Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Load-out outfits(swap gear sets from inventory) and Corruption
George_Black
Member, Intrepid Pack, Alpha Two
A few facts about my time in L2 before I get into the topic. Feel free to skip if your brain tells you that, features from a game Steven bases AoC on, aren't relevant for consideration on improvements. Your problem.
1) There were no cosmetics. Typically, when you got a higher grade gear you looked better (with the exception of the armor in my ProfPic, which was B grade and the best armors were A and S grade)
2) Players might have carried 1-3 weapons on them and swap based on the situation (types of enemies, way of fighting, or simply for a momentary passive bonus) but except for rare support cases, players did not carry armors sets with them. There was a weight factor as well that simple did not permit you to carry 2-3 armor sets.
3) Whilst there were ways to change your build, there weren't any load-outs. The preferred resistances or empowerments came from the supporting classes, based on the encounter.
4) When you died in L2 (except for dying from another player either as being Green or Purple you did not drop items and mats. You would drop items and mats when you died from mobs or, at a higher guarantee rate, when you were red and died from mobs or players.
Now, taken these into account, I find myself into new grounds, seeing the corruption system of L2 in a modern environment such as the mmo AoC wants to be:
1) Transmorgs/skins and load-out outfitting
2) Big variety of dmg type
3) No weight factor
I want to bring this to the attention of people and perhaps the devs themselves.
At around 45mins.
Steven here says that there will be a loadout system, during a conversation regarding dmg types and resistance types, which suggests that it will make sense to carry a few armors sets with you.
I want to know, how does that tie into the dangers of the corruption system, in which when you die you lose items and mats? PK, most of the times, is emotional and the result of true mmo freedom to interact with other players. Some player annoyed you, you PK them. Strange as it seems to all the PvE-mmo accustomed players, owpvp mmos simple are like that.
What happens if you carry 2-3 sets with you, as you would make use of the load-out outfit system Steven confirmed, and you PK somebody that wrong you? Should your chances of losing a whole piece increase dramatically just like that?
Suggestion:
When red and dead you drop mats and you have a high chance to drop items currently slotted in an equipment spot but never whole non-equipped items.
Your thoughts on the whole topic?
1) There were no cosmetics. Typically, when you got a higher grade gear you looked better (with the exception of the armor in my ProfPic, which was B grade and the best armors were A and S grade)
2) Players might have carried 1-3 weapons on them and swap based on the situation (types of enemies, way of fighting, or simply for a momentary passive bonus) but except for rare support cases, players did not carry armors sets with them. There was a weight factor as well that simple did not permit you to carry 2-3 armor sets.
3) Whilst there were ways to change your build, there weren't any load-outs. The preferred resistances or empowerments came from the supporting classes, based on the encounter.
4) When you died in L2 (except for dying from another player either as being Green or Purple you did not drop items and mats. You would drop items and mats when you died from mobs or, at a higher guarantee rate, when you were red and died from mobs or players.
Now, taken these into account, I find myself into new grounds, seeing the corruption system of L2 in a modern environment such as the mmo AoC wants to be:
1) Transmorgs/skins and load-out outfitting
2) Big variety of dmg type
3) No weight factor
I want to bring this to the attention of people and perhaps the devs themselves.
At around 45mins.
Steven here says that there will be a loadout system, during a conversation regarding dmg types and resistance types, which suggests that it will make sense to carry a few armors sets with you.
I want to know, how does that tie into the dangers of the corruption system, in which when you die you lose items and mats? PK, most of the times, is emotional and the result of true mmo freedom to interact with other players. Some player annoyed you, you PK them. Strange as it seems to all the PvE-mmo accustomed players, owpvp mmos simple are like that.
What happens if you carry 2-3 sets with you, as you would make use of the load-out outfit system Steven confirmed, and you PK somebody that wrong you? Should your chances of losing a whole piece increase dramatically just like that?
Suggestion:
When red and dead you drop mats and you have a high chance to drop items currently slotted in an equipment spot but never whole non-equipped items.
Your thoughts on the whole topic?
0
Comments
Thanks.
Made an edit on title
All you'd have to do to completely abuse your suggestion is to just put on a weak gear set before you PK. At that point a huge part of the deterrent is now gone, because the PKer could die w/o any fear of losing anything valuable.
There's also the other side of this coin that was used in L2. Just overstuff your inventory with the cheapest possible items, so that the chance of you losing your own gear is as low as possible.
