Can a player get TOO GOOD at PK?

I have a lot to say on this topic, but in the interest of not stifling discussion too much I'll try to be brief. 

1. Is it even possible that a particular character can become so buff or meta in the game as to create a negative influence across the gameworld?


Absolutely, and it's quite easy, too. To be clear, it takes quite a lot of code and world knowledge to pull it off, as well as patience with respect to building skills (and/or spells), but it's definitely doable. The only real barrier here is time.

A character that is built to PK efficiently sacrifices a lot, including their own safety and quite possibly their social life, depending on the context of the PK. Someone who goes around killing people in the wilds for loot, for example, is going to be received a lot less warmly than someone who serves at the pleasure of some noble and discreetly removes the noble's enemies from the game.

Why is it a negative influence? One reason goes back to the barrier to building such a "buff" character: time. Not everyone has time to play as others do. Armageddon exists in an older era of ethical game design, where building up a player's addiction to a game was essentially necessary in order to extract value from them (think MMOs in the Everquest era and earlier). Nowadays, addiction to games is often linked to things like micro-transaction purchases. But since Armageddon lacks micro-transactions (for now!), the game extracts value from its players in the form of plot devices and activity. A PC who is "too good at PK" invested a lot of time in something besides roleplay with other people. They then turn around and use that time to kill PCs who are probably adding more to the roleplay scene than they ever will. A PC's story ends when they are dead, and a PK-efficient character ends a lot of stories.

That being said, PK-heavy characters can be a positive influence too. Take, for example, twinks' tendency to take magickers to the grasslands for spell-grinding purposes, since mana generation is high there. If a player were to roll a Tuluki ranger whose sole purpose in life is to harvest peraine and shoot magickers in the grasslands with poisoned darts, they'd effectively be reinforcing an aspect of the game world (that Tuluk is hostile towards magickers) and the players of the dead magickers can learn a valuable lesson from their death (not to ignore the setting simply to grind skill points). So they can be a positive influence, but in very rare and situational cases.


2. Is this even a bad thing if it drives code changes which (arguably) improve the game?


Code changes in response to a particular player's behavior, or even a group of players' behavior, is extremely reaction-heavy. So the answer to this question really depends on whether the reaction itself is warranted. If players were exploiting a bug and the code was adjusted to fix the bug, then the game is effectively improved. If the code change is done simply because staff don't like a particular player's behavior, that is intensely toxic.


3. Why would administrators make code changes to curtail player activities instead of just addressing activities with one or more players?


Getting a bit deeper into the speculation side of things here, and touching back on my answer to the last question, staff tend to be a very reaction-heavy body. They have been known to come up with changes to game policies based on recent events at the time, to varying responses and with varying levels of justification, including the bans on using words like "necker" or "mister" in RP or even the ban on playing out rape plotlines. If staff are willing to make such changes to game policies based on recent events, for better or worse, it's not much of a stretch to believe that they would take this logic to code changes too.

If we assume the staff body are more prudent, long-term thinkers (which they haven't really demonstrated they are, but let's pretend for the sake of argument that they have), then they have an interest in making code changes that curtail certain activities that could get out-of-hand in the future. Perhaps they don't want a particular PK tactic to catch on, or they don't want a character to get rich in a way that shouldn't have been possible in the first place. It follows that they would patch the code instead of simply lecturing a player to stop, because it stops all future players from abusing the code, too.

Speaking of lectures, making a code change helps avoid the lecture to a player about their activity in the first place. Staff who are confrontational also tend to be unpopular. It follows that staff who are not confrontational tend to be popular, or at least not unpopular. Making code changes to address "problem behavior" not only avoids the lecture, but spurs the usual rounds of staff-praising on the GDB that lead people to think each and every member of staff are working hard on the game.

Adding to @signifyinmonkey's good point about risk-averse play, I want to mention that in the four styles of play outlined by the Bartle taxonomy, PK is not the only aspect of competition, or the "Killer" archetype. In a game like Armageddon, the "Killer" archetype can also cover things like political maneuvering against other PCs, and similar actions that require social power rather than coded power. The problem is that since coded power has the ability to remove all of a player's social power in one fell swoop, the more codedly powerful PCs get, the more risk-averse competitors to those PCs will get both codedly and socially.

I believe there's no quick fix for such a problem that will satisfy everyone. As signifyinmonkey mentioned, staff tend to respond to groups of codedly powerful players with more powerful NPCs in an RPT. Players tend to respond to groups of codedly powerful players by making "deals with the devil" in the form of quasi-IC cooperation between groups that shouldn't like each other, such as an average grebber paying off a gemmed Whiran to drop codedly powerful players into the Silt Sea or a hole full of gith. What Armageddon inevitably needs, among many other pressing needs, is a cultural change where players mutually understand that PK always ends someone's story and ought to be a last resort, and "Killer archetype players" should pursue other means of competition such as political maneuvering, slander, intimidation, blackmail, threats of violence, and maiming before moving for the kill.

Hey, whoa whoa whoa.

I'm not 'building' any world. You might be surprised to discover that I'm not prone to PK at all. I'm only opening the topic up for discussion. I have no real dog in this fight.

I find it particularly egregious that staff DO punish certain people for PK and allow others to do it with seeming impunity, but that's my only real take on the situation.

only prob is i think ur conclusion is based on when killer griefer were the same stereotype

even tho griefers of them are a subset the wiki says

"For most the joy of being a Killer results from a friendly competitive spirit. They're in it for the sport, trying to read their opponent's moves and generally acting with honor."

so yeah if it attracts killer types and they became staff a smaller group of griefers may be able to make staff and do the same shit but even that smaller group has to hide their griefing well enough to get past staff who by ur estimates already have grifers among them who would see that a mile awy and aptly stomp them before they became competitive lol

plus not useful to always try and use that personality model to explain things or ppl

The model is particularly difficult to deal with in more modern games that encompass a wide degree of functions. An exploration-heavy mud in 1995 wasn't particularly big on roleplay (social) but these days you have a larger degree of overlap.

Also to address the idea that staff are anti-pk. That is ludicrous, in fact I would argue quite the opposite. I think I love seeing some pk battles go down between 2 skilled players. What I think the majority don't like to see his griefing-style pks where you are clearly doing it just to satisfy your own ego or to grief the player on the other end because you know who it is and dislike them oocly.