basically, a green character will keep coming back over and over so the red character is forced to kill him giving him massive karma. should this person quit now?
people usually do this with an alt. they will try to pve grief you, set you up so you go red on them, maybe remove their jewels so they don't have magic defense, so even if you do a weak magic attack on them as a warning shot, they end up getting one shotted. they just keep coming over and over, usually with an alt to not lose exp on their main. now you are forced to attack them or they will kill you. you cant run too much because there will be other players in the same map who will kill you, and you don't want to die red.
eventually, you get so much corruption that the only feasible way to lose it is to die over and over, or just bring a protection squad who pvps (and possibly get corruption) while u spend easily an hour losing all that corruption.
you can win a farming spot this way, by simply dying over and over to the same person, and that's just ridiculous, you shouldn't win by dying or losing the PVP (kind of good there isn't any instant teleport to make karma bombing harder).
if you do this when you are very low level, you might as well delete your character and start a new one. you will never get rid of corruption.
as a rule for myself, I never pk more than 3 times. if I realize I'm getting karma bombed, ill simply just die and won't drop anything if I have 3pk or fewer, then I can come back and try to win the spot, and later, I'll do the pk quest to lower my pk count to 0.
also, just because someone goes red frequently, that doesn't deserve a mechanic that makes them quit the game. that's silly.
Karma bombing seems a misuse of the original intent which tries to protect against ganking.
The problem is that the game has "farming spots" which players like to hold.
If this is not a problem but is by design, based on how and where mobs spawn, then developers should implement some kind of heat map to easily recognize that a player enters into the area used by another player and flag the intruders for PvP..
Maybe the player which holds the farming spot could place some pillars or torches which would warn intruders that if they come closer, they'll be flagged.
well, players are always gonna find loopholes. lots of people want extra penalties against someone killing the same person multiple times, but they never consider that the person killing the other dude multiple times isn't always the villain...
additionally, corruption isn't there to protect against ganking. there isn't also anything morally wrong with ganking.
anyways, some areas in l2 were perma flagged. also, some private servers added a few extra areas on some popular spots and removed the death penalty in those areas. more pvp! could work for ashes, but also, it can work against you. because if you place those torches or whatever, you are already inside the flagged area and you are at a disadvantage vs someone who wants to kill you. now you can get cced, or the attacker can just come out of nowhere and kill you when you are fighting a mob without any consequences.
No, spot owners should not be flagged.
The torch would work as a marker. It would start being active only after you killed a certain number of mobs.
You as torch owner would remain green.
If another player approaches who is not in your team, it would become flagged.
If the intruder would place a torch too, that torch would remain inactive until this player would also gain mob kill counts.
So if the intruder is stronger and the spot holder does not dare to fight him, it can try to at least do more damage and get the kills counted for himself and his own torch.
If that works, then the spot owner holds the spot by being better in PvE. If doesn't, then he gets flagged for PvP by the intuder's torch and the intruder can attack him and chase him away.
A farming spot might be a larger area where the player moves constantly and might have to place multiple torches. But only one intruder should be flagged.
If a team moves through the farming spot of a solo player, they should not all of them get flagged and exposed to an ambush.
The player which holds the spot should not be warned by approaching players.
Regarding gankng, I meant corruption is to prevent repeated ganking because Steven wants so.
I have no idea what to say about the ganking morality. I guess depending on context I can see it ok or bad.
Definitely is not griefing.
but then you have an advantage when fighting others for no reason, as they will be instantly flagged upon getting close. that's unfair for them, especially melee vs ranged. also, some people are also just passing by and have no intention of attacking you, now they re screwed xD
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
0
Options
akabearMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
Even during guild wars there was pk`ing. Take for instance Guild vs Guild declared war and enemy guild is found and attacked and happens to have non-guild members in group during fight. Those non-guild members might be friendly players to that guild or just random fill in players; they were often pk`d along with the group especially is suspected to be going to offer resurrections and pre-empting heals.
