How to properly balance the corruption system

Imnotkio

With all the corruption mechanic discussion and PVP/griefing debacle, I decided to chime in. I've played a total of 4 different MMOs with open-world PVP with a system similar to the corruption system. Some of them worked wonderfully to curb griefing and some of them were either not enough or too punishing encouraging reverse griefing (karma bombing).

Balance

To me, the balance between the game being too heavy on pvp or too heavy on pve depends not only on the level of corruption penalties but also on the death penalties.



If corruption penalties and death penalties are unbalanced, players will resort to griefing. The type of grief depends on the balance. if corruption penalties are too high and death penalties too low (like it is now), the griefing will be mob training, karma bombing, corruption baiting, etc. On the flip side, corruption will not be enough and regular griefing will occur.

Once corruption and death penalties are balanced, you then start thinking about how much pvp you want in your game. Do you want to attack people on sight or do you want players to only attack when they really hate the other player? In my experience, low corruption penalties and low death penalties generate a heavy pvp game, what some ppl would call a gankbox. High corruption and death penalties mean ppl will only engage in PVP if they have a personal stake in the matter.

Once you have a good balance between death and corruption penalties, it's just a matter of increasing and decreasing those together to fine-tune how much pvp you want in the game.

But balance is only responsible for fine-tuning the amount of PVP in a regular scenario. You still need a bunch of other expansions to the system to avoid people exploiting the system.

Necessary fixes

Some of these are already mentioned to be in the works but I'll add them anyway:

1. Combatant status last too little. If you flag combatant, it should have a longer period before you go back to green. I would suggest, from my previous experience with this type of system, 5~10 minutes if you haven't killed a person and 15~20 minutes if you killed someone.

2. Looting a corpse is an action of aggression. It should flag you combatant

3. Red players should be able to fight back. Right now the situation is once you go red, you either die to a friend or try and clean the corruption. But cleaning the corruption is almost impossible, as you are constantly being attacked by other players. This leaves you in a situation where you either fight back and get more corrupt or just accept death. It's a snowball situation that makes corruption penalties way harsher than death penalties and breaks the balance.

4. Corruption increased on a high level on low-level player action. I know this is intended and I'm not sure if it's implemented yet, but since gear right now is almost all your power and you get new gear tiers every 10 levels, you should get corruption increase once you start killing players 5~8+ levels under you.

5. Affiliated players should not be able to kill each other (guildmates, alliance members). Also, add a cooldown period when you leave a guild before you can join another. This should help with the players killing friends to clean the corruption (even though it doesn't stop it completely)

6. Corruption penalties should be shared. If 8 players attacked and killed 1 player, all 8 should get corruption. The responsible for the killing blow should get a bigger value of corruption and the others should get a reduced but still significant corruption value. It should not be divided as it dilutes the corruption. It should be a fixed value independent of how many ppl participated in the kill. This also helps against ppl leaving players with low HP and letting a mob finish off the player.

7. More flagging options. Example from Tibia:



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. A UI element displays the 3 flag options and the one you have selected at the moment should be highlighted.

I think it is important to notice that these types of decisions are made on a case-by-case basis. Therefore, using menu settings to decide these things is NOT the way to go, as it is not a binary static decision. It needs to be UI elements that you can easily swap between either by clicking on them or by keybinding.


The mistake of trying to fix everything pvp related with corruption

In the past weekends after A2 started, corruption has been getting more punishing, as the reports of spawn ganking and new player ganking from pre-A2 tests were going rampant. This is a mistake as the new player experience is a completely different thing from the rest of the game. Tuning corruption based on this early experience will make the rest of the game suffer for it. You can always create alts to annoy players in the starting portals and when you get corrupted delete that alt and make another one.

CORRUPTION SHOULD NOT BE RESPONSIBLE FOR FIXING NEW PLAYER EXPERIENCE ISSUES

On top of that, I don't see why the new player experience needs to involve pvp right from the gate. Give the players a grace period to settle into the world, learn their buttons, and do the tutorial before they are in danger of player interactions. I would suggest a grace period of something like 3 levels or 5 hours (if the player hits level 3, or 5 hours have passed, he is now pvp enabled).

Additionally, other issues like spawn camping need to be addressed. Dying while respawning when your loading screen hasn't even finished yet is bad, regardless if the killer gets corrupted or not. This should not be a thing. Implement safe zones around the respawn shrines so you can at least finish loading the game before dying.

Last but not least, the character should persist in the world until you are out of combat and also while you are purple. You shouldn't be able to alt+f4 in the middle of combat and your char disappears. You shouldn't also be able to alt+f4 while purple and wait the timer out before logging in again.

