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.
Comments
I'm simply pointing out the flaws that exploit the system in a way that hurts PvP instead of just deterring griefing
I'd say you're on the right track, but from what I can tell, Steven wants griefing to be minimized, not necessarily PKing. My stance is to tweak corruption to allow the first bit to get PKs in, but as a result you need to space your kills out so you don't ramp up into the death sentence zone of corruption. By doing this, you prevent camping, Repetitive, and under leveled PKing, while still allowing players to get their hits in on the ones using non-combatant status as a shield. Obviously it will need tested to find the sweet spot.
I agree, if corruption is too strict, it will inadvertently become an opt-in system
Aye griefing being contained is fine.
PKing doesn't fit the bill for Stevens definition of griefing.
Good thing Ashes if attracting a broader audience from a variety of different games to test this in A2 and give feedback. I think having feedback from just L2 and WoW players would make for a very shitty PvP scene in Ashes.
agreed.
Already a thing. While yes, it could be adjusted or changed at the Sandal Lord's whim, trying to say "I think Steven wants this." is not supported by a host of other quoted material over years of activity.
Steven can say as much as he wants about what he considers griefing, but I know at what lvl the complains will start pouring in en masse. And that's when people start getting PKd. Not repeatedly killed on the same spot, but just PKed here and there.
Also, as has been discussed previously, no one will know the intent behind repeatable kills. You might be farming a location and keep PKing the same annoying dude who's trying to farm the same spot. That dude will see this action as repeatable negative harassment. Steven, supposedly, doesn't see it as one. Which way will the GM powers swing then?
Same will be true for location control, dungeon farm prevention, personal deep-rooted rivalry, etc etc. All of those will be repeated and majority of those will be seen by the victim as harassment. At which point Steven will either "make the system work as intended" and tune corruption penalties ever higher, or he'll lose a ton of people while trying to defend his standpoint on what "harassment" really means to him.
I think things will change in A2 after feedback. Maybe not change greatly, but for certain some change.
There will always be those who complain. Luckily, Risk vs Reward is part of his unchangeable pillars, so the removal of the risk of getting PKed should never happen. This also goes in line with not making corruption so strict that nobody would ever bother engaging in the first place.
And to top it off, Steven has already said the game isn't being made to be the most played MMORPG he's making his preferred MMORPG, so if that means a bunch of players abandoning ship because they don't like the playstyle, so be it. Luckily, I enjoy the concept of an MMORPG utilizing Steven's chosen pillars of design so far.
If people are going to cry grief at the slightest inconvenience towards their gameplay they aren't going to make it in Ashes to begin with, because it's going to happen to everyone. There's an entire land management system and people will protect their residential node at all cost.
the difference is regular greens cant see you anywhere on the map, bh can
I like the stat dampening tbh. it prevents lots of ways to abuse the system, like making an alt just to pk and be perma red without getting your main character's hands dirty.
just play l2, you will get most of your answers there xDDD. thats why im not worried about the system or the penalties. the only thing that is interesting to me is how long it takes to cleanse corruption. but i understand your concerns ;3 this thread is fun tbh. just wait until a2, its not a bad system.
well its opt in, no one forces you to attack any1 xDD
what i see in this thread is a lot of pvpers who want lesser penalties or punishments for pking. they keep thinking they will be doing the pking most of the time, when in reality, they will be the ones getting pked by groups and then will ask for the system to be harsher xDDDD.
An opt-in system protects players from PvP. So what I mean is if the penalties are too strict, nobody will engage in OWPvP, just like in an Opt-in PvP game. The goal is to set it in a sweet spot. Strict enough to deter grieifng, lenient enough to still allow PKs that arent defined as griefing.
yeah, I got it and I agree. but being corrupted is an undesirable state. if I have to pick between harsh penalties and somethign in the middle, I'd go with harsh since it will prevent lots of abuses.