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.
basically, a green character will keep coming back over and over so the red character is forced to kill him giving him massive karma. should this person quit now?
How it this "forcing"?
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.
No one would PK "normally", so only the ones who want to PK on explicit purpose will do this, after properly preparing for it.
Ashes has no deleveling and supposedly the lowest a death penalty can go is 20% of stats. That's fucking nothing.
So a PK alt can be of a high lvl, with low-mid gear (or just the simplest one to reacquire) and go around PKing to their heart's content. They wouldn't even think about mob grinding, so they'd either have a friend who kills them asap, or they'd just rely on others hunting them.
This kind of balancing removes any owpvp from the game, cause, as Depraved pointed out, people would use the system in the wrong ways. All while the worst PKers do their thing w/o a care in the world.
In other words, this just doesn't work with the most recent info about death penalties, but it does ruin owpvp.
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
basically, a green character will keep coming back over and over so the red character is forced to kill him giving him massive karma. should this person quit now?
How it this "forcing"?
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.
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.
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.
Unless that happened in a low population private server where it's a free for all, then I don't believe you.
Never saw that in nearly a decade of official L2. The few times I saw a guy on a PK rampage, it was always the same, he gets chased by someone with better gear, killed and then every single person in the server knows he's a PK char, and he just gets tailed everywhere and he can't do it anymore. So, nope, that's just hard to believe. Mass corrupted player = loot piñata. If you aren't tailing someone like that, then you must hate free loot.
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.
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.
All of those other ways to pvp are mostly (if not purely) group based, especially if we'll get even more pvp zones. The entire point of this type of corruption system is to allow pvp outside of events (which all of those are, outside of seas), and to allow it for all types of players and not just groups.
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.
0
Options
akabearMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
edited April 20
L2 Pk`ing was strategic / political too..
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!
basically, a green character will keep coming back over and over so the red character is forced to kill him giving him massive karma. should this person quit now?
How it this "forcing"?
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.
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.
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.
couple of mins killing mbos of our own level. corruption is the only defense we have against pve griefers
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.
0
Options
akabearMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
edited April 21
How Pk`ing worked in above in L2 differed if solo or in a group and who fighting.
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.
basically, a green character will keep coming back over and over so the red character is forced to kill him giving him massive karma. should this person quit now?
How it this "forcing"?
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.
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.
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.
ok mad ea bad call. do I deserve to be punished so hard I have to quit the game? as someone else suggested
basically, a green character will keep coming back over and over so the red character is forced to kill him giving him massive karma. should this person quit now?
How it this "forcing"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In AoC you will not be able to use storage, to free your inventory.
Staying red all the time will not be practical.
Ashes has no deleveling and supposedly the lowest a death penalty can go is 20% of stats. That's fucking nothing.
So a PK alt can be of a high lvl, with low-mid gear (or just the simplest one to reacquire) and go around PKing to their heart's content. They wouldn't even think about mob grinding, so they'd either have a friend who kills them asap, or they'd just rely on others hunting them.
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.
This kind of balancing removes any owpvp from the game, cause, as Depraved pointed out, people would use the system in the wrong ways. All while the worst PKers do their thing w/o a care in the world.
"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.
In other words, this just doesn't work with the most recent info about death penalties, but it does ruin owpvp.
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.
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.
I kinda feel like you didn't read what you replied to. I addressed all of these points in the very paragraph you took.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I kinda feel like you didn't read what you replied too. I addressed all of these points in the very paragraph you took.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Instead of focusing on making corruption removal easy by killing your own alt / guild member, better think how it can be made fun while Bounty Hunters try to catch that player.
Didn't you said you want to be a bounty hunter?
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.
