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Griefing
Voxtrium
Member
Some problems I see, so here are my theoretical problems with griefing.
I want to take advantage of other players farming. I plan on killing players farming high tier mats. I will likely become corrupted but what stops a family member from teleporting to me and killing me to reset some of that corruption and eventually all of it.
Or the player killing everyone can simply buy a plot of land in a high value area kill non combatants store loot and armor in house. Let themselves die many times with no gear on/no value lost. Once uncorrupted move gained mats and and move house to new high value location and rinse and repeat. Or even worse, kill a few high value farming players, become too highly corrupted to keep going so drop by the homestead, dump everything, go get urself killed by a friend/ family/ guild member. rinse and repeat not moving house, never worrying about corruption reaping only benefits.
Okay so next what about having a network of guild homesteads in high value locations, rotating corrupted members you use an uncorrupted member to kill those who are corrupted to remove debuff. If IS makes it so fellow guilds camt remove corruption from fellow guild members one could easily use an alliance. Or more likely have a bunch of people pick up the bounty hunter trait in the guild and the bounty hunters "hunt" the corrupted to reset corruption. The network of homesteads allows for the alliance to easily store valuable loot gained from their corrupted players, The bounty hunters feed off the corrupted player. Its a positive feedback loop that would be painfully annoying to deal with. Even if you remove the ability for anyone who is in your guild or your alliance to remove corruption debuffs from you people will just use discord alliances to coordinate removal of corruption with bounty hunters. Again creating money for bounty hunters profit for corrupted players... there is no real downside.
Any way the homestead offers a unique difficulty for corruption. Intrepid good luck
IMPORTANT - This is not asking the question IF the value for the corrupted players or bounty hunters is truly worth it. The game doesn't have enough details or playtime for us to know this, so only respond with further food for thought not "corrupted players wont gain enough from this strategy to make it worthwhile"
I want to take advantage of other players farming. I plan on killing players farming high tier mats. I will likely become corrupted but what stops a family member from teleporting to me and killing me to reset some of that corruption and eventually all of it.
Or the player killing everyone can simply buy a plot of land in a high value area kill non combatants store loot and armor in house. Let themselves die many times with no gear on/no value lost. Once uncorrupted move gained mats and and move house to new high value location and rinse and repeat. Or even worse, kill a few high value farming players, become too highly corrupted to keep going so drop by the homestead, dump everything, go get urself killed by a friend/ family/ guild member. rinse and repeat not moving house, never worrying about corruption reaping only benefits.
Okay so next what about having a network of guild homesteads in high value locations, rotating corrupted members you use an uncorrupted member to kill those who are corrupted to remove debuff. If IS makes it so fellow guilds camt remove corruption from fellow guild members one could easily use an alliance. Or more likely have a bunch of people pick up the bounty hunter trait in the guild and the bounty hunters "hunt" the corrupted to reset corruption. The network of homesteads allows for the alliance to easily store valuable loot gained from their corrupted players, The bounty hunters feed off the corrupted player. Its a positive feedback loop that would be painfully annoying to deal with. Even if you remove the ability for anyone who is in your guild or your alliance to remove corruption debuffs from you people will just use discord alliances to coordinate removal of corruption with bounty hunters. Again creating money for bounty hunters profit for corrupted players... there is no real downside.
Any way the homestead offers a unique difficulty for corruption. Intrepid good luck
IMPORTANT - This is not asking the question IF the value for the corrupted players or bounty hunters is truly worth it. The game doesn't have enough details or playtime for us to know this, so only respond with further food for thought not "corrupted players wont gain enough from this strategy to make it worthwhile"
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It's not impossible, I don't think there's a single system that will account for ALL work arounds, but what they can do is minimize the effectiveness of doing most of them long term. In your example, you might be only able to do this a few times before the Negative Experience debt makes you unable to kill someone farming in a high value area, not to mention the shit storm you might bring on yourself from your victim's guild/friends as well as other bounty hunters not in on your plan.
Having your guild mates kill you to remove corruption is still going to negatively impact you, since you're still dying, that is still a disadvantage regardless of if you die naked or not. Having a "home base" anywhere is an advantage, but I can't believe that simply stripping your gear off, stashing it and having a friend kill you is going to be sustainable, since regardless of your gear durability, you're base stats are still impacted, which includes your health and gear proficiency. Meaning you could strip your gear off, get killed, and then not be able to even put your gear back on until you work off the XP debt. This is as much as 300-400% penalty if you're corrupted when you die. There will be people who are still going to do what you're suggesting, but the time commitment is going to severely limit the number of occurrences.
You also have a "kill count" and are supposed to gain more corruption the more you kill, and as far as I know, dying won't "reset" this. You will need to do a quest, which again, takes time away from the scheme you have.
