Corruption System: Feedback & How it is Abused

The recent changes to the corruption system made it much more punishing. Specifically the Corruption I change that added: You drop 1 to 3 equipped items randomly upon death.

While I agree the corruption system system needs to be harsh, I feel that dropping equipped items for killing a single play is a bit too harsh and that dropping equipped items should start at Corruption II.

Currently Corruption Baiting is very popular among certain guilds. Corruption baiting works like so:

Build a raid/party with intent on PvP. Tell members who are too weak/low level to be effective in a fight to not flag/fight.
These members stack on flagged friendlies so they will die to AoE of the opposing combatants. Thus giving the opposing combatants to last hit them Corruption I.
After, the entire raid, flagged or not, can focus down the corrupted player(s) and loot the bodies, taking gear.

This can only be combated by using ONLY single target abilities/(ranged)auto attacks, but that puts any group not using corruption baiting at a severe disadvantage. The better option is too either also use this tactic or run away.

While you could remove item drops at Corruption I, this doesn't fix the inherit issue, as it only takes you 3 kills to hit Corruption II.

My suggestions to fix this problem are the following:

Have a toggled setting that keep you from hitting Non-Combatants from being hit by you while you are flagged.
Make that if anyone in your party/raid flags, that your entire group/raid is put into a flagged state. (This is already the case if you are a support class, as Bards melody and any Healing from Clerics will flag you).
Add another flagging state which allows the player to hit Non-Combatants & Combatants.
Making it so you cannot un-flag while in combat and a short time after(30s).

Some other more minor things that inflate this issue are the following:

Players who are combatant to you sometimes show up as white named, not purple, even when actively attacking. This causes confusion on who I can and cannot attack.
You can un-flagged mid combat, dropping the crossed swords off your name plate. This makes the issue above even worse. Once the enemy is low and running away they can un-flag making it hard to tell if you can commit to the kill w/o getting corrupted.
Flagging up doesn't change your name to purple until you have attacked, this makes it hard to tell who is flagged, w/o clicking through every player.

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Comments

Bell

I like the idea of having a toggle to solve the problem. So that corruption doesn't get misused.

Rhuric

I do not think flagging up should flag your entire party. The reasons bards and clerics get flagged quickly is because melody is aoe active all the time, and any beneficial ability cast on a flagged person flags you. A Ranger could be flagged just by throwing thorns on a flagged person.

The single simplest solution to corruption baiting would be to make AoE abilities not hit non-flagged people unless they are specifically targeted or struck by a single target skill first. This should include auto-attacks.

I'm fine with corruption 1 causing item loss, there should be penalties and they should be meaningful. Xp debt alone isn't enough, it's easy enough to gank an un-flagged person, then have your buddies kill you to clear out corruption. If the only thing you're risking is XP debt at that point, then there is no true penalty.

greek

Rhuric wrote: »

I do not think flagging up should flag your entire party. The reasons bards and clerics get flagged quickly is because melody is aoe active all the time, and any beneficial ability cast on a flagged person flags you. A Ranger could be flagged just by throwing thorns on a flagged person.

The single simplest solution to corruption baiting would be to make AoE abilities not hit non-flagged people unless they are specifically targeted or struck by a single target skill first. This should include auto-attacks.

I'm fine with corruption 1 causing item loss, there should be penalties and they should be meaningful. Xp debt alone isn't enough, it's easy enough to gank an un-flagged person, then have your buddies kill you to clear out corruption. If the only thing you're risking is XP debt at that point, then there is no true penalty.

I won't die on the hill for this change, and I don't believe corruption should be cleared by guildies/alliance member or PvE deaths. Still can be abused but making it more inconvenient to clear. I also believe higher tiers (3+) of corruption should just delete items, that way there is no chance of recovery.

Onlyblacksmoke

Rhuric wrote: »

I do not think flagging up should flag your entire party. The reasons bards and clerics get flagged quickly is because melody is aoe active all the time, and any beneficial ability cast on a flagged person flags you. A Ranger could be flagged just by throwing thorns on a flagged person.

