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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.
Lvling via PvP and PvP quests
Ironhope
Member
Personally I love the fact this game's niche is PvP.
I can't wait for the open world PvP both while leveling and at max level.
And I'd actually love it if the game went further and provided questing infrastructure and incentives for PvPing while leveling.
Such as, having not only PvE quests but also PvP quests which either encourage you to take down other players or even demand that you do so.
For example, let's say the same quest path eventually leads you to choose bewteen two communities, each with different quests and quest rewards and reputation rewards.
Each community's quests put you on a path of conflict with the players who chose the other community and it's quests.
For example, the quest from Community 1 demands that you hunt animal X for fur.
Community 2 quests will demand that you taint the furs of animal X to screw Community 1.
Just quests in general that puth players in competition with one another, and groups against other groups.
In general I think you should be able to loot quest items from a player you defeated in pvp if you're on the same quest as him.
Or you could just have quests that require you to kill X players but that would be more boring... not as boring as ''go kill 8 boars'' but still.
But yeah, how would you guys feel about PvP quests being a thing and via them lvling via PvP being a thing?
Personally I'd love it, I mean, you're going to have plenty of open world pvp anyway so why not at least build some infrastructure for it and some extra rewards for it?
How would you design these systems if you want them in the first place?
I can't wait for the open world PvP both while leveling and at max level.
And I'd actually love it if the game went further and provided questing infrastructure and incentives for PvPing while leveling.
Such as, having not only PvE quests but also PvP quests which either encourage you to take down other players or even demand that you do so.
For example, let's say the same quest path eventually leads you to choose bewteen two communities, each with different quests and quest rewards and reputation rewards.
Each community's quests put you on a path of conflict with the players who chose the other community and it's quests.
For example, the quest from Community 1 demands that you hunt animal X for fur.
Community 2 quests will demand that you taint the furs of animal X to screw Community 1.
Just quests in general that puth players in competition with one another, and groups against other groups.
In general I think you should be able to loot quest items from a player you defeated in pvp if you're on the same quest as him.
Or you could just have quests that require you to kill X players but that would be more boring... not as boring as ''go kill 8 boars'' but still.
But yeah, how would you guys feel about PvP quests being a thing and via them lvling via PvP being a thing?
Personally I'd love it, I mean, you're going to have plenty of open world pvp anyway so why not at least build some infrastructure for it and some extra rewards for it?
How would you design these systems if you want them in the first place?
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Comments
I hope Intrepid sets up military nodes to have frequent events with and against each other. Both parties should have to gather in the node and are tasked with objectives that sort of have protagonistic and antagonistic nature.
The game modes could be anything… a cat mouse game to steal relics, PVX objectives where you have to get the most points and so on.
I dont think it should be a big source for xp though, id rather like to see guild or node orientated rewards.
One way of doing this could be making it a high reward and high risk path to leveling. Where it can potentially be the fastest means to level in the game, especially to highly skilled players, but carry the risk of falling behind safer leveling paths. So, while you may not be able to take down a strong opponent on your own, grouping up with like minded individuals can greatly improve not only your chances, but also your xp rates. Or perhaps you can get something akin to an xp booster as a reward for doing pvp quests that boost xp gain, which could be extremely useful for players who are already at max for leveling their gatherer and crafting skills.
Overall, letting players have the freedom to decide how they want to spend their leveling experience could make the generally tedious part of an MMO engaging and exciting, though ensuring that those other means of leveling are comparably viable is an important step for making players feel like they have that freedom.
Either that, or the things you have mentioned involve killing other players through the flagging system, which would be detrimental to your development due to corruption.
While its great to have ideas for a game, you have to ensure that your ideas for the game fit inside the design pillars that are already established.
The way it is now, you've basically said for the local pizza place to be better they should serve Chinese Food.
If you want to be 'the bad guy sometimes' then roll an orc, join a guild of jerks, name yourself Voldemort, ride a black horse or become corrupted and drop your gear. All of those are in-game mechanics already.
Well, in the ''questgiver community vs questgiver community'' example I gave the two people would be on the same quest in the same lvling zone so realistically they would be on the same level or in close range of it.
For the ''kill X players'' quest I'd just add ''X players in your level range'' to it. A problem I could see with ''kill X players'' quests is that the player's friends could just line up, afk while their bud kills them so he can gain free XP..... ye that could be a problem.
Ye fair enough, there would be fewer people leveling around by that time so it would be a less acessible system but still, I think it would be better for players to have this opportunity even if it never materializes rather than not have it at all.
I like how that sounds.
Forced....
... do you come into a niche pvp game and expect to level out there in the world without world pvp?
