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.
Guild bombing
JustVine
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
So we can make bosses more difficult just by 'active participants'. This feels like this would lead to opposing guilds just rolling up, pinging the boss, and letting the harder version of the boss overwhelm the enemy party till they are more killable. Thoughts?
Node coffers: Single Payer Capitalism in action
1
Comments
I like how in these forced scenarios the big bad guilds have nothing better to do than harass unskilled players.
Here is a more realistic scenario:
A big bad guild has a challenging goal to achieve in a challenging area. Then another big bad guild appears, (not some unskilled grouped randoms) and what happens is natural and not an exploit: PvP.
When access to a boss is too open, and you want to have PvP contest for the boss, then you necessarily have to reduce the difficulty of the boss so players can actually fight two+ battles at once without being overwhelmed.
Personally, I think this is fine for most bosses, as long as there are also going to be bosses where the PvP contest is rewarded with access to a boss - and those bosses can be more fine tuned.
Last time I checked, a bit of both was the intention.
Ok, but does this mean that whenever someone dies, the boss difficulty goes back down?
Because if not, it's not really rewarding to protect your farm, the opposing group achieves their goal whether you beat them in the fight or not. And 'needing to kill opponents who haven't actually attacked you because they pinged your boss and made it more effective' seems like an unpleasant gameplay loop.
I doubt that a group taking this approach would GENERALLY go so far as to actually let themselves die so the people fighting become corrupted, but it's the same sort of thing.
Any counterstrategy to this, or moreso 'just assuming that bosses will lose strength again when someone on their combatant list dies'? I'd have no specific problems with that myself, but it's interesting enough to think about.
Say there's an 8-man party boss. The boss has a zone around him that tracks any player action, including movement. As soon as a player steps into the zone, they go on the combatant list. If that person is the 9th+ on the list - they contribute to the stat growth of the boss. The stat growth could just be a few %s per additional combatant, with several steps of anti-zerg mechanics ramp-up. Any non-movement action generates threat.
The boss' nameplate has general dmg trackers (shown in %s), visible to anyone (though this could be argued against). Any attacker gets their own line in the tracker. Parties are shown with their leader's name, same for raids. Threat values are only visible to tanks who've casted a particular ability on the mob (this is my personal preference and could be omitted for this example).
Flagging up starts to remove your threat value on the boss (say, 2% a second). While flagged, you will generate 1/2 (or maybe lower) the threat per action. If your threat goes away completely, you get removed from the combatants list, but, as long as at least one member of your party is on the list, your party's looting rights remain. Any death would immediately half your threat. Becoming red removes you from the combatant list and removes all threat. Stepping out of the boss' zone starts to remove your threat at a greater pace than flagging up, and removes you from the combatant list immediately if you had no threat at all.
This way the starting party are encouraged to flag up first, because it would move the enraged boss onto the newcomers much faster, especially if they decide not to flag up themselves and to just hit the boss. Conversely, if the first group gets flagged upon by the newcomers, they'd definitely want to fight back immediately, because the enraged boss would stay on them for longer otherwise.
What do you think? Is this too convoluted? Would it even work? Are there huge exploits that I missed?
no, do not reduce difficulty. look at wow
Lord Kazzak
that world boss would be alive for HOURS while guilds are fighting it out for hours. Meanwhile Lord kazzak is also nuking both sides.
In EQ - non pvp server - players who were able to feign death would train the opposition while everyone is trying to DPS. the group who dealt the most damage was rewarded with loot.
Ok, coming back to this, to be clear, the intention is to throw off the hate mechanics, encouraging direct combat over bosses,
If Group A flags up and starts attacking the boss, they generate half threat, therefore leaving all 'strain' of tanking on Group B, presumably.
Group B can also flag up and begin a fight around the boss, to protect their farm. The Anti-Zerg mechanics trigger but do not remain consistent (basically players have the ability to control it using their Flagged status, so you could, for example, have a Cleric that stands nearby and Mages occasionally ping with a Fireball to maintain Flagged so that they generate less threat on the boss').
This seems to mean that you are okay with DPS being able to shed hate and drop off a combatant list by having a sacrificial green healer within range that they can hit, as long as this, in turn, puts them into a Flagged State for any competition to come by and start trouble with them.
