Dealing with random player killing in an open-world PvP MMO.

For such an ambitious player-driven MMO as Ashes, the presence of random player killing (RPK) poses a challenge.
How do you allow for player agency while protecting new / weak players?

On one hand, giving players the agency to dish out justice in blood makes the world much more interactive and unpredictable, as your reputation and behavior may have dire consequences.

However, the challenge is that this level of PvP-interactivity, typically also gives rise to RPKs. Some of which intentionally grief, and others who just PvP indiscriminately.

The corruption system is already a great safety mechanism against this. However, with player-interaction at the heart of Ashes it would be great to see additional counter-RPK mechanisms that are driven by the players themselves.
Bounty hunters as planned, are a great first step.

However, bounty hunting only taps into monetary motivation. It'd be great to provide tools by which guilds and players may establish a reputation of benevolence and fairness. If Newbie Joe can report a RPK or griefer to the local guild, then it puts justice back into the hands of players. If the game tracks and incentivizes such player-driven justice, then guilds may want their territory to garner a reputation as a safe haven with just proceedings.

If Anti-PKing or peacekeeping is made worthwhile in this sense, we'll be encouraging the community to respond to griefing or bad behavior organically.

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

deakbo

I think the coming out of the gates and being close to a node also helps killing newbie players. Your second to last paragraph is a great idea, I just didn’t want to paraphrase it AHA.

Khronus

Have dead players inventory be lootable except for equipped items and one bag that is special and "hidden".

When you murder a player under X levels than you, make your weapons and or armor or a random piece become lootable. This item cannot be sold on the market but can be broken down for materials or sold straight to a vendor (not to other players). Too much of this corruption can make things worse...this makes it not worth killing low lvls. My concern here is taking advantage of the system vs aoe characters. Purposefully sending a lowbie to die and then kill the player to take their stuff.

When you gain the corruption, make it so other players can sense your presence and find you easier. Rangers could also have an additional way to track corrupted.

Killing players WITHIN X levels of you is just considered PvP. Gank away. Take their farming inventory and go deposit it quickly! Bounty benefits would be great here. Let's say you have killed or participated in killing 10 players, then you would gain a bounty on your head. Someone now killing you would gain them some form of bonus but it should not be something good enough to be manipulated. Just an added bonus and someone to hunt down...maybe that player has a ton of loot on him/her from the kills they have? Repeatedly killing someone for just pvp points (or whatever it will be) wouldn't be beneficial but if I see someone has killed 12 people.....the thought of them having 12 people worth of farm....totally worth me mounting up and hunting.

Back in Vanilla WOW I ran world pvp groups and the rule was "if it's red, it's dead'. We killed anything and everything and kept moving. Lowbies got killed, other groups got killed and overall it was really fun for as much fun as zerging can get. There was no reward and no negative but people still did it and people who died understood....pvp zone is a pvp zone. Griefing is going to happen and people need a way to avoid getting griefed with safe areas or ways to get away from said griefer.

There should also be areas that are considered pvp without a penalty if possible but that's a different discussion.

Bricktop

I think there are enough mechanics in place to protect players from Griefers already. Aside from corruption and dropping gear and lowering stats, there is the "Enemy of the state" mechanic. Which allows the mayor of a node to declare a person an enemy of the state and that allows every citizen of the node to attack the player freely. So it will work exactly as you described. A Griefer is running through the node, the citizens petition the mayor, suddenly the griefer is Kill on sight to 2000 people with no consequences to them.

People TYPICALLY aren't going to go red on low levels for no reason because they will gain exponentially more corruption than if it was a player who was their level. At the end of the day it's gonna be a PvP game and you are going to want to try and fight back unless the person completely outlevels you because you lose less of your gatherables.

When I played Lineage 2 which basically has almost the same system, people typically went red to defend world bosses from people who wouldn't flag back, or they went red on enemy guild members who they didn't want to accept war invites with for whatever reason. Random PKers existed but it wasn't the normal because losing gear was painful in that game, and each person you killed made you get more and more corruption the next time you killed someone. Eventually someone who PKed a lot would get huge corruption amounts and it would take them hours to work off the corruption through grinding mobs. People and guilds wanted to "save" going red for when they needed to because of that. It's going to work the same way in Ashes.

