maybe not from the get-go, but given a bit of time you can simply swap between playing wolf and sheep. Also the items in the game are given less weight than say WoW and considerably more availability.
Should you lose you're gear you can buy new gear off the market, provided you have the money.

If you want full loot you'd have to go even further and reduce the weight and impact of gear and items and see to it that replacement items are relatively easy to come by. Absolutely no diablo-esque drop system that requires astronomical amounts of time to grind and farm random items. EVE does this by letting players massproduce items and sell on the market.