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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
Even in L2, which was most definitely a much more group-requiring game there were solo players who just farmed solo mobs at their own pace. Steven explicitly said that Ashes will have solo content. So unless all the solo players stop playing the game - there will be solo prey for PKers.
Neither of those things matter to a career PKer, as I've explained in my posts above.
Wiki doesn't provide more context to the "enemy of the state" system and I don't remember if we've heard any other details on it, so it's difficult to say what exactly would that imply (if it will even be implemented).
Outside of that, PKers don't need any supplies from npcs. And guards won't be killing people with bad rep, because as that page references - we'll potentially have quests related to having bad rep, at which point punishing people for the actions that you encourage would be the stupidest thing ever.
Does "players drop more if they die green" not encourage PKing, if the attacker's goal is to get their target's loot? The whole "flagging reduces the amount of stuff you drop" feature is literally there to encourage fighting back, so as to avoid a higher penalty on death, which means that attacking and killing greens is encouraged, otherwise there'd be no point in encouraging players to try and lessen the penalty related to those attacks.
At this point I think the BH system is either gone or has completely changed. At least that's what the current design direction and the length of time since the last BH mention tells me. PKing has huge potential penalties and we've gotten more pvp events (and seas), which go directly against a need for a BH system.
Agreed, the thing however is: I don't think there will be "solo locations". Outside of Points of Interest, I think everything will be suitable for players without a group. And assuming that maybe 20% of the land mass is POIs and maybe 15% will be Nodes, that leaves something like 65% of the land mass for higher solo player activity.
My main point here was that the areas in which solo players may be, might not be safe for corrupted players/reds/soon-to-be-reds. Also the point was not to say "there will be NO PvP", but more to point out that involuntary PvP can be avoided without too much downside and might be less likely that people worry overall.
So we are talking cheap gear, okay. But that assumes that gear of any sort will be cheap. Sure, gear may be cheaper depending of its quality, but the quality difference between a "career PKer" and a normal player can easily be big enough to make that 40-50% combat power count a lot. Additionally if they would want to mitigate the stat disadvantage from cheap gear via their level, they would have to invest time playing much less aggressively to gain that advantage... only to then throw that away to kill a few low levels?
I don't know about you but in all the games I have played so far the only cases of this happening in big numbers were games where progression was fast and easy - neither of which applies to Ashes from what I see. And again, my point is not that mindless ganking won't happen at all, my point is that there are very few people who would find that rewarding.
It does not say so explicitely but would it make sense since the Wiki states that "Bad actions taken, such as failing certain quests, may result in gaining negative reputation". IT would be strange that failing a quest accumulates bad reputation with a Node but when someone kills the citizens of Node, stealing resources from them which no less are required to maintain the Node, would go unpunished. So that wouldn't make sense IMO for this not to be implemented, though you are right, this has not been explicitely mentioned... yet.
To the point of "PKers don't need supplies from NPCs": That may be true, but just like corruption shuts down services from all Nodes, the enemy-of-state status could shut down services with the specific Node which you have made your enemy. Meaning in that particular node you are treated as corrupted, while being treated normally at other places. But the specific benefits of the enemy Node are no longer accessible to you, or more expensive. Same goes with the redemption quests - nobody said that what you are doing is going to that specific node with your had hanging down in shame and say sorry. It would make more sense that for example diplomats from a nearby religious Node would offer you to fix your reputation with XYZ Node for a favor. So it DOES make sense for a more mature leaning world to have these kinds of punishments in place.
I don't think that this is an incentive for the attacker, but a disincentive for the green player. Do they want to give up more of their collected goods to impose a big punishment on the attacker or fight back. I think THAT is the focus of that design choice.
For the attacker the higher drop rate is no reward since the additional penalty imposed for killing a green far outweights that. Also: While the higher drop is only a chance (you do not know how much the green even had), the penalty is a guarantee. So I really don't agree that this is much of an incentive. Guaranteed penalty VS a chance of more loot, sounds to me like an intentionally skewd risk-reward-system.
And mind you, Steven has been on record saying that they deem killing players in no position to fight back unproductive for their game loop and therefore designed these punishments. And I am confident that by the end of Alpha 2 the only real reason you would risk going red for most people will be to incite war between Nodes, with "career PKers" being VERY few and far between (IMO).
I don't agree on that point. since I see the Bounty Hunter system as the emergency measure that will kick in if PKing would actually get out of hand at some point for some reason (e.g. an influencer deciding to go rouge with his goons). From what I have seen so far, Intrepid and their experience being players themselves look like they are preparing a Plan B if "unproductive PvP" is happening too much so not to be required to make something up on the spot when it gets to that point.
