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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
I think your problem here is that you see 'Combatant' as being a term that means 'engaging in combat' whereas it's a specific term for a state within a system.
Just forget about 'Combatant' and 'Non Combatant' and deal with just colors.
Red is by definition attackable by Green. Red is attacked by Green because Red killed one Green, and Greens have 'shared hate' which persists until one of them kills the Red or they outrun the entire serverworth of Green.
The more 'Green Mobs' you kill, the higher your 'Server Hate' becomes vs 'Green Mobs' until you do a quest, die to them enough times, or fight enough of the monsters that are their enemies.
"Engage in Combat" vs not has nothing to do with this. You are marked Red because you have 'Server Green Hate' debuff active. Go cleanse your debuff.
Bounty Hunters are just 'Elites' that can TRACK you while Red, but don't contribute to Green Hate. They're a different mob.
But just as I was about to type out a good response, Azherae pretty much laid it out already. OP disagrees with the currently established laws of the Verra land and that is fine. It's as fine as Dygz disagreeing with open seas flagging, or several other "pvpers" who disagree with the absence of unpunishable ffa genocide in Ashes.
If you disagree with the system - you're free to not participate in the game that has it. This system has been tested for years and worked just fine. A lot of people (and mainly me) are interested in Ashes because it has this kind of system.
P.S. if you're not willing to take the currently presented punishment for murder of innocence in Ashes - you're a weakling imo. I've played with this system for 12 years. None, of thousands of people who I played with, complained about gaining more corruption for killing more innocent people. None saw their executioners (the "greens") as valid combatants, because they weren't. They were just killing a hardcore mob. And the PKer became such a mob after killing an innocent person.
And you know what real hardcore pvpers did? They didn't become monsters. They'd either outplay their opponents in pve (if their target didn't respond to their flagging). Or they'd participate in pvp. PK was seen as the weakling's way out, because it meant that you had no other way to win against your target. And I bet it'll be seen in the same light in Ashes (I sure as hell will see it as such).
End of the day though its fine people aren't going to care to look at any side and will only stick to what they want rather than having a more unbiased discussion.
You just need to harass someone so much until they leave and see who is willing to waste more time depending on situations. If you keep stunning them and slowing them eventually they might attack you back.
Though like i said earlier i feel the concept of pking isn't going to be a real focus on pvp and more an emotion thing. You simply start wars between people and then you kill them as much as you want without corruption. It makes pvp more focused on wars, politics, groups than individual pvp. Reducing that to a faction allows being disrupted during pve extremely more minimal from constant small encounters.
So easy for me to look at both sides as far as design reasons are made.
And with owpvp, you'd usually flag up with your basic attack (either ability or phys atk) to let your target know your intention. That hit also lets them know how strong you are. If the target doesn't flag back and continues to farm mobs, you start farming mobs too and try to outfarm them (L2's looting right worked in the same way as AoC's iirc). If you can't outfarm them, you'd usually either move onto another room, because you "lost" already, or you'd try and bring the other player low enough in hp so that they leave the room to you or the mobs kill them. And only after all of those options failing do you proceed to just PKing them and hoping that there's no one around to punish you before you cleanse your karma.
But even that interaction only really worked on private servers where you had system buffs and could clear difficult content solo. In normal setups you'd always be in a group and you'd always fight back if flagged upon. Mainly because you had limited time to play together and getting your whole group to the same depth of the dungeon would take more time than just fighting back rn and protecting your farm. Ashes will have the same party-based content and an even bigger incentive to flag up as a party, because there's no TPs.
In other words, yes, PKing will be a very rare occurrence imo and will only happen deep within dungeons where you have the highest XP gains combined with the lowest amount of people farming the location, because murdering the other party's healer to try and remove said party from the location would be way easier and faster than trying to outfarm them. And btw, this could also lead to the "red vs purple" interactions that the OP was so confused with at the start of the thread.
But even that kind of situation would only happen if both parties are not in warring guilds or citizens of warring nodes. And if we're talking about best content around (for their lvl) - I'd assume they'd probably be at war, exactly because it's always faster to fight for the location and farm it after (and fighting through corruption is riskier).
Question, how long did it take to remove the karma in that game from one kill? Would help me gauge potential direction for AoC.
