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The corruption system and multi boxing.
fleshnbrain
Member
What will the policy be on multi boxing. I'm worried about people multi boxing and killing their own characters that have corruption to clear their corruption and to continue to PK lowbies/people that don't attack back with no penalty and gaming the system. Hopefully they will address that.
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There are other penalties associated with corruption other than gear loss. While I am sure there will be people that will try this, it is unlikely to be worth persivering with.
The rewards from killing a character are actually quite low, so there is no real monetary incentive to do this. Someone that has two accounts could absolutely come up with a better way to spent their time.
Obviously some people just want to see the world burn, but there are better things these people could spent their time on to that end as well.
Multiboxing and PvP will be a bit different, in my opinion on AoC. While the rules that we all know still apply from previous MMO's (to an extent), this corruption system adds a new element to it. Somewhat similar to reputation, but more advanced. The best advice I can give is if you wish to PvP because it is in your blood, the more allies you have the better you will survive. This may sound cliche, but in truth not so easy to do. Eventually even with a corrupt PC, you will run into a group of corrupt individuals, no matter how long your perfect streak is.
Doesn't matter if its an easy way for a player to clear their corruption to continue to PK players or people that don't fight back people will do it. Hell you dont even have to multibox you could just roll around with a friend and your friend could PK someone and your friend could just drop group and kill the corrupted friend to clear it.
To me, it is essentially cheating (though to a light extent) combined with p2w. That person can afford as many accounts as they want, and so they get their own personal army. Just doesn't seem fair...
But on the other hand, multi-boxxing sucks in other ways too, like... It's just not very good. Usually in WoW when there is a multi-boxxer you can easily solo the entire group of 10 by just finding the lead box/second/third in line and CCing those to death.
AoC has PvP content that matters to the game and the world though, and I would be really annoyed if it came down to me vs some guy ... and some guy happens to also be 10 guys.
I have some hopes that multiboxxing will just not be viable because of mechanics, like collision, which could be used to separate them beyond /follow distance, or even just not having a /follow function, which is what WoW did to remove multi-boxxers from BattleGrounds, and it worked pretty well.
Would prefer it be bannable, but I understand how difficult that is to police when there's technically not any botting happening. TECHNICALLY.
Essentially though, it is still botting as far as I'm concerned. Just a very inefficient one.
Indeed they could, and people will.
But as I said, look at the other penalties.
Lets say you are minding your own business, and mean little me comes over and kills you. You make the decision to not fight back, forcing me to either stop the attack, or gain corruption (I still have that choice at this stage).
If I kill you, you die, and I gain a small amount of materials based on what you have on you. You can an amount of item degredation, and an amount of experience debt. This experience debt means you have slgihtly lower health, mana, skills, stats and gear proficiency, and need to gain experience to work it off.
Now, I killed you and gained corruption. While I have corruption, there are four major things I need to be aware of. The first is that if I am killed, I could drop an item I have equipped. The second is that I am less effective in PvP combat while corrupt. The third is that when killed, I will respawn in a random location rather than in a designated respawn location.
In our situation, I have a friend or a second account near by to kill me to remove that corruption. This is fine, if I drop an item, he can give it back to me. I respawn in a random location and then eventually find my way back to my friend.
However, the thing you are forgetting are the other penalties. I was killed in PvP combat, so I still suffer the same penalties that you suffered when I killed you. This is the materials dropping, item degredation and experience debt.
The only difference here is - I was killed while corrupt, and so I have those penalties applied to me at four times the rate you had them apply to you.
That means that if your items took a 2% hit to durability, mine take 8%. That means if your experience debt sees all your stats reduced by 5% and take you 25 average equal level mob kills to work off, mine is down 20% and will take me 100 kills.
This is the deterrent to this kind of behavior.
Really nicely laid out, puts into perspective the deterrent very well.
Imagine someone multi boxing 40 characters haha
I didnt know about the random spawn location, that should be enough so people dont that. I dont believe any of the other penalties would be enough to deter it though, because actual multiboxers would have multiple characters and multiple sets of gear. Spawning in a random location might be enough though.
Same thoughts.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Yhr9WpjaDzw
Well, even without follow/assist and a ban of input broadcasting (hardware or software), it's still doable to multibox. You will just face limited number of boxing, not 40 char-one-man-army.
That's what i used on an other game with input broadcasting restriction, using dedicated keyboard and computers :
Without follow/Assist, the best i can do is probably only dual box (using the left pad of my mmo mouse to move around the second char)
U mean the Asian Bot Gold selling company
Most companies that sell gold are based in North America or Europe, but are happy to let bias reign.
