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 am "hyperfocusing" on one element because I know exactly what it leads to, as I had a chance to witness it in other MMO (mostly on the side of those who did that against competitors)
And do you mind specifying all those "broader problems", so that we don't leave them unaddressed?
Without corruption it basically becomes a free PvP area, which incentivizes zerging and leads to complaining of casual players and non-competitive guilds. We shouldn't turn a blind eye on inevitable consequences of it, should we?
And how exactly will that prevent the strategy that I described previously and preventing your competitors that don't want to flag from farming boss/dungeon/location with little to no risk of going corrupt? It just doesn't.
First of all, my suggestion does not interfere with PK protection mechanisms in any way. Secondly, what is the bigger issue that you are talking about?
For sake of having a proper discussion, BE SPECIFIC, do not talk about things that I haven't said and do not twist my words. Thank you in advance
If you and I are fighting, I will be able to see if you are hurting. Health bars are an in game representation of this.
It is the game developers way of communicating to us players information our characters would be able to see.
The lack of a health bar is pointless. If you want to suggest that it aids those with less skill (I disagree with this premise, but am happy to argue the point), then you should be all for it as it means over all player PvP ability would be higher with it than without it, making for over all better PvP in the game.
If you truely believe that it helps people with less PvP skill, and you are arguing for it to not exist, you are directly arguing for worse PvP in Ashes.
It doesn't provide any competitive advantage to you or me, as in this case, I can see your health as well.
Firstly, this is an argument based on generalization (which is not an argument you want to make). And it is simply not true as it has nothing to do with nostalgia.
Secondly, L2 players may share the same opinion for a very simple reason: they played the game that has a lot of similarities with AoC (open world PvP, flagging system, corruption system, etc.) and they know exactly the pros and cons of those in-game mechanics.
Please stay on point, there is no need to make assumptions that are simply not true and then use them as a counter argument.
Flanker someone not accepting your solution doesn't denote lack of comprehension.
A lot of us want to see hp bars and want some other way to solve the problem.
Corription system design flaws need to be solve within the corruption system. Sabotaging other gameplay features to make up for it is not acceptable.
Great. Please provide at least one that doesn't ruin the existing systems, does not affect the core pillars of the game, does not create more problems by trying to solve one problem AND finally - actually solves the problem. I'm all ears.
It has absolute NOTHING to do with the corruption system. Are you sure you understand the problem that I'm trying to address?
Well, duh... have I ever said that it is acceptable? Have I offered "sabotaging" something? Is there anyone here who disagrees with this statement? How is this relevant? Which "other gameplay features" are actually being sabotaged? Could you please... be specific... finally?
Ill be a clear as I possibly can. Not seeing HP bars is not a solution that is acceptable to solve the griefing issue you describe. Its a cure to shame the disease.
There will need to be a different solution, because myself and many others will take the exploit over not seeing hp bars.
If you would like to explore other means to solve the problem I am more than open to talking about them
I honestly don't know how to be more clear than that. If that doesn't explain the position well enough, I'm sorry, it's the best I can do.
Good: RP?
Bad: ability to safely keep target on low HP -> mobs kill that target -> no PK penalty.
Implications of the hidden HP:
Good: harder to abuse in unfair context?
Bad: more shallow/borring combat.
For OW I'm leaning to the hidden side. For arenas or other mainly-PvP events - to the visible.
I am stating that a rough idea of how hurt an opponent is, is information our characters would have and thus information we should have. Then why exactly is it that these "cons" didnt happen in the other game that has a lot of similarities to Ashes; Archeage.
If you were able to point to a game similar to L2/Ashes that shows enemy HP, and has issues you can attribute to it, great, that's a debate to have.
However, since the issues you are talking about simply didnt happen in Archeage, I dont even see scope for a discussion on it as there are no actual, realized negative aspects that anyone can point to actual examples of, rather than theoretical issues.
Even if what you talk about in the OP were to actually happen, you havent explained why it is an issue rather than just one more avenue by which player skill and knowledge can be displayed.
I mean, if me and my guild were killing a boss and someone came up and tried to damage our tank, we would simply have out of raid people present to kill them. Since them attacking our tank marks them as combatants, these out of raid players wouldnt even need to gain corruption.
This is how organized players would deal with this situation. It isnt an issue, it doesn't need to be designed around.
He wants to treads the middle (PvX) ground in order to avoid being too close to either side.