I think the best way to counter both of those abuses is to have a behind the scenes "weighting system". The game would track how often and for how long you're using specific pieces of gear and those pieces would have higher chance of dropping on death (obviously within the base chance of dropping a gear piece as related to your corruption values).
Imo this would completely prevent the overstuffing abuse and would also minimize the issue you had in the OP. Situational pieces would have a smaller value on them because you'd only wear them for short periods of time, while your main gear would most likely be the one to drop first.
If I missed an abuse in my suggestion, do point it out.
2) if you put on a weak gear before PK I'd turn around and kill you and win the pvp.
3) This may not be the case if the suggestion takes places
4), 5) The overstuffing cannot happen in AoC unless your aim for the day is to go PK.
People need the tetris full item inventory free. If you overstuff you won't be able to pick up possible loot.
You would, but anyone who wouldn't just immediately fight back when flagged upon would most likely not care what kind of armor their attacker is wearing. Also, they can't sight-read that armor, so they might not even know either way (I fucking bet the gear icon won't matter).
And that's my point. The only ones who overstuffed their inventories in L2 were the PKers who just went around fucking people over. They overstuffed because that let them PK for longer w/o losing their main gear. They would do that in Ashes for the same reason (especially on alts against super lowbies).
Your suggestion would just tell them "just bring a change of clothes and you'll be fine, your main gear will never drop". Imo that's a problem.
I am not against any idea that would aid in both making the Reds lose a valuable item.
But the outfit system, which requires ppl to walk around like a piniata, should be considered in the corruption system.
I'd assume the current system already accounts for multiple items being present on a character. Purely because a full set of gear is 16 pieces + weapons. If reds just "dropped gear" and the system didn't specify how many items the player dropped - it'd be a full loot game for the reds.
Most likely there's just a relation between corruption values (+ potentially PK count) and the amount of crafted items a character will drop on death. So if you have enough corruption to drop 2 items and you roll bad rng on death - you'll drop 2 random items.
Which is exactly why overstuffing could be a huge problem. And I hope that my idea of adding weights to gear pieces was already at least brought up in Intrepid's design meetings and has either been implemented or they came up with an even better way to balance the system.
i would think u would only have a chance to dropped equiped gear in ur current loadout you have on which you can only change out of combat so if somone manages to get out ofd combat and switch to a shit set and die well thats fine cause he managed to clear combat.
In Ashes, the focus is on more Meaningful Conflict.
I noticed that annoyance usually comes from a conflict that is not being resolved for one reason or another. PK serves as last-resort solution to a conflict.
I guess I've seen such a statement somewhere.
So you say you will be safe transporting your stuff from the freehold to the caravanserai? Or with a loaded mule in the wild?
If you go on a murder spree and you have 10 pks under your belt then you might start feeling a significant dampening to your skill effects against other players. I don't want to give necessarily a number or curve for players to extrapolate prior to us having the ability to actually test these ideas and where those numbers are going to lie; but I would say what is the intent behind that dampening: The intent isn't to limit the fun of the player, the intent is to provide a give-and-take or a risk-versus-reward; and the risk of continuing down the road of accruing corruption is not only the loss of your gear and amplified death effects but also your ability to perform in that activity.[48] – Steven Sharif
This quote gives the example of 10 pks, so definitely some will go as far as 5. Having 1-2 pks could be frequent.
And the intent is to allow fun and risk-versus-reward.
In this quote Steven says that making the corruption penalties too strong would even be anti-social because pour PKers would be kicked from the guild
And I think that the intent behind the corruption is that like during a rise in passion and like anger and whatever you want to make this decision and do something and you'll suffer the repercussions later. But if those repercussions are just overwhelmingly bad and even anti-social in the sense that like your guild is like hey man you went corrupted and this gives us like corruption points on the guild, and like you're out of here, then people just aren't going to choose to use it; and then at which point might as well just take it out.
By default no one has a reason to fight you.
But sometimes there can be incentive for players to attack you. For example, if you carry a large stack of Hunting certificates and have it be known to others. Then someone might want to take them from you. Or if you are occupying a good farming spot. Or trying to kill a boss. How likely you are to be attacked depends on what you are trying to do, for the most part. Currently 80% of game content is planned to be open-world and can be contested. "Can be" and "will be" is very different. A lot of game content will rarely be contested, and you should almost never get attacked engaging with it. Meanwhile, some other content will be so competitive, due to the value it can provide, that you are guaranteed to get assaulted, if seen as potential contender. Or you can call someone's cat dumb and see what happens. There is also a small chance that someone has a bad day and will fight you for no reason.
