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Death, Punishment, and Anti-Griefing systems
Cyridius
Member
Just to preface, this is going to be a long post with what I hope is well thought-out and useful feedback and commentary. Abandon hope all ye who enter.
A few things to start off with; I've been playing MMOs for over two decades. I have experience with everything from hardcore PvP MMOs, casual PvE, PvX and so on. I've been around the block and I've seen how a lot of games do things whether it be Dark Age of Camelot or World of Warcraft and anything in between. I am not providing this context as some form of bragging rights, because it doesn't make me any more or less qualified to talk about a game, but it's just to indicate I'm not some person who's played nothing but WoW for 19 years and wants AoC to radically change to cater to me. Another bit of context is that I'm professionally employed as an economist - so I spend my day thinking about human behaviour, allocation of scarce resources (the most important of which in the context of gameplay is time), and optimisation - that said, I don't think anything I will be saying is all that complicated or unintuitive. It's just a matter of how I think about things. That, combined with my experience in games over the past few decades, informs how I think the systems I'm about to discuss will work in practice. Let me also state that when I use the word "fun", obviously I can only speak to what's "fun" for me and the people I know, and not for everyone. I'm not using the word objectively.
I'll also say that I cannot say that any of the systems outlined relating to griefing in AoC are flawed from conception, because they're not. I think the design philosophy of "soft" deterrents for PvP griefing are generally very excellent. Nor can I say that they're flawed in execution because they haven't been executed yet. I do believe, however, that some of the death penalties are fundamentally and conceptually flawed. I fully expect the existing specifications of these systems to change either in advance of, or during, Alpha 2, which I'm very excited to be testing with everyone else. I know that the Intrepid team is responsive to feedback and the results of testing - I do have confidence that they'll adjust as needed when they have an evidence base to support an adjustment. And if I'm wrong, I'm wrong - that's just how it be.
I'd also like to note that I have not watched or listened to every stream or podcast fully to catch every comment or answer to a Q&A segment, nor seen Steven and co's every forum or Discord post. I'm using the wiki for reference, which I'm assuming is reasonably accurate and up to date as it's in use as a reference material in the official Discord. If I make factual errors, please point them out and this post will be edited to reflect where the error has occurred and replaced with more accurate information, for future readers. Now, with all that window dressing out of the way, on to to the substance.
For those who aren't aware of the death penalties planned for AoC, I refer them to the wiki. The system, along with the Corruption system, is clearly influenced by Lineage II, with some improvements in both regards. To summarise the key points;
For a "non-combatant", i.e. someone who is not doing damage to other players at the time of death;
1. You will incur an XP debt that accumulates.
2. You will get stat debuffs and debuffs to loot drop rates which will accumulate with your XP debt, according to the linked podcast.
3. Your gear will suffer durability loss.
4. You will drop a portion of the items in your inventory, depending on if they are gathering or crafting materials, as well as a portion of your glint.
Glint, I might add, is basically just gold (or a trade good) that has yet to be exchanged with an NPC vendor, and therefore should be treated in my opinion as gold loss. Durability damage on gear is also generally viewed in MMOs as gold loss as well as you can generally just take them to an NPC vendor and have them instantly repaired. However, in AoC, the wiki specifies that it will cost crafting materials in order to repair damaged items, which adds an additional layer to this system so we do have to wait and see how that will play out. However, I would still treat it as gold loss regardless - if anyone is capable of repairing their gear given the right materials then it should just be viewed as a gold loss with an extra step to it, for example, as it would simply be a matter of buying the materials from someone. Similarly if it's only skilled crafters who can repair, as they will charge for the service. In either scenario your coin purse would be getting hit twice for a single death.
In other games that kind of mechanism is used as a gold sink in order to mitigate inflation of gold in the economy. Players who have a lot of gold are also likely to be the ones pushing the highest level of content and therefore the ones most likely to die - which means they're also the most likely to be spending the most amount of gold on repairs. In AoC, however, this is just a transfer of resources between players - another player loots your Glint or provides you with the materials or repairs to your gear, and gold changes hands. It has no deflationary effect - which is fine, depending on implementation it can also lead to more genuine player economic activity, which is more important than controlling inflation.
However, this system can either be really good or fairly bad. Keep in mind this is the penalty for a non-combatant, that is, someone who dies in PvE or who gets ganked in PvP and either cannot or does not fight back.
So, to begin with how I think it might be good - it encourages people who are attacked in PvP to fight back. This is because the death penalties for those who are flagged as "combatants" are significantly less punishing. Approximately 50% less. That means that if you're in a PvP situation and you can't escape or the odds are relatively even, you're encouraged to fight back as refusing to do so carries considerably more risk. That said, this is almost an irrelevance - there are few scenarios I can envisage where a player wont do damage to another player who is attacking them, even if their ultimate intention is to flee. This will flag them as a combatant and therefore they'll suffer the reduced death penalties regardless.
