Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
Edit: @IceWindAle was it?
Aka 3 wrd story. Same type of boost
Now lets get back on topic shall we little one
First post here, Hi all!
L2 player, waiting to refugee over to AoC.
You won't find a better flagging system. Dropping gear on chance after death while chaotic works amazingly well. It sounds harsh, but it is designed to discourage griefing lower level peeps. Coupling this tried and true system with no fast travel sounds like adding Jack to Coke, perfect.
This is no way has ever discouraged PvP over prime hunting spots, or clan warfare, etc.
Rarely has there been groups of "Reds" roaming around, as they are fundamentally at a disadvantage. Reds get hunted, they don't hunt.
What Carve said about the possibility of going chaotic, if the kill shot lands in the window where the target is transitioning from flagged to normal. This is possible, but not easy to do. The "purple" name is flashing "white" at this point as a clear warning that they are transitioning. The kill has to come at the lat second of this flashing.
Now originally, in L2, you had a chance to drop gear if you died to a mob. This was removed early on. However, it was a great deterrent to bots, as at the time you could train mobs indefinitely and drop them on bots then return shortly later to collect prizes
-CS
Risk should be other players attacking you on sight everywhere because you have become notorious.
Risk shouldn't be game mechanics automatically reducing your stats, because other players are too lazy to organize and care of their friends.
It is. Just a different type of community than what you think of.
You have to realize there are different types of communities than one that you prefer.
If you can take it from me, it's all yours.
I was referring to a specific type of community, you are right. I was referring to the one where nodes will be "linked" by helping each other share goods that the other might not have. A more global sense of community as opposed to a local one. However, when your node is stuck because another has advanced too far, time for trade is over, it's all about the siege.
@Valerian, not sure how I was contradicting myself. I stated that a siege was the only way to kill other players just because they are part of another node without gaining corruption. I then mentioned guild war mechanics, but they have (as far as I know) not been posted (I didn't look though either, so if they have can someone post a link?).
There are caravans with a roaming PvP zone around them that will encourage PvP. But the caravan drivers won't exclusively be from a node you don't like (although you could choose to only target those specifically).
In addition to Guild Wars they have also mentioned friction between religions, suggesting that maybe two opposing religions will want an Icon in the same place, so that too would encourage PvP.
There will also be arena's.
I don't see a need to encourage PvP more than that, but as Gothix can testify, I am not a huge fan of PvP either. I do hope for PvP'ers there will be more reasons added as the game progresses as far as lore/story/meaningful reasons can go.
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As for the corruption mechanic I think it's a grand idea and I am looking forward to testing both sides.
@Gothix said "Risk shouldn't be game mechanics automatically reducing your stats, because other players are too lazy to organize and care of their friends."
I think that is an unfair statement. Friends might not be available. Friends might be available but engaged in things they consider more important. Assuming one of the reasons the corruption mechanic is in place is to help "lazy" players does not seem appropriate. Many could, and would, make generalizations about the corruption mechanic being needed because of unsavory traits PvP'ers might have in common.
@NoeSparks Personally I play the three word game because I enjoy it, it was never intended to be there to spam forum points, but each to their own eh?
@Tayosis ... just the one type of gear...
@Gothix we get that you dislike the corruption mechanic. sorry.
And some of my favorite moments in l2 were fighting over hunting grounds. You could grind xp to get rid of karma, so if you could pk someone and get rid of it before they got back, you were okay. Fail, and they'll probably scoop up some of your hard-earned gear. Really made for some tense moments.
But the more you pk'd (even after getting rid of your previous karma) the more karma youd get for each subsequent pk. It was a really elegant system. It even punished pking lowbies more harshly - if you were pking out in a beginner area, good luck traversing the entire map to find enemies high enough level to gain xp from without dying.
Currently, it just seems like if you pk, you're going to lose some gear eventually. I'm in favor of penalties, especially when it comes to griefing, but pking right now seems like pure risk rather than risk/reward under the current system. I'd much rather see an alternative way to grind away corruption in addition to pvp death.
The reason the punishment seems strict is because it required to if it's to act as a deterrent for murder.
Players that don't fight back lose more than players that do fight back. So if a player kills another players avatar that didn't fight back they should be subjected to more loss when their avatar is killed. This makes sense to me, although players that like killing players that don't fight back, this probably sucks for them.
Why should there be a reward, in addition to looting someone for more materials than those who fight back, for PK'ing?
