Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
A major multi-game guild devoted to player-killing decides they want to go to Server X. Then another PK guild hears that the other one is going to Server X and decide to join them out of fun. Other guilds follow. (I’ve seen boards dedicated to people across various online games into PK so this kind of communication and coordination isn’t totally implausible.)
Next thing you know, Server X is known as the “PK server”. They don’t cheat, they play within the rules and just deal with whatever consequences of corruption they get (though with such a huge PK population they probably have no shortage of purple opponents and might not have that much corruption). The community knows that the server should be avoided if you don’t want to risk being attacked all the time unless you want to join a roving PK gang.
Really, I don’t see the problem. I guess if you start on a server like that which becomes a PK server and Intrepid charges you to move to another server that might be a problem, but maybe they’d waive a fee temporarily if enough players petition.
There will be griefers and if they only turn purple then they can reearn green and grief you agian and repeat. There will be lots on unwanted pvp in the pve area especially in the uninstanced boss and raid areas
But you also need to remember that Ashes plans to be a low information game. You’re not going to know that the person attacking you is 33 levels above you. They’re not going to have a level indicator over their head like you see in most MMOs. You won’t even see their hit points, just maybe a percentage. And with cosmetics you can’t look at gear to see how strong they are. Maybe you can figure it out if they are casting a spell that you know isn’t available before level 40 but that’s just a maybe.
Furthermore, you telling me that someone has killed you 4 times already and you are confronted for a 5th time to that player... you will STILL bravely fight back to "lose less" for the 5th time ? Not saying that such a thing will be common or that it will happen often but say it is happening to you. At no point will you decide that it's perhaps best not to fight back and wreck that player with corruption ? 50% times 5 is 250% death penalty + five times the respawn and walk back trouble on top of that. I'm just saying...
Corruption system isn't meant to stop PvP. It is meant to discourage abuses. Like the scenario I gave as an example.
Edit: Even if you did not have any information. After being easily killed 4 times by that same player... you would know what is up even if you don't have specific numbers.
No, I’d do it once, if somehow he ran me down again I’d fight back or even run away. If I got killed twice I’d get out of the area before he found me again, I’m no idiot!
I’m intimately familiar with the purpose of corruption, after more than 2 1/2 years talking about it on three different forums I have probably seen every argument there is about it.
I doubt I’m getting taken out 4 times by the same player unless it’s as part of a siege or some other ongoing PvP contest that I’m trying to participate in.
Side note: I seriously doubt that a level 10 will somehow be able to run away from a level 43 (movement skills, equipment, mount and mana points... Nothing in the lvl 10's favor) . Furthermore it isn't about being dumb. The player could follow you where you go. How ? Maybe he is ranger and have tracking skill. Why ? Maybe you accidentally insulted that player in chat or something and he/she just wont let it go. Why doesn't really matter. If you've been a gamer for a long time, then you definitively know that complete jerks are not a myth. Some even get banned because of it.
That being said I think people are not taking into consideration the limitations and risks that being "corrupted" brings. Not everyone is going to want to go red at the drop of a hat, while others might see no issue with killing you outright so as to not compete for leveling/farming areas. There will probably be dedicated characters for PKing. In L2 they were known as "perma reds" and would generally be high level characters with crap gear they don't care about losing and run around lower level zones terrorizing noobs that have no chance of fighting back. This of course with the intention of never working the karma off, hench perma red. Steven knows all about this and I'm sure will be instituting systems to negate or at least severely limit the idea of a perma red character.
There is a lot of speculation on how this system will curb griefing but we'll never truly know until we get some time in game and see how everything else works alongside it. Let's not forget the omnipresent "Subject-to-Change" plastered everywhere either.
I've played a lot of MMO's, and honestly, L2 was pretty lax on griefing when it came to PVP, as in there was almost none. You would worry more about people training large groups of mobs on you than unwanted PvP. Players who are in well-established guilds, max level with end game gear will not be trolling around the starter zones killing level 15's, I just don't see it. Rarely will someone engage you in combat unless they have a real reason to. If they do, 90% of the time they are baiting you into attacking them back so they get a free kill, just don't take the bait.
See below:
In the left-most diagram, green player attacking red stays green.
You probably misread the diagram. It says if a non-combatant attacks a combatant, they are flagged as combatant.
The only time they don't turn into a combatant when attacking is if they attack a corrupted.
That's not quite true. @Nizzikef Currently it doesn't work that way. Corrupted can't defend themselves against greens. Steven however knows, what ramifications come with the current status quo. They will keep an eye on that to potentially adjust it for one of the upcoming Alphas, as they know that the current system is troublesome.
They already do have one system against this. The Stat dampening, that will makes your character close to useless in combat once you accumulate enough corruption.
