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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.
Comments
Of an equal level, you'd get far less corruption. But indeed, this is a major concern in general. I would hope that mayor's could declare non citizens as not allowed to gather if resources are becoming scarce. So if a non citizen begins gathering in the node, they become flagged for PvP
From my perspective I played on a pvp server in WoW since vanilla. So I saw when there was no punishment at all for ganking/griefing. Then when they instituted dishonorable kills that did help---except for people who didn't care about ranking, lol. the realm forums, mIRC, and zone chat provided a place for people to talk about griefers...and people started to become known on the server for it. Hunting parties would form---this seems to be a primitive form of BH. But it definitely I feel fostered realm community
I am a huge fan of world pvp--it adds an element of danger, mystery, and challenge to what would otherwise could be a more sterile experience. That being said...I don't want to feel on my toes 24/7...I could see how that would be stressful for some players.
I made a post about this.
The solution is - after a certain threshhold is met of nodes being removed - a guardian of sorts spawns. High level NPC that only aggros on anyone gathering. Defeating guardian will require a group of 8 players MINIMUM.
This NPC aggro range is huge and will beeline to anyone gathering and attack. It will not attack random players moving by it. It will defend itself if attacked.
the thought of a BH returning items to players.... FUCKING LULZ
that aint gonna happen. Most people signing up as a BH are ppl who were interested in PKing for loot. But because of the corruption system - deterred them. Now how can they PK and still get loot? Oh yeah, be a BH.
if I'm a BH and recovered your loot - that shit is mine. you can buy it off me or get gud and not die. not my problem. There will be many people like this.
BH is there to prevent griefing an area or those spawn camping, it should have ZERO mechanics dealing with the green victim. That's not their job or purpose. It's even in the damn name. All they get is an indicator of a PKer is active nearby - go make a play and chase the Pker down. that's it.
Too many BH in the game --- ya gonna be disppointed when there isnt much content to do, cause some BH prolly killed the PK by the time you arrive.
And as for "there's too many BHs and not enough PKs", this is exactly why I said that my suggestion would allow for lesser corruption penalties, because the impact on greens would be also lessened. I had an additional mechanic to support it when I initially came up with this idea, but that's all just testing and tweaking.
In other words, I just want the system to be better (and it might already be, who knows) and I just think that it's possible to make it better for all 3 sides and not just either greens or reds.
Still a negative for the nodes citizens. But at least that sort of deals with individual griefers
With that said - Incentivizing BH would also discourage PKers/PKing
Mother earth dont give a fuck about it's node citizens. These guardians can be spawn even by the citizens themselves. Mother earth looking out for herself.
Corruption is a punishment. So if bots are taking all the nodes then you have to get punished to get rid of them. We all know there will be bots, lots of them.
paid subscription deters bot accounts and most importantly - ACTIVE GM's will nuke out 99% of bot activity that gets reported.
What other games failed was active GM on servers around the clock.
Fun lore, but not a great solution for a games mechanic.
The game already has integrated the possibility to get back 50% of the resources instantly if the attacked player flags himself before he dies. Trying to keep all 100% is a sign of greed. It is justified if those were gathered over a long time, like a few hours, but why would a weak player stay away from the city with valuable resources so long? In AoC the city is just 5 minutes away.
What we can add is a two step corruption, 1st when the player is killed and 2nd when the resources are picked up from the ashes. Maybe even inspecting the content could already trigger that. Also defending the ashes of a player until he comes to retrieve his stuff could be rewarded.
But the game doesn't want to be that protective. Wiki say "These ash piles are immediately lootable by any player.[63] Player flagging is not triggered by looting.[12]". If flagging is not triggered, corruption should not be triggered either.
And with travel times being longer than just "tp here then tp there", if you tell all greens to just run to the city every time they pick up an item - they'll tell you "you're crazy"
But I'm sure you've seen several threads where people complained about being constantly killed or having only 10 minutes a day to play the game or anything along those lines (or just not wanting to pvp if they're not in the mood like Dygz does). To those people the thought of "protect your spot and you'll get to enjoy the game more" seems to be as alien as "I want everything to be instanced" for me. And I feel like giving them some potential insurance for the time spent, while also letting the PKers kill a few more people a day, would go a long way. Though those PKers would still have to be caught first, so it's not a 100% insurance.
I do not entirely buy the "it's in alpha" position that is the go-to when things don't quite look right. They still decide what to show everyone. Stuff like the moon looks garbage is understandable. "We threw it up in the sky as a placeholder to make sure it moves around first." or whatever they want to say.
For combat - you can mostly determine what combat will feel like when watching what they have provided. And for anyone who has game design programs and has dabbled in it, you know what's required, so you look at what they made and think they really stopped short, why?.....They have not elaborated on what they wish to achieve visually, either.
To give an example - If you take a game like Pantheon and demonstrate their combat, which is basically stand in one spot and auto attack and press buttons once in awhile, and have beside it Ashes of Creation combat, you can easily tell the difference between the two intentions, and get the "jist" of what it will be like, based on the approach taken.
