Greetings, glorious adventurers! If you're joining in our Alpha One spot testing, please follow the steps here to see all the latest test info on our forums and Discord!
Options
What is the appropriate amount of Green ganking?
ExiledByrd
Member
I have read that the corruption system is designed to protect Greens(non-combatants). The bounty hunter system and to an extent the military node is based around people consistently getting corrupted. How many corruption/bounty hunter events need to happen in order for the system to be worth it?
If successful ganks are rare, then the bounty hunter system falls apart. I do a big quest chain to unlock the system and level a military node for the benefits, but have to compete for the rare red with everyone else in the node?
If I was in a bounty hunter guild but people only became corrupted near my node 2-3 times per day, I don't think that would be enough content for the guild to partake in. Maybe a bounty hunter guild more as an RP or icing on the top thing while focusing on other PvP content like Caravans?
If successful ganks are common, Greens will be rare and AoC will get the reputation of a murderfest. However, there will obviously be more content with the Bounty Hunter system. I normally farm to relax but if the success rate of bringing my stuff back drops below a certain percentage, I don't know if I'll do it much.
My theory, I think the corruption system is not designed to protect greens but to increase the Risk (in the Risk vs. Reward) of hunting greens. Corruption will be common, farming will be a high risk activity or in groups for rare materials, and the majority of lower rarity materials will be farmed from freeholds.
What does everyone else think? How many people need to be corrupted for the game to make sense? Or more importantly, how often? Is it okay if Bounty Hunting is a rare activity?
If successful ganks are rare, then the bounty hunter system falls apart. I do a big quest chain to unlock the system and level a military node for the benefits, but have to compete for the rare red with everyone else in the node?
If I was in a bounty hunter guild but people only became corrupted near my node 2-3 times per day, I don't think that would be enough content for the guild to partake in. Maybe a bounty hunter guild more as an RP or icing on the top thing while focusing on other PvP content like Caravans?
If successful ganks are common, Greens will be rare and AoC will get the reputation of a murderfest. However, there will obviously be more content with the Bounty Hunter system. I normally farm to relax but if the success rate of bringing my stuff back drops below a certain percentage, I don't know if I'll do it much.
My theory, I think the corruption system is not designed to protect greens but to increase the Risk (in the Risk vs. Reward) of hunting greens. Corruption will be common, farming will be a high risk activity or in groups for rare materials, and the majority of lower rarity materials will be farmed from freeholds.
What does everyone else think? How many people need to be corrupted for the game to make sense? Or more importantly, how often? Is it okay if Bounty Hunting is a rare activity?
1
Comments
I agree getting ganked will not be fun. But it does seem core to AoC gameplay and I think some will find fun in ganking and more importantly in killing the gankers. I guess my question relies on how much unfun AoC can give greens to make the other systems work without losing them.
If there's not enough bountyhunting happening to make ganking feel punished, players will be less careful about getting corrupted, which in turn will entice more players to be invested in bounty hunting.
I mean. Yeah. Like I said, if you wanted to making ganking impossible, you'd make ganking impossible.
What's your bigger concern here?
Are you asking about what the ethical restrictions for ganking should be that the community should enforce? And the circumstances under which corruption should be viewed as reasonably justified?
(Here my answer is very simple: It'll be a different culture on every server and across different subgroups, and that's inevitable and desirable.)
Or are you asking about the value of the bounty hunting system? Because you want it to be a more engaging PvP activity, or because you want the...development effort invested into it to be lower...?
Honestly, I'm not sure. I think I am worried about the thin wire that AoC will need to balance on. Community balance sounds nice, but people are really bad at determining what is bad for them in groups.
On one side, if there is not enough ganking. The BH system is underutilized. There is a lot of work that went into it and I think it could be a lot of fun.
On the other side, to much ganking, some people are not having fun and go do something else. A lot of people who would enjoy the game otherwise stop or never start playing.
Neither of these are game stoppers from an AoC point of view. There will be enough people who play the game even if it becomes a murder box or if murder becomes untenable. But I think there is an incredible game somewhere in between.
If I could choose I would make the corruption risk high enough that generally it's not worth doing. Similar to @Voxtrium leave OWPvP to those situations where emotions are flaring, resources are contested, or people deserve it for non-pvp griefing. Then I would change the BH system to a node based system and add bounties to people who kill your node's caravans.
