OPK (Open PK) and other changes

Open PK (OPK) feature added to Aardwolf:

There is a new feature called ‘OPK’ which is an abbreviation of ‘open PK’.

A player can flag ‘OPK’ at any time but, once set, cannot be removed for at least 3 days or until you remort. When the flag is manually removed, there is a 24 hour timer before it can be added again. The most important things to know about the flag are:

• You can be PKed by other OPK players in any room in the game that is not a ‘safe’ room or similar.
• There are no clan restrictions on using this. The game considers you a regular PK player regardless of clan. This means that any other ‘PK’ player (not just other OPK players)s can attack you in a PK room. Only other OPK players can attack you in a non-pk room. Other than this, who you can and can’t attack follows regular PK rules including level checks, not being able to kill people in same clan, etc.
• While you are ‘OPK’ flagged, you will receive a 10% exp bonus for all kills, enhanced campaign rewards similar to hardcore and will receive, on average, 2 extra qp per quest. We will probably end up tweaking the numbers for both hardcore and OPK but right now these are decent bonuses for the added potential of interruption to your playing but intentionally less then hardcore bonuses.

A few other housekeeping items related to Open PK:

• You cannot be hardcore and OPK at the same time.
• OPK (and Hardcore) players will no longer show their location in ‘where’ unless they are either in warfare, in a clan room, or you have revenge on them. Oracles and Ninjas can see full location.
• Hardcore players, Hardcore kills, OPK Players, OPK kills and regular PK kills now show in gamestat 5. Pinning down exactly what is considered a “OPK kill” vs a regular PK can be tricky. A kill is considered ‘OPK’ if the two players wouldn’t have normally been able to kill each other without the flag but it doesn’t check every single scenario – mostly if the players in a non-pk room or are in a PK room but one / both of them are not clanned. There are probably other scenarios where it technically isn’t an OPK kill (such as revenge), but this is close enough to get a feel for activity level of the new feature.

Other PK related changes:

• To prevent ‘griefing’ on corpse retrievals and genally make PK less of a pain, you will no longer have a corpse to collect after being PKed. Equipment will be kept on you as if it were a warfare or combat maze kill. You do still get transported to your morgue with hp/mana/moves at 10. The grace period on OPK kills has also been increased to 10 minutes.
• Using ‘who pk’ will now also include OPK and hardcore players.
• Hardcore mode now has a bonus qp for each quest completed at an average of 3qp per quest.

Keyrings and other changes unrelated to OPK:

• Made a couple of changes to the way keyrings work. When you die, a container will be created called, for example, Razor’s Keyring. Whatever items were on your keyring at the time of death will be in this container. Whenever this container is returned to you, the items will be quietly transferred back onto your keyring. Rot-death keys will *not* be purged on keyring so this transfers over the bag ‘loophole’ which I don’t have much appetite for fixing after all these years.
• If someone else loots your corpse then your keyring will sit in their inventory as a normal container until they return it to you, at which point the items will transfer to keyring again.
• Changed the way ‘Elemental Ward’ works – it will remember the last damage type you chose and automatically use that same damage type if you cast the spell with no arguments. This makes it more useful with the ‘spellup’ command.
• The Air Focus, Fire Focus, Earth Focus and Water Focus spells have been removed and replaced with the single spell ‘Elemental Focus’. When you cast it you now have to specify which damage type you want to focus on. As with Elemental Ward, it will remember the last damage type you used and default to that if cast with no arguments. Also to clarify, this effect does increase melee damage too, not just spells, so with the recent increase it is fairly significant.
• Any percent practiced you had in air focus is now elemental focus. The game will estimate practices spent on the other 3 and add some practices for them at login.
• Allspells will no longer show spells that have been removed.
• Invsort by weight should now correctly display the weight of aard bags and other containers that have items in them and a weight multiplier.
• Setwanted will now show the player name that set the flag in the info message.