I agree that there won't be that much PKing overall. I'm just saying that the type of that PKing will be far worse than what it would be if the penalties and counters were designed slightly differently.
This will depend on how well the economy is setup on any given server. Considering that mats will supposedly create a type of pyramid, being useful all the way from low lvl items to top lvl stuff - I'd imagine that there'll be a ton of mats on the market, of which you'd need relatively low amounts to craft a low-mid piece of gear.
And considering that the gear is only half of your damage, hitting someone of your own lvl with the weakest weapon in the game should still do a fair bit of dmg to them, otherwise the gear can't be "50% of your power". And even if the 20% stat reduction from the XP debt takes away from your power directly, rather than a relative reduction - you'd still have roughly 30% of your character's supposed power even with the weakest weapon. And I'm sure that'll be more than enough to PK someone who doesn't fight back, otherwise the power scaling in the game is kinda out of wack and pvp in general will feel like shit.
It takes only a few rotten apples to spoil the whole lot. If there's even a few career PKers for every hundred players in the game - that's already a ton of PKing, unless the corruption's stat dampening is tuned real high (which I want) and removing corruption takes hours and hours even through death (which I'd personally want for fairly high PK counts).
Oh, I agree that your rep might go down. I simply disagree with what you think the consequences of bad rep will be.
"Treated as corrupted" has several connotations. I personally don't expect enemies of the state to be KoS by guards. Especially if EotS is an acquirable status by just getting bad rep at a node.
Yes, that could definitely be a way to design those quests. I'm fine with anything really, as long as it's expensive and time-consuming to do.
The penalty only applies if you die though. And even then it depends on how you die and what you looted for the kill.
I still see player loot as one of the major incentives to kill people, mostly because A TON of people on these forums use that as justification for PKing or as one of the incentives when discussing the corruption system. I personally don't want someone's loot, nor do I even want them to drop it. Hell, I'll most likely return the loot to the victim (or defend the ashes until they can come back), but I know that I'm in a super minority when it comes to this interaction.
Steven has said a lot of things that directly contradict each other, or just has had designs that do that. I see this current design as one of those contradictions.
But doesn't this defeat the purpose of the corruption system, and its high tuning, then? If players can "get out of hand" that means that the corruption system failed to do its job, cause it's there to prevent people getting out hand, right?
And if players don't get out of hand because the system is doing it's job, then why the hell do we have BHs as a concept, which required its own development time and design balancing and all that stuff.
And the balancing itself will be a pain in the ass for the devs, because you'll have to always think about how the system can be gamed. If you provide too many benefits to the BHs - people will use alts and friends to boost themselves through the system. If you don't provide benefits, barely anyone will be a BH and PKing might "get out of hand". But you don't want that to happen so you tune the corruption system higher. But now there's barely any PKing, which means that the BHs are even fewer and even more pointless as a system.
This is the paradox of the current design, as I see it. I hope I'm missing something and that the overall design is much better and deeper, but until we see it in practice - it's really hard to believe that it is.
I think that is one of the key things: This will vary. Significantly. I am pretty sure that there will be "Server Culture" and "reputations" which are based on the types of player that find themselves on these servers. A server with more solo players would probably be more attractive to the kind of "career PKer" you described, yes.
Differnt in what way? I honestly think the design is pretty good.
You might be able to kill someone who does not fight back even if you do just 1 dmg per hit, the point is that it get increasingly difficult and once players have a feeling for how strong or weak someone is, THEIR incentive to fight back may increase, before they are at a disadvantage.
But if I look at the points above combined I get the feeling that this is such a niche issue. We are talking about a tiny portion of the players who would PK in the first place and a small portion of players unwilling to fight back, paired with a low chance of if even occuring in the first place.
I agree. But that is why I think Intrepid has gone for A) the bounty hunter system and B ) the world event system which can dynamically adjust these things, not only from an ingame perspective but also from a mechanics perspective. Intrepid to my knowledge never excluded the world event system isn't monitoring things like that. And it would be easy for the system to recognize that in a certain region PKs are high, generate quests that reward hunting red, generate quests to recruit new bounty hunters and gradually increase the corruption per PK.
My point: All the tools that are necessary to address overboard PKing are already there, that is why I do not worry too much about this, Intrepid has improved their feedback process enough for me to not doubt that they'd pick up on it when this turns out to be an issue.
