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Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
For sure, the corruption system could be a door for some of the coolest cosmetics in the game.
It's an incomplete gameplay loop.
I've been a red player in Asherons Call before L2 even released, who cares.
That may have been the case for L2 but that's not always the case for the genre. But we can check statistics from classic WoW show that PvP servers are the most populated.
Is their PC zapping them upon game death? Absolutely not. If that does someone psychological damage they have priorities to take care of outside of the game, like their mental health.
Players consent to being PKd in a PvX game the moment they click login. That is voluntary.
Corruption system is parasitic in design as it returns nothing to the game.
Obviously, Ashes of Creation's corruption system was intended to hinder excessive player killing, since it is not a faction-based PvP game. It serves as a countermeasure against excessive PKing.
Also, PvP events and PvP areas will help a lot in making people busy, otherwise people would have to resort to PK only.
But then the corruption system became this corny system.
It's really not even a corruption system, it's a territory system of laws. The moment they decided that corruption cannot be gained on the seas, those seas literally just became international seas.
Now corruption is just an incomplete justice system disguised as a religious system.
I really do hope they flesh it out, because lore wise it's not making much sense.
I dunno how it was back during vanilla, but that was also almost 20 years ago.
According to Steven, the corruption system isnt a gameplay loop at all.
Making corruption a gameplay loop would mean players had a specific reason to gain corruption - and that is something they are going out of their way to have.
Corruption should always be a consequence of your actions, not the path you need to take in order to achieve the cosmetic you want.
As such, corruption isnt a gameplay loop. It is a gameplay dead end.
By design.
People can have all the ideas they want for additions to corruption, but at the end of the day, asking for a reason to gain corruption specifically is asking Intrepid for an actual alteration in the design goals for the game.
Though again, that would only be the case if the corrupted player gets caught or decides to take the positive routes of corruption clearing rather than just grinding mobs.
I mean, people already have this.
If you kill a player and gain corruption, you will want to work that corruption off as fast as you can - meaning you are probably going to start it right where you are.
As such, you are working off corruption in the node that you killed the player in - meaning the node is gaining experience.
That is literally the definition of the player losing, but the node gaining.
Sure, sometimes people will leave the nodes ZoI, but that is all a part of the game being an open world sandbox.
It's impressive how people can say the system is flawed, despite it hasn't been tested yet. But I guess it's arrogance. Because they are so smart, and know what is wrong with it. But they also have the answer. How about we wait till it has been tested.
I have seen what full pvp leads to. High level players running around for hours, killing low level players. To the point where they can't be in a zone and just have to log out. So 1 selfish person can ruin it for a lot of people
Another user who didn't even read the thread LOL
It is impressive when people give harsh opinion about others and they can't even read at least one message in the thread... it is magical!
This topic is defending the corruption system since Intrepid is putting the corruption system in danger... Intrepid is the corruption system's biggest enemy!
So how exactly should we react to the changes (or, revelations) of this system while neither us nor Intrepid have properly tested it. I'd say it's quite fair to hypothesize about the potential problems of the system when Intrepid is literally doing the same by making it more and more diminished in prevalence while also making the punishments harsher.
And no one here wants that.
I just want to save the corruption system from Intrepid.
If they'd bothered to read, they'd figure out we want a complete system that makes sense system and lore wise and doesn't bite Intrepid in the ass.
Yup.
Hasn't L2 been testing the corruption system for the past 20 years?
I totally understood the stat dampening change, because I agree that lowbies shouldn't be harassed, so giving a shitton of corruption to a PKer who's killing lowbies so that he loses the ability to PK more is right imo. But L2's penalties were already quite hard even w/o the additional penalties that Ashes will have. And I'm sure you've seen other L2 players say that PKing wasn't even that widespread most of the time.
So when I see that we'll have an even harsher system in Ashes and then I see Steven adding mechanics that go around the corruption system - to me that's a red flag showing that Intrepid is scared of the backlash and are preventively enharshening the system w/o even testing it.
Of course it could all be the case of "this was planned from the very start, but we're only now learning the details", but then I'd have to ask "if you were already making the system as anti-owpvp as possible, why not advertise that as a feature? Way more people would be glad to hear that, instead of just hearing "we have a system to protect the pve players, trust me bro"".
