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.
When is it Rational to go Corrupt? Are there any Loopholes to Player Corruption?
Goalid
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
In this deep dive into the corruption system, I attempt to give a model of behavior for the decision to become corrupt. This model won't be perfect since people aren't purely rational beings and there are factors that we find out experimentally that we could never expect theoretically. Then, I go over another model for a loophole in the corruption system that has been often discussed in the past, to see if the worries are justified. No matter the conclusions here, it is worthwhile to see how the corruption system plays out in alpha 2, before deciding it needs any changes.
What is the point of corruption in Ashes of Creation? Is it to prevent all unwanted PvP as some seem to believe? No, it has three express purposes:
1) To prevent players who mindlessly kill and grief other players for no express purpose other than their own enjoyment. This applies especially to protecting lower leveled players from higher leveled players.
2) To add risk, and therefore meaning, to PKing in Ashes of Creation. It is not meant to prevent all unwanted open world PvP in Ashes, as a toggle would serve that purpose far better than corruption would. It isn't even meant as a pure punishment. From Steven in 2017: "It's not punishment. It's risk. Reward without risk is meaningless." https://ashesofcreation.wiki/images/thumb/e/e7/corruption2.jpg/350px-corruption2.jpg
3) To propel the bounty hunter system, one of the main perks of a military node. This is an odd thing to consider, but the bounty hunter system is pointless without corrupt players and needs a healthy population of corrupt players to stay relevant.
So, when analyzing the corruption system we have to have these three design goals in mind and see if the current mechanic achieves these goals. Let's consider a simple situation. You are attacking an unflagged person, and are certain that just one more attack will kill him. Should you kill that player and go corrupt? Let's list the most essential benefits and risks.
One benefit is the items that the PKer will be able to loot from their victim, and we can assign a value to whatever our PKer expects that to be. Often when talking about corruption, people have stated that nobody is going to kill other players for some iron ore they have on them. This is true, but remember that the gathering and crafting systems in Ashes are based on Star Wars Galaxies. In Star Wars Galaxies, there were different qualities of materials, and they would spawn randomly. So, the price of a high-quality material gathered in just an hour could be worth many times the normal gathering amount.
The other benefit is the psychological value generated from going corrupt. Some people like going red in games with karma systems. It's a cool aesthetic and it adds a challenge to the game. Can you survive while being chased by others? There is also just the simple joy of killing someone in a MMO and ruining their day.
The costs for corrupt players are as follows:
- Respawn at random spawn points instead of the closest spawn point.
- A chance to drop gear upon death while corrupt
- Stat dampening that reduces your ability to PvP
- Your location is given out to bounty hunters
- Incapable of player to player trading
- Suffer four times the player death penalties a non-combatant would, which include:
- Higher chance to drop materials
- Stat dampening from experience debt
- Durability loss
- Lower gear proficiency
- Reduced drop rates from mobs from experience debt
Consider the items a PKer may drop if he is killed while corrupt. Corrupt players drop 4x the number of materials and processed goods a non-flagged player would normally drop, so essentially say goodbye to whatever mats and processed goods you have on you. Corrupt players will also have a chance to drop their equipped gear. There is the chance there will be different levels of corruption, and only at higher levels of corruption will you have the chance to drop gear. But for the sake of our analysis, we'll just assume you have a 25% chance of dropping a random gear piece if you die under any corruption.
Next, we have the opportunity cost of having to grind off corruption and the potential experience debt. The opportunity cost is the next best activity a person would do if he were not doing the current activity. If you're stuck grinding off experience debt for an hour, you weren't able to spend that hour mining, or playing in the arena, or whatever a player would have done with that time if he hadn't died while corrupt. This opportunity cost will be considered under both the amount of time it takes to work off corruption, as well as the amount of time it takes to work off the extra player death penalties if one were to die corrupt. It also seems that one will not be able to gain much while grinding off this experience debt, "Another point, experience debt can significantly reduce your drop rate for monsters. The more debt you own the greater the drop in % for loot tables. These modifiers are applied in a divisible manner for parties." https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/comment/233161/#Comment_233161
For our analysis, we'll consider grinding off experience debt to provide no gold income.
We don't know if corruption will work as a tiered system or a spectrum. If I die after working off 90% of my corruption from 1 PK, do I still maintain the full corruption penalty of 4x the amount a non-flagged player would? Or do I only get 10% of that corruption penalty since I worked off 90% of the corruption? If the latter, the expected cost of going corrupt will go down, but we'll assume it's the former.
Bounty hunters are looking to kill corrupt players for their benefit, whether that be some form of honor points system or the materials/gear the corrupt player has on them. When going corrupt, each player has to consider the risk of dying to a bounty hunter / non-friendly player.
Durability loss damages the gear you have equipped. If your gear breaks, it will require considerably more materials to repair it than if you were to maintain your gear. The repair system is not just a gold sink, but a material sink, and we don't know how close in quality materials have to be to repair gear. If my Orichalcum sword has 100% quality orichalcum ore, do I need 100% quality ore to repair it, or less? 90%? Just any orichalcum ore? We don't know. We'll just assume the value of materials to repair an item is 1/4th the cost it took to create the item. Why so low? Let's say you get a full set of BiS gear, and it took you 500 hours to get all the materials to craft it. We are saying it'll take you 125 hours to fully repair your gear, I think that's already pretty harsh. We'll have to see how harsh the item durability cost is in Ashes of Creation, but I believe Intrepid isn't trying to make us throw our keyboards across the room every time we die in our best gear. Fingers crossed. There's also however a concern, that to evade this all a corrupt player would have to do is switch the gear they are wearing after they go corrupt, since gear in your inventory won't take a hit from durability loss.