Invisible hp makes pvp harder at the top, which is what I want. Visible hp makes bullying players easier, which is what I don't want. Those are my main statements on this discussion.
The "skill issue" thing is in the context of the top pvp, but I understand that I should've made that more clear in that particular comment.
The responses about "having more info", imo, confirm what I'm saying. If visible hp makes pvp decisions more clear - that means it's easier to participate in pvp. That seems to be Diamaht's main argument (outside of the most vague and generalized statement of "visible hp good mkay").
AA was faction based, right? And the "corruption"-like mechanic was for within-faction attacks iirc, right?
So how did AA address those attacks. Was it "corruption on attack" or "corruption on death"? And if there was no corruption per se, what was the equivalent mechanic that made you write this part of the comment, in this context?
You gained criminal points (or left clues that others could inspect to give you criminal points) when attacking and for each attack of someone of your own faction, as well as for killing them.
The thing is, that whole bullying thing didn't happen at all. Even when half the player base could attack you without consequences, people didn't. Hell, even when it was known that I was the only pirate on the server, and so every other player could attack me knowing there was literally no one else at all in my entire faction, it didn't happen.
To reiterate - in Ashes, every player has a potential negative if they attack you where as in Archeage most* did not (*depending on faction split of your server). Yet even when people had no reason to not attack you, this kind of griefing simply didn't happen. That isn't to say PvP around bosses didn't happen - it did - I am simply pointing out that the griefing (or what is claimed to be griefing) did not happen in a game where it is more likely to happen than Ashes, even with full health of rivals on display - the very thing people here are claiming will lead to this griefing.
This whole thing seems to me to be nothing more than people wanting a thing closer to the earlier MMO's they played, and so have fabricated reasons in order to argue the point.
If you want player skill/knowledge to be a real part of this whole situation, then I would suggest making it so mob threat lists include anyone that has dealt damage to a player the mob is engaged with - even if they are at 0 threat on said list.
This is what EQ2 did on it's PvP servers (at least for a while when I played on one), and meant that players with detaunt abilities could simply detaunt the mob they are fighting (or feign death), and it would then go after the character that attacked that player. Or, if you are like me, if someone was stupid enough to put a DoT on me when we are near a raid encounter, I could simply detaunt that encounter as a tick of that DoT was due, and that raid encounter would then run straight after the player that put said DoT on me.
If (and this is a massive *if*) this kind of griefing becomes a thing in Ashes, then the above solution is an actual fix that allows player skill and knowledge to shine through, rather than removing information making it so players are less able to make good decisions.
And as others pointed out, there'll be some of us who abuse this exact system to show Intrepid that it CAN be abused in this way, so it'll be on Intrepid to decide what is the best way to address this abuse (or if they even want to).
This is exactly one of the things I've been mentioning in the context of pvx. Definitely expect stuff like this in the game, if Steven is serious about his claims of making "a pvx mmo".
That sarcasm completely misses the mark. You're bringing up a completely new potential side effect here.
The problem I was pointing out about your original argument was that it wasn't even doing anything to effectively counteract the issue you were pointing out in the first place. If you want to stop people from PKing around bosses/PvE encounters without facing repercussions, hidden health bars are an obvious band-aid on a gaping wound. If you're lucky, you might achieve some sort of result combining a million band-aids into a makeshift fix, but there's probably a better way to do things.
Also, how exactly is zerging dis-incentivised in the bossfight you're picturing? Where ratting is possible but risky? Wouldn't that lead to the same zergs attending the boss and using their less valuable players to try and kill off priority competitors?
Unless you can describe a boss fight scenario where guilds would somehow not zerg at all in a PvE + ratting scenario, but constantly show up in zergs if the same boss fight was PVP-enabled, I don't see how this is an argument at all.
Which leads to the same solution for either variant: In both scenarios you counteract zerging by managing how rewarding certain encounters are, and you embrace it, and just make it interesting in encounters that are meant to allow for large groups. It doesn't have anything to do with what the PvP component looks like, or whether you can see other players' HP.
If anything, compared to my suggestion of just making corruption a reliable countermeasure to all unconsented PVP, your original suggestion incentivises showing up in a zerg, so you're less likely to be sniped by ratters, because it's easier to stay healthy while fighting the boss.
I can't be specific about alternatives, because that misses the point. I'm not here to dictate how Ashes should be designed. My point is that your proposed solution for a problem you have pointed out is flawed.
