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
So which approach has the higher chance of impacting the amount of PKing and the abuse of said PKing?
We have @iccer as well. Iccer, how much content competition did you experience in AA and how much did people kill each other during that competition if there was any?
And Azherae, I assume you disagree with what I told Noaani, that AA's design had other differences in design that contributed to the fact that his abuse wasn't nearly as prevalent? Cause if more content for people creates more friction, wouldn't that mean that AA should've had more people attempting all kinds of ways to win out over the ones they're in friction with?
Or do you envision a non-pvp kind of friction here?
When NDA drops we'll have concrete testing and info directly from Ashes. And at that point we can only have our own preferences on the design, at which point comparisons wouldn't really matter.
Obviously we'll still have our own preferences and the drama related to them will not go away, but all of us L2 players will be abso-fucking-lutely drowned by everyone else's feedback. There's, like, 6 of us here or smth.
But this then brings up another question. If during testing my preferences for the design don't change, would you be against me voicing my preferences for it, even if they're dumb within the economic design of Ashes?
I'm not sure which assumption you're referring to, and I absolutely prefer to yield to those with the experience, but in this case I should clarify that I got caught up in this because of the terrible way this thread has gone overall.
Neither AA nor L2 has the incentive structures in question.
The question here is 'will being unable to see HP deter people from griefing down players because they don't want to risk getting Corrupted'. As a generality, this answer will almost certainly be no because of the difference in the incentive for attacking players in Ashes and therefore the resultant setup for the attack.
There is nothing about Ashes' design that supports this answer being likely to be yes. Now, I don't even care about the specifics of this, as noted, I already gave an answer to this.
If you are saying that in AA, people did this because they could see HP and wouldn't have done it in the same situations if they were in L2 because they couldn't, that's between you and Noaani I guess.
Obviously if someone thinks they can keep you low and get you killed by mobs without getting Corrupted, because they want your loot, they will try. Will they 'choose not to attack you because they aren't sure if you are low, to avoid getting Corrupted'? I guess the game can be built like that and I just think that would be such a low quality game relative to the goals that I can't imagine it...
This is such a mess... oh well...
You should give whatever your preferences are, I really only start to care when we go through 4 pages of people accusing each other of being fanbois, L2-cloners, PvE Themepark whatevers... because it goes nowhere and imo helps nothing.
But if Ashes changes its economic design to be closer to L2 in the way I've interpreted your wishes, I believe it will lose so much of its specific appeal that it will not stand up to TL. Because then it will be 'Lineage 2 players vs Megaguilds'. Just instinct, though.
As for the AA thing, see what I was telling James above,
Iirc you said in the past that your group would be more than ok to keep PKing people as long as you physically can, simply because the punishments will not outweigh your own enjoyment of the activity. So obviously this avoidance abuse wouldn't be nearly as required for you as it might be for someone who wants to avoid the penalties at all costs.
Losing gear in L2, which sometimes took months to get, due to dying as a PKer was a fairly strong reason to try and avoid getting corruption. So, depending on how long it takes us to get gear in Ashes - that will dictate the impact of corruption penalties on people.
And, if anything, I'd imagine that a way more complicated and intricate economy system would imply that good gear might take even longer to get. And to me that implies that getting corrupted would be highly undesireable. Which then means that attempts at avoiding it would be desired. And that would finally clash with the motivation to kill a person (either for their loot or for the content contest).
To me, this sounds like a near-perfect reason to use the precise abuse us L2 players don't want to be as viable.
I simply won't have 14h to discuss these meaningless topics during that time. I didn't really have that time today either, but mihoyo grind priority is slightly lower than forum grind prio for now, hence the 14h of spamming these threads up.
You are the one who often points out that a PKer with even the slightest amount of prep is not really risking gear because they don't need good gear.
And I therefore see no connection between an intricate economy and good enough gear taking long to get, certainly not gear 'good enough for what we are talking about' because you would generally not do this kind of harrassment in good gear, would you?
No problem.
Correct, but the L2's incentive related to this design is closer and higher than the AA's incentive.
The answer to the question is definitely yes, to which extent it deters is debatable due to Ashes possible higher incentive of(What's that guy packing in his bag?).
For you to get a better picture i will give you the common L2 incentive and the AA incentive(or lack thereof).
