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/forceATK toggle (not toggle PvP....). Mechanics needed.
George_Black
Member, Intrepid Pack
In todays Dev Update, I was surprised to see Jeff Bard unaware of Stevens degisn regarding /forceATK.
However, these are the risks involved with transparency during development, some people might misunderstand or bad mouth the developers. And for that I congratulate Intrepid Studios for their courage and confidence.
The full action/tab/flagging/Corruption mechanics are still not in place obviously and that is why Jeff and Steven were not eye to eye on the combat toggle and what it means. It isn't necessary coding at this point in development. That's my guess.
Why is this toggle, as Steven wants it, important for Ashes of Creation. I wanna break down my views on attacking mechanics so bear with me for a few posts.
However, these are the risks involved with transparency during development, some people might misunderstand or bad mouth the developers. And for that I congratulate Intrepid Studios for their courage and confidence.
The full action/tab/flagging/Corruption mechanics are still not in place obviously and that is why Jeff and Steven were not eye to eye on the combat toggle and what it means. It isn't necessary coding at this point in development. That's my guess.
Why is this toggle, as Steven wants it, important for Ashes of Creation. I wanna break down my views on attacking mechanics so bear with me for a few posts.
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I didn't like that proposal because I believe it weakens a lot of open world PvP features.
What I want to discuss in this topic has nothing to do with that, so if you want to discuss optional flagging here is the link https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/46883/combatant-opt-in/p1
I want to discuss how IS could make improvements to L2s combat mechanics and what the /forceATK toggle should achieve. It should:
This is important for such an ambitious game and I think it is worth the coding. I'm sure that the people working in IS know what needs to be done and how it should be done when the time comes, but hey, that's what we are here for at this early stage, to give our 2cents.
If you clicked on a player and used the Fireball key, you would receive a system message saying "Incorrect target".
The way to hurt a player would be to hold down the CTRL key anytime you wanted to cast an ability to hurt a target player. That game came out in 2003 and the combat and movement was slower that what we have today. Over the years L2 improved it's /forceATK method to the point that you could do exactly what you wanted to the targets you wanted without spreading your hand like a spider web over your keyboard.
If you /forceATK a player who didn't fight back and eventually killed them, you gained corruption.
If the player fought back, you didn't have to use the /forceATK methods, you could normally atk any purple or red player.
but that was nearly 20 years ago, and now we have action combat and better means to design games.
So let's see how /forceATK can be implemented succesfully in our tab+action combat that also has Non Combatant (green), Combatant (purple), Corrupted (red) players out in the beautiful open world without boring FACTION PvP.
Yes, I always hated being told who to kill and who not to kill in games like ESO. And that's why I chose L2 instead of w0w back in the day.
So how can IS implement a /forceATK toggle that works in this game?
Let's examine some scenarios and see how it can be tricky, but will eventually will work fine.
You see a group of players nearby and one of them player, xXx talks trash to you. You use /forceATK toggle so that your abilities can damage players. You strike a hit and your name becomes purple, xXx fights back and you are both purple. But what about the other players nearby that are Non Combatant? Will they get hit by your action combat abilities, or your AoE abilities? Will they possibly die as non combatants, getting you or xXx corrupted?
Another scenario is that you see xXx in a group of players and you want to PK. How do you avoid hitting the other non combatant players if you are using action combat abilities? How do you kill only xXx.
What about normal attacks? Do they affect non combatant players that happen to jump in front of you when you just action-combat fight a mob?
Here are some implementations that I hope will work and also maintain Stevens vision for action/reaction and risk.
I have extremely limited coding experience since the beginning of last year and I sure am naive to think that simple if {
}
then {
}
loops and methods is all that's required. For me, the future as a developer seemed grim so I quit after only a year. I admire those who can actually create games, even if I don't like the design. It's my choice to play or leave at that point. It takes a lot of dedication and patience. Not every moment is enjoyable and creative.
But for those that may be sceptical of these /forceATK toggles I say this. If the code is there it can work. And when it comes to achieving Ashes ambitious goals, I believe time spend on writing that code and revisiting it during bug encounters, is worth the effort, as opposed to designing things like opt in combatant toggle, that offer nothing to the overall open world combat vision.
What if you and your friends are using AoE abilities to take down many mobs and while you do that, a player comes in and flags on one of you and then your AoE abilities damage him? Now you are all unwillingly purple, free for the kill and in a dire state since you are dealing with all those mobs.
Well.. what if, based on the above post, your hotbar outline is 'green'? That means that all your abilities affect just mobs.
If you and your friends all see this person come up and hit you, then you should all beat that player into the dirt and wait for the Combatant status to fall away, since it’s a timed state.
Doesn’t seem like much of an issue to be honest.
