Age of Conan's guilds encouraged not to PvP in groups?

I still don't understand the uproar. From what I understand, they are ganking. Which usually implies a greater number of players or higher level players taking out the opposite. They are saying nothing about equal battles, just for them to not gank people when they are in a group of larger than 15 players.

There has already been an official post from an AoC community lead about this:

So, there seems to be some confusion on both sides of the issue.

Let's try to clarify the situation, and then perhaps we can get somewhere.

PvP is acceptable in all shapes or forms. We have built-in mechanics that allow the player being killed to find a way out of it.. When those mechanics fail or do not function as intended we will step in. Until then we will be as hands off as possible.

Now, we have a lot of players, a lot of servers, and a lot of petitions, as you may know. We do get a lot of petitions on Deathwhisper about "griefing". When do we take action? When it crosses the line. You can camp someone until the next day if you want. More power to you.

What you cannot do is verbally threaten them or use inappropriate language. You cannot use exploits or bugs to kill other players, or for any reason, for that matter. The game is rated M, but that does not mean you can use racial slurs or issue personal attacks.

In this case, the GM was seeing a lot of reports of griefing with regards to SA's guild. He didn't say you couldn't pvp. He made the honest mistake of giving out his personal opinion that maybe keeping a lower profile might be handy in avoiding a negative reputation. Obviously, it was a mistake. If you feel like it, bring all 300 of your friends, enemies, or whatever and beat each other senseless.

It seems that our policies are not clear cut enough, and we will make every effort to clarify them so that there is absolutely no question as to what is appropriate and what is not.

This is why Age of Conan fails as a PVP game. Just give me Warhammer, a game by a dev who knows PVP.

Yeah, man, I'm a little surprised at the rumormongering by Massively of posting a biased forum post as a "news" about Funcom's policies.

I just read the chat transcript on their forum, and I was about to say, he basically says, "I would advise ganking in smaller groups if you want to avoid some GMs getting on your case. That's my personal advice, and not official." And yet this gets posted as "Funcom doesn't want people to PvP in groups".

Thanks for posting the official response Vipper, it corroborates what the reading I was getting from the chat log. If you're going to post news articles on rumors, please just post the facts, instead of adding your own interpretations, or more clearly label it as a biased rumor.

"Funcom isn't happy with guild members attacking other players in a group." isn't really reporting the facts of the scenario. Provide the link, give a description of what was said, factually, and let people draw their own conclusions.

Here is two more screenshots to had:

http://img140.imageshack.us/img140/9085/gmszq7.jpg

http://img140.imageshack.us/img140/2425/gms1xv7.jpg

And for the threads deleted on the forums and the account bans.... Funcom clearly never heard of the Streisand effect... pitty.

True to form for the pvp community, if players don't have hard coded rules for pvp in a game, some will abuse it until the game company is forced to code it or lose a large number of players.

Well, aside from the fact that FunCom launched the game less than a week after it went in to beta - bugs and all, I kind of saw this coming to their PvP servers. This is a common thing in PvP servers with regards to all MMO's. Generally with PvP games/servers, a "gang" will take over the server and force you to pay them to be a part of their guild/clan or will constantly hunt you down and kill you. I see this being a real turn-off for PvP in any game, and all developers need to do something about it.