Serious concern/question about being a bad guy

*Since this thread is getting more attention and people know me from other games and are now wanting to join in the conversation then I will amend my opener here but still keep the original text for posterity sake as you read and catch up.

This thread wants to focus on in-game mechanics that already exist that will allow for good guys to choose to partake in a risk/reward situation and those bad guys that are the potential punishment waiting for them. This game offers much potential for discussion and that is all we want is an open discussion for ways to be bad, and no this thread is not promoting the killing of unwilling participants. Our version of pvp is the literal definition of player vs player on a more small scale version outside from guild/city raids. We are discussing a way for good guy players to seek risk and how bad guy players can be the counterpart*

I want to start this off by saying that I understand how taboo pvp is to a large portion of players. Most people want great story arc progression and maybe others are interested in pvp just enough for the rewards, achievements, gear etc. I would like to present another type of player, not necessarily a roleplay type person but a person who wants to be a bad guy. I want to know how this game will appeal to those of us who aren't looking for dungeon glory, who don't have time for world politics or a sense of life long goals... I want to discuss the person who likes being the bad guy, the guy who was raised with nothing given to them, who learned that the only way to get by is to take it from others and to inflict a little pain so others know how he/she feels.

I have watched some videos and read some articles/posts and I do feel like I have an entry-level understanding of this game's open-world pvp structure, but I feel like it is a far more punishing system, then it is a way to play the game. As stated above, I get that the vast majority of people aren't going to be interested in this but there are plenty of people who like being the bad guy and every good story or hero needs a bad guy. This game has the bounty hunter system and some guild and zone pvp but I have yet to see a full break down of actual pvp focused gameplay.

I don't want to just be a griefing player killer, but I do want some incentive to play a bad character that keeps the fancy lads and goody players on their toes. So far I see more in=game mechanics dedicated to punishing these types of actions and only allowing just a tiny taste of the bad life, I don't see anything that rewards players for taking this path. This game gives you religious arcs that lead to exclusive items, titles and even new skill augments. This game allows a player to build a restaurant in popular hunting areas to benefit the dedication of their time to crafting delicious food and planning a location to be the best source of buffs in that area but what about the bad guys?

Is there really no underground sub-faction that has rewards certain individuals for throwing a wrench into something? A reverse bounty system? An unholy religion that promotes being a bad guy? I mean look at some of the possible skill combos necromancer, trickster, assassin, charlatan, shadow lord... This game provides the bad guy prototypes but doesn't embrace the full potential? Please please please tell me that with all the love put into this game and all the "doing better than other mmos" doesn't mean that you have written off the classic villain player character in light of trying to making people a completely safe and comfortable feeling.

I know a lot of the devs in this game mention older mmo games as inspiration so I am sure you guys remember Ultima Online? You had a full on red player system that basically turned you into a different type of player. Will this game have something like this or is it only that internal system that punishes you for being bad by basically making you completely useless after so long so that you are no longer a threat to even a level 1 critter.

Can someone please link or explain something related to my questions/concerns? I would obviously love to hear from a dev or tester.

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Comments

Caeryl

Flagg wrote: »

@/Atama this is a very biased example.

I'm a green player in a guild. We want to harass another guild. I harvest their trees CONSTANTLY or lets say i'm strong enough to steal kills from them, repeatedly. They have to sacrifice corruption to stop me and I just go right back to it. Eventually they cannot stop me and I have put a serious hurt on them.

I don't know for sure if the game will function this way, but any system can and will be abused on both sides.

If your guild wants to harass another guild, you declare war on them, now you can try to killsteal and ninja gather in their home region and kill their members without any corruption coming into play. This works the other way around too, if they choose to retaliate against your guild. They can also: siege your home node, attack your castle if you have one, raid all of your caravans on sight, beat your raid groups away from dungeons.

You as one person can moderately annoy a handful of people. A guild can destroy another guild if they’re dedicated, and they will never have to deal with corruption if they do it right.

Atama

Flagg wrote: »

@Atama this is a very biased example.