PresentPotato

Listen take away corruption system completely and make the community self police I.E. Bounty hunters kill red players as a form of justice. there issues fixed. In a game where it's devs want the player to drive everything including economics to taxes to node gov to wars to guilds wars WHY NOT allow players to further drive and dish out justice when its needed. WHY this Dev overreach when you could allow players to help out other like minded players. Take your hands off the PVP v PVE wheel and see if the players will bounty hunt and take care of the quote problem with an outlaw fantasy.

Nukle

Great post, good points all around. I like that you added the idea of more then on/off pvp toggle. I think that's a great idea.

I think a easy fix is maybe a level restriction on ganking loobies. maybe only non-consensual pvp within 5 levels? and maybe that gets disabled after level 10? spitballin here

Nukle

PresentPotato wrote: »

Listen take away corruption system completely and make the community self police I.E. Bounty hunters kill red players as a form of justice. there issues fixed. In a game where it's devs want the player to drive everything including economics to taxes to node gov to wars to guilds wars WHY NOT allow players to further drive and dish out justice when its needed. WHY this Dev overreach when you could allow players to help out other like minded players. Take your hands off the PVP v PVE wheel and see if the players will bounty hunt and take care of the quote problem with an outlaw fantasy.

I would be worried it could be exploited.

PresentPotato

The systems are always able to be exploited. this way the system will adapt and grow by its own player base. ever driven by the guilds and mayors nodes and trade as well as materials. an entire eco system is waiting to be made of bounty hunters and out laws. black listing red players and banished to one node which is governed by outlaw mayor and guilds wishing to live that fantacy.

Texas

I'll wait to hear from kio, but you point to very real problems right now. We are in the "grief fest" portion of the game and my experience was that nearly all low- to mid-level locations had someome trying to grief the majority of the time. Usually trying to mob train 3*'s into groups. If you flagged on them, they simply let you kill them and you were punished way harder than they were.

Imnotkio

Texas wrote: »

I'll wait to hear from kio, but you point to very real problems right now. We are in the "grief fest" portion of the game and my experience was that nearly all low- to mid-level locations had someome trying to grief the majority of the time. Usually trying to mob train 3*'s into groups. If you flagged on them, they simply let you kill them and you were punished way harder than they were.

Yes we are high now in a weird place where corruption is too high, but death penalties are not so low either, so we are in between the pve and grief fest on the compass, where people reverse grief a lot.

Imnotkio

Update on this after P1 ended (see original post for context):

Corruption is a mechanic to mitigate griefing. Right now it is stopping way more than just griefing, including defensive actions like killing the person training mobs on you, or the person that looted your body 2 minutes ago.

1. Issue
Combatant status still lasts too little.

Reasoning
Along the lines of "looting a body is an aggressive action, therefore looting should flag you as combatant", when someone flags as combatant to loot your body, you take 2 minutes to walk from respawn to your death location and the guy that looted you is already green again, attacking that person is not griefing nor initiation of aggressive action. Attacking the person who looted you is a defensive action and you should not have to risk corruption to get your loot back. Having the combatant status last a ridiculously small amount of time leaves no room for the person who died to go back and fight back without risking corruption.

suggestion
If you flag combatant, it should have a longer period before you go back to green. I would suggest, from my previous experience with this type of system, 5~10 minutes if you haven't killed a person and 15~20 minutes if you killed someone. Of course, the flag shouldn't end when the person logs off. Either the flag should persist and continue after logging off and on after a while, or (preferably) the person shouldn't be able to log off while combatant status persists (if he does, his char remains in the world until the combatant status ends).

2. looting making you combatant (FIXED)

3. Red players should be able to fight back. (reasoning remains the same)

4. Corruption increased on a high level on low-level player action. (remains the same, although we know its an intended mechanic)

5. Affiliated players should not be able to kill each other (guildmates, alliance members). Also, add a cooldown period when you leave a guild before you can join another. FIXED (although server resets remove the cooldown period so please fix)

6.[ b]Issue[/b]
Corruption penalties should be shared.

Reasoning

If 1 player kills 1 green player, he gets X corruption. If 8 players get together and kill 1 green player, they get total X corruption. If 40 ppl get together and all go around killing solo players, they can still do it 40 times and be at the same corruption level as 1 person killing another. So now there is less risk of going corrupt as you have safety in numbers, and corruption doesn't increase to make up for that.

Additionally, even with the HP bar workaround currently present, it is still fairly simple to let mobs get the last hit on a person. Mob training and mob killing blows are fairly common and a player who does this shouldn't escape the corruption system.

Suggestion
If 8 players attacked and killed 1 player, all 8 should get corruption. The responsible for the killing blow should get a bigger value of corruption and the others should get a reduced but still significant corruption value. It should not be divided as it dilutes the corruption. It should be a fixed value independent of how many ppl participated in the kill. This also helps against ppl leaving players with low HP and letting a mob finish off the player.

