Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
Saying one can simply grind the corruption off isn't a answer if they get corruption bombed so hard their gear drops on death with a high chance and need to spend hours to work it off or lose hours of progress from the corruption and dying.
Only way you can solve the issue is if they have a different corruption system for boats, and boats can not damage players.
Though they don't need a different corruption system when they can just have open water pvp as it is a different kind of content. Something people need to simply realize, again you don't need to like every mode in a game to enjoy a game...
Increase risk? Provide another variety of gameplay desired by the devs? Pirates are cool? Could be any or none of those
If it were me, I'd send in the first ship with level ones as a decoy, they'll likely die quickly from attacks from other ships. This would corrupt those ships and allow for less penalties for the rest of my fleet but more penalties for the enemy. Instant advantage
That sounds like the interesting political/strategy based risk gameplay Steven was aiming for to me. But how is this more likely at sea than land?
Also I think I might have missed an assumption you were making. I didn't realize you were proposing the scenario as 'ships gain corruption'.
Exploiting the system is strategy...... When has Steven ever said that?
To me it's an exploit. The difference between land and sea is on land you'll select an individual and see their level, on a ship, you'll attack from a distance hitting another ship with players on it/potentially hiding in it. Send 10 lvl 1 rogues stealthed on it and they die. Not a great time for the attackers.
Politic/strategy shouldn't be based off manipulating a system as it wasn't originally intended. Corruption isn't meant to be a weapon. It's meant to be a limiter
In L2, which is the inspiration for the corruption system baiting players to accidentally kill a white player (green in AoC) to get them red and kill them was a common tactic. The white one was sitting in the middle of the road and was annoying all the other players. If someone annoyed you you would run to him and hit him once. You would get purple, but that was basically slap to the face. The problem was that the white player had a dot on him and was hovering at 1HP. So hitting him cause any player to go red and then his friends came out and killed you. A friend of mine lost his weapons that way which he worked for for month. So...this was not an exploit then and I doubt steven sees it that way. But you have to ask him
Simple solution would be to base corruption gained not on the number or level of player on board but on the difference of the ship classes.
So, when we're talking about features I think we need to discuss what we want Ashes to be, not replicate what was done in L2 / Archage.
As I said, it was the slap to the face gesture that did establish itself in that game. Usually, one hit with a weapon would not kill someone so it was used to show someone you disliked him or his actions without consequences. Or without consequences if you were not trapped as describes above.
AoE attacks don't work on greens though. Destroying a ship vs boarding it was going to be one of the main strategic decision making processes in naval in my opinion for precisely that reason. So again I'm not seeing how the scenario would have come up in the way you are describing. Even if AoE did hit greens, that'd be way more likely of a strategy on land than on sea. Got any other thoughts on how it'd come up more frequently in the old system?
If you think corruption is meant to be only a limiter not a weapon, I respect that. I think about game design/fun a little differently than you which is why I highly encouraged IS during that one dev discussion to find a way to nerf karma bombing as it benefits me immensely and that'd be kind of unfair/unfun for people who don't enjoy that style of play. It's definitely an important topic that needs to be addressed.
Also now that you've made me think about it more I'm starting to dislike this change (I didn't care before since it mostly only benefited me.) Because you just pointed out to me that this change indirectly simplifies the boat meta of the game. Long ranged potion launcher attacks are now way more powerful and will now probably be more difficult to balance since everyone is forced into purple and can now be more easily effected by AoE.
How would you go about ship classes then
As Dygz says below your post. Basing inspiration doesn't mean wanting exploits. It is why there have been changings to the overall system and making it more pve friendly.
Assuming the AOE thing works the same for players and ships is naïve at best. I'd make some assumptions that there will be aoe ship attacks people have control over with projectiles akin to siege. If you are trying to base things off it won't happen again that is naïve unless they say ships combat is all tab target, which again would be naïve.
If AOE attacks don't work on ships, then how will engagements work? Instead of being able to engage the entire ship with potion launchers you have to catch up and board or individually target every crew member with each potion launcher attack? Likeni said in other comments, the systems don't need to be the same if it can work.
The ship is.
The object of naval combat will be to destroy the ship. Ideally, you'll leave the players alone in the water, stranded, needing to either swim home or "self die" before they can get on another ship.
I mean, a lone player in the water isn't going to be a threat to a warship. If it's anything like Archeage, even just getting on board a warship that doesn't want you on board is a challenge - let alone doing anything while there.
Since you are going to be using your ship to attack another ship, and not a player directly, the entire concept of corruption in naval combat just doesn't make much sense.
This is the reason I have always assumed it would just straight up not be a thing in naval content in Ashes.
Bigger ships killing smaller green ships get more corruption. Since there are only 3 classes that I know of, and we want to promote PvP I would say for the biggest ship (tier 1) against anothe tier 1, almost no corruption gain. Tier 1 against tier 2 only slightly more. Tier 1 againts Tier 3 (personal ship) maximum corruption.
