Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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.
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
I dunnno---hopefully they have corruption partially based on the unique ID of the player you've killed. As in, if I've killed 10 different people all at my level, to me that should be less corruption then if I killed the same player 10 times (griefing). At that point killing 10 different people my level is not griefing at all or ganking---so why would there be consequences for that if the target of my killings aren't rage quitting the game? Which I think is what they are trying to prevent...people from quitting the game (loss of $$) because it's not fun for them.
In the wiki it said the only ways to remove corruption was dying, exp, and a quest...but not sure what happens when you are max lvl when there is no more exp? I guess you only can do the quest or die.
The quest idea to remove corruption was removed. The game system treats corrupted/red players as monsters and the NPC's KOS them.
There is supposed to be a quest to remove kill count.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Removing_corruption
To you, sure. To others...no. So it's all about balance.
From what I've seen in the pvp wiki it looks like it's reasonable...but again, we won't know for sure until we get to try it out in Alpha.
I for one want to see how I can manipulate it.
For example---it says you have a risk of dropping items...ok then I'll just equip shitty items to kill someone and make sure I don't have any materials.
Also, according to the wiki players can heal/buff corrupted players without becoming corrupt themselves...so I'd plan to heal/support a corrupted person as they kill.
To get rid of corruption, I assume you can just de-equip everything and have nothing in your inventory, commit suicide a few times, and have it removed. Then start again.
Not sure of the above theories...but excited to try
sometimes it's not just about being the hunter...it's also about being the hunted...I'd love to evade some bounty hunters.
Guess I just gotta fill my inventory with stuff I don't care about losing before I start...but can still attack players.
maybe the 3 gods were wrongly imprisoned by the other 7.....you sure you're on the right side?!
The wiki does say we can worship those gods >_> Some players will have to be an offering to them...
When you just kill another green player that didn't fight back - you should be punished. When you kill several such greens - you should be punished even more. And if there's several players across the server that are all killing several greens who don't fight back - that's the genocide. If corruption has weak punishments for killing sprees, there's gonna be server-wide genocide of green players. Mainly because people like you, who want to kill whoever whenever in any quantity, will know that they won't be punished for doing exactly that. Ashes is a party-based game for the most part. Imagine a group of 8 people who just so happen to be quite weaker than you (will definitely happen at max lvl). They just so happen to be pacifists or you might have a reputation for being a strong player so they're scared to flag against you because then you'll definitely kill them all. And so they don't fight back if you attack one of them.
In the current system you'd be severely punished if you killed each one of them one at a time (even if you had breaks between kills). But if Intrepid implements a sort of ID system, you wouldn't be punished as much for disrupting a whole group's gameplay.
And while I do agree that IDs could potentially make the system a bit better, I do think that this addition would make the system even more convoluted than it is rn (and a ton of people are still confused about it). And I definitely see some future threads of "hey, I killed this dude and it gave me 100 corruption, but when I killed this dude it gave me 500 corruption! WTF?!!? Is this a bug? Is that second guy cheating?"
Also, I can't even imagine all the kill tracking one would need to do or to pay attention to (if Intrepid provides an in-game tracker for all your PKing targets) in order to control their corruption gains. This would definitely become very tedious very fast.
Being merc'd is being killed so quick that even if you couldn't respond, you failed to recover but it wasn't done out of stealth.
And being snipe'd is being picked off by a Ranged savant who beamed you before you could even find them on the battlefield or just being sniped.
Right now the corruption system is on paper. It needs to remain, but it's parameters will get tweaked and I'm confident that it'll not be parasitic design while trying to deter parasitic behavior. For clarity, this does not mean anyone is a "parasite". For those who don't conceptually understand, parasitic design is something that doesn't feed back into the systems or benefits the game, parasitic behavior correlates to the design features where a players action doesn't feed back into the game.
PKers and outlaws have their place, they can also catch a steep bounty on their heads and pay the price.
Which is why I support them being dry looted with the more corruption they incur. It allows flagging on PKing someone to be a strategic and tactical decision while someone who just wants to be a murder hobo for no reason can do so and incur those consequences as well.
The bounty hunting system can easily let someone take the head of the PKer along with their plunder and return a portion back to the player who lost their goods.
especially as a healer where I won't get any punishment for healing/buffing a corrupted person...We'll just have to figure out how to get rid of my companion's corruption...or not get corruption in the first place like damaging/debuffing/stunning someone and having a mob kill them...so we don't get corruption.
and like I said earlier...it's exciting to be both the hunter and the hunted. So the BH system will for sure be fun.
if 8 people combined can't kill me, solo and corrupted...that would mean I'm wayyyy overpowered. But I guess in theory that could happen...
but that's a fair point. I personally don't get thrill in killing someone unless there's at least some challenge...or if they're in a zone that has competing resources.
still, we'll see how it plays out in the Alpha
Not quite. Consider the 'attacking group' side.
Tank is controlling positions of mobs, not killing.
Bard is buffing not killing.
Summoner is preventing escapes by body blocking/helping tank, not killing.
Cleric is healing (probably unnecessary if opponents not fighting back, but perhaps helping due to mobs around) not killing.
Rogue is going for damage meant to bring down high HP targets to killing range, but not killing.
