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
True. Sieges will not happen often, except the monthly Castle sieges.
So caravan running might be the PvPer main activity in this game.
I hope PvE will be good.
That means soloers without guild will have a safer life than guild members but will sacrifice guild buffs. Because guilds can be at war, allowing defending resource farming spots against competing guilds.
it isnt a design flaw. the system is an enhanced version of l2 karma system that will prevent some abuses. also, remember that corruption isnt a desirable state to be in. also, you could just turn purple then attack the corrupted player, giving him corruption if he killed you. dont need a 4th state, just remove corruption gaining after you kill 1 or 2 targets (but please dont do that, this would bring back the abuses that the system is trying to prevent)
5 Castle-node Sieges each week + 5 Castle Sieges each month.
Also - The Open Seas.
Plus Guild Wars and Node Wars.
We simply disagree then. I believe corruption punishment should only be dealt for killing those who refuse to attack or cant defend themselves. I will test it thoroughly regardless to make my point in the alpha 2 assuming this is a point to be made by then. Otherwise 1 corruption kill inadvertently can become several times that many from defending against players who are seeking PvP, as opposed to keeping to themselves and truly acting as non-combatants.
You say punishment isn't dealt, yet the player is corrupted for the kill against a player who didn't fight back, and dealing with the negative affects. The initial punishment is dealt for the crime committed right then and there, that being a massive debuff for an allotted amount of time, in which you must spend the time either working it off or be killed, whichever comes first. Giving corruption for defending themselves is a massive increase in punishment that doesn't punish griefing, it multiplies a punishment that was already dealt simply for PvPing.
Its just as simple of a matter of corruption being too punishing to the point of making fighting back a bad idea. This is where the real threat to the Risk vs Reward concept comes in with corruption. Why fight back when I can just let myself die, run back and kill the player who is now corrupted while not worrying about having CC affect me because I won't flag as a combatant, they're weaker because of it, and I will get several times the reward that I lost? And anytime they defend against me and kill me their corruption continues to increase? Hell, at that point, I would never fight back when initially ganked simply because the game sets it up to be more profitable and easier if I let them kill me and I hunt them down. And on the other end, why would I corrupt myself if by doing so I know I have no chance of surviving due to every time a new player attacks me and I win, my corruption gets extended again and again until I just die from excessive debuffs? Too much risk to the system as I see it, for very little chance at reward on the end of anyone actually engaging the fight. Where on the flip side, theres hardly any risk for a player to attack a corrupted player, and more than enough reward. While this would be fine to just deter the griefing, as it isn't supposed to be rewarding camping players, killing lowbies, etc. It is not fine when dealing with general OW-PvP, which defending yourself, corrupted or otherwise, most certainly is PvP, not griefing. So if you kill 1 or 2 players to hold down a resource area, you should have a reasonable chance to work it off while fighting off whoever happens to come after you without increasing your punishment you are already dealing with. Where if you have been griefing, you'll have a much more substantial amount of corruption, in which case you'll not only be weaker, but you will be getting attacked far longer due to the increased amount you have to work off, significantly increasing your chances of being killed. But if both include gaining corruption for defending oneself, both have an equal outcome, where they continuously gain corruption until they inevitably die.
You could make the argument for corrupted players to not receive assistance from non-corrupt players, which would solve one of the issues you mentioned. It makes sense that a corrupted player would either corrupt the assisting players as well, or just make it as simple as having a debuff that decreases all outside healing by 100%.
And please tell me how it would be too easy to deal with corruption if you dont get corrupted for defending yourself, in comparison to how impossible it would be to ever deal with corruption if you do gain more every time you do defend yourself?