But there are a few scenarios where I can imagine that happening, and those are the ones that concern me. In particular, I'm concerned for low level players being effectively one-tapped by higher level players, who then as a result suffer the normal non-combatant penalty because they didn't even get the opportunity to retaliate. People can and will be malicious, we all know that. And what will happen is that high level players will strip themselves of their most valuable gear and will take what's enough to quickly and easily kill low level players and just do it for the sake of doing it. This isn't a new practice. Mortal Online, for example, had PvP where players fought "naked" because dropping your gear on death (as can happen to highly Corrupted players in AoC, which they will be if they're ganking people far below their level) was a massive disincentive to actually gearing up for PvP, because eventually you would die and someone else would take it. Players are experts at mitigating risk, and people are also known for being malicious - combine both of them and this system might not do much to discourage random PKing of low level players.
How much of an issue this is depends on how punishing the Corruption system is for doing this. According to the wiki, you get a stat debuff that will scale with your Corruption. This is an excellent idea and it will just come down to quantum. If your stats are brought so low that even a low level player can feasibly kill you, then it will continue to be a problem, but it'll be a mitigated one as you wont be able to just go on a murder spree. Instead you'll just be massively irritating a few people instead of a lot of them. I think that's a situation that most people can live with, but the accuracy of that depends entirely on what the system will be like when it actually makes contact with real players.
This is before we talk about potential "exploits" of the system that Intrepid are aware of but don't seem to think are a cause for concern, such as someone avoiding Corruption status if they make it so a mob gets the last hit on a player they're attacking. That player will still be lootable when they die, so there is no downside to allowing someone to die in that fashion after attacking them. Similarly, you might be able to avoid the PvP dilemma altogether by dragging a large pack of mobs onto a player to kill them - but that is entirely contingent on the implementation of mob leashing (how far they will chase you) and aggro (who they prioritise attacking) in AoC, which there isn't enough information on to make it worth speculating about. I'd also add that there is nothing to prevent a party from stacking all of the Corruption on a single player, as Corruption is based on the last-hit as opposed to contribution. This is something that will need adjustment, in my opinion, by changing from a last-hit based system to a contribution-based system (I would say the same for Bounty Hunting as well, I might add, which works on the same principle and will lead to shoddy player interactions), or a system where Corruption is spread evenly across all party members when it's incurred, if they are in the local area.
With regards to the dropping of items on death, I do think this should be exclusive to PvP deaths where a player does damage to you, even if they don't land the last hit. I'm not too fussed about this either way, but it is worth thinking about why items should drop on your death in the first instance. It's the same reason you get drops when you kill mobs - it's a reward system for whoever kills you. A mob is not going to loot your corpse and then sell the items in town, there's no point dropping items for it. Nor should a player simply be rewarded for stumbling across your dead body and looting it despite having done nothing to earn that loot. If a player kills you, or contributes to your death, that's a different question and in that case I think dropping some items makes complete sense. That said, I think losing some items on death in PvE is perfectly acceptable because it creates a degree of risk factor. It just wouldn't be my preference.
In general, however, the XP Debt system from bullet points one and two above is simply not going to work well. I think it's a good idea for players who accrue a large amount of Corruption to suffer XP Debt as an additional penalty, but let's think about this for everyone else for a moment.
Remove XP Debt from the equation. You die in combat to either a mob or a player. What do you suffer?
1. Time loss through dropping items which you spent time gathering and farming
2. Time loss through having to return to the location you died
3. Time loss through having to go get your gear repaired
4. Gold loss through dropping items
5. Gold loss through having to deal with gear repairs
The time loss is the largest penalty here. There is nothing worse than feeling like you just "wasted" your time, or that you now have to waste your time. That's already punishment enough, and it's a punishment that scales depending on whatever situation you're in - if you drop a lot of things, if you respawn far away from where you died, and so on. Now on top of that, we're adding XP Debt. What does that mean?
Like everything else, the XP Debt is clearly inspired by Lineage II. Thankfully it seems toned down - in Lineage II your XP loss could be significant, you could de-level and you had to use Scrolls of Recovery to remove your debuffs. It was real old school which I know a lot of people feel nostalgia for (and for good reason). It's also a system that's best left in Lineage II.
Let's spell out what dying actually means with XP Debt in play. You have to do levelling progress that you have already earned, and you are debuffed during the process so that it's actually harder to earn than when you did it the first time around. It's a needlessly punitive punishment and people are, in general, not going to enjoy it - which is the most important factor when designing a game. Systems need to be fun, including failure. Your progression is already set back by the fact that you died in the middle of doing something - for example, gathering materials, farming mobs, doing some form of open world content, etc. You now have to go do that again. Which will be fine because presumably that content is fun to do. When you start adding things that make a player weaker as a result of failure, or which place a player behind other players with regards to their progress, that's when your system leads to disengagement with the gameplay loop, because it's unfun. The result of failure in the majority of cases should be close to status quo. You failed to progress, now try again. Your punishment is the time and resources that you used in your failed attempt.
If we look to a game like ArcheAge, which AoC is heavily inspired by, the death penalties were practically non-existent. You suffered from Rebirth Trauma which basically meant you did less damage and healing when doing a World Boss, that was about it. It used to be more severe but then they nerfed it because people didn't like it. But people still tried to avoid death because it meant they lost time, or if they were fighting over a world boss or trade caravan, they had less chance of securing the objective they were fighting over.
