Update:Blog - Design Notes: 'Skulling' Changes
This blog was written by Mod Mark and dates to 23 August 2011.
Hi
Due to some unfortunate recent behaviour in the wilderness regarding tricking people into 'being skulled', we have made some small changes to the way that killers are remembered after death. If you’re not a PK’er and you don’t spend time in the wilderness, this isn’t the blog for you! Basically (via a complicated and very drawn out elaborate scam) a player could find themselves retaliating to someone fighting them in the wilderness and find that they were the ones 'being skulled' while their attacker was not. This lead to people (even experienced pkers) losing equipment because of an exposed flaw in the system.
Firstly, let me explain what I mean by 'being skulled'. If you chose to attack someone in the wilderness a skull icon would appear above your head. If you died while having a skull above your head, you would respawn with no items. The only exception to this rule was if you were defending yourself by retaliating against someone attacking you/ or who recently attacked you. The system would remember your attackers and allow you to attack them without fear of being skulled, even after death. Let’s call this a 'combat relationship'.
Previously a player who was attacked and killed in the wilderness could return to their killer (within a certain time limit) and engage them in combat without the fear of being skulled. We have now changed this behaviour. If you die, then you no longer have the ability to return to your killer and attack without being skulled. If you do not die then the system still remembers your 'combat relationships' in exactly the same way it always has.
Death now causes the game to wipe any 'combat relationships' you might have. Death basically makes you start again, removing your skull and forgetting any of the fights you had previous to death.
Please note - We never just change things for the fun of it. We carefully weigh up the pros and cons of any change and discuss the issue with players so we can understand the impact of the change. In this case we believe that there is no impact to 99.9% of legitimate Pking tactics, but that clarification to the system benefits all players.
If you have any questions or would like to discuss this matter further, please visit the forum post here.