Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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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
But as I've suggested before, I'd prefer the corruption removal time be semi-reasonable, but BHs would have a time buffer for a free kill on the ex-PKer and the PKer being unable to flag on the BH(on the first come first serve basis), so the Red always gets punished. I see that as a good addition to the BH system, w/o making going red completely unwanted. Though no one has poked holes in that suggestion, so I dunno if I missed anything when thinking about it.
No, that's not going to work that way either. Because, again, it doesn't work that way now.
There IS a 'downside' in PvP in Elite, for example. You can't dock to repair or refuel or restock your weapons at most places.
They still don't die.
I don't know how to make this point though. I feel like it relies on an experience and belief that most people who are 'okay' with PvP don't have, particularly those who played games at the higher level. I'll just repeat it again.
The gap between a competitive player and a casual in a game where the competitive player has put in, say, 1000 hours, is usually so large that the casual stands NO CHANCE WHATSOEVER. By skill alone. I can play a FT50 in SFV against a Bronze player and win 50-0. A Diamond player can do this while choosing RANDOM CHARACTERS to give themselves a handicap.
If the concept is 'well people who can't fight well at all should just leave or gather more friends', great. But the first thing I am going to do when Red is call my gang to protect me. I got my gain, they're probably nearby, I don't feel like dying, and I need them to help me burn off the Corruption anyway. Or I just log off, wait for them to get to my location and log on again.
Now you've got 7 'Gold' vs 'whoever happens to be around' because I'm certainly not going to do this 'when I know for sure that people who can beat me easily or before my friends arrive are online'.
If your answer to this is 'well someone will beat your group', the question is 'why?' Are they better? What if we're the best around? Are they more relentless? Are they going to keep throwing themselves at us until we are Corrupted ENOUGH that they have a chance? Corrupted enough that it 'recruits an army'? No prob. The question isn't 'will we fall', it's 'how many have to suffer before we fall?'.
In your example, nothing would prevent you from going unpunished, mainly because your whole group of friends is ready to go corrupted for you. But how many such groups are there? Especially considering that with each kill you'll get more and more corruption (either on one player or several).
And I can't really answer that question because my experienced is too skewed towards a much less punishing system, so it was completely fine to PK some randos that came to punish our previous PKing. Ashes will definitely be way harsher in such situations. And if I understood your Elite example correctly, it'd be way more punishing than that game too.
Another solution to this I could see is victim-dependent stat dampen, where each PK on the same person would either give them much higher defense against their PKer or the PKer itself would be weakened against that particular target. Though I dunno how hard would it be to code that. And this still doesn't solve the issue of group PKing, but that's a whole different beast bordering on harassment.
Are you referring to Elite Dangerous? How often does someone naturally come across another person let a lone a red in space? Correct me if i'm wrong but unless someone is intentionally hunting the red, it would be very rare for them to naturally come across them while the red will be free to pull individuals out of hyperspace and pick them off.
I don't think this is a good comparison since in a populated world, it won't be rare for you to see others.
Any time you spend keeping yourself safe is time you are wasting. You aren't getting away with it for free if you waste you and your friends time to keeping you safe while you burn off the corruption. Time is also a resource.
Just to be clear before I get a bunch of responses about how I don't want PvP or want the corruption system changed (not necessarily at you entirely).
I don't care as long as Intrepid's goal is achieved. I would be fine if they change their GOAL too. If they make it so that the idea is simply 'hey if you are low level and don't have friends, you should never attempt any open world gathering if you don't wanna be ganked'.
I'm saying 'I am okay with a game where low level players are explicitly told by the system to not even try'. So I honestly don't see Corruption as important. It's probably gonna do exactly what it is meant to do and stop some of the more pointless PvP. I feel it's better for the entire atmosphere, the entire FEELING of the game to be clear to the casual player from the start.
