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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.
Comments
They will be aware that they'll get flagged by seeing those torches. Just like entering into the deep ocean.
One should avoid entering into the farming spot of other players.
Having this game mechanic, developers can also design the map to either allow alternate paths or not. In both cases will be "by design".
Maybe you could configure to trust your own citizens, friend list, allied guilds etc.
And we can let thieves have some chance to sneak, camouflage, disable torches etc
I think the duration to wear off karma in L2 had it about right. 10-15 min of XP per kill, exponentially ranking up and a quest that also was time consuming and only cleansed a few pk`s making it a dedicated decision for just how much time out you were prepared to make to be good to go again.
Note though, at L2 end game, there were more politics, more money at stake and players were more prepared for time out as a result of PK`ing. Early game did not matter, mid game was a focus to end game.
If you attack and kill a green, it is by choice. That is basically the end of that entire premise as far as I am concerned.
If someone is willing to take the full penalty of being killed while a non-combatant, it is on you to consider if your reason for killing them is worth the corruption. The answer doesn't have to automatically be "yes" - you get to make that decision like a grown up.
Well my response is specifically on the idea that I have the option to change the punishment to the gankers. However I am not sure I understand why this ruins OWPVP, as it stands right now, the entire ocean is OWPVP, every siege, raid and dungeon will have loads of PVP if its not already auto flagging, in addition caravans offer free PVP, 75% of everything we do day to day in Verra will have flavors of PVP. There is no need to make the corruption system friendly to let more PVP happen.
I love PVP but at some point I will want to eat a bag of chips and chop down some trees or hit some rocks, I want to do that with relative safety, if everytime I hop on I am worrying about getting killed by a random willing to go corrupted... then any truly casual gamer will be experiencing 5x worse and it likely means this game will die. The casual playerbase of this game will be paramount to making the rest of the content fun and engaging long term because the variability of those players is extremely high - Like college basketball vs the NBA
the first time, yes. but when they keep coming back (remember instant teleports) you are forced to fight them (sure you could log off for the day, run and risk being killed by other players, etc), or you die, but you don't want to die red.
i also explained, but for convenience reasons you left that out, when I realize I'm getting karma bombed I just die red. i always have 3pk or less so I'm never dropping anything. however, you usually have to fight when you are red and people come after you.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Player_death
There are respawn points (similar to WoW) but you still have to travel back to your body. Corrupted players respawn at a random spawn point non-corrupted players respawn at the closest spawn point.
Random dude going on a rampage was rare, yes. But PK in Lineage2 was rarely about psychos going mad killstreaks (partially this was due to the perfect balance between profit from killing & severity of punishment for the victim due to death vs penalty for the killer)
There were 2 cases for PK in L2:
1) People PKed those who intruded on their spot (hello Sharif with his WoW-like BS about "zero incentive to go red"), then quickly washed their karma in a far corner & returned. Because of how system in La2 worked, killed dude cannot just resurrect in 5 meters and go for revenge, he will spawn in town, will need to rebuff etc by the time he gets back the killer will wash the karma, even on OG rates it was pretty fast. Especially if you keep your PK hygiene good (doing repentance quest & never letting your killcount go over 5).
2) Groups/Clans used special alt char with common A grade bow (cost literally nothing but deal big dmg still even on high lvl chars if used under full buff & cheapest C grade set (GC)), to wipe everyone in the area they disliked & to not get karma for them.
You really cannot do anything against this wihtout flagging on these dudes. Either you flag & fight (and die), or be PKed. Thats how it worked on high pop servers.
In early chronicles & in La2 Classic such a chracter was a MUST for any consistently leveling group.
P.S. 3) There were also level-restricted areas such as Kruma Tower, max party size restricted areas & also special rules/hard to access areas (monasteries), in such areas a lot of random PKs happened, also there were PK clans who organized dedicated raids then hid in their clan halls outside of cities/forts. SO random PK existed too but I doubt we will see something akin to this in AoC.
If corruption balancing is so severe that getting a single PK would set you back several PK deaths to remove the corruption - no normal player would risk attacking another player, due to fear of losing their gear when they die.