Putting this all together we get an expected value equation for the decision to go corrupt:
E(v) = (W*π+P) - (L*(1-π)*g + D*d*(1-π) + C*π + X*(1-π))
E(v) is expected value
W is the loot value a PKer expects to gain
P is the psychological value of going corrupt
L is the value of the items you may lose upon death
g is the percentage chance of dropping a gear piece while corrupt
C is the opportunity cost of grinding off corruption
D is the value of materials it takes to fully repair your gear
d is the % durability loss your items take upon death while corrupt
X is the opportunity cost of grinding off experience debt
π is our chance of total survival while we work off all our corruption
1-π represents our chance of dying while corrupt
Let's use our equation to look at an example now.
You are a master herbalist, and it is currently winter. Normally you would be making a killing off gathering rare herbs, but during winter you make only 500 gold per hour gathering and have nothing else you'd currently rather do. You know that mining is still quite profitable during winter, with master miners having the chance to get high-quality ore. And you know that a rare ore vein has finally spawned in the local mine. You believe that this ore is currently worth 6,000 gold for an hour's worth of mined materials by a master miner. You then see that a player you know is a master miner, is exiting the said mine. You are on the same level. You decide to attack this player, but they refuse to fight back, baiting you to kill them and go corrupt. You also do not have your best gear set on you. It's silly in a game with such high item durability costs to use it outside of raids, wars, world bosses, caravans, and generally the highest content. The gear you are wearing has the value of 2,000 gold a gear slot, with 10 gear slots. You have a 25% chance to drop one gear piece if you die. You don't have any other materials or processed goods on you. The time to work off corruption for one PK will take 15 minutes, and the time to work off experience debt if you die while corrupt is an hour. Durability loss for a non-combatant is 3% per death, so for you, it is 12% if you die corrupt. And the value of materials it takes to fully repair an item is 1/10 the value of the item. Assume that your chance of getting caught is 30%, as you're an assassin and quite capable of escaping bounty hunters. You're not the biggest fan of going corrupt, but find it somewhat enjoyable, valuing the experience at 100 gold. A non-flagged player who dies drops half of their materials. Do you kill the miner and go corrupt?
Let's check. E(v) = (3,000*0.7 + 100) - (2,000*0.3*0.25) + (5,000*0.3*0.12) + (125*0.7) + (500*0.3)
E(v) = (2,100+100) - (150+180+87.5+150) = 1632.5 gold
You will make a large economic profit by killing the miner and going corrupt in this case. Now, if we were to imagine that the miner was a lower leveled player and gave double the amount of corruption, then the opportunity cost to work off the corruption would rise, which is important, but also the chance of escape would go down, dramatically lowering the chance of keeping your stolen materials, and increasing the chance of you losing a gear piece, taking item decay, and having to grind off experience debt.
The important takeaway is that the equation as described above would entail a large cost for players who just want to kill others for no other reason than their own enjoyment. If you're killing lower leveled players, these costs increase dramatically. There is still an incentive for players to try and steal resources and go corrupt, meaning that the bounty hunter system will come into play as players will be going corrupt and trying to avoid them. There will be open world PvP over the rarest materials in the game, which I'm personally happy about. This scenario fulfills all three of our design goals, and the corruption system is a success.
But, what about a special loophole? A player wants to steal another's materials, but they don't want to risk dropping their gear or the chance of losing their stolen materials. So, they have an alt or friend kill them right after they go corrupt. Assume the same conditions in our situation above, except in this scenario. You will certainly die, so you will undergo the full penalty of experience debt and item durability loss, but otherwise, you are lowering the chance of losing your stolen materials to zero, as well as the possibility of losing the materials/gear on your person. We'll keep the psychological enjoyment, as there's two parts to it. The joy of killing another player, and the joy of escaping bounty hunters. So, the equation we get is now:
E(x) = (W + P) - (X + D*d)
A much simpler equation, it is only the materials you steal and the psychological enjoyment of killing another player subtracted by the opportunity cost of grinding off experience debt and item durability loss. So, to plug in the numbers from our previous example:
E(x) = (3,000 + 100) - (500 + 600) = 2,000 gold
A gain in profit of close to 400 gold from our normal scenario. So, this special circumstance is more profitable, but thanks to the high item durability loss and high experience debt penalty, the profit isn't much higher. Everything is good, right? The system is working as intended, the high durability and experience debt is preventing players from going corrupt.
Let's assume that bounty hunters are especially effective at catching corrupt players. They catch corrupt players at a rate of 70%. Then, the profit in the scenario where we try to kill our innocent miner and evade bounty hunters goes down to -157.5 gold, we're now going corrupt at a loss. It doesn't make sense to go corrupt now. But, what about our special loophole? That profit stays the same, you make 2,000 gold.
This makes sense, when bounty hunters are successful, it's less profitable to go corrupt. But, when bounty hunters are good at their job, it makes more and more sense to have a friend kill you instead of dying to bounty hunters. The only prevention is the cost of experience debt and item decay. And the opposite is true as well, when bounty hunters are bad at catching corrupt players, it makes less sense to use the loophole.
I believe the loophole will be a well-known method and popular. These aren't the days of old, people have been playing MMORPGs for a long time, and are more likely than ever to abuse any system they can. Even when talking to players from Lineage 2, it was fairly common for red players to have a friend kill them to protect their gear. And Lineage 2 didn't have a bounty hunter system like Ashes of Creation, so that's a big change to the system. Although, they didn't have an item decay system either, which seems like a very burdensome cost. What if the loophole becomes standard in Ashes of Creation's Alpha two? Is there any way to keep bounty hunters involved?