BaSkA_9x2

Miracle wrote: »

How do you allow for player agency, while protecting new / weak players?

On one hand, giving players the agency to dish out justice in blood makes the world much more interactive and unpredictable, as your reputation and behavior may have dire consequences.

However, the challenge is that this level of PvP-interactivity, typically also gives rise to RPKs. Some of which intentionally grief, and others who just PvP indiscriminately.

However, with player-interaction at the heart of Ashes, it would be great to see additional counter-RPK mechanisms, driven by the players themselves.
Bounty hunters as planned, are a great first step.

However, bounty hunting only taps into monetary motivation. It'd be great to provide tools by which guilds and players may establish a reputation of benevolence and fairness. If Newbie Joe can report a RPK or griefer to the local guild, then it puts justice back into the hands of players. If the game tracks and incentivizes such player-driven justice, then guilds may want their territory to garner a reputation as a safe haven with just proceedings.

If Anti-PKing or peacekeeping is made worthwhile in this sense, we'll be encouraging the community to respond to griefing or bad behavior organically.

We have no idea how rewarding Bounty Hunting will be. It could get to the point where it's so rewarding that PKing is pointless and people will actually find ways to abuse the BH system. In other words, it's too soon to talk about how good or bad the BH system is.

A node can declare non-citizens an enemy of the state. I'm not sure but that could mean that person automatically becomes "corrupted" when entering that node's ZOI. So if a node has a no-PK policy, they could simply shit on everyone who is a PKer. On the other hand, I don't think Node Citizenship can be removed from you, so you could PK and be unable to become an enemy of the state in this case. But PKers can always be boycotted, servers Discords will definitely be a thing and if there's any add-on like system in-game to make a "blacklist", PKers will already have enough a hard time. And I'm not even gonna talk about the debuffs you get for being corrputed and made useless at some point.

KHRONUS wrote: »

Have dead players inventory be lootable except for equipped items and one bag that is special and "hidden".

There's no need for this: only gatherables drop on death.

KHRONUS wrote: »

When you murder a player under X levels than you, make your weapons and or armor or a random piece become lootable. This item cannot be sold on the market but can be broken down for materials or sold straight to a vendor (not to other players). Too much of this corruption can make things worse...this makes it not worth killing low lvls. My concern here is taking advantage of the system vs aoe characters. Purposefully sending a lowbie to die and then kill the player to take their stuff.

When you gain the corruption, make it so other players can sense your presence and find you easier. Rangers could also have an additional way to track corrupted.

Killing players WITHIN X levels of you is just considered PvP. Gank away. Take their farming inventory and go deposit it quickly! Bounty benefits would be great here. Let's say you have killed or participated in killing 10 players, then you would gain a bounty on your head. Someone now killing you would gain them some form of bonus but it should not be something good enough to be manipulated. Just an added bonus and someone to hunt down...maybe that player has a ton of loot on him/her from the kills they have? Repeatedly killing someone for just pvp points (or whatever it will be) wouldn't be beneficial but if I see someone has killed 12 people.....the thought of them having 12 people worth of farm....totally worth me mounting up and hunting.

These ideas aren't bad, I think they could be implemented if Intrepid feels the need to.

KHRONUS wrote: »

people need a way to avoid getting griefed with safe areas or ways to get away from said griefer.

I don't think this is a fact. If it's done right, I think Ashes could work with almost no safe zones apart from your freehold, using crafting benches, instanced places, etc.

KHRONUS wrote: »

There should also be areas that are considered pvp without a penalty if possible but that's a different discussion.

I would like this very much too, but this is something that we're probably not going to see before launch because of scope creep.