WoW Vanilla esentially did what I just suggested (but with different systems), sending players with conflicting interests in the same areas to encourage wpvp.... and people back then and in modern times (with the release of WoW classic) loved it.
I mean, that's what this kind of game is supposed to be, an adventure. Adventures are intrinsincly challenging.
But no, it wouldn't be forced. In the example I gave you can just not pick the PvP quest or you can just let the players of the competitor quest-giver community ruin the npc furts so you spend 10 times more time on the quest. I guess that would be an option too.
I guess you would just have to look for people who are flagged for PvP and ignore the hippies.
I mean, is wpvp between people of the same level (or close to) questing in the same area that serious of a ''griefing''?
Yes. You are basically removing the corruption system that the developers are implementing. My nine friends and I will ambush you as we level our characters. Whenever given the chance, people who like griefing will log onto the game after work and will PK whoever they can, which will be fun to them. You never have 1 on 1 fights in MMO games. People don't want fair fights. Age of Conan had open world PVP, and higher-level players went to level 1 zones and started killing new players so they couldn't level. I am forming a new guild, Guild of Bandits [griefers], our goal is to seek wealth and the freedom to live however we want. Join now. Don't worry. We are level 10, and you are level 10 so it's all good. Our alts are level 30. Maybe someday you can get to level 30 if we ever let you finish your quests.
The thing is, OP proposed adding PvP quests...So people doing this type of quests already know that PvP is the objective. People with these quests can have a tag or a marker on top of them so they can be identified in a crowd.
Lets say 2 players A and B have these quests but A bring his friends with him to help. Considering his friends might not have the quests qualifies them for corruption and if they do then its not even an issue.
Considering progression in AoC is highly PvP based, I dont see how this is even forced PvP or different from any other PvP stuff.
Lastly, Its a PvP quest.
The only issue I see with this is that friends can just kill each other to complete the quest, but there are ways around it like specifying that all the kills need to be different players and some level based restriction like +-3 to avoid griefing.
The open pvx environment is going to provide enough reward and conflict by itself, with the corruption system acting as guardrails. Yes, it will have to be calibrated in A2 and Beta, but I don’t think a quest system is going to work here.
I just don't see how it's possible with any of the planned features of Ashes. I can see them adding something to military nodes in the future perhaps, in an expansion. Like the battlegrounds we know from other MMORPGs, and not the battlegrounds we have in Ashes, which are something quite different.
There will be rival PvE quests that result in PvP combat.
It's just that PvP kills will not provide xp or rewards.
The xp will come from completing the PvE quest.
IF that were the case, then essentially we would have a quest involving PVP as the OP suggested, but it would be within the existing structure of the game as Crow3 mentioned. These would not involve corruption, since sieges, guild/node wars and caravan battles do not make a player corrupt.
If you spend a lot of time in most lucrative areas in the game you are probably going to be fighting constantly for the right to resources and mobs anyway, not even including actual pvp themed stuff.
How so with it being optional? You can pick the PvP quest up or leave it.
If you aren't feeling prepared for the PvP then leave it and go do the PvE exclusive quests.
Either way, if it was so easy for the other guy to get a PvP-questing group of 9 that means its going to be just as easy for you to match that.
So where's the imbalance and unilateral removal of anything?
I will agree however that zerging is a problem in any pvp mmo-rpg and I've never seen one single mmo-rpg handle it well enough, probably because that's how real life combat works too and when you're trying to emulate real life combat in the cyberspace it's going to naturally suffer from the same intrinsic unpleasantries as the real life thing it's copying.
I disagree. Looking at Classic WoW, BDO, etc I think it's a very common form of wpvp.
1. The examples I've given (community 1 vs community 2) naturally put players of the same lvl range in conflict.
2. The ''kill X players'' simpler quests should only be refering to people in your own level range (as I said in one of the replies to another user's comment)
So these PvP quests just won't work if you're higher level. There will be no point to them and I would agree with corruption being applied to higher levels killing those flagged for pvpquests just as if they hadn't been flagged for pvp in the first place.
So actaully yeah, that's a good idea. Glad something came out of this discussion.
Good that's what I was suggesting.
Yeah but I suggested quests that will award xp and/or other rewards for killing x players in your level range.
I honestly ain't particularly excited with these and like the ''PvE quests creating conflicting interests between players resulting in PvP'' PvP quests a lot more.
If what you want is a niche PvP game instead of a PvX game - there are niche PvP games you can play.
