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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.
How will open world dungeons function properly
PherPhur
Member
So I seen on the wiki that you have to press a specific key combination to hit another player who is not flagged.
With the corruption mechanic surely no one is going to actually fight each other at the dungeon, instead just fighting the monster to get the 40 or 60% dmg needed to claim the drops. Which will make the dungeon very easy.
Is there something i'm missing? Cause this seems like a very poor system. I'm hoping that people are auto flagged as combatants upon entering a dungeon, but i haven't heard anything on this yet.
With the corruption mechanic surely no one is going to actually fight each other at the dungeon, instead just fighting the monster to get the 40 or 60% dmg needed to claim the drops. Which will make the dungeon very easy.
Is there something i'm missing? Cause this seems like a very poor system. I'm hoping that people are auto flagged as combatants upon entering a dungeon, but i haven't heard anything on this yet.
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At the end of the fight, the party with the highest damage done, including first tagging bonus, will be granted looting rights.
Interesting and unique i suppose. So dungeoning will probably stay a PVE experience.
I was hoping people would start unflagged, but make it so that anyone not in your party could get hit without that special key combination. And make it so people stack corruption half as much if they kill another unflagged player, so even if someone goes and purposefully stands in someone elses AoE and dies it doesnt grief them terribly.
I could just imagine someone accidentally hitting another player, flagging themselves as a combatant and a chain effect of someone in the other party killing them, then they getting flagged, then someone kills them, so on and so forth.
I think that would add a lot more interesting dynamic rather than everyone being so focused on the mobs and loot.. A nice middle ground to just auto flagging everyone as a combatant and having it be the way it is now.
Yea I guess I hadn't really thought of it completely. I was going to say it seems more likely that if 2 groups meet each other at a dungeon on accident that the people getting attacked would just let themselves be killed so the other people get corrupted, them come back and wipe them and their reduced stats(plus get some of their gear).
But I hadn't thought about one person being the designated person in a group to get corrupted.
But, considering that travel times won't be instantaneous, wasting time running back to the dungeon might be way less beneficial than just flagging up against your attackers and just beating them. At least that's how it went down deep in L2's dungeons, and that game had TPs to the dungeon entrances so it didn't even take that long to return.
True. Dang healers always getting the shit end of the stick
Well thanks for the clarification and insight, this makes me much more excited to play the game.
I'm still working out what I think is likely to happen in a dungeon setting, tbh.
I don't think the notion of a group only having on PKer is going to be a thing in Ashes. I just can't see how that would work - I can't see why one group would stand there and be killed knowing only one player would gain corruption. The only way I see this being a thing is if groups only ever attack each other while one is taking on some content with a moderate difficulty.
To me, I can't think of a worse way for the game to go than to make this normal behavior.
And hell, we don't even know if the whole pvp system won't change before release. I sure as hell hope it doesn't, but there's no real assurance for that.
From everything I've understood so far, success in AoC largely based around the amount of people you have helping you to do something. So I imagine either people will either bring extra guildies in to protect them as they clear a dungeon or they'll hire mercenaries.
But then you'll also have people like me who are just hanging out watching the whole thing unfold, figuring out who the underdog is and siding with them. If we can't rid the game of RWT, then being a check is the least I can do.
It's not much, but it's honest work.
Think of them as overland content inside caves, ruins, forests, towers, etc etc. But the mobs will hit hard, have high HP, be aggressive and social, with slows stuns and aoe dmg. They are the places were the best materials, gold (or certificates for gold) and xp is given. Since the mobs respawn, people find a corner and grind xp. If other groups come near them pvp/pk may happen to protect the corner.
There are raidbosses around, which can be contested. Often deep inside a dungeon there might be an epic raid boss, maybe related to a very challenging quest, either to enter the chamber or an extra reward or progress after killing it.
As for your flagging concerns there are 0 functional problems, 0 social problems. AoC isnt the first game to have flagged pvp pk or special button. Lineage 2 (mmorpg) was EXACTLY like that and everything worked fine.
The catch? These areas are for guilds or smasll organized groups. You cant just join a groupfinder with a bunch of randoms you've never met and expect to hold your corner or kill an RB.
To any suggestions about the CORE DESIGN the answer is "no". No discussion.
Is there anything you still need clarification on?
I can see guilds duking it out through an open dungeon especially when rare materials are at stake - the two most common fights being attempting wipe the actively tanking party (to maximize % loot share) and right after the kill (to steal rare materials harvested).
