This article collects information regarding the conceptualisation of the gameplay of The Mana World

The role and concept of player vs. player combat is a topic that is very controversal among the development team and fan base. There are many different views how much pvp combat should be restricted and how much victory and defeat in pvp combat should be rewarded or penaltized.

Arguments against restricting pvp combat are:

• Encourage competive gameplay
• Posibility of self administration (players are able to punish players directly who behave badly in their opinion)
• Constant thrill of being attackable

Arguments for restriciting pvp combat are:

• Encourage cooperative gameplay
• Avoid high level characters destroying the game for low level characters
• Avoid ganking (killing characters while they can't defend themself)

Here a list with some of the proposed concepts:

PVP proposal from old wiki

Reward for killing notorious player killers

PVP proposal from Andrew Harrison

Separating the world in zones with different risks of pvp combat and rewards in these zones for killing monsters is propotional to the pvp risk.

PVP proposal from Crush

PVP combat only between guilds that are at war.

PVP proposal from Feline Monstrosity

PVP optional, can be switched on from setup window.

PVP based on challenge

Players have to challenge other players for pvp combat. The challenge can be rejected. There may or may not be a penalty for rejecting challenges.

Mainly Unrestricted PVP (from Muereme)

Players can kill other players without such thing as automatic monitoring. Wouldn't a big automatic monitor system be too much trouble? IMO (technically speaking), doing a very complex background monitoring may affect server performance in detriment of the game. Maybe just having an "age restriction" would do the trick...some kind of noob protection from levels 0 to, say, 15 such as invulnerability to pvp and the inability to attack other players. Or what about an in-game legal system? Maybe there could be an special rank for players with no human kills such that they could be part of the prosecution and trial (with a voting system or something) of a PKer if they want (with sentences like time of prision or something like that). I think that would actually enrich gameplay.

Also note this thread: http://forums.themanaworld.org/viewtopic.php?t=649&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0