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
As discussed in the other replies. If this were implemented, it would not make PKing widespread at all. PKing would still lead to losing items and XP and you would basically get nothing in return as long as you aren't superman with 5 lucky charms hanging around.
I don't know man, the idea that I could have enough beef with someone in a game of 10.000 players to lose items and my precious time is pretty ludicrous to me and I've been playing MMOs for quite a while.
Yea I like that. That's why I want there to be a far off reward for surviving a meat grinder 10 times over.
So the corruption system is an attempt, hopefully successful, to curtail this type of game destructive behavior.
30s video. The red player gets away with it.
Early on, as a newbie, I recall getting excited after invited to a "high level group" and taken into dungeons that I could not explore solo. However, whilst knowing I would drop gear on death, I never contemplated a pickup group would have key players that were organising groups, taking new players into content that was above their level only to let them die and pickup their gear that dropped.
Early on there were random pk`ers that killed you for gear.
Soon after there were organised pk`ers that went on regular rampages, looting the gear of all those that were killed.
As the player levels increased and the stakes also increased, the pk`ing toned down.
Later Pk`ing became far more political and strategic.
The bounty hunters will be quest bound to military zones, so perhaps the military zones may have more order.
But to kill a pk`er is actually quite hard, whist their risk increases and not much down side for self to attack, in late game mostly players adept at pvp opt to go pk.. so its not so easy.
There are still gains in AoC for pk`ing which was much reduced in L2.. so I see incentive with risk that there will be a portion of the community willing to take!
I 100% agree and I hope you can agree that anything short of instantly banning offending parties is completely ineffective. So considering what I'm proposing is essentially bait, what's the problem in adding it? The only beneficiary would be people who like adversity like myself. Non-combatants would not even notice.
There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the point of this system. The goal of the corruption system is not to create some kind of emerging gameplay dynamic to survive the slaughtering of people minding their own business. It is to systematically discourage player behavior that is harmful to a online game's player base. That means there is no reward structure for participating in the system, only punishment.
I just don't get it. You lose stats, you lose XP, you lose items and you gain some herbs and ore, which you could acquire much faster if you simply go around picking plants.
But somebody that dislikes you just got floored by you. Simply happiness. No need for material reward. Dont you get it?
Corruption is to deter that behavior, as @Jirue stated very well.
Well then it's just a fundamental disagreement. Imo this would literally change nothing, not even a fraction of a fraction of the playerbase would be affected. I enjoy games that sacrifice 7 hours of work in a 15-minute confrontation with players but I acknowledge that that's not at all a common idea. Since this changes nothing, I don't see the point in just upholding the absolute ideal.
But since this does not affect the deterring force, what exactly is the issue?
Again, since this is completely independent of the consequences and my proposition does not change anything, there is no utilitarian reason not to do it. Of course, since it's not something people want, there is no reason to add it but that is besides the point.
To give some new ones.
We had a clan party one time and had a random player join to complete the group. That invited player was counting drops. The system at the time was item drop pickup was in sequence to players in the group and gold shared. That player was counting drops and would throw out useless arrows or equivalent on to the ground so others would pickup on their turn and increase his likelihood of picking up the valuable item. We asked him to cease, he continued, so we ejected him from the group and pk`d him.
Our clan held a grudge against a "trusted" player that cleaned out the clan warehouse and left clan.. That player never returned the gear and was on a permanent KOS.
A known town scammer, had a great scam, was also KOS.
Back to why pk for gathered items, imagine you are on your return journey from out exploring / pve and your drops look a little poor. Perhaps there is a lone gatherer that you saw on your way out that is still there on your way back. Perhaps they take an opportune pk for a portion of the loot and burn off their karma for 5min and return..
You are making a mistake in the sequence of events.
You don't become corrupt by attacking a green player. You become corrupt by killing one. Attacking first doesn't automatically make you corrupt and then they can fight back with no consequence.
Here is a scenario:
You are green. I am green. You attack me, you turn purple. At this point I have 2 options:
If you see someone not fighting back, you can stop. If you're still a dick, or really want a small part of their materials, you then become corrupt.
Once you're corrupt, then yes, you are free game. However you can hide for a bit and grind to work off your corruption and then kill someone else. However there will be a sort of hidden multiplier, that makes it so the next bit of corruption earned will increase based on your previous PK tally (of the non consensual kind).
On the other hand, even if stat dampened, if you, a max level player, PK a low level one, you can still probably take them and kill them. Just a matter of keeping those killing to a minimum lest you actually get taken out by a lvl 5 players and you drop you weapons or armor.
ALSO
Bounty hunters.
Bounty hunters can track you on the map and come kill you. However they are always flagged as combatants to you. So you don't have the stats dampening affecting you in that scenario.
So long as you stay hidden, only Bounty Hunters can find you. And you can fight them on equal level (although they might still be higher level than you).
The issue is that the system cannot have an reward without creating a incentive. Having an incentive completely undermines the goal of the system to act as a deterrent to undesired behavior. If you reward someone for using the system, then the system is no longer a deterrent. It is a risk-reward game. And that is not the design goal of the system.
The OP joined the Forums a few hours ago....
We could just wait for him to catch up on all the reading from the past 4 years rather than rehashing the same stuff we've said every month since the launch of the forums.
I believe in that case, the burden of responsibility falls upon him to read up before creating a thread. If he had some doubts on some points, then a thread is more than welcome
This but one part was missing. The system is GRANTING you the freedom to make a risky choice, to attack those that you deem worthy of your wrath or greed. It's literally there to let the ragelords/griefers make a decision and rack up dumbo points to be hunted down by players engaging in the consensual form of pvp.
