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2 suggestions for the PK count system
NiKr
Member
First one is super simple.
Account-wide PK count. This would not impact the lives of normal players, but would somewhat limit the PKing abilities of anyone who wants to have a PKing alt on their account.
Second one
PK count removal quest should send you to the node whose citizen you PKed and have you do a node quest there (ideally one of the harder more massive ones). If you PKed a citizen of your own node, you can't remove that counter tick until you change nodes. Nomads can obviously PK anyone and then just do a quest in their victim's nodes.
I think this approach would force people to travel around (which imo is a good thing), would push people to try and be friendlier with their node mates, and would provide nomadic players with a small benefit (considering that they ain't got much of that in other aspects of the game).
Neither of these suggestions increase the penalties of the currently described system. The first one just reinforces the main goal of reducing genocidal actions, while the second one gives a counterbalance to the action of murdering someone. Obviously the victim would still feel bad about the situation and the PKer might still suffer death penalties, but in the long run those who PKed other players will have to pay back to the community of their victims.
In case the victim's node got destroyed and citizenship removed, the PKer can just do a quest for their own node to remove a tick.
What do you think about this kind of design? Is this too much hassle? Not enough? Do you have other ideas to balance out the PKing in the grand scheme of things?
Account-wide PK count. This would not impact the lives of normal players, but would somewhat limit the PKing abilities of anyone who wants to have a PKing alt on their account.
Second one
PK count removal quest should send you to the node whose citizen you PKed and have you do a node quest there (ideally one of the harder more massive ones). If you PKed a citizen of your own node, you can't remove that counter tick until you change nodes. Nomads can obviously PK anyone and then just do a quest in their victim's nodes.
I think this approach would force people to travel around (which imo is a good thing), would push people to try and be friendlier with their node mates, and would provide nomadic players with a small benefit (considering that they ain't got much of that in other aspects of the game).
Neither of these suggestions increase the penalties of the currently described system. The first one just reinforces the main goal of reducing genocidal actions, while the second one gives a counterbalance to the action of murdering someone. Obviously the victim would still feel bad about the situation and the PKer might still suffer death penalties, but in the long run those who PKed other players will have to pay back to the community of their victims.
In case the victim's node got destroyed and citizenship removed, the PKer can just do a quest for their own node to remove a tick.
What do you think about this kind of design? Is this too much hassle? Not enough? Do you have other ideas to balance out the PKing in the grand scheme of things?
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Comments
No disagreement on the rest but this part is bad design. There's not necessarily a good way to know in advance what node someone is from, particularly if you're both abroad. There are also enough situations where you might need to fight a fellow node member after going red for another reason.
And as for situations where you might have to fight your nodemate, I personally would like for there to be a push against those situations. In theory, nodemates should be working towards a common goal. You should have comradery and all that jazz. If you meet your nodemate on the other end of the world, you should immediately know that he has your back.
And again, all those assumptions come from Steven's desire for node citizenship to be the highest loyalty for a player. Obviously it might not work out that way, and then I'd be fine if you could just remove the tick in your own node, but to me it seems like a nice way to push people together. You see a Red from your own node and you help him remove his corruption so that he might do the same for you in the future. But you'd only be sure (or at least somewhat sure) that he didn't get that corruption on your own mate if you knew that he wouldn't be able to remove that PK tick if he did (which would be detrimental to any of his future PKing endeavors).
In other words, I wanna see a true sense of neighborhood comradery in Ashes, especially considering that most guildmates will probably not talk in chat and just sit in discord. And this kind of change to the system would push them to socialize with their nodemates more.
I also don't believe that 'node camaraderie' is going to convince even the majority of players to not try to take you out in that case. Particularly if they're a bounty hunter generally. There's enough people on these forums who consider PKing never morally permissible to believe that this won't come up. That loyalty will be higher than node loyalty. It doesn't even matter if it's rare, because the core premise is that it can't be cured.
As such, if you are defending yourself, your PK count doesnt go up because you wont be gaining corruption.
