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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.
Combatant attacks non-combatant
Bleebz
Member, Pioneer, Kickstarter
Hello. I am a veteran Ultima Online player and I thought they had an excellent flagging system. I was looking over the proposed flagging system of AoC and found a point of confusion. If a combatant attacks a non-combatant, the non-combatant can’t even defend themselves lest they become a combatant? This seems like an oversight.
If you’re innocent and someone attacks you, I think you should be able to defend yourself without the possibility of being ganked by a third party.
Thoughts?
If you’re innocent and someone attacks you, I think you should be able to defend yourself without the possibility of being ganked by a third party.
Thoughts?
2
Comments
If that’s the case, then the original combatant attacks you freely, you could then fight back, and the friend of the combatant can now attack you with no repercussions. The proposed system would actually encourage less PVP. People will stand there and wait to die, and pass out the corruption.
Attacking innocent players should cause corruption even if the innocent chooses to fight back and then dies, and the innocent should not then flag to everyone.
It’s a subtle point of nuance in an open PVP system that will allow for more PVP rather than people just waiting to die and giving corruption to the attacker.
Aye. I agree, I have seen too many times that a player dies because they had to toggle on PvP mode to defend themselves instead of being automatically enabled once they are attacked. And any player attacking another player (regardless of PvP mode) should automatically receive an amount of Corruption for injuring another player. The corruption should come from both initiating a fight (meaning you attack a player who has not previously attacked you). looting or stealing form the player. and even more corruption should come from killing a player (finishing them off).
There is no guarantee for your safety. Life isnt fair.
There is no oversight in the system, open world PvP is not optional.
I am a Lineage 2 veteran and the system works fine for those that want an open world game as opposed to those that want instanced or zoned content.
You are not innocent in my eyes if you occupy an area that I want to grind.
Your interests are in conflict with mine, and since this is a video game I can use ingame violence.
I will attack you.
If you dont fight back I will make the choice to bear the concequences.
If you do fight back, you better try to win or go back to the nearest village.
If you are sick of losing, join a guild and find safety in numbers. This wont be a pacifist game.
If you can't protect yourself solo, travel in a group. <--- this is healthy MMO behaviour.
if people gain corruption from every form of PvP then corruption is no longer a useful punishment and turns the game into PvE only.
L2 has proven this system works, and AoC will innovate on top of it.
Ultima Online (1997-2001 or so) had faction-based PVP that could occur anywhere, and then an innocent, criminal, murderer system. Killing an innocent allowed for them to report you as a murderer. They were allowed to fight back when attacked, and if you died to them, they could loot everything you were carrying.
A criminal was anything from a thief, someone who loots an innocent, someone who heals another criminal or murderer, etc. Attacking a criminal was fair game, anyone could attack a criminal. The timer for being a criminal was 2 minutes.
A murderer was someone who killed enough innocents that they could no longer visit towns, save one or two towns without guards. Dying as a murderer would cause stat loss. Becoming a murderer was a very serious choice for that reason, and it took a long time to decay.
This was a very robust system. There were lots of innocents, criminals, and murderers, and characters in the game were far from safe. I had 2200 murder counts on my PK. From the standpoint of killing innocents, I don’t like the idea that I can attack them, and to apply corruption they’re forced to just stand there and take it.
As someone who has done a lot of PKing, it seems to me like you’re opting to have less PVP threat when attacking a non-combatant.
Do you mind explaining UO's flagging system? I haven't played it so I have no idea how it's different than AoC's flagging system.
The point of the system is that open PvP is somewhat desired, and definitely not discouraged.
If there were a penalty for attacking another player, people would be more reluctant to do that. This is the effect penalties have.
Rather than penalizing players for attempting to initiate PvP, Intrepid are penalizing people for continuing PvP when the opponent is not keen (which could be the case for any number of reasons).
Once a player does have corruption, non-combatants are able to fight back without flagging, and indeed are able to attack the combatant player without flagging.
If you want to make the comparison to UO, you should look at non-combatant vs corrupt player, not vs combatant.
You can then view combatants as a group of people in the middle that have recently participated in consensual open PvP.
Maybe where we differ in our opinions is that I think attacking innocents and taking their items should have strong repercussions. I can admit that my view might be skewed by the fact that UO was full loot, and I haven’t reviewed the proposal for PVP looting in AoC.