Yes it does. Its whole point is balancing PK protection mechanisms. That's why you brought it up as a solution to effortless griefing in your original post.
Unless you're trying to agree with me in that your proposed solution isn't very effective; in which case, nicely observed.
Counter question: What's your argument against my more direct suggestion of corrupting every player who attacked a non-combatant when that target dies (say within 10 minutes or before their health has been fully restored)? What's the benefit of these "you can attack but you can't last-hit players" games you're playing with corruption? Why is bullying a target and letting a boss last-hit a player more healthy for the game than just straight-up allowing players to attack and kill whoever happens to be in their way without repercussions in the first place?
It's just not good enough that you "risk" going corrupt for it. What's the interesting mechanic about sometimes dying to a boss because someone hit you without allowing you to retaliate (i.e. have the corrupted target be punished), and sometimes being allowed to retaliate? Either getting rid of a player is worth going corrupt for, then everyone who attacks a player who dies should go corrupt, or the reward for getting rid of that player isn't worth going corrupt for, then we shouldn't let people get away with it because they perfected PKing without consequences.
People dont' drop loot in that game, if people did it be a even bigger deal to do it and get easy $$$
You also know I am more than keen on using game systems in unintended ways at times.
However, I fail to see how seeing rival HP can ever be actually abused.
Lets say me and my guild are killing a boss (group or raid) - you can't get to a tank or healer. If you can, we deserve to lose - there is no way to abuse this system here, you just outplay us if you are able to do it, and we never stood a chance.
Lets not also talk about the fact that if the top end content is any good, a tank should be taking *at least* their full HP worth of damage every 6 seconds, so their HP bar would be fluctuating so much that you could never actually be sure that an attack wouldn't kill them, assuming you could even get to them.
At best, if you did get to a tank or healer, you would be killed before you were able to make any meaningful use of the fact that you can see their HP going down.
In a solo setting, if I am killing a mob and you are able to attack me and deliberately not kill me in order for th mob I am fighting to do that, then I am fighting mobs that are too hard. In the time it should take you to get me down to low HP using smaller abilities so as to not just kill me, I should have been able to finish off any mob I am fighting - leaving you in a somewhat awkard position. If I am unable to kill the mob in time for you to be able to get me to this point, then that is my own damn fault.
This is the reason it literally never happened in Archeage - it simply wasn't possible. You could kill a player easier while they are fighing a mob, but no smart player would leave themselves in a situation where someone can walk up, do some damage to said player and leave letting that mob finish them off.
It just isn't a plausable situation.
There absolutely will be times when players are fighting each other and a mob gets the killing blow, but that will have nothing to do with players being able to see each others approximate HP. And if it is in the game, any notion of there being a way to grief other players due to being able to see their approximate HP completely falls flat.
Making everyone who hit a dead player corrupted would simply mean that groups will have a designated attacker, so this particular change wouldn't influence the system in any meaningful way. Adding any type of "anyone who heals/buffs the attacker of a dead player corrupted" will simply bring a shitton of distrust into pugs, because this would be a direct way to robbing support players in broad daylight (unless you make the flag state last 10min as well).
The initial risk of the attacker in the current system is that anyone is free to hit them back now, but this second attacker would also take on the same lvl of risk. Making the attacker corrupt on hit would mean that anyone is free to attack them w/o taking any of the risk on themselves. In other words, you create a "slap is punishable by death" kind of situation with this.
The "worth of getting rid of a player" is a scale rather than a black&white situation. By flagging on someone you let them know that you want to remove them from the location. The victim is free to leave, fight back or die with full base penalties (there's also waiting in hopes of the third party killing the attacker). Depending on any of those choices, the attacker can either try hitting the victim more, in hopes of driving the point further, leaving the location themselves, or killing the target. And the "worth" equation only starts at this point, not at the start point. Invisible hp adds to the "risk" part of said equation, because you'll never be sure at what point you can stop attacking the victim.
The change to "hit = corrupt" puts the equation at the start (realistically even before it), which then decreases any amount of owpvp drastically, because as soon as you touch another player - you're hit with heightened penalties (even if they're lower than the current ones), while everyone around you is completely free to absolutely demolish you w/o any repercussions. Absolutely all of the risk is now on the attacker, and the victim doesn't even have a say in this.