You are not forced to be corrupted, you are not forced to fight back, and you are not forced to attack others. These are all choices you must take into consideration, figure out which one you prefer, and deal with the consequences of that choice.
The resources dropped by the player killed, the satisfaction of giving him an exp defict and possible his farming spot.
There, those are the benefits for corrupted players, all the rest is well deserving punishment of this risk vs reward system.
Aren't we all sinners?
True. I probably should have emphasized the fact that it's a deterrent of bad behavior that doesn't completely undermine the capabilities of Open World PvP. It still allows players the ability to go ape while also limiting the damage they can do overall by using the player base as a policing force. It's honestly a brilliant way to handle Open World PvP. Props to original designer(s).
“I just found out about the game! I’m eager to play, but... Corruption...PvE server...DPS meter...!!!”
However, there are some things that I believe the OP was unaware of when starting this thread.
The first is that you only gain corruption by killing players that don't fight back, this seems to have been corrected.
The second thing I don't think they are aware of is that corrupt players don't suffer stat penalties when fighting bounty hunters. While this does leave the obvious near-exploit of players using a bounty hunter to point them towards corrupt players, this is also an easy situation to resolve if it turns out that players do this.
The third thing I don't think the OP understands is that the range of corrupt player tracking for bounty hunters is quite limited. We don't know how limited, but we know it will be limited. This means the smart corrupt player will simply move away from areas where a bounty hunter is likely to be, and no one will be able to find them. Since the game world will indeed be large, there will be places that players can go to grind off experience that are out of the way.
The way the system works is that your first kill to gain corruption is a major step. Once you are corrupt, it is kind of out of your hands as to other players attacking you freely. You have the choice to let them kill you so you have some corruption removed (all of it, if you only have a few kills).
However, since many players that would gain corruption aren't the type of people to stand still and let others kill them, that first step in to corruption is risking a snowball effect from happening. Other players can come up to you and attack you, and you may well be able to kill them easily for a while - but this will mean the corruption piles on, and you are left with a debilitating penalty when your original intent was to only kill one player.
Basically, the corruption system adds system-based weight to the decisions all players make in relation to PvP, and this is a good thing.
I think most players have some aspect of the corruption system they would change if they could. However, the core of the system - including the fact that corruption is a penalty and should not be rewarded at all - is a very solid system core.
That's the whole point. There shouldn't be any benefit to PKing. If you want to enter combat, then do it in a meaningful way, there will be plenty of chances too! But going around and attacking players just so you can have the satisfaction of killing them is the whole point of this system. Do what you want, Intrepid won't stop you... but the other players will. That is the core design of Ashes and shouldn't be touched unless you want to deal with more griefers than players.
If Intrepid added a system in place that rewards PKing, you have effectively killed (pun fully intended) the whole social structure of the game, thus turning it into another solo RPG with grouped dungeons like every other MMO. Here is an example of what a reward system for PKing would look like.
Player A and B run into each other in the wild. Both players want to explore a new dungeon in the area to locate a hidden room. Both players team up and go into the dungeon. They find the room and suddenly Player B leaves the party and backstabs Player A, taking all the loot for themselves and some extra items off Player A corpse for good measure. Player B has no consequence for doing this and has the right to do it under a pro-PK system and thus is able to leave the dungeon and disappear before Player A can track them down or ask for help.
In what world would any rational player want to risk something like that? To spend over an hour methodically clearing a dungeon, buying the supplies needed for that type of adventure, just to be backstabbed and looted? The answer is not a single player would put up with it and so we go back to "The New-Old Ways" of an MMO where you either run everything you can solo, or keep inside a small group of guildmates that can be trusted while avoiding every other player like its an episode of The Walking Dead.
As it stands, the reward for PKing is being able to loot certain crafting materials off a player. Your risk is being hunted down as the scummy gamer you've now become and losing a lot more than your crafting materials. We don't negotiate with PKers.
And no, no rewards for corrupted players.
You want PvP? There are duels, battlegrounds, arenas, caravans, node sieges, castle sieges and guild wars. There you go. They exist outside of the corruption system.
The only reason to actually PK outside of this is bc you are a d*ck.
The comparison is this: you can either fight someone in a proper, organized fight where both players want to fight (boxing) or you can do to the local pub and start a fight (a felony).
You wanna feel like big balls pvp player? You have 7 systems in the game for exactly that. Do that. Leave the non-combatants alone
1. Say I'm in a pickup group doing world content and 1 of the group members goes full psycho and just murders someone. Will I also become corrupt?
2. Say someone is just generally being a dick and griefing me and I attack him to try to start consensual pvp but then he uses some method to commit suicide? Will I become corrupt in this scenario? This is a really important one because I could see intentional suiciding to force players into corruption being abused in a number of ways.
1. No, being in a group with a player who goes corrupt will not corrupt you.
2. If by 'griefing you' you mean they attack you and go purple, then you fighting back will make you both purple and with winner of that fight will not be corrupt. If he is badmouthing you or killing your mobs or doing something besides attacking you, if you hit him and kill him without him hitting you back, you will become corrupt (red). So self control is necessary.
We will have to wait and watch out for tricks people are bound to play on the system. For example, in Lineage 2 I played a healer. If I ever healed a purple player, I would become purple and could be killed without the killer becoming red. So, if a stranger asked for a heal, I could start casting and he could slap me, turning himself purple. When the heal landed, I would turn purple and he could kill me. So, whenever a stranger asked me to heal him, I would ask them to sit, I stepped away a tad, then healed them. If they tried to stand during the heal, I would stop the casting and warn all my guildmates to watch out for this person.
Yeah, I kept a notebook of names of untrustworthy players back then. Yeah, I have already started a notebook like that for AoC, based on board comments...mostly lists of great people to look up.