Why award players to go around and kill players that don't fight back?
The risk is steep, but you likely made someone else's play time suck (momentarily at least) which was clearly the goal, you got more from them since they didn't fight back, and now you get to PvP players that want to. Seems like there is a bunch of rewards already for killing players that don't fight back.
It's just that if you're eventually guaranteed to drop gear that will be collected by another player (given that PVP death is the only way to lose corruption) it's not really a risk/reward scenario. It's so punishing that nobody with any decent gear at all will even bother.
I don't think PKing should be advantageous - it's not the sort of thing I'd want to encourage, and the risks should outweigh the rewards - but I do think the game is better off if it's a factor, and that we could refine corruption a bit more to hit that balance.
In Gun Gale Online, they apparently found it fair to possibly lose equipment worth over 2000$ in real life (super rares that few people (think 0.01%) in the server even own) upon death. Without being corrupted or a PK, just dying in a non-competition setting (tournament don't drop). It seems you can't even stats reset in that game and it must be long to level, because the bad guy of this chapter kills because he was convinced to make a bad build and now is stuck without enough STR to carry heavier guns. This in a game with legit RMT where the same guy bought a 3000$ worth invisibility cloak.
In Overlord's Yggdrasil (and presumably the new world), you can lose 5 levels upon any death (which would normally take days straight to get back if you knew where to hunt - which is apparently nowhere in the new world), and it's full-loot drop on death where world items seem more iffy (they're so OP, you might keep them on respawn).
So either the authors of those 2 didn't think things through, or they thought super-hardcore lose-everything-on-death would be mainstream in MMOs in the near or not-so-near future. Yggdrasil is said to be one of the most popular games (in the 2130s), even though it gets closed after just 12 years for no specified reason (like a sequel or a bankrupcy). I mean in the current market, a 'lose everything on death' game would only get a tiny market share from very very hardcore gamblers and pvp enthusiasts. No higher share than Eve Online compared to all MMOs.
The point I'm trying to make is that at a certain point, if you punish a game mechanic too severely, it's likely to disappear. If your aim is simply to deter pking, then why not just disallow it entirely? The fact that it's included at all implies that the Devs want PKing to play some role in the game, and in my opinion, the mechanics as proposed will reduce that role to almost zero, which is self-defeating.
Personally I'd be happy with both corruption and gear dropping - it just seems to me that having a PVP death as the only way out is overkill, as it leaves only a single outcome on the table, and is likely to snuff the mechanic out entirely (which doesn't seem to be their aim, but of course I could be wrong about that).
Whether the game would be better/worse off with zero PKing is just a matter of opinion, but doesn't it seem a tad too early to decide that the proposed mechanics have already resulted in the best possible balance?
No, and stop claiming falsehood pls.
The goal was not to make someone else's play time suck. The goal was to steal from him 20 iron that you needed yourself.
It's a game that advertises to feature a theft of resources.
Now a MMO should either, make stealing viable (not ganking and griefing, but attacking player on occasion, single time for the loot he has), without breaking your game play with reduced stats OR it should not advertise that it's a conflict base game with stealing of resources.
This question comes from my lack of understanding of the system as a whole. I know PVP is encouraged through Sieges and what not, but why is small scale PVP punished so? Or does the "corruption" system only arise when you kill low level people and camp them?
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Fvr9KYT104i8WYppCup1v6SUTZFJTobVz8uRHDas4YM/edit
But instead of farming iron you kill the player. If you need the iron yourself can you just farm it?
Maybe that player farmed the last bit in the area and you don't have time, or maybe someone is being lazy *maybe* and they just want to kill the player and take it. Do you know for sure that iron will drop? We don't know precisely how loot mechanics in this way will play out yet. You drop materials, are they the materials that were most recently harvested? The ones you have the most of? Do looters get to pick?
Okay, so maybe my assumption that deciding to kill a player to take something you wanted that you either watched them collect or are gambling on them having as being intentionally disruptive to their gameplay was a bit far. But are you assuming that when they don't fight back, and you kill them, they don't think that sucks? Do you believe they enjoy it, or are neutral to the whole thing? Maybe some are.
Maybe I should have said "...which you knew would be part of the outcome" as opposed to "...which was clearly the goal." Unless you honestly believe that players that don't fight back when attacked by other players enjoy the experience.
Edit: Also didn't they say on stream you could reduce your corruption through PvE?