Well, I have a solution from a while ago. My solution is that the items that you would have dropped had you died while corrupt, become corrupt as well. Those items are now "blood-stained" or whatever you want to call it, but the point is that the corruption is on both the players and their items. You can't trade or process blood-stained items. Blood-stained items mark you for bounty hunters, automatically flag you, and drop 100% of the time if you die. Player death doesn't remove the blood-stained quality, the only way to remove it would be:
1) To go to a shrine and cleanse the items. There would have to be several shrines to prevent bounty hunters from camping the shrines.
2) Return the blood-stained items to their original owner
3) A bounty hunter claims them and then those items fall under the bounty hunter system.
Now even if you purposefully kill your toon and give the items to your main / friend, the materials are still at risk by bounty hunters or other players. So now the risk of getting caught by a bounty hunter still exists, and the loophole is closed.
Hopefully this post helped you understand when you should be going corrupt, and how to think about the many costs of corruption vs the benefits. I think in practice, players will overestimate their chance of grinding off all their corruption before getting caught. There are plenty of other questions about the bounty hunting system such as how many people can become bounty hunters, do bounty hunters get honor points or get to keep the dropped items from corrupt players? Is the only risk to being a bounty hunter the experience debt accrued upon death? There's also a question of monopolization of rare resources by controlling the areas where they spawn, and whether a guild trying to monopolize an area at the risk of corruption is worth the cost. Plenty of interesting systems to see play out in Alpha 2. I hope to make an updated post well into Alpha 2, to see whether my prediction came true, as well as have better numbers/examples for when it's viable to go corrupt in practice.
Some links:
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Player_corruption
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Item_durability
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Crafting
What is the point of corruption in Ashes of Creation? Is it to prevent all unwanted PvP as some seem to believe? No, it has three express purposes:
1) To prevent players who mindlessly kill and grief other players for no express purpose other than their own enjoyment. This applies especially to protecting lower leveled players from higher leveled players.
2) To add risk, and therefore meaning, to PKing in Ashes of Creation. It is not meant to prevent all unwanted open world PvP in Ashes, as a toggle would serve that purpose far better than corruption would. It isn't even meant as a pure punishment. From Steven in 2017: "It's not punishment. It's risk. Reward without risk is meaningless." https://ashesofcreation.wiki/images/thumb/e/e7/corruption2.jpg/350px-corruption2.jpg
3) To propel the bounty hunter system, one of the main perks of a military node. This is an odd thing to consider, but the bounty hunter system is pointless without corrupt players and needs a healthy population of corrupt players to stay relevant.
So, when analyzing the corruption system we have to have these three design goals in mind and see if the current mechanic achieves these goals. Let's consider a simple situation. You are attacking an unflagged person, and are certain that just one more attack will kill him. Should you kill that player and go corrupt? Let's list the most essential benefits and risks.
One benefit is the items that the PKer will be able to loot from their victim, and we can assign a value to whatever our PKer expects that to be. Often when talking about corruption, people have stated that nobody is going to kill other players for some iron ore they have on them. This is true, but remember that the gathering and crafting systems in Ashes are based on Star Wars Galaxies. In Star Wars Galaxies, there were different qualities of materials, and they would spawn randomly. So, the price of a high-quality material gathered in just an hour could be worth many times the normal gathering amount.
The other benefit is the psychological value generated from going corrupt. Some people like going red in games with karma systems. It's a cool aesthetic and it adds a challenge to the game. Can you survive while being chased by others? There is also just the simple joy of killing someone in a MMO and ruining their day.
The costs for corrupt players are as follows:
- Respawn at random spawn points instead of the closest spawn point.
- A chance to drop gear upon death while corrupt
- Stat dampening that reduces your ability to PvP
- Your location is given out to bounty hunters
- Incapable of player to player trading
- Suffer four times the player death penalties a non-combatant would, which include:
- Higher chance to drop materials
- Stat dampening from experience debt
- Durability loss
- Lower gear proficiency
- Reduced drop rates from mobs from experience debt
Consider the items a PKer may drop if he is killed while corrupt. Corrupt players drop 4x the number of materials and processed goods a non-flagged player would normally drop, so essentially say goodbye to whatever mats and processed goods you have on you. Corrupt players will also have a chance to drop their equipped gear. There is the chance there will be different levels of corruption, and only at higher levels of corruption will you have the chance to drop gear. But for the sake of our analysis, we'll just assume you have a 25% chance of dropping a random gear piece if you die under any corruption.
Next, we have the opportunity cost of having to grind off corruption and the potential experience debt. The opportunity cost is the next best activity a person would do if he were not doing the current activity. If you're stuck grinding off experience debt for an hour, you weren't able to spend that hour mining, or playing in the arena, or whatever a player would have done with that time if he hadn't died while corrupt. This opportunity cost will be considered under both the amount of time it takes to work off corruption, as well as the amount of time it takes to work off the extra player death penalties if one were to die corrupt. It also seems that one will not be able to gain much while grinding off this experience debt, "Another point, experience debt can significantly reduce your drop rate for monsters. The more debt you own the greater the drop in % for loot tables. These modifiers are applied in a divisible manner for parties." https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/comment/233161/#Comment_233161
For our analysis, we'll consider grinding off experience debt to provide no gold income.
We don't know if corruption will work as a tiered system or a spectrum. If I die after working off 90% of my corruption from 1 PK, do I still maintain the full corruption penalty of 4x the amount a non-flagged player would? Or do I only get 10% of that corruption penalty since I worked off 90% of the corruption? If the latter, the expected cost of going corrupt will go down, but we'll assume it's the former.
