Greetings, glorious testers!
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest news on Alpha Two.
Check out general Announcements here to see the latest news on Ashes of Creation & Intrepid Studios.
To get the quickest updates regarding Alpha Two, connect your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest news on Alpha Two.
Check out general Announcements here to see the latest news on Ashes of Creation & Intrepid Studios.
To get the quickest updates regarding Alpha Two, connect your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Mule PKing
Ludullu
Member, Alpha Two
On yesterday's stream we learned that killing a player's controlled creature will give us lesser corruption value than what we would've gotten if we killed the player themselves.
Here's the clip for context
https://clips.twitch.tv/SteamyLivelyWaterMau5-VRVyw0WmCXdCvPoZ
And with that in mind I started to ask myself, why would that be the case, considering that the mule can carry x10 of the player's inventory and will most likely get utilized during prolonged farming sessions (be it artisan or mob-based one) or just to "safely" transfer mats between locations, instead of using a caravan.
This seems quite counterproductive to the principle of "risk vs reward" in the context of the corruption system. You murder a mule, you get less corruption than what you would've gotten were you to kill the owner BUT THEN you get x10 more loot than what you would've gotten off of the owner. If that ain't wack I don't know what is.
Steven previously mentioned that you can knock a player off a mount with CCs. And we now know that you can't use CCs against green players. This would imply that a player who's transferring mats by riding the mule should be safe from those CCs.
But then there's a problem of
What is yall's opinion on this? To me this seems assbackwards. There's a chance that we just don't know some detail that solves this issue or this will just get changed during testing, but what is your opinion on is as it currently stands? Do you want it to get changed or do you think it's fair to get less corruption for much greater rewards?
Here's the clip for context
https://clips.twitch.tv/SteamyLivelyWaterMau5-VRVyw0WmCXdCvPoZ
And with that in mind I started to ask myself, why would that be the case, considering that the mule can carry x10 of the player's inventory and will most likely get utilized during prolonged farming sessions (be it artisan or mob-based one) or just to "safely" transfer mats between locations, instead of using a caravan.
This seems quite counterproductive to the principle of "risk vs reward" in the context of the corruption system. You murder a mule, you get less corruption than what you would've gotten were you to kill the owner BUT THEN you get x10 more loot than what you would've gotten off of the owner. If that ain't wack I don't know what is.
Steven previously mentioned that you can knock a player off a mount with CCs. And we now know that you can't use CCs against green players. This would imply that a player who's transferring mats by riding the mule should be safe from those CCs.
But then there's a problem of
I would assume that mule speed is rather low, otherwise the caravan system would not be used because it'd be easier to just make a few trips on a mule rather than risking a caravan. And with that speed being low, attacking a mule while not mounted should be pretty easy (especially for a ranged character). Which means that you can PK the mount directly, have your partymates completely loot it (potentially 5 players'-worth of stuff) and just run off into the sunset, while you have less corruption to work off than if you'd killed the rider.Mounts can be targeted separately from the player while mounted.[26]
What is yall's opinion on this? To me this seems assbackwards. There's a chance that we just don't know some detail that solves this issue or this will just get changed during testing, but what is your opinion on is as it currently stands? Do you want it to get changed or do you think it's fair to get less corruption for much greater rewards?
7
Comments
You know what this sounds like? Sounds like a job for a poison pill
Just messin with you. Good points raised in your post.
I think if someone is using a mule, they need to be prepared to defend it. If someone is going to let an attacker kill their mule uncontested, I'm okay with less corruption on the mule. For me, corruption is good to prevent player deaths, but shouldn't allow players to transport high value with no risk. Steven's comments made it sound like it will be untenable to kill a green, and I don't think a mule should be protected by this. The mule transport needs some amount of risk, otherwise some people may make 10 trips with a mule instead of using the more risky caravan system.
Plus, a player could always keep their most valuable gathererables in their personal bags, while the mule carries the common stuff. And if a gatherer is carrying something very valuable in their personal bags, that then creates a very interesting risk/reward decision on whether to defend the mule
Idk, initial thoughts, need to ponder it more.
Usually you'd either run away from a group of attackers or hang corruption on one of them in hopes of them getting punished (with fighting back only being a valid choice if you had smth valuable). But, assuming that you can't just get on another faster mount while you have a sully stocked mule, in this situation your only real solution is to fight back, because even basic mats in big amounts are quite valuable. And to me this sounds like just the super forced type of pvp that a lot of people dislike.
