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Alpha Two testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about Phase II and Phase III testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Make PvP Viable
davenb
Member, Alpha Two
Starting from P2 we mostly had PvP in form of caravans PvP to fight over Gold basically, which was fine although from someone who played AA I still wish they would just copy paste that system, currently with flagging on a caravan event let alone 10 is just way worse than force flagging and ganking those caravans esp when you summon your own caravan in order to claim the goods it becomes very messy with people flagging wrong and be in 15 events which some you might be attacker and defender, I honestly don't see the point of an extra system rather then just force flagging and killing it. While you will go corrupt for it, which is the next problem. (not even considering outsiders or people flagging your side in order to crowbar the goods so no one can have it, like wtf is that?)
In this game when going corrupt you will lose your gear and eventually this will be regulated with the Blight system where you can kill some people before losing your gear which will always be the cutoff point. As soon you risk losing your gear you cannot kill someone anymore, you just wont and this is not a good thing. Going back to AA where you would face jail time aka real time you wont be able to play which people would mind less than losing their gear however you faced punishment so people would't go out just killing people for no reason. In addition you faced a jury which was just a bonus to get some player interaction where you could slightly rp and or decide the verdict of people which some had good or bad reputation, just a bonus addition towards the jail system. I rather sit in jail for 2 hours and do manual labour task then losing an item which i farmed for (lets be real, couple days) while it does desensitise to just randomly murder people.
Going back to caravans you also have no real downside to attack someones caravan which would be the case if you just need to force flag. I don't know about you guys but in P2 we murdered so many caravans Steven didn't even showed us the statistics in EU, there was no reason not to and I think that's lame, there should be some "risk and reward" to it. There was also big problem with caravans where a lot of battles became "throw your body against it " battles. With so many embersprings around you could just respawn with spawn protection and go to the caravan and hit it til it was dead (which is significantly harder now in P2.5 tbf). Next point would be embersprings and respawn time, in current game I do think there are too many embersprings which makes killing someone less impactful, when fighting someone in lets say in Jundrak over the hawk bow or daggers where you always could be back than less than 5 minutes (daggers even 1 Minute) that also goes for every POI or almost everywhere developed zone in the game which I saw mainly in P2 due to caravan pvp which happened everywhere.
Going to P2.5 where gold doesn't matter due to no goldsinks and broken economy you fight over named mobs which you cant because how the corruption system works, so you have to dps race which is just lame. In Jundrak til recently we could do that which actually was pretty fun, we fought over the named mobs in order to obtain the kill and hopefully the loot (which made the tedious grind at least fun), which was a good thing you fought over a limited resource which is what Steven wants (at least he said that) and a lot of the core Playerbase. I'm not advocating to make everything lawless or something but pvping should be viable, be it some lawless POI or some lawless zones with good resources or make a viable corruption system because the risk of losing your gear is not viable and never will be.
Right now the pvp system is inferior across the board compared what we had in AA and without some major changes I don't see it being better in the future
In this game when going corrupt you will lose your gear and eventually this will be regulated with the Blight system where you can kill some people before losing your gear which will always be the cutoff point. As soon you risk losing your gear you cannot kill someone anymore, you just wont and this is not a good thing. Going back to AA where you would face jail time aka real time you wont be able to play which people would mind less than losing their gear however you faced punishment so people would't go out just killing people for no reason. In addition you faced a jury which was just a bonus to get some player interaction where you could slightly rp and or decide the verdict of people which some had good or bad reputation, just a bonus addition towards the jail system. I rather sit in jail for 2 hours and do manual labour task then losing an item which i farmed for (lets be real, couple days) while it does desensitise to just randomly murder people.
Going back to caravans you also have no real downside to attack someones caravan which would be the case if you just need to force flag. I don't know about you guys but in P2 we murdered so many caravans Steven didn't even showed us the statistics in EU, there was no reason not to and I think that's lame, there should be some "risk and reward" to it. There was also big problem with caravans where a lot of battles became "throw your body against it " battles. With so many embersprings around you could just respawn with spawn protection and go to the caravan and hit it til it was dead (which is significantly harder now in P2.5 tbf). Next point would be embersprings and respawn time, in current game I do think there are too many embersprings which makes killing someone less impactful, when fighting someone in lets say in Jundrak over the hawk bow or daggers where you always could be back than less than 5 minutes (daggers even 1 Minute) that also goes for every POI or almost everywhere developed zone in the game which I saw mainly in P2 due to caravan pvp which happened everywhere.