I agree with you that, if you aren't flagged, your AoE abilities shouldn't affect flagged people (and vice versa). This should work for healing, buff, debuff, and damaging abilities. That said, I *do* think that your raid leader should have the ability to flag your entire group with a separate keybind to their individual flag. This can even come with a "Press Enter" confirmation for people who are scared to get flagged, but this is a pvx game and you shouldn't be in a group if you don't trust your group leader to be an effective pvp shotcaller.

I also think the points @greek made about a 3rd flag state where you can only attack other combatants vs attacking anyone is the most important suggestion on their list. huge upvotes to that!

Catra

I agree! Another game had this type of system it was wonderful attaching image to show it.

Basically if you unchecked any of those ratio's, if you was to go in a flagged state what ever was unchecked you would be attack-able. It made it so if you did AOE your intended targets would be hurt only! No white named character(Civilians in this image.)

Saucisson

greek wrote: »

Flagging up doesn't change your name to purple until you have attacked, this makes it hard to tell who is flagged, w/o clicking through every player.

I think it shouldn't even be visible at all, even by inspecting a player.
Not knowing the intention of a player is a very good design in my opinion.

FIZZ

Rhuric wrote: »

I do not think flagging up should flag your entire party. The reasons bards and clerics get flagged quickly is because melody is aoe active all the time, and any beneficial ability cast on a flagged person flags you. A Ranger could be flagged just by throwing thorns on a flagged person.

The single simplest solution to corruption baiting would be to make AoE abilities not hit non-flagged people unless they are specifically targeted or struck by a single target skill first. This should include auto-attacks.

I'm fine with corruption 1 causing item loss, there should be penalties and they should be meaningful. Xp debt alone isn't enough, it's easy enough to gank an un-flagged person, then have your buddies kill you to clear out corruption. If the only thing you're risking is XP debt at that point, then there is no true penalty.

In regards to being struck by a single target ability/basic attack first. Wouldn’t work for basic attacks(melee) due to cleave. Especially fighters, all they’d have to do is walk in front of an ally being swung at by a fighter.

Nepoke

All around excellent points.

Targetting and toggles
I like @Rhuric 's idea about restricting AoEs and cleaves to only damage a green if it is the active target.

Adding more flag toggle states would work, but additional toggles increase clutter in the UI and should be done only if there are no other solutions. When my group is getting jumped, the last thing I want to think about is juggling my PvP states.

Penalties

greek wrote: »

I also believe higher tiers (3+) of corruption should just delete items, that way there is no chance of recovery.

This is actually one of the best ideas I've heard on how to handle big guilds mitigating the risks of corruption by teamkilling. Other restrictions, like preventing guildies/allies from killing their own reds, can be circumvented with alts or extra accounts.

However, I do think stacking many different types of restrictions together with item destruction is worthwhile, because hopefully at some point exploiting the edge cases will become too tedious for too little value, and players are incentivized to just play "normally".

Mass flagging
I'm still on the fence about mass flagging when it comes to raids and parties.

First, if mass flagging is a decision by the group leader, then it is almost always detrimental to use the feature:

Here Raid 1 has chosen to flag everyone in the party, while Raid 2 only initially flags their initiators(tanks).

If AoEs can hit greens, then Raid 1 risks getting corruption baited as OP has illustrated.
If AoEs can't hit greens, then Raid 1 can only initiate on the least valuable targets, while Raid 2 can pick any moment to dive in and CC, after which the DPS can flag up for a free engage.

So I think in practice manual group flagging would end up rarely used in serious PvP. If so, a big part of PvP becomes microing your flag status and as a design that sounds boring.

Secondly, if parties/raids automatically flag up as soon as one of the players decide to flag up, then that enables bad actors to control the PvP status of their group.