7. Issue
Flagging options are not enough.

Reasoning

Even tho we currently have more options added to the settings menu, to me this is still not enough and done poorly.

I'll give an example of a situation that actually happened to me: I usually leave the "require force flag to hit combatants" off, so I can quickly react to a gank situation in a grinding spot. But war was declared on our guild and we had to quickly move to fight that war. When I got there, there were players from a second guild that wasn't at war with us (guild A was at war with us, but not guild A.2). I had no intention of attacking players of guild A.2, as I would rather they do not participate in the war and if they wanted to attack me they could either also declare war or get corruption. But since I had that option on and they were in the middle, I inevitably flagged when I used AoE abilities. So I kept accidentally flagging until I had to stop in the middle of combat to open my menu and switch settings.

Second example: I enable the "require force flag to hit combatants" for reasons like explained above. And then I am faced with a situation where purple players are ganking me and some of them remain white. So now I have 2 choices: Handicap myself and use single-target only and probably die, or open the menu mid-combat and die and hope to fight the next time.

These types of decisions are made case-by-case basis, and since they are combat settings, there is no way to go into a menu mid-combat to change them. they need to be a quickly accessible setting to change.

Suggestion

See the original post for suggestions on how to implement this properly.

8. spawn camping (FIXED)

9. Alt+f4ing (APPARENTLY FIXED AS I WAS WRITING THIS, TO BE SEEN)

10. Corruption and new player experience (FIXED*)

*"In the past weekends after A2 started, corruption has been getting more punishing, as the reports of spawn ganking and new player ganking from pre-A2 tests were going rampant. This is a mistake as the new player experience is a completely different thing from the rest of the game. Tuning corruption based on this early experience will make the rest of the game suffer for it. You can always create alts to annoy players in the starting portals and when you get corrupted delete that alt and make another one."

While the new player experience was fixed, the corruption penalties are still as harsh or even harsher than when I made the post. And the game suffered for it as I expected. Training mobs became the norm as you couldn't kill the person because of corruption. Karma bombing was the norm. The amount of emergent open-world PVP was severely reduced to a point where most players didn't even engage in it.

Corruption is a system meant to deter griefers. As per wiki:

.The goal of the corruption system is to keep risk alive while significantly curtailing or deterring the ability for players to grief other players.[9][10]
.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.[10] – Steven Sharif
.The open-world PvP flagging system is designed to deter people from griefing other players without limiting opportunities for open conflict.[80][81][8][6]

Open-world PVP has a purpose:

".Contesting open-world dungeons or raids.[8]
.Contesting scarce resources and hunting grounds.[11]

The risk of gaining corruption is expected to deter the vast majority of players from griefing other players but this doesn't mean that PvP won't occur in the open-world.[21][11]
"Just because our flagging system gives corruption to PKers, doesn't mean PvP won't happen. There is plenty of reason for PvP to occur open-world.[11] – Steven Sharif""

Right now, not only corruption is not tuned for that (OW PVP) to happen but is also encouraging the exact behavior it is meant to prevent (griefing). I understand that they overturned the corruption because of Alpha behavior, but it is only making the game worse for it.

Overtuning aside, there is still a design problem.

11. issue
Corruption design discourages not only griefing but any amount of non-consensual pvp.

reasoning
While corruption penalties can be reduced to make initial corruption levels less punishing, you still get corrupted from a single kill. There are plenty of scenarios that make isolated PK incidents not be considered griefing. In Steven's words, the definition of griefing:

"Now the question is, when risk becomes something that doesn't stop other players from impacting your gameplay in a negative and harassing and repetitive manner. The motivation to do that action is less about their personal advancement and more about impacting your gameplay because when they elicit the response of anger or rage from the player, they feel a sense of accomplishment. That in my opinion is what griefing is. It is outside of the expectation of the gameplay behavior that is communicated in the design philosophy." – Steven Sharif

Now, would killing a guy because he is training mobs on your party be considered griefing? Is killing a guy because he mined a copper node and you want that copper griefing? Is griefing when a dominating guild enforces its rules on its region and kills rule breakers? From steven's definition, I wouldn't say so.

If that is not griefing, why are you being punished for isolated PKs?

If you get corrupted from a single kill, then you need to apply an "easy come easy go" design philosophy, making it easy to get corrupted but easy to clean as well (I won't even enter the topic of "easy to get hard to clean" scenario because that is just an unbalanced idea). This creates several issues:

A. Players kill you and clean that corruption before you can return and have a chance to fight back against that player (like the combatant status short-duration design). This way, griefers can actually get away with their killings, while players who are doing so for genuine reasons can be disproportionately punished. It becomes basically "RNG" who gets punished for going corrupt.