I see. Well, I guess we will have to wait for the game to come out, A2 or a Q&A session to see what exactly the consequences are. Or will you enlighten us on the consequences of losing reputation with a Node, @Vaknar ?
Why would it not go so far?
Same and the disadvantage of going through another Nodes diplomats to regain access to the Node that you had such a severe falling out with seems like a great way achieve that.
If I read the Wiki entry on player corruption correctly, the stat reduction also applies to corrupt players while still alive.
"Corruption score has a scaling impact on skill and stat dampening that will ultimately make them ineffective at PvP combat.[21][10][13][8][15][11][31][89][18][2][16][17][12]"
Skill and stat dampening penalties are applied when a player dies or when they gain corruption. This causes negative effects, such as a reduction of health and mana.[13][8][15][2][16]
Well, then we cant discuss this further as we are on different sides regarding the validity of the source.
To me it means that the corruption system, like any system ever, is not perfect - and it was never meant to be.
If you allow me the analogy, that is like saying gravel in a natural water filter is useless because it does not filter out all the possibly harmful things in the water.
The point of the corruption system IMO is to disincentivize most players from going psycho and inhibit that intended game loop to the detriment of other players enjoyment of the game. At the same time non-consentual PvP is a strong tool to fuel change in the game, so fully disabling it was not an option either.
So while corruption filters out most players, the bounty hunter system is specifically designed to increase the risk for the few players who remain determined to do what Intrepid considers "unproductive PvP".
Lastly: I don't agree with the static description of the system. Yes, there will be times and servers on which Bounty Hunters are probably completely irrelevant.
To my understanding in Ashes PvE begets PvP and PvP begets PvE.
And rising PKs will incentivize more Bounty Hunting, while lower PKs will disincentivize clogging your hotbar with "useless" Bounty Hunter abilities. Call it "seasonal necessity" or whatever. That's how I see it and I don't think there is need to expect the system to govern PvP to not have layers to them.
Because there'll be quests related to getting bad rep. Some players might get those quests and notice that they got them due to bad rep. They might try going even lower, in hopes of getting even better quest along this chain. And depending on where the lower limit for EotS is - they might cross over and now get punished for following where the game lead them.
Also, I'm not exactly sure how you'd be supposed to increase your rep if you can't even enter the node, cause the guards keep killing you on sight.
To me this would just yet another contradictory design.
Yes, and as I said, I support this stat dampening in going as low as to make a PKer completely unable to damage other players. But this is simply a preventive measure, rather than a punitive one. If the PKer doesn't care about the XP on their current lvl and has enough gear to keep replacing their destroyed one - they'll just die until the corruption goes away and then go back to PKing.
This will definitely reduce the amount of overall PKs coming from career PKers, so that's good and I hope that it's designed that way.
At that point I'd argue that we are dealing with such a small number of players that this is actually no worse than a random elite mob flooring you, but having a decent drop chance for gear in return.
The difficulty of the fight might be a bit different in the usual games. But with modern behavior trees and mobs having access to basically the same class skills as players, I think players will quickly discover that the lines in Ashes are much more blurred than many think.
IMO even "PvE" players will end up much closer to PvP than they think and "PvP" player will find that PvE content may not be as "boring and undynamic" as most lament.
O you can bet your ass jerky if I see corrupted players I will just start swinging unless there is a big power difference for whatever reason.
That is the one primary unknown we have. Will there be so many players out there randomly walking around that whenever someone goes corrupt they get attacked by so many individuals it doesn't even matter, they just die? This question relies heavily on player density and content density. Narc mentioned in a video recently what amount of land do we expect to be made without significant content in it. He stated 70% seems reasonable, I would agree and wager its anything from 50-80% of land will have nice aesthetics but not have any content specifically designed for it. Additionally if their goal is 10k players on a 1,200 km^2 map that is 8 players per km^2 assuming an even spread - more likely however going with 50% of land is actually being used and therefore is realistically the PKers roaming area, that leaves 16 players there on average. Yes I know the numbers are far more skewed than this but still, point remains will corrupted players just get smoked to begin with?
I asked who the others (who died green) are to be clear what category of players we talk about.
I see players willing to die green in a few cases:
1) when tries to hold a farming spot which would give him something in return on a longer time
2) tries to escape with the full inventory and takes advantage of not being CC-able
3) he has nothing in inventory and is curious of the other side will get red or not (want to make him red?)
4) he knows the other side is much stronger (more players) and cannot survive no matter what he does (is like case 2 and 3 combined)
5) he expects the corruption to protect and make PvE viable?