Similarly, you can pair up Archeage 2's teaser trailer (pre-alpha development?), beside Ashes of Creation combat, and once again, immediately notice a difference. Archeage 2 (apparently further behind in development) was able to demonstrate the feel of their games combat, and while this is also the case with Ashes, it doesn't appear to be as enjoyable to watch.
For a game that is focusing on combat, you would think there would be advances made, and more focus given to this aspect of the game. Even if they had 2 models fighting in combat, and said, this is what we are going for but we have to do this with everything else, so right now you will only see this happen for these 2 models and it will be very basic for everything else, because they havent added all the animations yet for other models...hit boxes...blah blah blah...watch combat tutorials for UE5 and you will see how long it takes to come up with this stuff.
We had a ranger combat demo of left mouse button mashing, Archer was more involved, and the cleric also had left mouse button mashing...a few combat abilities thrown into the mix.... so, if not really a combat demo...we were shown a status effects demo... and if thats the case, they definitely havent been working on combat much.
So all of this makes it a little hard for me to buy the "its in alpha" excuse.
In this particular example I would agree. If all classes are going to have access to dodge, block (if they equip a shield), and potentially parry mechanics, then what you're also saying is to some degree that's a fundamental part of combat that's relevant to everyone.
Something that pervasive should really have been thought through and decided much earlier. It makes me feel as a prospective player that they're not taking combat seriously.
With that said, what I saw from the fighter, ranger, and cleric showcases I was actually very happy with directionally.
The problem is it's challenging to make accurate estimate of what combat will actually be from showcases of lvl 15 characters against mobs that haven’t been tuned yet, and fundamental combat mechanics are still unfinished/undecided. Basically, what we saw is a very rough draft.
On top of that, because your abilities depend on where you spend ability points, one cleric's combat is going to (sometimes) look different than another’s.
Right. And to that at least I would say I really liked the direction they were going with that.
Hearing from the combat team in the Dec. Dev Update was helpful. The focus on archetype identity, and how combat feels specifically, was reassuring.
The only thing I can confidently say about combat right now is that it looks interesting
You cannot make mmos great again for those who have only 10 minutes a day to play the game
The minimum time/week should be 16h
A change which somewhat surprised me is that ancient road system which allows fast travel. Where is that located? Is floating in the sky like a highway? Can you transport resources on them? Can you pvp if you meet another player?
But back to the BH viability. They should not be able in 100% of cases to take and give back the resources lost by the green because the PK-ers will have 0 reason to become corrupt.
How do you balance the success rate?
And once that is done, it still means that some greens will not get their resources back.
The corruption system already protects green players. I have no need to body guard or rob the rich to feed the poor.
There's also the incentive of reward by killing corrupted as a bounty hunter.
And if the design of how the bounties get given out (if I understand it correctly that is) remains the same, then BHs would have to get their targets at a tavern or a certain NPC only in a lvl4 military node. At which point there's definitely some amount of distance that a BH would have to travel from said tavern/npc to the PKer. And the time of that travel would have to determine how quickly the PKer can remove their corruption through grind.
Military NPCs could give immediate info about any new PKer and might even make announcements in "BH chat" about a new PKer, so anyone in the vicinity of the NPC could quickly get the bounty from them and try to catch the PKer before they remove their corruption. Tavern-based bounties could maybe only work if the PKer was above some corruption threshold (or a PK count one), because taverns would most likely be closer to the killer.
And we could have that only a BH kill would drop the victims resources rather than just any kill, which imo would strengthen the BHs' reputation amongst the people and would decrease the amount of greens just attacking the Red (because some maniacs consider that a bad thing). And again though, the BH still gotta kill the PKer in order to get the resources, which is never assured.
This is just the surface-lvl first-thought kind of design, I'm sure it could be refined into something much better or there might even be able a better way to satisfy all 3 sides of this equation.
In the Grand scheme of things, I don't feel a free loader should be helped. It means a lot of time drain when there will never be recompense.
I realise there are bounty rewards but that is par for the course. I don't see the need to pass off any loot back to a free loader.
It's not like only BHs can kill a red. I'm sure that green victims will just yell in chat "there's a Red in this location", so if you're just running somewhere close as a random dude - you're always free to just go kill the Red and get all the loot for yourself.
But a "bounty" system supposes that someone's paying for that bounty. And the game could just say that the greens are the ones doing that. And it is kinda already the case. Taxes collected from those "freeloaders" support the whole system, so in a way what I'm saying is already the case.
Sure, they will pay taxes and probably create the best armour but we will also pay taxes and create the best armour.
I'm not sure how often a bounty hunter will be required but the game is long term in all hopes. Doesn't matter if I complete bounty hunter tree in one year or ten years really.
And again, I'm talking about this mechanic in the context of more frequent PKs, so even those greens do just never fight - they'll still die somewhat often.
I do not see why they should also get all the resources back after a bounty hunter has earned those resources.
There's meant to be resources sinks and pvp is a big one.
That's like saying "well I stole this money from another robber, so I definitely earned this money". Though if you do think that, well then we just have differing povs (as if this wasn't already apparent