Exploiting corruption system -Game breaking exploits, NEEDS ADDRESSED

Exploiting corruption system, Ganking players 13 level lower. Than clearing by running off and dying on mobs in a zero traffic area. PVE death need not to clear corruption. Gear needs to go into the Heavens, not drop. I have seen this system exploited this way , now in 2.0,2.5,3.0…. It is either this or people just team up and have friend kill them.

This is only making a Toxic game environment, not one with risk vs reward. Will force causals out of the game. lev 25 people with grey lev 10 gear and ganking lev 12-14.

Another issue, player 1 (lev 12 attacks lev 25, force flaging him/her to defend himself than 3-4 other lev 25 just gank the solo. NOTHING the neutral player can do. (fix attacking player turns blue, neutral player turns blue if he/she attacks back, anyone healing or attacking during fight on players turns red… OR SIMPLE FIX, can only attack players of = level, everyone doing damage or support buffing/healing goes corrupt.

FIX: Only flag vs = level player, corruption happen to ever player that does damage or supports doing damage to said neutral player. Gear goes to heavens , not dropping to be reclaimed by teammate. Corruption clears, when working it off, or dying from player.

Bottom line: Current system is open for mass exploitation, and griefing. No risk for reward,

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Comments

fabulousfei

I think you take the issue in a bad "way" .

People who PK and then die on mob while being way higher level only does it because they reached max Level and don't care about XP anymore.
You need to adress the cause, not the consequenses… And the cause of this is the too quick leveling.
The best solution is to increase a LOT the XP debt upon dying while being corrupted, something like 15% instead of 5%, while ALSO making be able for corrupted character to LOOSE Level and so skills.
Also do you know why people suicide while being corrupted? Its because cleaning corruption IS INSANLY LONG, its a huge mistake that been made by the dev.
By making the corrupted player required to farm for an hour to clean their corruption, they basicaly destroyed that option.
Players rather suicide, loose 5% instanly and then go grind for 20minutes uncorrupted to get those 5% back.

It's about balance, If cleaning your corruption would "only" require the player to grind for 10-15mins, people wouldn't suicide, they would actually hunt to clean themeselves, and THEN, and only then, the whole hunt for corrupted player would work, and corripted players would take that "risk".

Lastly what you complain about is a mostly a Alpha symptom, because there is no geopolitics and people are playing like idiot to kill time.
It's a multi factor issue(too fast leveling, too long corruption cleaning), and your solution is way too drastic…

Gardosien

Negative, the same issue will be in live is system is in place. Nothing stops me from making a lev 11 ranger, force flagging a lev 25 crate carrier , while my 2 -3 buddies stand their to take his shit or kill him if he flags up. IF he doesn't flag I just kill his mule , go corrupt rinse and repeat. Fast to lev a toon to lev 11 than farm the gold I will make via exploiting the system. OR is this working as intended, just open world free for all pvp, vs this BS imo..

PS : I sat in town the other day with a lev 11 range and was sniping mules, with zero guard aggro….. Working as intended?

Foossa

I also agree there is an issue with how corrupt works and love the idea of having to work it off. You should not have a simple reset as you mentioned.

XP debt from dying at higher levels cause a decent amount of kills. Why can’t corruption work the same, make it so the culprits have to work off the corruption, make it meaningful and prevent it being “death” related and more task drive. It A) ensures time/investment for the server and mode to react to foul play B) guilds/friends have to protect that corrupt player if there is malice- Make it so hitting a corrupt player does not flag you. Now there is choice for the price of helping a corrupt friend, do I risk becoming corrupted to protect corruption? That is now intentional.

Lastly, you pick up a crate that isn’t your own, you flag indefinitely while holding and 5 min after, not this Garbo 2 min. You signed up for it, you know what you did. It also provides a new system of honorable pvp where people can go and engage with those that are choosing it.

Mechanics like this would help the community feel better about the game guiding towards friction, for the right reasons.

warrenashes

good thing you're not a dev. If you want the game to be better I suggest you stop making suggestions.

truimagz

The worst thing is coming back to your corpse being looted and knowing if you fight the guy he's going to run away and a 25 will come upon you shortly.

jhaerik

Just make it open PVP and it'll sort itself out entirely. The corruption system adds nothing but abuse potential. Just let people who want to pvp, pvp.