Thanks for the explanation. So in UO, if another player attacks you first, and you defend yourself and kill them, then you would become a criminal? And then the guy who attacked you first could report it and make you a murderer? I mean, I think I understand the system. It doesn't sound that bad, except for that scenario.
In UO if you attacked a criminal, you don’t flag. You remain what you were previous to the attack. Same with attacking a murderer.
If you attacked an innocent, you flagged criminal. Anyone could attack you, and their flag didn’t change. If you killEd the innocent, you could get a murder count. If the innocent kills you, they can loot your inventory and you do not get a murder count.
After enough murder counts, you were semi-permanently red (corrupted) and could suffer stat loss.
If you attack a player and they dont fight back, you get a portion of the raw materials and certificates (look them up on the wiki), and that is it.
If they do fight back, you get half of the amount as the above.
There is no actual item loss to combatants or non-combatants, just harvested resources and certs.
Item loss only comes in to play when you have several kills worth of corruption.
As someone who has done a lot of PKing I don’t like that people will just stand there and die, just to give me corruption. They should get a chance to kill me, put me in stat loss, and take all my gear. That’s the real thrill.
While I am unsure, I think you may be missing the fact that if someone attacks you, and you fight back (and thus become a combatant), you suffer half the penalties if you die as you would have if you were killed as a non-combatant.
If attacked, most players are likely to flag as a combatant just to lower their death penalty, and are then in a position where they may as well at least try to fight back.
Corruption is likely to mostly be a result of a stronger force attacking a weaker force, or a player attacking someone that is pissed off with them (for any number of reasons).
Once the game is live long enough for people to understand the system, most players will fight back, as it is always to their benefit to do so.
And there will be times that you will win 1v2 or 1v3 and that will be the best feeling in your gaming days ever, and you better had the recorder on.
Here is the flagging system of L2 in action.
Steven has played organized in L2 for many years and I applaud him for using the best open world flagging system instead of wasting resources re-inventing the wheel.
Obviously improvements need to be made if we are to have ACTION COMBAT.
There is no flaw. It is designed to offer players freedom of choice, rather than handhold them.
I wrote more info here about what happens when you kill players that dont fight back
https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/44745/the-corruption-idea-prevents-random-killing-not-pvp-so-carebares-and-gangers-alike-chill-out#latest
In UO there was a sharp distinction between a combat focused character, and an artisan character. It was a skill based game and each character had to choose their skills. If you chose to be a fisherman on a character (5 characters per server) you were practically not a combat character.
This is a very similar system to the game that I grew up with. Slight differences. Nuance.
I think the core of my objection is the ability to fight back against naked aggression without the requirement that you’re flagging to be ganked. It still looks like an excellent system compared to most modern MMORPG’s.
If you are innocent and are attacked, is that truly arbitrary? Why force a decision between your silly pixels... and justice
I struggle with that idea, as a roleplayer.
The world we are in was abandoned eons ago, and unaccessable since then.
We are essentially the first people back in Verra for thousands of years, and the only people that are there are basically people that are volunteering to go through a portal that is absolutely a one way journey - which also means we had no real idea what to expect on the other side when we set out.
Based on that, there is no system of laws, nor are there people to maintain the peace - initially.
Now, as we progress nodes, we will develop cities and have guards and such. However, these are only in specific regions, and since there is still essentially no laws, they are not there to actually enforce law, but to protect people and property.
Once you are out of sight of these guards, you are literally in a lawless land, with no one to enforce laws even if they existed.
WIthout law, there is no concept of guilt or innocence.
This is why corruption is more a part of nature in Ashes (albeit corrupted nature), rather than actual crime points or some such that Archeage has. As there is no inherent sence of balance, it also isn't karma that games like BDO have.
Hopefully that helps.
I reject your claim that an absence of socially organized law forgoes the concept of innocence or guilt.
The very fact of corruption in the world proves differentiation between innocence and guilt.
Non-combatant, combatant, and corrupted are direct identifiers of this virtually manifested paradigm.
As such, all players in Verra are at all times innocent and guilty, as there is no system by which to make any distinction between the two.
I mean, this only applies if you insist on the concept of innocence being accounted for. If you understand that it isn't a concept the develoeprs have in mind with the game, then none of this matters.