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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.
Risk & Reward versus Corruption
Uboon
Member, Alpha Two
There are many consensual PvP systems in AoC, from epic castle sieges with guild prestige and ownership benefits, to small caravan raids with player profit and material loss at stake. All these PvP systems have clear rulesets with obvious risks and rewards. Outside of these systems there is only one system to control PvP - corruption.
The corruption system allows open-world PvP to happen at any time and place, albeit with ill defined risk and reward conditions in some scenarios (IMO). The affects of corruption will need to be balanced, probably in Alpha 2, so that the amount of PvP is at a desirable level. Heavy corruption effects will deter open-world PvP completely, light corruption effects will allow for rampant ganking.
The premise of this thread is that balancing corruption will be very difficult, and may even be impossible as player attitudes and objectives change, requiring corruption effects to be increased or decreased dynamically to maintain the desired levels and quality of open-world PvP. Whether AoC will balance the effects of corruption remains to be seen, but I would like to suggest a way of increasing the likelihood of corruption being effective...
Add more PvP systems in order to reduce the number of PvP encounters that must rely solely on corruption to balance the risk and reward.
As an example, I imagine that a large part of open-world PvP will involve players running around gathering. Perhaps an individual is going about their business on a perfect rotation hogging all the nodes. Perhaps a number of individuals are deliberately stripping resources to damage the land management around a node. Perhaps many citizens of a node are actively levelling their node by gathering everything and other players want to impede that. Instead of having to rely on just corruption to manage all that PvP, and hoping the effects of corruption are balanced just right to allow for meaningful PvP without mindless ganking, I believe that a PvP system should be added to manage and control this particular type of PvP effectively. The new PvP system will help maximise fun, meaningfulness, impact, risks and rewards.
For example, and this is just a quick idea to illustrate my point, what if the more resources a gatherer carries, and/or the more harmful effect they have on the environment, and/or the overall weekly greed/load of the gatherer, what if all this caused a 'greed meter' to rise. At a certain level the gatherer would cease to be green and become open to PvP without the attacker risking corruption. Or perhaps the higher the 'greed meter' the lower the corruption. The 'greed meter' will lower over time, or when materials are handed in or gifted to a temple for example. The 'greed meter' would completely reset if the gatherer dies and the attacker loots the materials. This 'greed meter' would lead to more gameplay options and emergent behaviours and tactics. For example, a gatherer would have increasing risk of being attacked the more 'efficiently' they gathered. A perfect example of risk versus reward.
In the examples above, I have chosen just one area of potential open-world PvP and devised a system that may not actually work or be enjoyable. But the point I am trying to make is that we should add more PvP systems in order to reduce the number of PvP encounters that must rely solely on corruption to balance the risk and reward.
In conclusion, reduce the number of PvP encounters that must rely on corruption, by creating a few more PvP systems.
Whadyafink?
The corruption system allows open-world PvP to happen at any time and place, albeit with ill defined risk and reward conditions in some scenarios (IMO). The affects of corruption will need to be balanced, probably in Alpha 2, so that the amount of PvP is at a desirable level. Heavy corruption effects will deter open-world PvP completely, light corruption effects will allow for rampant ganking.
The premise of this thread is that balancing corruption will be very difficult, and may even be impossible as player attitudes and objectives change, requiring corruption effects to be increased or decreased dynamically to maintain the desired levels and quality of open-world PvP. Whether AoC will balance the effects of corruption remains to be seen, but I would like to suggest a way of increasing the likelihood of corruption being effective...
Add more PvP systems in order to reduce the number of PvP encounters that must rely solely on corruption to balance the risk and reward.
As an example, I imagine that a large part of open-world PvP will involve players running around gathering. Perhaps an individual is going about their business on a perfect rotation hogging all the nodes. Perhaps a number of individuals are deliberately stripping resources to damage the land management around a node. Perhaps many citizens of a node are actively levelling their node by gathering everything and other players want to impede that. Instead of having to rely on just corruption to manage all that PvP, and hoping the effects of corruption are balanced just right to allow for meaningful PvP without mindless ganking, I believe that a PvP system should be added to manage and control this particular type of PvP effectively. The new PvP system will help maximise fun, meaningfulness, impact, risks and rewards.