6) he is a bot
First let's remember Steven says the game is not for everyone. So the last two points (5 and 6) should be ignored.
Only players who can accept PvP as a possibility should play the game.
And all who play the game should be ready to become flagged if that saves some resources.
Else it should be some strategic reason or mistake (being afk) or surprised and killed too fast - all valid reasons.
So we should also agree if players will become red, that is because the game will allow that. It is just a matter how many times a player can kill some other player and how will remove the red status.
The answer to "why in L2 was different" I do not like. It was an almost useless flagging.
The red was able to clear the status before the killed player arrived back so the player would not even bother to come back and go through the same experience one more.
AoC tries to make the red player flee and be hunted by greens and by bounty hunters. That is the main point of the corruption.
Players who hate being hunted should not become red in the first place.
Some will become red because they think they can clear the corruption without dying.
If a player with a main character supports the alt with gear, that is an acceptable case, as long as the gear degradation for killing the red is higher than the resources needed to repair the gear.
Now the question is how many times such a character can kill before being useless.
We have the PK value which can make such a character useless after a first kill. (I see you mentioned it too)
Then what? Deleting the character would make the player go through the leveling phase again, which does not stop at level 50 but is followed by other progressions too. So is not an option.
We have to be sure that clearing the corruption is viable by grinding XP for a longer time not as you say within a few minutes, barely enough for a BH to reach that player. And that experience must be fun.
The bounty hunter will not get an exact location but a general area where the red is so it can happen that they pass close to each other if the area has low visibility (a lot of vegetation or complicated terrain)
In a different thread I suggested the red player, if dies being killed early by a friend or by a BH, should still grind the XP to be able to become green. Else should stay purple. The "being hunted or being vulnerable" experience should happen no matter what. We can combine this stage with denying access to storage and player to player trade, so he will have to use the same gear and not be able to collect resources.
...
By "reverse logarithmic" you mean exponential?
You might want to keep in mind that in theory there will be some percentage of players not even on land at all. I think pirate life will be a thing, so density on land may be even lower than Narc suspects - especially when we have to assume that there won't be 10k players online all the time.
With that being said: A bounty hunter (or bounty hunter groups/guilds), depending on the rewards, may be a traveling character(s) tracking corrupted across various territories. Heck they could even take comissions from other players.
Leaving that aside: I think there is a misconception that corrupted players will have it easy for some reason and I don't see what that would be the case. Even solo players may band together in groups while farming in a specific area to counter PKers. They know the risk exists, they know they would have an advantage the second one of them dies without resistance and they can add "farming of PKers" to their list with a simple arrangement. The only way I can see that not working out would be if Node comissions and/or mayoral quests cannot effectively focus even solo players a bit closer together.
All in all, you should have a decent chance to work it off. The time to work off corruption should depend on how hard it is to actually survive before you're done. If it's easy enough, then the timer should obviously be longer, on the other hand if you're almost surely screwed for going corrupted (as a solo at least), then the time to work it off should be short.
This difficulty would of course increase accordingly when going on killing sprees/having high PK count.
...
If some one ganks a random player 20 levels lower picking flowers not flagged for combat... That's just cool, no issues there?
They should absolutely get more corruption.
Or do you mean that if someone already has a high count then their new first kill makes them useless and the question is what would that count have to be to make it so? Then yeah, I agree, we don't know and I'd personally say ~10 should bring you to 0 pvp attack and should take you ~100 deaths to clear. Though even 100 deaths might be a bit too fast, if there's enough players around.
I've also suggested previously that BHs should be able to kill the recent-ex-PKer as a green (as in, the PKer has cleared his corruption in whatever way and is now green, but the BH won't become a PKer and the PKer would also not be able to become purple against the BH, while he can still fight back), so that the hunt continues for longer than the time to remove corruption would be (at least if we're talking low PK count).
Exponential goes vertically at the end (and gets to the "end" quickly), logarithmic goes horizontally. I want reverse logarithmic, so that the more corruption you have the longer it takes to remove it by death at the start.
Say you have player A with 100 corruption and player B with 1000. Both decided to die to remove their corruption. Player A dies twice and removes 60 then 40. Player B starts by removing 5 on the first twenty deaths, then 6 on the next twenty, 7 on the next, etc etc until he drops down to a hundred and only needs 2 deaths just like player A did.
That kind of thing, except maybe even slower, but that's all testable and all that.
Your suggestion is even better because it lets the BH do the hunting instead of relying on random players around.
