How do we prevent them from killing eachothers?
Give players an arena, and a gun and your game is going to turn very soon in a pixel based bloodbath, how do we prevent this?
It might sound silly to wonder how to prevent players from killing eachothers in an FPS game but it is more about making the perception of the player more intense to me. The more explosions and death around a player, the less “intense” it feels. In the end it becomes all dull, someone working in an airport hardly notice the noise of the planes on the tarmac anymore.
I’m trying here to explore a few possibilities, how to let players fight eachothers and give them the right tools to do it without lowering the game to a mindless slaughter. This is in the idea of making a social experiment more than a deathmatch game.
Dimensions of the game world: It’s obvious that a smaller, more cramped game world will encourage frictions and fight amongst the players, so we can consider that a larger gameworld (doesn’t necessarly means a larger area, but can also be: more rooms, floors and corners) will reduce the amount of frictions between players. However there is a drawback, a too large game world brings the risk of boring the player.
Weapons precision: Precise weapons give satisfaction to a skilled player but they also give him confidence which increase the chance of him picking the brutal solution to a problem. Making weapons more impredictable still makes them a valid tool for the use of force to solve a problem but will carry the consequence that the outcome of the conflict will not be as predictable. The drawback is that it also lower the difference between a veteran player and a newbie, new players also tend to be more impulsive while they are still learning how the game is working.
High death consequences: Turning the death into a more serious consequence to a player’s failure can also encourage the player to avoid direct confrontation, the main drawback is that it’s a punishment that only apply to the loser, we all have been frustrated one day or another when being killed by another player by surprise and nothing we could have done differently would have changed the outcome.
I’m not sure my article is complete, but i would like to add that, even if we add more things to do, weapons remain an easy way to be gratified in a game, and as long as the guns are available it will be really difficult to make players keep it in their holster.
I’m open to suggestions 
http://www.torquepowered.com/community/forums/viewthread/115631