You can look to a game like World of Warcraft here as an example of this being done badly. Mythic+ Dungeons are a core endgame loop for a very large amount of the playerbase. M+ Dungeons are activated through use of a Keystone. That Keystone has a level. The more Dungeons you successfully do, the higher the level, the better the reward. If you fail a Dungeon, your Keystone gets de-levelled - you are taking a step back. This means that in addition to you have used up over half an hour trying a dungeon and failing, you are not forced to clear content at a difficulty you have already cleared in order to take another shot at what you just failed. This is time wasting.
As I noted above, players are excellent at mitigating risk - the end result is a community which has geared itself towards over-optimising this part of the game, a large amount of gatekeeping and strict adherence to metas, even where doing so makes no functional difference to your chances of success (i.e. a meta that might matter in top level M+ Dungeons is then enforced in the lowest level M+ Dungeons where it makes no sense to enforce it because of the perception that it will improve your odds of success, thus minimising your time spent). There will be meta party compositions in AoC, that's inevitable, but an effort should be made so that players whose classes are off-meta don't get proactively excluded, or have odiously higher barriers to clear for inclusion, in content because groups would rather take someone with a different class.
It also discourages players from venturing into that kind of content even if they might enjoy it, even if they might be good at it, because the risk of your failure is compounded by also resulting in other people failing, which in turn puts pressure on you to perform, which you may lack the confidence to risk. AoC is a game where combat will largely be party-based, and so this same dynamic of lack of confidence and subsequent pressure will persist into its open world content when the punishment for failure is so significant.
The example of M+ in WoW is, I think, on one of the more extreme ends of the spectrum. But AoC does run the risk of surpassing it. XP is gained through doing all sorts of activities, which means that XP Debts can theoretically be quickly paid off. But what if you die 10 times in a day, or even more than that, because you're trying to see if you can clear some hard content? What if you just have the misfortune of being attacked a lot in the open world and losing in PvP? What if you're just not that good at the game because you like to play casually? How long am I going to have to spend re-grinding my level? How long am I going to have to spend getting back to my old level of power? Any time at all is too much. Fun in this context is not derived from having to re-grind my XP, it's derived from the content itself being challenging to complete and rewarding that completion. Carrot, not stick.
The debt accrues so you have more XP to pay off, and you get weaker and weaker as this accrues, meaning it's going to take you progressively longer to do it. It's a compound punishment. That also means that in order to prevent the accrual of the debt and significantly underpowering yourself, every time you die you will need to set aside time to clear that XP Debt in order to get back to where you were before you even attempted the content that you failed at doing. That's time wasting. It's a severe punishment that should be reserved for severe cases, not the norm. That's before we even mention the reduced loot drop rate, which to me is honestly a punishment so out of pocket that I don't understand why it's a thing. Not only are you going to have to set aside time to re-progress something even slower than you did it the first time, you're going to get less rewards in the process. There is no player that I've ever spoken to, and no instance I've ever been in outside of a hardcore survival game (which AoC isn't) where I've stopped and thought "Yes, less stuff, that's going to be fun and engaging!" It will not be fun gameplay.
Let me be clear - I'm not for death to have no consequences. I'm also fully for risk-based content. But the degree of risk and consequence is a different question to whether there should be any at all, and it needs to be fair, proportionate, and not something that makes you feel like you're wasting your time. Everything other than the XP Debt will be fine, I think, but this system will be a non-starter for most people, and I'm reasonably confident that this is the conclusion that Alpha 2 testing will inevitably lead us to.
I would like to add that these death penalties only truly exist in what are described as Hunting Grounds - that is, the "sandbox" element of the open world. The place you go for killing mobs, gathering resources, etc. Open world Sanctioned PvP such as node wars, guild conflicts, castle sieges, caravans etc. do not suffer this same kind of death penalty system. And you have to ask - why? I am not going to attempt to get into Intrepid's head on this one because that's a fool's errand, but if we're excluding some of the most significant consequences to failure from some of the most important content, then why have it at all? Content which, I might add, is still described as "high risk" despite not having most of these death penalties?
I can't say why, but I can say that from my perspective, the removal of XP Debt, for example, from Open World Battlegrounds indicates is a positive because you don't have to deal with the egregious power reduction mechanics nor does it break up your gameplay loop to now have to go and get rid of the debuff. That would be my personal take on it, anyways.
What few of you managed to make it through this screed, I'd be interested in hearing thoughts and counter-arguments - I don't intend for any of my replies to be this absurdly long. There is no TL;DR.
A few things to start off with; I've been playing MMOs for over two decades. I have experience with everything from hardcore PvP MMOs, casual PvE, PvX and so on. I've been around the block and I've seen how a lot of games do things whether it be Dark Age of Camelot or World of Warcraft and anything in between. I am not providing this context as some form of bragging rights, because it doesn't make me any more or less qualified to talk about a game, but it's just to indicate I'm not some person who's played nothing but WoW for 19 years and wants AoC to radically change to cater to me. Another bit of context is that I'm professionally employed as an economist - so I spend my day thinking about human behaviour, allocation of scarce resources (the most important of which in the context of gameplay is time), and optimisation - that said, I don't think anything I will be saying is all that complicated or unintuitive. It's just a matter of how I think about things. That, combined with my experience in games over the past few decades, informs how I think the systems I'm about to discuss will work in practice. Let me also state that when I use the word "fun", obviously I can only speak to what's "fun" for me and the people I know, and not for everyone. I'm not using the word objectively.