You and your love of the term "meaningful pvp". Its all meaningful. You simply favor Objective based PvP. There is plenty of meaningful risk for corruption, as opposed to griefing corruption. I do plan to indulge in Open sea PvP, but if I have to defend a nodes environmental management by killing enemy node gatherers, I expect to take corruption for the kills where they intentionally dont fight back, not the ones where they finally do.
assuming none of those castle sieges and castle node sieges are happening simultaneously with each other or other node sieges. But I hope they do happen more often than I believe they will. Most of my PvP will be at sea, but I do plan to be very active in node progression, which will inevitably lead to corruption kills.
Meaningful Conflict is the term used in the Kickstarter campaign and the first few years of development.
And, yes, I love that term.
And, yes, Meaningful Conflict acts as hype for me, while obsessive Risk v Reward acts as anti-hype for me.
It's OK for you to think that the design for Corruption makes PvP not fun.
Ashes is not made for everyone.
Corruption can make it very fun if it is only a deterrent for excessive griefing, as it is stated to be. My argument is that increasing corruption for non-griefing pvp not only goes against what corruption is designed for, but it just feels bad. Nice try with the passive aggressive bit at the end there though. I am holding 1 thing close to my chest as far as a theory goes to get around it if need be, though I would rather it be made better. Either way, I think I am covered when it comes to enjoying the game.
This game would function mostly without any Open World PvP at all, and while I am glad for the option, adding the fourth status just increases it for no meaningful reason relative to the goals that are related to dynamism.
I expect that if I, or my group's 'Enforcer', get corruption, that the green players around our Node who see this will not have a particularly high chance to attack, due to the assumption that it would be done in order to achieve something positive for the Node Community.
Whereas Corrupted Invaders are instantly KoS for any citizens without danger, and their best option is to leave. I support this because it allows us to prevent the 'Node' being 'griefed' as well.
And how will you tell a node invader apart from someone part of your node? I have mentioned in another post there needs to be something to distinguish players part of nodes differing your own.
And I would argue that environmental management relies almost entirely around Open World PvP via enforcement. Otherwise gathering just becomes the new form of PvP lmao.
And I would also say it doesnt increase PvP at all, you'd still have the fights. It just wouldnt be nearly as impossible to deal with small amounts of corruption since you wouldn't end up snowballing immediately into a state of high corruption once you started to be hunted, unlike the current design.
Say you've killed someone deep in a dungeon (one of the most meaningful reasons to PK). The closest respawn point to your location is, say, 1 minute away of direct sprinting. If it was your first PK - I think that you should be able to clear your corruption within that 1 minute. So that if the only one who came to fight you is the victim - they're already late.
If you have a few PKs under your belt - it's several minutes to remove corruption, so you'd want to quickly change your location (w/o anyone seeing you) and do your best to kill mobs as fast as possible.
If you have 7-10+ PKs - you're royally fucked and shouldn't have PKed in the first place.
I would personally prefer if respawn points were a bit further from the dungeon, so that it's never really 1 minute to come back (unless the PK was right at the entrance). But this is just yet another point of design balancing.
But this sort of approach accomplishes the same thing you want, but w/o having the complete safety of "no matter who fights me, I'll still remove my corruption".
But as you said, we just disagree on the harshness of the corruption punishments themselves. You want them to be super soft, while I want them to be super hard. No one should want to be a corrupted player and if you ever "must" PK - you should be scared for your damn life, instead of chilling around.
Again, you're hung up on the "defending yourself" part. Criminals should not be "defending" themselves. PKers are not fighters - they're murderers. If someone kills a person and then goes on killing more people who are trying to stop that someone - is that someone completely in their right to only get punished for their first kill?
I know that the "realism" of the system might not be seen as fun gameplay in this instance, but I agree with this design mainly because I've seen PKers in L2 outlive the danger of dying Red because they could just win against their attackers. This was fairly rare and would usually just end with the PKer asking friends to wipe him several times in a controlled manner, but the PKer never got properly punished by the victims themselves or by any outsider at all. Your suggested system would make this a very frequent occurrence, which would also be even worse than L2's design.