Ideally you'd even let your PKer leave the party real quick and kill a few mobs solo, just so that he got the max XP possible and removed karma faster.
Considering mob amounts and respawns, it'd usually take 2-3 mins, if your party was clearing the whole room within 1-1.5 mins. And it would take the dead party 2-3 mins to return to the same place in the dungeon if they were super well cooperated and just booked it right from the TP location to the room. So if your own party was somewhat weak, while the victim party was strong - they might've come back before you cleansed your corruption. Same would happen if you were on higher counts of PKs.
Though again, this was somewhat rare, because you'd usually just have warring guilds which were just a ffa, so any given room was a revolving door of parties that were constantly killing each other.
I'd personally want a roughly same timeframe for AoC's corruption cleansing and victim returnal. Your first PK of an equally-lvled player deep in the best XP dungeon should give you the amount of corruption that would take the same amount of time to clear on those mobs as the time required for your victim to return to the same place from their spawn location. The returnal time would have to account for whether you can use a mount in the dungeon, of course.
I feel like this is the fairest way to go about the system. Your first PK is barely punishable. Your second can already be punished by the victim themselves. And higher count of PKs would give even the BHs outside of the dungeon enough time to come hunt you. And if you just so happen to be a disliked person or a member of a disliked guild - even your first PK might be punished by other green players in rooms nearby, if your victim shouts to them about you.
And that last point is my biggest argument for the system remaining just as it is. Green not flagging against reds is way more social. You going red gives any green around you an outlet for their "sense of justice". It'd still be their choice whether to give up their farm and risk their loot or to just let the victim deal with you.
And again, I'm talking in the context of party farming, not solo. Stopping your farm to kill a PKer as a solo player is quite easy and fast, but convincing your whole party that this one PKer is worth several minutes of their farm, potential loss of the farming location (cause someone might take your place in your absence) AND potential death on top of that - now that's a whole different story. At which point there's a higher chance that a BH can go and try dealing with the PKer. Obviously there's a chance that having a BH in each party will be the meta, but that just means that there's enough PKers to justify that, which means that PKing is not as harshly punished as it might seem rn, which means there's quite a lot of forced pvp on top of guild/node-based one - and all of that sounds super fun to me, as a pvper.
If it is based on xp and you are killing lowbies it be a pretty big consequence on top of it to find mobs that will give you proper xp as well and helps prevent that kind of griefing.
This is why I'm almost sure that lowbie PKing will almost never happen, while equal lvl PKs will just be quite rare. I truly believe that people have this huge illogical fear of this system simply because they've never really played with it, or played with a bastardized version of it that. And even more people come from games like WoW, where genociding your enemy was the norm, so of course they'd immediately think that pvp is trash and should be removed.
Ya that i agree with you on, im a way more pvp heavy person I have no issue pking tons of people. But Even i realize a lot of people are not like that on games lol. Even for me i have a rule to generally not go red when I played BDO and would limit myself and stop.
I pretty much try to create more friction because it is more of a entertaining story then people never really pking at all.
Granted for some people one death is too much for them cause they just want to relax and not deal with anything. It be nice for people to have some acceptance on pvp but some pvers are just not like that at all. It is normally a mental note I need to take based on my own guild mates to protect and help motivate them and teach them the fun elements of PvP/PvX with the experience as a whole. Its the downs that make the ups feel so great after all.
lol - welcome back.
Heh - I figured you were away for a bit when I didn't see you weigh in. Good luck!
If the non combatant initiates combat with a corrupted then dies.. the corrupted level should not increase.
It just means I won't be playing because that doesn't fit my playstyle.
Revenge of the greens. Don't piss them off, they're peaceful until you push them too far and murder one of their own, then you realize the game was rigged from the start.
heheheheheh
I'm going to tell you a secret. Something nobody here will tell you. As one fellow PvP'er who will get corrupted to another fellow PvPer who will get corrupted(by the sounds of it)
Its just for fun. They could have a mechanic that throws you in prison for a period of time like IRL and subvert the whole mess, but that's just not fun is it.
Lets be real here, bounty hunters will love their jobs, people seeing corrupted players will see an opportunity to grief them and take their gear and love doing it. Greens will be hopefully satisfied when you get corrupted and they are able to kill you without flagging themselves, making killing them stack more corruption.