I'm also curious if we will see diminishing returns on a bounty that is just killed over and over. Say the first time you get killed as a bounty, you're worth 100 gold, but by the 10th time, it's 50 silver, making just farming a friend who goes corrupted hardly worth the effort. However since you asked not to discuss this, I won't go further, but you can't have this discussion without first understanding that although not important to you, this point might be important to the community at large.
This has been a known suggested "work around" since the corruption system was announced, and I can't imagine Steven/Intrepid has not considered it when designing their system.
Aside from that. High value resources will most likely be farmed by guilded high lvl players with defenders around them (cause why risk it). So instead of PKing this will just be some pvp for the resources.
On top of that, any high value location will be built out with freeholds as soon as people know that it's a high value location. No one will sell their freehold there and you won't have the space to just plop your shit there and PK everyone around you.
Also, if you already have a freehold near high value resources - why PK someone there when you can just farm those resources and immediately store them at your freehold w/o risking long-distance travel with them.
Also, we don't know whether family can TP to you on their own or whether you'd have to summon them. And in either case IS could just disable the TP if one of the members is flagged/red/in combat.
And as the main point, high value resources would probably be located near high lvl nodes/mobs/dungeons. Which means high lvl people would be running around and you yourself would have to be high lvl. Leveling in Ashes takes quite a bit of time. The more PK count you have on your character - the more corruption you'll get for each new kill. The more corruption you have - the more XP debt you'll get on death. So if you use your main character (or a guild uses several people) to constantly PK different gatherers - soon enough they'll get so much corruption for one kill that they'll have to spend days grinding the lvls back.
Also, if the same guild does this kind of shit, they'll have awful reputation, get no new players and will get shit on by every other guild/player group.
So once again, why would a guild/alliance risk aaaaall of that just to get a few rare resources that they could've just farmed themselves w/o any problems?
Steven has said the game basically treats Corrupted like monsters and... you can't Family Summon a monster.
Corrupted cannot be Family Summoned, so it seems highly likely that Corrupted cannot Family Summon, either.
Because it will be easy.
One doesn't have to do this all the time, and OP still outlined a relatively optimal strategy for doing it occasionally or a bit more than occasionally. It's part of the game. Similarly, a player who specializes in the Processing Skill might not be able to do the Gathering part. Then, if their allies are not online, or only the combat ones who don't do gathering or crafting are online, their source of materials is either 'buying it' or 'killing the player who is gathering it'.
Exp Debt is a problem, but so is 'spending actual currency on materials'.
Also, there's the fun factor for some. Most PvP minded players are so much better at it than average dabblers that it's borderline ridiculous and even a 40% decrease in effectiveness from Exp Debt will not make them lose to the type of person they'd be targeting. The main 'risk' here is 'not getting away with it' which is a separate consideration.
This is actually a really good question I didn't consider. Would be worth a confirmation on this.
Well, I've got no specific questions in mind for this month's Q&A segment, so you can leave it to me. What exactly are we asking?
"Can a Corrupted Player use the Family Summon Mechanic, from either side, either summoning Family or being summoned?"
If anything, I'd say it's easier to level up a gathering alt and just have yourself a character that can gather those resources w/o you going red. And your friend can defend you while you gather. Now that's an ez solution..
That's a weird take, to me.
If you 'just' raise a Gatherer, and I even EXIST as the 'person who kills gatherers and takes their stuff', then you still have to get good enough to stop me and my group from doing that. And if you're at the skill level where you can stop me from killing you to TAKE your stuff, then you're above the skill level of the other 'person who just leveled up a gatherer'.
Similarly, if you had that level of skill and move in a group of two, then when you meet the 'Gatherer plus their Protector' you still win, in fact that's an optimal situation for you because the Protector will probably fight back and you won't get corruption from them, and if the Gatherer heals the Protector, they too will flag and no more corruption.
The entire point is that if your opponent fights back, you don't gain Corruption. You don't have to be good enough to beat a person who fights back, you have to be good enough to convince your opponent that it's better for them to not fight back.
Also, I'd hope Intrepid can implement a "check" of sorts that prevents friends from abusing the BH system. The easiest way to do that would just be "if you claim the same bounty (this being the PK player) - your bounty reward is reduced" and make that shit inverse scalable.
And in that context, just killing the gatherer and its protectors would already no longer be "easy". And it'd have to be done by bigger groups than just "a couple of friends", at which point it's no longer griefing (which is the OP's main concern).
And if instead of trying to farm some valuable gatherers you just make your own and maybe even become the same highly protected dude - that's not only more valuable, but imo easier.
But even all of that said aside, my main point is "it'd be really difficult to continuously grief high value gatherers (for multitude of reasons)". And if those gatherers fight back - it's no longer griefing, so the OP's concern doesn't apply.
Got it now, but in this case the OP's (and to some extent, speaking for myself as well) point is that this is the intention. The idea at the core here being "put one's freehold near a good gathering spot as soon as possible".