Starting with L2 as its the simplest to explain, the incentive for such a strategy would be taking over a high value farming spot you desire without PKing(also an expected Ashes incentive).
Now for AA. the incentive for such a strategy would be..... None?
For you to properly understand it i need to touch on other AA designs that can mostly be separated in 2 points:
Meaningless PK Penalties: Why would you ever bother with such a strategy in a game where Pking Faction enemies players is benefitial and PKing same faction players rewards pathetic penalties?
Homogeneous Dropslists Basically imagine glint in the form of coinpurses in the droplist and almost nothing else, "Taking over a high value farming spot" wasn't really a thing in AA(other than literally the first patch of the game) due to AA's Homogenios Droplists throught vast map regions, so what would you compete for? Higher monster quant spot? Even if it wasn't a thing, just PK whoever and take over or be a lil less efficient with the amount of monster killed in whatever other part of the map region.
I hope this helps you understand why the L2 to AA comparison in this situation is unreasonable.
Aren't we all sinners?
Considering no fast travel, you'd need to have fairly static respawns if you're not just maining a career PK character. And if you ARE using that kind of character with the explicit purpose of trying and get some good high value loot from people - we'd then need to look at the statistics on how many people that are farming that loot would be willing to fight back.
L2's experience definitely wouldn't help there, cause, as I keep being told, player culture has shifted and way fewer people would be willing to just fight back when attacked. If that is the case - yes, career PKers will definitely go around murdering people for their loot in barely any gear.
And then this becomes the issue that you mentioned, where anyone can loot a corpse that was PKed. I'd definitely be all for restricting victim loot to only the PKer (and I believe I stated this in the past discussion of this topic). So if testing shows that even during Alpha no one is willing to fight back, then one of my main pieces of feedback would be a "PKed victim loot should only be pickupable by the killer". Obviously I'd love a deepening of the BH system in relation to that mechanic, but that's a way later piece of feedback.
But outside of career PK chars and kills purely for loot, fights for content definitely happened mostly between players on their mains in their good gear, so removal of contestants would always have a risk of becoming corrupted if said contestant wouldn't budge.
And obviously contests for content come down to whether they're even needed. And, as I see it, those contests can only happen if content is limited enough and valuable enough to fight over. Now, I definitely hope that the contests will mostly happen between guilds at war (or potentially nodes at war), but, as Voeltz above have pointed out (though it's funny that they called out L2 players, when we're literally the ones complaining about the potential abuses
But as you've just pointed out, NiKr, you see my perception moreso as a bias.
All I can ask is this, therefore:
If someone is willing to defend their farming spot at a World Boss to advance their guild, and World Bosses are not PvP zones, for example, so that defense involves going red, what is the difference between that and killing a player for a percentage of a full bag?
In the case of the World Boss you're risking somehow still not being able to kill it, so you end up Red but with no benefit. At least in the case of killing the random people, you know you will only go Red if you get some benefit.
It's incongruous. L2's Corruption system and incentives work together in exactly the way you've explained.
Either way, I'm gonna leave it, my involvement this time was as much a waste of time as the rest of the middle pages and I'm sorry to all for it.
Sometimes not letting your enemy get the boss is as valuable as getting that boss yourself. And considering that bosses (especially big world ones) will be dropping full gear pieces alongside super valuable mats - not letting your enemies get boosted by those items is a much much much bigger boon than any kind of loot that you might get from a killed player.
Like, even if you were to PK your enemy after they successfully farmed the boss (and you magically knew who had ALL the mats on them) - you'd still only get a fraction of the loot w/o the full gear, so even in that situation your perceived reward would not be as big as denial of content in a competition.
Nah, new voices in a prolonged discussion are always nice. And we at least switched away from "L2 is shit - no, wow is shit - no u - no u" to something at least a bit more productive. And that's always a good thing.
Not at all, even if you might consider it a waste of your time, i personally highly appreciate your inputs in most of the conversations, so please, don't be sorry.
Aren't we all sinners?
Well that's back to me then.
If you kill me cause you're defending your spot, all that tells me is that you think this spot is worth defending. You're gonna be here, and you're gonna be accumulating STUFF. Stuff my guys can come take. If you cared enough to defend it you're not gonna be gone with the goods, and the longer you stay there to defend it the more valuable your drops will be when we take them.