Imo, considering the potential rewards, you either shouldn't be able to attack a mule-type mount until you kill the owner or the mule itself could give scaled corruption values depending on its capacity. To me this seems like a fairer "risk vs reward" equation than the current "pay a little price to get a huge prize".
I just hope that people be knocked out of their mules and we can opt by attacking the mule only, this seems good.
Killing the player will force a respawn somewhere else, but if he doesn't die then he can keep travelling.
This will let true elite pvpers making roadblocks and having a toll.
I think the mule is a design error because is in competition with the caravan mechanic which forces players to accept PvP.
But maybe the mule can still act as a compromise for when a caravan cannot be used.
Like transporting goods from the freehold to the caravanserai.
What definitely should be avoided is to provide a safe place to store materials while gathering rare resources a few hours long over the entire map.
However is consistent with what many players asked in the gathering and PvP thread: a place to store materials safely: that might be their own inventory.
Another info in the stream was the introduction of various crate sizes, even the extra large crates.
I wonder if those will store more materials or if are reserved for some special components, like siege weapons or ship components which should not be in my opinion fit onto a mule at all.
As with everything corruption we‘ve pretty much talked it to death, and just need to test it.
From my understanding you fill your mule with stuff and bring it to the next node where a caravan can start off.
Repeat the process until you got a full caravan.
Then use the caravan to transport the mass of raw goods to your home node.
Also Steven said that he did not want people Pking for the sake of making them rage Quit.
But its ok to PK to steal others stuff.
Its a risk of the attacker having the possibility to get killed while being corrupted.
Loosing maybe even their own gear and taking a ton of exp debt.
While the target has the risk of being attacked while carrying goods.
I am more concerned how green players can abuse the mule.
Let Purple guy kill mule while you stay green.
Purple guy becomes Red.
Kill red guy while staying green.
If he kills you he gains even more corruption.
PM the bounty hunters in discord that there is a red in node X.
or call your friends to hunt the red down.
Profit by looting the gear from red.
As for the having 1 guy kill a mule and 4 others loot it.
Just make it so that anyone outside the guild / party / family of the mule owner cant loot the dead mule without gaining corruption for X minutes.
The loot bag should shine Red to make sure everyone understands that they gain corruption by looting it.
Hard to predict in detail before we see the entire chain production, all ingredients involved in recipes and where those resources come from.
For example fish. Is it used only for food? Certain fish might come from mountain lakes only.
Some plants might spawn only in the arid or desert areas.
If Steven wants, can make them unique and non-replaceable by other kind of resources and one could not find them unless he lives in those nodes, close. Then I would introduce a decay time, to store the resource fast in containers to keep them fresh. Processing fresh resources could give an advantage.
Then processed goods should be shipped only with crates.
I hope Steven will protect the caravan system, because it is the only thing which sets the game apart from other MMOs.
I think player death is more disruptive because this could block you from reaching your destinations, people can literally deny content from you by making a roadblock, but if you don't die then it's fine you can keep going.
Importantly this means that regardless of level, as long as I am with the mule and you kill it, I can whale on you for free so either you die or respond, maybe kill me as well and end up with significantly more corruption.
Now problems that arise here is a mid level getting ganked by a high level where the defender will not win even with dampened stats. Now the question that is mainly raised is, was it not on the player to calculate the value of their goods and appropriately prepare themselves?
Another issue I would personally get real annoyed with, will be when I farm peacefully for 3 hours enjoying my evening talking to my buds and I have nothing but some standard stone/wood in my mules bags but someone sees the mule and kills it. If i immediately lose access to the full loot that was available in the mule while it was alive then regardless of if i win that fight I will have lost a potentially large amount of time. So hopefully IS decides that when a mule dies it drops 100% of its loot to be repicked up and not a reduced amount like in caravans.
All around, I think this will force players gathering high tier resources to be in small groups, encouraging group play, but also potentially creating guilds blocking resource locations more often because if you already need to group to safely harvest the materials why would you let another group do the same?
Completely unsure how I feel about this ngl. Like others stated mules cannot replace the caravans, however the potential for griefing is really high if mules drop a portion of loot and not all. If mules drop all loot they had, I think the system would be ok, my only worry being that playing this game alone will be nearly impossible if you are near any in game population centers or popular destinations.
