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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Idea For Bounty Hunter System/ Anti Lowbie Ganking
Spirit101
Member
* When a player is killed by somebody, they have an option to donate a small amount of coin into a bounty that pools on the enemy player that killed them.
* If an enemy player is 'x' amount of levels above an enemy player they gank, they receive a scale based amount of 'outlaw' xp that continues to build over time. Once they hit a maximum threshold they receive a 'criminal' debuff that can be activated by enemy bounty hunters that have killed you. This debuff puts you in a prison of some kind, or maybe like.... an area that forces prison labor which could be farming of some sort. I mean obviously this idea could be expanded upon. I like the possibility of going further and adding a guard system but that could be very niche.
* Maybe for a bounty hunter to achieve this, they have to use a special skill that traps the enemy 'outlaw' as opposed to
killing them? Again, this is all just off the top of my head as I am typing and I will use this as a launching pad to
improve upon as I come up with more ideas.
* *This could be a really attractive and intense system designed around max risk/reward for those who take
pleasure in ganking lowbies.
* Bounty hunters could earn fame with a system designed around not dying after accepting a bounty quest that also factors in a tiered time limits for more rewards. This could incentivize very skilled pvpers to basically act as arbiters of justice against those who are prone to do annoying 'lowbie' pking. Other rewards could include specialized items that revolve around tracking/faster teleporting etc. (just another random spitball that could be added upon)
* When a player continues to player kill past a certain threshold, their name appears on a board that registered bounty hunters can come to and accept as bounty hunter quests. This could go many different ways and could tie into player driven pools of gold that they put towards killing the enemy that killed them.
**For a system like this to take off I'd like to see special rewards for all involved, except for maybe the players who spend an inordinate amount of time killing lowbies. Could be in the form of purely aesthetic based gear, titles, mounts, etc..
Anyways, I plan on continuing to brainstorm about cool systems we gamers have probably dreamed about ever since mmos were a thing but have yet to actually get. I am crossing my fingers this game delivers a truly next gen experience in this way.
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Comments
* Outlaws or 'criminals' that have been caught are forced to mine or farm a specific amount of materials that directly go towards settlements or something important. They can't actually leave this prison area until the farming has been completed.
** I absolutely understand a system like this might sound insanely punishing, but as a hardcore wpvper I feel like it would be a refreshing and unique way of dealing with and maybe even weeding out those players that kind of give wpvp a bad name.
Players are not being placed in a prison. Probably because that sucks to play. However, the corruption penalties are quite extensive and can only be worked off by either grinding experience or dying. However, removing corruption by dying results in a death penalty that includes most of the penalties of corruption. It is already quite punishing.
This is my issue with bounty hunting. it's being used for a single purpose, corrupt players, and everyone's guessing that with the corrent detriments there will not be very many corrupted players. So this means bounty hunting will either be garbage and never really used often or they need to figure out some other activities for bounty hunters to preform, such as dealing with a player bandit system or criminal npcs.
I mean it doesn't have to be drugs they are smuggling. How about dangerous corrupted flora and fauna? no trouble there.
Also, my point was that there won't be enough corrupted players to actually facilitate the usage of bounty hunters on a regular basis. Sure, that's the goal. But that leave bounty hunting as an unused feature that currently does nothing else. I think its beneficial if they expand what it does rather than let it stagnate as an anti-asshole patrol.
I would agree it'd be more fun/engaging to have things like this.
I do wonder what IS knows that we don't though because they have fleshed out the bounty hunter system wayyy more than I would have expected or thought necessary, as if they too expect a decent number of corrupted players. Or maybe there are PvE things for bounty hunters to do too? Maybe the amount of raw gathered materials players drop will be more valuable than we expect?
I guess I just don't understand what incentive there is to kill multiple players in short succession to accrue corruption. If the 'reward' that entices players to do so is raw materials, then wouldn't that player want to not lose the materials they just picked up (not to mention their gear)? So then they are not likely to go on a spree that may cost them their material goods if they did the killing for material goods in the first place. And crimes of passion are unlikely to be a spree too, usually people's ire is directed at one individual or otherwise they could just declare a war of some sort. Bear in mind that this all assumes the ability & skill to go on a spree in the first place which I suspect will result in people doing such things in groups. The only other way I can see lots of corrupted players is if the item economy is very fluid and it's trivial for a max lvl character to get decent crafted gear so it doesn't feel as much of a risk to lose the gear but that would also have problems with regards to bounty hunting.
The greatest number of corrupted players in my mind will be explicit or implicit RPers who want to play out some outlaw fantasy, which they either can't for too long because of the heavy penalties and loss of gear, or they won't do effectively because they will be using shit gear they don't mind losing. The other large source of corrupted players I suspect will be collusion to get friends bounty hunting progress.
Again though, given how much effort Steven seems to want to put into the bounty hunting system (with a progression system and chief bounty hunters for nodes etc) I feel like we're missing some critical information, which would be even more reason to just wait and see how this pans out. I do worry that in alpha and beta, where progress isn't permanent and things will get reset, it may seem like lots of people are willing to just go on sprees and lose their stuff who wouldn't do it if their progress wasn't going to get wiped. To clarify, I think the corruption system and the idea of bounty hunters is really really good. I just can't justify in my head the depth and scale of what is planned for the bounty hunters...