Ok so in this scenario the only way for you to "accidentally" become purple is if you choose to flag for PvP. Most of the time you can't hit someone at all unless you first turn on your combatant flag. It's always an opt-in to go purple. If this other player has already flagged as you said, and you choose to attack back, then all parties are purple and none of you gains corruption. It's just an all-consensual PvP fight. But if you're green and choosing not to fight (your PvP toggle is OFF), then even if you use AoE abilities, your abilities won't hit the other player at all.
The only other scenario is if the enemy player that jumps in on you is already red, and your team of greens hits him. You'd still be green even after attacking a red player. Unclear if you're green after killing them - I think the answer is Yes but Steven hasn't clarified that.
As for your other posts, my understanding of Steven's comments today were that he's already decided to have a toggle, albeit in a much easier fashion than you described (just a simple keybind to toggle it on or off). Here's the process overall as I understood it.
1. You start out green/Non-combatant, unable to hit any other players at all.
2. You hit Ctrl+F, or whatever keybind they set for it, and flag yourself as capable of hitting other players. This is a very common idea other games have already done. You are still green, however since you haven't yet hit anyone.
3. Someone comes along and you attack them and now you are purple. You are officially a combatant.
4. After you kill them, one of two things happens.
a) If the enemy player was also purple/combatant (i.e. if they hit you at all during the fight, they will be purple), then you can go on with your business because it was a consensual fight. You will remain purple for a set amount of time after PvP combat ends before going back to green (if you leave your PvP flag on, then you're back at step 2. If you turn it off, you're at step 1).
b) If they were a Non-Combatant/green (player who did not attack back), then you gain Corruption and you are now Red/Corrupted.
This happens when there is a large group hidding around the corner waiting to kill your little group and use your spot. Also I have 0 worries about it. The devs will failproof it. Others still might be worried if they are not up to date.
If there is a group of non combatants and you want to PK only one of them, how would the simple toggle do that?
Flagging for PvP - aka turning on your Ctrl+F PvP toggle - still only means you're green, not purple, which took a minute for me to realize. The "benefits" of dying while purple are that you only suffer half the penalties of a green player. However you will not be realizing these benefits often.
I had previously been under the impression that merely flagging for PvP would make you purple all the time and you'd always suffer half the penalties of a green player even while out PvPing, and that this was the incentive to flag for PvP. But now I realize this is not the case, at all.
You are only purple for a few minutes at a time while participating in a PvP fight, so those halved death penalties serve only to incentivize people to fight back for that brief fight. This may have been obvious to others, but it just hit me just now - most of the time everyone will be green suffering normal death penalties outside of consensual PvP deaths.
But also in terms of that thread and the context of today's PvP toggle discussion - being permanently purple is not how the combatant status works, and would also be a massive exploit of the death penalty system. Allowing players to permanently suffer half the death penalties of everyone else is laughable to even consider.
Then only attack one of them lol. It's not hard to turn your PVP Flag on, and kill just the one guy. Remember you can choose how much of your skillbar to slot with action abilities and how many with tab - and also remember action isn't all massive AoEs. Action also means other types of abilities. So you can choose a few tab abilities on your bar, and a few non-AoE action abilities. As Steven always says, it's about player agency.
Or if you want to be an AoE only killing machine, then maybe don't attack a group when you only want to kill one. Risk vs reward - choose your path and live with the consequences. Here, though they're not forcing you to go purple, they're just going about their business.
Sure the system works someone gets corruption when that guy dies but if he didn't want to go down as non-combatant and lose more items, suffer more penalty too bad for him if he didn't attack FIRST.
PvP in the hunting grounds is essentially "who has the balls to attack first" per Steven's Benefit/Downside. "You did damage" and "Now people can attack you".
This essentially sounds like groups are going to stare each other down like some wild west movie and see who makes the first move. Issue with this is who makes the first move in a western usually wins. Here it will likely mean first move = corruption.
It's possible they could adjust the TTK or that CC is going to be max duration of 1 second or that everyone's always going to be ready to push their pvp button when other players roll on screen or that we're all just a bunch of button mashers and we'll never focus fire people because corruption.
The WHOLE point in my thread was that corruption is acting against it's intended purpose of limiting griefing and PKing when mutual players, groups or parties engage in pvp in the hunting grounds in the event someone can be killed BEFORE attacking back. Guild wars, node sieges, caravan raiding are all going to feed from hunting ground pvp to a large extent. As it currently stands the lack of manual combatant toggle seems flat out "wait what....." as Jeff would say. Either corruption is in the game to limit PVP or it's in the game to limit corruption - based on Steven's answer today it's flat out in the game to stop people from engaging in combat outside of objective based play and that essentially ALL hunting ground pvp will likely be the result of gankers looking to gank because they were going to do it anyway.