I like both suggestions from the OP - on the assumption node citizenship is clear.
I dont think there will be such a concept as a PK alt.
You can have a red character moving around to find greens to kill without worrying about losing your gear upon death, nor will such a character go far without being jumped on like some pinata.
Remember, Steven said there will be activities that will enable a char to redeem themselves, lowering the PK count (not talking about corruption points here) to zero.
Such a suggestion will make PKing easier. It will be a lot easier to do the redemption activities with one char and reduce the PK count of the account, rather than doing it painstakingly with all chars.
Why is it important to reduce the PK count, some might ask.
Because if you are a red player and your PK count is 4+ (or whatever the devs decide) there is 100% chance that you will drop inventory items as well as equiped (gear) items.
I see no reason for this suggestion.
Understand that the concept of "pk char" isnt realistic as I explained above. Not one bit.
100% there will be pk alts
Now, obviously the stat dampening is there to limit this somewhat but we don't know at which point it starts to really decrease your stats to a point where you can't even kill a lowbie.
We also know that node development will most likely have you running around both low and high lvl players, so that cuts down on the longevity of someone's PKing session.
But let's say there's a low lvl dungeon. It's full of lowbies because it's the best place for them to farm stuff. The closest high lvl location is 2-3 minutes away from the entrance and that's if the high lvl BH is even in that high lvl location. A theoretical dick has a high lvl alt with cheap gear at his lvl and the most glass-cannon build possible. He can kill a lowbie healer through burst within seconds and can then just kite the remainder of the group and kill them because they no longer have heals. Those lowbies would probably be somewhat bad at the game so it makes things even worse.
Now, with some skill and luck this PKer might be able to clear a few rooms-worth of lowbies before they either kill him or a BH comes to save them. This would put the PKer at around 20-30 PKs. Or, depending on how much corruption you gain for killing lowbies at high lvl, you might be stopped by the stat dampening at around the last person of the first group (if not even before that).
The PKer can then just die several times, lose his cheap gear and maybe get XP debt worth a few lvls. But the counter would still be at ~8 at the minimum. And now if this PKer went back to his main char and needed to PK someone, he'd immediately get 8-count-worth of corruption, instead of whatever you'd get for your first kill.
And he'd now need to go and do the quest to reduce that counter if he wanted to be able to PK more on his main. And as I said in the OP, I'd like those quests to be as expensive/difficult as possible. Maybe even have them high-lvl only, though that might destroy low lvl pvp/pk so that might be a bit too harsh.
But either way, that PKer's actions on his alt would now influence his future actions on his main, while w/o a account-wide PK counter people could just make new alts and keep PKing lowbies for fun w/o any repercussions.
2) I dig this idea
Well, what stopped you? Or them?
This is my experience as well (in MMOs), once a certain mastery of the game is achieved, but I've seldom seen 'what exactly stops those people' other than 'them getting bored or losing interest'.
Bear in mind once again that I come from a community (outside of MMOs) where only personal skill progress even EXISTS, far less 'is cared about', so this may be more alien to me than to most.
And again, I mainly see this as a deterrent against lowbie genocide. If Intrepid succeed at the ttk goals genociding players at your own lvl might be fairly hard, even with glasscannon characters. RPS design might counterbalance this, but that will mostly depend on how exactly Intrepid set up the RPS.
I agree with the spirit of the idea - punish the player, but at a practical level, I think it will just backfire and reduce the overall effectiveness of the guardrail.
We've already seen 2 big changes to the pvp/pve balance with the open seas and ruins mechanics. As much as the carebearish part of the community has complained about those 2, I feel like some murderhobos complaining about my suggestion would bring some balance to things.
I mean, the risk that anyone is able to attack and kill you with no penalty, and you will suffer a penalty for defending yourself is already an established aspect of corruption.
I fail to see how this is any different.
Though the discussion about node citizenship from another thread makes me think that your alts might be nomads, at which point that part of my suggestion kinda falls apart completely so it might not even be important.