If your goal is to have PvP players who have the skill to dominate situations and fight a lot, Corruption is practically pointless except for 'killing people much below you'. If your goal is to encourage an environment where PvE players have reason to accept PvP and learn to PvP better, there are better systems to achieve this than the Corruption one.
I'm looking forward to TL because it has an interesting twist. No Corruption at night. Good for RP. Hopefully it's terribly crippling in the daytime. That way players can literally go 'oh I'd better get home before it gets dark and random murderhobos start coming out of the forest'. That's gameplay.
If people are willing to take massive exp debt (cause afaik they still get it) to 'raise my Corruption score high enough to actually see me die and suffer for killing them' then they can bring it on.
But you asked' how many such groups are there'.
According to what I understand from MY side of the world... 40% of players will be willing to do this if they are relatively confident that their group will win. As the game goes on, this number rises because players in these groups enjoy the PvP more, expect it more often (from other similar groups) and therefore become MORE incentivized to fight.
This is anecdotal ofc. Could just be the communities of gaming I hang out in. But if you're betting on the 'percentages' and not 'the Corruption system' itself, then there's nothing specific for me to add. I hope Intrepid gets their goal. If their goal is that my group can kill whoever we want and the consequences eventually happen after doing this about 10x, that's fine. If it is that we have to worry about it racking up after flattening the group that comes after me a few times, also fine.
If they DON'T want this to happen, they have 3 more test sessions to figure out a way to make me stop doing it.
Your responses to me are so weird sometimes...
Burning off Corruption is achieved by ... grinding for Exp. We were going to do that anyway, what? Maybe with a bunch of uncoordinated people with separate goals this is somehow 'a waste', but for my group at least...
It was Tuesday.
EDIT: As for the Elite comparison, my group lives one jump from one of the most populated and high traffic star systems in the game.
The entire reason they rack up those numbers is because people ARE trying to kill them and failing to do that. Take that for what you will. If it's quieter around your star system, then glad to hear it.
That's cool about the TL day / night pvp ruleset. I'm going to go read more on that. It's very 'Purge' like.
Cause this is the rough sequence of events I see happening with this system. Let's say it takes an hour of solo farming of mobs of your lvl to remove corruption from one kill. Depending on how Intrepid decides to distribute XP in a party, you might either add or shave off 10 mins to/from that hour. Assuming this corruption clearing is happening with a party - you're most likely farming a location where parties would be leveling (unless there's such a huge variety of farming locations that you can find a completely unknown spot). If there's another party there and they see your PK dude - they can attack him w/o flagging. Literally the whole party of 8 people just targeting one player, which would decrease the ttk by a ton. Even if your party wanted to fight back - they'd have to flag up. And unless your whole party decides to also attack the other party 1 member at a time - your party's ttk will be longer. And that other party can heal freely, while yours will be flagged because they healed/helped the PKer. So now there's potential of another party joining the fight against you, but for now we can assume there's no other party. Most likely within seconds your PKer will be killed by that party and they'll just run away if they don't feel like fighting the rest of your party.
Now let's assume your party is such damn chads that they managed to save your PKer, PK the entire enemy party and even managed to spread out the corruption between different people. Now they have to farm for another hour in that same location (or try switching, but then you're just running around as PKers so that's an issue in itself). And now that victim party is yelling across the lands about a whole party of PKers in that location. So on top of any BHs in the vicinity, there's now several parties who might want to go farm your up for some loot (I assume there's parties because you're in a party-farming location). And again, they won't flag up so they won't have a reason to fight each other - you'd be the only target for all of those people. So you're now being hunted by a ton of people.
And if by any unreasonably small chance you manage to PK literally all of those parties (at which point I'd say Intrepid have failed party balancing), you're now so damn deep in corruption that it'll take you hours upon hours of farming mobs, all while trying not to kill anyone else so that you don't get even deeper WHILE everyone is still hunting you (even more now, cause at this point you're infamous).