Here's my confusion/concern. Your other point is that technically, one should almost always flag up to protect your farm, so it would then be difficult to claim that this 'Flagged Threat Shedding' is not an intended form of gameplay.
So I'm just making sure that you expect/intend that outcome before anything else.
The additional green would have to be off-party, off-guild and off-raid, so they'd need to be constantly watched over and cared for, so that's another small addition to the overall complexity of the situation (though obviously a really small one).
As for the example you mentioned. Anti-zerg mechanics would engage as soon as Group A enters the boss' zone (its radius would obviously have to be tested and balanced). So if Group A decides to buff up and do other prep for the pvp in that zone - they'll start generating threat as green already.
And while writing that out I can't believe that I somehow missed that Group A's threat from buffing up as greens would obviously start going down too. My bad. Maybe the rate at which the threat drops could be tied to the damage done to the boss? But I feel like this would truly be waaay too convoluted for any normal player.
I was just trying to think up a way of helping out Group B in situations where Group A doesn't want to flag up and just wants to mess up the farm. Mainly because to me pvping under the boss is a totally normal thing, so if both groups decide to flag up - that's the "proper" way of figuring out whose farm it should be. Pvping under a boss is obviously difficult and pvping as a group that's already been fighting the boss for a while would be doubly so. But to me that's just the nature of owpvx. My opinion might change, depending on how Intrepid design the anti-zerg mechanics and just the general difficulty of most bosses.
as much as I hate the notion of Bosses, I will play along with a solution.
As stated above, Lord Kazzak... If my group is engage in a boss, we already did 20% damage - chances are you won't out DPS us to win the loot right.
So, you will try to fight us, kill us for the boss. But the Boss is engaged with us.
While I HATE THIS IDEA / The Boss creates a giant "forcefield". Anyone inside are forced opt in to pvp. When Entering this field:
* YOU LOSE ALL BUFF
* but you can Re-Buff yourself once you entered. This will prevent buffing outside and getting a surprise attack in.
Another Idea is - When Entering the field - you also entered into the Boss threat list. The Boss Mechanics should have:
* Snap Aggro on a random player. Usually target the player with the least threat. Therefor it would randomly attack the invaders.
* Room Wide AoE (Falling pillars, pool of lava, etc)- this hits everyone
* Boss AoE - This hits everyone
* Random Adds spawn - this will be on everyone, usually goes after healers and low on the threat list.
So this will disrupt the invaders as well. They too have to deal with the Boss while trying to kill the original group.
Lord kazzak wasnt an easy kill in the open world in world of warcraft. Massive Horde vs Alliance Guilds fighting for the right to kill lord kazzak. Sometimes its a DPS race, other times just all out war and everyone getting massacred by the world boss.
The boss' anti-zerg mechanics could also concentrate on the outer parts of its zone, so the newcomers would always get hit first, while the og group could maneuver under the boss and reposition themselves for a better fight.
In other words, there are ways to design this in not the worst way possible, considering the owpvx goal.
That could be the case but only to a certain degree. For once someone has to be stationed in the area already to know that someone intends to engage a world boss - because global mobility is not a thing. Next it requires enough people to be there to influence the strength of the the boss - which is something that would heavily depend on the number of people actually being "free" so no better targets in the area be it other bosses or points of interest. And lastly that requires a large guild - and if I remember correctly, the benefits/buffs for guild members will decrease with increasing guild member numbers.
So with enough preparation it should be possible but it would mean a major commitment that can only really pay off when they also actually intend to take down the boss in the end.
On the Wiki > so not necessarily the strength of buffs but the number of benefits.
And here the direct quote from the interview Steven gave on the topic
That's obviously 4 year old information but it still fits into the greater idea of the game so I assume it will make it into the final version, where the maximum number of players who can join a guild will determine the number of buffs/skills each member can have. Which probably means we might have "Elite guilds" with small amounts of people and "cultivation guilds" with a higher member cap who will have an elite guild - like an inner circle so to speak - above them that you can join after performing well in the broader branch of the guild.
But to bring that back, since we are talking boss encounters here, I am not sure how interesting member bombing these would be for guilds with high member counts. Loot has to be shared with more members, the logistics of these guilds gathering to do that in the first place is not small, so I'm not sure if effort and reward would line up enough for this to be a common strategy. If you do it in the turf of a big guild - sure. But in any other case I don't think its very likely.