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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 does pvp work around caravans?
Gandalfthegrape
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
How will scouts be associated with the caravans? Will there be a no punishment pvp circle around the caravan? If you send out scouts ahead of the caravan and they aren't within the pvp enabled area can you still kill them without fear of repercussions? Do you still become a baddie for non consensual pvp? What are your thoughts on other ways to abuse this system with the way it has been described so far? Im hoping loopholes like this can be closed up before launch.
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somehow I get the feeling that nice mechanics some people want to prevent are being called loop holes
Like I can avoid pvp entirely if the caravan isn't marked on the map by being in discord and having people ride ahead in 2 layers of a circle formation around the caravan and just altering the course when they see anyone. The players after my caravan can't kill my scouts without being punished. So there is no loss whatsoever with me. All I do is communicate to everyone in the party the new heading and go around those players. With forward or flanking scouts rotating to a rear position with the center scouts replacing them at their location when the course is shifted. 2 layers to artificially extend the effective view distance by double making my caravan effectively invisible if the course is altered whole allowing everyone to stay in formation through visibly seeing everyone. but the attacker not being able to see the caravan, all they see is a couple of people riding by and then moving slightly tot he left or right with them never making it to my second layer max view distance as the course has already been changed. I could also get people in my discord call to all stream to the call giving everyone in the call an effective 360 view of the entire caravan making moving fully as a single unit quit easy. If the caravan is map marked the way a delivery is in gta then it would make this obsolete. Personally I think map markers should only be used for non consensual pvp cereal killers but it is an option for this.
And if you, as a guild or a constant group of people, have any kinds of enemies who are explicitly targeting you and your caravans - your scouts would just be an indicator to them that you're doing a caravan run. And considering that mounts will most likely move faster than a caravan, they'll just find you by running around a bit.
Maybe. I feel like that would only work if the enemy targeting my group had large amounts of scouts for their main force and already and knew the names or had a kill on sight tracker add-on for everyone in my group. If the caravan is under 60% mounted speed my idea would be completely irrelevant. But if it was like 90/80% it would still probably be fine. Do you happen to know if they have given out a chart for running, mounted, and caravan speeds yet by any chance? Or has it just been the estimated time to walk across the map?
Do you happen to know if the health pools are able to regenerate or you can repair them? I wonder if its possible just to ignore the people defending pop all your cds and nuke the caravan and then get wiped after. Oh god do caravans operate as re spawn points for the defenders? So many questions i'm sry XD.
And I somehow doubt that caravans will be changed to being much faster than this. Mainly because the whole point of attackers and defenders is to be able to stay on pace with the caravan itself, while pvping each other.
I don't think you know what a loophole is.
I cannot wait to see the progress on this system. This and merchant ships are my biggest excitement for the game!
Founder and Guild Leader of -Providence-
Ya that's really slow actually. I hope they add a visible circle around the cart to know if you are entering the pvp zone or not.
The point of the system is for pvp. If you can avoid pvp it's a loophole.
https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=loophole+definition
We must close this loophole immediately. Otherwise players will abuse the system by planning and strategizing just so they can protect their caravan. We should also look into the loophole of players coordinating and strategizing to down world bosses. I mean seriously, they could all just be in discord together talking about how to avoid the boss mechanics.
MMOs cannot be made great again unless Discord is destroyed in the process
If players can fully avoid boss mechanics that's generally called exploiting and people have either gotten banned for it or they completely overhauled the mechanic to fix it in many games. There was an exploit in wow where you could stand on top of a lamp post and you wouldn't take boss damage. Following the same reasoning "they could all just be in discord together talking about how to avoid the boss mechanics" It's clearly outside the intended use of the system. The fact you don't think they should fix problems like this before there is even a beta is absolutely astounding to me. So yes it's bad and a loophole.
You could also load up a caravan with the cheapest possible resources never go to the objective, drive it around, and use it to actively target players for non consensual pvp combat without getting the bad boi debuff. So yes this entire system is heavily exploitable past it's intended use without having other mechanics like map icons, time limits, etc.
In my opinion there should only be a set cost to buy a caravan and then if you make it to the destination you get a bonus reward like taking that materials you have in the caravan and adding 20% of that specific material type making taking high value materials in them actually work doing. If anyone kills it they get the reward and you lose the cost materials and the gold to buy/craft it. It would emulate the same cost vs reward mentality without completely ruining the experience for most of the people involved. Or limit the resources you are able to put into it like under 10 hours of farming. Rust does this well with tcs you can only make your base so big relative to what you can actually farm in a set time frame. So losing it doesn't result in you losing a completely disproportional amount of resources.
I see absolutely no benefit to using the caravans when I can safely transport resources on my own that actively discourages players form attacking me, and on top of that I can be mounted which will make it SIGNIFICANTLY easier to avoid almost any enemy. And on top of that I can be in a party anyway while we are all transporting materials and while mounted. There is no benefit to using this beside bag space which doesn't matter if you can make more trips while you are mounted anyway.
These are all significant problems and fall under the category of loopholes.