In other words, Steven wants even fewer PKers than L2 had, which is why the system "works as intended" in this regard. You just disagree with his decision.
We have both pushed for this concept in other posts. Honestly if we went the route of actually having variables for gaining corruption as opposed to the super basic 1 corruption kill = "welcome to hell", I wouldn't see there being anywhere near as much of a need for what I am suggesting. If 1 or 2 corruption kills amounted to 1-10 minutes of work to get rid of it, I have no worries. But if a single corruption kill amounts more towards 30+ minutes of working it off... this is the sort of issue I am more concerned about. I should have provided a value to what I am theorizing corrupted kills to be.
But with different variables you'd be able to do things like have defensive kills grant corruption, just a smaller amount, directly adding the choice of risking more corruption or trying to run, as opposed to any kill you get exponentially screwing you. I would even go as far as saying corruption itself should have levels, with corresponding punishments, as opposed to one static set of punishments with increasing duration and power debuffs the more you get.
I am indeed focused on the defensive part, because it is just PvP, not griefing. Even in the real world, criminals have a right to defend their own lives believe it or not. You could make the argument that a bounty hunter should grant corruption when killed maybe, but that comes down to more of a "law" thing instead of a magical force like corruption seems to be. If somebody murders someone and runs away, and someone else hunts that murderer down to kill them, they are also going to be charged with murder. But realism aside, I believe if its voluntary PvP, it shouldn't give more corruption. And corruption, by design, isnt made as a guarantee to punish the corrupted, there is a reward factor in it for a reason. You just arent supposed to have a very good chance of being rewarded once you have griefed enough. And if a player is strong enough to win in a fight against other players even with their corruption, arent they earning their reward? I would hope that if I beat someone in a fight, I don't get punished for being the better player. If I am griefing someone through camping them or killing a low level player, I fully expect to get punished because at that point it isn't a fight. And yea, "killed by friends" is going to be a serious issue when it comes to corruption and avoiding the penalties. Only way around that one is GM's catching people in the act imo. But that has nothing to do with a corrupted player being able to defend themselves without shooting themselves in the foot every time they have to do it.
All of that being said, yes to gradually increasing the severity of corruption punishments the more you get and variables for obtaining different amounts of corruption. Starting with low punishments to accommodate for PKing that isn't actually griefing, but gradually spilling over into a bad state to be in due to excessive killing. And all of that is assuming you are correct with low times of corruption.
we dont know how long it will take to cleanse your corruption. we have to wait for a2. also, im an advocate for not dropping gear if you die red and only have 1-3pk (could be global on your account to prevent abuse with alts), that way you can just simply die if you pk someone and outta nowhere, someone comes and tries to kill you, avoiding from getting more corruption, but also puts a limit on how many times you can do this. you would have to do a long quest to lower your pk counts.
But it depends on the other variables of the system and how they're tuned. I'd be fine with those "levers" above being the way they are now, if it's balanced out by the way other levers of the system are tuned.
For me it's not really about red vs green. And I definitely don't care about the eternal war between extreme carebears and griefers. As far as I'm concerned, both of those groups have a mindset and certain emotional instability that makes anything they say on the subject worthless.
For me, it's just about....is there a healthy amount of open world pvp/pvx and contesting of resources? Or did we get New World'd. That's pretty much it.
We know from a recent interview that Steven expects the average player to get murdered about 3% of the time. I think he said 3%, something close to that. That's pretty rare. Might be killed more than that in a pve game from getting mob trained lol, or just mobs period.
But that's what he said. So I'm assuming he intends to create the whole open world/contesting of resources dynamic within the combatant/purple realm. By designing the flagging system to compel people to flag and defend themselves in situations where it makes sense to. Like actually compel people.
System just needs to be tested.
I agree with everything you just said.
Dygz is just posting what the Sandal Lord has expressed multiple times.
Which he also put out in this post to a video where the guy had "bad takes."