Bounty hunters are looking to kill corrupt players for their benefit, whether that be some form of honor points system or the materials/gear the corrupt player has on them. When going corrupt, each player has to consider the risk of dying to a bounty hunter / non-friendly player.
Durability loss damages the gear you have equipped. If your gear breaks, it will require considerably more materials to repair it than if you were to maintain your gear. The repair system is not just a gold sink, but a material sink, and we don't know how close in quality materials have to be to repair gear. If my Orichalcum sword has 100% quality orichalcum ore, do I need 100% quality ore to repair it, or less? 90%? Just any orichalcum ore? We don't know. We'll just assume the value of materials to repair an item is 1/4th the cost it took to create the item. Why so low? Let's say you get a full set of BiS gear, and it took you 500 hours to get all the materials to craft it. We are saying it'll take you 125 hours to fully repair your gear, I think that's already pretty harsh. We'll have to see how harsh the item durability cost is in Ashes of Creation, but I believe Intrepid isn't trying to make us throw our keyboards across the room every time we die in our best gear. Fingers crossed. There's also however a concern, that to evade this all a corrupt player would have to do is switch the gear they are wearing after they go corrupt, since gear in your inventory won't take a hit from durability loss.
Putting this all together we get an expected value equation for the decision to go corrupt:
E(v) = (W*π+P) - (L*(1-π)*g + D*d*(1-π) + C*π + X*(1-π))
E(v) is expected value
W is the loot value a PKer expects to gain
P is the psychological value of going corrupt
L is the value of the items you may lose upon death
g is the percentage chance of dropping a gear piece while corrupt
C is the opportunity cost of grinding off corruption
D is the value of materials it takes to fully repair your gear
d is the % durability loss your items take upon death while corrupt
X is the opportunity cost of grinding off experience debt
π is our chance of total survival while we work off all our corruption
1-π represents our chance of dying while corrupt
Let's use our equation to look at an example now.
You are a master herbalist, and it is currently winter. Normally you would be making a killing off gathering rare herbs, but during winter you make only 500 gold per hour gathering and have nothing else you'd currently rather do. You know that mining is still quite profitable during winter, with master miners having the chance to get high-quality ore. And you know that a rare ore vein has finally spawned in the local mine. You believe that this ore is currently worth 6,000 gold for an hour's worth of mined materials by a master miner. You then see that a player you know is a master miner, is exiting the said mine. You are on the same level. You decide to attack this player, but they refuse to fight back, baiting you to kill them and go corrupt. You also do not have your best gear set on you. It's silly in a game with such high item durability costs to use it outside of raids, wars, world bosses, caravans, and generally the highest content. The gear you are wearing has the value of 2,000 gold a gear slot, with 10 gear slots. You have a 25% chance to drop one gear piece if you die. You don't have any other materials or processed goods on you. The time to work off corruption for one PK will take 15 minutes, and the time to work off experience debt if you die while corrupt is an hour. Durability loss for a non-combatant is 3% per death, so for you, it is 12% if you die corrupt. And the value of materials it takes to fully repair an item is 1/10 the value of the item. Assume that your chance of getting caught is 30%, as you're an assassin and quite capable of escaping bounty hunters. You're not the biggest fan of going corrupt, but find it somewhat enjoyable, valuing the experience at 100 gold. A non-flagged player who dies drops half of their materials. Do you kill the miner and go corrupt?
Let's check. E(v) = (3,000*0.7 + 100) - (2,000*0.3*0.25) + (5,000*0.3*0.12) + (125*0.7) + (500*0.3)
E(v) = (2,100+100) - (150+180+87.5+150) = 1632.5 gold
You will make a large economic profit by killing the miner and going corrupt in this case. Now, if we were to imagine that the miner was a lower leveled player and gave double the amount of corruption, then the opportunity cost to work off the corruption would rise, which is important, but also the chance of escape would go down, dramatically lowering the chance of keeping your stolen materials, and increasing the chance of you losing a gear piece, taking item decay, and having to grind off experience debt.
The important takeaway is that the equation as described above would entail a large cost for players who just want to kill others for no other reason than their own enjoyment. If you're killing lower leveled players, these costs increase dramatically. There is still an incentive for players to try and steal resources and go corrupt, meaning that the bounty hunter system will come into play as players will be going corrupt and trying to avoid them. There will be open world PvP over the rarest materials in the game, which I'm personally happy about. This scenario fulfills all three of our design goals, and the corruption system is a success.
But, what about a special loophole? A player wants to steal another's materials, but they don't want to risk dropping their gear or the chance of losing their stolen materials. So, they have an alt or friend kill them right after they go corrupt. Assume the same conditions in our situation above, except in this scenario. You will certainly die, so you will undergo the full penalty of experience debt and item durability loss, but otherwise, you are lowering the chance of losing your stolen materials to zero, as well as the possibility of losing the materials/gear on your person. We'll keep the psychological enjoyment, as there's two parts to it. The joy of killing another player, and the joy of escaping bounty hunters. So, the equation we get is now:
E(x) = (W + P) - (X + D*d)
A much simpler equation, it is only the materials you steal and the psychological enjoyment of killing another player subtracted by the opportunity cost of grinding off experience debt and item durability loss. So, to plug in the numbers from our previous example:
E(x) = (3,000 + 100) - (500 + 600) = 2,000 gold
A gain in profit of close to 400 gold from our normal scenario. So, this special circumstance is more profitable, but thanks to the high item durability loss and high experience debt penalty, the profit isn't much higher. Everything is good, right? The system is working as intended, the high durability and experience debt is preventing players from going corrupt.