Mage is maybe keeping up the mana of other party members or something, not killing.
Ranger is doing consistent DPS spread over all targets with higher HP, similar to Rogue (basically 'responding to opposing group healer actions) and this results in them not killing.
Fighter on the other hand is a death dealing powerhouse supported by buffs and positioning tricks from all the others, even without CC.
Fighter does all killing, despite 8v8.
Common enough in such games, with the main limiter being 'no CC on greens', which is definitely great, but in general, just making the point that 'you can end up with 5+ of the kills in an 8v8'.
Fair enough but I think we're talking about 2 different scenarios. I am not talking about 8v8.
In my reply I said solo. @NiKr laid out a scenario in which me, a lone corrupted player, encounters 8 pacifists that are all my level. NiKr said in that example the 8 pacifists may not want to attack me because they might be too scared even though we're all at the same level.
So giving that example scenario, all 8 of those players have attacks, even the ones that are support roles. if 8 people all at my level cannot kill me by myself, when I am already corrupted (debuffed), as I said, then that would suggest I am highly overpowered in that scenario.
But this is all getting into the weeds of possible scenarios in a system we haven't tested yet---so we'll see how it all plays out hopefully this year
And at that point, you, as a single player, can completely disrupt their content by killing just a single player in that group. And yeah, in the context of max lvl characters, I'm sure there'll be enough vertical progression space for a single good pvper to outplay 8 pacifistic pvers, especially when you consider overenchantments.
the wiki says you can see how damaged a player is by their char pic but can't see their actual health...so it's a gamble...as I see it...from a distance I would:
1) break their cc, assuming the mob will not aggro on me
2) debuff the party
---at this point hopefully they have not spotted me amidst the chaos with the mobs
3) damage someone low enough to where the cleric will focus on healing that person while the tank is still taking dmg from a mob, thereby disrupting the healer's rotation and eating their mana
4) if there is an equivalent of "mana burn" use that on the cleric and any player using cc
and viola mob wipes them and I escape with no corruption
in theory, of course...I'd never do that
If I'm in a group of 8 vs 1.... I expect we would strive to kill the would-be PKer in order to end the PvP as quickly as possible so we could continue to do whatever it was we truly wanted to do besides PvP.
And that would still be disruptive even if no one in the group dies.
Because it forces us to stop doing what we actually want to do and instead focus on PvP.
If that PvP encounter is just 2 minutes out of an hour or two, maybe we wouldn't care.
If, for some reason, it takes up 10+ minutes out of a 1-hour session - I might start re-evaluating whether it's a game I want to play.
But I'm pretty sure this will be a somewhat common occurrence, so some players will definitely get filtered out because of it.
Certainly how the corruption system is tuned will be the biggest factor in how often people are attacked and killed. I think most pvx players (as in, people who enjoy pvx) will be fine with how the system ends up. Obviously that's one of Intrepid's main jobs, satisfying their target market. It should deter most griefing type behavior, but still allow for some, though not unlimited, open world pvp and contesting of resources. We'll see how it ends up.
But the player himself has a lot of personal agency over how often they are attacked too, even in completely unrestricted open world pvp games. Just by being smart. Thinking. Planning. Diplomacy. Making friends. Trickery. Timing. Scouting. Stealth (not the mechanic stealth, just playing stealthily.) Knowledge of environments and the types of players that you might run into there or along the way.
In other words, the corruption system is going to be tuned however it's tuned. Everyone will live by it. But there will still be 300 IQ plays and 0 IQ plays to be made. Whatever the final tuning ends up being, the player still has a ton of agency in how often they're attacked just by using their brain. I for one hope that Intrepid does not balance the system around the 0 IQ andys who try to get honey from the same pot a grizzly bear is currently licking. Then complain when it doesn't work out.
It'll be a tactic for guilds disrupting supply lines at the base level when its needed.
Ashes is designed for hardcore PvPers. And, sure, the PvPers who choose to play Ashes will be the ones who are fine with however Corruption is tuned.
Pvpers will have to do a lot of pve to progress their level. Perhaps even more than they would have to do in the typical pve only game, based on Ashes' slow progression time. If they don't want to, they can play a pvp lobby game, a shooter, or something like Smite or whatever.
Ashes is designed for pvpers who like pve or don't mind it at least. It will appeal to many "hardcore" pvpers, certainly not all of them though. It's designed for pvers who like pvp or don't mind it at least. I mean, getting kinda granular here. It's designed for pvxers at the end of the day.
There are many different shades of PvX. It can take different forms, some with more of a pve focus, some more pvp focus. But yeah for someone who wants to like Ashes' particular brand of pvx, they're generally going to have to like or at least be neutral towards both pvp and pve. Based on what we know, both will be very prominent.
I am a PvEer who likes PvP sometimes, but, I don't play hardcore PvP games - like Ashes.
Again, for Ashes, PvX just means that the PvPers who choose to play Ashes will have to do some PvE to progress their Adventure levels.
If they would add an area where only PvE-ers can enter, will you be satisfied?
I probably still wouldn't play... which is why I haven't suggested that they should add an area where only PvEers can enter.
Open Seas is fine. It just makes it very clear who the actual target audience is.
I hope those PvE dungeons will not be private and allow trains.