I'll also say that I cannot say that any of the systems outlined relating to griefing in AoC are flawed from conception, because they're not. I think the design philosophy of "soft" deterrents for PvP griefing are generally very excellent. Nor can I say that they're flawed in execution because they haven't been executed yet. I do believe, however, that some of the death penalties are fundamentally and conceptually flawed. I fully expect the existing specifications of these systems to change either in advance of, or during, Alpha 2, which I'm very excited to be testing with everyone else. I know that the Intrepid team is responsive to feedback and the results of testing - I do have confidence that they'll adjust as needed when they have an evidence base to support an adjustment. And if I'm wrong, I'm wrong - that's just how it be.
I'd also like to note that I have not watched or listened to every stream or podcast fully to catch every comment or answer to a Q&A segment, nor seen Steven and co's every forum or Discord post. I'm using the wiki for reference, which I'm assuming is reasonably accurate and up to date as it's in use as a reference material in the official Discord. If I make factual errors, please point them out and this post will be edited to reflect where the error has occurred and replaced with more accurate information, for future readers. Now, with all that window dressing out of the way, on to to the substance.
For those who aren't aware of the death penalties planned for AoC, I refer them to the wiki. The system, along with the Corruption system, is clearly influenced by Lineage II, with some improvements in both regards. To summarise the key points;
For a "non-combatant", i.e. someone who is not doing damage to other players at the time of death;
1. You will incur an XP debt that accumulates.
2. You will get stat debuffs and debuffs to loot drop rates which will accumulate with your XP debt, according to the linked podcast.
3. Your gear will suffer durability loss.
4. You will drop a portion of the items in your inventory, depending on if they are gathering or crafting materials, as well as a portion of your glint.
Glint, I might add, is basically just gold (or a trade good) that has yet to be exchanged with an NPC vendor, and therefore should be treated in my opinion as gold loss. Durability damage on gear is also generally viewed in MMOs as gold loss as well as you can generally just take them to an NPC vendor and have them instantly repaired. However, in AoC, the wiki specifies that it will cost crafting materials in order to repair damaged items, which adds an additional layer to this system so we do have to wait and see how that will play out. However, I would still treat it as gold loss regardless - if anyone is capable of repairing their gear given the right materials then it should just be viewed as a gold loss with an extra step to it, for example, as it would simply be a matter of buying the materials from someone. Similarly if it's only skilled crafters who can repair, as they will charge for the service. In either scenario your coin purse would be getting hit twice for a single death.
In other games that kind of mechanism is used as a gold sink in order to mitigate inflation of gold in the economy. Players who have a lot of gold are also likely to be the ones pushing the highest level of content and therefore the ones most likely to die - which means they're also the most likely to be spending the most amount of gold on repairs. In AoC, however, this is just a transfer of resources between players - another player loots your Glint or provides you with the materials or repairs to your gear, and gold changes hands. It has no deflationary effect - which is fine, depending on implementation it can also lead to more genuine player economic activity, which is more important than controlling inflation.
However, this system can either be really good or fairly bad. Keep in mind this is the penalty for a non-combatant, that is, someone who dies in PvE or who gets ganked in PvP and either cannot or does not fight back.
So, to begin with how I think it might be good - it encourages people who are attacked in PvP to fight back. This is because the death penalties for those who are flagged as "combatants" are significantly less punishing. Approximately 50% less. That means that if you're in a PvP situation and you can't escape or the odds are relatively even, you're encouraged to fight back as refusing to do so carries considerably more risk. That said, this is almost an irrelevance - there are few scenarios I can envisage where a player wont do damage to another player who is attacking them, even if their ultimate intention is to flee. This will flag them as a combatant and therefore they'll suffer the reduced death penalties regardless.
But there are a few scenarios where I can imagine that happening, and those are the ones that concern me. In particular, I'm concerned for low level players being effectively one-tapped by higher level players, who then as a result suffer the normal non-combatant penalty because they didn't even get the opportunity to retaliate. People can and will be malicious, we all know that. And what will happen is that high level players will strip themselves of their most valuable gear and will take what's enough to quickly and easily kill low level players and just do it for the sake of doing it. This isn't a new practice. Mortal Online, for example, had PvP where players fought "naked" because dropping your gear on death (as can happen to highly Corrupted players in AoC, which they will be if they're ganking people far below their level) was a massive disincentive to actually gearing up for PvP, because eventually you would die and someone else would take it. Players are experts at mitigating risk, and people are also known for being malicious - combine both of them and this system might not do much to discourage random PKing of low level players.
How much of an issue this is depends on how punishing the Corruption system is for doing this. According to the wiki, you get a stat debuff that will scale with your Corruption. This is an excellent idea and it will just come down to quantum. If your stats are brought so low that even a low level player can feasibly kill you, then it will continue to be a problem, but it'll be a mitigated one as you wont be able to just go on a murder spree. Instead you'll just be massively irritating a few people instead of a lot of them. I think that's a situation that most people can live with, but the accuracy of that depends entirely on what the system will be like when it actually makes contact with real players.