TheKingdomKing

Id like to see

Player and NPC bounty hunters being sent after PKers
Node (town/city) safezones where guards will fire upon and chase down pkers
Player and Guild level rewards for hunting pkers down (achievements, guild points, titles, etc)
Drop ALL items at a certain level of PK. (so if a pker is only griefing, when they die they will lose everything they have on them)
Players not continuously PKing for 0 reason. (lol)

Riegnar

From what I've been reading on all the PK/Corruption related posts is a bunch of people crying to furthermore dis-incentivize PKng till it gets to the point of AoC becoming a safe haven for casual players like the rest of the MMOs nowadays.

You want my take on it ? It's enough that a player with corruption cannot gain exp, can drop his gear, and is always being hunted by other players- it's also fair. But having your stats nerfed ? That by itself sounds ridiculous to me, stop trying to add onto it.

Balrog21

It's already been said if you are corrupted and try to enter a city the city guards will attack you.

Merek

I completely dislike 3rd party interference in games. Once I'm in, I don't want an admin or anyone but players dealing with each other. So I'm all for this,

Miracle wrote: »

However, bounty hunting only taps into monetary motivation. It'd be great to provide tools by which guilds and players may establish a reputation of benevolence and fairness. If Newbie Joe can report a RPK or griefer to the local guild, then it puts justice back into the hands of players. If the game tracks and incentivizes such player-driven justice, then guilds may want their territory to garner a reputation as a safe haven with just proceedings.

However, I do find the corruption system too good to be true. I doubt it's going to be completely sound and un-cheesable. It'll get to the point where people bait those with good gear into getting corrupted simply to take it from them. The system forces all PVP to be "consensual" which removes most of the risk from doing anything in the game.

Paradise2

BaSkA13 wrote: »

We have no idea how rewarding Bounty Hunting will be. It could get to the point where it's so rewarding that PKing is pointless and people will actually find ways to abuse the BH system. In other words, it's too soon to talk about how good or bad the BH system is.

Yup, the primary concern is not so much its efficacy, but rather tapping into a variety of player-driven motivations, many of which are not monetary.

Bangeo

Riegnar wrote: »

From what I've been reading on all the PK/Corruption related posts is a bunch of people crying to furthermore dis-incentivize PKng till it gets to the point of AoC becoming a safe haven for casual players like the rest of the MMOs nowadays.

You want my take on it ? It's enough that a player with corruption cannot gain exp, can drop his gear, and is always being hunted by other players- it's also fair. But having your stats nerfed ? That by itself sounds ridiculous to me, stop trying to add onto it.

Pretty much this, the amount of downsides to pking, already making it close to pointless, for a world where its "built by the players" the only reason apparently the players will have to pk will be around caravans, anyone pking outside of those areas is almost assumed to have no good reason other than griefing, which we know isnt true when it comes to an Open World PvP. Having your stats nerfed is one if not the most ridiculous addition to a system like this.

Being Green is literally so safe, that if anything itll be easy to abuse that status, getting corrupted. Bounty hunters alts or players will be used to scout for other people in their guilds to gang bang corrupted players with no risk while being green.

If the system is too punishing itll have the same effect as what happened in Archeage where they hard forced people to play faction, 1 pk could land you in jail for 40-50mins, killing alot of openworld pvp between guilds and players.

Like I said, the system atm somewhat assumes the only reason you PK is to grief, and for no other real reason.

Hurf Derfman

@Miracle this is a video game, not a social experiment.

Sometimes the best way to deal with a griefer is to get better at pvping or make friends with those that already are.

The corruption system already sounds plenty punishing.

Nothing is stopping players from forming bounty hunter guilds/communities.

maouw

*Raises hand Hermione style*
I have a question!

Would people have an account that they pop into to PK and then log off?

Is that a thing?

Bricktop

maouw wrote: »

*Raises hand Hermione style*
I have a question!

Would people have an account that they pop into to PK and then log off?

Is that a thing?

@maouw
I suppose they could if they wanted. I'm thinking they will do it the same way they had it in Lineage 2, where corruption will have an accumulative effect on your character over time. The first time they PK somebody they might get 100 corruption and they kill 3 mobs and they are cleansed of it. However this builds over time even after you cleanse it. So let's say a PKer goes red on somebody for the first time in weeks, but they have already killed 300 people over the course of their characters lifetime. They would be slapped down with 20k corruption right then and there because they have already PKed a ton of people on that char since launch, and that might take them 6 hours of grinding mobs to clear. There was no way to clear your character of past transgressions when I played L2, so it would just build and build over time each time you PKed someone, even after a "cleanse".