Tier 2 againts Tier 1 slightly more than normal. Tier 1 against Tier 1 normal corruption. Lower classes against higher classes no curruption (I believe that would be hard to win anyway).
Above all else, we have what I consider another problem.
Are coastal battles between ships subject to all of this or not?
If the result is 'hey don't fight in coastal waters you might get KarmaBombed', that's not great in my opinion. Similar to if you get 'well, coastal battles don't really involve ships', because there are probably quite a few players who would want to do this.
Steven gives the argument about Cross Continental Trade opportunities, but I don't really see why because Naval Caravans should have been PvP zones anyway. Maybe it's for 'preventing scouts who are out there looking for hypothetical red pirates' from being effective?
This decision definitely isn't 'causing' any new technical problems with Corruption, but it definitely seems to be getting into a weird space.
If I use my ship to bring my crew to the edge of open water and they jump off and go attack a coastal fishing boat and sink it, who gets Corruption for boat-sinking, if anyone?
That's a good point. I just think it would also make sense for attacks to damage/kill players on the ships being attacked. And it's only speculation for the goal of naval combat. To me, the players should be just as much of s target as their ship.
And what if I run a fleet of fast small ships to take down a large ship?
Then you do that. Its the same as when low level players band together to kill a highlevel player on land.
As you can see from my discussion posts, I want to have the corruption system on the open sea. But making the corruption system work in all situations was always a pipedream. It will never cover every possible situation one can dream of regardless of where it is active. So all I ask is the same behavior as far as it is possible.
Apart from that. One of the ships will still go red.
Going off of Archeages naval content, attacking players on a ship will be vastly less effective than attacking the ship itself.
While this is obviously a matter of balance, I would assume it is what Steven will be going for.
Player abilities are likely to have essentially no effect at all on ships, and potentially also no effect at all on players that are stationed at different stations on a ship (wheel, weapons, perhaps navigation etc). In order to attack these players, you will probably first need to dislodge them from that station.
Otherwise, a ranger with a sniper arrow (or some similar long range attack) on the crows nest of a ship would be able to cause far too much trouble to a ship far too easily.
While I wouldn't want to speculate too much as to what system Intrepid would use to make it happen, I think it is safe for us to all assume that in naval combat, you are only really interested in destroying the rival ship - the players are kind of immaterial without it.
The fact that Intrepid plan on making ships only able to be spawned in ports or harbors (as opposed to Archeage where you can spawn them anywhere) only adds to that uselessness of players in the ocean without a ship.
But smaller ships aren't necessarily weaker... just for an example, in sea of thieves I run circles around galleons with a sloop.
Right but can you prevent the Galleon from doing whatever it was that it was trying to do? And if you could, who needed a Galleon?
It's definitely not that the scenarios are the same, but even in terms of how one might hope or expect this type of world to 'feel', it seems to me that it'd be more beneficial if 'big boat can be chased off by flotilla of smaller boats'.
If your sloop fleet is able to seriously bring down a Galleon, and that's the only Galleon in the enemy group, isn't that a standard encounter problem of 'being swarmed by quick enemies'?
Similarly, this seems like it could be 'easily' resolved by disabling the 'Greens can freely attack Reds' rule on the Ocean, rather than making the whole zone autoflag.
I am not seeing the problem. You want a smaller ship that attacks a bigger green ship to get more corruption?
I know its not perfect, but that is something that can be tested and adjusted.
I think you made a jump I was not making. So let's see if I can briefly explain how I assumed naval combat was going to work. Assume ships have hull levels and individual component health that can be damaged by either canon fire or player attacks. Assume potion launchers can deal structural damage as well as normal aoe damage. If you shoot the launcher at the ship's rails it'll do structural damage to the rails and a percent damage to the hull. But if a green is standing right there, they won't really get hit. In order to hit a green you'd need to board or destroy the ship so you can get close enough to them to use single target attacks (or just let the sharks eat them.) Maybe you can have ballistas that count as single target attacks to help with engagement threat range a bit. This was the very basic model of what I was assuming navel was going to be like. To me this is very functional and balanceable naval combat.
I agree if you assume potion launcher aoe can kill greens there is some risk involved with firing at people who you don't know the level of. But then I gotta ask, why are you aiming at greens instead of the ship at that range. Why are the greens wanting to get killed. Seems pretty obvious that you should just be aiming at the hull when you can. And why does it matter that your cannoneers are corrupted in this model? Lots of potential interesting questions.
But I think you can now possibly see why I was not understanding why you thought greens were going to die by potion launcher? I just never saw it as a necessary component of naval combat. So it's at least clarified to me why you think there might be a karma bombing problem in the old model. I disagree that this was going to be the case. We may never know (except we will because coastal naval combat is still going to be a thing.) I'm looking forward to that particular presentation from IS.
This is a modern game, and that much should be expected as a large possibility to ensure group play is also active at sea.