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
Safety in numbers does not assure you safety against numbers.
My 'gather but also kill anyone who doesn't pay protection or join in gathering' group will usually be 5, and hopefully 8 (when other gatherers realize it's more to their benefit to be in my group than outside it since it will let them push out other gatherers).
I'm not saying this is a bad thing, it's a great push to be even more social, but it's never safety.
Over the many years and MMOs that I've been invested in, I've learned that the most important is to not have gathering animation being canceled if the gatherer is being attacked. This provides very annoying avenue for griefing to take place. Gathering should be canceled only if gatherer decides to do so.
Player's drop should be present upon every death, not just the PVP. This will make it simply a part of the everyday life instead of something to be scared of during the PVP.
There is a very thin line to walk here to maintain the risk and reward balanced for everyone involved.
What are the incentives that the lootable player system brings?
It promotes social interaction and group or rivalry creation.
Large guilds would be aiming to either protect the gathering areas, so they can benefit from healthy node economy.
Or they could be attempting to monopolize the resource nodes to manipulate the market price.
Either way, it is a very good breeding ground for a natural conflicts between guilds.
Lets imagine a scenario. A freehold tavern, where you can eat a good food to buff yourself for faster gathering, and meet a local PVP-er that would gladly help protecting you, if you pay for his meal and beverage, to buff his combat ability so he can be stronger in PVP, to increase his military faction progression.
The gatherers "Hell yeah, I did it!" moment after reaching the safe zone with all the gathered resources.
The gankers "Hell yeah, I did it!" moment after a bountiful expedition with a safe return.
Existing quest system to reward gatherers, construction of special buildings in a node.
How can we mitigate the bad feeling when the lootable player system won't go our way?
Looting rules:
Looting enablement period should be activated only after player has released his soul from the body, either by clicking a button to go to a respawn point, or if the timer for resurrection has run out.
Remains of the player should be lootable after loot enablement period has expired. (i.e.: 60 sec after player was moved to respawn point)
This would give a player good chance to come back, exact the revenge and take back the looted materials, even with a bonus loot if the attacker is corrupted.
There should be same loot activation mechanic for player as it is for monsters. Tag and damage system for multiple attackers that are not associated in any way. Attacker's party can loot if the tag and damage requirements were met. Defender's party can always loot.
Looting limitations:
If a player takes a decision to take defensive stance and becomes flagged person, amount of dropped materials should be significantly less then from a green player.
In my opinion, the difference should be more than 50%. If unflagged player drops 20% the amount of materials carried, flagged player should drop less than 10% the amount of materials carried.
Drop amount should be greatly reduced or removed altogether, if the players are in the opposing sides of a war (node, guild, ...).
Corruption
Corruption and Outlaw/Bounty hunter system should be the main tool to balance risk and reward.
Corruption system should be a sufficient deterrent from griefing.
We need to take into account the corruption removing/cleaning time and effort, versus the gathering time and effort. This should be very balanced.
Player level difference shouldn't matter for gaining a corruption, unless there is a very clear indication that attacking this player is going to incur large amount of corruption. The main concern is, that it would be easy to grief attackers with low level gathering alts/bots, if the indication of level difference is not clear.
Gatherers
We need to allow multiple people, to be able to gather the same node at the same time, provided they are members of the same party. This would promote gathering in a party and would bring safety in numbers.
We should calculate drops per each resource present in the inventory separately, and round the decimals down. This way, the gatherer will be more likely to loose parts of the lower tier or more abundant materials and keep the rare drops.
There should be UI element/tooltip, that will include information on the amount of materials dropped from the stack in the case of death. It should cover both unflagged and flagged scenarios, so players can easily calculate the risk that they are taking by staying out of the safe zone.
Gathering nodes should give short buffs (i.e.: 10% defense for 10sec, 10% movement speed for 20sec, ...) to give more options to gatherer for the upcoming PVP engagement.
Player death should grant a stacking buff that would decrease the amount of dropped materials for next XY min. There should be externally visible indicator, that the player has the buff reducing the amount of materials dropped. I imagine that this could decrease the desire for repeated kills or griefing.