And as for the corrupted interaction, like I said in the post, the loot would be picked up by the PKer's mates rather than the PK himself, so while the PKer will still suffer the death penalties, the amount of loot garnered from that single kill should far outweigh that penalty, especially considering that one death would probably be enough due to lower amounts of corruption.
And as you said, this will push people to be way more social, but it would also provide quite a lot of tedium to any solo gatherer that might've wanted to have a good gathering session. And we don't even know the values of our inventory capacity. Maybe you can only cut down 20 trees before maxing out your backpack. This would mean that you either have to use a mule to gather more or run to the nearest storage every few minutes, which is beyond being a chore it'd just be bad design imo.
I don't think being robbed is a problem.
On the next night rally your buddies and go for a chill robbin the hood.
What people are failing is seeing that they can be in both ends in this tug of war, one day you will be stealing, the next day people will steal from you.
It's just the content, it's fine like this.
Even the most hardcore players don't want to be constantly fighting for their life or resources. There has been many a time when I have just wanted to sit back and enjoy the games aesthetics and grind insane amounts of loot, I know for a fact I will usually have a group, however when I'm not I don't want to be forced to different content because it is common for mules to be taken by other players.
@NiKr
So it will likely depend on gathering speeds. If my inventory can hold 1000 items, and a mule 10,000 but it takes an hour to grind 1,000 gatherables then the mule will never be filled by a single players grind, or if it is, then that is a big risk that is accepted by the player, since asking a player to return to an inventory location once every 2-3 hours is very acceptable.
With that being the case, if I solo gather with a mule and your group of 3 gank me, you have no idea if I have been farming for 20 minutes or 120 minutes and thus the resource drop might very well be very mediocre. All in all I think as long as the player inventory is relatively good and and the gathering speed average then mule usage will often be used at a partial capacity merely to increase grinding time but almost never used to fully max out unless in a group, which would nullify your worry.
My main worry here is more about the risk vs reward equation. Mules exist to carry more shit in them, yet they give you less corruption. I see that as the biggest PKing bait, while also being a huge detriment to any player who hasn't thought deeply about all of the consequences of having resources on his mule. And I feel like there's gonna be at quite a few of such people.
There's a chance that the "lower value of corruption" will be smth like 90 for the mule while it's 100 for the player, but at that point I just don't see why you'd have that distinction.
And just as a personal opinion, having a rule where you gotta kill the player before you can kill the mule would lead to a much more exhilarating risk-taking situation with a huge potential for reward. And this could then be a natural bait for PKing. You ride a super slow, but empty, mule instead of a fast mount in hope of fucking someone over with corruption. But the choice to go corrupt would be purely and truly just on the attacker, rather than have some other nefarious reason behind it, be it pve griefing or some other kind of player abuse to bait a PK.
That to me sounds like a great risk vs reward situation.
Why even have mules if they're there just to punish people into using caravans. It seems especially silly considering that there's already an example of an "encourage rather than punish" system in the game. That being the pvp system. You're encouraged to fight back and rewarded with lower death penalties in case you lose.
While here you have the caravan system, which is already risky, reinforced by the potential risks of your mule getting killed because it gives less corruption. And if you use neither of those systems, you have to spend a shitton of time to transfer your goods.
All while the punishments for the attackers are directly inverse. You lose pretty much nothing in a caravan attack (gear decay and potential loss of ladder progress is nothing compared to the potential rewards). You only gain a relatively small amount of corruption if you go directly for the mule, while getting up to x10 the player loot. And you get full corruption if you kill a player while only getting the smallest reward for it.
It's a weird inverse of risk system. Non-pvpers are encouraged to waste their time running around with only their backpack capacity to transfer goods, while pvpers are encouraged to attack the highest value targets. I didn't think about this interaction in-depth before, but now that I notice it, it is much much more lenient towards pvpers than I thought.
With your strat it requires a minimum of 2 players, and therefore 2 hours of prior grinding by the defending player, and tbh, 2 hours of grinding means they should have dropped off their grinded resources by then... obviously this is based on a theory regarding gatherables and the time required to gather them.
And these timetables are based on if the player is putting 100% of grinded resources onto their mule, so imo this situation is highly dependent on the gather speed and player storage.
I don't really see any issues, you are literally being set as corrupted and haven't even looted the mount yet after killing it. Meaning they can fight back while staying green.
We have 2 scenarios. One is a mule standing next to a player who's gathering whatever resource. In the majority of cases it'd be pointless to attack the mule because you got no clue about its contents (unless you've been spying on this player for a long time).
