Legion of Armadyl

            Player-killing, otherwise known as PKing, is a high-class sport of choice for many people who play RuneScape.  The goal for most people who engage in this extreme sport is to kill all the other players before they can kill you.  All players have their own theories and systems of honor when PKing, making each fight a completely different experience.  To accurately sum up the entire experience of PKing for most players, a few words can suffice:  Kill everyone you see and make sure to fight dirty.

            Whether you win or not when PKing depends on several things.  In the first place, it depends on your definition of winning.  For lower leveled players, doing well in Player versus Player areas, PvP, is if they can loot a bit of mithril and some shrimps.  For higher level and richer players, they have not done well in PvP if they do not come home with items worth more than several million pieces of gold.  Personally, I am happy as long as I don't lose more than a fifth of all my money each time I go PKing.  How much you earn is dependent on the amount of money you earn each trip and how much you lose each time you die.

            PKing is a very controversial sport.  In real life, this would be because the sport promotes violence, and indeed the whole point of the sport is to kill the enemy.  However, as it is not in real life, it is controversial for an entirely different reason.  At the end of 2007 the creators of RuneScape, JaGeX, decided to do away with people trying to sell RuneScape gold in exchange for real money.  Among other preventive measures, in one of the largest and most controversial decisions in their history, they removed the Wilderness, which had been the only place to partake in PKing.  There were mass riots in the cities of the games, and thousands of players quit upon the removal of, in their eyes, one of the best aspects of the game.  Ever since then, PvP has been highly controlled and debated in an effort to prevent real-world trading.

            Near the end of 2008 and after nearly a year with very restrictive PKing opportunities, JaGeX reintroduced PKing in a new form: PvP Worlds.  In these worlds, players can fight other players within a certain level range in all but a few safe areas.  With this, there was suddenly a boom in the amount of people decided that the time honored method of annihilating the other person was much fairer than that newfangled method of peacefully talking the problem out.  There are now several servers dedicated to PvP, and these worlds are filled with dozens of people fondly know as PJers, the short term for those hundreds of barbarians who slaughter innocent players and run away if the fight starts going badly.

            Overall, most people consider PKing a great way to escape the everyday grind (I know, it even happens in a video game) and meet other people as vicious as them.  Pking is a necessary part of RuneScape; it gives people something to do on their spare time, it lets them meet new friends, and of course enemies, and if lucky earn money faster than any other way in the game.  What it all comes down to though, is that without Pking opportunities, players would be reduced to hacking furiously at a tree in a violent frenzy trying to level their woodcutting!