Random ideas to play around with:
Corruption should impair usage of mounts.
High level gatherers could gather more resource from the low tier node which would minimize the time spent in a risk area and would promote high level artisan gameplay.
High tier or rare materials could require high tier of outlaw faction standing to be lootable.
Instead of dropping materials, there could be gold drop only. This would probably require a limitation on the amount of gold that can be stored in the warehouse.
If the player is holding unequipped full items in the inventory, these items should be eligible for dropping with a low chance. This would bring a bit more risk to crafters in a comparison to gatherers.
I've read an idea on here that I liked quite a bit. Ability to black list players from accessing your shop.
Another interesting idea I found, is the NPC guards patroling the main roads to help make it less desirable to incur corruption.
Faction mitigation:
All of the items i this section would require externally visible indicator, to give attackers ability to calculate the risk and reward for the attack.
Economy nodes rank: Gathering insurance timed ticket with variable quality. Buff to reduce the amount of materials dropped.
Outlaw faction: Treasure hunt contract with variable quality. Buff to increase drop rate from attacked players.
And a weird idea about mini caravan system for gatherers.
There could be a "chest" that would have demolition protection.
It would be indestructible if player remains within certain distance of it.
It would become lootable after certain period of time, if the player moves too far. There would have to be a balance struck, to enable player the time to return close enough after being killed, before the looting rights are enabled.
It would follow the caravan spawn and looting rules, if the player get disconnected.
Player can keep stockpiling the resources inside of this chest to mitigate the loss of gatherable during the surprise attack.
Player can arrange a group of friends/guild to help with moving the items from this "chest" to safety of a village (social interaction encouragement), or player can move the items unprotected with much higher risk involved, but no social interaction would be required.
System like this would allow for gatherer to gather in relative peace near the gathering area, until he has the assistance of guild/friends to safely move the gatherable, yet there still would be a risk of organized group that would be observing this behavior and can try to overpower the defenders and take the loot, a great way to start a guild war in my honest opinion.
Gatherers can self-set their risk / reward ratio in town before exiting to go gathering.
This toggle, would not be visible to other players and not impact/change the capacity to be killed.
Different modes
Another thing to note is according to the wiki, mules that are killed will also drop the same amount of materials as the player. This will be huge because the materials lost will potentially be double what you thought they were. So based on that I would say in total including your mule, it shouldn't be more than half of materials lost for a non combatant player. Of course there will always be people complaining regardless of how high or low they are. Higher drop rates means more players will be targeting gatherers because of the reward and more people will leave because of it. Like everything, there needs to be a balance. As people have been saying before me, this really is something that will need to be tested during Alpha 2 to find it
@Trubi This is a well-articulated comment that goes over some of your ideas on alternative play loops and ways to mitigate the risk of dropping gathered materials
As someone else already explained, gatherers aren’t only losing resources when they’re killed, they lose time, which is often more valuable than the materials themselves. Attackers don’t risk that. They can invest a minute or two and reap the benefits of half an hour to a few hours of someone else’s work. Worst case, they die, drop nothing since they haven’t been gathering anything, and have to work off a small amount of exp debt by doing what they were already doing. It creates an unhealthy gameplay environment at detriment of the players actually doing the heavy lifting.
Letting gatherers lock down 10-50 specific material items gives them some agency, and lessens the significant gap in risk levels between them and those that attack them.
Alright. Based on Alpha 1 numbers, (subject to and likely to change to even less loot loss imo), but based on those numbers, a 50% portion is already protected. A further 50% from there is protected again just by flagging up as combatant and fighting back, all the way down to 25% max loss. But you want more protection. You want to protect the actual valuable things, like the rare greens, blues and purples that you get from chopping trees.
If it was your choice, I'm sure all a corrupted killer would be left with is a bunch of white/grey basic materials. Which would neuter the whole system into near meaninglessness.