This is just speculation, it worked that way in L2 and I'm betting it will be similiar for ashes. People typically took going red fairly seriously in L2 because of the stacking effect over time and they would "save" it for times they thought they needed it.

CROW3

maouw wrote: »

*Raises hand Hermione style*
I have a question!

Would people have an account that they pop into to PK and then log off?

Is that a thing?

I asked that same question a couple months ago. Basically, can I create an outlaw alt, get to a certain threshold of corruption, strip my gear and suicide my way back to zero. Rinse repeat.

As far as I understood the response - the answer was ‘yes.’ That may have changed (or will change) in the last couple months of dev - so, I’m ok to be wrong.

Riski Biski

My current thought process behind the Corruption system is that, as per any of the concepts in the making, is that they are a work in progress and will be explained as time goes on.

As it stands, what the information that this post and the wiki page on Corruption has provided to me is that there would be a cat-and-mouse aspect among those who want to brush with the aspect of player-killing versus those who will grief.

Take, for instance, the notion of how likely open-world/free PVP will take place if people know that there is a system that will punish them for dunking on lower level players. If someone is going to run around with the chance that by doing so, they could lose their premium(?) items for the sweet price of being able to kill a few low-levels who may just retreat to the node and allow the guards to take care of it.

It's a minor(ish) impact against the low-level, who would lose nothing but time in the interaction versus a fairly heavy penalty for the higher level player who would have their loot up from grabs, not to mention the additional penalties of being possibly hounded by the bounty-hunter players who would do so until the corruption has gone.

What strikes me as the plausible/likely scenario that will take place is interactions between equally leveled players, possibly over rare resource nodes/events out in the wilderness, wherein the penalty isn't that high, but the risk of entering a corrupted state could be mitigated by the reward of rare loot or otherwise.

Whilst I'm not a PVP'er myself, it would be a shame if they restrict those who want to actively PVP to caravans and sieges, as this would be little better than signing up for a battleground or otherwise in WoW or SPVP in GW2.

Honestly, I'm looking forward to seeing how this would be implemented, so I might know how often I'm going to have to run away.

Warth

CROW3 wrote: »

maouw wrote: »

*Raises hand Hermione style*
I have a question!

Would people have an account that they pop into to PK and then log off?

Is that a thing?

I asked that same question a couple months ago. Basically, can I create an outlaw alt, get to a certain threshold of corruption, strip my gear and suicide my way back to zero. Rinse repeat.

As far as I understood the response - the answer was ‘yes.’ That may have changed (or will change) in the last couple months of dev - so, I’m ok to be wrong.

@CROW3 Then you'd stack up a crippling amount of EXP debt. Obviously, The gravity would depend on how much EXP Debt you gain.

@maouw at some point you will have to get rid of it, as corruption will decrease your combat efficiently. Not just that, the more players you have killed the higher your Corruption gain will be per kill. What you are proposing shouldn't be sustainable very long.

maouw

yeah gotcha - the stat decrease is what makes a PK alt ineffective compared to lost-my-temper-in-the-moment PKs

Hurf Derfman

@Riski Biski Let me give you 3 scenarios on what could happen. Let's assume these events take place in a mid level zone.

By default you are green flagged.

Scenario 1.
Dude attacks me, he's now purple flagged.
I do nothing because I'm afk. He kills me, he gains corruption. (Red flag) and while it's been a week since he spent 16 hours straight pwning noobs at the stater gate (just like he would in his favorite Korean MMO) it took him a whole 3 days to work off being red, and he is surprised that the red kicked in after only just one kill. Apparently lacking in the ability to use Google he sets out to spend the next five minutes struggling to kill what is presumably an even level mob. But more on that later.