For example, and this is just a quick idea to illustrate my point, what if the more resources a gatherer carries, and/or the more harmful effect they have on the environment, and/or the overall weekly greed/load of the gatherer, what if all this caused a 'greed meter' to rise. At a certain level the gatherer would cease to be green and become open to PvP without the attacker risking corruption. Or perhaps the higher the 'greed meter' the lower the corruption. The 'greed meter' will lower over time, or when materials are handed in or gifted to a temple for example. The 'greed meter' would completely reset if the gatherer dies and the attacker loots the materials. This 'greed meter' would lead to more gameplay options and emergent behaviours and tactics. For example, a gatherer would have increasing risk of being attacked the more 'efficiently' they gathered. A perfect example of risk versus reward.
In the examples above, I have chosen just one area of potential open-world PvP and devised a system that may not actually work or be enjoyable. But the point I am trying to make is that we should add more PvP systems in order to reduce the number of PvP encounters that must rely solely on corruption to balance the risk and reward.
In conclusion, reduce the number of PvP encounters that must rely on corruption, by creating a few more PvP systems.
Whadyafink?
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Edit: I do enjoy your greed meter idea though
Edit edit: I re-read the OP and realise I miss a few intentions while I was multi-tasking.
Your idea definitely fits the PvX spirit in regards to dealing with excessive gathering.
Link your greed meter idea to the Enemy of the State system and/or to the Node Wars system. If it's a solo player overfarming in the same node (not his own) - the system should track that and notify the mayor about it and make it easier/cheaper for him to make that overfarmer an enemy of the state. Now every citizen of that node can annihilate this overfarmer w/o corruption.
Do the same at node-citizenry scale to counter any nefarious deeds by one node against another node. Make the requirements to declare a war against the overfarming citizens easier for the side that's being overfarmed. Now you have yourself a whole war with a ton of free pvp w/o corruption.
TL;DR make the current systems better instead of just adding more bloat.
Actually that is a great idea... If existing PvP systems can be used to cover a lot of the PvP that would otherwise have to be handled by corruption, then we could rely on corruption less.
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Corruption will have little to no effect on people who want to participate in open world pvp, besides stopping them killing/ganking those who do not wish to participate in open world pvp. If you flag purple on me, and I attack you back there is no corruption risk. if you flag purple on people and they Ignore you or run away that's not pvp. it's popping a loot piñata. Meaningful pvp isn't killing dodos, if you want to have a genuine pvp battle in the open world flag purple and see if people retaliate if they don't keep it pushing. if you want to farm gatherers for their materials instead of gathering it yourself or hitting a caravan. Then you pay the corruption penalty and work off the death and be on your way.
The Wolves of Verra
are recruiting: https://discord.gg/Rt8G3sNYac
An example of my problem scenario is a gatherer with full bags of materials who decides they want to avoid the risk of losing those materials while keeping the rewards of their efforts (ie the said materials). The only system to control any potential PvP in this scenario is corruption. As corruption is very hard to balance, and is primarily designed to prevent griefing, it will likely be on the rather high side. So in this scenario the gatherer can often decide to not fight back, allowing them to often avoid risk and keep their reward.
My conclusion is to keep corruption as a system to prevent griefing, but where corruption is trying to control PvP in other scenarios, such as fighting gatherers, a new system should be created to control the PvP in a way where the proper balance of risk versus reward is maintained.
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In this case, though, the Gatherer has explicitly given up some of their reward to create risk for the other player. It's the attacker that is experiencing 'risk vs Reward' in that case, the Gatherer is really moreso being passive.
If they have a full bag, and fight back, they will have a 75% full bag after, and their opponent (if winning) will get a reward of 25% of that full bag.
If they don't fight back, they will have a 50% full bag after, their opponent will get a reward of 50% of that full bag + 'Risk of being killed while red' to go with it.
The problem with the Risk vs Reward system in this case is that a Purple with an empty inventory is risking only exp (the baseline risk) if they die when jumping a Gatherer. The Gatherer's gain from winning this is... 'getting to keep the results of the time they spent'.
I don't see it discussed much, but the MAIN reason to 'not fight back' I think, is because if you fight back and lose, the attacker is still Purple/Green. They can have their friend come by, take all those materials, and it is fine because they can still trade due to not being Red.
You'd not fight back so that you have a higher chance of ensuring you can send friends/guildmates after the person to get more of your stuff back, but even so, it'd probably be about the same amount of stuff back as what you'd keep if you went purple.
If dying once isn't enough to remove Corruption though, then it's definitely better for a person who 'has a good set of PvP friends' to just accept it, since the Red player can't trade their loot away.
Second, "not fighting back" does not decrease your risk - it literally increases it. A green player loses more stuff than a purple player. So if that gatherer wanted to "avoid risk" (outside of just literally running away from any passerby) - they'd need to fight back.
u cant trade when your corrupted (purple)
There's several issues with your position that I see.
