Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
Real life got the law though, and will hold the aggressor accountable.
There is a very good chance that if you attack and kill a random player, they drop nothing. If you have no crafting materials or glint on you, you have nothing at all that you can drop. Even if you do drop something, if the attacker isn't set up to specifically carry that type of object, they may well have no option other than to leave it on the ground.
When looking at what happens in other games and trying to compare that to Ashes, you need to look at systems that Ashes is planning on doing differently - in this case it is inventory management.
But considering the corruption system up to a point the farmer will have the upper hand in the fight since the corrupted player will be slightly to highly handicaped. In this case there is easy opportunity to benefit from it.
Besides whether they like to be attacked or not there's no denying the considerable amount of satisfaction of taking down a PK.
To the attacking a PK point, I also disagree that someone should flag for engaging a corrupted player. Globally flagging a player for attacking a PK would legitimize the act of PKing. Only suggesting it feels a bit weird, they are ''outlawed'' so their fate should tend to death until and if they redeem themselves.
Although with the bounty hunting system people actually go out their way to get at them. I don't know that it would be so much significant if those players locally flagged to the PK and not give the corruption if they get killed by the PK.
I personally expect mobs to have same defensive passives, stats, potentially even abilities as players do, so any given player would have builds that would work in the same manner against both/either.
Obviously there's gonna be differences between any given mob or player, but this still doesn't mean that there's pvp builds and pve builds, it simply means that there's different builds to match different situations.
There will be builds better suited to PvE, and builds better suited to PvP.
This is because you use different tactics against each. A plan that works well in PvE will often not work in PvP, and vice versa. Thus, the optimal PvE builds will - at a minimum - work to emphasize the tactics used in PvE, while the optial PvP builds will emphasize PvP tactics.
We can say that we don't know what those builds will be, and we can say we don't know how unoptimized each build will be for the other sphere of combat, but we can absolutely state without any hesitation that there will be builds better suited to PvP, and other builds better suited to PvE.
I'm sure EQ was overdesigned like that, but what about AA? Was it overbalanced the other way or was some gear just optimal for both situations?
It wasn't about gear, it was more about your build.
I wouldnt ask players who dont want to PVP for much input on a PVP system in a PVX game. Players not planning to PVP at all shouldnt be catered to in a game that requires both PVP and PVE participation. That is why this system should ONLY deter griefing. PKing within reason should be a natural part of the game, as it is one of the main Risks for going out into the Open World to do anything. I am not saying that players should get to PK for free and murder unchecked, it should only be limited to reasonable amounts with reasonable times determined by testing. And if you are attacked by someone and you defend yourself, you are no longer PKing, you are PvPing. So that should no longer count as a noncombatant kill seeing as that "noncombatant" is literally initiating a fight.
So its purely a personal preference of yours that PKing should be practically nonexistent, as opposed to design corresponding with what Stevens Design may be? Not to say there is anything wrong with that. I just want to be clear this is just what you prefer as opposed to attempting to claim this goes according to what the game design is actually aiming to achieve according to what we currently know so far.
By going this route, you are making bounty hunting irrelevant, youre erasing a majority of risk when entering the Open world, and making being the player who engages open world PvP extremely disincentivized to do so. I am a diehard PvPer and can tell you that if it is so punishing that only an average of 100ish players would likely ever risk a noncombatant PK at any given time, I would not only avoid initiating PVP completely, but I would actively not retaliate, as to cause corruption, flag as a bounty hunter (Or hit up a guildie who is one or have an alt account already flagged as one so I could find them on the map ASAP) and hunt them down for 4 times the reward every single time. With that strictness, you are making a faux opt-out/opt-in PVP system.
As I've said before, Steven copied this system from L2 one-to-one, with the slight change to decrease what he sees as griefing (i.e repetitive PKing at scale). If he wanted PKers to be able to "defend themselves" - he would've changed the system more.