Steven chose the L2's pvp system because he liked what player choice it brought into the game. Changing said system would completely change that player choice, which in turn completely changes other designs of the game. This is why L2 players usually say that changing the system won't work, because at that point it's no longer the system that Steven chose for his game (and kinda built the game around it).
I'm aware that you are talking about top end PvP here. My understanding is that you are of the opinion that top end PvP players would take the time to get an understanding of how many HP various characters, classes and races at differing gear levels with differing buffs would have.
My point is that if this is a barrier to top end PvP, getting rid of that barrier by showing everyone a base approximation of a rivals HP would mean there are more PvP players that are better. There is one less barrier to being better.
The top end ceiling isn't lowered at all, it is just a little easier for more people to get there, meaning more and better PvP.
W/o seeing hp values we would only be able to guess (or know through extensive knowledge acquisition/testing) how hard we could hit your dpsers w/o ever risking our own dudes becoming red.
You're thinking from the pov of a good player. I'm thinking about pretty much everyone below that range. Griefers don't go for good players, because in majority of cases they'd just fight back (raid stuff excluded here of course). A bad/lowskill player would quite likely behave just as Steven does on purpose in his showcases. He'd try to run away from both you and his mob, run into even more mobs and die on the spot with full penalties. The griefer's flag drops in a minute and this situation can be repeated if the victim comes back.
Visible hp enables this kind of powerplay across all lvls, so high lvl griefers can do this to super lowbies.
Iirc you said yourself that AA pve was quite weak. I definitely don't want that kind of pve in Ashes. But even on the weakest pve in the game, the weakest players are still more likely to misplay in some way.
Again, this still only really applies to good players who can react fast and correctly. And considering what I said, this would also have to be available from low lvls as well.
But yes, having those kinds of abilities would definitely make the overall situation better, which is exactly why I hope they will exist. And once Intrepid shows them (or at least talks about them) - I'll definitely be less concerned about this particular abuse.
So no, to me someone who just knows how much hp someone has would not be at the same lvl of skill as someone who had to learn that value through speaking to others or leveling a char themselves, or fighting the same target over and over, or theorizing on wiki/another site.
I fully realize that this is an antiquated approach to viewing skill, but I don't care about being a boomer
From the perspective of the raid, it makes no difference at all if you are trying to kill those DPS or not, and thus makes no difference at all if you can see out HP or not.
You gaining or not gaining corruption here isn't really relavent to the effect you are having on my raid - we really wouldn't care. Thus it isn't any form of griefing or abuse, it is playing the game as it is intended to be played, and playing the game in a manner that we should have a plan to fight against. The level doesn't really matter - if anything the greater the disparity the more HP need to be left on the target.
For example, if at level 1 I have an ability that deals 10 - 14 damage, at level 50 that same damage spread would perhaps see the ability dealing 200 - 280 damage (my expectation is that it would be much higher than this).
If that low level player had a total HP pool of 200HP (20 attacks of that low level spell - seems more than reasonable to me), then I couldn't use this ability on them at all and expect them to not die.
Even if we go to a mid level scenario and say that the attack does 100 - 140 damage, I'm still only able to use it once if they are at asbolute full HP. Since that ability would average 120 damage, and the low level has 200hp, that means I am leaving them with 40% or so of their HP on average - at the absolute worst it would deal 70% which should be more than enough to deal with a mob or to run away.
Whereas an equal level player could attack that low level character and keep going all the way down until they have 15hp left, and then attack one more time knowing it still wouldn't kill them.
Basically, the higher a level you are in comparison to someone else, the greater the percentage of HP you need to leave that player in order to guarantee that your next attack won't kill them. Any notion of higher level players griefing lower level players using this is simply going to backfire on those higher level players that attempt it. And you can then beat them for that. Players that make bad decisions getting killed is kind of the point, isn't it?
I mean, if you want to hang around some weaker player waiting for them to make a mistake so that you can then attack them to just the point where the mob they are fighting can kill them so that you can loot the meager loot they drop, more power to you.
Doesn't mean it is abusing the mechanic though.
What you are talking about here isn't knowledge or skill, it is memorization.
Memorization without actual knowledge is how we get misinformed people that think they are correct.
If you're slapping someone, you're turning the PvE zone into a PvP area, and should be willing to face the repercussions. Either you bring enough buddies willing to go corrupt with you and defend you, or you pray you can survive your corruption through sheer luck of no one showing up to punish you.