I've seen this kind of situation happen in L2 and usually it just ended with a guild TPing in and obliterating the PKers. But Ashes won't have TPing so it'll take a bit longer, but I'd assume the result will be quite similar.
And the alternative to all of that is "just kill your party's PKer first and help him remove XP debt", so the punishment would still get dished out. And as for my suggestion for BH buffer, ideally it would track how the PKer lost his corruption, so that "removal by death" would also remove the reward, while removal by XP gain would keep them for 20-30 mins until the first BH kills them.
I am not saying that Ashes could not get this right because obviously there is a chance. I am eager to see what will happen in practice.
What can I say here other than 'yes'?
My circles is Fighting Gamers.
People who play 'pure PvP' games for hours, explicitly seeking people who they will LOSE to, in order to gain skill.
An overlap is with 'people who like grinding'. Absolutely will. To us the entire POINT OF THE GAME is to randomly provoke strong challenges in PvP. If the game also says 'you are also allowed to actually get a real benefit from smacking around players who don't have the skills sometimes, and the outcome of that will be that stronger players will now come to you ON PURPOSE for more PvP'.
Good grief, if I could 'get Master Rank players to join my lounges faster by smacking around Bronze players', I would do this all the time. Why even bother trying to convince them that I'm worth their time due to being Gold/Platinum when I could just ATTRACT them?
Lemme know if I need to call everyone just to clarify what I'm saying here. Yes, I am telling you that if the outcome of 'me being protected when I am Red by my group' is 'we all spend an evening of being Red and having PvP matches', that will sound like 'a productive Saturday afternoon' to not only my group but at least 25 other people I know, I believe.
I'm COUNTING on that lack of fast travel, you see.
So what I'm trying to say is that you'll get more punishment than fun. Well, that is if your people care at all about their progress/gear. If they don't - more power to ya and I totally support yalls outlook on Ashes
Current Corruption is not a DETERRENT for me or my group.
That's what we have to focus on if we continue this conversation. Not 'will we be punished'. Will we be DETERRED from taking the same action again whenever.
Losing FASTER with low corruption is BETTER so technically the only thing that the current Corruption achieves is deterring us from... winning?
So at some point the best option becomes 'well we're too corrupted now, better let the people who came all this way kill us a few more times'.
Then go back to farming, because now we're not Corrupted.
It's not a time issue. To us, this IS the game. Grind mobs, fight players, maybe do some basic Artisan stuff, and those just come about due to 'Grind Mobs' and is the entire incentive behind 'fight players' (when starting from Green).
I don't know what the rest of people do with their MMO time, but you're talking to someone who plays PvP only games with no inherent reward other than personal skill progression for... I'd say roughly 15 hours a week minimum.
The current Corruption system as described is not a deterrent for us.
The goal of corruption is to reduce ganking, not completely stop it. Since there is more to this game than grinding, people are going to want to do other things than grind exp. When someone decides they don't want to kill someone because they don't want to spend time grinding exp, that is reducing ganking. Also, while you are grinding exp, you are also not ganking people which is again, reducing it.
As for elite dangerous, it sounds like you guys are pretty good at a game that has a high skill ceiling. We will have to see how high ashes skill ceiling is. What system are you guys at?
EDIT: i guarantee there will be times your group will be deterred from pvp because you don't want to deal with the penalty. Even in the scenario where your group is as good as you think they are and have unlimited time, there are plenty of other people who aren't you and will be deterred.
Also, you know you have reduced drops when you have negative exp so you are not farming at full efficiency when you farm off all the negative exp from being corrupted?
Lineage 2. You did not played it on c3 or C4.
For various reasons, I'm not gonna say openly. I never said we were explicitly good. I was referring to other players in the area. As you know (under the assumption that you play) you can check local system data for bounties racked up by other players, and their location.
Now, I'm not saying we're not either. You can conclude that yourself either way based on other things I've said about other games.