I'm a green player in a guild. We want to harass another guild. I harvest their trees CONSTANTLY or lets say i'm strong enough to steal kills from them, repeatedly. They have to sacrifice corruption to stop me and I just go right back to it. Eventually they cannot stop me and I have put a serious hurt on them.

I don't know for sure if the game will function this way, but any system can and will be abused on both sides.

Guilds don’t have trees so your example doesn’t make any sense.

Most objections I’ve seen to corruption on this board amount to someone taking “my” resources or attacking “my” enemies that you are farming. The issue is that they aren’t yours.

Darktide

@Caeryl Carebear guilds don't play like that. They'll make alts or have a detachment to harass you that you can't declare war on. I've seen this in Life is Feudal. You can't war dec individuals. And you're going to take a hit every time you kill them...

But in my thoughts I came up with an idea... Guild/node corruption. Based on it's populus. A metric of just how evil the area is, safe-havens for villians where guards won't attack and the BH system doesn't work if the zone is corrupt enough. Food for thought. I can think of ways this could be exploited, however. But it's a cool thought.

Darktide

I hope that you can kos individuals. I'll be pleased.
It's not guilds that i'm concerned about. I enjoy guild war-ing. Oh, i'm not talking sieges, but that's a part of it. I'm talking attrition, long-game, constant aggression. That's my favorite part of games. It's those little pesky individuals that are hard to squish with these type rules. That includes alts, which are prominent in games like Life is Feudal for example.

Frosty_Tips

Flagg wrote: »

Also, back to the OP's point. Some players really love that red flag, being known as a bad-azz that you should run from. Well in this game, you'll be a bad azz with a stick vs a carebear with a howitzer. I don't see the fear factor there.
.....
I hope that you can kos individuals. I'll be pleased.

@Flagg On that topic of KOS list (meaning people you can kill without gaining corruption) I hope to get a question up to Steven asking if he can expand upon the Node "Enemey of the State" Kill List. It's great for Nodes but we need KOS lists at the Guild Level, at the Family level, and even the personal level. So while a Node Mayor maintains a KOS list with a max list size of 100 (that you get no corruption when you kill said person) a Guild leader maintains a KOS list with max list size of maybe 20. A family unit gets the KOS list feature and it can have 5 names on it. And every single player has a personal KOS list of 1 or 2. To avoid working the system, I would say names cannot be replaced on the list for a cool down period of 2 months. So if you have a personal KOS list and it has only 2 max slots for names, then if you get pissed and put 2 names right away, you're now stuck with them for 2 months.

As for Corruption mechanics being too harsh, I just don't know about that yet, the devs can tweak that during beta so we just have to wait and see just how harsh we're talking here. Steven has thrown out the number of 20 kills being an amount that basically makes you worthless and that 1 or 2 kills won't hurt you much. But that's all the detail we have.

Plus it just was a way of life as a "Red" PK type of player. If you drink too much Sunday night... well monday morning has the price to pay for doing that but you get through the hangover and party again the next day. Same with PKing, we don't know the details yet but it sounds like you and the boyz can have yourselves a night of random PKing, really rip up the town. Each of you builds up about 5 kills worth of corruption. At that point your group of evil dudes is nerfed bad enough that your fights are getting too hard so you call it a night. The next day you spend grinding mobs to clear off the corruption. We don't know how long of a grind that is at this point, it might only take 4 hours. I mean big deal. So you do the hard work that is required living the PK life and grind that shit off and then the next night the broskies are calling up saying time to raid the country side again and you're like yep! good to go, im back to zero corruption. Meanwhile OneEyed Tim, your group cleric didn't handle his shit, he didn't spend some time grinding mobs so he still has lots of corruption and he just has to say "Sorry I can't tonight guys, mob grinding for me sadly."

Darktide

@Logan True. Totally true. We don't know yet. A lot depends on mechanics we don't understand fully and have only had a glimpse of. They could potentially strike a balance. I hope they do, but I feel like on a normal server, the restrictions are absolutely perfect for this current "entitled" age of gamers.