This is before we talk about potential "exploits" of the system that Intrepid are aware of but don't seem to think are a cause for concern, such as someone avoiding Corruption status if they make it so a mob gets the last hit on a player they're attacking. That player will still be lootable when they die, so there is no downside to allowing someone to die in that fashion after attacking them. Similarly, you might be able to avoid the PvP dilemma altogether by dragging a large pack of mobs onto a player to kill them - but that is entirely contingent on the implementation of mob leashing (how far they will chase you) and aggro (who they prioritise attacking) in AoC, which there isn't enough information on to make it worth speculating about. I'd also add that there is nothing to prevent a party from stacking all of the Corruption on a single player, as Corruption is based on the last-hit as opposed to contribution. This is something that will need adjustment, in my opinion, by changing from a last-hit based system to a contribution-based system (I would say the same for Bounty Hunting as well, I might add, which works on the same principle and will lead to shoddy player interactions), or a system where Corruption is spread evenly across all party members when it's incurred, if they are in the local area.
With regards to the dropping of items on death, I do think this should be exclusive to PvP deaths where a player does damage to you, even if they don't land the last hit. I'm not too fussed about this either way, but it is worth thinking about why items should drop on your death in the first instance. It's the same reason you get drops when you kill mobs - it's a reward system for whoever kills you. A mob is not going to loot your corpse and then sell the items in town, there's no point dropping items for it. Nor should a player simply be rewarded for stumbling across your dead body and looting it despite having done nothing to earn that loot. If a player kills you, or contributes to your death, that's a different question and in that case I think dropping some items makes complete sense. That said, I think losing some items on death in PvE is perfectly acceptable because it creates a degree of risk factor. It just wouldn't be my preference.
In general, however, the XP Debt system from bullet points one and two above is simply not going to work well. I think it's a good idea for players who accrue a large amount of Corruption to suffer XP Debt as an additional penalty, but let's think about this for everyone else for a moment.
Remove XP Debt from the equation. You die in combat to either a mob or a player. What do you suffer?
1. Time loss through dropping items which you spent time gathering and farming
2. Time loss through having to return to the location you died
3. Time loss through having to go get your gear repaired
4. Gold loss through dropping items
5. Gold loss through having to deal with gear repairs
The time loss is the largest penalty here. There is nothing worse than feeling like you just "wasted" your time, or that you now have to waste your time. That's already punishment enough, and it's a punishment that scales depending on whatever situation you're in - if you drop a lot of things, if you respawn far away from where you died, and so on. Now on top of that, we're adding XP Debt. What does that mean?
Like everything else, the XP Debt is clearly inspired by Lineage II. Thankfully it seems toned down - in Lineage II your XP loss could be significant, you could de-level and you had to use Scrolls of Recovery to remove your debuffs. It was real old school which I know a lot of people feel nostalgia for (and for good reason). It's also a system that's best left in Lineage II.
Let's spell out what dying actually means with XP Debt in play. You have to do levelling progress that you have already earned, and you are debuffed during the process so that it's actually harder to earn than when you did it the first time around. It's a needlessly punitive punishment and people are, in general, not going to enjoy it - which is the most important factor when designing a game. Systems need to be fun, including failure. Your progression is already set back by the fact that you died in the middle of doing something - for example, gathering materials, farming mobs, doing some form of open world content, etc. You now have to go do that again. Which will be fine because presumably that content is fun to do. When you start adding things that make a player weaker as a result of failure, or which place a player behind other players with regards to their progress, that's when your system leads to disengagement with the gameplay loop, because it's unfun. The result of failure in the majority of cases should be close to status quo. You failed to progress, now try again. Your punishment is the time and resources that you used in your failed attempt.
If we look to a game like ArcheAge, which AoC is heavily inspired by, the death penalties were practically non-existent. You suffered from Rebirth Trauma which basically meant you did less damage and healing when doing a World Boss, that was about it. It used to be more severe but then they nerfed it because people didn't like it. But people still tried to avoid death because it meant they lost time, or if they were fighting over a world boss or trade caravan, they had less chance of securing the objective they were fighting over.
You can look to a game like World of Warcraft here as an example of this being done badly. Mythic+ Dungeons are a core endgame loop for a very large amount of the playerbase. M+ Dungeons are activated through use of a Keystone. That Keystone has a level. The more Dungeons you successfully do, the higher the level, the better the reward. If you fail a Dungeon, your Keystone gets de-levelled - you are taking a step back. This means that in addition to you have used up over half an hour trying a dungeon and failing, you are not forced to clear content at a difficulty you have already cleared in order to take another shot at what you just failed. This is time wasting.
As I noted above, players are excellent at mitigating risk - the end result is a community which has geared itself towards over-optimising this part of the game, a large amount of gatekeeping and strict adherence to metas, even where doing so makes no functional difference to your chances of success (i.e. a meta that might matter in top level M+ Dungeons is then enforced in the lowest level M+ Dungeons where it makes no sense to enforce it because of the perception that it will improve your odds of success, thus minimising your time spent). There will be meta party compositions in AoC, that's inevitable, but an effort should be made so that players whose classes are off-meta don't get proactively excluded, or have odiously higher barriers to clear for inclusion, in content because groups would rather take someone with a different class.