Being allowed to bully people beyond being able to fight mobs, but not facing the consequences, just seems like dishonest scumbaggery. Where you have one group that actually musters up the strength to take on a boss, but they can't make any headway, because a group of annoying rogues is harassing their healers, and if the group tries to deal with the rogues they just book it and come back later, just to screw with you? Just seems tedious and not consistent with the intention of the system that those kinds of dynamics don't get affected by corruption, as long as the rogues skirt the lethal damage effectively enough.
I guess you might say that in that case, if the group can't simultaneously deal with the annoying rogues and the boss at once, they're not sufficiently equipped to deal with the situation. I don't know if that alone is enough to dismantle my argument. I think there are many similar cases where a more final, stringent corruption system would yield more satisfying results.
In other words, I'm talking about griefers punching down, while you're imagining them punching forward if not upward.
But yes, the raid part of this context is definitely the weakest, cause usually raiders are the strongest players around, so I'm completely willing to give up that point, though I don't think I even made it at the start.
This is you assuming how power scaling will grow. We've discussed this before and I don't agree with your assumptions.
But even if you were correct, iirc we'll be able to put points into abilities, so what if this griefer character (who's most likely an alt to avoid bad rep) simply didn't put more than 1 points into their weakest attack ability. Or purposefully used a build that decreased their basic atk as low as possible and used the very first weapon in the game (or hell, even just attacked barehanded).
Unless barehanded attacks deal half of lowbie hp - there's a way to abuse visible hp. If they are in fact that strong - yeah, this particular point would be moot and the visible hp would simply influence casual players at higher lvls, or would be abused by lowbie alts.
It's essentially PKing a person w/o any repercussions. And doing so quite easily. My main gripe is with the "easily" part. The harder it is to go around the punishment - the fewer people will attempt it or, at the very least, be successful at it.
Any and all "skill" is memorization. Either through muscle memory or your own. I'm sure you know this, as the biggest pver here (especially considering EQ2's difficulty).
But even if you've memorized any and all combinations of builds/setups/buffs/debuffs/etc - you still won't know precise hp values on your target, so you'll have to deal with that in some way, while reacting to your opponent's actions.
Knowing that info to as a precise of a point as possible would make things easier. It makes decision making easier. It makes rotation understanding easier. I know this for sure because L2's instanced arena shows hp and it directly influences what abilities people use at what times. And I see that as ease of pvp.
p.s. I think I said this here before, but I'm fine if Ashes also has visible hp in arena, mostly because the entire approach to arena pvp is different and obviously there's no abuse of PKing there.
p.p.s I also understand that the "skill" part of my argument is way weaker than the PKing part, which is why I only brought it up when visible hp was an argument for "there'd be more pvp in the game", and even then it was still a tangential addition that had little weight as a proper argument.
tis the opposite. ppl who can see their enemies hp will pvp less...you will only fight when you see someone with less hp than you or something, same as gear inspecting ahahaha and will avoid fights even if you have a good reason to fight for.
when you cant see the enemy info, you will man fight for spots, and like nikr said, seeing the enemy hp or not doesnt prevent you from pressing 12345 nd doing your combo and killing the other person or dying.
This way the victim would have twice the tools to address the harasser. We'll already have the CC advantage as victims, so adding a mob-using tool would make things even easier.
Also, as I admitted in my discussion with Noaani, the "dudes harassing a raid" part is definitely the weakest thing when it comes to my main argument. And I'd fully expect the harassing side to purely attempt full PKing, because that has a way higher chance of wiping the raid.
I'm mostly concerned about the casuals, who'd be way closer to leaving the game if they were attacked a few too many times w/o the attacker facing any punishment for his actions. Obviously you can always tell the victim to go seek help, but that's not always available.
I simply want a game that has a fairly lively owpvp scene, rather than a game that has arenas and pre-established system-based pvp events. Steven seems to want the same thing, which is why he yoinked the L2 flagging system. Changing it to "hit = corruption" would completely defeat the point of taking that system in the first place.
you know...you can avoid people trying to keep you low so that a mob kills you. if you dont know how, thats an user error. you can also force the pk on them ;3
the top 10 players will be the top 10 players regardless. you cant have more than 10 people in the top 10 players. what you said made no sense.
also, people skills dont magically increase because they can see the enemy hp
Can you address my point about the frustrations of non-committal gameplay?
That is a pretty logical tool, as well.