Family Name: Bantalope

Region (NA/EU): EU

Hello o/

I would like to start out this by mentioning I am a permared player so this is all from the PoV of someone already max negative karma.

Withing the G-Labs patch there is a change that I don't think many people are fully paying attention too or simply don't understand why it is a good step for the game so I'd like to put my opinion in.

The current state of the karma.
Currently there are a few different kinds of players when it comes to karma:
- Blue players - Players that are normally max karma and at most flag to defend a spot once or twice (Generally 300k)
- Blue griefers - Players that may abuse the karma system to grief without punishment; killing a player without going negative, knocking off horse trainers, using low AP weapons to grab people and move them to boats etc. (1-299k)
- Semi-red players - Players that will bounce between red and blue dependent on their situation and what they want to do (-1mil-300k)
- Red players - Players that are permanantly negative karma (-1--1mil)

This system allows for people to change very rapidly as recovering karma is currently a 1 hour job to go from full negative to full positive.

The benefit of red players for a blue player is that if one attacks you, you do have the option to fight back while with a blue player you cannot; this allows you to continue to defend yourself while with a griefer they will simply farm over you with no countermeasure other than losing your own karma or leaving/swapping servers.

Why is this change good?
This change incentivises players to try and stay on one side of the spectrum, if you go too far down it could take upwards of 30 hours of grinding to simply get back to a blue state. 
This means players that do kill alot are committed to that choice and face the standard punishments of crystal loss, and the likes and more easily distinguishes the line between blue and red.

This sets up an avenue to rehaul the karma system, despite what you think of red players most can agree that people grinding over you and similar griefing methods are unhealthy for the game and being able to fight back to deal with it should always be an option.

Currently the karma system places you in a clear line of good or bad with no real inbetween while -10m karma can allow for more; by simply changing the system so the players have 100k max karma this already puts in a thin line to going red which leads onto the suggestions.

Further suggestions to improve the karma system
#1 Reworking the karma states
Currently the karma is setup as:
- >0 Blue
- <0 Red
My suggestion to this is to change the max karma to inflict a criminal state more frequently:
- >0 Blue (max 100k karma)
- <0 - -1m Grey (Criminal)
- <-1m Red (Murderer)
This allows for people willing to lose karma to be put into a criminal state more easily allowing them to be attacked by other players and guards, punishing players that arent prepared to face the consequences of their actions.
A different state of murderer and criminal also then allows for certain perks for murderers allowing different content for those in that karma state (quests, red only safe areas etc)

However this just leaves the issue of people defending their spot and grinding over you which is fixed with my next suggestion

#2 Removing the option to grind over people
At first an impossible task but certainly doable.
My suggestion:
- When killing a mob it applies a 2 minute buff upon its respawn, this buff token claims the mob as yours during that duration (Not for players below 0 karma)
- This token is visible to all players and when killed by anyone other than its original owner, will apply a self defence state to the owner as well as decreasing the intruders karma by 50K
- This allows the original spot holder to then fight back against the intruder, allowing them to fight with no karma penalties including killing them.
- The intruder will still lose karma upon killling the original spot holder, then placing them into a grey (criminal) state.

- During event spawns, tokens you hold will be frozen till the event despawns or is killed 

This solution utilises the new space of the negative karma max to force players into a criminal state for imposing on others territory.
There is of course the issue of certain spots like elvia where a weapon increases your max clear tremendously but any suggestions to that are more than welcome.

Conclusion
The karma changes put us in a great position to keep making changes to the game allowing for a more playable game where people can have an actual avenue to fight back and the system can be properly utilised more than an arbitrary number.

The proposed changes obviously do hold some issues that I'm more than welcome to suggestions on, and if any other scenarios come up then i would be glad to add them in as a proposed change.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and please feel free to leave your opinions on it below.
Any comments blatantly discussing "removing pvp and pve only servers" I will be ignoring as they aren't relavant to the current discussion.

Have a nice day everyone. o/
- Bantalope (Permared Muiquun member)

Edits:
#1 Added not for neg karma note to the grind token section

#2 Added the required adventurer name and such at the top

PA, please us tag while red. I BEG!

And what do you suggest about the perma red eva-geared unkillable (in PVE gear) griefers, who attack you just to drop your elixir rota, knock you off horse, to kill alts at world bosses, etc? If they are max. negative, and they use cheap crystals, they dont lose anything.

I think the biggest issue with the PvP system are these players who abuse this side of the system; thats why a lot of people suggest PVE servers or the complete removal of the flagging system.

Press like 1 button to swap crystal setup and kill them?

I'm gearlet myself and have no problems killing eva memers swapping crystals and and maybe artifacts. And worst case you can still just swap to marni oder another server to not play into their kind of gaming.

Swapping servers might be too late or not possible/unwanted sometimes; killing them or swapping server is useless after they killed you and dropped your elixir rota; some spots dont have marnis; in certain situations (having cd, doing boss train, doing guild boss) you cant or dont want to swap servers.

The problem still stands even if you do the suggested things: they do the attack without any kind of punishment/negative consequences. They dont loose more karma as they are already max negative. This is the main issue, they dont risk anything, while the attacked player looses buffs, items (elions), time, etc.

 - Jail time when they get killed. At least it effectively removes them from the spot

- powerful guards popping up ; though I'd remove any crystal / enhancement gear loss for getting killed by these guards

In the end, we're all simply asking for PA to take care of all these aspects, because it was their initial proposal after all. But Marni/Arsha/pve seasons are easy escapes, not real solutions. When will they finally decide to make a proper system? Excessive pk, excessive ks, all those lame behaviours abusing the lack of working penalties : PA should take care of it.

I like the proposal made by OP, for a long time PA could have made better choices, instead of isolating players and making them intolerant to interactions. 

Arsha is the closest thing to a solution assuming both players are there for grinding.

Arsha is the closest thing to a solution assuming both players are there for pvp.

I've never seen a good flag system.