I don’t think he worked on UO until a release or two after Renaissance(Trammel). However the rest of the lead devs all also stated flatly that non-consensual PvP was bad for UO as a business (however good it might have been for generating ‘stories’. ‘Stories’ don’t pay the bills.)
An aspect of the articles that doesn’t get touched on much, is where in the UO post-mortem they talk about ‘giving players the tools to police themselves’.
Personally I think the Concord mechanic is kinda lame and boring, and not really representative of what EVE is supposed to be about. If I wanted to design a ‘harsh and unforgiving universe, where actions have consequences and people need to deal with them’, I probably would have gone with something like:
- Concord only covers rookie systems, career agent systems, trade hubs and maybe 1-2 jumps out from trade hubs (slower response time each jump out), and possibly a couple other systems designed to be neutral meeting grounds.
- Leave the flag system somewhat as it is, but make it so that killing an ‘illegal’ target bumps your ‘Criminal Standing’. It also gives ‘kill rights’ to the corporation of the person you killed. Since most systems have no Concord, kill rights in this context only means ‘they can shoot you without getting criminal flags, but if they do you can shoot back’.
- The length of the kill rights the victim corp gets depends on the value of the kill. Corps could also pay ISK or possibly Concord/DED LP (see below) to extend those kill rights.
- Bounties would pay out 65% of ‘destroyed value’ from the killmail.
- Killing criminals pays out some type of Concord/DED LP based on (destroyed value) X (Criminal Standing). Notorious criminals pay out more.
- Once your ‘Criminal Standing’ got high enough, the kill rights would extend to the targets’ alliance.
- Once your Criminal Standing gets high enough, that’s it, you’re declared a pirate and are KOS to everyone everywhere.
- A significant criminal standing would cancel the ability to buy ship insurance.
- It would be very difficult to lower your Criminal Standing (however you might get benefit with the pirate factions for it).
It would need some testing and tweaking, but I think this would result in a few things:
- People would have a strong incentive to join the biggest meanest corp they could.
- Gankers would face the same kind of risk their targets do… that of being a viable target at any time to any random attacker (with kill rights) that happens by.
- Bounties would become meaningful again, and players would have some recourse to being attacked (if you can’t fight back, just slap a bounty on him).
- People would have an actual reason and economic motive to fleet up and go looking for gankers/criminals.
- Criminals would have to choose between flying around in a paper tiger ‘gank fit’ or fit for tanking or escaping.
Now being a criminal would be a real thing, being a ‘white knight’ or cop would be a real thing, and even victims would have some agency because every bit added to the bounty would make the target that much more likely to be killed.