But ok. A perk/talent in the gatherer artisan tree, "Warrior Gatherer." When the player dies as a combatant, a small player selected portion is safe from loot drop. That small player selected portion, ON TOP of the already 75% reduction auto set by the game, for flagging as combatant.
How about that?
From a node vs node point of view, the system makes a lot of sense. Gathering increases XP for a node. If you want to slow the growth of a neighboring/hostile node, you get a group to go kill gatherers. If you want your node to grow, you organize gathering groups to gain XP and stop that.
I second the ideas others have had about some sort of gear/level/talent progression system for gatherers that allows them to save more of their stuff upon death, or to have safe inventory slots. I like it because it adds more variety to gathering gear/progression, and if someone really doesn't like dropping stuff, they have a way to mitigate SOME of it, but can be at the expense of other benefits.
With that said, I understand the risk vs reward for a gatherer, but what is the risk vs reward really for an attacker? Others have asked, but I still don't know the answer.
They may attack someone and be killed and get the penalties associated with dying. Is there anything more? From what I know, the attacker has many advantages and it's not a balanced risk vs reward system when comparing PKers vs gatherers.
[*] They choose when to attack and can only do so when they are at a high advantage.
[*] They are doing something they enjoy, forcing gatherer into doing something they may not enjoy (at that moment).
[*] PKers are likely only going to do so if they like PVP, meaning they are geared/specced for it, and have done it more, and are better at it than your average gatherer.
[*] They can have an empty inventory so they lose nothing if they happen to lose.
[*] They can do a poke attack to a gatherer, gauge their strength/health and if too high, run away, or wait for the most opportune time to attack (ie they aggro a mob or two).
[*] If they find themselves at a disadvantage, they just leave, nothing lost other than a little time.
They seem to be able to set the rules of the engagement, force the gatherer onto their terms, so there should be a reasonable risk for them too.
Random semi-thoughts:
If you initiate combat against a green player, and they kill you, your death penalties are increased.
Initiating combat against green players adds a tiny amount of corruption, even if you stop attacking them. Probably more fair to only add corruption if you do it repeatedly.
Social consequences - in game ways of tracking players that are notorious for griefing/killing gatherers.
Even if it's not globally visible, I would like a way to add a note for a player. Targeting them shows a *, letting me know I made a note about them. Good notes, bad notes, just something for me to remember players by. Essentially a way to reward/punish behavior that is player driven.
Make more use of the bounty system. Gatherers can add bounties to notorious PKers, even if they aren't corrupted.
For me the major source of stress is "not being able to do anything" when ganked (the sense of being helpless & hopeless), rather than the actual loss (of items) -- e.g. getting stunlocked to death by a stealthed rogue in WoW; getting warp-scrambled, webbed, and blobed to death by a group of cloaky gankers in Eve; or getting attacked when I'm in full gatherer-gear in some other game.
Speaking of that, please do NOT implement things like "gatherer gear" that has absolutely zero combat capabilities. The mere existence of these gears essentially forces gatherers to wear it (coz efficiency), and at the same time ensures they can't do shit when attacked, which will also defeat the purpose of the flagging mechanism (why bother fighting back and flag yourself as purple if you'll always lose when you're caught in gathering gear?)
IMO the ideal case would be that high lv players can gather items in their regular combat loadout (may be with food/spell based gathering buffs), so they can fend off gankers; while low lv players can gather items in loadouts / builds that boosts cc / mobility / survivability that can help them escape if they're attacked.
1. My warrior attacks a woodcutter. If I win, I will get some wood that the woodcutter has collected. If I lose, I won't lose anything.
2. My miner is attacked. If I lose, I will lose some ore. If I win, I won't get anything.
Where is the fairness and risk / reward here if only one side gets all the risk and only the other gets the reward?
Another thing. If I meet someone in the world it is green, purple or red to me. And me for him? How should I know this? I think he sees me as green, but for example our cities are at war and I am purple or red for him.
Who will get the prize? The killer of the PK player? So if you give a bounty on my PK character's head and I log in my alt to kill my PK character, I'll get your money? What will be the role of your gold? Is he to avenge your death or encourage me to kill you more?
