Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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.
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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.
Comments
I think the disagreement between us is that I'm looking at the bounty hunter system and you're just looking at corruption penalties. Ironically, the bounty hunter system needs corrupted players to function or it's useless, so Intrepid is implicitly intending on there being corrupted players.
We are both satisfied with the cost of corruption currently preventing people from griefing. But, I'm more concerned about a scenario where corrupted players are just eating the xp debt to ignore the bounty hunters. And you're right, xp debt can be tuned to where it's punishing on its own to prevent griefing, and create some cost to fighting over resources. My worry would be an ultra-rare resource gets camped, and some players just kill each other to avoid bounty hunters, because they think the cost of xp debt is worth the stolen mats. And then there's no room for the bounty hunters in that scenario, so all bounty hunters do is kill the rare, dumb griefer.
They have in the past said that the corruption penalty has built in controls so they can persuade general player activities either towards more or less corruption killing.
These controls include the amount of corruption gained per kill, the variation for killing lower level players, the threshold of where item drops become a factor, the percent of materials dropped, the ratio at which corruption is worked off, the amount of corruption that is lost when killed, the ratio at which that corruption is converted to experience debt if killed, the ratio at which experience debt is worked off, the stat penalties suffered in PvP while corrupt, and these are just the obvious ones.
Between these dials, Intrepid can shape player behavior to achieve the amount of corruption gain then want to make the world function.
As for bounty hunters, they are not a concern unless you have a high enough level of corruption. You don't show up on their map after one kill - you need more corruption than that.
Once you start getting up to that amount of corruption, you need to consider both the fact that a kill isn't going to remove all corruption, and that you are going to respawn - still corrupt - in a random location.
If you are really worried about bounty hunters, you want to stay with your friends.
Personally I don’t think those situations will be appearing too often, assuming everyone in the area has started as a non-combatant. PvE/non-combatant deaths have full death penalties applied, while Combatant deaths have half the penalty applied. So if that resource is so incredibly rare, there’s no reason players wouldn’t flag combatant to fighting over it. Inflicting a minor Corruption value on someone is not worth losing the full drop value of rare mats.
Even assuming the attacking player started Corrupted, then any non-combatant fighting over the resource should kill the Corrupt player the moment they come into the gathering area, as they should be aware that they can’t mitigate their own losses due to being unable to flag Combatant on a Corrupt player. They’ve got nothing to lose by attacking, and a lot to gain if they kill the Corrupt player. Bounty hunters come in to play if the Corrupt player is consistently PK’ing, whether to troll or for profit. They’re not meant to avenge one-off attacks of opportunity around rare resources.
Then go back and gather the resources you wanted.
Should be better to just gather the rare resource on your own than work off full Corruption.
As to it being better to go and get the resources myself - if I am a better PvP'er than I am a miner, I am better off PvP'ing for mined resources than I am going and mining them for myself.
Agreed. Though it would be much more efficient (with some exceptions) to attack caravans than individual players as a multiplied benefit to offset the corruption. Exceptions that come to mind would be suspected rare minerals, a fully laden (if Intrepid makes it obvious) miner + mule, or if the raid on a caravan is too large which spreads the material gain too much.
There is 0 reasonable cause to farm mats by PKing, while there are sanctioned PvP/farming occassions like caravans.
The more you talk the more you invalid yet another "PK loopholes" topic. And this guy did a full "analysis" on why people will go red. For mats... hahhahahahhah
Materials that travel by caravan are most often going to be bulk, common materials. Rare materials are better moved via characters spec’d for speed and combat-avoidance making unannounced runs, as they’re a much smaller (and quicker) target.
Steven says it'll literally be a reason people do it haha, and it's because the game is going to have ultra-rare material spawns that you probably can't get because you're locked out of mastering that profession
At the end of the day, I can't tell you for certain if players will spend their time killing each other or not, because it's all theoretical. I believe there are costs to grouping up for mats, including that you're now upping the opportunity cost of camping the area the more people are there, as well as the mats now being divided between the entire group. Whereas you can just have 1 friend or alt account kill you. And bounty hunters may have an easier time organizing than corrupted players.
I believe it will become a problem in Alpha 2, even if they turn the dials on corruption penalties / # of bounty hunters. Because they're two different expected value equations, I don't believe you can optimize for both the loophole and what I believe is their intention of bounty hunters killing corrupted players. If it isn't a problem, then Intrepid should obviously not change anything because it's working as intended.
Right, but I’m guessing the majority of those situations wouldn’t involve corruption, just massive pvp battles against the raid. To engage corruption to would mean the ‘robber’ team would have been able to get through and kill the ‘raiding’ team’s master miner before that player fought back.
I’d venture that master miner would probably flag with the rest of the raiding team to fight off the robber team.
Pure speculation, however.
The PvPers "protecting" the Master Gatherer can kill the enemy team and/or let some of them become Corrupt. And then have the Master Gatherer return to do what they do best.
Works great if the protectors are also able to pick up most of the Master Gatherer's dropped resources.
We are generally just talking about when people are by themselves or have one or two others with them.
You can come up with literally infinite possibilities that alter the original premise of this thread, yet none of them actually alter the original premise of this thread - that premise being that there will be times when it is worth attacking other players and gaining corruption in order to make a profit.