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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.
Thought experiment: What if they removed dropping things on death?
Nerror
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
Just as a thought experiment, what if Intrepid decided to stop glint, gathered and processed goods from dropping on death? What cascading effects would it have? What would need to be changed at a minimum, to stop the whole system from falling apart?
2
Comments
Not disappearing from the player's inventory. (as part of the death penalty)?
Or
Nothing to loot from the ash pile (you still lose them on death but it's completely lost no one can loot it ever)?
The risk will vanish or be drastically reduced.
I wouldn't like such a change.
So that explorers to be safer to explore while having no backpack or mule loaded with things?
So effectively you would be ruining their purpose about corruption stopping pvp and creating a lot more of random pvp. Even more so over spots, and more general chaotic pvp just cause.
Unsure what the point of this is experiment is though since you aren't being clear on that. You can't say change minimum when you are talking about no drops from deaths now as that is already a giant change.
Either the game is balanced for drops or not you can obviously make a system for both. Though one leans towards PvP and one leads more towards higher risk.
I mean not disappearing from inventory.
I left it vague on purpose
As for Mag's point about corrupted players not dropping anything - they'd be the only ones TO drop stuff. That's their punishment. That's the L2 way which I believe is better than the current Ashes way.
Don't you think if players didn't drop a portion of their inventories gatherable mats that players would rely on caravans less often. WIth (IMO) caravans being an extremely important system to AOC.
Make mats heavier, bigger in inventory, less stackable, whatever. Force people to use mules and caravans. And the tradeoff is you lose nothing on death.
We already have this in the game supposedly. Glint is supposed to be caravaned cause it's so heavy or smth. Big mats are the same. And the entire point of bags is to limit the amount a player can carry at the same time.
So, if anything, changing the game to no player loot would only make it better imo.
May as well make pve servers as well then.
Well, what did you tell your friend the cascading effects were?
There's certainly a cascading effect on development...
DAoC and ESO were of the best PvP MMOs made and you never needed other players loot to make PvP great.
system wouldn't fall apart...
nah that was suggested before. it removes risk from attackers and defenders.
L2 corruption is not as harsh as AoC. Effectively you are saying make corruption even worse for players. If we are going down make corrupting as bad as possible to the point people don't use it for pvp, just remove owPvP flagging and the element of risk/ reward. That way development time wont be wasted and pvp can only be around guild / node decs. Very easy solution if we are catering to this kind of element and reducing this pillar in the game.
I didn't really get into specifics much. It wasn't the setting for that, since I was driving.
I mentioned changes would have to be made to caravans, the corruption system, boss drops like epic and legendary materials, and the economy in general, since it removes one of the significant money/item sinks in the game.
But the topic kept buzzing in my head, hence this thread.
The premise of Ashes is that PvE creates, PvP redistributes (lets ignore how well I think that is going).
That redistribution has sieges, potentially wars and caravans as mid and high level examples - but only has item drop on death as it's low level example (not talking about level as in character level, but in terms of concepts). This really is the only place where a single player can meaningfully participate in that redistribution aspect of the game.
The game would feel disjointed with this change made if some other form of redistribution at a low level wasn't added in to replace it.
I've very much read it, you are clearly not getting what I'm saying. You are essentially advocating for removing the pillar while creating immense risk 0 reward. And trying to use L2 as an example even though the corruption system is tuned to be more extreme.
Hence I'm saying just advocate to remove owpvp around corruption. There is no point adding a system in with extreme negatives just for the sake of it.
There are just too many variables to make any concise answer possible. I started writing out an answer, but it got so long that even I stopped reading it.
The most basic answer is that it would change the feel of the game from a more gritty and dangerous one to a more mainstream one, which I don't think is what any of us really want from it.
I don't see how any of these are true.
Either that or I don't understand the point of the post.
Surely, the game might feel different. It might even feel different in a way we don't like. But 'the system' wouldn't fall apart any more than it would fall apart with very high Corruption values.
The cascading effects on the systems would be minimal if players did not drop items on death. It would require a rebalance of the economy, but so does 'changing Corruption in any way'. I'd argue that any change to Corruption would require a larger economy rebalance than that, except that we have no solid information on the economy to begin with, at this time.
We simply don't know what work has been done to the systems so far, that would be affected if this was changed. There are models in which this would instantly break the whole thing, and models in which it would require a few number tweaks.
I say this to point out that if you're talking to a person that doesn't follow Ashes, explaining the effects won't always 'land', since any logical bases you use to explain it, will just be speculation, to them.
If you stick with the game you have to be cool with the mechanic no matter what (and deal with it).
The main cascading effect would be the "risk" part of gathering/transporting materials. Assuming the caravan system would be kept in tact, there would have to be a rebalance to make the caravans more lucrative considering you risk losing it all versus just travelling by foot.
Also, the original design seems to be attempting to encourage some kind of "fair enough" pvp, where you drop more items if you don't attack back, but they get corruption in exchange. So fighting back minimizes your losses. The idea here is, if you think there is a chance you can win or escape, it is worth fighting back. This dynamic would be lost if there are no items dropped when killed.
It might be something they can just fine tune. Maybe the default loss is 50% of your mats upon death, 25% if you attack back (although I can see this being abused as a teleport back to town). 100% loss sucks, hope they don't do that.
Otherwise, no drops on death could actually be healthy for the game. A lot of the people who just log on for an hour to grind out don't necessarily want to be at high stress the whole time, watching for gankers. This is especially true while gathering. Sometimes you wanna just put on some music and chill at your game, no adrenaline/hyperactive attention required. Feeling like some kind of prey animal constantly ain't really that fun and requiring a group of 5-8 just to go out and gather some mats is ridiculous. It can take an hour just to get 8 people to agree on an objective and get ready to go, let alone just to bodyguard you for mat gathering.
So now we are talking about what you think (even though you didn't post it here with your stance) in changing the system to be more lax.
Do you not see the issue as this is not sounding like just some slight changes.