So no, it's not just my personal preference. It's that my personal preference matches that of Stevens. Except, considering that he said it'd take way longer to clear corruption than it did in L2 - my preference is even laxer on the PKers than what he wants.
Yes, you're thinking about it from the pov of a pvper, while I'm thinking about it from the pov of how the game will be seen by everyone. 100 PKers at any given time is not just "100 dudes killed 100 dudes, and are now just existing in the world". It's "100 dudes killed 100 dudes, then cleared their corruption because they were at
It can be the same dudes that cleared their corruption after the first kill, or it could be their partymates to share the corruption rather than stack it, or it could be someone across the world. But this would still be quite a lot of murdering.
But to make it clear once more, cause I don't remember if I've said this in this thread. PKING IS NOT PVPING. When you PK someone - you're hitting a passive target. There's no "versus" there. All the pvp for all the hardcore pvpers will be happening in nearly a dozen different avenues for proper pvp where both sides are fully aware of it and are prepared for it. This is one of the main reasons why I desperately want more info aboute guild wars, because their balance will be one of the main things to support my suggested corruption balancing.
As for "most people just wouldn't fight back" - that's exactly what I want. That's exactly how those "100 dudes" would come to be. As I said in that quote, I expect majority of PKs to happen around valuable locations, which means that it's either a deep dungeon that takes quite a bit of time/effort to get to and/or a place that has great loot, so the victim would also think twice about dying with green penalties.
But if they do - they'd need to be sure that they can get revenge on the PKer or at the very least that the PKer would get scared by the danger of being Red and leave that valuable location. Except, as I stated in other explanations of my preference for the system, I want first PKs to be cleansable within the rough amount of time required for the victim to return to the same spot. In other words, the PKer wouldn't be as scared about the situation, if they believe that they can cleanse their corruption fast enough.
And if the victim doesn't come back fast enough, and/or if no one else has enough time to catch the PKer - we come to a mirror situation where the initial victim now has to decide whether the location is worth them going corrupt. Of course there's a chance that the PKer believes in their power strongly enough to just fight back, but that's a whole separate discussion.
And if the location IS valuable enough - we have ourselves the second wave of the "PKer dude" that comprises my suggested <=1%.
And if the initial victim simply tries to outfarm the PKer - it might lead to a second count for that PKer, which means a longer timer on the corruption cleansing, at which point there's a much higher chance for BHs to catch him and/or for the victim to get revenge (or for an opportunist to come along).
But if the PKer is now scared enough to earn a new PK count - they gotta either outfarm the victim or spend their time carefully bringing down the victim's hp, to put pressure on them. This would then tie back to my insistence on invisible hp values, because visible ones make this approach dumb fucking easy, and I got no damn clue why Steven decided to go with them. But that is also a separate discussion.
And so, if the PKer is not strong enough of a PvX player (i.e. can't outfarm someone in pve) and is scared of going too deep into Redness - they'll leave the location and the victim will keep farming. And imo that's how it should be, because I want pvxers to be the main playerbase. If someone can only do one thing - they should lose. This also applies to the victim, cause if they lose on the outfarm stage of the interaction - they'd need to either engage in pvp or move on.
Also, if the PKer does only sit there constantly flagged by trying to keep the victim at low hp - the victim should call for help against a harasser and any pvp-enjoyer around can come kick the attacker's ass.
What I've just described is pretty much any given day in L2 in any given semi-valuable location. Except more often than not people would simply fight each other for the spot, rather than toy around with the corruption system. But I've heard waaaaaay too many people claim that everyone's a fucking pussy now and would not fight back. Even your assumption that "it's better to just give them corruption" goes towards supporting that claim.
I hope that losing more loot on green death will push people to fight back and that corruption does enough being balanced towards quick cleansing at < 3 PK count, but, as I said at the start of this comment - Steven has already said that their current plan is to have that cleanse time to be reaaaaaaal fucking long (cause even L2's was quite long, and my suggestion is more based on private server interactions where it was quite faster). So it's Steven that wants the system to be really harsh towards PKers - not me.
