Regarding Corruption Bounty System

M33P

Is there anything in place to prevent people from collecting their own bounties through an alt account? What could be implemented to keep people from keeping corrupted alts in order to funnel resources into their main.

M33P

Just some of my thoughts -

Making bounties randomized rather than open, then scaling the corrupted players debuff to the level of the player who accepted the bounty may be a fix. But, that does significantly reduce the scale and openness of the bounty system. Idk, a lot of this weighs on just how big the bounty rewards are and whether or not they are derived through the system or the player base. Using taxes to fund the bounty system may actually provide a larger incentive to tax your people and for them to actually want to pay them.

Songcaller

I believe corrupted players will appear on the mini map for Bounty Hunters. I don't believe people can select bounties from a list but not much is known about the bounty system.

Warth

@M33P
So far none that we know of.
I wouldn't be too scared though. Some People will certainly do just that in A2 till it gets hopefully discouraged/fixed

M33P

@Warth
Ah ok, I was mostly just posting this out of curiosity, and to see if anyone had any ideas on how to get ahead of it before it does occur.

BaSkA_9x2

M33P wrote: »

Is there anything in place to prevent people from collecting their own bounties through an alt account?

Probably nothing preventing that, but it's definitely a concern.

We don't know how bounties will work yet, all we have is this:

Taverns are one of the locations that bounties will be posted. As players gain corruption, taverns may offer bounties to eliminate those players; or have a specific area cleared of problem players, thus giving a POI (point of interest) on the world map.(Wiki page)

So we don't know if bounties are paid by other players, if they are paid by the Node's "reserves" or if they are paid by the game system.

What we know is that being heavily corrupted to (probably) get a big bounty on your head means you will need to die many times to lose corruption, gain EXP debt (which is probably meaningless when you're at max level), gear degradation (need to spend money/mats to repair it, no matter if it's equipped or in your inventory), skill and stat dampening (probably severe dampening during many deaths, up until you're almost back to green) and of course the risk of being killed by someone other than your alt/friend and dropping your gear.

All in all I feel like the BH system is very interesting and a good addition to the game but bounties will not be the driving factor for hunting reds, killing them for their loot will be instead.

Mag7spy

This has to be one of the harder solutions to prevent self griefing tbh, if a guildy kills you or someone who was a guild member in the last 24 hours shouldn't be able to loot your body. Can also make the looting rights random and shared between the people in the area with each person only able to pick up certain amounts of the loot. Enough where if they self kill they might get screwed over and they have to rethink if it will be worth it at times.

x4 negative xp should also help as it is already in the game.

Warth

Mag7spy wrote: »

This has to be one of the harder solutions to prevent self griefing tbh, if a guildy kills you or someone who was a guild member in the last 24 hours shouldn't be able to loot your body. Can also make the looting rights random and shared between the people in the area with each person only able to pick up certain amounts of the loot. Enough where if they self kill they might get screwed over and they have to rethink if it will be worth it at times.
x4 negative xp should also help as it is already in the game.

Guild restrictions wont do anything. Many guild already plan to split into a plethora of 30man Sub-Guilds if the perks from keeping it small would be worth it. The same will happen with corruption and bounties, if guilds focused on open world pvp deem it profitable to have 2+ unaffiliated Guilds in-game, while being 1 guild outside.

I think the easiest/only way to limit abuse of the corruption system would be implementing the following measures:

The system cant be creating stuff out of thin air. Once a system does that, people will exploit the shit out of it. All material rewards gained by the Bounty Hunter need to be those, another player (in this case the corrupted) loses. Aka, the material he has lost, the gear he might lose, the hunting certificates...
No generation of an automatic gold bounty, as that becomes easily exploitable. If a player wants to set an bounty, then that is okay as the scale maintains balance.

The non-materials based rewards (EXP, Progress in the BH-Progression Path, BH-Ranking Points...) need to scale with the time play-time the corrupted survived. From close to 0% when killed the second after he went corrupted, to 100% some hour(s) later.
This way, a person whod commit murder with one of his Alts and collected the bounty with one of his mains a second later would not receive anything. By the time the reward scaled up to its full amount, plenty of other Bounty Hunters would have time to swoop in and collect the bounty.