Scenario 2.
I get back to questing and spot a mining node, but before I can loot it, a funny looking caster attacks me. I fight back we are now both purple flagged. Whoever wins does not gain corruption. Winner now remains purple flagged for up to 5 minutes-ish.

That part is still in development™️

Let's assume for the rest of this example that I died because I thought that all bard/mages were just worthless support bots.

A random third party who is green flagged by the name of Heroic Avenger sees the fight and wishes to avenge the fallen. (And by avenge I mean get the mining node.) He does not know that the winner is afk because his mom told him to take out the garbage. So the winner is afk and purple flagged. The Green flagged "hero" also becomes purple flagged as he attacks the now afk player who is arguing with his step dad (probably named Todd or Phil) about when his mom originally told him to take out the garbage. Mr afk is now dead, but since our avenging hero killed an afk player who was purple flagged he does not receive corruption, loots the mining node and gets the hell out of Dodge while he waits out being purple flagged.

Scenario 3.
Being new to MMOs the Avenging Hero decided to try to hide his toon in a nearby waterfall not realizing his name plate is still clearly visible. He is physically shaking from the adrenaline rush of his first ever PK, and thinks he's being terribly clever and that it's working when in reality nobody happens to pass by.

Meanwhile I return to the area spending perhaps a little too much time looking for a round two with that bard who is nowhere to be seen. The mining node is now gone so I move on. My flag state reverts back to green.
Being a gathering type in this completely made up example, I spot an herb by the river. After I loot it, I see a guy oddly standing in a waterfall facing the wall. He is purple flagged but it's bad form to kill the afk and I briefly wonder if his mom or wife is telling him to take out the trash. Or maybe his three year old child managed take off their own poopy diaper and is now trying to hand it to them? The way the lil tyke is holding it by the strap, the diaper open and it's a small miracle the poo hasn't hit the ground yet. I mean, we've all been there. Why else would he make such a half assed effort to hide himself while flagged for PVP?

I digress.

As I move down the river a bit I spot a red flagged (corrupted) player and being the sort who checks their combat log after dying, I quickly realize that that this is indeed the same "Dude" from example 1.
DOUBLE BUBBLE!

It would seem he had some difficulty with a single mob that should have been a very simple 15-20 second fight. Being the paragon of virtue and honor that I am, I allow him to heal to full.

As I engage he just stands there and says, "pls dont kill me im new" and then just "pls" over and over again. When I get him to about half health the guy in the river seemingly back from his AFK who I noticed is now green flagged heroically rushes in landing the killing blow and Dude's final words are, "pls pls pls pls pls".

Turns out Dude had been quite naughty and is now lootable. His boots are up for grabs. They aren't an upgrade and are nearly broken. I take them anyway.

The Heroic Avenger takes Dude's pants, then asks, "how cum we didnt go purplwe"

"Ah, quite right. You see when one who engages in nefarious and heinous activity such as killing those who are unable or unwilling to fight back you gain corruption. Once corrupted my dear boy, they are fair game to every one and suffer stat loss in PVP. Furthermore the only way to be rid if it is to grind NPC monsters.

Of course I suppose you could die a whole lot, but you would still incur not just the usual amount of XP debt, but indeed four times the amount."

"Oh" he replies, and then, "lol" as he begins to sit and stand repeatedly on the corpse of Dude.

We go our separate ways. The end.

Tyrantor

Newbie Joe needs to suck it up and deal with it like the rest of us.

Newbies aren't going to be bound to nodes and this newbie can move across the map with limited work, far less time (IMO) than tracking down some random do good guild in the area and then finding the person to "discuss" his RPK with.

All this concern about Pkers - who do we report those Mobs to when they kill us?

Noaani

Tyrantor wrote: »

Newbie Joe needs to suck it up and deal with it like the rest of us.

Newbies aren't going to be bound to nodes and this newbie can move across the map with limited work, far less time (IMO) than tracking down some random do good guild in the area and then finding the person to "discuss" his RPK with.

All this concern about Pkers - who do we report those Mobs to when they kill us?

If the mobs kill you in the same way a player does, I believe the appropriate avenue for this is a bug report.

Child Item