Deterrence and Culture

Last post I wrote that a lot of the PvP that a happens in an open-PvP world is not the kind of PvP the players or the designer wants. Everybody agrees that a simple full-loot, open-PvP world where everybody can attack anybody any time and with no additional rules or features is not going to work. It turns into a death match. But opinions deviate on whether this is a problem one can fix and if so, how.

Let's first find out why this is actually a problem in a MMORPG. After all, it seems to work quite well in real life. You can very easily murder a lot of people iRL, if you are cold-blooded enough. You can take their stuff and live in their houses. But society employs specialists to hunt you down. These specialists use features that we cannot possibly implement in a MMORPG. A Sherlock Holmes simulation might be fun, but inside a MMORPG it would be too demanding for nowadays budgets. Also, death penalty is extreme iRL. The murderer has a lot to lose: his entire life. Wheres in a MMORPG the most somebody can lose is some time invested in the game. This runs both ways, of course. To be murdered in a MMORPG isn't as bad as iRL, either. But this doesn't reduce the frequency of it happening.
What is important to note, however, is that iRL you are not prevented from going on a killing spree by some invisible force. You can do it if you really want. What keeps you from doing it is deterrence and culture.

To make a good simulation-heavy MMORPG, one should therefore try to find similar mechanisms of deterrence and culture that prevent people from going on a killing spree. To do that two issues must be discussed:

1) In what circumstances do we actually want players to attack other players and in what circumstances do we actually want to prevent it from happening? How can the system distinguish between the two?

2) How do we deter somebody from killing another player in a situation defined in (1)? Is there a way to determine players that are likely to behave in a non-appreciated way and can we thus prevent them from being able cause harm in the first place?

(1) is hard enough, but (2) is even harder. The central question is: How does the system know who actually attacked whom? Especially in a MMORPG with friendly fire and area damage, systems can easily be gamed. Working with thresholds can help. For example you define a group of players attacking a player, if they do some x% health damage to him within y seconds and didn't receive this amount of health damage by the supposedly attacked player in z minutes before.

Another approach is to use the knowledge of the player and empower him to e.g. set up bounties. The problem here is that this approach works completely independent from whether PvP has actually happened. The system requests some sacrifice (gold payment) from somebody to encourage players to harm another. Problem is balancing the system in a way that the “sacrifice” and “harm” are of a meaningful magnitude to new players and rich players. Consider the possibility that a rich player can support a new player with e.g. gold.

Do you know a game that gets it right? Or do you even have a specific suggestion?