Thats how i would go about it as it basically prevents/limits most of the exploiting scenarios.

Songcaller

Nothing to stop someone from killing greens all day, log out, then bring the bounty hunter late at night to do the reverse deeds. You will always have options. Plenty of techniques can be transferred from the old PvP Xp farms from other MMOs.

Warth

Neurath wrote: »

Nothing to stop someone from killing greens all day, log out, then bring the bounty hunter late at night to do the reverse deeds. You will always have options. Plenty of techniques can be transferred from the old PvP Xp farms from other MMOs.

That is why, as suggested, you should scale the benefits of killing him as a bounty hunter based on the play-time the corrupted survived.
Corrupted logs out, logs back in, is killed by their bounty hunter friend? Bounty Hunter receives barely anything.

Also, quite personally, Id be all for the character of a corrupted player staying present for 5-15 minutes after logging out (same as caravans) for that exact thing.

Songcaller

Yeah. I would agree with your stance. It shouldn't take too long to sync with the systems. I mean, Ashes is quite social and I'll be a healer base. More often than not I'd be in pvp that doesn't cause corruption. I also don't plan to go corrupted unless I really want to at a certain time. On top of that, I've decided not to be a Bounty Hunter so I don't really have to worry about the systems. Hence my knowledge wasn't up to date on the Bounty Hunter parameters.

Mag7spy

The main issue is you lose corruption from dying to players, if they did it akin to BDO where you can only lose corruption from your own effort, there would be less chance for them to have a comp out. Yet then it might be too punishing with a much higher risk.

Songcaller

BDOs system is really rubbish. Its become more watered down the longer BDO has existed. It literally means very little to be red in BDO these days. You can even go red by killing protected animals in BDO. The system is a really bad system which started out quite grand but has turned into a joke.

Mag7spy

I think that has to do with BDO as a whole gameplay wise, though im to really trying to get that deep into it as that isn't the point.

It is mainly making it so you only lose corruption by doing in game stuff and not losing it from being pked. Though a friend could pk them to get some of the stuff in the inventory they most likely wouldn't want to give up all their gear and weapons. Like they could but they would get so much debt xp it get pretty big and they still would have to work off corruption while other people could still flag on them.

M33P

What if the gear became corrupted too, preventing other players from equipping it. Instead, they would have to dismantle the gear for their reward. This would keep a net positive for bounty hunters but a net negative for bounty abusers. The bounty hunter could also resell the gear back to the corrupted player to make profit that way. Thoughts?

Mag7spy

M33P wrote: »

What if the gear became corrupted too, preventing other players from equipping it. Instead, they would have to dismantle the gear for their reward. This would keep a net positive for bounty hunters but a net negative for bounty abusers. The bounty hunter could also resell the gear back to the corrupted player to make profit that way. Thoughts?

I had a similar kind of idea, though it was more so the gear drops are corrupted for that player and they can't equip or pick up if it drops while they are corrupted. That way it would remove the reason for self killing to protect their gear or drops. So only other players would be able to benefit from it.

Warth

@Mag7spy that wouldnt work imo.

Gear is replaceable. Even if the corrupted themselves cant use it, he will just drop it for a guild mate and take another gear piece from him or the guild instead.

Also, circumventing corruption penalties is an entirely different topic imo.
OP is specifically asking about gaming the BH system. You dont need to be a BH to circumvent corruption

M33P

@Mag7spy

Hadn't thought about them dropping gear in order to hide it. Not sure if that's even possible within the game. So ya, if they do have the option to drop gear, I'd probably make it to where no one could re-equip it after dropping. But like Warth said nobody should be able to re-equip it after it leaves the corrupted players inventory, or they'll just hand it off to alt accounts/friends. Re-equipping would give them a route to dodge penalties and possibly game the reward system.

*Read your comment wrong lmao*

Mag7spy

Yes he can give it away but he can't use it, its simply about add more and more reason for a player to not want to get self pked. Even more so if he had very rare gear on him that he would never be able to use again (can tie to to guild members unable o use it as well). The greater the attachment the less chance for this to get around the system. There is no full way of avoid all consequences its simply about increasing the scale to one side so it is less likely people try to avoid it.