Harsh as long as it doesn't interfere with OWPvP. Which is why a few corruption kills should more or less be a warning, not a death sentence, and punishing anything beyond that with much harsher consequences
corruption isnt a desirable state to be in, thats why you cant make it too lenient or it wont be a state where you dont want to be at...and it doesnt interfere with ow pvp. it might interfere with SOLO ow pvp though, but the game is built around playing with a group, not soloing even though you can solo.
also, corruption penalties aren't immediate, they are deferred. you might not get penalized at all if you avoid death, or if you have a friend kill and revive you. You can also die and not drop anything, or drop things that arent very valuable.
the worse thing that can happen to you is that you drop your hard-earned gear, but you might die a lot and never drop it, or not die at all, or have a friend pick it up and give it back to you, or use cheap gear to pk or an alt...the other person who died to you loses immediately and there isn't any way for them to circumvent that. the pker is able to circumvent penalties.
the system also helps with new waves of players coming to the game in the future, especially against solo players who are going around ganking weaker players, even if those players are at the same level.
If your concern is about keeping corruption as an undesirable state no matter what, then have the 1st few PKs a state leading up to corruption. My entire point is that you need a minor punishment buffer to allow for PKs against non-combatant griefers. Also, ganking isn't griefing, repetitive ganking is griefing. So even with my suggestion, the problem is being deterred while still allowing typical PvP with minor punishments, leading into heavy punishment once the system recognizes repetition to qualify for griefing.
And if you weren't meant to have a chance to get away with corruption, then you could just say anyone corrupted instantly is level 1 until they die. But thats not the goal here. Minor corruption (a couple kills in a reasonable time frame) is meant to be escapable, heavy corruption (killing sprees and griefing) is meant to be heavily punished and incredibly difficult to escape death. No matter what you still have hard penalties to deal with such as always having the chance to drop gear.
I mean, if you gank someone 5 times over the course of 10 minutes. You're basically camping them
not if they keep coming back to my spot...if I chase them around the map killing them, then sure
Well yes, at that point I'd guess they are engaging you. But if they are using non-combatant status as a shield, you'd probably want a buffer to smack them a few times before corruption absolutely wrecks you
Indeed, which is why I've been saying to have the first few be lenient as a middle ground. I can't think of a way to differentiate, so I say to just allow a limit determined by testing for what is acceptable to kill before ramping corruption into overdrive.
Definitely contextless!
i kill you 3 times, then i stop because ill get too much corruption. but now my friend kills you 3 times then stop, then i come with an alt and kill you 3 more times, then my friend comes with an alt and kills you 3 more times. then the cooldown for repetitive kills is over and i kill you with my main 3 times, then my friend kills you 3 times..and you can do this to every person...
probably the best thing to do is just to allow 1-3 pk counts where if you die red, you wont drop your equipped gear, however, you can still drop other things. then you have to do a loooong quest to lower the pk count back to 0. nto something trivial that takes a few mins or an hour. and make the 1-3 kills account bound, not character bound so you can't abuse alts for pking.
But if there are cases where you know that a player has epic resources, he may or may not be alone.
The system as it is now help gatherer teams survive when they are afraid they cannot defeat the solo ganker.
I see no reason to help a solo ganker to be as efficient as a group of gankers.
If the gatherers can team up, gankers should do that too.
Typical case for ganking could be on roads between nodes where players transport carefully selected materials, using mules instead of caravans.
Gankers will be the force which push players to use caravans when they transport something expensive.
While they look for caravans they'll see players with mules and will attack them. If they do not flag as combatants, the attackers might stop, thinking they have nothing of value. Once in a while they might go all the way and kill, to check what the mule really contains.
If green players notice that gankers stop ganking, they may think it is safe and start increasing the value of materials they transport outside of the caravan system. When the value gets high enough, gankers will notice and start ganking more often again, pushing them back into the caravan system.
It is more like suicide but you do not want to commit it yourself and you ask a bounty hunter to help.
In the middle of reading up on coding,
Pieces of it involve: recording kills, time inbetween deaths, TTKs, map location.
Pretty much a tracker within the corruption system.
But we are going off of information we have based off the land management system (which will encourage pking) and is meant to cause soft friction and Stevens definition of griefing.
So there’s still missing pieces, level discrepancy and node citizenship.