With everything you have just said. Why even allow the option to PK in the first place? Everything you are claiming to be so against is completely solved by allowing for players to simply opt-out of ever being attacked in the first place. If its already so punished and abhorrent to ever do such a terrible thing as PKing, why not only allow players to opt-in for PvP, and otherwise not be able to be killed? Everything you are suggesting just screams "The only time a player should be attacked is if they consent to it". Which is a terrible idea. And again, there is literally no point in having bounty hunters with your suggestion since if you only have 3% of players being hunted by 97% or hell even 25% of the ENTIRE server participating in that if we go by amount of military nodes, then only a percentage of a percentage of players participating will ever even be able to participate in that system, and that wouldnt even be consistently participating. And of course I am looking at it as a PvPer, it directly affects PvP, and PKing IS PvP. Its a player killing a player. Sure its one sided and boring, but youre still engaging another player. The only focus should be PKs under the definition of griefing. Which is repetitive with the intention to harass players. If you eliminate all forms of PKing, you are effectively eliminating incentive to EVER engage in PvP (not even PKing) due to the extreme punishments of engaging anyone with the chance of them not fighting back. The way youre proposing to handle it is likely going to result in little to no actual world PVP considering the only benefits you have are some resources, AND the work around of not even actually killing noncombatants, but bringing their HP down to a general threshold safe enough to not accidentally kill them and following them doing so until they leave because they cant fight mobs, or even use train tactics to potentially wipe them with mobs. Too strict of a system is just going to result in non-participation outright, which is bad for many of the systems and designs, and work arounds that could potentially feel even worse than what that system is actually trying to prevent.
This is what the corruption system is for. Steven has indeed voiced his disdain for PKing, but if it wasnt clear to you that he was referring to PKing in relation to his definition of griefing, then I would argue that is clearly what he meant.
The goal of the corruption system is to keep risk alive while significantly curtailing or deterring the ability for players to grief other players.[8][9]
It is my expectation that the system will perform very well in keeping risk alive, but significantly curtailing or deterring the ability for players to grief.[9] – Steven Sharif
I think your issue is not with my suggestion, but with Steven's own design.
p.s. I also just said that I want majority of pvp to happen in wars (mainly guild ones), but there's also another almost dozen ways where it'll happen. And none of that pvp has death penalties, while all of it is in fact opt-in and both sides consenting to it.
If you want to go around PKing people and then freely killing anyone who attacks you for PKing - this is not a game for you.
Stevens own design is to focus griefing, by his own words. By the current design, he has even suggested getting 10 PKs before even getting seriously affected by corruption, though that is just spitballing on his part. Even in that ranger video it suggests they are considering allowing some PKs to happen with little repercussions. You say its harsher than your suggestions yet you are saying you want none of that? Are we even following the same information?
As far as my desire to PK goes, I only wish to have the option to PK outside of Stevens definition of griefing, and solely to deal with reasonable situations such as fighting for content with reasonable risk for the action, not a basically instant death sentence. The extreme punishment should be reserved for outright griefing activities, while PKing a reasonable amount of times within a reasonable amount of time should only be treated as a precursor to that sentence, still punished mind you, but reasonably as opposed to going from 0 to 100.
And as I've been saying, there hasn't been a word about first kill not giving corruption.
There has been this though
A player's corruption score (corruption value) increases with each non-combatant player killed.[8][10][11][12]
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Player_corruption
I can't watch all the references from that list cause my electricity is about to go out, but I'd imagine none of those even imply "your first kill is free".
And as I've said already, even at base lvl AoC's corruption balancing is more punishing than L2's, while what I'm suggesting is slightly less punishing than L2's balancing. This is why I'm saying that Steven's design is way harsher.
You simply want way more PKing than either me or Steven want.
Neither of us can say exaclty how much PKing steven wants. We just know he doesnt want griefing by his own definiton of it, which is EXCESSIVE PKing with intent to harass a player. So he may very well accept a singular PK or 2 or however many he sees fit under certain variables as less punishable.