Once someone has decided to attack you - it can go several ways. You can fight back, and turn it into a PvP. You can remove the reason to attack you, run away, talk your way out, or stop the fight in some other way. If you decide to do nothing to stop the attacker - other player will then decide if it is worth the risk to PK you, or try to find another solution.
This is roughly the idea behind open world PVP/PK.
TLDR:If you don't want to get PKed - don't get into a situation where someone would be motivated to fight you, and then do nothing to stop them. If someone decides to PK without a reason - it is not ok, and karma system is there to punish it, specially if it is repeated, or you can try to stop it yourself, if you feel like it.
I'm against this since I would see people abusing it to either lose cheap gear or no gear at all by going naked. I feel like they always worded the corruption penalty as being a chance to lose completed items to avoid this potential abuse.
I hope I can see this dynamic soon in Alpha 2.
I discussed it in detail recently in this thread:
https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/56124/a-4th-player-combat-flagging-status#latest
I miss @Dolyem
Makes sense to me. This would also prevent players from filling inventory with trash to lower the chance of dropping actual good items. Just need to prevent swapping gear while red to avoid abuse.
Due to the tetris inventory for whole, non-equipped items, people can't carry around trash gear, on top of the gear sets they might need, on top of the open slots incase they loot something.
Not enough space for trash gear.
As for cheap gear or naked, the lack of bonuses will be revealed in the weakness of the dmg.
If somebody attacks you with low dmg, you turn around and kill them.
A dead, wannabe Red cannot abuse anything while eating dirt.
A red can't completely dodge the corrupted death penalty but if I'm interpreting you correctly, they could avoid losing gear by going naked and getting killed.
I want to limit the drop table to whole items in the equipped slots, not the inventory.
I dont believe that PKers can go red with trash items, unless they aim for low lv players. That carries a different magnitude of corruption.
Also, if you believe that everyone will just fight back then wouldn't that just remove your issue completely?
Players need to spec into bonuses suited to deal with players and mobs at the exact same time, due to owpvp.
It's not like they will swap when they wanna do PvP content, and they will swap again when they wanna do pve content.
Personally I play a brawler build. Not the best for dps and I wont be carrying a pure dps set.
I will go red many times and I wont feel like a pinata.
But as with everything in AoC, a single feature is tied to many systems and needs to be examined.
I dont believe that everyone would fight bsck all the time.
But if I see a lv40 dealing 200 dmg, when he should be dealing 1500 dmg, I would take him down faster than a mob, and go on about my day.
If anything, I feel like the best way to mess with people would be to just run around as a naked lowbie and try to PK people with a spoon. They either flag and open themselves up to being killed by proper players or they literally die to a spoon
If there's enough variety in gear builds then we'll definitely need loadouts.
To those that dont know:
At that point in L2 they introduced a bad design in which you could grind for passive elemental resistance and passive elemental dmg.
You would grind earth wind fire water light dark stones, really... really grind in an ugly area to get an attribute on your weapon and a mix of attributes on your armor.
Which made the whole pvp a random pokemon encounter and took out any skill involved.
If you had spected into 20% earth 20% light 20% fire 20% water 20% dark and a person with a dark weapon attacked you, well you only got 20% resistance.
If you had spected 100% dark and a dark weapon attacked you, you were good, but his buddy right next to him would nuke you with whatever other elementally empowerer weapon he had.
Nikr, dont fuck with me, you had those multiple sets on a private server x30 xp rate or so. Not in an official server. Deny it and I wont take your word seriously anymore.
It was a bad design that turned pvp into chance.
I would not take into consideration any bad designs if I was making an mmo.
I dont think is relevant to what we talk about here.
Hive mind
Which is why I said that if Ashes has a good (emphasis on GOOD) variety in gear builds then we'll need loadouts.
As another example of a great use of loadouts (though they were simply macros in L2) - Oly fights against certain classes. DK against Soulbreakers for their paralysis, Majestic light of Major robe against stuns. Once again L2 was quite limited in its variety, but even then loadouts were useful as purely a QOL feature. I expect Ashes to have a much greater variety, which would require loadouts to work well.