They also dont farm their own gold, they buy it off other players and market it up to on-sell.
Source for both? I'm actually curious about this
First hand experience.
Edit, and also second hand information, as well, I guess.
I know a guy that sold enough gold in one particular game to buy a house - which is what he did.
Well, I cant say "most" accurately.
What I can say is that all that I have contacted have been NA/EU, and between them have sold gold, items and accounts on 14 different websites.
My observations are that it is 100%, but I opted to just say "most".
At best you can say that some are NA/EU, which is fair, and they aren’t all Asian. I don’t think anyone says they are, but it’s reasonable to remind people that those activities also happen closer to home.
- First, Multiboxers don't sell gold or accounts or stuff like that, that just pure fantasm. Multiboxers tends to attract player and GM attention, i didn't play any mmo where i didn't have at some point a GM who talk to me or made basic verification like messing a little with my characters to check if there is some form of automation. You basically play under Sauron eyes so yes, you respect the rule by the letter. That mean multiples things, to start, you have to register all account under your name, tos states that "Accounts are registered to you personally and may not be sold, traded, gifted", so if a multibox play multiples characters under fake/multiples names, he can be ban without any further investigation. From an account seller perspective, you can get that's not optimal to have all accounts registered under the same name.
That also mean than a ban of a account will probably spread across all accounts. So, from a gold selling botter perspective, there is no point to multibox, they just run multiples accounts playing separately and independant as bot, there is absolutely no reason to make them stick together, attract attention, put all your eggs in one basket and have they all ban together.
- Second, the only guy who play 40 or more account that i know is preparedwow (back in the days, there was also Sam Deathwalker, but he stop playing in 2015 and it was software boxing), i guess it's the true identity of Intrepid, and he is not someone who needs money (he just spend 2500$ just to play on the alpha). Btw, this guy is not really liked by the multiboxing community. I mean it's this kind of guy ( NSFW : https://bit.ly/3zJHlNQ )
The good new is that he drop playing wow as soon as they enforced the "no input broadcasting (software and hardware)" rules. Since it's the same here and LieutenantToast stated "our stance as it stands is that anything that maps one input to more than one output is a no-go (one keypress should be one action on one character)", there is no reason to think this guy will stick around.
That does not mean you will get no multiboxers, even without input broadcasting it's still doable to manually control multiples characters, but you will sometime cross path with dual boxers not 40 man-army (realistically not doable without broadcasting)
I literally couldn't find any other sellers though.
When I was looking to sell my guild (not just the guild, literally every member of the guild, which at the time was the second guild in that particular game - a game that is no longer live), I literally looked in to every gold seller I could. When you are talking about putting something up for sale that would go for $45,000 (split with 50 guild members), you tend to get a phone call very quickly.
I *literally* couldn't find an Asian seller. I tried - as I know I could have haggled a better bargain with someone from China (experience in the matter).
Saying "most" was being generous, based on my experience. I would have been justified to say that for the week I was looking, literally all sellers were NA/EU. I didn't though, I opted to just say most, and I am quite comfortable with that - on reflection.
To be clear with you the only part I disagree with is your 'most na/eu' statements based off ancedotes. The 'mostly/only china' crowd is pretty outdated stereotyping in this day and age. Way more complex than that. Sweatshop labor conditions and cheap labor aren't Chinese specific characteristics.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Yhr9WpjaDzw
Enable/disable PVP at log in screen, Zero penalties to pvp other enabled players, Literally gotta go to the log in screen to disable, Caravans e.t.c. areas auto scripted tp push players in/out of the PVP system so no new player fear of penalties.
Keep the Ganking system more or less as is, But keeps the ability to go a bit heavier on killing no flagged players in future.
GM's can easily keep an eye on the logs of people who flag up because that is where the Bots will be/Multiboxers too outside of gathering.
2 system, 1 justified punishment for being a dick, 1 more script to add to the sever with just a colour change required.
Literally the issue with MMO's to date solved without even breaking a braincell.
I went to every website I could find that was selling gold in any game, and worked out who the company was behind it - most companies sell their products on 3 or 4 sites, as it gives them coverage. A lot of players won't use a website that is being spammed in the chat of the game they are playing, and sellers know it. They spam chat to advertise the fact that gold sellers exist, knowing full well that those "smart" players are more likely to have buying gold on their mind if it is being spammed, and in order to "outsmart" the gold sellers, they will just google a different website when they want to buy gold, so as to not support chat spam.