The second one is a player riding a mule towards a node. The chances are, the mule has resources in it (otherwise why ride a mule, unless you're baiting the PK). And if the mule was utilized, it'd mean that it has at least more than a player's worth, because otherwise the player would've just used their own backpack instead.
You can now attack that mule and have your mates loot it, while you either run away as a Red or just let the rider kill you.
This type of activity could be done by a group of friends or guild/node-mates around well-known resource spots (a thick forest, a huge field with a ton of plants, a mine, etc). Pretty much the same as someone waiting for caravans to attack, but with mules, or most like just both/either.
This would work quite nicely under the assumption that it doesn't take an hour to fill up your backpack.
But if it does take an hour or more, then I'd ask why even have mules. Majority of people will have around 2-3h a day to play the game. If they're gatherers, they'd spend a bit of that time doing random shit or looking for a gathering spot and then they'll be gathering for around 1.5-2h, which would be right around their full backpack (depending on the resource, I'd assume). They then just run back to their node, put that shit up for sale or trade it to whoever and logoff.
In that kind of system the mules would most likely only get used to transfer several people's resources, if those people want to avoid using a caravan. At which point we get back to my first example - there's attackers waiting for such mules and are ready to attack them, except this time the mule is even juicier than in the first example because it has several backpacks-worth of resources in it. There, I described a situation where I'd consider it an issue. The issue being - the attackers barely risk anything while stand to get a huge reward.
Imagine that a group asks him what he is doing there, if he harvested resources which are protected by the node. Can he talk himself out and prove his innocence?
If he is not solo but there are more players with mules in the area, then the node should send fast reinforcements to investigate.
I feel ok with the reduced mule protection for such cases.
Then we have this Steven quote from the latest live stream. "Most players won't go red, the vast majority of players won't go red."
What does it even matter how much corruption a donkey gives if the vast majority of players aren't even willing to flirt with going red, ever, because the corruption system is so harsh. I don't think there will be many donkeys dying.
"Ashes of Creation is endeavoring to build a risk vs reward centric pvx style game. And that intent and purpose will be delivered upon and it will not change." - Steven, latest live stream.
That's a strong quote. I don't think he's referring to donkeys or corruption though with that, maybe other systems. But certainly not donkeys, because of this quote again, "...the vast majority of players won't go red."
I've recently given my opinion that either "many" or "most" players won't go red. But the vast majority? Not sure what that means, but it sounds like more than "many" or "most". Sounds more like between 5% and 10% of players will actually be willing to go all the way in contesting content.
So I can't say I'm terribly worried about my donkey when the vast majority of players won't even be willing to contest my resources in it.
But it all has to be tested, as Steven also said in the live stream in regards to corruption, "And we have to playtest that first."
So I have no idea whether a donkey should give less corruption. And based on the current direction the game is leaning, I think the donkeys are in a pretty safe spot.
Edit: And honestly, after typing this all out, donkeys seem like one of the safest things in the game. Probably should give less corruption for the very, very few people even willing to kill one.
Attacks go corrupted, pretty big risk to me since person with the mule is going to attack you as well. Also the risk of having a mule with loot to carry all that stuff however it works is that it can be attacked. Not everything needs to be equal in terms of content between corruption, if your mule dies and there is a red player kill them and get your loot or prevent them from looting it to begin with and going red for no reason.
If you kill the mule you become red. Now that you're red the owner of the mule can attack you without turning purple.
I’m waiting for three bounty hunters to show up with a Hippogryph on their wanted poster.
So if someone is red/purple and is attacking your mule then it will be funny if you have people in steath around the mule and one shot the attacker
LUL
Player death would be more disruptive in terms of travel time, if you are just traveling from one place to another, but in terms of the amount of time and effort a player loses, a mule death could be much more disruptive. The time it takes to fill up a mules inventory is supposedly 10 times as long as filling your own inventory, so losing a mule could be up to 10 times as disruptive by that measurement.
There are a lot of good points here from both sides on the topic, but this idea is still bugging me in light of yesterdays live stream. Steven said very clearly that they would not compromise on risk vs reward, but as it stands, there is clearly a lower risk to killing a mule and (seemingly) a much higher reward, as compared to killing a player, and that bothers me.
I hope there are some missing details that explain this apparent contradiction, or that they will revisit the issue in testing, otherwise it's hard to believe they are as dedicated to risk vs reward as they claim to be.