Gear is ~50% of player power. So, let's say you deal 100dmg to a 1k hp player with a good weapon. If that weapon provides roughly 50%, that would imply that you can deal 50dmg with either your bare hands or with the very first weapon in the game.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Instead of focusing on making corruption removal easy by killing your own alt / guild member, better think how it can be made fun while Bounty Hunters try to catch that player.
Didn't you said you want to be a bounty hunter?
Easy This is already planned 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.
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.
Gear is ~50% of player power. So, let's say you deal 100dmg to a 1k hp player with a good weapon. If that weapon provides roughly 50%, that would imply that you can deal 50dmg with either your bare hands or with the very first weapon in the game.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Instead of focusing on making corruption removal easy by killing your own alt / guild member, better think how it can be made fun while Bounty Hunters try to catch that player.
Didn't you said you want to be a bounty hunter?
Easy This is already planned 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'm not talking veterans or newbies. I'm talking about people who just want to PK others. Their main is high lvl, which allows them to have money to keep buying gear. Their alt is the PKer and they could not care less about penalties or whatever, because they can simply die, equip new gear and go kill again.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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'm not talking veterans or newbies. I'm talking about people who just want to PK others. Their main is high lvl, which allows them to have money to keep buying gear. Their alt is the PKer and they could not care less about penalties or whatever, because they can simply die, equip new gear and go kill again.
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.
Who are the "others"? Or what are they if they can be killed easily with cheap gear and stat dampening?
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.
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.
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.
All of those other ways to pvp are mostly (if not purely) group based, especially if we'll get even more pvp zones. The entire point of this type of corruption system is to allow pvp outside of events (which all of those are, outside of seas), and to allow it for all types of players and not just groups.
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.
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'm not talking veterans or newbies. I'm talking about people who just want to PK others. Their main is high lvl, which allows them to have money to keep buying gear. Their alt is the PKer and they could not care less about penalties or whatever, because they can simply die, equip new gear and go kill again.
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).
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)?
Who are the "others"? Or what are they if they can be killed easily with cheap gear and stat dampening?
Literally anyone who doesn't fight back. A solo gatherer, a casual mob farmer, a small group of friends who are afraid that they'll get ganked by "the big bois" if they flag up, anyone who believes that the system will remove the PKer from the premises and the victim will be able to just come back and continue their activity - all of these people would die to a literal lvl 1 character, unless lvl1s do 0 dmg.
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".
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I’m torn on the account wide deal… I see both sides of that argument.
To me it's a question of "if you have an alt that PKs a lot, doesn't that mean that you're avoiding PKing on your main?" And if you're not avoiding it - you should, because you've PKed a lot already, so there's gotta be a balance.
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"
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.
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.
I'm a bit late to the party but I think there are a few things many (not necessarily here) have been missing about the corruption system and "ganking players for fun" so far, that maybe needs to be clarified.
To gank players you have to find them. Given the group based nature of the game VS the size of the map, I doubt you will have so many run ins with other players outside of Points of Interests in the first place.
They are most of the time in groups - even when you go collecting resources, there is no reason to think that Mister and Miss Casual will wander off too far in the first place (there is bound to be ample demand for rather safely collectable resources) or that they'll go to the edge of the world without preparation.
The whole narrative that corrupted will just relax and kill each other into uncorrputed status again doesn't hold up with Bounty Hunters tracking them, them respawning at random locations as long as they are corrupted, their characters staying ingame for a whole minute after logging out and maybe most importantly: With their combat stats reduced corrupted may not even be good at killing each other at all.
There is EXP debt and there is durability lost on each death that will stick with you even AFTER you may have gotten rid of the corruption.
Most importantly in my opinion however is this: If we look at how reputation works with Nodes I think we can assume that PKing someone will reduce your reputation with the Node that character is a citizen of. This means that random acts of killing will step by step lock you out of points to resupply at, because once you are an "enemy of state", guards of the Node will attack you and all the Node services will probably be unavailable to you even when you manage to get rid of the corruption.
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.
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.
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.
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.