Ashes of Creation is huge. Even individual nodes are huge. If people can spread out as much as they're going to be able to, there won't be that much conflict over spots. There's gonna be enough content for everyone. The incentive for conflict in this game mostly isn't taking your spot. It's taking your stuff, and all the time you sank to collect it.
Even if there isn't enough space for everyone, all that "you defending your spot" means is that I can come take your spoils and run, instead of spending all that time out there, vulnerable, to collect it myself.
Your farming time is more valuable than your spot. I'm gonna come steal it from your bags.
Fighting for spots is what's making them valuable to me, because if I manage to defend the spot and get (and in case of Ashes keep) its loot - that loot will be all the more valuable to me.
And if you bring more people to get that location's loot - I'll simply know for sure that it's a juicy spot to grind. I'll get my own people there to farm it even more and we'll have ourselves a fun time killing each other back and forth.
That's the whole soul of owpvp games to me. And, to me, losing mats will be no different from L2's "this player managed to kill you more times than you him, which directly decreased the amount of the location's loot you managed to get within the timeframe of you trying to farm it". And with flagged death penalties reducing the loot in half I wouldn't even lose all that much.
The only problem here is that all the pvers are in no way ready for this kind of gameplay and they'll definitely hate that you can do what you said you'd do. But that just means that they're not the target audience for the game. Or, at least the ones who refuse to seek help for these kinds of situations are.
P.S. I do not post this for self-promotion purpose, even though some of the people who disagree with my comments will immediately start screaming that I do. Your 5 views are obviously very precious, but that's an honor I can do without.
So I've been following the discussion and it's hard to tell if you are where I think you are in your thoughts on this. The primary assumption it seems like you are making MIGHT be that 'content will be fought over in the larger metro areas PRIMARILY, because content is scarce elsewhere'. If this is incorrect, please forgive me, as it is a very long thread and instead consider my own assumptions below.
Here are some assumptions I am making instead.
This is an assumption predicated on just how big the game is purported to be by node number and size of map.
This is an assumption predicated on the fact that other 'node-type' games tend to have equal capacity for content quantity depending on player activity. (e.g. bigger systems in elite dangerous have a mild bias to quantity of content, but not a big enough one to effect where you live. Quantity fluctuates based on random bgs factors and pilot activity on a smaller scale than we discuss with the average Ashes node.)
This is an assumption predicated on the fact that Steven might care about people living in smaller nodes having an equal amount of things to do on a personal level as a game designer.
This is an assumption predicated on the fact that different player types pursue different types of social situations and 'cooperative' social play is something that is more possible in small and medium nodes.
(this last one is possibly the most important assumption out of all of my assumptions)
This is an assumption predicated on the fact that a lack of these opportunities would limit the 'frontier' fantasy from certain types of player expression. To make it clearer why that is, the travel time from one node to another is going to be quite long based on what we know about the speed of travel and map parameters. Having to go from one node to another for content is going to be quite burdensome. If some nodes just have that much more, and more rewarding, content then the frontier players are basically indirectly taxed in a way that will lead to rural areas having basically NO incentive structure to live there. And that tax is in the form of doing ' less interesting things' and generally more predictable things. Part of being on the frontier is for the unexpected to be expected and not having anyone but your self to resolve the unexpected.
Let's say a level 6 node contains 500 consecutive players in it on average, and 100 farming spots worth of high-tier content.
- If a level 4 node contains 100 consecutive players in it on average, and it has 0 farming spots worth of high-tier content, then "content will be fought over primarily in level 6 nodes."
- If a level 4 node contains 100 consecutive players in it on average, and it has 10 farming spots worth of high-tier content, then "content will be fought over primarily in level 6 nodes," as well.
(High-tier by my definition means highly scaled rewards in terms of loot value and XP, not just high level. I expect most of the word to offer some amount of progression for high-level players. The question is the concentration of those areas in nodes of different levels, and the value contained in those areas.)So the scope of where you draw the cutoff line between acceptable and unacceptable concentration of content doesn't really come through in your description.
I expect metros to spawn high/top lvl content in each of its vassal nodes, but that content will still be limited, because there's only so much space in the game, and you still need to have lowbie and midbie content in the game, so that newbies can lvl up w/o issues all over the map.
