Suggestion: Disable @noks
Description
Disable @noks to remove protection against kill stealing.
Rationale
Judging from the fact that my suggestion to disable main and map chats was silently and hastily closed, I don't imagine this one will be taken seriously either. I'm mostly putting it here to alleviate myself of the sense of duty I feel to attempt to repair the rapidly deteriorating spirit of this game. And so that I can have something to point to when everyone is standing around a corpse and scratching their heads over what happened.
Ragnarok was designed to bring people together. But when I say an MMORPG is designed to bring people together, everyone imagines a hug circle. That's partly right but it's mostly incomplete. What I mean is that it is designed to make people collide. Every material part of the game is supposed to be trying to serve the purpose of causing people to cross paths and have a social encounter of varying meaningfulness and consequence.
I know that idea will run counter to what the introverts, anti-socials and materialists think they want. And I could argue against that for hours, but I don't want to get lost in the weeds. I think most reasonable people can acknowledge that the mechanics of an MMORPG exist to ultimately produce social experiences. And if I'm wrong that we can mostly agree on that then I won't bother you guys again because writing is difficult and there is no reaching people who have the self-awareness of a Pitman.
I don't know if everyone sees the same things I see, but I observe that the general attitude of players in the game can be characterized as free-spirited at the best of times and profoundly meaningless at the worst. Things generally feel like they don't matter. People generally seem like they feel like things don't matter. I would attribute it to a number of things, but for the purposes of this suggestion I'll talk about the role I think @noks plays in the meaning problem.
Why the fuck would any reasonable person want to be KSed? Well, I don't particularly want to be KSed. It's kind of annoying actually. If you were expecting a masochist to describe to you the pleasure of pain then I have a red candle to sell you. But I do think the absence of KS protection is a significant part of what causes the game's mechanical nature to manifest a social nature. I will demonstrate some of the differences between a server with @noks and a server without it by telling two stories about four knights.
Story 1
There are four knights at Clock Tower Underground who are mob killing Bathories. Their names are Ashley, Becky, Charlie and Dom.
- Ashley is the weakest and most honorable knight. She will never KS somebody on purpose.
- Becky is the second weakest and second most honorable knight. She will only KS somebody who KSed her first. And she will only KS equally in retaliation.
- Charlie is the third weakest and third most honorable knight. He will only KS somebody who KSed him first. But he will KS in retaliation infinity times.
- Dom is the strongest and least honorable knight. He will KS everybody all the time.
If the only people on the map are Ashley, Becky and Charlie, then there won't be any KSing and everyone will get along happily. So in that case, the best strategy for the first three knights is to never KS.
But when Dom is on the map, Dom will KS everybody all the time. And that redefines the best strategy for everyone else. Now Dom's strategy is the best strategy.
Ashley, Becky and Charlie don't like Dom because he is making farming and leveling slower for them. To get revenge, the three knights temporarily adopt Charlie's strategy to KS Dom in retaliation infinity times.
Dom doesn't like the taste of his own medicine. If it was only one knight KSing him then he wouldn't care because he is the strongest knight and he can tolerate the loss while still coming out ahead. But since all three knights are KSing him then the loss is great. However, while the three knights may succeed in bullying Dom off the map, they haven't managed to redefine the best strategy for Dom. Dom's best strategy is still to KS everybody all the time.
Being honorable knights, Ashley, Becky and Charlie feel pity for Dom because he is barely getting any monsters at all. So the three knights decide to use Becky's strategy instead. They will only KS equally in retaliation.
Dom begins to notice that the other knights have stopped KSing him all the time except when he does it first. The three knights have successfully managed to redefine the best strategy for Dom to match Becky's strategy, and the map is free of KSing again.
End.
Story 2
The four knights turn on @noks and everyone is happy, except for Dom who likes more direct competition with other players while leveling and farming. But 3/4 happy is pretty good.
End.
Both stories consist of four characters who have unique personalities and play styles. But in the second story, the characters never come in contact with the personalities and play styles of the other characters. Each person exists in a protective bubble in which conflict can scarcely arise, lessons can scarcely be learned and few stories emerge to be told.
In the first story, it is possible for each of the four play styles to emerge and be experienced by the players. There will be times when the map is populated by Beckys who protect the Ashleys by deterring the Doms. There will be times when the map is populated by Ashleys who learn to become Beckys when preyed upon by Doms. And there will be times when the map is populated by Doms who exert dominance over other Doms and hone their dirty tactics in a dog eat dog environment. Nobody's play style has been excluded or invalidated, which I think is great because I think they are all fun in their own ways.
I'm often told by gamer friends that people aren't interested in MMORPGs such as Ragnarok anymore. While Ragnarok's era is certainly past, I think the decline of MMORPGs is mostly a consequence of the rise of new genres like MOBA and new platforms like mobile and tablet. MMORPG is simply an opportunity cost of experimenting with new genres. But I think the MMORPG decline is also in part because the tenants of RPG design have faded out of the collective memory. People don't seem to remember what RPGs are about or what makes a good one. The borders between genres have become so blurry that gamers tend to assume that the borders don't matter anymore. We'll say, in so many words, that it's an indication of the progress we have made and undoubtedly a reflection of our virtues. We've become more accepting and inclusive of gamer types, we think, as if the killers over at Street Fighter ever gave a fart about the socializers over at DnD or vice versa. By my estimation, the feuding of gamer types didn't emerge in any significance until games began trying to cater to multiple types, and the players learned that they had to fight for the game's soul.
My point in all of that is that gamers are collectively still learning that genres are better when divided because they are often incompatible. The things that make an RTS or a MOBA compelling will often dilute the things that make and RPG compelling, and vice versa.
If this wasn't already so long I would draw upon the research of my favorite social psychologist Jonathan Haidt to show that developed countries such as those where most gamers reside are suffering from a crisis of overprotective adults. As a result, younger generations are increasingly failing to develop the ability to deal with simple conflicts, especially social ones, such as those I developed in Ragnarok during my adolescence through experiences not unlike those of the four knights. I think @noks reflects the trends of overprotective-ness, helicaopter parenting, and incompatible design philosophies creeping into this RPG.