Groups are not afraid of that because they'll kill their mate immediately and loot him. Career PKers don't care because they have proper gear (as pointed out above by Jam). So the only ones who don't participate in this activity are the people who'll suffer the most from it.
There was a lot of status and money to be made by Castle ownership. Guild A signs up for a castle siege, Guild B who currently owns the castle does not want to lose their status. Therefore Guild B goes on a pk rampage killing Guild A members wherever they are found. This goes on over the lead-up to the siege to persuade Guild A to be a non-active participant and/or just not attend, nor support the other Guilds in any way that might overthrow their castle ownership. By pk`ing Guild A( the weaker of the guilds ) that are planning to attend the siege was a numbers game.. without their support, it was all the more likely the stronger guild attending could not win the siege alone and the castle would not change hands.
Extreme cases, there was a full seige signup by dummy guild too. and so no threat to the owner..
Equally, there were monetary trades to negotiate castle ownership switches behind the scenes. Guild A, the owner of the castle, took a payment from Guild A, an attacker to make a strategic "mistake" at the right time so that there was no apparent loss. But a switch in ownership and a benefit to both.
Even with the current mechanics in AoC, if there is money or status to be made, then I think we will eventually see some of this happen!
If you killed them and plan on staying in the same area long enough for them to return from the known respawn point, that seems to me like you made a bad decision right at the start.
If you kill them, stay in the same area and they come back and fight you, you still have the option of admitting defeat and leaving. Like it or not, that is what that situation is - someone using the games systems to put you in to a situation you do not want to be in, thus beating you.
While we can always band together and ask others for help as well - > indeed at least for those who are alone and can not get help against Playerkillers quickly or at all -> Corruption is usually the only thing that can defend them somewhat.
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
✓ Guild is " Balderag's Garde " for now. (German)
Throwing one example out there, first round one of your group pk`s 1-3 players.. They die, and resurrect in town. Only one of your group goes red.
5-10min later the killed players return again, angry.
During that time, your team are guarding the red team member . And by the time they return, the red player has already worn off some of their karma and is re-buffed. The players that return attack again but this time one or two of your group have decided they will take the final pk kill this time so as to spread the karma and reduce the risk and the revengeful players return again.. They die again.
Chances now if they had died twice already, that they will not be prepared to take the xp hit again and not return OR return again in greater numbers.
Then it is a decision, ramp up the xp to be clean before they return, move on to a different spot so less conspicuous, log out for a short time until the heat is off or call own re-inforcements.
Once a server is well established, the players that are in constant conflict become well know and so too are their likely actions.. so it is not so difficult to make the decision..
L2 was notorious for farmers and the farmer groups had their highlevel, group perma-red enforcers.. So occassionally when clearing a catacomb of farmers by pk`ing them did not bode well but for the majority of time if you know your own and own teams pvp skills, it is not hard to know which route to go and have lesser threat!
Each clan had their own KOS players.. and so going red sometimes was doing guild duties.
ok mad ea bad call. do I deserve to be punished so hard I have to quit the game? as someone else suggested
No one said that a murderhobo would have to quit, they said no one would care if they did.
And yes, it should be possible to make a character unplayable if you make enough bad decisions.
Staying red all the time will not be practical.
There is gear durability loss. That should be balanced to matter and death to be more "painful" than grinding XP. By more painful I mean the resources required to repair it should come from an amount of grinding which provides more XP than removing the red status.
Also there is no de-leveling for the purpose of not losing allocated points into some skills. But there is XP loss which may applies some negative effects:
Maxing out experience debt for a level can result in roughly 20% stat dampening for that character. This percentage is expected to be highly variable.[1]
Experience debt decreases the drop rate percentages from monsters.[8]
So even if a green character provides the resources to repair gear fast, the PK alt will still have to grind that XP back anyway but with less resource drops and with added damage to their gear.
The cleric resurrection ability will keep red players red and no corruption will be cleared when re-spawning this way. Otherwise it would be an obvious loophole.
"wrong ways" depends on what Steven's intention is.
