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 mean there is a difference between
- going to the spawn point and killing a player
- reducing player's health to let the NPC kill him
The 2nd case was explicitly mentioned on wiki. Probably is more annoying than the 1st method but it can happen if players refuse to fight with the attacker.
Only if the attacker hits to often or too much, it becomes corrupt. Then I consider that the greens who remained at the spawn entitled to be more upset and have an advantage to defend the spawn point.
But depends how many are on both sides and if they damaged all greens or not. Can happen that greens will still be unable to be a threat but also unable to stay arround and farm efficiently.
I do not understand this case:
My suggestion simply protects non-combatants from combatants who would possibly use corrupted players as bait
PvE players want a great PvE experience not just the ability to survive in a PvP world. Or to grief PvPers.
I mean a harsh corruption would be like a flag in option menu where you set yourself as willing to PvP or not.
But with the AoC system you would have to just refuse to fight back and be careful to still survive while fighting NPCs.
Such interferences probably do not lead to a great PvE experience and the PvP is not the best either.
Pretty much any dungeon location will most likely kill you if you're below a certain threshold of hp, so parties and solo players (if there are solo dungeons) will have to fight back immediately or even be the first ones to attack (just as it was somewhat often done in L2), because it'd be easier to know for sure that you either win or lose, rather than risk fighting hard npcs at low hp and then waste time for sure.
Dungeons and valuable content will be farmed by hardcore players (majority in guilds as well), and to a hardcore player the time equation of minmaxing would present flagging up as the best possible solution to a potential attacker.
The biggest variable in all of this is your ability to play around mobs that would most likely be on you during the pvp. But w/o knowing the AI difficulty or the pve quality, it's very difficult to say how these kinds of interactions will go down.
Either way, I've previously suggested several tools that would let people control mob agro in such a way where another player's aggression might play against them. But as all the other things - this will be tested in A2.
Ganking is punished by Corruption on the Mainland. And the penalties increase as the PK (gank) score rises.
I mean Ashes really only has PvX locations.
And there should be plenty of areas across the Mainland with dangerous mobs to be fought and contested over that are not dungeons.
Yes, Repetitive (camping) would be griefing. But just a couple and moving on would not be. So as it is currently designed, non-grieifing PKs are punished just as much as griefing PKs, which is punishing PvP, not just griefing.
The 4th flagging suggestion is an alternative to a simpler solution which would be for anyone attacking another player to become a combatant. This would allow for other players to kill them and not gain corruption. My suggestion still grants corruption to non-corrupt players, preventing players from using corrupted as bait to turn players into combatants to kill them.
I'm more or less considering spawning here as returning to the area after death. So if a player is PKed and returns to the area they died at and is killed again and again and again.
Graveyard camping in Ashes of Creation is going to be very hard to achieve since players will respawn in a random location nearby. It's not like they'll continue to spawn at the same exact location.
If you damage a player and they die to a mob within a certain amount of time before they attack you, you get corruption. Simple enough solution to deter that behavior. Could.even have it be a certain amount of damage % to the player instead.
Yes and no. With the current iteration of corruption, if someone attacks my group in a dungeon and we let them gain corruption, coming back we gain 4x the materials and potentially some gear, and we aren't affected by their CCs and that group is stat dampened. And while I may have to fight back to them, they are also in a dungeon which would likely be easier to find them in, especially if it occured towards the beginning of the dungeon. Plenty of incentive there to almost never react to the initial engagement.
Griefer PKs would have a higher PK score than Non-Griefer PKs. Higher PK score has higher penalties.
Dying helps remove Corruption, so... if you had a legitimate reason to kill a couple of Non-Combatants, there should be little incentive to continue killing Greens.
Even if a Green attacks you while you're Red.
Allowing a Green to kill you while you're Red is the flip side of the Non-Combatant allowing themselves to be killed by you. Karma.
Why is there an assumption that the other group will insist on flagging Red if your group refuses to flag Purple?
When you return... that Red group is stat dampened. There is no guarantee that they will be stat dampened enough for you to kill them. Especially no guarantee for the 2nd engagement.