While gathering during a war can become very annoying, I dont think drops should be affected by war-status. Afterall, disrupting the resource aquiring process during a war feels like a very "war"-thing to do. It's also a situation where you are much more likely to find willing bodyguards for the boring job of letting you haul wood back home, since protecting that same process during a war becomes much more of a common interest.
As it’s been stated already. The gatherers carry the vast majority of investment and risk in these engagements. Actually they carry all of the risk right now in the case of being attacked while gathering, while the attacker takes on very minimal, if any, risk.
No attacker should ever get half of what the gatherer was carrying. That would make it unquestionably more efficient to gank than gather and creates unhealthy gameplay patterns. Even 25% is highly significant. It’s 25% of the total time that gatherer invested that they could lose. An attacker spending 30-60s isn’t comparable to a gatherer’s 1-2hrs of steady work, so obviously attackers shouldn’t ever be getting comparable material gains outside of successfully taking down a caravan.
Let’s all stop acting like killers are putting in equal work by stealing from those who actually gather and contribute to the node. To be clear, that isn’t a judgement state, that’s literally how node growth is designed to function.
Sorry, but disagree. Why would anyone kill another player for loot with the requirement to camp the dead body while red! Not going to happen, would be end of the whole point.
L2 had it right, which is losely what is being followed, stick with what works!
The “safe pockets” for crafters is not loosing their armor and gear. Why provide even more incentive for the gather. You also don’t even loose full inventory on death. I think the benefit is in the favor of the gatherer.
I think a balance exists for both but the idea of “more safe pockets” doesn’t seem to be fair.
How are they not putting in equal work? They are putting in the time to get to a combat status that allow them to PvP effectively. If a gatherer is putting in the time to grind and farm valuable resources. Why not put in the time to join/form a group to farm in safety with one another.
Risk is dependent on a multitude of factors. Farming material early game will be high risk and high reward. Most gatherers at the beginning will be the richest/best equipped players in the game and fighting them will be just as hard if you a pvper. Assuming PvE gear and PvP gear can be worn at the same time which I believe Steven mentioned.
Reducing the drop tables anymore than what they are at just removes any need to engage in PvP and just makes it so that nobody does it. Which at that point ruins the game. If there is no true compromise then we might as well have PvE servers and PvP servers and call it a day.
Not true. Nobody talks about the inability to attack and kill the gatherers.
There are many other pvp activities that you can and will have to take part in. Loot from gatherers is an easy profit without risk, and it is wanted by people who are afraid to risk a fight with an equal opponent who is prepared and willing to fight.
The current solution where one group takes all the risk and the other group gets all the reward is the worst possible and destroys the risk / reward ratio.
This has two main consequences
1. Much less willing to play
2. Higher raw material prices
So the loot from the gatherers is an advantage for a small group of players who want easy income and a loss for the rest.
No one is saying you shouldn't be able to do that. Killing other players to gain or keep control of a resources area is one thing, looting the defeated players another. The question is about if there should be ways to protect the resources that have already been harvested and in the bags/mule of the dead players.
First off appreciate the feedback without devolving into pointless name calling, discussion is good. I understand the other PvP activities and very much look forward to them. But I am looking at PvP from the current lenses presented by Steven himself.
A fully functioning player economy needs to have a certain level of risk while farming. Too much protection done by the game creators ruins that organic flow of economy. If said group locks down a certain area to control flow of material I believe that it’s within their right to kill those farming within that area and by killing them while farming allows them to recoup a certain amount of the resource farmed to help limit outward supply.
Having high prices on raw materials is not a negative at all, it is an intended gameplay loop. For reference, new world had their No pvp/no dropped loot within 2 weeks before the know dupe glitches were exposed the economy was in shambles. The highest “tier” items were penny’s on the dollar. I think our goal collectively should be to make sure that does not happen ever in the game. But with the proposed extra safety on “dropped loot” I believe gets us to the same point in new world just a little slower. People can make a collective effort, as a gameplay/social interaction loop, to help drive down the price of something.