It also discourages players from venturing into that kind of content even if they might enjoy it, even if they might be good at it, because the risk of your failure is compounded by also resulting in other people failing, which in turn puts pressure on you to perform, which you may lack the confidence to risk. AoC is a game where combat will largely be party-based, and so this same dynamic of lack of confidence and subsequent pressure will persist into its open world content when the punishment for failure is so significant.
The example of M+ in WoW is, I think, on one of the more extreme ends of the spectrum. But AoC does run the risk of surpassing it. XP is gained through doing all sorts of activities, which means that XP Debts can theoretically be quickly paid off. But what if you die 10 times in a day, or even more than that, because you're trying to see if you can clear some hard content? What if you just have the misfortune of being attacked a lot in the open world and losing in PvP? What if you're just not that good at the game because you like to play casually? How long am I going to have to spend re-grinding my level? How long am I going to have to spend getting back to my old level of power? Any time at all is too much. Fun in this context is not derived from having to re-grind my XP, it's derived from the content itself being challenging to complete and rewarding that completion. Carrot, not stick.
The debt accrues so you have more XP to pay off, and you get weaker and weaker as this accrues, meaning it's going to take you progressively longer to do it. It's a compound punishment. That also means that in order to prevent the accrual of the debt and significantly underpowering yourself, every time you die you will need to set aside time to clear that XP Debt in order to get back to where you were before you even attempted the content that you failed at doing. That's time wasting. It's a severe punishment that should be reserved for severe cases, not the norm. That's before we even mention the reduced loot drop rate, which to me is honestly a punishment so out of pocket that I don't understand why it's a thing. Not only are you going to have to set aside time to re-progress something even slower than you did it the first time, you're going to get less rewards in the process. There is no player that I've ever spoken to, and no instance I've ever been in outside of a hardcore survival game (which AoC isn't) where I've stopped and thought "Yes, less stuff, that's going to be fun and engaging!" It will not be fun gameplay.
Let me be clear - I'm not for death to have no consequences. I'm also fully for risk-based content. But the degree of risk and consequence is a different question to whether there should be any at all, and it needs to be fair, proportionate, and not something that makes you feel like you're wasting your time. Everything other than the XP Debt will be fine, I think, but this system will be a non-starter for most people, and I'm reasonably confident that this is the conclusion that Alpha 2 testing will inevitably lead us to.
I would like to add that these death penalties only truly exist in what are described as Hunting Grounds - that is, the "sandbox" element of the open world. The place you go for killing mobs, gathering resources, etc. Open world Sanctioned PvP such as node wars, guild conflicts, castle sieges, caravans etc. do not suffer this same kind of death penalty system. And you have to ask - why? I am not going to attempt to get into Intrepid's head on this one because that's a fool's errand, but if we're excluding some of the most significant consequences to failure from some of the most important content, then why have it at all? Content which, I might add, is still described as "high risk" despite not having most of these death penalties?
I can't say why, but I can say that from my perspective, the removal of XP Debt, for example, from Open World Battlegrounds indicates is a positive because you don't have to deal with the egregious power reduction mechanics nor does it break up your gameplay loop to now have to go and get rid of the debuff. That would be my personal take on it, anyways.
What few of you managed to make it through this screed, I'd be interested in hearing thoughts and counter-arguments - I don't intend for any of my replies to be this absurdly long. There is no TL;DR.
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Karma worked well in Lineage 2. Steven enjoyed playing Lineage 2. He expects Corruption will work well in Ashes.
We will test it and see.
getting corruption through contribution through instead of last hit is terrible. some people have suggested that and its highly abusable by the person who is attacked. this will almost completely eliminate open world pvp. if you are concerned about a party killing you, get your own party and kill them? XD cant expect a solo player to beat a full party. or farm in spots that are designed for solo players.
going red for killing low levels for no reason at all other than killing low levels isnt something that is going to happen often. it will happen for sure, but the chances that the same person is killed over and over by a high level are basically none, not only because of the debuffs when you are corrupted, but because leveling in aoc doesnt take that long (unless they change it). you could also simply level up in another area if it happens to you.
when a server opens, there wont be high level players. and after a while, when there are high level players, there wont be that many lowbies. just a few people here and there who join the game late or make an alt. and the person doing this would most likely have to do it on an alt, so he will have to spend a couple of months to level up a new character to kill one guy who just joined the server?xD its not even a concern at all.
xp debt is an ok mechanic against karma bombing, for example. some people consider karma bombing griefing. i dont. but its still an exploit. at least if you are screwing me by dying to me multiple times, you are also screwing yourself. if you have nothing in your inventory, then death has no consequences, except for exp debt. we also dont know how severe it will be and if it will not affect you at max level. so saying it is bad in aoc isnt accurate.
also, we dont know how often you will drop things on death, whether you are red or not. whats the % to drop anything? is it 100%? i doubt it will be. you might die white and not drop anything at all.