In this context we talk about who should own a farming spot: the player better at PvP or the one better at PvE.
Or in a game which calls itself PvX, should the one better at PvP have an advantage?
To me the player which arrived first at a spot (or won it from another player) should have some advantage in holding it. It should be a PvX objective.
My example with the torch which marks the area was working against the karma bombing.
But that will help also the PvE player as it will deny mob counts to go toward the PvPer and that should not be able to take the farming spot without becoming red.
Can also be that AoC will encourage movement over land rather than farming in a spot through reducing gradually dropped resources or increasing mob respawn time.
The spawn rate of resources in a given area is influenced by how players are interacting with those resources.[3][2]
Defeating certain world bosses or mobs can positively impact the respawn rates of resources and animals in their vicinity.[4]
So if you fight mobs which are not bosses, resource respawn rates decrease.
The game has a lot of PvP already in form of caravans, castle sieges, guild wars, node wars...
Outside of them the flagging system will reduce the non-consensual PvP..
Else it makes no sense and the flagging system should be removed and go full PvP.
I said "cheap gear", so durability doesn't matter at all. And you can't overtune durability costs so damn much that these people would feel it, cause then you're fucking over the rest of the population.
20% stat decrease is nothing, and it can't go above that because there's a "max lvl of debt".
I agree that it should be a pvx objective. Making a location pvp doesn't accomplish that imo.
Both players are free to fight the mobs, and the one who deals more dmg wins. If the loser thinks he's better at pvp - he's free to flag up to show the intention to fight. If the pve winner thinks he's a better pvxer - he'll fight back and win. If he doesn't win - he's not a better pvxer. If he doesn't fight back - he's not a better pvxer.
At any point in that decision tree, both players should have pve tools that let them use mobs for their pvp goals. And the one who comes out on top will win the pvx encounter.
It'll be very interesting to see how this works on practice. I haven't played a game where this was a feature, so I'm excited to try. Right now it's kinda difficult to imagine how exactly this system won't lead to an increase in owpvp and PKing.
Flagging system removes non-consensual killing. It encourages non-consensual pvp by letting people flag up on other people, rather than having a toggle.
As for making the game full pvp, several people here already think that the game is moving in that direction, with pvp zone boss areas and dungeons and all that.
I'm personally against all of that
You have to feel the durability loss else is meaningless. And must be meaningful exactly in this context, where a red dies. Durability drop should be higher just as he took 4 times more from the green when he looted him.
And if a PK alt can kill with a cheap gear, that would mean the gear is not important which is also a problem.
A player with cheap gear should have high chance to die and not be able to be a PK player in the first place.
So a player geared up for PvE which holds the spot will be able to continue holding the spot without engaging in direct PvP. Will stay green and the PvPer will just try to help mobs kill him. Most likely the PvE player will leave unless can and wants somehow to trick the attacker to become red because health bar is not well visible.
Were you requesting to not be visible at all in that other thread?
The quest/commissions we do for the node can give XP and rewards too. The quests will change every half hour so players will be sent to different areas on the ZoI.
Therefore not all players will go to a certain spawn location.
Could be that for this purpose they will also chose to team up.
But this is all for leveling the node and maybe the players.
At high level, they will end up in a few locations which were unlocked by the high level parent node and there we have to assume no solo player go. Guilds will be more frequent and possibly guild wars to cancel the flagging system.
I am not but I also do not push into that direction because I have no idea how else IS can bring enough players into the game and keep them all in the same open world without separating the player base into PvPers and PvEers.
With the current system the extreme pure PvE players will not come but the same must happen with the extreme pure PvPers and maintain a PvX attitude in the game.
For that reason the best gear should not come from the deep ocean.
Didn't you said you want to be a bounty hunter?
Either of those methods are pretty much free for anyone who's above lvl20.
Like I said, career PKers will be not influenced in any way, while anyone who'd be willing to PK in a less punishing system would now not even risk it.
There's no separation in gear in Ashes, so the dude who's worst at pve is simply the worse pvxer and should come to terms with that and get better.
