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Preventing players from gaming the Corruption System
Namil
Member
Currently as it stands there isn't much in the way of preventing corrupted players from cheating the intended repercussions of the system, I have a few ideas that I think might be a good solution to this but this is more so an open discussion.
Right now I can think of 3 major issues:
1) Players can easily take their important equipment and crafting reagents and store them in a safe place and wait for bounty hunters to kill them so the whole point of the corruption system would boil down to an eye for an eye, rather than an eye for your gear (if that makes sense).
2) Having familiar faces kill you over and over to remove the corruption rating, this would mean that people are free to grief and kill as many players as they'd like with few repercussions and this is especially going to be a problem when exp isn't a factor at max level.
3) Group PvP and directly trading stolen goods to players who are marked as a non-combatant to minimise loss in case of death.
To start off I think corruption levels shouldn't be lowered per death, it should be a timer that adds exponentially longer increments of time depending on how far corrupted you are to demotivate players from doubling down on being fully corrupt and ontop of this, the node of influence where the PK happened should not allow players from entering zones which might be deemed safe such as town or cities or if they do then they should be captured or killed by guards and have the same consequences as if they had died from a player except the items they lose should be thrown into the void or be forcefully committed to the node's reliquary and not be rewarded to any player specifically. If a player is killed by a node, only then should the corruption time lessen because there's no way the player could've gamed their item loss.
Once a player becomes corrupted, their inventory should be locked out from transferring to a location where they would not drop on death. This still means they can swap out their gear but P2P trading and depositing into banks / caravans or chests would not be an option. This doesn't totally negate people gaming their item drops as they could be killed repeatedly to have all of their gear drop by a friend but they'd be totally defenceless during this period where they have no gear on, their gear would take heavy damage on repeated deaths, their PvE progression would be stunted because they wouldn't be able to fight against mobs and this would all be ontop of the already hefty death penalties in the game.
Finally to combat some of these heftier penalties, I think removing scaling combat dampening as corruption duration got longer would be a good idea. The incentive not to be an absolute bandit is already there in this case but if you do choose to go down that path then you'll have to seriously hide but at least you'll be able to protect yourself in the process as I'm not personally a fan of dampening in games.
I know some of these ideas definitely won't be for everyone and there are certainly some flaws but what do you think? Do you have any ideas that could prevent the player-base cheating the system and making Corruption redundant?
Right now I can think of 3 major issues:
1) Players can easily take their important equipment and crafting reagents and store them in a safe place and wait for bounty hunters to kill them so the whole point of the corruption system would boil down to an eye for an eye, rather than an eye for your gear (if that makes sense).
2) Having familiar faces kill you over and over to remove the corruption rating, this would mean that people are free to grief and kill as many players as they'd like with few repercussions and this is especially going to be a problem when exp isn't a factor at max level.
3) Group PvP and directly trading stolen goods to players who are marked as a non-combatant to minimise loss in case of death.
To start off I think corruption levels shouldn't be lowered per death, it should be a timer that adds exponentially longer increments of time depending on how far corrupted you are to demotivate players from doubling down on being fully corrupt and ontop of this, the node of influence where the PK happened should not allow players from entering zones which might be deemed safe such as town or cities or if they do then they should be captured or killed by guards and have the same consequences as if they had died from a player except the items they lose should be thrown into the void or be forcefully committed to the node's reliquary and not be rewarded to any player specifically. If a player is killed by a node, only then should the corruption time lessen because there's no way the player could've gamed their item loss.
Once a player becomes corrupted, their inventory should be locked out from transferring to a location where they would not drop on death. This still means they can swap out their gear but P2P trading and depositing into banks / caravans or chests would not be an option. This doesn't totally negate people gaming their item drops as they could be killed repeatedly to have all of their gear drop by a friend but they'd be totally defenceless during this period where they have no gear on, their gear would take heavy damage on repeated deaths, their PvE progression would be stunted because they wouldn't be able to fight against mobs and this would all be ontop of the already hefty death penalties in the game.
Finally to combat some of these heftier penalties, I think removing scaling combat dampening as corruption duration got longer would be a good idea. The incentive not to be an absolute bandit is already there in this case but if you do choose to go down that path then you'll have to seriously hide but at least you'll be able to protect yourself in the process as I'm not personally a fan of dampening in games.
I know some of these ideas definitely won't be for everyone and there are certainly some flaws but what do you think? Do you have any ideas that could prevent the player-base cheating the system and making Corruption redundant?
5
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Edit: Corrupted Players have a chance to kill Bounty Hunters, it would not be in a corrupted's interest to leave their gear behind, because if they left their gear behind they'd stand no chance at all.
If you read the post you'd understand? The penalties are easy to circumvent and a lot of people are always going to choose the route which causes them the least conflict, which would be to exploit the system. It's not as simple as what you just wrote.
This wasn't my point either, I was saying that there was an option for circumventing item loss by having players kill them until they had no gear as a flaw to my idea. If they had no gear or resources, why would they care about being killed by a bounty hunter?
no offense but did you even read his post?
We will just have to wait and see how it is implemented, I think the community can think of many ways to game the system off of the information we currently have since we don't know specifics. I'm sure that Intrepid is willing to change certain parts if they are too exploitable.
Also, from my understanding, there will be a kill count applied to each player. so for instance, if somebody spends a weekend ganking and gets 5 or 7 kills while corrupted, and then they clear the corruption using either one of the methods you mentioned or from grinding, there is still a kill count associated with their name .
Once their characters "kill count" reaches certain threshholds, they will may gain corruption faster or have other negative aspects until they clear their characters "kill count" through religion quests or other means.
You didn't read my post man.