And yes, corruption increases with each non-combatant kill.
It also says this
Corruption penalties occur as the corruption is gained.
Which could imply miniscule penalties for early corruption vs extreme penalties for higher corruption.
And I never said a first kill shouldnt give corruption, I said it should be less extreme punishment at a low level of corruption, such as 1 or 2 kills. And we have literally just watched a video showing such a case. Its not written in stone of course, but to sit there and act like its meaningless just because you dont agree with it is being disingenuous about the design possibilities.
Maybe that's where the misunderstanding is? I'm talking about death penalties. As long as you have even a single point of corruption - you're Red and you get full Red death penalties.
If you disagree with that position then we simply disagree on how the system should work.
As for the video we saw. Every damn video Steven says "this is not final product, not final pass, not final application, not final visual, not final bugs". We've also seen other videos where some skill wasn't working for some reason or where Steven had to use the admin cheats to enable smth. So no, I will not rely on what we saw there, when I've listened to Steven explain the corruption system for years and nothing has indicated to me that it's in any way different from L2's system, aside from the corruption-based stat dampening which is there EXACTLY to prevent the kind of griefing Steven is talking about.
24:30 until 29:30
Listen to him and tell me where he says "PKing will have small enough of a punishment for people to PK more often". He directly states "PKing will be rare and here's a shitton of reasons why. We will also test the system to fine tune it towards that exact balancing".
Yall PKers really don't listen to Steven, even when there was an entire damn part of the showcase about this shit.
But if they have loot on them? Will dungeons feel like PvE areas?
We will literally have unlimited PKing during both of those "events". And that PKing will be over the locations themselves rather than player loot, which is how it was in L2.
PKing is still not going anywhere, but it will simply be really rare.
Ill comment on this part here.
One would argue thats would be consider risk vs reward you made a choice to optimised your PvE farming and getting more loot with a higher risk of being weaken in being attacked by a player
Where somone who PvE with a spec optimal for PvP is gonna be farming less mobs in the same time but there more capable at fighting back if attacked.
So there a trade off there
if a red player is attacked by a green player then the green player is participating in consensual PvP agaist the red player there for the corruption hit should not occur,
Also some more points
- It is my expectation that the system will perform very well in keeping risk alive, but significantly curtailing or deterring the ability for players to grief.[9] – Steven Sharif
If the corruption system is to harsh then there no risk in open world due to no one will be willing to go red at all. Corruption is there to curtail griefig other players and killing a single person around ur level would not be considered griefing in most people eyes (repetaivly or ganking lowbies however would be)
Now i would consider it griefing if green players can just throw themself repetaivly at a red player dieing over and over compounding the corruption penalty on the player, when the only option is to die or make things worst its a bad system.
So overall the system need a buffer zone where there can be threat of killing somone green to add risk to the world but the buffer cant be to big that it allows for constant ganking before triggering corruption ststus
So it needs to have atleast the ability to kill 1 person (your level or above) without going red to maintain that risk in the world.
Or
If you go corrupt on 1 kill you need the ability to defend yourself without making your corruption penalty worst from greens throwing themselfs at you. Stage 1 corruption shouldnt be to harsh of a penalty and the x4 death penalty should suffice here, with gear drops and stat dampering playing a roll in deeper stages of corruption if that player chooses to kill more greens (Or lowbie) without working off the corruption from the kill first. The system realy comes down to how long it takes to work off per kill and when the more painful death penalty take into account which will probaly be a big part of A2 dialling in those numbers.
The primary means to remove corruption is through death. Multiple deaths may be necessary to remove all corruption.[46][27]
This has been said since 2017. There's no "greens throwing themselves at you". There's only "you're pretty much a mob and don't deserve to defend yourself, so either die at the hands of people or avoid them and kill mobs".
Yes, PKing will be rare. That's the entire point. It'll always be there as a choice, but it's the last resort, because the potential punishment is high.