Example: A goblin event is happening and the 40 random lowbies in the area form a raid to clear it. The [Asshats] send an infiltrator to the party, who then proceeds to flag the whole raid as combatants. The [Asshats] then swoop in and lawfully murder everyone.

For emergent socialization (which Intrepid is after), I think we can't have abuses that affect the flag status of others. If everyone needs to be vetted before grouping up, much of the old school mmo vibe of partying with new people is lost.

So automatic mass flagging makes group PvP more intuitive, but also opens up abuse. I don't have an elegant solution here.

Caeryl

For the most part the system in Alpha2 is very much NOT the intended behavior of the system, so detailed critique of it as-is isn't super useful, because none of it other than base function of flag state is staying.

One kill on a green is not intended to regularly drop equipment.

It's not intended that anyone can manually flag or unflag themselves, especially not while actively in combat.

It's not intended that damaging AoE hits greens unless you tick a setting box, or that support AoEs hit purples unless you tick a setting box.

RaspberryHeaven

It's simple, killing characters whose level is significantly lower than yours shouldn't give you corruption

Hamlet

Adding option to choose "i dont want to attack non-combatants" seems like a pretty easy and good solution

novercalis

not a big fan as a bard, getting corrupted because a group started with us. They send 1 player, flag our fighter and because of my melody song, I get auto flagged and nuked.

Barab

Should be all in party or raid flagged if one player is flagged....just too much room for abuse. And I love the gear destroying mechanic over dropping as it is as well abusable.

iCHROMATICi

Corruption baiting is an issue that as a whole will not be healthy for the PVP aspect of this game.

I don't know what the best solution to fixing this is, but like some others have said, the option to "Turn On/Off" being able to target NPC/non-combatant targets seems like a good start to fix this issue. Others games have this feature implemented and it does solve several of these issues. As it currently stands, people are able to greatly inhibit their opponents like Greek stated in that the opposing force essentially pinholes you into utilizing single target abilities only. Then afterwards they reap the rewards of your dropped items without taking on any of the risk.

As for the idea of flagging/un-flagging while in combat, I did not test this, but I definitely think there needs to be some form of cd on unflagging or at least a system where you will be un-flagged after your next death.

Imnotkio

I'll copy the feedback I wrote in my post.

other games have already fixed this issue and it's pretty simple. Just give us more flagging options. We should have at least 3 pvp flags: Offensive, defensive, pacific. In offensive, you would hit everyone including greens. On the defensive you would only hit purple and red players, making so you can pvp against consenting players without the risk of going corrupt from accidentally hitting greens. Pacific would be hit no one. There is also the possibility of splitting the defensive in 2, by adding a flag just to hit red players (so that way you can pvp red without the risk of going purple). An UI element choose display the 3/4 flag options and the one you have selected at the moment should be highlighted. You can see these flagging options properly implemented in past games like Tibia and most recently Ravendawn.

Example from Tibia:

In this example, you have pacific mode (attack no one), defensive mode (translated to ashes system would be attacking only purples and reds), defensive mode 2 (attacking anyone that attacked your party members, even if they are green, and also all purples and reds), offensive mode (attack everyone)

Blip

I see we already want to kill open-world PvP here. You know corruption is buffed for Alpha, right?

greek

Blip wrote: »

I see we already want to kill open-world PvP here. You know corruption is buffed for Alpha, right?

How would this "kill" open world PvP?

Hamlet

I thought of an additional suggestion.

You can flag for PVP anywhere but to unflag you need to be in a city.

You make the choice.to PVP... you are going to pvp

Caeryl

Hamlet wrote: »

I thought of an additional suggestion.

You can flag for PVP anywhere but to unflag you need to be in a city.

You make the choice.to PVP... you are going to pvp

Nah. It's going to be behavior based, aka you're purple when you attack someone and are stuck that way for a short while. No manual unflagging at all.

yianni_LoD

I thought it takes 90s to unflag.

Because we unflagged for quite a bit and let people kill us and they never went red

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