The fugitive system which has yet to make it to Funcom's Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures live servers and yet has been the topic of much talk among the community. We've heard some people complain about it saying that it won't help, while others have been more positive towards this new feature.

So far, here's a quick look at how the system works. Each player gets a certain amount of murder points for killing a character with a lower level. It's pegged at 100 per kill if I'm not mistaken. Now once you hit 1000 murder points, you become a fugitive.

What does it mean when you become a fugitive? It means that you become a prime target for other players as killing you will not increase the murder points of any character. In addition, you will randomly drop an item each time a player kills you.

Now, it is possible for players to lower their murder points. As of this article's writing, it is by just simply waiting it out since the murder points drop by a certain number over a span of time or by getting killed.

Theoretically this sounds good, but like all systems, there are ways of breaking it which I'm sure may be painfully obvious to the more experienced MMORPG players out there.

The first, and probably the most glaring exploit in my opinion, would be a group of lowbies teaming up to take down higher leveled characters.

I'm not really sure if the developers have taken this into consideration yet, but a group of lowbies can take out one high leveled character with no fear of retribution. To make matters worse, if the higher leveled character retaliates he or she will be penalized by the system.

The second, and perhaps one that should scare the developers more, is if the community decides to ignore this new system and just go on playing as they normally do. You'll still end up with a group of fugitives in their 80s ganking people just as badly as when the system was introduced. Only this time, they have a new badge of honor to wear, the fugitive status.

Of course there are more possible ways that the system can be broken, but that's a story for another time since these are all just theories which will not be explored fully until the PvP Consequence system hits the live servers.

So at this point, I'd like to throw out a question to you Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures players: What are your thoughts on the new system?

---

Related Articles:

• Age of Conan test live servers: PvP consequence system, focus for next updates revealed
• E3 2008: Age of Conan to get new expansion, dungeon, areas, features
• Age of Conan patch notes for July 23: memory leak fixes, feat retraining prices reset