A few points;
1. I'm not making an argument that solo players should beat parties. That would be silly. Just as silly as 5 people killing 1 person but only 1 person out of the 5 getting Corruption. Can you explain how that is abusable?
2. If you're planning to have no new players after the game releases then you're just planning for the game to be dead in a year or two. New players should be planned for, expected, and have their entry into the game be as smooth as humanly possible.
3. We do know quite a lot about how the mechanics work as they are currently planned to work, which is what my post discusses. They're in the wiki, which is based on statements made by Intrepid developers.
1- if all 5 contribute to the kill, now they are all corrupted, which makes them an easier target for another party attacking them. you can bait people like this. if only 1 person gets corrupted, only one out of 5 is at a slight disadvantage, and the rest of his friends could pick up the gear he might drop and then give it back.
also, what if you are in a party with random people and one dude decides to pk someone else they had beef with. is it fair that you get corruption too? maybe you did an aoe heal cuz the rest of your party is fighting mobs. its not fair, isnt it?
what if you killed someone and they came back and you pk that person. its not fair that your party gets corruption. or if there is a known pk around and you revenge kill him. its not fair that your party gets corruption.
2- didnt say that. imagine this: some dude spends 2 months leveling his main, then he spends a few more months gearing up. then he tries to pvp but he sucks so he makes an alt to kill lowbies cuz thats all he can kill. he spends another 2 months leveling it up, then he goes to a beginner area. what are the chances that he finds and kills a new player there after the game has been out for a few months? he would have to be at the exact moment and time a new player is leveling up there. and guess what? that playe ris going to outlevel that area faster than he can die to you multiple times xD. on top of that, after a couple of kills, his char wont be able o take on a low level, presumably, because of the stats dampening. plus it will require multiple deaths to get rid of corruption. plus you gain more corruption because you are at max level killing a low level. realistically, that character is never gonna recover unless that person is willing to spend several hours dying ove rand over, and possibly deleveling, to just have 5 minutes of fun. do that every day and you will most likely delete that alt xDD
3- we dont know thet drop chance, period. we just know that you have half the penalty if you are purple and 4 times the penalty if you are red. even in l2 you wouldnt drop with a 100% chance when you died.
On point 1 you ask some valid questions but they've all already been addressed by points I've made previously. In my proposed alternative, it works as follows;
Some random joins your party and then runs off somewhere else and kills someone. You;
1. Have to contribute to the kill to get corruption.
2. Have to be in the local area.
If you're partying up with people and they go off and kill someone and you're not contributing to their PKs, you don't suffer the consequences. The other reasons why you said it should be last-hit based are exactly the reasons why everyone should suffer consequences for things that they themselves are choosing to do. Why should an entire party that all, collectively, decide to PK someone be able to place all of the consequences onto a single individual? Why should other players have to get Corruption in order to deal with a PK party? Why should a PK party be able to cheese the player loot system? Nothing stops them from securing their friends' loot if they have Corruption, so now you're just advocating for players to have workarounds for the intended consequences that the Corruption system is meant to have.
With how the existing system is designed, the rest of the party can just stay out of combat for a bit after killing however many people they want and all they need to do is pick one person of the party to be sacrificed, which sounds like a good use for an alt. If you get Corruption because you accidentally heal someone in your party who is PKing, then you know not to party with that person again if it bothers you. Easy.
For the second point, I'm sure stat dampening will reach a point where even a lowbie will be able to kill a high level player that's griefing them. How many lowbies are they gonna kill before that happens? 1? 10? 100? That's the point I'm trying to make - the quantity of people impacted by intentionally malicious behaviour matters. The new player experience matters. It's almost worse in your scenario if there's very few low level players because then any griefing that happens will just be concentrated on a small number of victims, as opposed to spread out over a larger pool of players to dampen the impact. And how is someone going to outlevel the area when their levelling experience is being wrecked by higher level players? Leaving the XP Debt aside (which I'm assuming will be almost negligible, or even not applied when it comes to low level players), it is not fun to experience the game like this at all. Thankfully I think Intrepid is taking it seriously so I do doubt it will be a serious issue. Which is why I'm pointing out areas where it could still be an issue to be exploited.
As for the final point, the drop rate isn't really the issue for me. Of course if it was everything in your inventory that would be a problem in of itself but that's not what it will be. We do know that the mechanic exists, and while I'm not to personally bothered by it I would just prefer that it wasn't a thing for PvE deaths - it seems like needless punishment. But that just means people will minimise what they carry around in their inventories.
1- he isnt running off to kill someone, he is doing it next to you. if you heal that person you are contributing, arent you? or if you buff him, or if you accidentally hit the other guy once.
what if you are running around looking for pvp, then you take your weapon off and hit someone once doing 1 damage, just to signal that you wanna pvp. that person doesnt wanna pvp so you move on, but with your suggestion, he could die to a mob on purpose (or accidentally) and now you are red. not fair.!
what about a fight for a boss. whoever hits first is fked. if we gonna pvp for the boss, you hit me, i attack the boss and die and now ur red. my group has the advantage. not fair again and abusable.