Let's assume that bounty hunters are especially effective at catching corrupt players. They catch corrupt players at a rate of 70%. Then, the profit in the scenario where we try to kill our innocent miner and evade bounty hunters goes down to -157.5 gold, we're now going corrupt at a loss. It doesn't make sense to go corrupt now. But, what about our special loophole? That profit stays the same, you make 2,000 gold.
This makes sense, when bounty hunters are successful, it's less profitable to go corrupt. But, when bounty hunters are good at their job, it makes more and more sense to have a friend kill you instead of dying to bounty hunters. The only prevention is the cost of experience debt and item decay. And the opposite is true as well, when bounty hunters are bad at catching corrupt players, it makes less sense to use the loophole.
I believe the loophole will be a well-known method and popular. These aren't the days of old, people have been playing MMORPGs for a long time, and are more likely than ever to abuse any system they can. Even when talking to players from Lineage 2, it was fairly common for red players to have a friend kill them to protect their gear. And Lineage 2 didn't have a bounty hunter system like Ashes of Creation, so that's a big change to the system. Although, they didn't have an item decay system either, which seems like a very burdensome cost. What if the loophole becomes standard in Ashes of Creation's Alpha two? Is there any way to keep bounty hunters involved?
Well, I have a solution from a while ago. My solution is that the items that you would have dropped had you died while corrupt, become corrupt as well. Those items are now "blood-stained" or whatever you want to call it, but the point is that the corruption is on both the players and their items. You can't trade or process blood-stained items. Blood-stained items mark you for bounty hunters, automatically flag you, and drop 100% of the time if you die. Player death doesn't remove the blood-stained quality, the only way to remove it would be:
1) To go to a shrine and cleanse the items. There would have to be several shrines to prevent bounty hunters from camping the shrines.
2) Return the blood-stained items to their original owner
3) A bounty hunter claims them and then those items fall under the bounty hunter system.
Now even if you purposefully kill your toon and give the items to your main / friend, the materials are still at risk by bounty hunters or other players. So now the risk of getting caught by a bounty hunter still exists, and the loophole is closed.
Hopefully this post helped you understand when you should be going corrupt, and how to think about the many costs of corruption vs the benefits. I think in practice, players will overestimate their chance of grinding off all their corruption before getting caught. There are plenty of other questions about the bounty hunting system such as how many people can become bounty hunters, do bounty hunters get honor points or get to keep the dropped items from corrupt players? Is the only risk to being a bounty hunter the experience debt accrued upon death? There's also a question of monopolization of rare resources by controlling the areas where they spawn, and whether a guild trying to monopolize an area at the risk of corruption is worth the cost. Plenty of interesting systems to see play out in Alpha 2. I hope to make an updated post well into Alpha 2, to see whether my prediction came true, as well as have better numbers/examples for when it's viable to go corrupt in practice.
Some links:
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Player_corruption
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Item_durability
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Crafting
4
Comments
But isn't your outcome based on your assumptions? For example, the 25% equipment drop rate for a corrupt player who is killed. Also, you assumed it is a 25% chance to drop one equipped item. What if it is a 25% chance to drop each item? Might also the % vary depending upon the extent of the corruption?
Once again in your example of killing the Master Miner, you implied that the Miner and the corrupt player happened up each other by chance. A chance encounter would make it less likely that the friend of the corrupt player would be available to kill the corrupted player and recover the dropped item(s). Also, the miner may not be full of ore and what they carry may not be of exceptional value. I do agree that the corrupt player may well not be carrying their best gear.
There is, perhaps, one additional cost to the corrupt player that could be considered. NPCs in nodes will attack corrupt players, so whatever materials they gain from victims will not be easily stored or sold. The corruption must be worked off before the materials can be taken to a vendor or storage, which reduces their expected value by the probability of death and dropping some of them.
Please consider these to be comments only, not criticisms. I enjoy your analysis and look for more.
Thanks for the great reply!
My assumptions for the example are pretty shallow because we don't have actual game data yet to compare. As we get that data, I'll update the analysis in order to improve examples for the model. I'm not as distressed by whether the percentage chance of dropping an item while corrupt will be much higher or much lower than my assumption. If the game is like Lineage 2, you'll need multiple PKs to have a chance at dropping gear, so that won't even factor into the analysis for the first PK. I'm more interested in looking at the model to see, "well if the percentage chance of getting caught by a bounty hunter increases as everything else is held constant, how does that affect the decision to go corrupt?" If it's a % chance to drop each gear piece and not just one, of course the expected cost of going corrupt will be much higher. We just have to wait and see how the Alpha 2 handles it.
With the master miner, I probably should have specified a friend being near, since if there isn't you'll need to find a friend before a bounty hunter finds you, and thus you'll still have a chance of losing your gear. In reality, I think some people will check on a gathering spot to see if they can get 30 minutes worth of materials within 1 minute of PvP. I just didn't want to talk about that situation, since then there's an opportunity cost of camping out the gathering spots and looking for gatherers with a lot of mats on them. And you're absolutely right that a PKer can't know for certain what another player is carrying, he'll just have to have an estimate based off what they can tell. For instance, if they know someone's a master gatherer or not.
It is true that a person may not be able to go to a node with corruption, lest they be attacked by a guard of the node. But, Steven has also said that corrupt players can store their items at their own freehold, since he doesn't consider that P2P trading:
Which actually increases their chance of keeping the materials. Which actually seems pretty odd to me so I didn't include it in my analysis. Can I just drop all my gear off at my freehold and all my stolen mats? And if I get to my freehold, presumably a bounty hunter can't come into it and kill me. Or can they? I don't know. So can I just go into my freehold if there's a bounty hunter nearby, and when they leave just kill mobs? I just think that would be too favorable for corrupted players. So I just don't know what to do with that whole scenario yet as it pertains to the chance of getting caught by bounty hunters.