Going to P2.5 where gold doesn't matter due to no goldsinks and broken economy you fight over named mobs which you cant because how the corruption system works, so you have to dps race which is just lame. In Jundrak til recently we could do that which actually was pretty fun, we fought over the named mobs in order to obtain the kill and hopefully the loot (which made the tedious grind at least fun), which was a good thing you fought over a limited resource which is what Steven wants (at least he said that) and a lot of the core Playerbase. I'm not advocating to make everything lawless or something but pvping should be viable, be it some lawless POI or some lawless zones with good resources or make a viable corruption system because the risk of losing your gear is not viable and never will be.
Right now the pvp system is inferior across the board compared what we had in AA and without some major changes I don't see it being better in the future
2
Comments
I don't think that would be the greatest solution it should be tied to some POI or something like you need a reason to be in that zone. As I understand it Steven dont want typical high level zones where you could pvp like in WoW for example. I can say Jundrak was great we had lots of good Named Mobs we could fight over which made the incredibly tedious farm enjoyable
I think keeping it static will just be boring after a while, having the lawless zones rising and fall with the Nodes seems more fun. It could be a reason a Node is built or destroyed, leading to even more PvP.
It isn't that dissimilar to Archeage - the main difference being that Archeage had a penalty of downtime, while Ashes has a penalty of active time.
And its worse, which it shouldt be, it should be a better system
Blown past falling sands…
It isn't worse.
The default way to deal with being in prison in Archeage was to alt tab into another game client running your second account. It was a consequence you could literally just ignore.
Any consequence you can just ignore isn't a consequence at all.
With Ashes, the consequence you have is something you have to actively deal with.
Both this comment and the desire to have an open PvP area just make me think you only want consequence free PvP - which is not what Ashes is about.
Edit to add; even with all of that said, there were no parts of the game world in Archeage where you were exempt from this penalty - and there were parts of the game world where you were unable to PvP (mostly).
Im sorry but if you think that you haven't read that right and saying it wasnt a consequence because you could on a second account is just flawed logic, you could also say you can have second account just following you and loot you if you go corrupt. same logic
In Archeage, your "consequence" was not being able to be productive on that account for a period of time. Being productive on a different account is what many did instead, but wasn't the only thing you could do. Because you were perfectly safe in prison, you could do literally anything that wasn't using that account. Depending on what it was you did, sometimes the "trial" would be longer than the sentence. Sometimes you didn't even have time to go to the bathroom before you were free again.
The only time it was ever an actual consequence was if that account happened to be where your guild had its best ship, and an ocean based event was due.
Any other situation and the whole thing was a non-event. It was a joke, a meme.
Running around with a second character following you in a game like Ashes or Archeage puts you at a constant disadvantage. PvP multiboxing isn't a thing, for a reason. Multiboxed pack runs in Archeage stayed in safe zones for a reason.
Essentially, you are equating a "consequence" that players used to joke about to putting yourself at a permanent disadvantage.
As I said, it wasn't good because it didn't require you to do anything. The fact that a second account was viable wasn't the point - the point was that the penalty was to do nothing while logged on.
You *could* play on a second account. You *could* go and make dinner. You *could* just shit talk in chat. You *could* just go to the bathroom and probably be out by the time you're back.
That is why it isn't a good design. It requires nothing from you at all.
Ashes consequence requires you to be active. You can't just sit still and have have it go away. That is the point of the basic design of corruption - you HAVE to deal with it in some way.
Asking for a way to still engage in open world PvP but without that need to deal with corruption literally is just wanting to avoid consequences.
It goes against what Ashes is.
Blown past falling sands…
There's supposedly some islands in the tropics that are still lawless. Yet people complain that it's too far and there's no one to pvp there, because no one comes there.
