Player Killing



Player Killing (プレイヤー・キル(殺人)), is the act of killing another player in an online game. With each story, the act holds different meanings and weight.

Sword Art Online
In Sword Art Online (SAO), the act of killing another player is equivalent to killing another person in real life. Players committed murders as they believed that the act was not morally wrong, based on the fact that the game allowed such an action at all. Some of the players were so deluded by such logic that they even refused to believe that people actually died when their Hit Points (HP) reached zero. Certain players instigated and committed murders for personal reasons, or their own enjoyment. Known PK guilds are Titan's Hand and, more notably, Laughing Coffin.

Committing a crime, such as dealing damage to a green player, would temporarily turn the player's «Color Cursor» orange. Players and guilds that had become infamous for murdering other players were labeled as red players and red guilds respectively to distinguish them from mere thieves. Despite this naming, player killers were still marked with orange cursors, as red cursors were strictly reserved for monsters. Although it was possible for an Orange Player to revert their cursors to green by undergoing an annoying alignment recovery quest, this quest is exceedingly difficult to complete for players who have engaged in killing other players. A player who has killed about five other players will find it essentially impossible to restore their colour cursor to green. On the other hand, a Green Player may attack an Orange Player without any change to the colour of their cursors, as this is considered an act of self-defence.

In order to prevent one's cursor color from turning orange, players would sometimes hire other people to do the dirty work in order to remain green themselves, such as the instance of Grimlock enlisting the aid of Laughing Coffin to kill Griselda, as well as Caynz and Yolko later on. Additionally, not all members of an orange guild actually had orange cursors. An example of this is Titan's Hand, which had at least two members who remained green to scout for targets and spy in-town, while the remaining members would await at set ambush points to rob the players.

ALfheim Online
The act of killing is encouraged in ALfheim Online. The game even grants monetary bonuses to a race that manages to kill the leader of another race, such as how the Salamanders once managed to kill the leader of the Sylphs before Sakuya was elected as the leader of the Sylphs.

Unlike Sword Art Online, a death in ALfheim Online will not incur death in reality. Instead, players leave behind a Remain Light before respawning at their territory or saved spawn point after approximately a minute in the field or 600 seconds (ten minutes) in a boss room.

Gun Gale Online
Players are encouraged to kill others in Gun Gale Online. Although players do not die in real life if they are killed in-game, a few members of Laughing Coffin devised the Death Gun plot to create the illusion that it was possible to murder people from within a game. To achieve this, they had one person in the game shoot another player, while at the same time another person in the real world sneaked into the player's house and used a drug to kill them in real life.

Types

 * Regular PK - Attacking a person outside the safe area.
 * Portal PK - Sending players to dungeons greatly beyond their level to die.
 * Monster PK - Luring hostile monsters to kill players.
 * Sleep PK - Manipulating a sleeping person by moving their hand to accept a Duel and then killing them.
 * Provocation PK - Manipulating and guiding players into killing each other.