Basically you could literally 'look out from your own front porch and decide if to kill the gatherer that is walking about near your house for the materials that you basically know they are gathering'.
I agree that if every PvP 'bandit's' house or hideout is treated as a 'Danger Zone' or 'dungeon' for Gatherers and they always bring friends, then the situation will be different, and that may be intended. If it is somehow not intended, then OP's point that Freeholds may be a difficulty in design for Intrepid, is valid.
Also, I'm fairly sure there'll be no highly valuable resources near freehold locations. Mb a tree or some bush, but that'd be a very limited resource that might not even drop on death (unless the dude farmed that shit for over 10h straight and you just sat there in your freehold watching him like a damn vulture lol).
And if you're only killing one-two people once a few days or once a week - that ain't griefing, That's just participating in the game's systems. Griefing would be standing between the node/freeholds and the gathering/farming spots and literally PKing every player going through. And corruption is there to prevent exactly that kind of behavior.
And if more casually-inclined players complain that they get killed once in a while in Ashes - that's on them. They should've known what they were getting themselves into. They should've gotten into a guild or found some friend group to help them out. Or just be ready to die by players' hands here and there.
In addition, having such a set-up in a 'high value area' would also be attractive for Bounty Hunters. If PKers haunt an area, so will BH since that is where their hunting is good!
Furthermore, as resources are mined, they are gone. The 'high value areas' will move from here to there so if one tries to set up freeholds and guild areas, they will routinely become worthless. You will end up being located out in BFE.
Mark 1:32:15
FAISAL: What about Corrupted people?
STEVEN: "If they have a Corruption Score, they won't be able to be Summoned. Combat status or Corruption Score or Event flag.
Event flag is, in the backend, what we use essentially to determine, "Hey! This person isa part of an Event", meaning they are either an attacker or a defender on a Caravan or they are an attacker or defender in a Castle or a Node Siege. Or, they're a participant in war. So, if there's a war event occurring or a war status between Nodes or a war status between Guilds, or they're a participant in an active Arena, that's what we call an Event flag. If the Event flag is active on the character, they also cannot be Summoned."
For certain, the idea with Event flags is to not allow Summoning people for Zergs, so seems like it will be the same for when you're Corrupted. If you can't be Family Summoned, you also can't initiate a Family Summon.
Well, that shortens the question, but might still be good to ask it anyways, so now it's just:
"Can a Corrupted Player use the Family Summon system to call their Family?"
@Avoxtrium - as far as I know, that's the intended design of Ashes. You say 'normal player' but in Ashes the 'normal player' is probably expected to either 'be able to hang in PvP' or 'always bring a group who can', while constantly weighing the situation.
I don't think it's particularly unfair since it also isn't really a surprise. If you see a Freehold sitting on or near a good resource spot, you basically know that you will be in danger if you try to get that resource.
Adding on the idea that 'the player who kills you might not suffer much for doing it because of their setup' isn't really a problem, is it? Even on a larger scale, it's just 'players creating a weird sort of PvP mini-dungeon', no different from 'Trying to gather something that is in an area patrolled by a random aggressive elite mob'.
@Nikr - I understand your view, but I never 'trust' developers, even good ones, to have the same perspectives on things that players consider 'common sense', particularly because their intentions may be entirely different. So I wouldn't necessarily 'bet' that one can't place Freeholds near relatively high-value resources.
Similarly, there's something to be said for the very simple fact that a sufficiently large amount of medium-lower value resources is now 'high value' and worth it for me to kill the gatherer for, which I would consider the bigger 'concern' here, but it's all the same.
But in all seriousness, I don't know if you'll be able to kill members of your family, since we know you already can't kill a member of your own guild.
What's to stop a guild from just storing their gear and mats in a local homestead? Basically nothing as the system has been planned. I'd assume guild would do this for their most valuable gathering spot in their node's ZOI, monopolize it, and charge monopoly prices for those mats.
Since your gear in your inventory won't drop either, I'd guess a corrupted player would just put on different gear too once they're corrupt, so even if they killed you in their best gear they can just take it off and its safe.
People don't seem to care though, they think experience debt is enough for corruption. Which makes me wonder why gear potentially dropping is even in the system, if everyone's just expecting corrupted players to avoid that risk.
Huh, swear I saw something in the wiki say it was only equipped gear. That's good though.
It's open world pvp. If somebody is determined to waste their time settup up and doing all the things you mentioned then good for them. It's not griefing. It wont be often. If anything else it will be a spectacle. But I dount the PK will get away with it most of the time.
Like a bad gambler he will lose way more than he will earn, and I am sure bounty hunters will often visit this "PK homestead area"
As for PK being able to summon family, we dont know that will work for sure.
The whole family summon system hasnt been talked about much, and from what little the devs have shared, the community doesnt care for it to be part of the game with no fast travel.