Not once did he say he wants less PKs, not all PKing is griefing. The last bit is all you need. "As a system it is core to introducing risk vs reward in Ashes, while disincentivizing griefing"
My point, defending yourself isn't griefing, therefore shouldn't cause more corruption following this core design philosophy.
That is a lot cake being shoved down PvPers throat.
Definitely needs to be explored, griefing isn't limited to PvP. Shitbags exist in every flavor and killing them is always the proper response.
I think if you kill someone and they're a known griefer or piece of shit, it's not a big deal. Regardless if they PvP or not, killing them is always the right answer.
I also think if you walk up and slap a bear, expect to get mauled. Same goes with someone who is red, I'm not going to assume every corrupted player is corrupted for a bad reason. If they killed someone who is a pos, good they should be celebrated.
So definitely needs to be explored further.
To some this is true, for others it is not.
Meaningful conflict for me entails much more than "sieges" and "caravans". Every individual is going to decide what they find meaningful.
If you kill just one player and gain corruption from that, the above happening is the actual real risk. It is taking things out of your hands - at least a little bit.
System should be adjusted in a way to actually deter griefing without stopping someone from killing griefers hiding behind their green status. Griefing isn't limited to PvPing.
I think Stevens goal of protecting someone building their character from others who have already done so is the correct path, I do not think this "L2" system or enhancing it is the correct path, sounds incredibly short ended.
I think "PvP corruption", should be changed thematically and turned into a "Law and Order" system and greatly expanded upon into a superior system.
Corrupted players aren't thematically criminal, they're corrupted. Criminals are people who break laws, corruption isn’t a law. One is akin to sin, the other is breaking some cultures rules meant to unify tribes into nations.
And what if a person had a damn good reason to go corrupted? No one knows why they went that route.
MMO History Lesson: PKing is PvPing as it came first, back in the old days it was everyone was red, everyone could get looted. We called it PKing, had nothing to do with some pseudo-moralistic stance people have today, they changed the loot rules so the carebears could partake in PvPing without any real consequence, it was simply survival of the fittest. So they had their fun at the expense of someone elses, which is ironic because that was their argument to get it changed in the first place. So if anyone didn’t know, originally carebear meant anyone not participating in full loot.
Back to this “Meaningful PvP”, it’s a wasted point. No one is going to decide what is meaningful to another person.
Meaningful to me means mastery and I find it anywhere in the world.
Meaningful to someone else means structured PvP, personally I think structured PvP is training wheels PvP but I digress, I’m an old school honor PKer.
10 Gatherers usecase
Let's say a spot with resources just spawns near your node and you find it at the same time with 1 other player. That player send a message and 9 more come and start harvesting, like bots, helping one of them to load a mule.
You are very good at PvP with epic gear and you could kill all of them.
But none want to fight you. They just harvest. You harvest too pretending to be peaceful.
When their mule is loaded or resources depleted, you kill the one with the mule and you become corrupt.
Most likely you cannot take all from the mule unless you have a mule too.
They see you trying to transfer the loot (slowed down by the tetris style) and they start attacking you.
You want now the game to let you kill them because they interfered in the fight you had with one of them?
Your assumption is that after killing a green you should have the right to hold your ground and to defend yourself against the other 10 gatherers and defeat bounty hunters too because you are good and clean the corruption with nearby NPCs which might guard the resources.
Steven wants you to run away and find a safe spot to clean your corruption, if you got valuable loot after kill.
Or you can just let yourself be killed.
Explorer gatherer usecase
Valuable loot you would get only if we talk about resources hard to find which do not fill a player's inventory.
Then you have a reason to kill and hide. Makes no sense to defend a spot against greens.
Transporting goods usecase
Can also happen that 10 players avoid the caravan system to save costs and they carry something valuable using a mule. Or maybe they just transport things to / from caravanserai.
You have a mule too, you could kill all of them but you have to play Tetris while transferring resources from their mule to yours.
