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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.
Bounty systems
ArchivedUser
Guest
I'm not much of a pvper but I'd like to discuss ideas that would get me interested in it. Namely bounty hunting.
A lot of what gets people to do things is all in the way you entice and encourage them. So what would be some good ideas to encourage player killer (PK) killers? What would get someone out of the city to go hunt one of these griefers? On top of that how do you implement these features and keep them balanced and prevent exploitation?
-Loot
Loot, well I'll leave that up to the devs on what they feel like is an adequate penalty. Whether that is gold, consumables, equipment (equipped or not), etc. The problem is how do you encourage a bounty hunter? How do you put that fear into a PKer? Well, I feel, that you will need to put real loss on the line for a PKer and real gain for a bounty hunter. So how do you do this? My suggestion is have different levels of corruption and these levels will control what you can lose and how much of it is on the line. So when you have a PKer traveling around with only his PvP armor and nothing else, what is there to lose? Well his gear and weapons. A known/experienced griefer will be smart enough to drop off all his stuff before he goes camping others. So while normal corrupt people may have consumables and gold on the line, the experienced one probably won't. So put his stuff on the line.
-Spawn Killing
So now how do you deal with spawn camping? Well you can just do it based of their status. Non-combative can have a 30 yard respawn, combatants could have 15, and corrupt could be limited to 5 or 10. So now you are making it to where they have to get back to their body asap and hope most of their things are still there. People can still grief but they will want to make sure not to lose.
-Bounties
So for bounties, I'd like to imagine that if you are flagged as corrupt, the guards should know your name and have you on a wanted list. Now to prevent exploitation you can't have the city providing gold for bounties because people will bounty kill farm. They and their friend will take turns killing each other and collecting the bounty. I've seen it in other games and it was really bad. So what do we do? Well you have their name up as long as they are flagged and you can locate them. Now how else can you encourage people to collect? How about a donation system? Allow players to donate any item such as consumables, materials, gear, or gold. As long as it is coming directly out of a players inventory and not the npc's there isn't going to be the problem of kill trading. The more loot on the line the more encouragement there would be to kill them. Naturally it'd go to the first person to kill them.
-Timers
So how about corruption timer/gauge? The simplest to me would be a timer which only counts down when you are in public non-instanced areas and online. That way you can't have a PKer just log out for the duration of their timer. They also wouldn't be able to just wait it out in their house or another private area. Every time they kill others this timer would increase. Heck you can even add a corruption skill tree and have special abilities locked behind time or kills. And to prevent players from sitting outside their homes and running inside anytime a bounty hunter comes by you can just put a timer before it can start counting down. Require a 1/2/5 minute timer to count down before their corruption timer can start ticking down.
So hopefully this will encourage some discussion on the matter. Anyways, I'd love to hear from everyone and see if people can poke holes in my ideas or have some constructive criticism. Thanks.
A lot of what gets people to do things is all in the way you entice and encourage them. So what would be some good ideas to encourage player killer (PK) killers? What would get someone out of the city to go hunt one of these griefers? On top of that how do you implement these features and keep them balanced and prevent exploitation?
-Loot
Loot, well I'll leave that up to the devs on what they feel like is an adequate penalty. Whether that is gold, consumables, equipment (equipped or not), etc. The problem is how do you encourage a bounty hunter? How do you put that fear into a PKer? Well, I feel, that you will need to put real loss on the line for a PKer and real gain for a bounty hunter. So how do you do this? My suggestion is have different levels of corruption and these levels will control what you can lose and how much of it is on the line. So when you have a PKer traveling around with only his PvP armor and nothing else, what is there to lose? Well his gear and weapons. A known/experienced griefer will be smart enough to drop off all his stuff before he goes camping others. So while normal corrupt people may have consumables and gold on the line, the experienced one probably won't. So put his stuff on the line.
-Spawn Killing
So now how do you deal with spawn camping? Well you can just do it based of their status. Non-combative can have a 30 yard respawn, combatants could have 15, and corrupt could be limited to 5 or 10. So now you are making it to where they have to get back to their body asap and hope most of their things are still there. People can still grief but they will want to make sure not to lose.
-Bounties
So for bounties, I'd like to imagine that if you are flagged as corrupt, the guards should know your name and have you on a wanted list. Now to prevent exploitation you can't have the city providing gold for bounties because people will bounty kill farm. They and their friend will take turns killing each other and collecting the bounty. I've seen it in other games and it was really bad. So what do we do? Well you have their name up as long as they are flagged and you can locate them. Now how else can you encourage people to collect? How about a donation system? Allow players to donate any item such as consumables, materials, gear, or gold. As long as it is coming directly out of a players inventory and not the npc's there isn't going to be the problem of kill trading. The more loot on the line the more encouragement there would be to kill them. Naturally it'd go to the first person to kill them.
-Timers
So how about corruption timer/gauge? The simplest to me would be a timer which only counts down when you are in public non-instanced areas and online. That way you can't have a PKer just log out for the duration of their timer. They also wouldn't be able to just wait it out in their house or another private area. Every time they kill others this timer would increase. Heck you can even add a corruption skill tree and have special abilities locked behind time or kills. And to prevent players from sitting outside their homes and running inside anytime a bounty hunter comes by you can just put a timer before it can start counting down. Require a 1/2/5 minute timer to count down before their corruption timer can start ticking down.
So hopefully this will encourage some discussion on the matter. Anyways, I'd love to hear from everyone and see if people can poke holes in my ideas or have some constructive criticism. Thanks.
