Friends, Fights and Limits

They can be friends

The same system that sends a war party after you can send you help. Which one you get is largely up to you.

Guilds remember how you treat them. Help one, hunt its enemies, and your standing rises; kill its people and it falls.

command	what it does
lua_faction()	where you stand with each of the great houses
lua_friends()	the sims who will answer you
lua_beckon(name)	calls one to your side for a while

Beckoning is the good one. A summoned friend fights alongside you, follows you, and will not wander off. Bring a healer and it heals you — and at PvP rank it will swear you the Oath, a serious buff that does not depend on ever getting the right mercenary contract to drop.

A beckoned sim is a real character with a name, a level and banked gear. It is never killed off when the favour ends — it simply leaves.

They can be killed

Sims are aggressive and fight back, and PvP protection covers them exactly as it covers you: you cannot touch one inside a safehold or a player city.

Kill one in the wild and:

• the death is announced on the PvP channel, naming the sim and you;
• you gain normal experience for a kill of that level;
• the corpse drops its carried bag in full, its gold, and each worn piece on roughly a one-in-three roll;
• whatever drops is gone from that sim for good — stripped from the identity, not just the body — so killing a well-geared veteran permanently downgrades it;
• you cannot camp the spot: a dead sim returns elsewhere on the map;
• and its guild may take an interest in you.

That last point is worth weighing. Killing sims is profitable and it is also how you acquire enemies who will come and find you.

They appear in /who

Sims are listed after the real players, so genuine names are never pushed off the end. Each row gives name, race, class, level and gender just as a player's row does, and they show their guild. The population count includes them.

What you cannot do

You cannot /tell, trade, group-invite or guild-invite a sim.

A sim is a world creature wearing a character's face. The systems that route a message, a trade or an invite look the name up among logged-in players, find nothing, and answer There is no such player.

This is a known limit, not a bug you have hit. Beckoning is the supported way to get one fighting alongside you, and it does most of what a group invite would.

A note on competition

Sims work the same camps and the same respawn timers you do, and they now fight whether or not anybody is watching — so a camp can be thin when you arrive.

Loot, at least, defers to you. Within 150 units of a kill, with that monster targeted, or with your pet or mercenary contract fighting it, the sim takes nothing.