A Proposed System to Fix the Easily Avoided Corruption System of Preventing Risk-Free Theft
In my mind, there are two purposes of the corruption system. First, is to discourage the griefing of low level players. This seems to be done somewhat well by the corruption system, a player killing a much lower leveled player will gain a significant amount of corruption, given what Steven has said in the past. But there are still potential ways to circumvent the corruption system that should be discussed.
But the second, is "Risk vs Reward". In the "Key Features" section of the AoC official website's front page, it labels a key feature of Ashes to be risk vs reward. That means, there are going to be risks in the world that you can take in order to get a large reward. Presumably, one of those would be the risk of gaining corruption in order to steal rare mats.
There is a place for non-consensual PvP in MMORPG's. If a guild has a rare mineral vein pop up within its node or its ZOI, there may be no reason to use a caravan to transport those mats to itself. This means the large bulk of natural, rare resources of that node will be transported by a mule, which will have approximately 10 times the amount of bag space that a player has. And depending on if rarer mats can stack in your inventory or not, and by judging the way the Alpha One handles dragon ingots the intention is that they can't, then having a mule filled with rare mats should be an excellent example of potentially gaining corruption in order to steal.
Which leads to how easy the currently planned system of corruption, as laid out by the wiki, is avoided. Upon a player's death, loot can be picked up by any player. Their own party member, the person who killed them, or a random. But corruption only goes onto the player who actually PKed the player. Lets now say that I want another guild to do the annoying task of building a gathering machine, or having someone mine the vein. And lets say this gatherer doesn't have any friends with them or paid bodyguards to help defend him against open world PvP for these mats. Then all that needs to happen, is that I give all my good gear to a friend, and have them lower another player's hp, and get the finishing blow myself. That way, I gain the corruption, and then my friend can pick up the mats, and trade them.
Corrupted players are supposed to not be able to trade while corrupt, so clearly the devs intention is that a corrupted player will have to work off that corruption, taking a risk, before benefitting from stolen mats. Currently, the only plan the devs have to combat my example is that you can't see another player's health bar directly. It will only give you a players percentage of total hp, not their actual hp number. In my opinion, that is not enough, and my example will be commonplace to steal rare mats without facing the intended consequences. And potentially, the toon landing the killing blow can be a low leveld alt. Oh, and if the gatherer tries to fight back against the low leveled toon, then they're flagged and can be immediately PK'd by the friend without consequence, also avoiding the corruption system. There needs to at least be proposed ideas to combat this before corruption is tested, to have alternate systems prepared.
I think I have thought of such a system regarding dropped loot from non-consensual PKing. Let's say that a gatherer gets ganked, and the zerg is attempting to steal rare mats from the victim and their mule. If a player is murdered in non-consensual PvP, the loot they dropped will become "blood stained" or "corruption stained." If "blood stained" mats are in a player's inventory, it will automatically flag that player for combat, and if that player is killed, all "blood stained" mats will drop and become lootable. Mats cease to be "blood stained" when one of the four following situations occur:
1) The mats are processed.
2) The victim, their guild, or their party regain these mats.
3) A random player picks up the mats and donates them to the local node government / their node government.
4) A bounty hunter picks up the mats and donates a portion of them to their military node.
Depending on if there are other rewards than dropped loot for bounty hunting, (4) can be changed to donating all of the loot to their military node's coffers.
The great benefit of this system is that it forces player to PvP if they're in the middle of stealing resources. It truly makes non-consensual PvP between similar leveled players for rare mats "risk vs reward". This also prevents the circumvention of the corruption system as it is currently proposed. I think it's at least worthwhile to discuss. In fact, if this system were to be implemented, the "non-immersive" portion of corruption penalties (murderers somehow not being able to trade items after killing someone) would go away. And there are a couple ways this could be tweaked. Maybe a bounty hunter has an ability that lets them smell the blood on the mats, displaying the thief on their map, so the thieves can be tracked down by bounty hunters just as a corrupted player would be. Maybe picking up blood stained mats adds a little bit of corruption score to your character. In my opinion, this system has plenty more options than the currently, again easily circumvented, proposed corruption system; when it comes to stealing mats at least.
Some potential objections and answers:
Q1) This further discourages PvP.
A1) Actually, it encourages it since players who pick up bloodstained mats will be flagged for PvP. What it DOES prevent is zerging a gatherer and getting away with it without any risk, the worst kind of non-consensual PvP.
Q2) Can't a patron guild of a military node also abuse this system by having their bounty hunters pick up the mats and purify them?
A2) To the extent they can send rare mats into their coffers yes, but those rare mats won't be able to be used for gear. AND, it will hurt that guild's reputation on the server if this is discovered, maybe other players can then work to take mayorship over the military node, and oust that guild's bounty hunters. At least that provides a system to prevent the zerg and hurt their guild more than the currently proposed system.
Q3) Will the game be able to track who was PK'd on those mats, in order for the purification to work? That's a lot of mat tracking for the game potentially.
A3) I'm not a programmer so I don't know. This would be the worst case scenario for my proposed system, BUT even then it has merits over the current system. You could just remove the victim purification part, and allow players with blood stained mats to be automatically flagged, and purified by donating the mats to the local node. And that will encourage PvP still, and provide further risks to a zerg stealing mats.
As a final note, the corruption system will be tested in Alpha Two surely, but we as a community should at least have discussions about it. That way we have solutions to potential problems that pop up during testing.