I am mostly talking about one specific case I had where I had an entire top end guild to sell. The amount of coin we had on us was enough for a company to set up business in that game (on three different servers), so I wasn't restricted to looking for people that were already in that game (though sold to a company that was, eventually).
While it is true that the internet is somewhat segregated, I have a hypothetical for you. If you were a person that bought and sold gold for MMOs, and you operated out of China (or anywhere in Asia, for that matter), would you not set up a website to sell your product to a western audience if the game in question had a large western audience?
Since I went around looking for people that sold gold, worked out what company they were a part of, and then approached them to see if they wanted to buy a guild, if a Chinese seller were active at the time and selling to a western audience, then I would have come across them.
When you look at a company that operates four or five websites each of which appears to be your typical Asian gold selling website, offer them a massive payday and get a skype call from someone that is clearly from Boston (try and fake that accent...), and one from Liverpool, and one with a clearly Appalachian accent, and someone from France (I don't know French accents well enough to know which part, other than to know it wasn't Paris).
The week I was looking, I literally went to every site I could find that was selling gold in any MMO. Almost all of them had made an effort to try and appear Asian, and all of them had an NA/EU person at the top.
I get the hesitation with me saying that most are not Asian. It doesn't square well with what people see in terms of people selling gold in game using broken English, websites that look very Asian (and also very '90's) selling gold, farmers running around their favorate games trying to make gold, using that same broken English (not directly associated with gold sellers, by the way - it is cheaper for them to buy gold from players than it is to pay people to farm it, even with Chinese wages). People look at all of these things and think "Chinese gold sellers".
Problem is, that is what the sellers want you to think. It's marketing, and they are good at it.
I don't see the point of allowing to opt-out pvp and/or pvp death penalties, it's one of the core feature of this game, you are never totally safe.
For me, (and it's a personal opinion, i perfectly understand if that's not shared), i would have prefer to get rid of the combatant/non-combatant/corrupted system and use the same death penalty for every one, with a % of chance of droping gear (really low % for equipped gear to keep the fear but make it exceptional) and xp loss.
As for ganking, in my opinion, this is something that should be managed by players, not by an automated system. There is the ability for a node mayor to "Mark foreign citizens of other nodes as enemies of the state.", amplify that. Make the ability to design criminal, capture and judge them. Make them unable to buy things from official market place and shop and force them to use black market with a tax value way higher than regular shop (and this tax can go to the pocket of a thief guild or something like that) Allow citizen to place bounty on people (maybe with a system where city official have to approve the bounty, or the hunted have few hours/day to contest it to the authority)... make it driven by players, not just by an automated system. Right now, if let's say a group of people wants to act as mercenaries or guard for a mayor, they will face corruption for doing their job and execute mayor orders.
Nice write-up.
With all the cumulative penalties, the risk of losing gear and the painstakingly long time to remove a lot of corruption, it's never really worth running around killing newbs. You'll PK once in a while, just because someone is being an annoying **** or because the risk-vs-reward due to circumstance is in your favour. And sometimes it's just purely accidental...
Played a lot of L2 with a near-identical pvp system, and killing low-level players with your main is never really worth it. You could do it with a lower-level alt, but the easier it is to kill someone (because of level/gear differences) the greater the risk (more time required to clear the corruption/more valuable gear drop) and it actually makes it much less appealing. The constant gank-fest, which some people think is the inevitable result, will not materialise.
At most, I used an alt to kill of newbs at a low-mid area. But after racking up 20-something kills in one session, it becomes practically impossible to remove all the corruption unless you dedicate hours. Meanwhile, whoever I killed could just go somewhere else, and recoup their loses in like 10 minutes. Actually just gave up on the alt because it was too much of a hassle to remove all the corruption. So jokes on me, I guess.
The ""Corruption"" system (yea, I'm putting your quotes in quotes) is actually well tested already. It was the basis for L2 which in my opinion has the best PvP system I've tried. It will not turn into a gank-fest. We know this. Because we've already seen it in L2.
Never being truly safe is a great feature that brings realism into game, and drives a lot of character interactions. In L2, the only safe zones where inside cities and, to be completely honest, I always wished that they weren't safe because it was such a weird arbitrary line. The (NPC) city guards, as well as any player in the city jumping on the chance of free loot, will enforce the safe zone anyway (although the guards could have had a higher dmg output).
And I'm sorry, but having a PvP opt-out is probably the worst thing you could do to the game. Fortunately, Steven knows this, so no need to worry about bad ideas such as yours being implemented.
If you want a game without player interactions, which it sounds like, maybe you should try out Solitaire.