Dolyem

My suggestion is destroy gear dropped upon corruption death and instead grant materials of similar value. That way if someone does try to off themselves, they still lose their gear that dropped and have to go through the trouble of recrafting or farming it.

Mag7spy

I want to loot that gear when i kill a red though, it give less reason to want to kill them. There is nothing better than when your character drops down on their knees to loot a player and you pick up their stuff.

Dolyem

Mag7spy wrote: »

I want to loot that gear when i kill a red though, it give less reason to want to kill them. There is nothing better than when your character drops down on their knees to loot a player and you pick up their stuff.

Well sure, but its entirely exploitable. With materials of equal value you still have plenty of incentive, but the person getting corruption will be in the negative even if they have an alt kill themselves.

George_Black

I dont think people become game developers by allowing such easy exploits. There's got to be more to making games than this.

Dolyem wrote: »

My suggestion is destroy gear dropped upon corruption death and instead grant materials of similar value. That way if someone does try to off themselves, they still lose their gear that dropped and have to go through the trouble of recrafting or farming it.

Too punishing. It also makes it a less tasty loot for hopeful hunters.

Mag7spy

No one is perfect so anyone can miss something or not think something is as big a deal. And until they show the system working in full and have people testing it all we can do is speculate flaws that can pop up.

Okeydoke

I'm not a brain surgeon but I'm pretty sure Steven realized that friends could kill and loot their corrupted friends when he dreamed up the system.

M33P

@Okeydoke

There's no harm in discussing it... Not sure why some of you are acting like we're attacking the devs creds. If anything, I'm just hoping this thread can act as inspiration for any devs passing by. When working in a creative field, inspiration can come from even the most half-baked of ideas.

Mag7spy

Simply why we are discussing ways to reduce exploits and not just stating the obvious o.O

Dolyem

George_Black wrote: »

I dont think people become game developers by allowing such easy exploits. There's got to be more to making games than this.

Dolyem wrote: »

My suggestion is destroy gear dropped upon corruption death and instead grant materials of similar value. That way if someone does try to off themselves, they still lose their gear that dropped and have to go through the trouble of recrafting or farming it.

Too punishing. It also makes it a less tasty loot for hopeful hunters.

Is it too punishing? Either way you're supposed to lose the gear in that scenario if you die as a corrupted. And I agree the loot is less appealing but as far as exploits go it seems like a logical solution.

George_Black

There is the chance that your friend will pick up the item. You will be eternarly greatful to them.
It's a moment similar to a goalkeeper saving a penalty shot.

Also, sometimes random players tend to give the items back to the red. Either because they hope to carry favour with the strong guild of the red player, or just out of human decency. Chance to form friendship even after a confrontation.

Take into consideration the social aspect of the game. With your suggestion you force a mechanical outcome in a system that basically want to allow the players to serve justice and punishment. Dont try to provide a solution to an exploit that is not there.

I disagree with the idea.

Dolyem

George_Black wrote: »

There is the chance that your friend will pick up the item. You will be eternarly greatful to them.
It's a moment similar to a goalkeeper saving a penalty shot.

Also, sometimes random players tend to give the items back to the red. Either because they hope to carry favour with the strong guild of the red player, or just out of human decency. Chance to form friendship even after a confrontation.

Take into consideration the social aspect of the game. With your suggestion you force a mechanical outcome in a system that basically want to allow the players to serve justice and punishment. Dont try to provide a solution to an exploit that is not there.

I disagree with the idea.

Fair points. I am simply thinking up exploits and trying to provide solutions. It's definitely some red tape. If you limit something like I have suggested, you will limit in more ways than intended like you mentioned. But allowing for those things to be done may also enable exploitation of the system. Its a coin flip for one pro/con vs another. I'm looking forward to the testing of it in alpha 2 regardless.

TheMarten

We can hope the Devs have a solution. I thought I heard or read somewhere that this game will bring back the $15/month fee. If that is true that may limit, but not stop, the Alt farming.

I do kind of like the mats in place of gear for loot idea, as it seems like crafted and rare items that have been equipped should not be passable. I mean, if you can't put it in a box to trade, it should not be lootable.

Interesting thread, thanks for starting it.