Ludullu

https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/comment/514141#Comment_514141

In other words "just let max lvl people murder LITERALLY FUCKING EVERYONE THEY WANT". Yeah, that'll definitely be good for the game, for sure.

jhaerik

https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/comment/514147#Comment_514147

I mean thats exactly how nearly every multiplayer game ever made has been lol. And you know.. the point of guilds and cities.

I don't know why people these days are so allergic to PvP. This game barely has PvE, it needs "something" for an end game. Considering it has an entire city v city concept you'd think that would be PvP. Otherwise people just hit level cap, get bored, and quit. I mean hell the only real I play MMOs is to PvP. PvM gets old real fast at level cap unless there are very solid boss mechanics. This game isn't going to have that, let's be real. The pve side of this game is just "hit buttons as they light up, occasionally roll."

Like what's even the point to all the crafting if you aren't going to fight other players?

Ludullu

https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/comment/514150#Comment_514150

Yes, shitty games that die insanely quick let their max lvl players do some seal clubbing until said death happens. Amazing and totally logical design, sure. I'd prefer if Ashes wasn't as dumb as that.

kadimir

https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/comment/514141#Comment_514141

I agree, the systems only punish players who are trying to be reasonable. The people bored at cap will get around and abuse every system if there is one.

Ideally the only system I'd have is this: if you kill a low level player you get a debuff. if you kill more low level players you get a ramping debuff that lowers your damage and max hp by a %. eventually by the time you've killed 20 players you'll be so harmless and squishy that they can kill you back.

this would not only be funny to watch, but also make it very hard for people to abuse it in pvp(i.e. throwing low levels at group pvp to cause them to get flag/corruption)

On a side note, I'm not sure how this is even possible, but I was fighting a guy who did flag back - and he unflagged and started running away so his purple wore off. In my opinion once you're in combat you shouldn't be able to unflag. as a result right before he died he went white and I got picked off by a random max level.

jhaerik

https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/comment/514161#Comment_514161

Ever considered Roblox?

Did you know chess is PvP? Albion Online, going strong for 7+ years. PvP. The 4th Coming lasted for around a decade as Full PvP. Then let's look at every other genre. League of Legend? Yow know the game with over 100m players? PvP. Every Shooting game? PvP. So you know your CoD's, or Battlefilds, Fortnite, Overwatch, etc. War Thunder/World of Tanks? PvP. Rocket League?

If anything PvP players make up the majority of online gaming. It's just that our games get ruined by whiney little care bears in like two genres of games. Those people would literal just be better off playing Animal crossing or the Sims or something.

Even though it's being advertised as "PvX" there is next to zero PvP in this game. Compare it to something like DAoC where there are titles for killing thousands of people, and an entire PvP progression system, this game has nothing.

Ludullu

https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/comment/514178#Comment_514178

Majority of the things you listed literally have a ranking system that prevents "max lvl players seal clubbing newbies". Yes, sure, there's alts and boosting, but those are usually against the rules. And albion has fully safe areas where you can farm up and learn the game w/o people murdering you over and over again. Never heard of 4th Coming, so can't comment on that one.

My issue is not with pvp, it's with newbies being unable to do anything, because max lvl people are bored out of their minds and the in-game systems do nothing to prevent the newbie abuse.

jhaerik

https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/comment/514178#Comment_514178

https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/comment/514180#Comment_514180

Where one max level player exists, so does another. Some people actually enjoy just running around killing gankers you know. It's a self policing system. It's much like WoW PvP servers back in the day. Whenever someone started ganking lowbies given 10-15m a bunch of people would show up to gank the ganker.

And while yes those games do have anti abuse systems, those systems frankly never actually work, and thus get abused. Everyone I know has multiple accounts for those type of games lol. My GC buddy on RL has like 7 accounts lol. (though to be fair he does it to pay with friends of various skill levels. And yes one of those might be reserved for my Plat 2 ass :P) Player policing works fine frankly. Even things like making the starting areas PvP free just leads to abuse cases like people camping groups just inside the safe border, where they themselves aren't attackable and operating out of it to gank.

It's a fairly big world, that's only going to get bigger. If the action is too hot somewhere… move. It's not like there are required quests.(I'd argue they need to allow artisan promotions in the towns though.)