The Wiki says you can't flag against Nodes (Allies), so I'm rather confused whether Military Node people will side with the Bounty Hunters or the corrupted people. I can't tell from the wiki if corrupted players can trade or not. In terms of corruption, you never know when you will go corrupted. Most people will fight back, its only certain people who will turn someone corrupted. It is not something one can simply plan, smuggle items away and exploit. Its more a spur of the moment exercise. The only time it would be premeditated is if a high level ganks a lower level.
There is also the probability that corrupt players won't be able to unequip items.
These two things should completely negate the above ways to "game" the system.
Nobody has ever said, including people from Intrepid, that you clear out all corruption if you die ONCE. You may need to die multiple times to clean out corruption which comes with a lot of debufs. Plus, you get respawned at a random spot on the map, not in town or anything like that.
Guard mechanics are not yet in the game, so i'd imagine they will attack corrupted players on sight. They are visible on the world map to bounty hunters, they can't trade, they cannot unequip items, they will most probably NOT have access to any vendor or NPC for quests and such.
The only way i see of going around the system is if you have friends that are willing to chase you around the world map to kill you and give back your items. That still leaves you with a massive EXP debt and the debufs that come with that.
It is important to note that YOU DO NOT DELEVEL. Essencially you get locked experience and that reduces your combat efficiency.
There will be plenty of mechanics to punish red players and all of them will get tested in the coming phases. Chill out and enjoy the ride bois...
But what about end game, when the players are max level? How is experience even going to be a factor when people aren't even getting exp anymore? Unless they move onto a new bar which represents something in the place of experience debt from corruption.
Thankyou for sharing your absolutely stout intellect and perspective with me for the sake of this DISCUSSION. I'm not shitting on the game, I'm being realistic about the players and if you really don't have anything to add then what is the point of you commenting?
Well I hope so, in which case it would be essentially aligning with my post but I couldn't find any information like that anywhere unless someone could link it.
And I'm just sharing the mind-numbing pain that I have gotten from reading all of the corruption threads of the past three years. Right now we can only go on what the devs have said, and it's pointless for every tom, dick and harry saying that "their views are the best" when in fact nothing new is being said. If you want to make real change test the game in alpha or beta and then fix the problems so you can help the devs if not then shut up.
The devs have said countless times that they encourage open discussion and feedback and that's what I'm doing by giving my ideas, If you actually read the post instead of being a presumptive asshole then you'd realise that I never said my idea was the correct one, infact I said there was definitely flaws and I welcomed opinions on my ideas. You really think being this pessimistic on discussion is healthy? I'm fully supportive of all of Intrepid's decisions an I'm simply voicing what I think the player base might do.
I played the game in Alpha 0 and I'm going to play the game in Alpha or Beta when a package releases that I like.
And why is your acceptable view better than the devs or another player?
Thats my point why is you're or there better than the devs when you have not tried it. It just seems to me that you want it your way and if not you will leave the game.
Aren't we all sinners?
You might be right but could you expand on what you mean by having the necessary time?
2° The necessary time for the PK and/or his friends to go to a "hidden spot" to remove corruption.
3° The necessary time to unequip and trade all your items with your non-corrupted friend.
Assuming no non-combatent player is around you to kill you on the spot, Definitely the Fastest and safest way, but in this case its no longer an individual, but a group action.
Aren't we all sinners?
That's because ur blinded by your passion to be a bounty hunter. The system is fairly easy to exploit as it stands right now. On average, the no. of pkers will be higher than the no. of bounty hunters. Some will also be of the same level/higher level than the bounty hunter. This means that there is no guarantee that a bounty hunter can help a person who is being constantly griefed by multiple people as he might get killed as well. Even if it was a single high level target targeting low levels, its going to be difficult to find bounty hunters of similar level that might come to take him out because of the no. of pkers on average being greater than the no. of bounty hunters.
Another way to abuse this system, is that higher level players can grief low levels by dealing enough dmg to almost kill them but not kill them. The low level player would be forced to use potions, bandages etc. constantly and it would needless to say ruin his experience with the game.
Another thing is that this would affect streamers pretty negatively. They will be forced to hide their server, for the first few levels, as otherwise they will be ghosted and griefed by several hundred low level players. The gear drop mechanic wont affect these players as nobody cares about low level gear and since there will be way too many of them, it will require the streamer to die multiple multiple times before the griefers are completely corrupted.
When i mentioned this initially, all of them instantly stood against me because i was "simping" for streamers in my post. None of them even bothered to consider that what im saying is, there is currently no consistent way to deal with mass griefers that target a single player, or higher level players that grief low levels as the chance of a bounty hunter of their level coming to take them out is unlikely.
I definitely see where you're coming from on the streamer perspective and I think some steps will need to be taken into account for every individual player when they first create a character, it would be damaging to the game's health not to accommodate for people like streamers who undoubtedly would bring a lot of traffic to the game. I think this will be an initial issue but eventually will die off as players spread out and away from eachother and with the nature of the game being very group orientated for the most part it shouldn't be too damaging of an experience to roll around with a group dedicated to protecting them because with every streamer comes those who want to help them succeed and those who want them to fail.
World scale luckily matters aswell so when this spreading out does occur it should mean that players won't be so easily willing to travel half way across the world to another node solely to grief.
I think one easy work around to this issue would be to introduce some sort of grace-period when a new character is made where they can't be attacked for X amount of time, not only for streamers but for every player. Further down the line, repeatedly harassing individual players on your own characters that are more equal in equipment and level will just not be worth it in my opinion but time will tell!
Unfortunately I noticed people's resilience to just hear out some of the valid concerns that people have aswell. I can't imagine Intrepid will let players cause mayhem right off the bat in starting zones though luckily, that would be chaos. There should be a point where no matter how much you dislike someone, killing them on your level 38 when they're also 38 will be hurting yourself more than it does them.
What are you referring to?