Edit: What's to stop me from taking a caravan to a location in the world where there is an important quest npc and also a choke point, hiding the caravan within that choke point and having 8 -14 people just aoe the choke preventing literally the entire server from accessing that location while at the same time receiving no penalty as we are all inside the pvp area.
When you die, you will respawn relatively far away from the Caravan.
Most likely, the Caravan will be located and destroyed before the entire server can be rallied, anyway.
It's an absurd scenario you've concocted that does not comport well with any reality.
Good point. Stand in the fire or get banned for exploiting. lol
You can do this very easily in wow, Half the player base quit wow classic because they kept getting killed trying to access brd and mc. If this game has literally any kind of spamable aoe you can do it here too. Yes you can hold off 200 people with 20 at a choke point because 20 people spamming aoe in 1 location is enough to create an instant vaporization barrier that nothing can cross. It just becomes an impassable meatgrinder you could throw 1000 people into that will accomplish absolutely nothing. You need to enter the defenders aoe in order to be in range to cast your spells to attack them. When you enter the aoe you get insta deleted. You probably wouldn't even need close to 20 given how many different classes there are in this game. Iv personally witnessed this and there are tens of thousands of hours of recordings across youtube that show this. You should probably play another game besides solitaire before hopping into a game like ashes my friend.
There is clearly a difference between avoiding a boss mechanic like fire by moving slightly to the left, and casing dots on the boss, leaving the raid and coming back when it dies because the raid wasn't thought out properly. You're clearly being intentionally ignorant.
No sorry thats my mistake. I was watching the video where the carvan gets stuck on a rock and the one linked above and I guess I must have missed it when I initially scrolled through. I went to look at he the article and you're completely right. After reading it again I'm honestly even more confused about the purpose of the system. It says its not really to encourage pvp but to encourage trade relationships between nodes. I can't think of a single reason I would ever use this for trade. The lowest cost method of doing something is the way most people will go. It costs me absolutely nothing to just walk or mount over to a different town all the while I have at the very least a false sense of security. It costs me an incredible amount of time and energy and I have the risk of losing tonnes of stuff all at once using the caravans. How many resources am I going to need to craft anything if my inventory and bank isn't enough already? How will I even hold all these items if my inventory and bank isn't enough to get them to the caravan. I would rather just walk every time. I would rather do 10 trips and risk dying 1 out of 10 trips losing a single inventory, than transporting everything at once and risk losing it all. Loss aversion is HUGE. I can't see this being something people are going to use if there isn't a massive incentive to do so. Like the guildbank/node bank or whatever of both nodes getting a big bonus when the caravan gets there. Or individual players that join it receive a part of the contents that are created in addition to what is being traded. Why would I pay for insurance when I could just walk? The only thing that would prevent me from walking would be to not allow me to transport materials in the open world, but like how would I even farm then? You could get a free caravan if yours makes it without taking any damage but you pay a 5-20% repair for being slightly to heavily damaged. If you make it to the destination and you're transporting copper bars each person in the group gets some copper bars when they make it to the end. If they are transporting highly valuable mithril each person get some mithril bars making it significantly more worth it to help defend than if it were copper. Idk without a large amount of positive incentives I can't see people wanting to use this. It's going to be interesting to see what they do with banks and if they are cross city. New world made it so they weren't and you needed to pay huge amounts to access your bank from a different city. That combined with no fast travel or very limited fast travel made a lot of people leave pretty quickly. It was also super frustrating being able to see you're stuff right there in the menu and some arbitrary barrier was put there to intentionally limit me. The risk of bringing say a red key card out in rust is dwarfed by the amount of loot you can get by getting a full launch site run. If the risk of transporting dwarfs what you will receive as a reason for you to do it, you won't do it. You're just going to camp launch permanently and wait for some sucker to come by and you take everything after or before they looted. It cost you basically nothing, a pistol and a rad suit. If you need to have some insane amount of resources and cost and you risk losing a bunch of it without at least getting 20-30% of what you are transporting on top of it people are going to be like lol no and just walk. Especially when you lose the protection from people getting the bad boi debuff for attacking you. It's a lose lose lose situation to use the caravans and way more incentivized to just walk around the world hitting loot pinatas. As you can walk all the way up to the group and be standing on top of the carvan, picked out your healer targets and just nuke the group after you all simultaneously hit attack.
I've read the wall of text. This part is the essence (I formatted it a bit).
And yes, I am curious too.
Somebody should ask on reddit, for this AMA session with Steven.
My thinking is that killing once will give just a slight corruption. Will be almost like there is none.
In that case, players who search for caravans will also kill you easily and take your resources.
Will you try doing the next trip hoping that those bandits will spare you at the 2nd trip? They are 10 of them...
It will be safer to join into a caravan defended by 10 players than going alone.
But if you're running somewhere with a mule, PKing you will be one of the most appealing things in the game. Using a mule will mean that you have potentially x10 of a person's inventory. And even if you fight back and the mule only drops half of what a green one would drop - that would most likely still be more than a full inventory of stuff.
Running a caravan saves you time and pushes you to be more social (cause you'd probably need protection or to share the caravan with other people).