There’s a balance Intrepid will have to learn how to calibrate automatically to meet their intention.
But I will say that I've always thought the Corruption durations so far were a bit of a joke. Would be better to make the bounty hunt timers pretty damn long as soon as the ganker executes their first victim, otherwise it'd be too easy to hide from bounty hunters once they've started pursuing the corruption trail.
As for how many PKs should be happening. Imo <=1% of concurrents should be PKers (i.e. ~100 PKers across the entire map). This would then mean that around 2-3% would be victims. Absolute majority of those victims would come from places with valuable resources/mobs/bosses, so it'd be meaningful PKing.
But, as Crow said, those PKers should only be able to do only a few kills at most, because after those they'll get hit with corruption-based stat dampening and shouldn't be able to kill more. Those few kills would create the 2-3% victims I mentioned, and would also give the PKers a PK count of ~3.
Anything over this PK count should drastically increase the chance of dropping gear and should also give enough corruption to completely disable the PKer's combat ability. In other words, repeat killers wouldn't be able to do more than a single kill within a certain timeframe (balanced during A2).
PK count reduction methods should be expensive as fuck, in terms of both time and resources/money. So anyone who wants to PK more often would have to spend their time reducing their PK count and earning money for that action, which in turn reduces their time PKing others. I'd personally also tie those methods to serving the nodes of the victims.
I personally believe that this kind of system would keep the risk of getting ganked fairly high. Would keep the ability to PK someone when you really need to viable. Would bring node XP to the nodes of the victims. And, depending on how well the Guild/Node war declarations are balanced, would keep the unavoidable owPKing to a relatively low number.
If people see 3% victims as "a murderbox" - I don't really know what to tell them
yea you can get quickly killed if massively lower lvl than the person or if its a group but 75% of people are gonna fight back if its a 1v1 either because they enjoy pvp to an extent or they dont wanna get a full xp debt / lose partial parts of whatever they are farming. since you get more xp debt as green than purple alot will fight back as well.
alot of the major pvp people that run solo or small groups will just not finish you off if you arent fighting back, with HP bars using a segment system its pretty easy to just stop at 25%, no reason to get corrupted unless you know that person has some rare materials or something good.
Alot of the pvp will go in a order of someone attacking and constantly poking someone until they fight back and turn purple and if they dont fight back then they will just stop and move on. yea theres gonna be a % of people that just finish you off for the fun of it though
i imagine for the first couple of weeks Full release theres gonna be more lvling than ganking anyway, itll be the bigger groups fighting each other over spots and then a gank or two to remove people from a hunting ground people are trying control and farm.
Also with everyone being purple in the open seas thats where alot of pvp will happen as well since you get reduced death penalties there as well.
Would still be a better Lovestory than Worst of Warcraft or Twilight to be honest.
It started in WoW,
this annoying, incredible fear of Open World PvP Possibilities ... ...
Well okay for "me" it started there. I didn't witness this in any other MMO, since i never really played another MMO. I played Guildwars 2 for a tiiiiiiiiiiiiny bit, but that got boring fast.
The BH system is still just an idea. The only tool they have is a GPS of red players. It's false to judge the PK system with BH as the starter point.
"The game to make sense?" You mean BH to have purpose?
When the BH system is out for testing we can talk about that.
The game needs to have a low amount of open PvP kills in relation to what many PvP players want just in order for the game to function, but the game also needs enough open world PvP kills without retaliation in order for the Bounty Hunter progression to be valid.
I straight up do not see the scope available for a guild to be based around being bounty hunters. I can be a thing a guild also does, but trying to be a specific bounty hunter guild is a surefire way to end up spending a whole lot of time trying to find a fight.
With the death penalty Ashes is set to have, if it has the same rate of open world PvP as even Archeage (was fairly low), the game will soon be abandond by anyone wanting either progression or economic activity to be the main aspect of their game, leaving only those wanting PvP as the main aspect (Ashes will not attract people wanting anything else as their main activity).
On top of that, because of the design of the game, they need to make sure there is still enough open world PvP to keep those wanting it happy and in the game. So, they need enough PvP to keep PvP'ers happy, enough of that PvP to be against greens to keep bounty hunters happy, but not so much PvP as to drive those wanting economic gameplay to any other games.
