My Dragons
Game Design VII - Hlep Tehre Ganking Me
In the design of My Perfect MMO, there are a couple of serious problems I'd like to avoid. One of them is the "ganking" issue: this is when a high-level person travels to a low-level area and starts killing the low-level characters there. They can't effectively fight back, so the only solution is to go do something else for a while, till the ganker gets bored, or call in the big guns in the form of their, or their friends', high-level characters.
This is suboptimal, leading to less fun for everyone except the PKers ("player-killers"). So what do we do about it?
There's the WoW solution, in which there are certain servers that just don't allow PvP ("player-versus-player") at all by default; if you want the PvP experience, you have to pick a server that allows it or set an option on yourself signaling to others that you're in PvP mode (and you still can't pick on those who don't have that option set)1. This is an OK solution, but I'd prefer something with a little more subtlety to it.
PKers tend to like power; one of the reasons they go around picking on the little guys is because they can. In much the same way that rape is not about sex, ganking is not about the loot or the XP, but about the joy of making the other player miserable. So, perhaps we ought to take away their power.
Whether you have levels and XP or not, there's going to be some method of working out the relative power of a PC and a mob; mobs that are too wimpy compared to the character won't give whatever reward killing them would normally bestow. Therefore, treat PCs like mobs when they fight, with the instigator of the fight the "PC". If the attacked character is sufficiently low-power that he wouldn't give the attacker any reward when killed as a normal mob, the successful attacker instead loses whatever reward the lower-level character would have gotten for killing them. So if Sam Seventy attacks Terry Two (and of course wins, because how not?), Sam loses whatever reward Terry would have gotten for killing a level-70 character (or a reasonable approximation, given that technically it Just Couldn't Happen). And if Sam hangs around and does it again, the second penalty is doubled. And doubled again. And eventually, if Sam fails to get the hint, all those nifty shiny things with level requirements aren't usable anymore...
As an added touch, folks who have lost power to ganking should also get a title that they can't remove, something like "the Cowardly", that doesn't vanish till they've worked their way back up to wherever they were when they started their PK career. And they have to repay all their training costs, if any.
None of this applies if the lowbie is the one to start the fight. You pays your money and you takes your chances and if folks want to go around picking fights they can't win, that's not my problem.
1: Certain actions, such as entering a battleground or a city of the other faction, or attacking a PvP-flagged character, automatically flag you PvP, but these are all things you can avoid doing if you wish.