But yes, I do believe that caravans will most likely be run by guilds, with most other caravans just being mayoral and quest-based ones.
That's a very polite way of saying I need to talk less, 10/10
If they regularly go after players who are part of a caravan they won't get the debuff. If they go after players not in a caravan they will keep getting what i'm assuming is stacks of the debuff, or is scales in an aggressive exponential way. So the incentive for any player who wants to do consensual pvp or to grief other players will almost always go for the caravan. I would rather go alone and hope they don't kill me a second time, they are doing more damage to themselves than me. I would probably just go over with an empty inventory and taunt them saying I have good stuff on me and their mom gave it to me for the awesome job I did last night, want it back? Or id probably go farm an inventory of resources on my way over so I don't lose my bank stuff to retest the waters. As soon as they added dishonorable kills in wow classic it killed city raids instantly and anyone who had any incentive at all to do well in pvp would straight up ban and blacklist you from major pvp guilds if you got a dhk while in a group with others. I would risk a solo ride every time over putting my stuff in a location where people have a greenlight to attack me.
Im kind of curious if you don't select the defend or ignore and you walk into fighting aoe on the caravan you're either immortal or you can give everyone who kills you the bad boi debuff probably? If you're immortal im just going to follow a caravan around and not join it to move my stuff. If I don't select anything and it makes me a combatant for everyone you could go kill afk players with no consequence. If I can give everyone the bad boi debuff im just going to follow the caravan around and stand in their aoe to intentionally die. If it teleports me out after a set time you could also grief push someone off a cliff or into mobs.
That's interesting I haven't heard that before. Could you please link it so I could find out more about that?
You can take more, In my opinion that's a disadvantage as it makes you a SIGNIFICANTLY bigger target than just some dude running by on their mount. And it would essentially be a magnet for every griefer to draw the griefers away from me. If you need 20 people at least to realistically defend these. That's 5 trips for everyone in the party that can transport stuff while you're mounted and instead of having an incentive for people to attack me they have an incentive not to attack me. If the caravan moves slower than walking mounts are going to be able to do at least 2 trips in the time it takes to do 1 caravan. It makes evading easier to. In the same way that people will always chose to call Lester to hide their business delivery to avoid the pvp aspect people will always chose to just run mounted to avoid pvp here. Losing 100 inventories of loot that the group of people has been farming for a very long time will either destroy the guild or make them quit the game. Iv watched Rust clans fall apart many times over 20 inventories full of loot. Iv watched rust clans fall apart over a single body that rapidly devolved into a verbal bloodbath due to conflicting opinions and blame. The larger you make the inventory for the caravans the more likely you are to cause a full social collapse. You're completely wrong to think anyone would ever risk that much for saving whatever amount of time it takes riding across the map. It makes no sense to me to have this many negative consequences while proving 0 positive incentive to do these. Gatherers aren't going to use these. People with the gathering profession are just going to gather from one end of the map to the other and keep the mats that are rare on that side of the map at the other, or sell them once they get there. I'm super skeptical about this system originally I thought it was just a mobile king of the hill that you could trigger for certain purposes and whoever had it capped when it got to its destination got a reward. I think this will destroy more social fabric than a boss that's mathematically impossible to beat.
Exactly. And this is why your original response to me was misguided and nonsensical.
At this point it seems you are either not speaking in good faith, or there are other mental issues at play.
In either case, I'm done and must block you. Farewell and good luck with your text walls.
People who result to insults are either trying to grief or they can't come up with a good argument. So really it's you not talking in good faith. I had quotes around "If players can fully avoid boss mechanics that's generally called exploiting" I was clearly paraphrasing the essence of what you said. "We should also look into the loophole of players coordinating and strategizing to down world bosses. I mean seriously, they could all just be in discord together talking about how to avoid the boss mechanics." You should probably go back and reread what you wrote because it seems like as you were raging that someone might not agree with something you think to the point where you forgot what you yourself said. Personally my goal is for 2 things. To make the game not be 90% doa like new world that iv sunk an ungodly amount of money into. Because Steven seems to know a significant amount about games compared to a lot of company owners, with a great direction for the game, and genuinely seems like a cool dude. And to find out everything I possible can to crush everyone under my boot. I'm sorry i'm forcing you to be here, you do you boo.
AoE will not damage you, no matter if is caravan or normal fight between two parties.
They made recently the caravans more secure for the ever fearful artisans Then they made the oceans full PvP, so your smuggling will not be so safe from a continent to the other.
Now in the pinned thread they ask how to protect gatherers against PvP because apparently is not protected enough.
Next they'll say they collected our feedback and they'll protect the gatherers more when they gather.
What will happen is that gatherers will run back to the node before that protection fades. Or mini caravans will transport resources toward the towns guarded by players or NPCs.
They will not chose solutions which protect when players are moving loaded with resources... away from the node. Away from the node will be riskier to move them alone. Is not like we see the flaws, we post them in the forum and they blindly ignore them.
he said it in one of the live streams =x
Did he say there was a 5x multiplier on stocked loot when they arrive at their destination or was that an estimate of what the economy would result in?