I would like to point out that nodes for gathering, in most games, have the same output in every area. I believe if you want to have a PvP gathering system in place. It should have increased value and a difference in quality and quantity depending on the difficulty of the area. Not just from node size. The nodes should be randomized within a wide area to disparage griefing of nodes. Special gathering tools should allow the players who are gathering to be able to find the materials faster and easier. Players who are not actively gathering with the proper gear should have a more difficult time finding nodes and be restricted to only certain lower level nodes. This will decrease the likelihood of running into a player killer while mining, but not fully. The risk is still there but doesn't give the advantage purely to the player killer.
Quantity and Quality
The quantity and quality should reflect the areas difficulty. As more mobs are prevalent within the nodes vicinity the quantity and chance ratio for rare mats should increase. This should also be multiplied with higher level areas as the enemies and risk increases. "The juice must be worth the squeeze." quoted from a movie.
Why the double risk?
What do I mean by double risk? basically you have more set backs than benefits to being the gatherer rather than the player killer. Not only do I have to mine the mats. I also have to protect myself. I have to protect my cart. I have to spend a lot of time in these process' to ensure I gain a benefit that might not be worth it. Especially if it only takes less than a minute to lose it all.
Players are not moral people.
Let's be honest. Advantage is the basis of video game mentality. If you have the advantage you will more likely take that opportunity to screw somebody over. Because there is a reward for doing so. I have not played a game where protecting another player from being player killed, yielded a reward. Im not talking about protecting a caravan. Im thinking of the equivalent reaction to player killing, which can be random, depending on the encounter. Player saving is also random in that sense, but yields no reward from the game system. Ultimately, It only matters from the result of the combat to which the game can define a reward. Which is either death or revival from death. In both cases, it means somebody lost something and was not "saved."
Option for PvE
Let's also be honest. If there is no overwhelming benefit to mining in a PvP scenario. It's not worth the wasted time and effort. If I can enjoy melting my mind by mining the same repetitive nodes over and over and over without having to deal with being player killed and losing the mats I spent hours mining. I will do that. Even for the lesser quality and quantity. Because achieving progress makes games fun. Why else do we do it. Especially if I am paying a monthly subscription for this interaction. It makes no sense otherwise.
Bots
The subscription we are going to pay for should cover this issue with anti-cheat and anti bot recognition. Like all games out there bots find a way because of hackers manipulating an easy system. Easy systems are there to make the game be enjoyable. What an ironic situation. Dealing with bots and mining should be easily mitigated with story requirements, subscription, gear requirements, and something that allows the nodes to not be pattern recognized. As soon as it is a pattern that can be defined, we get bots. This is where mobs come into play. If levelling is dependant on the area (ie. New Worlds area level adjustment) then mobs will be able to kill players that aren't geared properly and prevent bots from being low geared and just mining all the nodes. Making sure mobs have a flinch mechanic that are near nodes will helps this as well. As previously mentioned, randomized nodes also help the cause of bot prevention.
These are just my thoughts on the topic. I hope this helps.
Cheers,
Kol Draco
But there might be players who would prefer to sacrifice some fight capability to gain some advantage while gathering. Then, instead of improving theit armor for combat, they could adjust it to hide small pets.
These would be provided by the animal husbandry profession and would have different skills: scout, alarm, stealth, burrow, climb walls and trees, jump from tree to tree, flight...
When gatherers find a valuable resource, they could give it to such a specially trained pet.
If the gatherer is killed, it should still have the option to control the pets and try to avoid detection.
Pets which can burrow, would have the option to bury the resource. If the resource is not retrieved, it could become a treasure, to be found by a treasure hunter.
Pets which have stealth, could try to avoid detection.
The others might just run and try to escape or blend into the environment.
The higher tier pets could move and maintain stealth, carry more, detect higher tier resources.
When a PvPer attacks a gatherer, it may notice that a hidden pet jumps out and flees.
Would he kill the gatherer or run to catch the pet? Which one is more valuable?