And yes, I want invisible hp to decrease the abuse of the current system, which will happen regardless of the severity of the punishment, but would definitely be more prevalent in a stricter system, because it's more beneficial there.
Yes, the game will mostly target pvxers, if it doesn't go even deeper into the pvp side of the spectrum. And I do believe there's enough pvxers out there waiting for a game like this. And if the game is good enough, I'm sure that people further away from the center of the scale will get pulled into it.
Easy
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Bounty_hunters
Bounty hunters can activate their Pathfinding ability to reveal corrupted player locations on their map.[3][4]
This will flag the bounty hunter for combat only to corrupted players for a period of one hour from the time of activation.[3]
The pathfinding ability can be toggled on or off.[3][5]
Mount travel times are super short. Anyone above 1 PK count should have around 7-10min of equal-lvl-mob farming to do after 1 kill (and this increases near-exponentially the higher the count). In those 7-10+ minutes any BH in the vicinity would see the corrupted player on the map and go hunt them if they so wish.
And when removing corruption is not a god damn hour-long+++ shebacle - more corrupted players will exist in the game. More PKers means more reasons for more BHs to exist.
If it is an hour-long bullshitery - barely anyone will go red, outside of strong groups and super rare career PKers, which means that there's no point in the BH system's existence.
I've also laid out my plans to make the PKing impact on the greens negligible, while also making BHs feel better about themselves and their actions. Loot returnal and XP boosts for the greens after claiming the loot were the main points. Greens lose a bit of time by dying, but it's reimbursed through the XP boost (could also have a choice of adventure or artisan XP), while people are not afraid to PK here and there, all the while BHs are more prevalent and loved.
The potential abuse of "people get more xp by PKing themselves abd then BHing their PKer" can be addressed by node taxes and a citizenship requirement for the loot returnal to work. This would create a heatmap of safer and more dangerous nodes, which would bring more variety of pvp interactions to the game.
And to decrease the potential genocidal tendencies of people, the PK count removal costs should be very high, both on time and on money, and the count itself should be account-wide, so as to avoid the classic "this is my 10th PK alt so I can kill another 5-10 people before abandoning it and deleting the char".
I've also suggested npc-based guarding mechanic that's linked to the PK Count History of an account, where nodes could provide even safer spaces for their citizens, if those citizens supported this decision and paid for it accordingly.
So yes, I have thought about and suggested several ways of making the system better overall and for all parties involved, w/o potentially removing the entire feature by making it too strict. But none of this ultimately matters if Steven just wants everyone to pvp in events and run around holding hands outside of them. Though at that point I don't really see why he even took L2's system, while also introducing several features that go almost directly against his own changes to said system.
I am not sure if numerical examples help because they add one more step which I have to reverse engineer to understand why your model cannot be balanced and how to change it.
Gear should provide both attack and defense.
Assumption is that corruption is not there to allow pure PvE players to play the game but to equalize a little bit the fight when a skilled PvPer fights against a less skilled one after that player refused to accept PvP.
Having 10-20% fighting capability loss is significant where it matters, near bosses.
If a veteran player has an alt and wants to use it to abuse the system and become red, if that works near bosses where maybe we get large XP return or valuable resources, then I don't call it an abuse but a mechanic which all sides involved will use. Can be that such alts will try to take out each other on both sides. It is debatable if is a good game design. I would rather separate valuable drops from large XP rewards.
If a veteran player has an alt and wants to use it to kill random players elsewhere, then is an abuse and that character will not get the XP back. With the XP debt and with degraded gear the game brings him closer to the level of the randoms he killed. If he wants to show that he is better than randoms, it can happen that those randoms have also high level alts and are not unskilled.
I assume one can still chose gear, configure the character or the team (because we don't talk always about solo farming spots) to be more effective against mobs or against players. We may have ice golems which but not in the lava biome.
Players who have gear with cold damage and / or resistace in a lava biome would have it only for PvP reason.
And I prefer the current partially visible health bar which allows killing players with help from mobs.
The only abuse would be if that player has no way to be aware that another player is nearby.
That is cool.
So to have those 7-10+ minutes, the killing of the red to remove his corruption should be less viable.