No, Nikr already cleared some stuff up and I also hadn't given thought to one person of a group being the designated Pkr
I had just thought of what one of my friends was saying, being a healer with very low health to bait one shots to corrupt people and I figured that would be the likely outcome of an encounter between 2 groups, just letting them kill you to corrupt them.
But i also didn't realize you get less corruption for killing someone around your level. So yea, everything seems perfectly fine. Better than fine really, I don't think it could be done any better.
In my opinion, attacking a player or a group while they are taking on content is low.
It isn't something that should be prevented from happening, but IMO it should be discouraged. Perhaps something as simple as applying corruption if you attack and kill a group while they are in combat with mobs (just a thought at this stage).
To me, the exception to this is world bosses. I'd be quite happy if the area around world bosses was designated as a battleground so that corruption wasn't a thing at all here, and everyone could fight freely.
Cause to me, being always on the look out during mob grinding was the biggest part of the thrill of the game. The mobs themselves gave me nothing (even in the harder fights), so potential attacks from other people excited me to no end.
To me, even winning a siege that it looked like we were destined to lose in Archeage pales in comparison to beating an encounter we have been building up to for 11 months, and working directly on for 3 months.
Obviously that isn't all content - that is something that at best happens once a year.
So, here's my thinking.
If I am in a group that is doing dungeon content, that dungeon content will be appropriate for where we are. If another group is on the same content, that content would be appropriate for where they are. As such, the assumption should be made that both groups would be roughly equal - you are not likely to come across a group that is massively better or worse geared than you on content that is designed to provide you with gear (I understand this is not the case in L2 - but itemization in Ashes does look set to be far more substantial than L2's, so logically, the above should hold).
If we are keeping an eye out for a rival group, the assumption would be that we would then take them on, while the PvE content we were fighting is still attacking us.
Thus, the assumption is that the PvE content we are taking on is so basic that it makes little difference when taking on a similarly geared group.
What this means to me is that the game will never be able to offer a PvE challenge. This means that any time we are taking on PvE and are not being attacked, we are only experiencing a small portion of the game - essentially we are keeping ourselves so under extended that we can take on a similarly geared group at the drop of a hat.
Honestly, that just sounds mind numbingly boring for the bulk of the time.
No. Just the bad rep is enough. Stop hsndholding gamers in a social game. Let them deal with scum. Not everything has to be coded for.
I know people said they don't want asian styled MMO AoE combat, but maybe its best that the mobs be made like this so it gives some wiggle room for these PvP interactions without making the PvE so boring.
What I mean is make it so one mob is pretty easy, a small disadvantage to being in combat with and fighting another similarly geared and leveled player. But work that up so that it's the "risk vs reward" I keep hearing so much about. You can fight 4 mobs at once if you think it's safe or you want to take the risk, but if a PKr catches you you're a goner.
Make it so that mobs CCs and certain debuffs don't come into effect until you have a couple or a few aggro'd at once, or scale it. No CC for 1 aggrod mob, little for 2, more for 3, ect.(if the mob even has these things)
Cause even a little CC or certain debuffs from fighting 1 mob could be dangerous in PvP.
And like Elder said up above, scale the boss based on an average of your most recent fights. So if you have been taking that high risk on all the other mobs in the dungeon, then the boss is going to be high risk too if you tag it.
I think that a threat control tool in several classes could probably make this interaction more interesting and keep the mob difficulty high. Something like "the current threat list gets cleaned" and a "generate threat against a picked target" could throw a huge wrench into the newcomers plans, where the super hardcore mob suddenly forgets all about its original attackers and now goes for the new dudes.
Have those abilities on a long cooldown and maybe make them class-synergistic and you'll have yourself a unique tool to use for those kinds of situations, which would be somewhat useless during a normal fight against the mob. Like, yes, you can use those abilities to counter some particular mob mechanics, but if you know that you're farming a highly contested mob, I'd assume you'll save that threat control in case some competitors come to you.
If you are not engaged by the content itself (ie, the PvE), then you are not enjoying the content at all. If you are having to keep an eye out for potential PvP while participating in PvE, then you are not engaged in PvE at all.
Having the game designed like this would be great for a game that is billed as a PvP game. In fact, I would go as far as to say that is what I would expect.
A game that is trying to claim to be PvX though, it needs to do better.
However, it is people like you that are the reason I said it shouldn't just be made so you can't attack a group while they are in combat with PvE - I know you would be happy to take a bit of a corruption hit (or some other small penalty). I'm absolutely saying that you should be able to do that - it just needs to be so rare that people aren't always on the lookout for would be attackers - so that they can engage with and enjoy the PvE content.