The limited nature of that content will funnel more and more people towards those locations (the more people lvl up the bigger the contests for each location).
Whichever dungeon gets upgraded by its relation to the metro will only have a limited amount of mobs and bosses of top lvl which drop top mats. I'm sure there'll be pure top lvl dungeons around the metros themselves, but again, those will also be limited by available space.
Yes, the map might be huge, but I personally do not foresee it housing up-to 10k people all farming top lvl content (gatherables included).
If my assumption is proven wrong - great. Barely any pvp will happen, which means that pvers will be happier and the game will be alive for even longer.
And my assumption is also built on the fact that quite a lot of content will be prime-time-centric, so concentration of people around high value content will be even bigger, because everyone will be logging in just for that content.
Now there's definitely a hope that we'll have enough node and guild wars that will be happening at the same time, which will distract quite a lot of players away from other content, which would then free up space for those who might've been losing pvp around that content. But we'll have to see how that part of the game ends up being balanced.
But yeah, Steven's adoration of player friction, to me, dictates that design will push people together. And having limited content is one of the easiest ways of pushing people together.
Right, but the idea is to stop people doing that by making them not feel a need to do it - not to make them not do it because they feel the need, but don't want the punishment.
As we can all see, the thing people are asking for didn't work in L2, so why ask for it in Ashes if we know it doesn't do the thing people are wanting it to do?
Two questions, each should be answered by either a "yes" or a "no".
Did L2 show rival player HP?
Did L2 have the kind of negative behavior we are talking about here in an attempt to keep it out of Ashes?
The answers are:
1. No
2. Yes
What you will try to do now is to make a conclusion saying "Look, Lineage 2 didn't have HP bars visible and it still had issues with griefing! Point proven guys, there is nothing to talk about here!"
Which is obviously not gonna have anything even remotely relevant to the truth.
Lineage 2 system had certain flaws that have been addressed by Intrepid as they refined the system and made several improvements.
However, the fact that HP bars of non-combatants are visible in Ashes creates another opportunity to grief players that basically devalues, if not nullifies the improvements they made.
If this is too difficult for you comprehend and you will keep using manipulative tactics as well, I will be calling you out publicly for doing so in this thread as well.
Think there is probably more value in actual experince than hearsay.
I've played Lineage 2 (L2) for six years from open beta hardcore, then casually for another two years after returning around the 8-9 year mark.
During the early months after beta, I experienced gear loss in various ways:
1. I once accepted a random group invite to venture into a dungeon I hadn’t been to before. The group abandoned me, leaving me to die to mobs. They promptly picked up 50% of my gear, which had taken me a week to obtain.
2. I was PK'd while waiting for the ferry to leave the starter island, losing both armor and a weapon. It took me a few days to re-gear and attempt to leave the island again.
Later there were a few times to lose gear be that through pve/pvp death, with pk count death or being pk`d.
4. At level 40, I lost my leggings to a PK from a high-level guild that had an issue with my small group. We all died, and they took the gear.
5. At level 50, I lost armor to a mob death, gear that had taken 3-4 months to save for. I spent over an hour pleading with the farmer who picked it up to return it.
6. At level 70, while flagged red in PvP, I died and dropped only minor items.
7. Finally, at level 80, after 6-7 PKs, I died to a clan member and exploded like a bomb with all my gear scattered. Luckily, my clan member returned it, but it was a high-trust moment since rebuilding that wealth would’ve taken over a year.
Throughout the game, gear loss was relative to your level and wealth. Given how long and expensive it was to obtain gear, every death carried a calculated risk. Some players even quit after losing their gear.
I remember checking online black market stores back then and calculating my gear's real-world value. Just the bow alone was worth $1,500 at the time – who knows what it would be worth today!
Without a supportive guild, I would imagine if gear was even 10% as difficult to obtain and keep in L2, then the market of players willing to take that risk will be small!
I said:
> L2 system had certain issues
> Intrepid has already addressed them
You: What's out there to discuss? The problems that no longer exist?
Are you like... even okay?
Nope, the point is not to completely stop them as it is unable to stop people from trying to risk it even without HP information, the point is the amount of people willing to do so is diminished unless they would PK anyway(with or without info) but will still try their luck with limited information as a possibility.
Come on Nooani, are you really understanding the main point of the thread?
Aren't we all sinners?