SPOILER! The philanthropist and the murderer are the same person. Read on.

A few weeks ago, we kicked off the new version of the Game of Knife-and-Candle in Fallen London. As long-time players might remember, this is sort of hide and seek with more knives, or cricket crossed with The 10th Victim, or Killer if you actually, you know killed people. It's fictional and occurs only in text. Don't arrest us.

The first version of Knife-and-Candle was an attempt by a neophyte game designer (me four years ago) to build a real-time, unlimited-players, perpetual PvP game which overlapped with a scripted narrative. It had a couple of neat mechanics, some appealing fiction, a bunch of flaws and some colossal exploits. We tweaked it and tweaked it and found we'd created something with just as many exploits but which no-one quite understood the rules for any more. It turns out a giant open playing field and no ending conditions is proper hard to build a fun game with. WHO KNEW.

So when we decided to reintroduce it, we chose to do so a step at a time, iteratively and experimentally. We're adding and changing things every week; watching what people do; and tweaking in response to them. This also allowed us to start testing before we'd added some key technical features to the platform.... so we could be sure we would actually use and need them before we put too much time into them.

I'll blog about some of the specifics later, but there's more information here.

One of the issues around the mechanics has been the use of virtual currency. We have built no explicit pay-to-win mechanics into Knife-and-Candle: we didn't want people to feel they had to ante up or lose out to players with deeper pockets. However, it's possible to accelerate every part of the Fallen London experience by spending Nex, and that's also true with Knife-and-Candle. You can't easily win more by spending Nex, but you can do more. One of the reasons we're taking an experimental approach is to watch how much of a distorting effect this kind of cash-fuelled acceleration has.

'Some', so far, in the original version: which is the reason for the title of this post. One of our players spent a fair sum of Nex on acquiring additional opportunities to attack others. It didn't actually do him much good, because he didn't win noticeably more often, but it did upset other players, who felt picked on and complained on the forums. What happened next surprised everybody.

Our Murderer decided, on reading the plaintive posts, that he had in fact been unfair: that he had damaged the game experience of other players. So he contacted everyone he'd attacked on his spree; sent them a gift of in-game currency and apologised; and told them his current Form and location (the Knife-and-Candle equivalent of telling an assassin your address and sleeping arrangements). That last bit suggests in particular that he wasn't doing it to stave off an incipient vigilante mob - he was genuinely remorseful, and he made good on that remorse. He became, in short, the Philanthropist, or possibly the Martyr.

I don't think I've ever seen anything similar in another game. I like Fallen London players.