But when would the player become again invisible to Bounty Hunters? If is time related, more BH can kill the same player which is unfair.
The most recent suggestion I made was this one
I've been proposing a "return the stolen loot to the green" system for years now
Ideally there wouldn't be any player loot at all, but if there is - I think it should be managed better, using the currently presented systems.
The way I was suggesting it, the same problem needs to be solved, because if the red has to grind a certain amount of XP, more BH can grief him.
A solution would be if a BH manages a kill, the red to become green temporarily.
The reason why I think looting from the red ashes should cancel the red status is for cases where a mistake happened or an instant regret and the red lets himself killed.
But I wouldn't mind if even a negotiation could be done. Maybe the red would pay even more than he looted
Returning the initially looted things is a bit more complicated because the glint and resources stack. Maybe would work too but I am not sure id the BH would do all this work without some material gain.
As for the friends part, I don't really see it as an exploit as long as the loot is returned. The PKer has died, which means that the system-based punishment has been enacted.
The potential exploit comes from BHs progressing through their system by using friend PKers, but that's a whole separate balancing act that Intrepid will have to already account for, so, until they reveal their ideas, I wouldn't really know whether they have a good resolution or not. Mine would probably be "diminished returns on hunting the same PKers", with potentially "bounty doesn't count" if you've gone past a certain threshold of the same PKer bounties.
"Stolen goods" bags. Anything you pick up from a corpse goes into this bag and only this bag. Bags have names of the corpse that they were taken from. This bag also has a 100% of dropping from the one who picked it up (which would also promote revenge kills even in consensual pvp). The bag can only be picked up by the one who made the kill and is bound to that person (addresses the "entire party goes around PKing" thing).
If the BH picks up the bag - they give it to an npc, who then pings the victim about a returnal. Everything is automated and streamlined.
The PKer who managed to clear their corruption before dying will need to go find an npc that can "launder" the loot, which takes time and potentially some money, based on the quality of the loot and maybe PKer's progression in the highwayman system.
Yes, so what is the incentive for the BH to hunt if he has to give the loot back?
you can still give the loot back on your own. no need a system for that. although it would be complicated to figure out who the pk killed and looted.
but anyways, giving the loot back doesn't mean you are doing something good. imagine this scenario. i pk someone, take their shit, lose corruption, then that person comes back and pk me, they get their shit back, now u, a bh, kills that person and then returns the loot to me. are you really helping the "innocent victim" here and doing something good?
what if someone has been pking other players for weeks or months, maybe even lower levels. then one day those people become stronger and pk the ude, now the bh kills them and the serial pker gets his shit back. r u doing something good?
This is just adding more incentive values to an already overbloated equation.
One that we still are missing over half of the variables for.
You're just 'writing in all your own values' at this point. You can't use micro-incentives to model anything, particularly in a game where 'Stolen Glint' exists.
unrelated. I started to think several months ago, that you are actually a chatbot made by the original azherae who posts in this forum and the real azherae doesn't post anymore.
Got a more precise timeline than that?
hah! i was right.
i don't remember the exact date, but it was a while ago. that thought has been in the back of my mind for months.
also, stop web scraping, you are making the forums slow for me
Definitely not.
It's not necessary to 'scrape' Ashes forums in the way that would make it slow for anyone else, the forum software they use is very aggregation-friendly. Parsing also should not be adding any meaningful load.
If I ever get to the point of needing to generate an activity graph, I'll make sure to do it when activity is very low, and again, it would work incrementally anyway, so it wouldn't affect you. I don't need to care about late post edits.
I know it's popular for some reason but I can't stand this, ruins the game for me.
"Oh I'm just gonna disengage for a bit to play in single player mode".
And then presumably enter PvP again at precisely the moment it suits you (usually when a situation is already heavily in your favour).
The feeling that is doing something good might fade after 3-4 months. Depends how often this work has to be done. Too often is like a job. We should ask a policeman how he feels.
What if we introduce some kind of resource, like an essence, which could be used to craft some amulets or consumable or improve gear when fighting against corrupted players?
So when the green gets killed, in the process of resources being transferred into the ashes, some essence from the corrupted player could be transferred into the green's inventory.
Then the player could trade this to the BH in return to his lost resources.
The same or similar resource could get also the corrupted player when fights a BH, to get better at fighting against them.
Lol so the existing penalties:
- increased exp loss
- increased drop penalties
- chance of dropping gear
- appear on map for Bounty Hunters
- stat dampening (already goes too far IMO)
.. aren't already enough for you?