Exactly this. Everybody that played Lineage 2 knows, that the system works for the most part. That reds aren't going to be a rampant thing in the world. Curiously enough, it's the players that don't have any experience with it, that desperately look for a "worry" to overplay, thinking they could incentivize a change within a fundamental game mechanics. Feedback would be so much more useful, if people were to stop fear-mongering and actually gave feedback on topics where they don't have to talk out of their butt.
The first thing I'd listen to, is the WoW Crowd discussing fluidity of movement and combat, since that's something it always excelled in. The one I'd never listen to them about is meaningful open world pvp, as that's something, that hasn't been present in WoW in the past 17 years.
I see, so it's actually identical to L2 lol. I thought it would've added an interesting dynamic if they went the other route. I always thought it was cheesy when you killed someone, they shout out your location and everyone drops what they're doing for a zone-wide man hunt.
Green players do become purple when attacking another purple player.
Either this or provide a fourth color. Let's call it orange. It's pretty much:
flagged for Red players as combatant, not for other purples. You don't want a group of purple having the ability to defend a red guy from "greens", that would end up in a bad place as well.
Pretty much how it would work:
This is pretty much the System that Lineage 2 was build on from back in days of Ultima Online. Not sure why Lineage 2 got rid of the "personal flag" between an green aggressor and a red defender, but it did indeed spawn a couple of serious problems within Lineage 2.
The fact, that reds were the "punching bags" of all greens on the server made the survival chance for the red extremly low on a proper server. At least in the mid-levels where the population of greens was very high in the farming spots. Which would be the same for AoC, as our Leveling comes to an end at level 50. AoC would be even worse, due to the lack of fast travel and bounty hunters.
This brought the game to the point, where the easiest thing to do was killing yourself upon accruing enough Karma. Getting killed by a friend would at least protect your gear. Even more pressing was, that griefers avoided going red at all costs. They instead kept stealing through last hits and repeatedly poking Greens down to low hp to the point he couldn't properly farm.
Reds need a realistic chance to survive becoming red occasionally. If they don't provide that, then the system will be gamed through friend-killing, suicides or non-lethal griefing.
It is and it won't have a good effect on AoC @Nizzikef . The "green attacks red without flagging" is a serious problem. Steven already is aware of this potential problem and will keep an eye on how it plays out within Ashes. So i'm hopeful that it will see change throughout the alphas.
This system is completely foreign to people who haven't experienced it before. People who play WoW and other faction-based MMOs can only dream of killing obnoxious faction members stealing tags and otherwise acting in a way they wouldn't in front of the opposing faction only because they know they're safe. I can guarantee that people will want to create dedicated characters for killing other players but I'm confident there will be systems in place to curb this.
Like I said previously, we need to wait and see how these systems work in tandem. Yes, he's taking the system from L2 but he's also adding to it.
I never said that it was toxic.
I merely said that "every red becomes a punching bag for greens" won't work in AoC.
In conjunction with the lack of Fast Travel and the bounty hunter tracking system, the chances for a red to survive his corrupted status will be very close to 0. In Lineage 2 you were able to run away, hide and grind through the quiet minutes in another spot to slowly get rid of your Karma. This won't be a thing here as people can track you and you have no realistic way to get to a quiet spot to grind out your corruption.
With red not being survivable, one of 3 things will happen:
The design choice, that 9950 of 10000 player on the server can attack reds, without reds being able to defend themselves is asinine at best. It create an incentive to grief without murder or a incentive to simply suicide once you have killed somebody, as survival simply isn't a realistic option once you turn red. Which, in both cases, creates a poor gameplay loop in itself.
Looking into it, I was surprised at how much information was released on the Bounty Hunter system already. For now it looks like people will need to complete a quest to become a Bounty Hunter which is only available from a stage 4 Military node. Only BHs can see corrupted players on the map. The corruption of the player has to be high enough to appear to BHs. Accuracy of the corrupted player's icon on the BH's map is dependant on how far a player has progressed in the BH system.
Notably, Corrupted players can attack and kill BHs without incurring further corruption. - This is what I heard from one of Steve's Q&A's and misunderstood it.
From what I've read, BHs will need to toggle their ability to track corrupted players (Pathfinding) which comes with a cooldown in between uses and makes them free game for corrupted players.
Now, of course, this doesn't stop a Bounty Hunter from calling out someone's location but unless they're constantly looking at the map or they get some sort of notification there will be a small amount of time for someone to work off their corruption before any BHs are aware.
What I'm not sure on is if BHing will be considered a profession or if anyone and everyone will be able to become BHs...
Like owning and running a tavern probably isn't a profession. Cooking the food sold into one however is.