Also there just isn't anything wrong with ganking from an enjoyment standpoint. Sometimes entire battles in these style of games can start off due to two people arguing over something and logging an alt, IF it's allowed to happen. It's that natural self producing content that makes it fee like you're playing a game with other humans, and not just spamming 1-8 against the same NPC 7,100 times.

kadimir

I posted this somewhere else too, but new jank corruption explot I experienced was fighting someone - good fight. I win, then they bring friends, I lose… then when I come back they are back alone - except they stripped their gear so you kill them nearly instantly and go red. I assume this is much worse at 25 with good gear than lvl 13 in whites.

Ludullu

https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/comment/514181#Comment_514181

Yeah, this has been working amazingly for Ashes 🤣So amazingly that dozens of posts have been created complaining that everyone griefs, yet somehow no one is stopping them. There's always way fewer white knights than griefers.

https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/comment/514188#Comment_514188

Yeah, this kinda thing was used in BDO for the same reason afaik. Though this method only works if you force attack your target with full power w/o stopping. Or, of course, if the game is still such fucking trash that you can oneshot a person from full hp.

Kallysha

Yes the actual state how corruption is working is NOT really working that well… been known

Which i find might be due to the military settlement aka bounty system not being around when it should by now (more and more feels like a priority) and well the proper corruption system in practice. Why cant corruption be based on level and by that i mean, making extra punishing for max level killing under levels and less when both around same level. Those exploiting and using under level/gearless to go corrupted (and have a buddy near by…) make it so the probability of dropping anything in that scenario, very low ( under level corrupted ~ lower probability of significant loot/ upper level but gearless corrupted ~ the extra punishment applies, which means gear in their inventory still goes and debuff/dampening not depending on gear stats).

The max level individuals griefing (by pulling a bunch of mobs and purposely/intently provoke the wipe of players trying to level up) mainly happening in common/popular pois, (a way to recognize/i dont know) the leash of agro still attached to him, so when he loots the piles of ashes there be an high chance of going corrupted instead of just flagged (lets face it the odds are not on favor of those under level to kill a max level if flagged), if the corrupted individual is killed in those zones, make it so the recovering of their own stuff be drastically lower. Or actually even better just give people more interesting ways to level up instead, to avoid such issues.

More importantly bots and hackers, why isnt there a report option in game (similar to /bug with screenshot) for when people botting or hacking, a way to notify the devs, which then i would really love if they would just auto corrupt those doing it so (and eventually getting them killed by the guards near by or players/bounty hunters).

Those avoiding pvp at all costs, will exploit by having under level alts, for that i feel access to a lot of stuff should only be available at certain levels/or max level.

truenoir

I don't think the pvp system is exactly bad I think it probably just needs to be tweaked. If you look at older games for example like conquer online you would get pk points 5 per kill if you hit 50 you would go red named which would have a 10% chance to drop equipped gear and you would drop inventory the game had revive killing using a water taoist so there was some risk but it didn't stop people from killing you would lose points at a rate of 5 point per minute of playing if you hit 100 points then your name would go black and you had a high chance of losing most of your gear like a loot piñata both equip and inventory and be sent to jail where you could mine to complete a quest to slowly lower points as well as wait for the normal decrease. Of course it didn't stop people from making characters and killing till they had 9999 pk points and then being stuck in jail for months at a time or just deleting the character and remaking it but the jail system did keep some people reasonable and you had your average white knights willing to protect others. The bounty system was useless in that game because you could just have a friend kill you and claim the bounty. The same thing would likely happen in ashes too if a bounty system was added unless its done right.

If we use archeage as an example since its one steven played it did have the jail system and the pk karma points too but you could escape from jail even tho it was a pain since you where limited without skills in the jail area. Not much of a punishment didn't really stop people from ganking and griefing and as we know archeage eventually changed the pvp why because people cried enough to make it changed. Not to mention some of us like my guild used to block trade routes with tractors and kill people who would get stuck doing trade pack runs and that's when they took away collision in the game and started to create the peace time because people were tired of being killed during constant wartime.

So keeping that in mind we don't need to scrap pvp in ashes we need to just find a proper balance to the misaligned features of pvp.