This directly means that the "pvpers" just want to gank those who're gathering something (as you yourself say here) or farming mobs. This means that any pvp-avoidant player will either be forced to not go to lawless zones at all, or will suffer for it if they do, because there'll be gankers there more often than not.
As for the rewards of the zone, Steven's own favorite mechanic of risk/reward pretty much dictates that the reward gotta be, at least, high, because the risk of death is very high. So now all those pvp-avoidant players are not only missing out on just content, but also on potentially best content in the game.
And as I said, when lawless zones are the easiest way to create that risk/reward situation - why would devs spend way more time on more complex systems like proper corruption and war balancing. To me, open seas already come off as "the lazy way to design ship battles", because it's obviously hard to figure out how you'd apply the corruption system to a mechanic that's meant to unify groups of people into a single entity of the ship (w/o making the entire system SoT-like, which is its own pain in the ass).
But I'm somewhat fine with that, exactly because I understand that difficulty. But on the ground we literally have several systems that can create a range risk/reward equations - all of which are much better than a dumb "if you're here - you're a ffa target".
IMO the developers could learn something from Shapez 2. While it is a factory game, it has a feature where it scales really well. You build your machine on a platform to perform your basic task, but then before long you are building platform sized machines to perform that same task at a larger scale.
For corruption, this means that when you join a ship, you become a part of that larger platform. Corruption happens at the platform level, not the individual level. Make it so ships can't attack individual players in the water (you need to leave your platform in order to engage on the individual scale), and players can't attack ships unless they are a part of that platform.
Then you create a boarding system (and a means of defending against it) that opens up PvP at an individual scale within the platform, and you have your system for naval corruption.
Though I'd love if this became a post-release promise, cause it could be a great update to the seafaring mechanic.
They said that there is no reason to assume this whole system would be harder to implement than creating a part of the world that is exempt from a system like corruption.
ofc it does? it requires you to spend time that you can not play like what
It requires your character be in the games prison, but that doesn't place any requirement on *YOU*. You have literally millions of options as to what you can do with your time while that character is sitting in that prison, literally anything at all in the entire world other than playing that character.
Once again, as I said at the start, if a consequence is something you can safely just walk away from, it isn't a consequence.
Because you can do literally anything else in the world.
In order for it to be a consequence - as I have said a number of times - it needs to be using up your time, as a player. Your account being tied up in this does not mean your time needs to be held up in it.
I spent years playing Archeage. I was a pirate for a good amount of that. I had probably 100 max sentences (48 minutes iirc) in that time - not once did I spend my time as a player in prison.
I didn't play AA, but from what I've heard of that system - it's shit.
I didn't realize you were still arguing this point.
You can say "but it is a consequence" all you like, doesn't mean you are correct. If it i something that both players and Trion staff would joke about, you can't really call it a consequence. Even if you could, it isn't really relavent to your point at all.
On top of that, Intrepid are after consequences to actions that are commensurate with each other. Steven has already turned down the notion of the consequences of gaining corruption being anything you can deal with while afk by specifically stating that was a reason he didn't want to have corruption diminish over time. The comments on this were made specifically with Archeage and it's prison as a frame of reference
He specifically players to have to deal first hand with consequences of non-objective based PvP (ie, not caravans, sieges, wars or what ever they end up doing for battlegrounds). Adding parts of the world that are free from that but that do not have those clear objectives goes directly in the face of Stevens clear and often stated goals for PvP in this game.
So, you only gain corruption if the player you are attaking doesn't fight back. Doing that multiple times in a row is not PvP, it is being a murderhobo.
Intrepid have said they do not really want murderhobo gameplay to be a part of Ashes. They aren't going to stop you from doing it, but they want it to be punishing.
What this means is that you saying that you don't like corruption because it prevents you from engaging murderhobo gameplay can basically be restated as you not liking corruption because it is doing EXACTLY what it i intended to do.
I feel there is a need to break this down.
So, you are in a situation where you wish to contest a mob/zone/resource, but not only are you not willing to gain corruption in return for that mob/zone/resource, but your opponent isn't even willing to fight over said mob/zone/resource.
I think the problem here is that you are wanting to fight over things that are not worth fighting over.