2- we dont know how many people but we know its base don corruption you get and the higher the level difference, the more corruption you get. plus it doesnt matter anyways. its an open world pvp game. lower level playes arent entitled to be "protected" from a high level player. if a high level player does this, he is suffering the consequences. and again, this isnt something that will happen 24/7
3- if anything, pvp should have less penalties than pve. why are pve players entitled to not suffer the same consequences for dying?
You cant delevel.
It's from L2, an mmo that runs since 2003. Zero problems.
There is a myrriad topics like this.
The corruption system isnt there to protect sensitive players. It's there to prevent killing sprees and the game:
Leveling
Questing
Exploring
Gathering/crafting/economy
Raiding
It's not there to protect you. It's not there to prevent open world killing. It has been discussed many times before.
There is no griefing in games. Only life threats and serious insults.
I have the same concerns when it comes to mob dropping to kill someone or just running up behind someone that has mobs attacking them, damaging them and getting the mob to last hit them. Another exploit I could see is a naked max lvl with a basic/cheap weapon going and killing low lvls to troll, avoiding gear loss/gear damage. That one could be solved by having high corruption penalties for killing low lvls such as stat dampening that would take a long time to work off.
I think the solution to a lot of these is having a contribution based corruption system like Archeage had with the meter. The meter builds as you help damage/kill greens or support already corrupted players. As you mentioned, it didn't work in that game because all they had for penalties was the jail/trial system which was essentially just a timeout you could afk through or break out. I'm also hoping the reputation system plays a role in establishing order by marking relentless criminals as enemies of the node, but the devs won't talk about it
You're right, Dygz.
Alpha 2 can't get here soon enough for testing ... so we can put to bed all these individual takes on why the Corruption system is "simply not going to work well".
I agree that lessening drop rates as a death penalty is weird. I could maaaaybe see it as an additional punishment for the PKers, cause they have to refarm their power (given that they removed corruption through death rather than farming) and as a punishment for being an ex-PKer they won't be getting drops from their farming. But if that's the case - just have a separate marker for those who died as PKers and those who didn't.
On the point of "why planned pvp doesn't give penalties", the answer is simple. You will die WAAAAAY MORE during those events. So having super punishing penalties there would be beyond cruel, for the entire point of those events is to fight and potentially repeatedly die.
And quite a few of those events will require a ton of resource to initiate, so if you lose the event - you've lost a ton of time/resource investment. But spending an hour farming some spot and then dying and maybe losing 5 minutes of that hour (unless the base death penalty is insanely high) will barely put a dent on your progress.
Now I would agree that there should be a diminishing reduction, if you keep dying over and over within a certain amount of time. Obviously this would require the markers I mentioned above, so that PKers don't have this mechanic and have to work for longer.
I think the Corruption system is going to work perfectly well. As I said, it's an excellent way of balancing incentives and disincentives around PvP and deterring griefing. The issue is with death penalties.
Which is why the addition of the Open Seas is basically a deal-breaker for me, but...
Steven loves PvP so he's added large, permanent area for MOAR (FFA) PvP... and he's likely hoping it will incentivize more frequent large group PvP.
Steven will probably tell you, "If you don't want to experience the Risk of the Open Seas, simply don't adventure on the Open Seas."
Its open world pvp, removing corruption doesn't increase risk, it increases griefing, or allows griefing without consequence.
IIRC, currently the only way to acquire corruption is the kill shot on the target. If you force attack you can still grief without getting corruption. You just flag as combatant(purple). Would make more sense if it was based on damage done to green flagged target in my opinion. That way if you went around grieving it would build your corruption meter over time.
It seems to me, the act of attacking a green player should turn you red, and if they retaliate, you both turn purple. A group of pks can run around killing people and only gain corruption one at a time.
you lose like 1 minute
Again, Steven will probably tell you, "If you don't want to be griefed, simply don't adventure on the Open Seas."
Which is fine... but that means I won't truly be playing Ashes.
My goal will be to explore as much of the map as possible while leveling as minimally as possible - while hanging out with friends who are actually trying to pursue progression paths.
In Ashes, significant death penalties accrue upon death - including xp debt.
So, more will be lost than just 1 minute.
But, I get it... Bless Online was basically that. Someone would force PvP maybe twice per week and the encounter would take maybe 5 minutes including corpse run. Insiginifcant death penalties, so I could basically just ignore that open world PvP.
I agree to some extent. it should be based on damage done to the non-combatant(green) which accumulates over time on a meter for the attacker that progresses with severity levels if not dealt with. Seems like the more practical solution for a PvX game designed the way AoC is.
Dygz will tell you that this is not the case because pvp penalties are lower, but dying 20 times in an hour because no one is afraid to kill you seems like it will lead to bigger losses than dying only once in an hour because people are afraid of getting corruption. But the sea rewards will supposedly be worth those 20 potential deaths.
No one owns the seas past the coastal shelf. It's similar to international waters and jurisdiction.
If you enter the sea's corrupted, you will be flagged as corrupted out there too though apparently.
PvE players won't understand the excitement of different types of pvp and rule sets. They think everything should be the same or = less pvp. Or PvP = griefing lol.
HAHA, I come from the UO area, full loot pvp, and it still holds some of my favorite gaming memories. But if the corruption mechanic doesn't cover the entire world, they should at least change the definition so it does not imply griefing is ok on the open sea.