No account wide pk count please.. I want my alts to by my alts.
Does this limit them from being alts in any way OTHER than what you just described?
I knew of quite a few people with 'PK alts' in L2
I don't know if should be account wide, to affect even characters on a different server. Seems too much.
But I understand the intention.
I had a suggestion which could work the same way if it is bound to the character only:
I realize that the killer might even regret his action and offer to buy the essence back from the victim.
The concept is there. The more a player becomes corrupted, the more such essence is spread on the server and find it's way to somebody who is interested to defeat him.
Maybe with a large enough quantity one could infuse gear or do some other things too.
The only condition from my side is that such benefits should gradually fade as they are used. For example if you make a compass which helps you locate him (or to avoid him), then the compass should lose a little bit of strength each time it gives a positive result. If that player leaves the server and returns 1 year later, the compass should keep it's strength and start detecting him as if no time has passed.
Sorry but my cleric is not going to be PKing more than my alt rogue lol.
You disagreed with me when I said I see loopholes in the pvp corruption system.
You said in the other post "I've seen all possible "exploits" of this system in my 12 years of playing with it in Lineage 2." All possible exploits.....? Really? Why aren't you working for intrepid then designing a flawless system? I Laughed at that arrogance before, but now, all of the sudden you are advocating for harsher penalties? Are you seeing the light now or are you wanting to increase penalties for no logical reason?
You said "Neither of these suggestions increase the penalties of the currently described system. The first one just reinforces the main goal of reducing genocidal actions, while the second one gives a counterbalance to the action of murdering someone. Obviously the victim would still feel bad about the situation and the PKer might still suffer death penalties, but in the long run those who PKed other players will have to pay back to the community of their victims."
Your entire paragraph relates to increasing the amount of time needed to do "payback" for killing someone. That's a direct increase to a penalty.
As long as killing a someone results in them dropping a decent amount of their items pvp will continue. As it stands the amount dropped from a kill is way too high. The amount dropped from someone that won't, or doesn't have time to, fight back is extremely high. All this promotes is for people to quit the game or large groups to exploit bad design. I'm in the second category.
And my first suggestion is targeted at the same "exploit" as the corruption stat dampening change from L2's system. So no, this is not some new exploit that I discovered that Intrepid didn't know about. I just prefer it to curb the dicks, who'd use alts to attack lowbies, even more than the currently suggested system will already do.
In other words, I didn't increase the punishment for we don't even know how hard it was in the first place, nor did I change anything in the current design that would go against its direction.
You are literally wanting to tie the penalties from one character to another. That is a huge increase as now ALL characters are at a disadvantage until the penalty is cleared. That kind of action is typically reserved for GMs taking action against someone for stepping way past a line. Applying a penalty account wide is a bad idea. Applying a penalty from one character to another is a bad idea. At this point why not remove pvp entirely?
The real problem with this entire set up is the quantity of loot that is dropped when killed. Tune that and the rest will be viable. Don't tune it and there will always be enough incentive to make farming groups.
You didn't answer my question, "Are you seeing the light now or are you wanting to increase penalties for no logical reason?"
I will ask again since you missed it again, "Are you seeing the light now or are you wanting to increase penalties for no logical reason?"
Where are you getting your facts from? Can you link that stats to prove what you are saying? My alts, and I had a bunch, were used frequently for crafting, dungeons, raiding and pvp, they didn't just chill. What info are you using that shows how people play their characters and what they use them for?
I am amused by the personal digs at me but it doesn't change the idea that increasing the penalties is a bad solution. The problem isn't pvp, it is the quantity of loot dropped. Intrepid wanted people to drop a large amount of loot, which is a really, really bad idea, and in doing so they created a large incentive to gank people. The development of large squads farming everyone they see was the only possible evolution to this design.
I personally think that ~10-15 PKs should be fine, if the quest requires you to spend ~3h and a chunk of your money to cleanse your whole PK counter. Mb 3h is even a bit on the shorter side, but again, that'll have to be tested.