Topic: Should groups over a certain size, such as raids, automatically be marked as combatants?

Dolyem

A thought occurred to me that if open world PVP fights progressed into largescale battles over periods of time, a large raid/zerg group of players starting out of combat could potentially insert themselves directly into a fight and wait for the proper moment to attack, staying unflagged to either get killed and cause corruption on purpose or to just obliterate everyone once the opportunity favors them. A simple solution is to mark raids as combatants, the only loophole being players in several regular groups working together, although I suppose the deterrent for that would be friendly fire once they are all flagged. Just a shower thought. What are your opinions on this potential "exploit"? And yes I acknowledge testing needs to be done.

Edit: made a strawpoll for funnsies https://strawpoll.com/polls/1MnwvMkwLy7

Dolyem

NiKr wrote: »

Dolyem wrote: »

But how is that better than keeping a level playing field and preventing loopholes in mechanics like you just mentioned? Everything you described is more or less just a flawed design for PvP engagements.

There would not be a level playing field. All you would do with your suggestion is just make sure that the 3rd party just stays back while they wait for one side of the conflict to win. They would most likely do this even w/o being auto-flagged, but now they'd do this for sure.

Your suggestion brings 0 change to the interaction itself. It only makes it much much much worse for literally any raiding non-pvp group of players. You know all those people that want raiding to be its own thing? You've just fucked them all over with your suggestion. Now they're permaflagged when going to a raid. Now literally anyone can just attack them w/o any penalties. Now anyone sees them from a mile away (even more than if they were just green), because they'll be a huge purple blob on the horizon. And now you've alerted every guild in the vicinity that there's a raid that just respawned nearby, because there's a purple raid running around.

All of those things limit the amount of potential gameplay variety (baiting PKs, having big group decoys, not engaging in pvp when it's more beneficial, etc), while not brining any benefit to the people that are affected by the suggestion. And people would still look for loopholes too. They'd not raid up right up until the boss/even location. They'd keep their distance from each other to not trigger the auto-system (if you go this way instead of just "raid = flagged"). They'd do whatever it would take them to avoid being auto-flagged for no apparent reason. So yet again, the suggestion doesn't give any benefit while brings detrimental changes.

This is a pretty solid argument although I can't say what I stated isn't a massive problem as well, but all of what you said are definitely valid points. I will say however, Open world raid bosses will likely no matter what, be greatly affected by PvP. And what I mentioned earlier about this same exploit being utilized to wipe raids on bosses will be just as big of a problem as what you're stating here. The current design is still flawed from what I can tell, and a better solution than "Well just manipulate the current design" is desirable. Also I don't see an overwhelming need to protect massive groups of players with systems that are made to prevent ganking.

But I digress, I will play it with the current system in place. I will manipulate it in the ways proposed to gain the advantages mentioned. And I won't gripe about it when it is done to me. But I won't say it is a good design.