I think all these can be balanced during Alpha 2 if they decide to add them.
The NPC guards already exist. I favor more of them only in the Divine nodes.
But if Steven wants to add the possibility in any node, I will be curious to hear the reasoning and see the world dynamic during Alpha 2.
Changes which initially feel good, one year after getting used to them become less interesting. Variation is better and that is why I think only one node type should have more guards.
Your vision is one where you kill your own citizens or from the same metro nation.
Steven's vision is to make the caravan system work naturally, where people cooperate: some gather others protect caravans or loot other node's caravans.
From the perspective of the gatherer, the game should not feel as if they are red all the time and anyone can come to kill them.
Why loot the resources from a gatherer when you can buy them in the nearby node?
That gatherer probably with good reason identifies himself as 40% less skilled in PvP.
Might fight with other gatherers but in general such players would be happy to help building the world which others destroy.
The currently presented stat dampening death penalty does not stop this PKer from killing others easily, because the penalty has a limit on it instead of being endless decreasement of player power (which deleveling achieves).
This is simply yet another point of contradiction in Steven's adaptation of L2's flagging system. I personally think it'll get changed to an unlimited penalty, but until we see that change it's hard to argue from that pov.
You don't need hp to be visible to get help from mobs. But I agree that mobs should be usable by both sides, which would then mean that someone who only wears a "pvp" set will suffer for it, which would make them a bad pvxer.
And they wouldn't be killed all that often. Even if player loot has a big enough impact on PKing to outweigh the greater penalties, I still doubt that Ashes would have as much PKing as L2 did. And L2 didn't even have that much PKing outside of guild on guild interactions.
I've been saying for a long time that I consider player loot in pvp to be a bad idea. But if Steven is so damn in love with it, I've suggested solutions through the BH system, where the only thing that a green would lose is time. This loss would still be preferably avoided (just as it was in L2, where you dropped nothing on death), so it's not like the game would suddenly feel completely safe, but the overall approach to dying to a player would be more relaxed, because greens would know that there's a good chance of getting their loot back (well, in theory of course).
Who are the "others"? Or what are they if they can be killed easily with cheap gear and stat dampening?
Why not?
So to improve QOL you want to make ganking more accessible for the average player...???
This game isn't based around 1v1 balance... if I am a career ganker I am sitting on an alt with the best 1v1 class, with gear that is easy to acquire. And you talk a lot about the deaths resetting you, if that is the system that career gankers can loophole the easiest that isn't hard to balance around, corrupted 5 times this week? Congratulations you no longer remove corruption on death and instead need to contribute to your node 10,000 mats or something that takes a long ass time. Just have a single method of punishment for corruption isn't a good idea, repeat offences would obviously need to be taken into account.
In fact the only thing you really need to do to completely negate this argument about career gankers is add a stipulation on corruption that if your character goes corrupted X number of times in Y time period you are required to work the corruption off by "contributing to your community" like giving resources to your home node or something similar that time gates you.
\
Make it have several stipulations with more and more severe punishments, going from clean->corrupted->clean->corrupted in a single 24hr period? Boom enjoy a quest to deliver 1,000 mats to a local nodes treasury, doing it 5 times in a week? Here is quest for 2,500 mats delivered, 10 times in a month? Enjoy this 10,000 mats quest.
Then have the quest be the stipulation for removing the corrupted status of the player. Of course since the player is corrupted they'd get their ass whiped during their gathering phase which might make this too harsh but hey thats where you balance it.
Lets be honest if a 1v1 happens its almost certainly going to be the result of a gank - The vast majority of players would rather share the local resources then risk dieing, losing mats, and incurring an EXP debt. There is absolutely no reason to encourage any feasible path for players who just run around calling random PKing fun.
I safely bet it won't be different in Ashes of Creation.
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
✓ Guild is " Balderag's Garde " for now. (German)
It doesn’t sound like an exponential scale will curb the behavior here either. I may have missed it earlier, are you proposing some other type of loss (e.g. gold after a certain threshold)? If not, what else do you think would be an appropriate deterrent for serial griefers?