And, if they kill your group again... they may have completed the dungeon by the time you return.
Why would it be easier to find them?
Why would it be to worth anything to turn Red at the beginning of a dungeon??
If a group turns Red at the beginning of the dungeon, why would they still be at the beginning of the dungeon when your group returns?
How would you know where the Red group has moved to while you are traveling back to the beginning of the dungeon and fighting the respawns?
Remember that Ashes is a dynamic game, rather than a static game.
By design, dungeons do not have the same content each time you return. It's not like there will be the same exact content in the same exact locations on Tues as there was Mon - you can't necessarily anticipate the content that Red group is pursuing. Also, the Utility Skills of their group might take them to locations in the dungeon that are not accessible to your group, so...
Why would it be likely easier to find them when your group returns??
Ah now I understand.
So basically this flag could make the greens who fight against corrupt similar to a BH.
I wonder if players know if a green is a BH. Could be that you kill one and as soon as you become corrupt, you actually face bounty hunters not simple greens. Which already is an advantage for the corrupt, because can use CCs to run away.
And a disadvantage of BH vs Greens.
Checking the source of this CC change it sends me to YouTube but I cannot find the comment itself. The image on wiki is blurred for me but I manage to see that was a comment from Steven.
If it was a hastily reaction from him, it may have to adjust the Bounty Hunters too.
I am a bit upset to see the titles of yt videos. But is useful to know Steven cares and aims to have a popular game rather than a niche one.
I don't know if the corruption is harsh or not.
To me is meaningless until I get exact information with all those values to understand how much time it takes to work it off or how high the risk is.
I think there is no strong disagreement anymore.
I got confused when I split your short post here instead of keeping in one.
But I would like to know your opinion about my post where I said
Would it be acceptable if the corrupt player would not get more corruption when defending against new greens (not involved into the original fight) only after 5 minutes elapsed and only if the corrupt left the area and is running away?
Because after 5 minutes elapsed, I see greens hunting and attacking corrupts more like Bounty Hunters and competing with them. Or helping them.
The statement above I adjusted a bit the next post so I will use points this time to describe it more clearly:
- when a green is killed, all greens in the area close to where it died will be marked as "witnesses"
- a timer of 5 minutes would be set and would start and keep running only if the player is outside the area where the kill occurred
- green players which are not witnesses, would be "acting as" bounty hunters if they fight the corrupt player outside the area. But they would not have the BH ability to see the corrupt on map or other bonuses the BH may get. That means the corrupt player will be able to fight against them like against real BH and with the same consequences.
- "witnesses" killed before the 5 minute timer elapsed would increase the corruption. After the 5 minute elapsed, they would also start "acting as" BH
- the greens "acting as" BH against a corrupt player would remain in this state for a period of 90 seconds following their most recent attack on this corrupt player
With these adjustments I try to bring the Bounty Hunters to have equal chances with greens to catch the corrupt, otherwise they are in disadvantage.
So, would you agree with this adjustment?
Do you see any problems with it?
But, I'd want to see whether L2 players agree with me.
I'm explaining how I plan to exploit the system. The result will likely be no prevalent OWPvP as corruption is currently designed, simply because most won't see any act of engagement as worthwhile to chance corruption. If they stop attacking, my party simply heals really quick and jumps them while they are still marked as combatants. It's still an advantage on our part anyway since we can gauge their power and builds by their initial attack, further deincentivizing engaging combat. So whoever engages is put at a disadvantage for doing so regardless.
And with the current system of non-combatants granting corruption even while fighting a corrupted, we just sacrifice one to kill the corrupted, and each corrupted that kills us gets weaker and weaker, allowing us to cheese the fight.
Another idea would simply be to have 1 player in the group be a bounty hunter and hunt the group down immediately after they become corrupt. I could even have a separate account(and plan to) specifically so I can track down any group my group lures into corruption. And even if I didn't do that, it'd still be as easy as spreading out, locating the enemy team, grouping up, and engaging them. We could even potentially just wait outside for them seeing as Steven said corruption will take a lot of time to get rid of.
If we can't beat the corrupted that killed us, well they earned it, so good on them!