More and damn more I'm lead to believe that "pvpers" are just PKers and couldn't care less about good pvp where their target wants to fight back.
The risk in event-based pvp will come from losing time and losing out on content (which is ultimately also time). And if those even-based pvp is properly balanced to make up for the rarity of PKing - you'll be losing a tooon of time to it, just as it was the case in L2.
Yall really need to stop thinking about PKing as the only way to pvp.
If such a player is out hunting random mobs, running dungeons and all that kind of stuff - the kind of stuff where they perhaps don't so much mind an interruption - no one will consider it worth it.
As soon as they get to a boss - the kind of content that PvE players actually want - that is when the PvP starts.
If a PvE player is going to be attacked, they would rather it be while they are running content they don't care about than while they are running the content that is the reason they play MMORPG's at all.
I have no issues with death penalties that are 4x loot and the current chance to drop gear increasing as corruption increases. Those can start ASAP. Progressively dampening is fine too.
I'd even consider the utility lock downs of a character fine to activate ASAP as it creates a sense of urgency to deal with and can't be put off. Though I wouldn't mind some of these features also being eased into as more corruption happens. But the ability to remove/trade items from your character should still absolutely be prohibited for obvious reasons. But perhaps with lower corruption players should be able to at least withdraw items from storage, and have limited access to cities, very limited access mind and I would want it tested to make sure it even felt right.
I'd chalk the 60 minute log-out up to wherever the team considers the beginning of actual griefing.
I'd also say punishments should not decrease as you cleanse it in a single instance of corruption. Whatever your top end of corruption for that single instance should remain as such until you cleanse it or die.
My only real concerns are how the system is set up for exponential corruption growth after just a single engagement via simply defending oneself from attacks. I'd also argue that aside from those penalties I mentioned, other progressingly severe penalties such as permanent PK values should have a sort of threshold via reaching a specified number of PKs during any single instance of corruption or even throughout a day being added as a PK value to punish griefing(a spree) specifically as opposed to one off incidents not defined as griefing which wouldnt be added to a Total PK value because they wouldnt be defined as excessive PK griefing.
Also. This system is not Lineage 2, nor do i recall Steven ever saying it will be exactly as such, just inspired by it. That does not mean anything I've been suggesting is off of the table. And I already said that what we saw in the video isn't set in stone, but the mere fact that it exists is cause to consider the direction of design isn't exactly what you think. It's not guaranteed of course, but it's still possible considering what we have seen so far.
As I've been saying, Red can't defend themselves, but I fully support them having a really small amount of corruption on their first 2-3 PKs, that they can clear within just a few minutes (but only on best mobs at their lvl of course). That's the counterbalance to Reds not being able to defend themselves.
And yes, Reds can defend themselves against BHs, but it's on BHs to self-flag themselves to be able to track PKers, so it's still not a defense against a green.
I'm sure other games had smth similar, but I'd be very curious to see the similarities between AoC's system and those other games' systems. And then compare that level of similarity with L2's similarity.
The only change between L2's system and AoC's is the corruption-based stat dampening. That's it. Everything else is the exact same: flagging rules, greens not being CCable, corruption, corruption only going to one person out of a group and only if they made the killing blow, PK count, scaling of corruption gain with subsequent kills due to said PK count, heightened death penalties due to being corrupt, corruption going away by killing mobs and/or dying - literally all of that is 1-to-1 from L2.
"If the corruption system is to harsh"
Replace this with concrete numbers.
I mean the threshold depends from player to player and even on same player it changes over time, as the player gets desensitized if he doesn't lose patience first.
Can be that Steven sold us a dream.
All the while neither side realizes that absolute majority of PKing will be happening during wars, all of which will be infinitely worse than any PKing system out there (which is also literally what Steven has said several times before, and namely in the video I linked).
There will always be abilities that are better for PvE and/or PvP - always.
And with Ashes claiming to be a pvx game, I'd fully expect pve to require the same breadth of skill/gear usage as pvp will.