Another would be to say that L2 (and most other games) had people and guilds that were PK killers, and bounty hunters are just an in game system to support that. Resource drops on death are simply there to reflect that Ashes is primarily an economic game and L2 was not, and stat dampening is - as you say - a good thing.
I'm not the only one who would just leave the project if they discourage ow-PVP so much it doesn't happen.
I don't feel like this was actually well thought out, consensual PvP is a stupid notion. Everyone consents to the games design the moment they hit play.
I'm beginning to see that perhaps the call back to L2 was nostalgia only.
The saving grace will be most of the corruption testers will be pvpers I think.
As it is right now, Ashes is shaping up to have the most open world PvP of any MMO released in the last 15 years. One need only look at the places the corruption system is disabled to understand that.
Any arguments to the contrary are hyperbole at their best, outright dishonesty at the worst.
I mean, caravan PvP is still open world PvP. The corruption system isn't at play here, but the corruption system being present is not a requirement for PvP in the open world to be open world PvP. Same with ocean PvP, or node destruction PvP - these are all aspects of open world PvP because it is PvP happening in the open world.
Then you have node and guild wars - these are all open world PvP as well.
But sure, complain that Ashes is discouraging open world PvP. It really shows that you know what you are talking about!
I like a lot of the premise of what they have, but I also really like the idea of Bounty Hunting. Which will require people to hunt.
If corruption is akin to karma and sin, karma and sin exist everywhere.
I think their idea needs to evolve away from L2 and SWG and come into its own. With the removal of corruption from the sea, corruption isn't a spiritual issue anymore. It's just a Law and Order system with territories.
Corruption is the negative aspect of The Essence.
If you are going to a make an argument as to whether a game system makes sense based on the games lore (which is what you have done above), at least look in to the games lore a little bit.
In most games, respawning and traveling times are made very easy and there is no need to consume food or water. Games allow characters to run for days without needing to rest, change their gear or experience physical exhaustion. Due to these game rules, PKs are weapons of mass destruction.
Although Intrepid came up with the flagging and corruption system to address this issue, the method of cleansing corruption by merely picking flowers seems like an insufficient and uninteresting penalty.
No trading, no storing, dampening and losing gear... this seems just being spiteful towards PKers, these measures will not actually make the game more interesting.
Why should players who engage in PKing be penalized before they are caught? Instead, let them freely kill other players with no dampening effects, let them store and trade, and do as they please until they are caught and then bring the consequences.
Outcomes:
Let the PKs to bring danger to the game without any restrictions, but when they are caught there should be a range of consequences. After becomming a public manace, it will be fun facing the consequences of being a hard criminal.
The severity of the proposed penalties for PKs has essentially made the role of bounty hunters irrelevant. The corruption system has made bounty hunting dull, uneventful, and excessively harsh against PKers, with no interesting outcomes to the PKs and BHs.
It was a reference to actual real life mythos which in this case the system is closest to karma.
Of course, I read the lore and saw where Steven drew his inspiration.
This paragraph summarizes everything.
We know it and that's not important, the important part is that it is boring, a normal day will be like this:
A PK kills a green, then dies to random people and and loses gear, then he spaws and pick a some flowers and start working to cleanse his corruption.
This PK will also be dampened against NPCs so he can't even do PvE and he will dampened against everybody else too... so this PK will become pretty much like a human NPC, he is thrown at the world just to be killed over and over and keep picking flowers in between deaths.
MAYBE a bounty hunter shows up, I doubt since people will have their hands full with other stuff to do, so people will pretty much give up trying to do some bounty hunting and even Pking.
Not written in stone, I am already considering it will be changed which is the worst scenario!
Death penalties do not differ between Pvp and PvE, but this is subject to change.[62]
Bounty Hunting ties into military nodes and has nothing to do with the religion system. If Corruption is a spiritual issue, why are they sending people from military nodes?
Why now, can we only gain corruption from being inside of lawful territories?
At this point, corruption isn't a spiritual issue. It's an issue of a territory and the territories laws.