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Comments
Your first point about exp loss is a little confusing. We know from previous statements a little of what they have planned for it. Exp loss will never cause you to delevel, but does in fact act as a buffer that you must "grind" back before getting back to normal. What confuses many people is that they lump corruption and exp debt from death together. Corruption levels will affect how much exp you lose upon death, and the possibility of dropping actual items as opposed to just gatherables. The higher your level of corruption the more your stats are affected. Not all corruption is cleared upon death once it gets to higher levels. What has not been clarified is whether pve death penalties will also cause stat degredation. Jump off a cliff 20 times and how much of a debt can you incur? All good questions for testing once they give it to us to play with.
Loot we will just have to wait and see their plans for those that die corrupted. I saw numbers of 20% for purple, 40% for green, and 100% of gatherables for red, but I can't find the reference, so it may have just been a discussion I am misremembering.
Spawn killing shouldn't be an issue since there is not running back to your body as a planned mechanic. You will have a choice to wait for a player raise, respawn at nearest spawn point for those not under corruption, and random respawn for those under corruption. Still to be clarified how much distance the "random" part of that is going to be, whether node wide or world map wide. Would be hilarious is someone dies corrupted and ends up on different continent.
Bounties will have to wait till we see the system. But to stop the just having your friend collect the bounty people, could require them to pick it up from a board at an inn in the node where the offense took place. SWG had a system that was fairly free from the player swapping to try and game gold from the system. Since we have veterans from that game working on it I would expect them to use ideas from that and other games that worked.
They have said both things on corruption decreasing over time. Possibly a function of military nodes to reduce corruption, possibly a function of religious nodes to reduce death exp debt. So either it will be no reduction over time, only through player damage. Or they will maybe add you have to run to this area to reduce it over time, but that area everyone knows about, so it is in no way safe. Indiana Jones pvp temple of corruption reduction sounds fun.
Why not teleport the the corrupt player miles away to a random location when he/she kills someone without response rather than the killed player ? After all the corrupted player is likely to be spawn camping an area full of new players and easy targets or what would normally be deemed civilised areas.
Question:So i was about to say if it wipes all of it, what's to stop me from getting a bunch of corruption and having a friend kill me to grab anything that might drop.
Steven:That would be what is to stop you… Not only that, as a corrupt player, if you are dying, you’re not going to spawn at the normal respawn locations. You’ll be respawning randomly in the vicinity and you’ll also be trackable by bounty hunters on the map. Not your exact location but the general vicinity of where you are. So players who want to kill you, do not need to flag in order to kill you. They will stay as a non combatant if they are attacking a corrupt player because essentially at that point you’re like a monster and you don’t flag when you attack monsters.
Also found the dropped amount thing I mentioned above without the percentages.
"You can only carry so many things. And if you die while carrying a certain number of things, you will drop a percentage of those things based on the state in which you die. So if you die as a combatant you will drop the least amount, if you die as a non combatant, you will drop the normal amount and if you die as a corrupted player you will drop almost probably everything. We haven't decided for sure about that."
If you haven't read this one before, it is a transcript of an interview Steven gave where he went into depth on the whole pvp/corruption thing the way he sees it. Could they have changed their minds? Maybe. We just won't know until they put it in our grubby paws to play with.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Fvr9KYT104i8WYppCup1v6SUTZFJTobVz8uRHDas4YM/edit
2. bounty hunters should also have some loss if they fail while bounty hunting, a loss that equals loss of their target if he dies. this way bounty hunting also becomes challenging job, rather then just repeat running to target million times until you finally manage to bring him down. It also causes helps bounty hunters to get their name known, serves as a progression path through bounty hunter ranks
I think the corruption thing is something to look at, I think having a set timer that only count down while logged in would be the best way to go about that. There's a lot to read and lot to reply too so this is just my 2 cents. lol
@Gothix
1: looks like Unknown answered that for us, seems that being green causes you to lose a certain amount of stuff on death and being flagged/fighting back causes you to lose less.
2: I think the biggest penalty for failing as a bounty hunter would be missing out on the enemy's loot. If two BHs are chasing the same person if the first one fails, they'll have to respawn and run back and during that time the red will have looted them and the second BH will be able to engage the red.
1. staying purple should be incentivized even more. Current incentive is not enough (in my opinion).
2. As long as BH gets to run million times able to try again and again for free, that's not a good system. I'd say if BH fails 3 times, he does not get to collect any reward from that point on even if he succeeds the 4th time (or later). BHs should not just run, res, repeat, until they succeed, they should invest thought and preparation in what they are doing, so it is only fair that they only get certain amount of tries before not being eligible to BH that particular target anymore.
If i was pking and knew i would have massive amounts of debuffs, i would pk naked, not fun for the bounty hunter because they will show up fully geared ready to rock to one shot a pker debuffed with greens or naked.
However if my stats didnt get debuffed and i was real good at pvp, ill risk it, 20 percent on a purple is not so bad.....
I to will be a BH and be running a tavern on my homestead.
I like the idea of BH hunters being punished if they fail, but I don't think they should loose as much as the PKer would. I think that there will be a ranking system for bounty hunters. If a BH is killed by a corrupted player they risk losing a level and the benefits of that level rather than their gear.
I think that the BH levels should give bounty hunters access to higher level bounties and spread the range in which they can receive bounties from their home.
I like world pvp a lot but i wont kill without a reason. I think game mechanics like even gathering resources could end up in PK.
Bounty hunters should take a reward like, if they killed a highly wanted criminal, they get a better reward from a quest given in the nearest node that if its just some random guy. Or maybe loot an amount of gold of that murderer, but please, dont make pkers lose gear, because there arent BH without us
PK without a reason is boring but the satisfaction of killing a rude player is priceless.