A server where corruption has no weakness would be more acceptable to players like me. Or perhaps 1/20th the corruption gain... I just don't know the magic compromise. I personally like corruption. in my mind's eye, i could see a physical change to a character that radiates a dark aura with glowing eyes. I wouldn't want to clear that out every day... it's almost a badge of honor for a pker.

But I digress, even if they don't change it a bit, I'll find a way to fit in. I'll miss the flavor of being the villain, perhaps, but will make due. It's still a beautiful and amazing game in concept.

Darktide

It's funny though, everyone loves almost everything this game boasts the only real controversy is the corruption system, my wife has come to call the game Age of Corruption.

Logan

@Flagg This is interesting but I don't reckon you meant to tag me =p

Beck Altarr

@Flagg If you are corrupted and a Bounty Hunter comes at you, you do not suffer any corruption penalties vs the Bounty Hunter, you are at full strength. It is only against non-flagged bounty hunters that you would suffer Corruption penalties to stats/abilities.

SSRogue

Grails wrote: »

They won't do this with Corruption, that would just be the bad themed faction and you would earn reputation with them in these "other ways that aren't PKing" that you've described. Why does it need to be Corruption?
They wouldnt put it in as a secret because they don't want people to get corrupted much, it's a punishment in the literal sense! It's like a literal timeout that can grow into basically a permaban until it wears off, enforced within the game! If someone got some arbitrary secret level of Corruption and was rewarded, then it would encourage everyone else to do it suddenly. They don't want to encourage it, it's for actual bad people, not people playing bad characters. I understand it could be more than that with these ideas, but they have other systems separated out for roleplaying bad.

So you claim to have read everything and yet you skip over the ideas that have come up? Corruption is a term being used but others have come up in conversation along with ideas to increase the ability to be bad. As stated several times, this is not to promote pk'ing or griefing, it is to be the risk factor when good characters get greedy. Caravan is an in-game example of greedy good guys taking the risks and us bad guys being there as the repercussion. The entire point of this thread is to continue thinking of new ways to be bad and to keep good guys on their toes. Even if it is just a copy and paste of the caravan system just in a boat then it's something I like to think of and discuss. We have had some good ideas with the bounty hunter system tweak, a possible questline that takes good guys to a zone to hunt a particular thing for slightly more reward yet knowing that the zone is open pvp etc. This is for furthering the discussion of ways to be bad that is nothing like griefing or pk'ing unwilling participants.

SSRogue

nelsonrebel wrote: »

Thats all that "I think" many players are trying to say. That we know steven has already mentioned there will be avenues for bad guy play, we just dont know exactly what they'll be. The monster coins are an excellent example the other gentlemen brought up.

And there will be titles and achievments for war efforts and stuff but we wont see those until we hit around beta phase.

Yes he has and that is why the forums exist and more so my post. This is for people to discuss potential other ways to be bad. Maybe a dev will see it and see an idea or clarify something. It is all a discussion. I appreciate your input good sir/ma'am. Corruption in itself has been addressed as other topics and addressing them with potential changes is a harmless thing to discuss and have a thought process to build a discussion that may lead to a great innovative idea. You can't have good ideas if you don't talk

SSRogue

Dicdonya wrote: »

I think the corruption system should instead reward PKers for attacking high risk targets, whether that is some form of battle points, or anti honor points that form some sort of “evil” rank, or the reward is not getting gatherables, but instead consumables or a potential for inventory(not equipped gear) items to drop. Unless this game is different in some fundamental way, most high level raiders won’t be carrying many gatherables around at any given time, but might have plenty of consumables for dungeons/raids.

Since they have pvp ranks or ladders(right?), it would seem easy enough to tie corruption to pvp rank. So if you are just a douche griefer killing low level players and non pvpers all the time, you will gain no benefit, and get nothing but punishments. However if you choose targets at or above your “evil” rank, which would reflect the opposite of a pvp rank, you will instead grow your rank while possibly getting some sort of monetary reward.

Then pair your “evil” rank to some sort of underground or dark association in the game so that you have new quests or ties to for a little RP fun.