Thank you for the comments
this being said it hard to judge when all we have is what written down on the wiki so might need readdressed when we can actually play.
imo equipment drop and dampening effect should only occur as a penalty of griefing so to me this is killing low level players or killing someone to many times in a time period, killing somone your level randomly once and moving on i dont think should contribute to the harsher penalty of the corruption system (Aka equipment drop and combat dampening)
Corrupted player penalty should be the same as green players death penalty just amplified by 4 times or something so they come out even potentially if they kill 4 green players if they die before that they come out as a loss. griefing lowbie/the same person however should be what carries the higher penalty. Purple death penalties should be half of green penalty aswell to promote fighting back.
We will have to see how things play out however
I played a Lot of L2. I had a character just for hunting reds, best drops in the game!
Yep, that's accounted for by the variable C in the equation
I think the time to work off corruption in Ashes should be significantly less than the time to work off experience debt, which is why it is in my equation. If the time to grind off corruption is the same amount as the time to work off experience debt, then you're incentivizing the loophole. Why grind off corruption risking your loot, rather than have a friend kill you and spend the exact same amount of time grinding mobs?
Ooh that's cool that you were effectively a bounty hunter in Lineage 2, now you'll be able to formally be a bounty hunter in Ashes! What would you think about a bounty hunter system where a portion of the mats you steal goes to the military node sponsoring you, and the other portion you just keep along with gaining honor points? That to me would be interesting, because then you're thinking about what military node you want to be a citizen of, based off what portion of loot they're taking from you. And now you're making a decision rather than just trying to be a bounty hunter of the largest military node.
Player from another node scouting out your area, a few days prior to an attack
A player who has been camping people in times past, and you want them gone
Someone you just don't like... as they stole some of your loot prior
Locating a group of players who always attack your caravans.. time for some payback
Yep, that can all be considered under the "Psychological enjoyment" or "P" of the equation. And the goal there is to just have a cost for that so you're doing it because you hate someone or want revenge. There might also be politics / reputation with bounty hunters involving this, you kill some player from another node and they let you grind off your corruption without interference.
@Goalid My main in L2 was a healer, and probably will be again here. It was an alt who was a red hunter, since my healer would get PKed a lot I was motivated to hunt reds.
No, was answered long ago. The more corruption you rack up, the higher your "murdercount" (two separate mechanics), the more deaths you will need to completely get back to a "neutral" state. But then you have the substantial exp debt that will need to be worked off to get your stats back to normal.
Removing corruption
From the wiki.
The primary means to remove corruption is through death. Multiple deaths may be necessary to remove all corruption.[27][28]
Dying removes a significant portion of a player's corruption score.[29]
Gaining experience will also slowly reduce a player's corruption score.[27
After reading I find it very likely that players will utilize this loophole of friends killing you to save the loot and clear you of red.
Additional countermeasures that could and should be placed are:
Assissting in PK should give you the same amount of corruption to the assister.
A "Call for Help" mechanic which is granted to players who get attacked. It makes your character yell for help and players in the vicinity who hear it can navigate by sound to come to help you kill the attacker.
When a player hears it and finds the two players a pop up should appear which asks if you want to join the party of the defending player. So as to remove the possibility of accidently hitting him and getting flagged as an assister to PK.
If the player doesnt accept the pop up then he can attack both players
If he accepts the popup, helps the defending player to kill the attacker and then attacks the defending player within a 1 hour timeframe then he'll get the same amount corruption of the first attacker + an additional corruption amount based on level disparity between himself and the defended player.
If the defending player attacks the person who helped(provided that the person accepted the pop up) then he should get the corruption amount of the initial attacker + corrultion amount based on level disparity.
Neutral players who kill reds are obligated to turn in the gear from reds to their node. If the gear belonged to a citizen of the node or a citizen of allied node then he can claim it by paying gold(one fourth of the gear's value) and a % of the gold goes to the neutral player the rest goes to the node. % is set by mayor.
If the gear doesnt belong to a citizen of the node or allied node then the gear is transformed into a resource contribution towards node development.
When looting gear from reds or killed players the loot will be marked as bloodstained. Once bloodstained loot is in your inventory you get a prompt to call bounty hunters to come and retrieve the gear from you. If you dont accept to call then the bloodstained gear starts adding corruption over time to your character and you need to go to a shrine to cleanse the gear before you become corrupt.
Bounty hunters can still see and go to a dead red's body(they wont know if he is dead or not until they arrive. They'll just see a non-moving red). Once there they can loot it and if gear was taken from body then they'll start to see footprints, bloodstains on trees etc. leading to the person who didnt accept the prompt to turn in the gear. Footprints and stains shkuld be hard to see and spreadout as to make the job of tracking slower. Certain archetypss like rangers and rogues should have abilities that help with trackinf. Pets can be groomed to bwcome tracker pets who can assist in tracking and fight. (Pets who were groomed to be only fighting pets should do better in combat than tracker pets). If you use a tracker pet to track someone then you should get locked out of unsummoning it.
Perhaps bounty hunting could be treated as a sort of profession(like fishing in wow so you dont get locked out of other professions) which can be leveled and give bonuses to tracking and other things.
Examples of irrational PKing is killing someone that has wronged you in some way before. Maybe they ran their mouth and "tapped" you a few times without killing you when they had friends but now they ran into you all alone.