Did L2 have any positive karma with reward thresholds (carrots) or was it just negative reinforcement (sticks)?
This is the PKing part of the system. Everyone keeps thinking that weak PKers will just get flagged against before they even become PKers, but that's not the case and is simply pvper thinking. We have Dygz who for years have been telling everyone that it's simpler for him to just die to an attacker, if he believes that the attacker won't return to the same place after that (which, in theory, the system should achieve).
Simply personal experience from L2 servers where clearing any amount of corruption took way less time that was needed for the victim to come back to that spot. Even on those servers the PKing (outside of guild interactions) was quite rare.
I know that player loot will increase PKing in Ashes, but due to the consequences for PKing being so damn higher than L2's - I think it'll just be a counterbalance and the PK amounts will land somewhere around the numbers from the L2 servers I mentioned.
Of course I could be wrong, but it's just a hunch, that's also somewhat based on a ton of screaming about "players have gone soft and just want to suck up to the big guilds and never fight back".
I've been talking about almost this exact solution since forever. I just call it "PK count removal quests". So yes, I want more people to be able to PK, but I also want high amounts of PK count to get completely fucked over by the game and pay back to the society if they want to start PKing again.
This also ties into this High PK count means super high corruption. Super high corruption means "corruption-based stat dampening". So a person with a super high count will literally be unable to continue their genocide. The amount of their corruption would also be so damn high that even dying would take a ton of time (which works not only as a default deterrent, but also as a tool to decrease their PKing activity overall).
And the quest to remove the count would be super expensive in both time and money terms.
If the corruption removal on death is still a bit too fast, I'd be all for a reverse logarithmic scale for it. The higher your corruption - the longer it takes to remove at the start, but the lower you get it the faster it removes. This would directly support what I'm suggesting as well. Low PK count players can kill a few times when they believe it's needed, and removal of corruption is relatively fast, but get just a few more kills and you're quite royally fucked.
And I believe that this only works if the Count is account-wide. And in order to make this easier on the greens who might be getting killed - the BH system changes that I mentioned would be a good thing imo.
Only sticks. Murder is murder, so there's no way to unmurderize yourself to a point where murder is somehow not a negative.
I’m torn on the account wide deal… I see both sides of that argument.
Yep, agreed. I was thinking not ‘the upside of murder’ but a negative and positive spectrum of karma, like a number line. -100 you’re a murderhobo, 0 you’re neutral, 100 you’re a saint.
And some quests, factions, items have a pre-req of 70 karma. For instance, the Holy Order of Sandals may require higher karma than the Cloister of Vaknar. Idk what I thought might build karma, could just be contributing and staying in the basic rails of society. Could be interesting, but may also be too bureaucratic.
If, say, 3 PKs are "free" on every char and we have 8 chars - that's 24 fucking PKs FOR FREE. And unless intrepid says "you can't delete a character if they have a PK count" - THERE'S EVEN MORE FREE PKs.
I just don't see any good reason to not have it account wide. I know Dygz loves to bring up "all my characters are unique, so their stuff should be separate", but Intrepid could say "your account is your blood family and corruption is a blood curse, so murdering people puts markings on your entire you, cow, family"
That 100 is the unmurderizing I was talking about. I'm all for system-based pvp events that effectively give you "positive karma" for killing "the right people", and we obviously already have a ton of those, but any random green kill should always put you in the red, because the green didn't choose to get killed. Greens can choose their factions in the game and choose to leave them if they think that the other side kills them a bit too often, but when there's no choice made - the punishment has to be present.
The account wide implication would be a good deterrent.
So with all that in mind, I think the 4x death penalty will be enough. From where I stand nothing in the current design looks to me like it "encourages" PKing, in fact I worry more about people talking smack to each other to bait them into PvP more than anything else in regards to PvP.
The Bounty Hunter System will be an interesting "wildcard" in all of this, because it might end up basically ignored because the upsides it offers may be unaccessible on most servers where there are barely any corrupted to begin with. But I remember Intrepid talking about progression in bounty hunter profession and I would love to have a bounty hunter specc that increases the chance that you... confiscate a corrupted players gear.