Edit: In my mind, for the bounty hunting system to be in depth and good, the game needs to promote getting corrupted to have enough supply of corrupted players for bounty hunters to engage with. However, corruption is meant to be a deterrent, so... you see the dilemma? You either try to 'balance' the risk:reward for gaining corruption and reduce how much of a deterrent it is, or you commit to making it a deterrent and have the bounty hunting system be an unreliable source of (sparse) content to engage with.
See I completely understand your issue with adding more complexity to bounty hunting, the prime issue being that it might need to incentivize corrupted play, which is not my intention and the reason why I was attempting to suggest alternative activities that a bounty hunter could do to progress and play as a bounty hunter without needing the game to be full of corrupted players.
I've suggested things in the past like, a bandit flagging system, where you flag up as a bandit and go around attacking players that are within 5-10 levels of you for their loot. When you defeat the enemy player you do not kill them, they just get "knocked out" for like 30 seconds and you get some of their materials as contraband, and now you are flagged for hunting via bounty hunter until you get rid of said contraband at a safe house or what have you.
I don't think this is too complicated, and perhaps it would be annoying to have this happen to you, but a player attacked by a bandit can turn around and kill the bandit as if they were just another corrupted player but without the progressive death penalties such as permanent gear loss. In addition the attacked players do not get respawned somewhere else or suffer any of the death penalties save the material loss.
If that isn't to your liking, there could be npc quest lines and dailies for the bounty hunters to tackle, Illegal contraband as suggested before that bounty hunters can track down and subdue the offending party. There's no need for anything crazy as a punishment for this, have the criminal be knocked out for a minute, the contraband is taken back as the bounty hunter's trophy and they get paid. Could this get gamed? Sure, but steven's already acknowledged that this always happens, and the team just needs to do what they can to reduce such a behavior.
Anyway, My ultimate hope here is that bounty hunting is something that can be invested in, kind of like a job, and that you can just decide to go out and actively do. I want that instead of it being a random chance that you have your bounty hunter flag on and you see the map light up for a corrupt player, travel all the way there just to find out 40 other people were doing the same thing and the corrupt guy is already dead. From your own words too, they seem to be investing a lot into the bounty system and that's why I have hope for it to be expansive in the first place.
Well yes, It's basically a cross-over of the caravan system and the bounty hunting system. They could put some real grease in the gears of the "bandit" progression system for caravans and broaden it out for general use. If they can make a cops and robber's esque addition to bounty hunting outside of the corruption system I believe it will be a big hit.
Is this about solo bounty hunters? Wouldn't a bounty hunter just join a guild and participate in that Guild's wars or protecting their caravans or guarding their gatherers as well?
Or is it that what you're talking about is 'a way for a bounty hunter to never need to do anything else other than find corrupted players or similar targets to bring down'?
Even from a roleplay perspective, hunting your guild's enemies (which shouldn't cause Corruption if you're at war) would be very similar, and your guild could just 'pay you the bounty'. Depending on how hard it is to change guild, you could bounce around doing this, using your 'solo assassination skills' if alone, or group stuff if in a small group, and use clues to find the enemy guild people. Is it that this is undesirable, or 'not enough'?
I think I'm just excited about all the possibilities coming from what in my opinion is a complete failure and monstrosity; New World. That is neither here nor there.
I was able to skim some of the major points and concerns and I definitely feel like striking a balance between bloat, complication, and fun, will be a challenge indeed.
I guess I am simply incredibly enthusiastic about a combination of systems designed around a quality 'bandit/bounty hunter/criminal' ruleset. Something that to this day from my understanding as a long time mmo player, has never really been achieved.
That just sounds like regular open world PvP with extra steps, or rather it's an attempt to replace the current open world PvP system? It just waters down world PvP and deters fair conflict. You should already be able to kill players within 5-10 levels of you for loot. Adding conditions to that makes the game less open world PvP. Corruption is meant to be a consequence of engaging with unwanted/unfair PvP and bounty hunters are meant to interact with that. If bounty hunters just interact with regular world PvP actors/behavior, then I don't get the point of having them at all.
Sure, but why? Why couldn't those just be regular quests not tied to the bounty hunter system. We shouldn't have to bend over backwards to accommodate a system if it does not fit or does not add much to the game. All it does, in my opinion, is further enable the cops vs robbers fantasy but I mean, that can already be supported without an expansive and in depth bounty hunter system. Again, I feel like there is critical information I'm missing but as things stand, I think they would do well to just keep it simple to avoid wasting development resources and add onto it as is appropriate from testing.
There are quests involved with Bounty Hunters - I don't think all of those are associated with killing Corrupted player characters.
We'll have to learn what else is involved.
Based on my experience back in early L2, later on there will be higher level players - with nice gear - who decide to leave the game and go out in a blaze of PKing. The levelled up bounty hunters who get these guys will end up with a valuable treasure of good gear, though they will be harder to hunt and kill and certainly won't be around very often.
Exactly and I hope they flesh out the concept into a fun/worthwhile endeavor that has more depth than just collecting a few coins or what have you.