TL;DR at bottom.
@RapseyI don't think we can go for "fair", but depending on how it works it can be met with varying degrees of scrutiny. Y'all have some great logs. This would definitely need to be a group effort, but identifying alts across multiple IPs wasn't that difficult with moderator logs back when they were still on the client. All you needed were a few good inferences. Nowadays there's a box that allows for matching same ips and whatnot. And I know you guys have only made the logs more robust since then. I imagine anyone putting in effort could easily check ticket entries for multiples... but I also understand that it's a little bit of work. This is why the multi-tiered golden ticket thing works best IMO. We can simply say that 1 person is only allowed 1 golden ticket, and checking whether or not 10 players are the same person is trivial. If you're not the best at putting luck in your favor, then you can be the best at pking, you can no-life NPCs, and you can do a lot of other things to try and get a golden ticket.
I agree it's not necessarily a good thing or in any way "ideal". That's also why I'm insistent on this being infrequent and more of an "event" that brings the community together. It's not about the individual's wealth, it's about the reason people play the server in the first place.It may be a strange comparison but I hope you can see what I'm getting at. Giving a random OSRS player a 1M XP lamp would be a hugely nice gift. Giving them all 99's is such a big gift that it actually spoils the game for them. That's kinda how I feel about taking someone who's only ever had 100B and suddenly giving them 3T.
Hear me out here... This may tie into a larger idea that deserves its own thread, but the ability to pursue irrationally large amounts of wealth and fame are inherently necessary for captivating players to engage in much of the content in the game to begin with. The duel arena would be dead if not for the faintest allure of unimaginable wealth. Hell, this idea underlies the very concept of an RSPS itself! Private servers make getting all of the things that are difficult to obtain in the actual game much easier. This includes becoming wealthy, being notable, having a community presence, becoming a moderator, influencing the game, etc.
With regards to the wealth, I agree that most people aren't equipped to deal with a rapid increase in bank value. This is why lottery winners IRL often go bankrupt. But the attention a lottery generates (especially when the pot is high [pun intended]) brings people together. IRL, It allows them to engage with an interesting and fleeting aspect of their lives, but also draws them into whats going on around them. On PkHonor, the direct effect of this is way easier to characterize because we deal with a few hundred players online at most. Players joke and communicate on yell, in CCs, ingame, and make friends. This is true for the lottery guy at home and for people at the duel arena. The sheer craziness of having players walk around with 10s of trillions is enough to generate buzz that gets people talking, which in turn allows them to make connections that make the game slightly harder to leave behind. People are drawn to wealth and inevitably meet each other. Some are given loans by the rich players and thus a bond develops between the two. Sometimes losers bond over not having made the cut and might go PVMing or make their own group that shit talks those who let them down. People talking in general gets them to engage with each other and play the game in new and interesting ways. Having crazy shit like ultra rich players and lotteries are some of the reasons that people become attached to one another on the game. Wealth also causes beef, which causes people to takes sides sure, but also brings people on those sides together.
The larger discussion that this would've tied into is whether or not we've gone too far into ensuring that people don't can't cause any ruckus; I asked this very question a few years back. I read that post now and shit man, some of it was straight up prophetic. I mean, shit, look at this and tell me most of it didn't happen:
Spoiler: show
Sure, drama is annoying, and we're all supposed to be adults. But "tea" is something that captivates just about every person I've ever met (by "tea" I mean drama, the talk of the town, etc.). Having some sort of shit going on that people can just kick back and eat some popcorn to might actually have been necessary to keep people engaged. I'm not saying we need a repeat of 2010-2015, but perhaps a happy medium needs to be found. Maybe people spectating reports and staff reports isn't terrible. I know the job analogy came up when this was discussed a few years back, but I think of it more like a national court trial. That's always televised, people care and should be allowed to influence decisions like those. And we have a community where absolute truth (logs) exists and is available to every jury (moderators+), so it's not like OJ Simpson is gonna happen on PkHonor. I think it sometimes tended to get too chaotic before, but that enough time has passed where it can be given another go.
Recap:
The ability to have an impact, wealth, and importance is amplified by virtue of being on an RSPS. Giving people more opportunities to realize this ability can only be good for the server, as it directly complements the purpose for which they play the server in the first place. With regards to the topic, this means giving players a chance to compete for an undeservedly expensive item. Sure, some aspects cannot be made foolproof, but I'm beginning to think of that as a virtue. Imagine if someone managed to 'cheat' their way into a golden ticket, and then got lucky and won. They'd easily be the most hated person on PkHonor. Having that sort of event in the community would get people to interact with each other and see the game as the place where they have to do it - they'd bond over their mutual distaste for the player. It'd keep them on and engaged. We are not creating a system that gets exploited, we are creating a system that exploits human nature and people's shortcomings for the good of the server. And hey, if the winner happens to be level headed, we'll try again in 6 months.
Tl;dr:
The lottery isn't for the item, it's for the friends we made along the way.
The lottery isn't for the item, it's for the friends we made along the way.
lol