The fact that punishment is only given to the corrupted player and not the alts that baited is basically an abuse of the system. You could effectively farm naked which when they kill you instantly would make them corrupted which really isn't a good method. Conquer Online we used to use a bunch of low level characters when trying to punish pkers by having them kill to many and killing them and sending them to jail but that in itself was a grieving the pker tactic not really healthy for the game.

Some things that can be done to try to fix it would be like:

Killing someone 10+ levels below you → massive corruption

Killing someone who recently attacked you → little or no corruption

Killing someone who is repeatedly griefing you → reduced corruption

Killing someone in a contested resource zone → reduced corruption

Add diminishing returns for repeat harassment

If a player kills the same person repeatedly within a short window

corruption increases exponentially

the victim gets temporary immunity or a “shield timer”

the attacker gets flagged as a “stalker” and can also be tied into a global bounty system which lets everyone on the server there's a wanted bounty killing in a specific location. Some drops or money lost during pking event can be added to a global bounty system as a reward in case like this providing incentives for people willing to go seek out and kill the bounty target. That would help kill the corpse camping or area camping problem.

Fair fights should also be fixed in terms of incentives

Killing someone within ±5 levels → honor points (or other valid rewards)

Killing someone who is corrupted → bonus rewards (bounty system as well is a good option)

Killing someone in a contested zone → resource multipliers

How would a bounty system work?

Bounties need to be placed automatically to work this means some of the lost glint or money lost during a pk or materials lost during it would have to go into a bounty pot and it would grow each time a person killed someone so that the reward would grow.

When a player:
• kills lowbies
• kills the same person repeatedly
• kills non‑combatants
• griefs caravans with alts
• abuses corruption loopholes
They automatically get a bounty.
This prevents abuse and drama. By also having an server wide announcement the bounty will have a more difficult time escaping of course too for this system to work corruption cannot be removed easily it needs to be a punishment this is why pk points in games worked well because they would accumulate even if debuffs didn't get applied to the persons damage the fact they couldn't simply remove the points made people think about whether they wanted to pk someone is the risk worth the reward and if so when do i stop because its too much risk.

Bounty's should also have a state that lets people know they are a bounty whether it be something like red or black name or aura or more then one indicator and everyone should be able to kill these bounties without accumulation of corruption or points to claim the bounty. That would create a proper predator / prey loop.

Some rewards outside of gold could also be

• cosmetic titles

• reputation for towns

• special vendors

• unique mounts

• PvP gear tokens

• Pvp oriented cosmetics

This makes bounty hunter a career path in game and gives incentives outside of just monetary rewards for people to seek out and kill bounties.

Stormgard88

I was thinking that some change could improve this mechanic for everyone involved. First, change what corruption does at the basic level. For a person who is grinding pve mobs and keeps dying because they are too weak, a death penalty involving XP loss is a fair penalty to get people to reconsider their current strategy. That shouldn't be the case for PvP. Instead, I would suggest a mechanic that more closely represents a period of being "wanted". For example, say Rando level 21 guy sees a level 14 in a good hunting spot, farming up some high rarity pelts. This is that AoC moment where a decision has to be made. Rando 21 likes some PvP, an decides to see what this 14 has on him. He attacks, makes quick work of his foe, and gets himself some valuable materials.

This is where the new corruption should appear. For attacking a player who wasn't flagged, he gets the corruption debuff, which has a base time of say 5 minutes, + an additional minute for each level higher than the victim. In this case, 12 minutes. This debuff doesn't affect damage, or stats. What it does is make whatever you looted from your opponent untradeable and unable to be dropped for the duration. It also sends a system message to any player who is currently "queued" as a bounty hunter giving the corrupted players name, level, time that the bounty will last, and location. Now you have some really interesting possibilities… That player might call on his guild to help protect him. The victim may very well be doing the same, but also anyone who was interested in bounty hunting is likely on the way as well, and almost certainly they have others competing to get there first.

This turns what is currently some serious, cowardly and borderline cheating behavior and gives it the possibility of turning into a seriously epic battle that forms a gameplay loop that could make for some of the moments that the Devs intended. Beyond that, it has the makings of some really cool interactions between player, as the successful bounty hunter could return the stolen goods. (Or Not) It isn't perfect, but it is the direction I would like to see this issue go.

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