Murder has a mailing address
Open-world killing is part of Lineage 2 and we would not remove it. What we removed is the free lunch: here, cruelty has a bill, and the bill collector is an underground labyrinth.
A fifth of retail's tolerance
Retail lets a killer stack PKs into the hundreds before anything real happens. Here the threshold is one fifth of that: cross it and you are not warned, you are collected. The trip ends in the Underground Labyrinth, and your sentence starts counting.
The whole server hears the cell door
When a killer is imprisoned, a global announcement carries their name. Their victims know exactly where they are, and the prison door opens both ways: come down and pay your respects. The hunter becomes the visited.
Three ways out
Serve your sentence and walk. Fight your way to release from inside the labyrinth, earning it against what lives down there. Or pay a ransom steep enough to sting. Every route knocks your karma back under the prison line on the way out; you leave free, but a red name still has debts to work off in the world above.
Why it works
PK still exists; drama still exists; the red name still means something. What does not exist is the untouchable serial griefer, because the game itself makes sure that being cruel is expensive and being their victim is, for once, actionable.