B. It becomes really easy for people to karma bomb or reverse grief you if they are 100% certain that if they die to you, you will get corrupt. That way, it's almost always advantageous to let yourself die to get that person corrupt, especially in situations where you don't have a chance and nothing much to lose. I can get into an alt, go train mobs into a party, and I know they won't kill me because they will 100% get corrupted. I can even use this to my favor, by getting my guild mates to sit close to the place and train mobs on my enemies until they get fed up and kill me thinking they can clean the corruption quickly, and having my group gank that group once they kill me and get corrupt. You can say start a guild war but my alt is not on a guild. I could do this without an alt too and temporarily leave the guild.

The certainty of corruption is definitely a tool for toxic behavior in a game designed for emergent OW PvP.

C. Systems like the bounty-hunter become useless. Why do bounty hunters exist if players clean corruption in 5 minutes? Why does bounty-hunter exist if no corrupted player stays corrupted for long?

Especially in a scenario where corrupted players can't fight back. You kill a single person to stop them from training mobs in your party, and now you either die and accept the corrupted death penalties, or you fight back and you get even more corrupted, and eventually die and get even more corrupted death penalties.

Now, I'm not saying no consequences for these isolated PKs. I'm saying we need some leeway before a player is considered corrupt.

Suggestion

I have 2 games, one classic and one more modern, that implemented reasonably successful corruption systems, although flawed in some aspects.:

In Tibia, there were 2 tiers of corruption:

1st tier - You'd get 1st tier corrupted if you killed 3 greens in a day, 5 greens in a week, or 10 greens in a month.
2nd tier - You'd get 2nd tier corrupted if you killed 6 greens in a day, 10 greens in a week, or 20 greens in a month.

Of course, this is a rudimentary system from an older game, but it worked well enough to stop people from karma bombing or reverse griefing, as you didn't know for sure that if you died that person would go corrupt (death penalties were high with exp loss and bag loss). You'd also not know how many deaths you would need to take until that person became corrupted (up to 3) so in normal situations it wasn't worth it to die 3 times to get the person corrupted once, especially since that player would usually be smart and stop killing you if they reach the point of getting corrupted, making you die twice for no benefit.

Another benefit of this system is that players had a limited amount of kills before going corrupt so that they wouldn't waste those kills on random murders. They would use it when it made sense for them and they usually had a reason to spend those kill amounts.

More recently Ravendawn implemented a similar corruption system:

You'd get a set amount of corruption points by killing a green player. Everyone involved in the kill would get points, with the killing blow guy getting more. Level disparities also increased the amount of corruption points you got. You could have a reasonable amount of kills before you started getting corrupted penalties. You could reduce your corruption points by grinding, dying, or killing other corrupted players. The system was punishing enough that griefing was almost inexistent and you could still have open-world PVP fights.

I think the current implementation of corruption points, and long-term blight points is enough to deter griefing. But I believe a "hard to get hard to clean" corruption design is more healthy for the game. Killing green players awards corruption points and blight points, as it is now, but there should be a threshold of points before becoming corrupted.

Let's give an example (Of course the numbers are just for example and they can be tuned as necessary):

A threshold of 1000 corruption points is required before a person is considered corrupted. Each PK kill awards (100*blight_modifier*lvl_disparity_modifier) corruption if you did a killing blow, or [lvl_disparity_modifier*50*(blight_modifier/2)] if you only participated in the kill. The level disparity modifier starts at 1 and increases (1, 1.5, 3, 6, 12, 18) for every 10 levels of disparity (could be more granular, just an example). So if it's you never killed anyone, and you killed a guy your own level, you would get 50 corruption. Killing a guy 30 levels under would get you 300 corruption. Notice that these numbers are first kills, and don't present the blight modifier.

The Blight modifier would work with recency. If you killed one person today, and then 24 hours later you kill another person. You wouldn't get blight. If you killed a person today, and then another in the next 10 minutes, your blight modifier would increase. Basically, your blight number would be dictated on your biggest killing spree in a set amount of time.

In short, the idea is: if you kill a few greens from your level a day, you'd never go corrupt. A person who is engaging in griefing would get corrupted really quickly on account of the blight and level disparity modifiers. The more you kill on a sequence, and the bigger the level disparity, the higher the chances you go corrupt quickly.

This way, with players having more control around how many players they can kill without going corrupt, and giving them some leeway so they can engage in justified murders, you can make corruption much harder to clean, and more punitive, creating room for systems like the bounty hunter and discouraging toxic behavior like reverse griefing and karma bombers who hide behind the certainty of corruption.

The crucial point of this example and this suggestion is the threshold to get corrupted. I strongly suggest a "hard to get hard to clean" design when it comes to corruption and not making players red in the first green player they kill.