I think the phrase "risk vs rewards" when applied to the corruption system is like having a law that says "stealing is illegal unless its a lot of money", this just guarantees that players will feel forced to PK at the high end of the game. You will then have to constantly balance the risk vs rewards in your corruption system that is not really preventing anything in the first place.
Thanks! I put some effort into the post.
It's an interesting idea, but two problems I see would be if this wasn't party-based, then you would be punishing players who may have only gotten a single hit on someone, which we might just say tough luck to. And if it is party-based, then PKers will just not form parties, but still, group up.
Maybe there could be an "x player died here" for bounty hunters. Let them start to pick up the trail. Otherwise, I'm just seeing that system to be a big ask for the devs, although it would be a cool idea.
I had a similar idea of gear being broken apart so it could be donated to the node. Although, I was saying this should be more of a system tied to bounty hunters, rather than neutral players. For neutral players, I'd like to give them the option to try and keep the corrupted player's gear. You use the term gear here, but I assume you actually mean the mats stolen from the PKer's victim?
I think it would be burdensome to have the bounty hunter actually show up to take the blood-stained gear if you're just giving it to a node / victim. I think we should also keep the character based penalties, experience debt, stat dampening, etc. to the actual PKer, and have a system to ensure blood-stained items can't easily get through the corruption system by loopholes.
Having levels to bounty hunters is an already planned system, but making bounty hunting a gathering profession is an interesting idea, since I'm worried there will be too many bounty hunters if just any citizen of a military node can become one. That means potentially 1000s of bounty hunters in a military node. So I think there should be limits placed on how many people can be bounty hunters of a particular military node.
You're using the word "rational" differently from myself. When I use the term, I don't consider a person's tastes as rational or irrational, those are just their preferences. Is it rational for me to want cake? It may be bad for my health, and so some may say that it's a poor decision on my part, but it's neither rational nor irrational to have a desire for cake. Or a desire to get revenge.
You won't be forced to PK, but if you want the best mats in the game that are going to be worth a fortune, then you should have to hire protection from PKers or bring a friend. This is a PvX game, not a PvE game. If people want to farm materials all day for an average profit, that's fine. But this isn't going to be the kind of game where you can get the best resources at no risk to your character.
One of the most annoying things to me in a game that's supposedly PvX, is when the competition for the most valuable gathering materials on the map is done via who can teleport to the next node faster or pull mobs on the other player. Or some bot can just camp out the node 24/7 and only a GM can ban it.
If the corruption system's only purpose over a toggle flagging system, like New World has, was that some players could decide to get revenge against other players at a cost, then they should just do a toggle system.
I'm saying that if there is a net gain then it becomes the default and it won't be an issue of hiring protection to mine something but rather those zones will be PK zones controlled by the PK alts of the biggest guilds since preventing anyone from gathering the resource is better than hoping they drop that resource out of everything they can drop.
So now every guild that wants to compete has to have PK alts in order to gather this resource. All I'm saying is if you want this sort of thing to happen for the high end then why not just add it to all the other PvP activies? such gathering these resources works like the caravan system but centered around whoever picked it up because in essence that is what you are doing anyways but in a much shittier way.
However, there are a number of assumptions made that seem likely to be incorrect.
The obvious, as has been pointed out, is the 25% drop rate of items while corrupt.
Another is the seeming assumption that a non-combatant will drop 50% of the materials they have on them, and that a corrupt person will drop 100%. I would make the assumption that these numbers would be half of that - as if you drop 100% of materials when corrupt, it means your second death while corrupt has significantly less meaning than your first.
12.5%, 25% and 50% seem reasonable numbers to me for combatant, non-combatant and corrupt, respectively.
This assumption does have a drastic impact on the result.
You are taking the current example of an equation and extrapolating the result from an obviously fictional example as being what is going to happen in the game when it launches.
Don't do that.
I honestly never took the equation into consideration at all. My extrapolation is based on whether going corrupt is ever a rational choice based on the potential gains and if it is then you will have characters dedicated to it which is obviously something you don't want from a system whose sole purpose is to discourage PKing in the first place.
The idea of corruption is to add weight to the decision to kill another player, not to render it unviable.
Just because there will indeed be times when attacking other players is profitable, that does not automatically mean that "every guild that wants to compete has to have PK alts in order to gather this resource", as you claimed.
Again, all the assumptions have drastic impacts on the examples, but the formula is fine and can be used right now for the purposes of "If the chance of getting caught increases, the expected value goes down enormously." When A2 is released I'll make an updated post with far more applicable examples. I based the 50% of materials dropping based off the Alpha One, which just felt right to me during the A1. I too would expect there to be levels of corruption, for instance, your first level you drop 75%, your second you drop 100% of materials.
This is false, the purpose of going corrupt is to add risk to PKing, not to just discourage it. "It's not punishment. It's risk. Reward without risk is meaningless." https://ashesofcreation.wiki/images/thumb/e/e7/corruption2.jpg/350px-corruption2.jpg
Look specifically at the "reward" part of that quote.
This drastically complicates the risk/reward equation, particularly if those who were not responsible for the killing blow can loot the body.
It definitely does not remove the risk, nor am I saying that it would fail, merely noting that the calculation is much bigger.
Therefore I'd say it's fairly rational to go corrupt when traveling as a group and encountering a single target that may have meaningful gain to your group, either in 'preventing them from doing something you don't desire for them to do', or 'getting meaningful items that they may be carrying'. A single player, possibly a designated player, in the group, becomes corrupt, and then things proceed as normal. The precise application of 'droprate penalties' might also matter, but the Corrupt player then logging off (possibly to an alt) while the others share the spoils, negates that too.