We're the bad guys, its a game, we all know how this works but most don't like to admit it. You gotta have drama. They wouldn't have made the corruption system if they didn't want it to be like this. They know there are people like us that will grief a green. And yea, we get the shit end of the stick, and the greens seem OP when they won't get flagged for attacking you, but it's just how things work.
Embrace it, have fun, enjoy knowing other people will be having fun(except maybe that guy you killed to go red lol. Meh, they'll come to realize they're just allowing someone else to have fun trolling or at the very least be satisfied that you got punished for it). And when that time comes, when you've pissed off so many people on the server that you have to reroll lol, embrace it and know you've served your purpose well.
I personally will be getting corrupted trolling zergy meta minded zoomers, but maybe you do it just to blindly troll someone(me and you will probably get in a fight if they're just a chill player), either way I think we'll all have a lot of fun in AoC.
You know the risks, the conditions, the problems that would arise. If you made the decision to kill a green in the middle of green valley, i dont think the other greens should have to turn purple to kick you out. You've already decided to turn currupted, whats a little more curruption matter to you, while they have to fight for their potential lives.
I only ever intend to PK someone if I have a reason, such as the other guy being an asshole to me. So I accept the penalty of becoming corrupted, and then having to work it off, with potentially that work being disrupted by Bounty Hunters that are after my head. So all in all, most of the system design is really good in my opinion.
I simply disagree with that special condition that greens who are INITIATING combat with me (so I'm not continuing my murder spree or anything like that) can freely attempt to kill me and I have to think twice before fighting back. It makes little sense to design it that way for greens but not non-greens if you wish to punish red additionally for engaging in PvP. I signed up for a specific amount of penalty by killing that one green, I didn't sign up for additional penalty of either having my penalty increased for fighting back greens, or being forced to give up and die in case escape is not an option. The game should not force me to give up my life if my intent is to work the corruption off without dying. Such penalty is too harsh, and if it outweights whatever reason you could ever have to PK someone, the system in fact becomes unusable because you'll never want to PK anyone, in which case a simple PvP on/off flagging system would've been simpler.
It's simply a bad decision in my opinion, which hopefully gets revisited after testing. We do have quotes from Steven where he says the system should not penalize too harsh so as to become unusable, so we'll just have to wait and see how they balance it.
The solution to this is to not be alone, technically.
Let's assume I'm in full group and we come across someone who doesn't belong to our Node, who doesn't pay protection or belong to the known organizations, etc, and they seem to be at-level or even a bit lower. We fight them, they choose not to fight back at all.
Because they are not fighting back, it is easy to have our Fighter kill them and turn Red.
Two Greens show up to 'avenge' the fallen. Bard buffs, Summoner bodyblocks, I heal. And then we just sort of ignore them, it's like having a mob on you that can't be killed for whatever reason. But we're also presumably in an area with decently strong mobs (that's how we were working off the Fighter's Corruption, after all). We reposition so that the mobs spawn in position to attack the Greens while I keep the Fighter standing. I'm Purple now, but I don't care because being Purple doesn't mean the Greens can attack ME without going purple. The moment they do, the Fighter counterattacks.
Players who like PvP should probably find a group to be the 'Designated Red' for. Just don't kill people too often when solo.
The conditions required for there to be no solution to Greens are the only thing stopping this from being an essentially PvP game.
What other situation exists? By design, once you are corrupted, everything is a Red vs Green situation unless you are in an Objective PvP space. That's how you can tell this is the intent.
"Purple vs Red" only exists as a random afterthought consequence of multiple players interacting at once.
Greens do not have a choice to make you stop attacking them. You have decided to kill them. Its "herd mentality" you see it in nature. We are safe here because there are many of us here.
You have your own intellect. Dont kill a green in a situation where greens heavily outnumber you. In every situation where you are not stupid, greens not flagging to attack you has no issues. I do not support protecting the stupid. Never have never will.
It is going to be much more easy to get them fed to mobs in this game compared to do, you just need to not over attack but use a weak cc on them. And better yet they can't fight back else its a free kill for you xD.
Reds are fucked. Yes. That's the whole point.