TL;DR: New command usable as full group against solos / small man granting a kill rp bonus for letting them live netting about as much kill rp as killing them would have.
ETA: Depending on feedback this weekend or early next year.
Over the last months we discussed various options but never really found something that wasn't flawed in some way or likely not going far enough. However, we're now at a point where we'll just test one idea to see if it can't at least improve the situation.
The goal that makes it quite difficult is to have the different playstyles coexist within the same area to allow a fluent switch from solo / small / group fights to keep fights / zerging and vice versa.
There are 2 pretty big obstacles to visible solos / small man, this change attempts to address only one and that is the player base and its behavior. With the task system we're not really helping as we're practically incentivizing people to play red is dead even more than would originally be the case already.
The goal of the first change is to give an incentive to let visible solos and small man live, the incentive should be about as large as the incentive to kill them. Discussions were had here and it started with flat out giving the rp as if you had killed them once those that you let live expire of natural causes without your involvement, then it evolved into that amount of rp becoming a personal pool that would be be used up / added onto your future kills.
The initial iteration that will go live however will be a 20% kill rp bonus for your next 5 kills per person you let live, just the next X kills will stack up (e. g. if you let a 3 person small man live you will have a 20% kill rp bonus for your next 15 kills).
Depending on how / if it's used, it may become a permanent feature at which point it will also get titles and maybe reskins as further rewards.
As for the details, it will be a command with a range restriction that one of your group members has to do while having an eligible enemy in target, the range is there to show that you could actually have just ran them over if you wanted to but explicitly chose not to.
Once such a marked person dies of natural causes without your involvement the bonus is applied to you / your group. Please note that the marked person has to either die in a mostly fair fight or more than 60 seconds after marking them to be counted for you. The fair fight part is there to encourage people to let 1vs1 / small man vs small man play out without driving over them while the 60 second rule is there that you don't run in front of your zerg while marking everything that will be eaten in the next couple seconds.
The initial iteration will make this command only usable while in a full group, it's likely that it will become usable for smaller group sizes (e. g. trio vs solo, 5 vs duo etc.) in future iterations.
Please note that stealther small man are not eligible targets, however, stealther groups can use the command on eligible targets.
Here some iterations are possible that would also remove solo stealther, solo minstrels, solo skalds and small man consisting of just those classes as eligible targets, however, the initial version will only remove stealther groups as eligible targets.
Update 2021-01-06:
After the next pvp event, /tag will be slightly reworked. Instead of a % bonus for the next x kills an rp amount equal to killing the tagged people will be added to a personal pool and your future kills give up to 50% extra rp taken from this pool until it is exhausted.
This makes using /tag even if you intend to zerg afterwards worthwhile, right now you end up with using up a kill credit / 25% bonus for low rp kills like they happen in zerg / keep fights making it a net rp loss to use /tag even if you use up all the kill credits. This change makes it so that you never end up with a net rp loss if you use tag and use up all the accumulated pool rp.
Storing tag usage and hence allowing associated titles will then also be the case.
ETA: Depending on feedback this weekend or early next year.
Over the last months we discussed various options but never really found something that wasn't flawed in some way or likely not going far enough. However, we're now at a point where we'll just test one idea to see if it can't at least improve the situation.
The goal that makes it quite difficult is to have the different playstyles coexist within the same area to allow a fluent switch from solo / small / group fights to keep fights / zerging and vice versa.
There are 2 pretty big obstacles to visible solos / small man, this change attempts to address only one and that is the player base and its behavior. With the task system we're not really helping as we're practically incentivizing people to play red is dead even more than would originally be the case already.
The goal of the first change is to give an incentive to let visible solos and small man live, the incentive should be about as large as the incentive to kill them. Discussions were had here and it started with flat out giving the rp as if you had killed them once those that you let live expire of natural causes without your involvement, then it evolved into that amount of rp becoming a personal pool that would be be used up / added onto your future kills.
The initial iteration that will go live however will be a 20% kill rp bonus for your next 5 kills per person you let live, just the next X kills will stack up (e. g. if you let a 3 person small man live you will have a 20% kill rp bonus for your next 15 kills).
Depending on how / if it's used, it may become a permanent feature at which point it will also get titles and maybe reskins as further rewards.
As for the details, it will be a command with a range restriction that one of your group members has to do while having an eligible enemy in target, the range is there to show that you could actually have just ran them over if you wanted to but explicitly chose not to.
Once such a marked person dies of natural causes without your involvement the bonus is applied to you / your group. Please note that the marked person has to either die in a mostly fair fight or more than 60 seconds after marking them to be counted for you. The fair fight part is there to encourage people to let 1vs1 / small man vs small man play out without driving over them while the 60 second rule is there that you don't run in front of your zerg while marking everything that will be eaten in the next couple seconds.
The initial iteration will make this command only usable while in a full group, it's likely that it will become usable for smaller group sizes (e. g. trio vs solo, 5 vs duo etc.) in future iterations.
Please note that stealther small man are not eligible targets, however, stealther groups can use the command on eligible targets.
Here some iterations are possible that would also remove solo stealther, solo minstrels, solo skalds and small man consisting of just those classes as eligible targets, however, the initial version will only remove stealther groups as eligible targets.
Update 2021-01-06:
After the next pvp event, /tag will be slightly reworked. Instead of a % bonus for the next x kills an rp amount equal to killing the tagged people will be added to a personal pool and your future kills give up to 50% extra rp taken from this pool until it is exhausted.
This makes using /tag even if you intend to zerg afterwards worthwhile, right now you end up with using up a kill credit / 25% bonus for low rp kills like they happen in zerg / keep fights making it a net rp loss to use /tag even if you use up all the kill credits. This change makes it so that you never end up with a net rp loss if you use tag and use up all the accumulated pool rp.
Storing tag usage and hence allowing associated titles will then also be the case.
or the 8man has to wait to rezz them, i don't think this is rly a valid point, even tho we will see some kind of abuse ofc, like with any content, but that's np, abuse can be punished 
This command is having no effect, never used on me anyway.
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