I''m designing a MMORPG, and I want to make it impossible to lose items upon character death, but keep PKing (Player Killing) worth while (but not so rewarding that everyone goes around killing each other). I was thinking of something like an ear system like Diablo uses, and that the "ears", or whatever I use could be sold to the shops for gold. But that would be abused by killing "mule" character''s over and over. My game also uses the "Evil, Neutral, and Good" karmas, so I thought selling the "ears" would reduce your alignment further, but once again players would sell them on "mule" characters. It seems mule character''s are the problem, but they are unavoidable. Any ideas?

Why not setup a feature for players that lets them customize the level of "protection" of certain items they''re wearing. Flexible, but limited.

For example, a new player has a certain amount of points. Let''s say it''s 10. Items can have rarity levels (or quantity of money). If a player has an expensive/rare sword and a crapload of money on them, they can put "protection" on the sword (eating up, say, 5 points). Then let''s say the person has $10,000 of money on them, which would require 10 points, so you put protection on $5,000 of it. Now you have 0 points.

Now when the player goes into battle, should he die, he loses a random item that does not have "protection" on it, and the items that do remain untakeable.

This could lead to keeping priority on your items, and would be an interesting way for killing other players to be both valuable, and moderated.

A MMORPG called Project Entropia has a neat way of dealing with this, pretty much the same as munkie''s.
Insurance.
You insure an item, the cost being connected to that items value, and it will be return to you after death. You can insure everything if you have the money, but after you die it must insured again.

Other ideas for the ears, make the value of the ear dependent on the (former) owners level. So someone would have to level up high before they could make much money off it, and it would make players seek out the high people more than newbies.
Combine this with another idea, restrict people to selling 1 ear a day. That way people would have more incentive to earn the high level ears, as they want to make more cash faster (ear price would raise exponentially with the level of it) and can''t make quick cash by killing 1 player repeatedly (they could still make cash, but they would need a high level mule and it wouldn''t be enough to unbalance play).

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Very simple, do what everquest does ( other rpg''s I''m not sure if they do this also )

Make the ear NO DROP. To prevent trading to mules. Also to further stopping a mule from looting the ear, put a specific restriction on PVP deaths that only the person who killed the player can only loot the item, and after set amount of time, make the body/ear poof.


If you played EQ before, you will know you can''t sell NO DROP items but perhaps set a bit field that you can sell this specific NO DROP item, OR have a specific NPC that buys ears shrug. Just some thoughts.

Ok thanks for the ideas guys. I know what i''ll do now.