This isn't a bad idea at all.
"People like me"...the f you talking about? You are just jumping to conclusions.
As for the whole enjoyment/look behind your back that's just irrelevant.
Four reasons why I dont want it coded.
First, it's not needed. In L2 people have managed to turn around such an attack, taking the PKers items as well. That's what people like me like. To get red players gear. Or the enemy healer and support can try to defend the PKr, resulting in combatant status, leading to PvP.
Second, staff like that, low behaviour leads to clan wars and alliances. A protective system like you propose takes away the human anger and resolve.
Third, small guilds will benefit from being able to jump on the large raiding groups that most definatly will dominate the open world raiding scene. Why add corruptiom as an added obstacle? You hinder the bandits.
And fourth, it's a stupid proposition. You basically make a PvE race to decide which group gets to loot. You are making all open world RBs semi-instanced. To hell with that. Dont prohibit player interaction.
People like you should learn to stop trying to make the opposite side seem like the unreasonable one, especially when they come from a place of first hand experience (L2 pvp and raiding).
God it makes me angry when you think you got everybodys motives figured out; they are the bad guy and you are the voice of reason...
Am I wrong on that point? Do you actually want systems that prevent players from doing things they would want to do?
To your 4 points:
1, Ashes is not L2. L2's PvE content was shit. If Ashes has L2's PvE content, the game will fail. People expect better these days - and developers need to provide better. Even pure PvP games have better PvE content now than L2 had, PvX games need to be a step up from that.
2, The proposal isn't preventing anything in this regard - this is a non-factor.
3, Small guilds should not be able to easily prevent larger guilds taking on content. Attacking players while they are engaged in difficult content is an action that increases potential reward, but decreases risk. Adding the possibility of corruption gain in to the situation adds back some risk.
4, Intrepid are specifically adding a mechanic to the game to facilitate this PvE race you are speaking so poorly of. Also, if you actually read what I have written, you would note that I specifically said any world bosses should specifically be in battlegrounds - meaning corruption is simply not possible on them.
People like you should read and consider reasonable suggestions before you start trying to pull them to bits. Literally none of your points above are valid, and several of them have been literally directly addressed to make them non-issues.
This is actually a really cool Idea. Though, considering how many players there are in the area i'm not sure it'd work well most of the time. Unless of course when it resets threat it picks a random person not in your group that's within ranged class range.
Or it could be like a hunters misdirect skill in WoW except you can use it on people not in your party lol.
Probably not as I have opined, but I would expect Intrepid to come up with something - potentially not until after launch though.
I do not think Intrepid want boring PvE content, and they can not have engaging PvE content and also expect players to be able to take on PvP at the same time.
And rest assured, literally the only solution any game has come up with so far to resolve this issue is to have boring PvE content. L2, Tera, Wildstar, Archeage, Albion - the one thing they all have in common is that 99.9% of the content is dead easy to the point where you don't even need to pay attention to it.
It's a pretty fucked up system to have people attacking someone while they are fighting something and letting them die, escaping corruption, just so they can get the mob. I think the vast majority of people here would agree with that. And I'm on the PvP side of the PvX. I will be doing my fair share of getting corrupted lol.
So we just have to ask whats a FUN solution. We certainly don't want to take away the pvp aspect of encounters in the open world dungeons, that's, i think, the main reason they are open world.
Nikr brought up a really cool idea. I think some kind of skill for the tank that can insta reset threat is neat, cause it adds a lot to the pve side of things but it also helps solve that problem a little. Because if threat works like it does in WoW then just buffing causes threat generation. So if someone starts attacking you and the tank yells to his team "FREEZE" and everyone stops what they are doing, then someone on the attacking side is going to pull the mob.
Additively, or alternatively a hunter type misdirect that can work on other players outside your group is a neat addition as well. All the cool dynamics that could arise from that I think most people would consider fun. It'd just have to only be usable on someone who is flagged as a combatant so people don't use it on unflagged people for a corruption free kill.
Having a misdirect type skill on all classes would be interesting as the person doing the most damage to the other is going to have the mobs support as well(if they both have misdirected). Prehaps make it a weapon skill or something that people don't automatically have to make it slightly unique. Not sure on that.
There's also the option of having mobs be weak by themselves but strong in numbers which would help the situation and add a risk vs. reward aspect to things as well. Although that will lean the game more to the aoe side of things which might not even be possible with all the systems AoC already has baked in at this point.