They attack your mule after you killed theirs.
You end up killing all of them and now you are very corrupt with a mule and less experience.
They come back with a bounty hunter but they attack you first with the green alts.
Eventually you have to let yourself killed, else you lose a lot of experience.
Conclusion:
- 1 corrupt vs many green is not viable
- 1 vs 1 probably can be in some areas where you can avoid players and kill NPCs while they hunt you with bounty hunters.
- many corrupt vs many green can be like 1 vs 1, if you distribute the corruption. But many greens must let themselves killed. Those could be bots harvesting low tier resources. I don't see high level players defending low level gathering areas.
Call the process of flagging up "temptation of corruption" and you have yourself a justification why the death penalties are decreased in it. The "nature" is trying to trick you into becoming a part of it, so it gives you some benefits, but as soon as you go a bit too far - you're doomed.
So like I said, the story/lore could be twisted 20 ways to sunday. And any and all justifications can be thought up to make the system seem fine.
Then, as the player becomes corrupt, should get less agro from corrupt NPCs.
And I've already suggested mobs becoming "green" in the past. I'd love to see npc factions fighting each other and if players help one side - some of their mobs become full-fledged npcs who have left their corrupt ways.
PvX as fuck, and I'd imagine Dygz would see that as rpg as fuck as well.
Like I've said on this thread, some people have a good reason to be corrupted; griefers can be any color and killing them is always the appropriate response.
Why punish the honor PKer for killing griefers?
The system definitely just needs to be expanded upon, because it's not going to entirely work as intended.
Overcomplicating the system will lead to confusion and complaints (sandal knows we've had a ton already). Having a ton of small nuances and particular rules, that would properly differentiate honorable and dishonorable kills - would be that exact overcomplication.
PKing is just PvPing before they took the danger out of it, it's not griefing. It's just an old loot full loot way of doing things, you don't keep your shit if you can't keep it. I think Stevens goal of protecting someone building their character from others who have already done so is the correct path, I do not think this "L2" system or enhancing it is the correct path.
But killing someone because they don't "feel like fighting", when they're on very similar footing doesn't warrant a penalty.
Again, you're hung up on the "defending yourself" part. Criminals should not be "defending" themselves. PKers are not fighters - they're murderers. If someone kills a person and then goes on killing more people who are trying to stop that someone - is that someone completely in their right to only get punished for their first kill? [/quote]
So this is where I think "PvP corruption", should be changed thematically and turned into a "Law and Order" system. Corrupted players aren't thematically criminal, they're corrupted.
What if they had a damn good reason to go corrupted? You don't know why they went that route.
MMO History Lesson: Also PKing is PvPing, back in the old days it was everyone was red, everyone could get looted. We called it PKing, had nothing to do with some pseudo-moralistic stance people have today, they changed the loot rules so the carebears could partake in PvPing without any real consequence to their actions. So they had their fun at the expense of someone elses, which is ironic because that was their argument.
I know that the "realism" of the system might not be seen as fun gameplay in this instance, but I agree with this design mainly because I've seen PKers in L2 outlive the danger of dying Red because they could just win against their attackers. This was fairly rare and would usually just end with the PKer asking friends to wipe him several times in a controlled manner, but the PKer never got properly punished by the victims themselves or by any outsider at all. Your suggested system would make this a very frequent occurrence, which would also be even worse than L2's design.
In other words, Steven wants even fewer PKers than L2 had, which is why the system "works as intended" in this regard. You just disagree with his decision.[/quote]
So you don’t know what an honor PK is? I guess it makes sense since the newer games are relatively tame.
Someone can have a PK count of 1000. If he killed the shitbags and all varieties of griefers, then yeah his honor is still intact.
No reason to punish him for doing the server a favor.
The system needs to deter higher levels from bullying lower levels only. If a player chooses to die when they’re perfectly capable of defending themselves that’s they’re own damn fault.