1. You when seeing a gatherer and attacking them is effectively you trying to steal time. In order for the gatherer to have full bags they will have invested time, you want all those resources in a 30-60s ttk, Yes. you ought to suffer a higher risk. depending on the time to get a full inventory. The gatherer not fighting back is risking you being greedy enough to kill them which will cost them twice as much loot loss. Where if they fight an lose they get to keep 75%.
2. The reality is resource scarcity is going to make resources less valuable in their Point of Origin. if you want resources you should really be looking at caravan raiding. the pool of items being moved is 100x greater and there is no risk of corruption.
3. There is a difference between a gather gathering for profit and an ecoterrorist. if you are concerned about a foreign entity stripping your node resources then you can advocate for enemy of state, declaration of war or otherwise make that person a viable target which removes the risk of corruption. If conversely this is a local gathering your home nodes resources they could be actually helping your node grow, you killing them is counterproductive from a citizen aspect. Pretty unrewarding given you only get 25% of an inventory if they fight back. Additionally there are built in game elements you could target for far more reward. Why do you want to kill random gatherers? Why do you think you should be incentivized to kill random gatherers? The game is giving you targets to satisfy greed and pvp but you want to just kill randos in the forest, that is the exact impulse that intrepid is trying to curb with corruption.
The Wolves of Verra
are recruiting: https://discord.gg/Rt8G3sNYac
I don't think the following is necessary at all... However, I do welcome a "greed" system, with a greed-meter that tracks the average value of the resource being gathered by a non-citizen in a given node's market and scales the amount of corruption gained and the percentage of protected gathered resources if the player is killed.
Within this system, accumulated greed and corruption penalties could be visible to all players viewing the player's health bar as a measure of greed-meter. Accumulated greed reduces the protected amount a gatherer keeps in their inventory if they die, as well as the cost of corruption to the red player if they're killed while non-combatant. Currently, a player killed keeps %75 of the gathered resource if the player defends themselves and %50 if they remain non-combatant. After a certain amount of resources gathered, perhaps based on the player level, the player will start accumulating greed within a given node that they're not a citizen of. At maximum accumulated greed, the gatherer will protect %50 of the gathered resources if they defend themselves when attacked, and only %25 if they remain non-combatant till death. The corruption penalties will also scale accordingly. Risk and reward?
The corruption "balance" will be tested extensively in Alpha-2 and beyond, @hleV.
Given the amount of player feedback Intrepid likes to sift through, I'm fairly confident they will have it dialed in before launch.
In other words ---> High consequences for griefers ... and no free hall passes for carebears.
In response to the greed meter idea I would have have a friend come over and murder me real fast to take half my stuff to hand back to me at a later time and reset my meter. Get 100% of the stuff and still stay a deterrent to others. They might have to work a bit of corruption off but I'm sure friends can work away to game the system. Exploit the system that immoral pvpers are trying to capitalize on.
But I'll be definitely giving feedback to prevent the exploit you mentioned. Friends shouldn't be able to just kill you when you're red. They already can't flag on you, so why should they be able to help you avoid punishment.
If you could integrate the potential of the Events system into your ideas, how would you do so?
The trader's company in a stage 4 node could assign daily gathering quests for a specific resource in another stage 4+ node. To counter this, the thieves' guild of the target node could post a quest with a bounty for the players with gathering quests. Players participating in either side of these events - as in, they received the quest knowing the PvP consequences but with higher reward - are automatically tagged purple to each other.
This could be one way to gain progression in these two social organizations. These events involve both gathering and PvP opportunities simultaneously and can take place only after a node reaches stage 4 and have the necessary social organizations set up in that node.
I mean, depending on other systems I'd incorporate events as needed to promote, deter, and balance player activities and choices.
Too much gathering? Reduce or negate corruption when killing gatherers in that node for the duration until that area recovers.
Too many caravans/too much wealth in one node? Smack a debuff on caravans for that node to promote trade elsewhere due to higher risk in the wealthy node.
Monster coins and monster attacks on node ensure nodes with good activity and cohesion progress. Another way these can be utilized is if players from one node gather too much from a different node, this triggers and monster attack from the nodes they gathered from. This would likely cause many monster invasions against top tier nodes.
I'm more in favor of the more true open world pvp system, the corruption/flagging system. The system where you have to make "intelligent calculations" about what to contest, who to contest, where and why. It would be tragic and a damn shame to me if that system is abandoned or heavily diminished in importance.