And as far as dungeons go, I don't believe they will be changing constantly. They'll change due to events and node progress, but remain static between them as far as I can tell from what has been said. So unless one of those happens while running back, I don't see what is so difficult about retracing steps? Once you get far enough in you simple take the least path of resistance because you can assume the group has killed monsters there.
There isn't supposed to be a detterent for killing non-combatants, only griefing.
Remains to be seen how Steven will swing the hammer of "everything is subject to change" during Alpha 2.
That is true, which is why I stated "dangerous pve locations" before giving an example of dungeons most likely always being dangerous.
This is why I mentioned the pve difficulty. If mobs are hard, the attacking party would just need a single glass cannon alt (who's outside their party) to kill your healer. If mobs end up killing the healer - all the better. Once your healer is dead - your party is dead or you have to completely disengage. The harder the mobs, the harder it would be to disengage, so you'd probably just die.
Now you need to spend several minutes coming back, you've lost some valuable loot and you've gained xp debt. All while the attacking party would literally just kill their own PK alt (if you didn't do so immediately), gather his stuff and most likely revive him on the spot (if his amount of corruption was removed with a single death).
You've lost a shitton of time, while the attackers lost literally nothing. And now you'd have to flag up if you wanted to remove the attacking party from that farming location. But they'd be ready for that, because they were ready for that in the first place.
This would highly depend on the respawn points around POIs. Flag state remains for 90s, so unless there were other parties willing to flag up against the Attackers or if the respawn point (and your respawn coordination) is closer than 90s from the spot where you died - ya ain't flagging them back up that easily.
Well, this is kinda outside of my point either way, because flagged pvp is exactly what I want in the game and, most likely, what those Attackers would be prepared for too, so you flagging up against them, losing and then coming back is literally the intended gameplay.
Pretty much. The 5min timer is simply a "run away for a bit and then just fight back w/o any problems" situation. And if that timer is changed to something way longer, then we're coming back to the general discussion of "how long does it take to remove corruption on mobs".
Also, that timer doesn't really address dungeon PKs (which imo will be the most prevalent ones in the game). Those "witnesses" wouldn't even know where the killer is.
This could be "solved" by just letting dead players "shout" to the entire location's chat (and I do hope this is the case), but at that point there's literally no point in the timer existing, because greens in the surrounding areas would get to the killer way before the timer runs out, even if the timer starts immediately after the kill.
Sure, but with that change you'd get rid of OWPvP and a lot of risk vs reward as a result, so it's extremely unlikely if not impossible that he would go the full on opt-in route
In regards to the fighting back to an enemy party, I meant if I were to get them corrupt. A normal PvP fight isn't meant to have that worry, my point is I'd be able to hunt down people I make corrupt on purpose
Super easy mobs might remove that situation, purely because a healer wouldn't be able to die if they're attacked by an alt character and some mobs. But at that point the game would have much bigger issues imo.
I can't tell if you think this is good gameplay or not. Personally I think it's convoluted and entirely avoidable with my suggestions to have corruption lead into truly severe penalties once it can qualify as griefing. But as it is, I'll exploit as much as I can in A2 to make my points. Only real way to go about it is to try to actually break it.
My current belief is that the easiest and best way to balance the system is to have the time to return to your death location roughly at the same length as the time required to remove corruption from a single kill of an equally-lvled character.
At that point, flagging up is more beneficial because it saves you time. And time is always the only resource that ultimately matters in an mmo.
Obviously you could hope that your killer has a few PKs under his belt and it would take him longer to clear his corruption (or that someone else will kill him in the meantime), but that is exactly the risk/reward equation that Steven likes to talk about.
And that's the equation I've always considered in L2. But L2 only reduced your XP on death, so it was usually easier to just make your attacker a PKer. Ashes will have an even stronger push to flag up, which is exactly why I'm somewhat confused at a much harsher tuning for corruption's balancing.
But, just like you, I'll be testing this system as much as I can and give all the feedback I can. We'll see where we end up after that.
PvP players want a great PvP experience not just the ability to survive in a PvE world. Or to grief PvEers.