The way the prompt seems now is that we are giving even more protections and safety to PvE players and giving up on the core principals of risk vs reward.
Haven’t even tested the proposed system for alpha 2 and having questions of ways to make the game safer? Just seems like we’re jumping the gun. At this point let’s go with the suggestions of having tarkov like safe container where you can put a single stacked item in it. Anymore and what’s the point in even contesting people if you don’t get anything. Can’t even loot gear off people..raw mats is all we have.
Similar system to tarkov but leads to a balance issue. If a player is smart they will go out and fill there “craft bag” to the max and then go Home Depot the farmed material and go back out. They would incur 0 risk if they only farm one material up to the max “craft bag” allocation. Hence free farming aka no risk. Maybe if that craft bag could hold 1 item that would seem fair.
But i get that AOC strives to be a big game and most players dont want to lose their stuff. So no full loot. Back to topic.
First it depends on the ressource system itself. Are there different tiers in different regions and so on.
If that is the case you could do no pvp or no pvp loot in low level zones or for low level ressources. So with higher ressoureces or higher zones there comes higher risk vs reward. Albion Online is a good example.
This also depends on how your crafting system works. Do you use low level ressourece all the time too or are they useless ? If you use em all the time you should not restrict the drop.
Like i said before i prefer full loot. People should form gathering groups with dedicated pvpers. We did the same back in Darkfall and other games. We always had groups with 5+ gatherers and at least the same amount of full fledged pvpers. The second we got attacked, the gatheres ran away while the pvpers fought. Thats how MMORPGs should be played. But thats me again.
To help gatheres the profession gear could have special perks like faster movement, invisibility for a set amound of time and so on. Instead of taking away the incentive for pvp players we should give gatheres a way to escape. Not a surefire way but a good chance..
There are so many cool possibilities. Camouflage, invisibility, turn into a rock, hide some of the items in the earth to get em later, maybe a skill with a cooldown, there could be spirits spawning the second the gatherer dies and spread out in all directions and hide. Every spirit has a portion of the loot. Only the gatherer and his group can see those spirits on the map. The attackers need to search for them.
Lots and lots of things to give gatherers an edge but not full control. Otherwise it would be boring.
Im really looking forward to your solution. Ive played nearly every MMORPG in the last 25 years and you guys are 1 of 2 shining rays of hope i have left for that genre.
Cheers
In response to the change of the wording, here is quote of original feedback, followed by any related/restated notes, below that.
Now, I can say that I would absolutely only be content with almost exactly what I described above. Normally, I obviously just say 'do whatever Intrepid feels is best until tested', but between 'the other responses to the thread before now' and 'my concerns about the balance of activities', this is now the only thing I would want to see.
I don't want anyone to have any option for a separate activity based on the level of their Artisanship that reduces the reward (EDIT: or mitigates chance of dropping items) in any way, so that leaves only 'tools'.
I don't want anyone to have any tools (EDIT: for mitigating drops) that are explicitly reliant on their Artisanship level, because I feel this might reduce social situations more and skew outcomes.
I don't want players to have to plan things around the immediacy of a situation, I feel like being able to opportunistically note 'oh there's no one here right now' while passing through an area with the right gathering tool, should be able to organically lead to the immediate thought of 'I should gather some stuff and see if I can get away with it' without them having to recalculate where they were going or what they were doing, consistently.
I don't want players to have control over what goes into their 'safety bag' in any way that would let them 'just put away a precious resource when they get it' because that leads right back to situations where someone finds something rare or worse, steals it from someone else, and then immediately that item becomes 'uncontested'.
I don't want players to be able to wait near safer areas for gatherers returning from dangerous areas, regardless of the other social solutions that the gatherer could employ in that situation. If you want to take an Artisan Gatherer's rare resource from them, go up the same mountain/down into the same mine they did, or at least, consider that your chances of getting that resource from them if you do not, are much smaller.
So yes, given the change, this is just me doubling down on original feedback.
Thank you for the opportunity as always, Intrepid.