A lot of people donated a lot of money on that idea, back when it was framed as one of the big drivers of pvp, risk vs reward, conflict, politics, etc. And now lately, all we've heard is that it's going to be near unusable for the "vast majority" of people.
I have been called a barbarian for far meeker opinions, but my opinion is that if Intrepid is making a design swing from the more true open world pvp flagging system, to a more themepark model based on events and zones, you should let us know asap. It's a pretty big deal for a lot of people. And it's been like 6 years.
That said, I like both types of pvp systems. One is increasingly a rarity, and the other is a dime a dozen. Still hoping Intrepid has the balls to shake up the genre. But to answer your question, integrate the event system into pvp and risk vs reward in all ways possible and sensible.
Land management system - overharvested nodes, node citizens can kill non citizens harvesting there. Maybe "bountiful harvest" events that affect nodes at random, or perhaps only prosperous nodes if it makes sense design wise, where the node temporarily experiences an abundance - resources spawn back faster, with higher yields per harvest in general, and higher yields of rares, but it's an open pvp zone while this is taking place.
I mean I'm typing these ideas out and they're just so lame compared to just having a reasonable and usable corruption/flagging system that would cover everything. But you're going to have to give us a way to contest resources and create a dynamic world of risk vs reward somehow right.
World boss "events" - just go ahead and make these open pvp zones. This is something I was opposed to before, not so much now. Make them open pvp zones or it will just be a pve dps race with the same exact people getting pissed off anyway when they don't get loot.
Open world dungeon events - I'm not quite to the level of disillusionment yet that dungeons should be full time open pvp. But maybe have open pvp events in them sometimes where general drop rate is increased, rare drop rate is increased and even exclusive drops that only drop while the event is going on.
Guild/node war events - if the corruption system is going to be mega harsh, then these systems should be less restrictive. Enemy players of other guilds/nodes should drop a percentage of their loot when killed. Obviously there needs to be some restrictions on how freewheeling wars are, but in general room temperature IQ guild and node leaders should be able to declare wars to contest the content they want to contest, when they want to, and against whom they want to, without overburdening hassle.
The benefit of a Highwayman would be - vague indicators where there is lots of loot to be made. This could be indicated by giving a ZOI with a lot of players who hold lootable items a shining effect OR instead of the zone highlight you can choose to have a keen eye for "loaded" players (they have a twinkle effect when you look at them or wehn they move you hear the sound of coin purses or so), which however requires you to have direct line of sight; you have no idea where lots of riches are being made and maybe a kind of theme appropriate buffs (like you get a 30 sec movement speed boost and minor camouflage after looting a player). That would be the reward for becoming a Highwayman, it focuses PvP and corruption generating robbery onto specific areas; but the downside is: As a Highwayman you gain more corruption with each PK where the other person doesn't retaliate and a bounty hunter gets a premium from NPCs for killing you - which in turn focuses them on finding corrupt Highwaymen as more lucrative targets. It might even be worthwhile to specialize either on general corrupted or Highwaymen.
With all that being said - I'm not sure how common PvP to get other players gathered loot will actually be and there are way too many factors still unspecified to really know (what is the range of effort one has to go through to reduce corruption; How often will we actually meet other people in the world; how much total gathereables will we be able to loot from a player who decided to not fight back; how much of these resources does it take to actually make something valuable out of it and does it compare to the effort one has to go through to reduce the corruption again; how many resources will a player be able to gather in the first place etc.)
In the case of harvesting, the Events system could be used to manage undesirable resource gathering, opening options for PvE and PvP responses. If this covers most of the legitimate conflict around harvesting, then the load on corruption will be reduced, which is the central theme of this thread.
So like some other posters, I will drum up some event ideas...
"Starving Hordes" monster coin event, triggered when a particular type of food resource is depleted in the ZOI. Perhaps some goblins really loved those elderberries, so gatherers beware in this zone, the hordes are starving and are feeling carnivorous!
"Eco Warrior" world boss event, triggered when land management suffering badly. Initially no resources will respawn, then after a while a boss starts roaming resource nodes to protect them. Resources only respawn after boss has been killed. When boss killed his minions attack node buildings to try and loot resources back.
"Economic Warfare" player initiated quest event - The mayor of node X can start an event so that their citizens can kill all harvesters belonging to Node Y without penalty for a period of time. So not quite all out node wars, but economic conflict!
"Robin Hood" NPC initiated quest event. The thieves guild announces a quest to kill non-citizens with full bags, for a period of time.
I could up with crazy event ideas all day!
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