Master Assassin
(Yes same Tyrantor from Shadowbane)
Book suggestions:
Galaxy Outlaws books 1-16.5, Metagamer Chronicles, The Land litrpg series, Ready Player One, Zen in the Martial Arts
The only other situation where this could come in to play is if a large enough group of players are able to co-ordernate a strong enough attack with a good enough surprise to kill a player in less than a second. If players specifically go out to do this, and they are successful, then more power to them.
The argument that "but the player being attacked didn't want that" is a pointless argument in a game with open PvP, as that same argument could then simply be applied to all PvP.
The current TTK is only known by players currently under NDA so all we know is the intended TTK is a big longer, so they'll likely balance around that in testing.
Again this is what testing is for but my impression of the intended design is you're not going to kill a guy before he can even get one attack in. If he's already turned his PvP toggle on, he only needs to hit you once to be turned purple. If you 8v1 a guy in 3 seconds or less, then realistically he hasn't had a chance to opt-in to that fight and that's working as intended.
I think with the type of PvP toggle Steven talked about today you won't have to mash a PvP button when other players roll on screen. You will permanently be toggled to allow your attacks to hit other players. The only thing that turns you from green to purple is actually hitting a player, but you would always be capable of hitting them regardless. So if a few people run up to you, all you do is hit back, no toggle mashing needed. Just a totally normal fight.
I get where you're coming from but think of it this way - if you're zerging people down, they don't have time to react and they don't have time to decide they even want to fight you. The entire point of the combatant system, and indeed the entire point of the intended longer TTK, is to allow time for decision-making and counter-play. I understand the viewpoint that focus fire is skilled PvP, and in organized PvP it is - but if some dude is hanging around an area with friends killing mobs, seemingly minding his own business - he's not choosing to PvP you just because he's there.
Focus your efforts on ensuring TTK is properly balanced, but the corruption system seems fine as is. Ensuring a proper TTK is how you can ensure that a group that actually wants to 8v8 you can choose to do so. And realistically, it shouldn't take much for a person to be able to get one skill off before death.
Also however, read my reply about the death penalty. That's a massive reason why you can't have people be permanently flagged purple.
Normally, once you Ctrl+F to enable PK and hit a target, you will become a Combatant (purple). To prevent of accidently hitting other players, once you engaged in combat with 1 target, you could Ctrl+F again to turn /forceAtk off.
Of course, you will still be purple as you are still in combat with another player, but you won't start any other "in combat" states with other players.
Eternal Guild
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Eternal Guild
( Web | Discord )
Then you just take him off the black list if you cant handle it. Not to mention that is assuming he is kamakazing himself into my aoes.
Who said anything about zerging someone down? My example was two groups of 8vs8 - the first group to initiate the attack on one person in the other group (mage, priest, bard etc). A melee player may not make it to the other team to attack between CC(stuns, snares, knockdowns) vs ranged players in the opposing group.
Think about this. Say your guild is currently farming an exp/resource area with lets say 24 people and a few other groups come in the area and want those spots they roll in and attack your guild and take the spots... your guild says "Lets take that back" and then a back and forth ensues for several hours as the groups fight over a contested spot of play. It's going to be fairly obvious when you see the other group after that first fight that PvP is about to happen now instead of 8 players with focus fire maybe you have 10, 14, 20 etc all attacking 1 person before they can fight back just adjusting the TTK is going to have a limit to stay within their PvE and PvP expectations.
Master Assassin
(Yes same Tyrantor from Shadowbane)
Book suggestions:
Galaxy Outlaws books 1-16.5, Metagamer Chronicles, The Land litrpg series, Ready Player One, Zen in the Martial Arts
Intended time to kill has been given as 30-60 seconds in a 1v1 situation. Since you are using group examples, we have yet to see how much impact heals and buffs are going to have in keeping people alive against focus fire. In that vein, we do know that mages will be able to put party members into a safe space using the spell Safe Space where the member cannot attack or be attacked for a period of time. We also know that tanks will be able to use the ability Cover to absorb 50% of damage at a targeted player; although, we don't know how fast the tank can apply cover to a player.
I don't think that we can assume focus fire cannot be dealt with in reasonable situations yet.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Mage
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Tank How is corruption working against the purpose of limiting griefing and PKing? Are you saying that griefing and PKing will be increased over all rather than decreased as a result of corruption? It sounds more like your trying to say that the corruption system is intended to limit PKing and griefing but also limits consensual group PvP that is supposed to be allowed.
If that is what you mean, that is correct. My impression is that that the problem of PKing and griefing is a serious problem that harms the longevity of the game and player population while the challenge for groups of consensual PvPers working around the corruption system is not as major of an issue. Essentially, the possible difficulties of working around the corruption system are greatly outweighed by the benefits of having the corruption system.
