Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Improving Corruption for casuals
Imnotkio
Member, Alpha Two
So, I know this is a hot topic but I was thinking about solutions that didn't go against the design pillars of the game. And although there is not much we can do to solve it completely, we could mitigate the issue.
One of the biggest gripes with corruption is the fact that people that die feel a sense of injustice, especially for the more "pvp deficient" audience, which wouldn't be able to operate justice with their own hands. Most of the time, these people would die, sigh, and then move on, without really seeing the effects of corruption on their assailants, and eventually quit because of that feeling of injustice.
So, my suggestion to help that problem a little bit is not to change the corruption system, but to make sure that the effects of the corruption are more obvious to the people that suffer the most from the open pvp.
I suggest some type of notification board, that could be either controlled by the player or automated, where notifications about the people that killed you pop up, letting you know when they died because of the corruption you inflicted on him, how much they lost, loot, exp debt, etc. That way, these people would be more aware of how the corruption system is working and have that feels good man moment when they see some justice being done.
If you guys think notification boards are not the way to go, due to it being a little immersion-breaking, you could also add town boards in the nodes, with news posts about the ppl that were hunted by bounty hunters, effectively causing closely the same effect without breaking immersion.
I think this suggestion is not a change at all on how the game works, just adds a little bit of relief for the victims of open world pvp.
One of the biggest gripes with corruption is the fact that people that die feel a sense of injustice, especially for the more "pvp deficient" audience, which wouldn't be able to operate justice with their own hands. Most of the time, these people would die, sigh, and then move on, without really seeing the effects of corruption on their assailants, and eventually quit because of that feeling of injustice.
So, my suggestion to help that problem a little bit is not to change the corruption system, but to make sure that the effects of the corruption are more obvious to the people that suffer the most from the open pvp.
I suggest some type of notification board, that could be either controlled by the player or automated, where notifications about the people that killed you pop up, letting you know when they died because of the corruption you inflicted on him, how much they lost, loot, exp debt, etc. That way, these people would be more aware of how the corruption system is working and have that feels good man moment when they see some justice being done.
If you guys think notification boards are not the way to go, due to it being a little immersion-breaking, you could also add town boards in the nodes, with news posts about the ppl that were hunted by bounty hunters, effectively causing closely the same effect without breaking immersion.
I think this suggestion is not a change at all on how the game works, just adds a little bit of relief for the victims of open world pvp.
9
Comments
It has its own balancing issues, but those can be dealt with through testing.
Yeah, I've had a change of heart and can agree your idea would be grand.
I like this idea only if the bounty hunter has the option to open the victim's loot bundle if they want to. Most hunters would rather PK than run errands delivering small sums of lost loot back to victims, and they defnitely don't want to get unopenable loot boxes from dudes they hunted down and killed fair and square. Also, how would the extra reward and inventory balancing be done? Compressed bags of loot taking up a few inventory slots sounds very overpowered, and the system giving away rewards for killing corrupted players sounds very abusable.
Additional BH rewards should only come from the victim and from nearby node leaders, not the system. But then the victim loses even more money so there is little incentive except vengeance, which I guess is fine but realistically player placed bounties will quickly become dead content in my experience. Few will compound their loses by placing bounties after losing loot.
The only way this will really happen is through the server's discord. A guy is PvPing a lot of casuals? They will eventually get ostracized from the discord community and maybe hunted down if enough people get upset. I think this community vastly overestimates how much the average player will RP. I sure won't. That's simply not something I enjoy.
Eh, I don't see how this could work. What if the corrupted picks and chooses through the materials dropped and discards what they don't want? I feel like bounty hunters should just cash in on kills and be able to loot what is dropped by the corrupted. Gives more of a food chain vibe.
PKer would still drop anything else they woulda dropped on death. Bundle is just a 100% drop.
The reward for BHer would be only if they returned the bundle to the victim. If they don't want that reward - they can open the bundle and keep it. I'd personally punish that, but that's a way more debatable thing.
The reward would have to be counted through a ton of variables, with one of the more important being "if PKer has repeatedly killed the same victim - the BH's reward is lower". This would still work in a real life scenario, because the repeat PKer would now drop way more stuff, so BH would get other loot outside of the system reward itself.
The "friend" abuse would still work, though I have my own issues with that particular interaction as well. They are somewhat quelled because the PKer would suffer the death penalties in that case, but I do think that the friend abuse shouldn't exist.
I feel like this is just bloat in gameplay and dev time. If people want personal announcements sure, but looting doesn't need to be any more complex than it already is.
Two bags is fine, that actually helps with inventory management and makes it easier for the user to understand what they will lose and what is safe. Plus have inventory management that makes sense with your materials without interfering with your gear inventory.
That doesn't equal bloat and again that is a bonus. Now adding more systems onto a already complex system for no other reason than just making things even more casual friendly would be bloat. They need to figure out how all that works, implement it in their design and code, etc, so someone can have random bags to find random people in the world where they have no clue where. Just to protect the casuals?
They have a lot of complex systems including the flagging system and everything that comes with it, this is just another layer that isn't really adding a lot to the game.
I'm sure that Intrepid will already track item-player IDs, cause that helps with RMT stuff. So the biggest "bloat" here would be the return mechanic, but it could be done through quest/task system to decrease the amount of code required for it to work.
And I've said this before when talking about this system, and I mentioned the "balancing issues" in the first post here already, but I'd like this system in the context of shorter corruption clearing timers. Which would in turn balance out the "protect the casuals" design.
And if this is advertised and explained well to the players, there'd be a higher chance that greens don't enact vengeance on random PKers, so the reds would have higher chances to clear their corruption before a BH catches them. Obviously it will all come down to good balancing of different values, but that's a thing for alpha2.
Edit: just have the one who killed their killer also be included in the ping they get about them dying
There could be some cost to receiving back your lost loot and the victim would then have to decide whether their loot is more valuable than that cost. Though I feel like this would just be a yet another "feel bad" design. You die, lose time, lose loot, lose gathering/farming location. Then you learn that someone properly avenged you, but you now gotta pay them to get your stuff back.
I get that this is quite often how it goes irl, but I feel like game design should be a bit more fun. And we've all seen the "unfun" changes that have occurred in the last several months.
Dying/losing isn't meant to feel good. You're supposed to want to avoid it.
I approve this.
Well, either way. My point is that telling people that their killer died wouldn't really change much, cause they already experienced the impact of their actions.
That was sort of the point of the OP i believe. Giving a bit of satisfaction/closure without changing the system.
Yeah, I'm not trying to erase the frustration and loss of death, which is the intended design. Just trying to give some good feelings to the people in the mix with the bad ones
I like the OP's idea. It would give people a sense that the system is working. Sometimes killers are caught, sometimes not.
If you need proof, just look at Albion. In Albion, you can see every single PvP death on the website and what the player lost. People use that all the time to be toxic assholes. It's a great system though, I love it!
That would be an awesome Bounty Hunting feature.
Absolutely. The killed player shouldn't ever be guaranteed their stuff returning. That's on the killer and the killer's killer. If the killer's killer wants it, they should get to keep it.
Sounds cool lol. But if they wanted they could limit so the only person that see that type of info is the victim of the corrupted person if they want to minimize the toxicity