I'm not at all saying this is impossible - but I am saying two things.
First, Intrepid have a very tough balancing act to make this work - and failing at it will probably make the game fail.
Second, I doubt even they currently know where the balance point for this is - so we have no real hope of knowing either.
How long it takes to get back down to 0 corruption point is a hard one however i would say 20-30 minutes of pve or what not would be sufficent personaly but im sure more pve orinated player would like that to be bigger but that side of things come down to testing i guess.
im also not against policies that can reduce or greatly corruption points earned by killing players who are not citizen of your node if the mayor happens to decide to go that route, this can help with resource management for example in your node if enemies come in and start clearing/degrading out your resources of your node since thats a thing. i would say 50% reduction option for all nodes and military node has an exclusive policy that reduces it by 80% since there spose to be a bit more pvp orinated node style
note this is coming from a more pvp orinated player but i know there need 2 be a balnce to keep the pve players in the game since they add content for pvp players. I much rather meaning ful strategic pvp over a gank box personaly like deniening neighbouring node resources/locations to help further my node progression, Slowing down a node progression for example so mine can get ahead lvl wise. i dont realy want to be killing citizens of my own node (unless there comeplete a holes)
Agreed. Though it will be interesting how we as a player base actually determine and measure that accurately.
I think this is an important distinction from most OWPvP games - One that people don't get yet, I've seen your guild discords. You will actually want outsiders to grind in your territory because it contributes to your node (and probably economy). If players play completely rationally with a longterm focus (they won't), they would Bounty Hunt within their own vassal networks. To some extent, you will actually want your node network to be seen as the safe haven for PvE because that's how it will grow and maintain size. When in a rival network, they would seek some opportunistic PvP to collect the resources they are after, but won't go around generating unnecessary XP. (But again, this is the more organized and longterm mindset, Joe Knight will just play the way he wants regardless.)
I'll echo that corruption should build exponentially. Killing one player for being in your way during an activity is pretty 'acceptable.' The player specifically hunting other players within a short time frame should see increasing punishment with every kill.
Corruption should also be group-based or (better imo) apply to anyone who attacked the green recently, otherwise corruption simply won't work when people are in groups.
It would be a very boring open-world if I was god mode from players at any point in time.
This is also why i feel some elements are exaggerated with peoples concerns of corruption do to how strong the system is, you most likely won't experience much. PvP will be higher at the start with people trying to gauge the risk vrs reward and then it will slow down once they realize the punishment and the lack of chance to get away from the punishment (ie population density of the game plays a huge role).
You are going to be pvp from guild / node wars more than any corruption system.
There, random green ganking was very rare and infrequent. Common during beta but settled down when multiple guilds had created their position in the world. When it did happen repeatedly, it was usually only done by a rogue individual with no guild ties. These individuals often faced continual retribution from guilds often brutal and they eventually stopped (and learned).
However, there was also planned/strategic green ganking of individuals. This was done to provoke or end guild wars, to claim territory for experience points, deter attendance at castle wars, or to secure raids. Such actions had significant political and guild positioning consequences.
Your experience was influenced heavy by the guild you were in and the position they took in the world. (passive, neutral, aggressive)
If you got camped, you would ask your friends, guilds or even strangers nearby etc to come help and in return sometimes if they didn’t give up after that they would do the same and by the time you realize it, you would have a mini skirmish / mini war on your hands
This made the game random and fun and took leveling or going out into the world more exciting and also you got a break from doing something grindy, eventually it will die down and then people would go back to what they were doing or it kept going and if you yourself were over it, you could just go somewhere else to level
Nowadays, it’s everyone rushing to max level without interruptions as quickly as possible, I don’t envy them because they missed out on some thrilling PvP action back in the day
So many people on these forums trying to take the fun random things out of this game instead of just going with it and seeing the fun side 🤦🏻♂️
U.S. East
you are right, the system isn't meant to protect greens. its for risk and reward.
anyways, its possible that there's more to it to the military nodes and bounty hunter system. being able to detect red players is just one thing out of many. there will probably be other things attached to it that have nothing to do with red players
It should adjust itself based on the value the players are fighting for.
In areas with valuable resources, fighting will be more frequent.
You can always farm naked the lowest tier resources.
Or hire somebody to guard you (pay for protection). Don't be greedy.