I expect fisherfolk in particular to suffer from this a lot, hopefully they will group up with other fishers for defense, or the Bounty Hunters will also travel in sufficiently large groups near their spots, but unless Fishing is quite a low-skill Artisan profession, it's likely to involve much more 'temporarily secret or secluded locations'.
If I had thought YOU were going to spend any time on the wiki to post an answer, I would not have asked the question.
I now that you know the answer.
The risk/reward equation is only on the decision to kill, when you expect a skill hit to finish off your opponent. I think "poking" will be fairly common, so you're attacking someone in the hopes they might fight back. There's some game theory to this too, where an optimal strategy might be for everyone on the server to not fight back, but they all fight back because it's in their selfish interest to keep more of their mats. So the entire system is more complicated, the equation is just a small part of the overall open-world PvP scene in Ashes. And as someone pointed out, monopolization of a resource is something I'd want to look at.
Corruption is a penalty - therefore, it is a form of punishment.
Also, the intent of the Corruption mechanic is to deter PKing:
QUESTION: If my guild has no one corrupted and your guild is like always killing people and always corrupted, will your guild have repercussions because they're corrupted versus my guild?
STEPHEN: No I don't think so either. And the reason why is we want to deter it, but we don't want to make the system meaningless; and if the deterrent becomes too heavy-handed then it's a system without a purpose. And I think that the intent behind the corruption is that like during a rise in passion and like anger and whatever you want to make this decision and do something and you'll suffer the repercussions later. But if those repercussions are just overwhelmingly bad and even anti-social in the sense that like your guild is like hey man you went corrupted and this gives us like corruption points on the guild, and like you're out of here, then people just aren't going to choose to use it; and then at which point might as well just take it out. So I think there's a healthy balance between the type of deterrent used.
Always best to review the original source in order to understand the proper context.
Lykire states that Corruption punishes players for doing what they like to do.
Steven responds by implying that Corruption does not punish players who enjoy PvP with combatants. You risk gaining Corruption by attacking non-combatants. Because if you kill a non-combatant, you will gain Corruption penalties.
Corruption does not punish players who enjoy PvP combat. Corruption is a penalty implemented to deter griefing non-combatants.
For many people, keeping mats will not be as important as remaining a non-combatant.
Perhaps I want to become corrupted and see what challenge that brings me? It indeed punishes me if my gear becomes less effective. I prefer to meet that challenge without silly debuffs, thank you.
The corrupted face no penalties against Bounty Hunter's.
I was referring to the fact that the initial equation has values for chance of death, (and by extension 'getting away with the materials), and similarly for 'items lost when killed', which may or may not be the materials gained.
By offloading the material gain to another character who is not corrupt, and traveling in a group, who can in turn do many things to prevent or mitigate loss from the fallen Corrupt player, as well as being able to head into more dangerous territory (in terms of mobs) to work off the Corruption, a small group can rapidly reduce those factors, raising the groups E(v) for finishing off the non-combatant quite high.
So even if we only factor my group's Fighter, for example, as 'designated Corrupted one", there are already multiple strategies we can employ:
1. That player does not need to travel with their best gear and risk it in the first place, they only need enough output to finish off a weakened opponent, with the various 'accidental kill' risks mitigated by the fact that the opponent is not fighting back, and the rest of the group can still assist, debuff, and CC.
2. Though that player becomes unable to trade, any attacker that manages to kill them still has to loot their kill, which can quite possibly be interrupted. It is also not necessary to kill the attacker targeting the Fighter with any other character, and they suffer no penalties against the Bounty Hunter. At 'worst' the rest of us risk Corruption because the Bounty Hunter can remain 'green' while assisting the Fighter makes us Purple, but this would require us to kill the Bounty Hunter accidentally too. If we prevent them from looting the body in the situation where they win, we now have our corrupted ally's drops instead.
3. The person who does the initial 'poke' to test the reaction of the target does not have to be the Corrupted player, meaning that any situation in which they do not respond because they are waiting for 'the chance to make an attacker go Red' fails when the Fighter comes out to finish them off. The Fighter's situation has become 'worse', i.e. more corrupt, but we've already mitigated this situation from the beginning.
4. If this lowered chance of actually being killed and looted is sufficient to allow us to continue 'grinding' nearby, the opportunity cost of this is also lowered. We were probably grinding anyway. There is no penalty to Corruption if you can work it off before you die, which means all you have to do is 'not die'. Bounty Hunters for example are also paying the opportunity cost to hunt Corrupted players in hyper-efficient groups, because they may not reach the group before the Corruption has been worked off.
I agree that there is game theory involved, because I've done the calculations for the larger system based on it. I cannot find any risk values against a solo target that are not mitigated by simply having a group higher than 3 (at just 3, assuming an at-level enemy, you can only get to 85% risk mitigation because you don't have enough CC or similar to protect the Red from being focused down consistently) and assigning the Red role to a Fighter or Mage, without making Corruption penalties very high, or the rate of capacity to work it off, be very low.
You can play with the 'risk of death' value to make nearly all situations of Corruption 'dangerous', and we obviously do not know things like 'how easy will it be to avoid other player groups who want to kill your Red Role Finisher' in dungeons, but this would apply across the map. Low exp yield areas would have less people around, high would have more, the numbers will mostly balance and you can once again calculate mostly for Bounty Hunters and friend/guild based revenge kills.
Other factors such as 'their ability to log in an Alt or for a friend to log in their alt' are outside the scope of rational decision making in the pure sense because it's 'being able to raise the chance of risky combat after going red' to nearly max, but with no way to make that decision based on in-game information.