Also because I hate griefing, I think the corruption system should punish you severely for killing a low level player, like instant full corruption. I know it’s going to already do that, I just hope the increased corruption is massive in that situation. Force players who want to ambush players in the world to only target actual challenging players, which is IMO not griefing in any way. Also to stop corpse camping just make it so you gain no further reward for killing the same player more than once in a period of time and start losing rank and gaining loads of corruption if you kill the same target again within a reasonable period of time.

Now that is some creative thinking! I don't personally like the entire direction but I do agree it is a fun thought and something I would love to discuss further.

SSRogue

Flagg wrote: »

Also, back to the OP's point. Some players really love that red flag, being known as a bad-azz that you should run from. Well in this game, you'll be a bad azz with a stick vs a carebear with a howitzer. I don't see the fear factor there.

I'm in no way saying that i disapprove of the design choice, I actually think it's pretty cool and unique to this game. In a way, I appreciate it. I think it does, however take away any enjoyment from the criminal characters and takes it beyond harsh to just immoral. Like taking every person ever accused of a crime and sticking a bomb implant in their head.

You could say it's just not.. realistic. Having a big red name and bounty hunters I can dig. That adds an element of danger. The weakening element, I think is taking it a bit far. There's no even play field now. Not only do you risk having the Mounties after you, en-mass to complete a quest, but you're handcuffed and chained to boot, with a orange outfit.

I think the big hang-up here are the people laser-focused on the terms. You can say corruption but let's just say bad guy. So I become bad by a completely fair means, NOT by being a dick player-killing lowbies or griefing or anything like that. So I am a bad guy now, I get to show off that I am indeed that type of player that won't hesitate to defend myself and I go for the kills, but now what? There is so much potential for the bounty system to be fun on top of what is serves currently. There have been some dame good ideas above.

I just want more open discussion for more things bad guys can do to cause that risk-reward for the good guys. The corruption system can work as a passive deterrent for the griefers and with a little tweaking, there could be a secondary system to allow the grey area for good bad guys lol.

Orlando2

RahkstarRPG wrote: »

Attacking caravans, past the rewards of the caravan you claim itself, has a progression system for it.

Ganking though? No. They are trying to discourage ganking. It shouldn't be rewarded.

Ganking should always be rewarded when you do it on guilds you're in war with.

1. You don't get corrupted.
2. You hate them. Killing them will give you satisfaction.
3. You stop them from progressing.
4. Maybe some guild points as reward or something?

raylegh

I had an idea while reading your post.

Perhaps there could be an unique and limited corrupted guild or faction where a FEW limited amount of players who achieved something (even using rng) or whatever, can be invited to join and do "bad things" without being so penalized.

That would be really interesting and because it being very limited wouldn't be so annoying for many players as "all people having carte blanche to do whatever they want". Adding an interesting layer of concern without beeing too much and at the same time allowing bad minded players to have chance if they try, but not all of them.

Atama

Orlando wrote: »

RahkstarRPG wrote: »

Attacking caravans, past the rewards of the caravan you claim itself, has a progression system for it.

Ganking though? No. They are trying to discourage ganking. It shouldn't be rewarded.

Ganking should always be rewarded when you do it on guilds you're in war with.

1. You don't get corrupted.
2. You hate them. Killing them will give you satisfaction.
3. You stop them from progressing.
4. Maybe some guild points as reward or something?

I think in a guild war everyone is purple to the enemy, so yeah I think that would work. But I’m not sure, we don’t have much info about guild wars yet except that they will be a thing and that there will be “meaning” to them, it won’t just be senseless brawling.

Orlando2

Atama wrote: »

Orlando wrote: »

RahkstarRPG wrote: »

Attacking caravans, past the rewards of the caravan you claim itself, has a progression system for it.

Ganking though? No. They are trying to discourage ganking. It shouldn't be rewarded.

Ganking should always be rewarded when you do it on guilds you're in war with.

1. You don't get corrupted.
2. You hate them. Killing them will give you satisfaction.
3. You stop them from progressing.
4. Maybe some guild points as reward or something?

I think in a guild war everyone is purple to the enemy, so yeah I think that would work. But I’m not sure, we don’t have much info about guild wars yet except that they will be a thing and that there will be “meaning” to them, it won’t just be senseless brawling.

