Good evening fellow gamers
There's been a lot of buzz surrounding the proposed anti-griefing mechanic entitled "Corruption." Based on the initial description of the mechanic, I'm concerned that it may be too aggressive, and cross into the realm of anti-pvp. I've played a lot of MMOs, most relevant to this discussion being 10 years of EVE Online, Archeage, including many of the fresh starts, and BDO, off and on since launch.
I believe that at its core, the greatest driver of persistent, player narrative-driven content, is conflict. This takes a number of forms, and while it isn't exclusive to players engaging in combat with other players, that is generally the first to spring to mind, is the most divisive amongst the MMO community.
I am of the mind that the Corruption mechanic, as it is currently described, puts too much of a damper on organic PvP interactions, and fails as an anti-griefing mechanic.
PKing isn't the only way to grief in MMOs. Mob training, grind spot disruption, and tag stealing are all ways in which players can negatively impact the play of others without directly engaging them in combat. Often, the simplest solution to these activities is to kill the offending player in order to regain control of the area.
In BDO, there exist players that abuse the game's version of Corruption, called karma, by going to another player's grinding/gathering area, and become a nuisance by killing mobs or gathering nodes in the other player's rotation. If the original player retaliates by killing the intruding player, they receive a penalty to their karma. The intruding player can then return to the spot and continue being a nuisance until the original player either kills them so many times that they end up in a negative karma state, which causes them to be attacked by city guards and puts their gear at risk of downgrading, or until the original player leaves, thus turning control over to the nuisance player. This is called karmabombing, and it is clear abuse of a system nearly the same as is planned for AoC. It doesn't reward player skill, only persistence and willingness to engage in bad-faith behavior.
Players should not face harsh mechanics-based punishment for engaging in fair open world PvP. The Corruption mechanic should be split into two separate, but intertwined mechanics, which I will call the Bounty and Corruption system:
Bounty:
- Gained on every aggressive PvP kill outside of mechanically sanctioned PvP, such as node/guild wars, sieges, etc.
- Is worth a flat amount, plus an amount based on the value of the loot dropped by the slain defender
- Is paid out to anyone who kills the player with the bounty
- Bounty payout is an amount less than the value of the repair costs of the slain player, to prevent abuse by "selling" bounty to friends
- Dying while having a bounty increases gear degradation
- Once a player crosses a certain bounty threshold, they can be tracked by bounty hunters, similar to the current corruption system
- A player is able to pay off his own bounty at a premium
Corruption:
- Gained on "unfair" aggressive PvP kills, such as ganking low-level players, but not on kills of players at or near the aggressor's level
- Is gained in increasing amounts depending on level difference and time between "unfair" kills
- Results in scaling PvP damage debuffs
- After a certain threshold, PvP flags the character so that attacking and killing them does not result in bounty or corruption for the aggressor
- Is reduced on death
- Can be reduced by grinding/quests/similar ingame mechanics
My reasoning for splitting the two mechanics is that it allows the Bounty system to be largely player-driven, while the Corruption system remains mechanics-driven. This should result in more organic small-scale PvP content, which can be a driver for larger conflict. Tired of Guild A killing your gatherers? Declare war on them so you can kill them with impunity and collect their bounties, without accruing your own!
In my model for the Bounty system, it would reward players capable of consistently winning profitable engagements, while avoiding or defeating attempts at retribution. It would result in a net loss for unskilled players or those who attack others without reason. It would also allow players to more easily defend their grinding/gathering spots over the short term against nuisance players, without being punished with PvP debuffs or the chance of dropping gear pieces.
Corruption remains largely the same as is currently proposed, but simply would not apply to fights within a certain level range, and it should serve its purpose as an anti-griefing tool as well as the current planned iteration.
Player agency could be further granted over these mechanics by allowing node owners to, for example, permit/disallow players of certain Bounty totals into their towns. Were this to be implemented, I would caution against allowing high bounty holders into the largest of cities, as I believe the system should still impose some limiting factors on players that decide to go into the bandit lifestyle whole-hog.
The manner in which the PvP loot is handled could be another balancing lever. Loot gained from PvP could be marked as "stolen", which could cause it to be dropped in its entirety on death, could be subject to greater market fees when sold on the auction house, or banned from it entirely, requiring direct player trade in order to sell it, presumably at a lower cost than normal goods of the same kind.
Looking back on this, I realize I wrote a bit of a novella on the subject, so here is a TL;DR:
Explicit, "gamey" punishment for "fair" pvp bad
Player-driven conflict good
Make OWPvP Great Again
One aspect of griefing protection that I don't have a clean answer for is one that was brought up in the now-infamous Lucky Ghost video, regarding top guilds locking down the best dungeons/grind spots and using certain PvEvP mechanics to grief weaker groups attempting to do the content. If we were to look at this as a problem, which I'm not necessarily inclined to do so, what would be your suggestions to combat it, without negatively impacting organic open-world play?