I would pick up the PVP quest giving me a license to kill people. I would not turn in the quest for the experience but would keep it open to give me a reason to "finish the quest" [wink, wink] and keep killing players without having to deal with the corruption system. As a game designer you have to think about how players are going to try to bend your rules when implementing system. There is no way that they could make it level bond. Either the person is an enemy, or they are not an enemy. That is why NPC quests work better where you kill an NPC, or you protect a resource, or you escort someone.
You must have played on the nice WoW servers, because there were no fair fights in Vanilla WoW. There was the situation where you were trying to do a quest and as soon as you got to 20% health from killing the add I came and killed you with my rogue before you could get your health to 100%. There was the situation where my 5 friends hung out in Stranglethorne Vale because it was an area where level 30 players needed to go to get experience and was a wonderful zone to grief people. I played on a PVP server back then where you couldn't turn your flag off so if you joined that server you chose to PVP. That was before Blizzard changed things to make PVP optional. Having a quest where you steal something from a node might be interesting, but having PVP for the purpose of going from level 1 to 50 will not work.
One of my biggest fears is that PvP in many of its forms/modes is just going to be a giant zerg-fest. I hope that they take time to consider a world design that allows for people to PvP solo and in small groups -- some anti-zerg mechanics, small group objectives (like the caravan), and map design that provides places for all styles of play. 250v250 or 500v500 can be nice, but it's also nice to open-world roam and find those memorable solo and small group fights.
The idea of flag based PvP in Ashes is that you have a specific reason to kill a specific player. That reason could be in game (they have or are about to get a thing you want), or more personal (you just don't like them or their guild).
What Ashes isn't, even if some people would like to see it, is a game where you go out looking for some random person to kill because you have a bit of text in your quest journal that tells you to.
The game is introducing specific PvP systems (caravans, wars, sieges, arena, battlegrounds) specifically to retain the meaning of open world PvP - to make it so people have no excuse to just kill people for no reason, even if they are able.
Leveling through pvp can be easily exploited for quick and effortless XP, which in order to prevent would require a fair bit of coding (waste of human resources).
Leveling through pvp will change the dynamic of conflict of interests found IN THE ENTIRE GAME, making it weak sauce.
It will never happen.
This is probably the best way to implement a PVP quest system, having there be objectives can be a fantastic way of not only introducing greater variety into a player's routine, as it can open up different ways of playing the game entirely, such as a rogue stealing items from a caravan while the escort is duking it out with bandits, as one such example.
Though what I found really interesting was George_Black's stance.
Introducing incentives for PVP would indeed lessen the prominence of other aspects of the game. But, so would having PvE be too rewarding, or having node development be vastly more rewarding than exploration. Balancing different elements of the game so that players don't feel pigeonholed into only engaging with specific aspects of the game in order to keep up or catch up can be quite challenging. Yet, at the same time, I don't feel like gating certain ways of play until they hit max is a good way of going about things.
Players should have considerable flexibility as to how they approach the game, especially in a sandbox MMORPG, and if they want to join their bandit friends and raid some caravans, or join epic battles to decide the fate of the continent straight out of the gate, I see no reason why they should have to wade through content they aren't interested in so that they can get to the "good part".
Would it change players' motives? Absolutely. But having various kinds of people interested in a wide variety of things brings forth a far more immersive and interesting world. Letting players decide their own path instead of following the one laid out before them, even if it does mean making a few enemies, should be encouraged.
Though, your concerns about it becoming an ez xp farm are perfectly valid, which is why pvp needs to be balanced against other ways of play. By carefully designing how the pvp reward system is structured, we can prevent this behavior before it even begins. For example, having it tied to objectives tied to objectives instead of kills could make it much more difficult to exploit. Will it be possible to catch every form of xp farm that blows other options out of the water in terms of sheer gains? Probably not. But, we should still be on the lookout for them in every aspect of the game, not just pvp.
TL;DR Having pvp be more objective focused sounds like a good idea, and I feel like leveling through pvp should be just as viable as, say, gathering or exploring. This would allow players greater flexibility and freedom in how they approach the game.
While adding these quests won't make it so players can just PvP, the point he made stands. PvP is not for creating progression in Ashes. It is about redistribution of progression that has already been created.
You aren't supposed to go in to this game with a PvP mindset.
I think you misunderstood my suggestion Boane (or maybe my coherence in the english language failed me once more and I made myself misunderstood).
My first suggestion was making quests that create conflicting interests between players, so conflict will happen naturally.
Yes I also did suggest ''kill X players (within your level range)'' but I did not say/mean that while on the quest the corruption system will no longer apply to you.
Why not?
No I played exclusively on high pop pvp servers and was a total savage myself.
Yes there are plenty (especially in farming areas) but that's irrelevant because yeah many fights are not ''fair'' and that's just an intrinsic aspect of combat both in real life and in the cyber life.