Its never senseless, as I said you kill them at a boss or in a dungeon. You don't need the devs to give you a specific map or pvp mode to make guild wars meaningful.

Dicdonya

SSRogue wrote: »

Dicdonya wrote: »

I think the corruption system should instead reward PKers for attacking high risk targets, whether that is some form of battle points, or anti honor points that form some sort of “evil” rank, or the reward is not getting gatherables, but instead consumables or a potential for inventory(not equipped gear) items to drop. Unless this game is different in some fundamental way, most high level raiders won’t be carrying many gatherables around at any given time, but might have plenty of consumables for dungeons/raids.

Since they have pvp ranks or ladders(right?), it would seem easy enough to tie corruption to pvp rank. So if you are just a douche griefer killing low level players and non pvpers all the time, you will gain no benefit, and get nothing but punishments. However if you choose targets at or above your “evil” rank, which would reflect the opposite of a pvp rank, you will instead grow your rank while possibly getting some sort of monetary reward.

Then pair your “evil” rank to some sort of underground or dark association in the game so that you have new quests or ties to for a little RP fun.

Also because I hate griefing, I think the corruption system should punish you severely for killing a low level player, like instant full corruption. I know it’s going to already do that, I just hope the increased corruption is massive in that situation. Force players who want to ambush players in the world to only target actual challenging players, which is IMO not griefing in any way. Also to stop corpse camping just make it so you gain no further reward for killing the same player more than once in a period of time and start losing rank and gaining loads of corruption if you kill the same target again within a reasonable period of time.

Now that is some creative thinking! I don't personally like the entire direction but I do agree it is a fun thought and something I would love to discuss further.

Whelp what part of it would you like to discuss further? I am here, bored at work, and ready to discuss!

Atama

Orlando wrote: »

Atama wrote: »

Orlando wrote: »

RahkstarRPG wrote: »

Attacking caravans, past the rewards of the caravan you claim itself, has a progression system for it.

Ganking though? No. They are trying to discourage ganking. It shouldn't be rewarded.

Ganking should always be rewarded when you do it on guilds you're in war with.

1. You don't get corrupted.
2. You hate them. Killing them will give you satisfaction.
3. You stop them from progressing.
4. Maybe some guild points as reward or something?

I think in a guild war everyone is purple to the enemy, so yeah I think that would work. But I’m not sure, we don’t have much info about guild wars yet except that they will be a thing and that there will be “meaning” to them, it won’t just be senseless brawling.

Its never senseless, as I said you kill them at a boss or in a dungeon. You don't need the devs to give you a specific map or pvp mode to make guild wars meaningful.

Guild Halls and Guild Fortresses will have something to do with wars. Maybe sieging them, maybe burning them down (I remember blowing up enemy bases in SWG, so satisfying). But there will be a special PvP mode, that’s what a guild war will be.

Orlando2

Atama wrote: »

Orlando wrote: »

Atama wrote: »

Orlando wrote: »

RahkstarRPG wrote: »

Attacking caravans, past the rewards of the caravan you claim itself, has a progression system for it.

Ganking though? No. They are trying to discourage ganking. It shouldn't be rewarded.

Ganking should always be rewarded when you do it on guilds you're in war with.

1. You don't get corrupted.
2. You hate them. Killing them will give you satisfaction.
3. You stop them from progressing.
4. Maybe some guild points as reward or something?

I think in a guild war everyone is purple to the enemy, so yeah I think that would work. But I’m not sure, we don’t have much info about guild wars yet except that they will be a thing and that there will be “meaning” to them, it won’t just be senseless brawling.

Its never senseless, as I said you kill them at a boss or in a dungeon. You don't need the devs to give you a specific map or pvp mode to make guild wars meaningful.

Guild Halls and Guild Fortresses will have something to do with wars. Maybe sieging them, maybe burning them down (I remember blowing up enemy bases in SWG, so satisfying). But there will be a special PvP mode, that’s what a guild war will be.

Thats cool, but won't you be able to war a guild outside of that pvp mode?

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