@Morgana: You need to just admit that you ENJOYED hunting reds before stat loss was removed. You have said that your guild made a sport of chasing reds. That was probably your guild's primary reason for existing. As for me, I belonged to a guild, but it was mostly PvM and consensual PvP. As for the group of us who hunted reds, we never really had a guild, but McCheese, Topher, McDaddy, Viper, me, and a half-dozen others had sort of a semi-permanent militia; when somebody spotted a red anywhere around Minoc, McCheese would send us all an ICQ, and we would all drop what we were doing and recall in. We would just have 2 minutes after the PK killed a miner to chase him down and kill him before he could recall out. It was actually a great part of the fun of the game.
Please just admit that, until stat loss was removed, the PKs actually served several useful purposes:
1. They gave us blue veterans something to do. The reds back then were always truly great players. They had to be; they couldn't afford to die. They had battle skills that they had honed to perfection. They could time that explosion/para/explosion pot/e-bolt combo to the split second.
2. They added an element of danger to the game.
3. Turning red was something that only the very best players did after they had conquered everything there was to fight, and done everything else there was to do. If you were a red Dread Lord, it meant that you had managed to avoid town militias, anti-PK guilds, and any group of random blues who saw you and attacked. Players didn't turn red on a whim back then; when they died, it wasn't quite perma-death, but it was close. One guy had over 300 kills and over a million gold bounty on his head; when he died, he would have had to spend 100 days logged in 24/7, just wandering around as a ghost, to have avoided stat loss.
4. PKing wasn't all that rampant until after they removed all of the penalties. I was there. Except for a very few PK'er hotspots, like brit x-roads, most of Brittania was usually pretty safe, until they removed stat loss.
5. Yes, Brit x-roads was THE PvP hotspot, for a very good reason. You seem to have forgotten why the Brit X-roads was where all the PKs hung out, their very favorite place in all of Brittania. Brit X-roads was also THE place to shop for high-end stuff back then, all the way from day 1 till UO:R. It was the Luna of the pre-UO:R world, THE place to shop for that invul armor or silver vanq katana. There was a REALLY good reason why the PKs would hide around there to ambush shoppers. Instant wealth. There were shops everywhere, with all the best stuff in the game. And PKs wouldn't just attack somebody at random; they weren't going to take a murder count, which meant 8 hours of play time in which they wouldn't be able to rez, for just a potion keg or GM weapon. They would stay hidden, like a cat waiting on the perfect prey, and attack somebody who had just bought a suit of armor of invulnerability or a silver vanq weapon. I did a lot of shopping there; I wouldn't buy anything really expensive unless there were several other blues around, then hit the recall button the second after I bought it. If I wanted something else, I would recall back and rinse and repeat. I never once got PK'ed there in all of the hundreds of shopping trips I made at Brit x-roads. The people who got ganked there were generally the people who deserved it; they were beyond careless.
I did feel sorry for one guy who did get ganked; he had just bought a full suit of invul and a couple of vanq katanas, one of which was silver. He had bought the gold he used with real life money, too. And he didn't recall out to bank his stuff. He just stood there and kept shopping. 4 or 5 reds came out of hiding and hit him at once, a coordinated insta-kill attack. He lost maybe a million gold pieces' worth of equipment before he even got to wear it, when gold was still worth $100 per million. But, to be honest, you couldn't really blame the PKs for that one; I had the unworthy thought of taking a murder count for all that great stuff, if they hadn't done it. And I'm sure a couple of other shoppers had the same idea. Truthfully, if he was that careless when he bought it, he wasn't likely to have kept it for long anyway.
I do NOT think it's a good idea to put all the high-end vendors into a new Luna, which is exactly what you and Tanivar would be doing if you added a Brit x-roads guard zone. From day 1 till UO:R, Brit x-roads had been one of the biggest shopping centers on Atlantic. 99.9% of the players back then knew that it wasn't a good idea to stand around begging to get ganked after they had bought a bunch of big-ticket items.
I know that your guild had a lot of fun chasing reds away from the Brit x-roads, and as soon as you chased them away, they came right back. Even if you put some of them into stat loss, there was always a new red who couldn't resist the temptation of instant wealth. But that was part of the game. If you didn't want to take the chance of getting PK'ed, you were either careful when you bought the big-ticket items there, or you did your shopping somewhere safer, where you were much less likely to find the very best stuff in the game, but you were also a lot less likely to get PK'ed when you did find that uber item.
I was actually surprised that there weren't even more PKs hanging around there than there actually were. Imagine if you took Luna today and dropped in the middle of Felucca. But it wasn't the problem that you make it out to be. People who shopped there knew the risks. There was a reason why there were usually several people there shopping, despite the risks. There was a reason why several anti-PK guilds made regular patrols of the area. It wasn't a problem, it wasn't a design flaw. Nothing needs fixing. The shopping center was part of the way the map was originally designed. It was SUPPOSED to be the place where thieves, pickpockets, and yes, even PKs would lay in wait for unsuspecting shoppers.
After stat loss was removed, the shops stayed open, but the reds came out of hiding and killed everybody in sight. Where before, you only had to worry if you were buying a really high-end item, after the PKing penalties were gone, even the people just picking up a few ingots or a potion keg weren't safe. And the PKs got their retribution on the guilds that had hunted them. Instead of watching out for ambushes, they could now do the ambushing, and slaughter the anti-PK guilds without fear of stat loss if they died. After stat loss was removed, Brit X-roads looked more like a post-apocalyptic wasteland, with the bodies of both blues and reds strewn everywhere, than the mecca of the classic UO world that it had been.
I'll say it again. BEFORE THE PENALTIES WERE REMOVED, PKs weren't the big problem that you insist that they were. They were actually a useful part of the game, a vital part of the PvP element of UO. They added a sense of danger and adventure to the whole game. They only became an unbearable nuisance, a real pain in the backside, caused untold amounts of misery and grief, committed mass murder, made people shudder at the very thought of resource gathering, and pretty much frustrated the majority of the population to the point of distraction and pleas to do something about them, after the devs decided to remove all of the severe penalties that had kept them at bay.
UO was still gaining subscriptions when UO:R was introduced, but people were getting fed up with all of the rampant PK'ing. I know that it did become a real problem, but the problem was created by the devs. You were actually enjoying the chase, just like all of us in McCheese's informal Minoc Militia were. Until they removed stat loss and the reds first started fighting back, then they pretty much took over and they began hunting US.
We don't need 1,000 new anti-PK rules and a guard zone for the pre-tram world's version of Luna. The fact is that the early T2A rules were sufficient. PK'ing wasn't a real problem for most of us before they removed the penalties. In fact, if you would just look back and admit it to yourself, your time in your guild chasing PKs was probably some of the best fun you had in the entire T2A world.
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