Again, I have no issues with the way the Corruption system is. I quite appreciate the 'well now if you want to not be Corrupted you have to go grind mobs' as a way of preventing other combat from occurring. If the game's mobs are weak and boring then yeah, it's a deterrent, but at that point it's a deterrent for the entire game.
I don't want to either brag or 'call out' anyone's skill, but again, I find that in GENERAL Fighting Game players are much MUCH better at gaming in general than people who do not play other games at high levels or midhigh level MOBA players.
I theorize this is because of that raw 'I am doing this only so I can improve and because I enjoy playing my character' that you need to keep going in a game where your standard winrates are pretty much guaranteed to be 50% by design.
So yes, I absolutely agree that for 'people who care about things other than personal skill progression' and 'people who don't like grinding mobs', there will be some deterrent. But that deterrent unfortunately also applies to the unfortunate target.
I have to grind Exp because I'm Corrupted. They have to grind it because they have Exp debt. Even if the Corruption Exp Grind requirement is up to 3x the Exp Debt from dying green (I calculated this back in Alpha-1) I see this as a win and will continue.
Mild rant, mic drop, and now vanished it seems ...
He was ganked and ragequit. 😫
I dunno how you can 'guarantee' other people's behaviours, but to claim that you must be wrong outright would be ridiculous, so sure. At some point, somehow, we will be deterred.
I don't want to be deterred if Intrepid doesn't want me to be. If Intrepid looks at what I've said, and determines 'this is fine, this is the type of people we want to be allowed to just do this', this is absolutely perfect for all parties involved.
If Intrepid wants to deter our behaviour, I will provide them with information on what is a deterrent at any point they request it.
Yes, aware of reduced drops. There are no drops in SFV. You could argue that by 'playing SFV' for 90 minutes 'instead of playing Ashes', we would have achieved zero drops. Therefore if we feel 'hm today it would be more fun/cause greater growth to spend 90 minutes potentially Red in Ashes than to play SFV' then we will have 'more drops than if we went to play something else'.
So really, any condition under which Ashes is a similar or better experience in those terms, is a win.
I think something like what Steven describes herr will make it work. 100% possible to be a non-combatant that runs a town or something amd makes friends with people that actually DO pvp a lot. Like, maybe this PvE only dude is one of the best crafters on the server? Myself, being hardcore into pvp, would want to be cool with this dude since he can likely repair my shit or build new stuff for me. I help defend your caravans, or you while you gather amd in return you cut me some deals on new gear?
I honestly do think hardcore PvPers and PvEers can coexist and actually be cooperative with each other. If Steven's vision comes to fruition, I don't see how this cooperation would not be inevitable. People need to stop thinking it's going to be the pvpers vs pve guys. I think they will work each other.
It's not an experiment xD
People aren't so widely divided by their preferences and a great mmorpg is not as a simple as great PvE or great PvP.
The word "massive multiplayer" shouldn't even apply to what you're after, more like "specific audience" SAORPG (ah pretty good, SAO popular acronym xD).
PvP is the core mechanic of AoC that makes everything work. Either get used to it or play one of the dozens of other MMOs that substitute PvP with endless gear treadmills.
What am I after...??
It depends on what you mean by participate. If you’re murdered while gathering, is that participating? I guess you could say that with very few exceptions you are always potentially subject to player combat.
Aren't we all sinners?
It also depends what Steven meant by this because obviously people can play economy related stuff in cities relatively safe. However, that is not exactly what most of the PvE centric players want only to do. Many still wants to explore, experience the world, gather and fight against the PvE content such as, dungeons, raids and other open world activities. I presume you fall somewhat in that category as well.
It has said several times that they do not want the game become a gankbox, however, what is the level of open world PvP that developers thinks is acceptable, is a good question. At this point we can only speculate and mirror it to the planned corruption system. However, only time will tell via testing where the rules and restrictions finally settles. I predict hard times and that either PvE or OW PvP players will be disapointed to the final form.