Guild wars, node sieges, and caravan raiding all exist outside of the corruption system and don't interact with open world PvP or corruption. I don't see how those systems are going to feed from open world PvP; or, even where you were going with that. "Either corruption is in the game to limit PVP or it's in the game to limit corruption" Corruption is in the game to limit corruption? I can't even decide what you mean, but I think I already answered it above anyway.
Steven's answer was that corruption is a deterrent. A deterrent does not automatically stop anything. Players still have the agency to choose whether to accept corruption and how to manage it if they need to kill a player that will not fight back.
"...ALL hunting ground pvp will likely be the result of gankers looking to gank". That may be your opinion, but the game is being designed for group PvP in the open world over objectives and POI's such as World Bosses, open world dungeons, resources, etc. All of these things have value, are limited, and not everyone can have them. If multiple groups are shooting at the same world boss, then not everyone is walking away with the full rewards. People are intended to fight over these. From what has been described, this basic corruption system has been used successfully in other games that focused on open world PvP. Personally, I wouldn't just assume such PvP won't happen in Ashes.
That's the kind of awesome stuff you can get out of a game like Ashes.
I'm too lazy this morning to respond to all of the points but since this what covers most of the general idea I'll come back to it.
Having a manual toggle to turn ourselves purple would allow the game to keep it's PK/Griefing mechanic in tact while allowing the "consentual PvPers" the ability to participate within the system without the system then creating "challenges" within the accepted gameplay model. Would you not agree? If not why do you believe the system needs to create a challenge for consensual pvp instead of allowing this to happen outside of corruption (if both sides were to have flaged themselves purple of course)?
While it's true all of those objective based pvp events will be outside of the corruption system what seems to be missed is that they are all going to require open world/hunting ground player movement to initiate for some, most or all participates in them. So you'll have large scale groups of players actively en route to pvp objective(s) or leaving pvp objectives. Once a Caravan is wiped for example then do all members of the defending side respawn 2+ nodes away after death instead of inside the local zone? If the Caravan ends because it is wiped would it then not be logical these group(s) may continue to fight outside of the objective?
After guild wars and sieges end it could be the exact same thing on much larger scales (hundreds/thousands of players). Would it not make sense to allow these players to toggle themselves purple and just fight it out and remove the corruption penalty from not only themselves but from each other during these consensual engagements? I'm sure there would be people unwilling to flag themselves in advance of fighting, but from my perspective I care very little about causing corruption on someone if i'm unable to retaliate in situations described here and more concerned about having to tip toe around corruption just because an "objective" ended.
Master Assassin
(Yes same Tyrantor from Shadowbane)
Book suggestions:
Galaxy Outlaws books 1-16.5, Metagamer Chronicles, The Land litrpg series, Ready Player One, Zen in the Martial Arts
No it doesn’t make a lick of sense to let players be “Combatants” without first engaging in combat.
Non-combatant is not a statement, it is an indicator that you have not recently engaged in PvP. Combatant is not a statement, it’s an indicator that you’ve recently chose to engage in PvP. Corruption is not a statement, it is an indicator that you’ve killed a player who do not fight back.
Flags are not there to profess you want to fight, they exist to show if you are fighting or have recently been fighting. The context is necessary in order for flags to have substantial meaning.
Edit: And to be clear, non-objective based PvP is not something IS is endorsing. They have outright said they want to discourage meaningless PvP. If you aren’t fighting over an objective or other some advantage, then your PvP is meaningless.
It's not meaningless to the players that enjoy it.
It is meaningless in that it has no greater impact beyond that fight. In terms of basic game consequence, it has no purpose and no lasting impact.
Master Assassin
(Yes same Tyrantor from Shadowbane)
Book suggestions:
Galaxy Outlaws books 1-16.5, Metagamer Chronicles, The Land litrpg series, Ready Player One, Zen in the Martial Arts
You'll be purple whenever somebody is around you and you'll probably stay within the combatant state for a bit once you do it. A basic attack shouldn't hit very hard either, so you will be neither threatening to kill someone by accident nor hurt the person you attack at all.
Master Assassin
(Yes same Tyrantor from Shadowbane)
Book suggestions:
Galaxy Outlaws books 1-16.5, Metagamer Chronicles, The Land litrpg series, Ready Player One, Zen in the Martial Arts
Well, going by the dev’s own words. The primary reason for a node siege is to open up progression paths that node is blocking. An Economic node will offer far different experience than a Religious node, and offer different services. Guild wars will most often begin because two guilds have been competing over resources so often one of them got fed up with it. Constant caravan raids will play into it I’m sure, see how happy you’d be when a rival guild snags a whole cart of taxes away from you.
But seriously, large scale events like that are going to happen because they’ll grant some tangible benefit, and it’s honestly odd you think they won’t. PvP in this game is based around resources and services that players are meant to fight over.