Corruption System is Broken

Intro
I am sure there are many other posts about this, but I am adding to the frustration. I am one of the biggest proponents when it comes to giving time to flush out Ashes of Creation, but the Corruption System is going to quickly steer this game into a game-ending collusion track. The amount of bugs and issues within the Alpha 2 thus far have ranged from funny to frustrating. But that is expected in an Alpha. The issue isn't with the bugs, but the system itself. Currently, this system will destroy this game long before it launches, which is something I desperately do not want to happen.

The corruption system on paper seemed like a wonderful way to prevent griefing, but in practice, griefs the average player. You are unable to defend yourself from the many issues I will list below. "Just flag up and kill them" is exactly the solution to someone contesting your camp site, or training your group. However, engaging in pvp to defend your group or camp more often than not results you or your group becoming corrupted. Punishing the griefed, more than the griefer.

Scenario A
You are experiencing at a camp and another party decides to come in and contest your mob density or named mob. You're stuck with contesting for mobs, resulting in less exp per hour and potentially losing gear drops off of random mobs or nameds

Option 1 - You flag and attack. The invading group doesn't flag, resulting in your group becoming corrupted, and now having a severe disadvantage when that group returns to take your camp. Now they can attack you, have the tactical advantage for taking your camp, and you lose gear. This results in a large amount of time lost for making up the larger penalty of corruption debt and requiring you to find/craft new gear.

Option 2 - You stay unflagged, allow the invading group to kill you and your group, lose 50% of your resources that you have been collecting, and then have to come back to contest the corrupted players. You kill them, take 50% of what they have (25% of what you lost) and now have to work off your 2-3% exp debt. This is the most optimal route, but it is also just a version of corruption baiting.

Option 3 - Leave and go somewhere else. (Who the hell is doing this? This is a PvP game!)

Scenario B
You are experiencing at a camp and another player/group decides to come in and train mobs on your group, resulting in deaths and wasted time.

Option 1 - You can continue fighting off constant waves of trained mobs, losing time and exp debt to deaths, and just hope the griefer dies or grows bored. Meanwhile, the griefer can loot your groups corpses, get flagged for 2 minutes, and get away free as your group runs back to your camp from the Emberspring, and now you lost 50% of your resources.

Option 2 - Flag and attack the griefer, resulting in one or more (depending on the scenario) of your group members becoming corrupted. This results in wasted experience working off the corruption debt for self-defense and also marking your group as on the map for others to come and kill your corrupted members.

Option 3 - Give in and leave. (Again, really?)

Conclusion
Both scenarios are trying to paint the picture that the way the system is currently working, the standard player is caught in a lose-lose situation. Now add the compounding Blight issue and you are forever indebted to a corruption system just for trying to experience for the rest of your characters lifespan due to griefers or even just partaking in the PvP aspect of the game. As of now, the corruption system is convincing PvP not to happen at all, rather than prevent griefing.

Issues with the Corruption/Flagging/PvP system (No particular order)
1. Corruption Baiting - Being able to unflag to cause corruption before you die. (I'm aware of the fix, it isn't working)
2. Leaving Game - Alt F4 or Log out to instantly avoid dying or being killed (I'm aware they are adding a time out eventually, still an issue.)
3. Unable to Defend - If you are corrupted, you can't defend yourself from being killed, (yes, alt F was enabled) as if the debuffs weren't enough. This could have been a bug, since its clearly designed to allow corrupted players to fight with the debuffs, but restricting people from actually being able to defend their self, even while corrupted, is a huge issue.
4. Infinite Scaling Punishment - To punish players indefinitely and multiplicatively for defending themselves, their camp, or falling victim to corruption baiting is insanity. Players are being punished for the longevity of their character for every altercation in a PvP game.
5. Horse Corruption Baiting - People can summon standard low hit point horses in large scale combat, causing corruption from their horses dying and suffering a measly 10 min recall timer while gaining the gear from corrupting an enemy player. (This was supposedly fixed, still occurs)
6. Gear Lost, Defense, and Recovery - The gear lost seems to always favor your weapons. Considering how drastic of a change a weapon can be, losing your weapon can make everything post death insufferable. Not only are you less efficient for groups or soloing, you are now not even able to have a weapon for defending yourself when you are randomly teleported to a respawn location on death with Corruption effects (unless you are carrying multiple weapons on you, which is what I suggest at this time)
7. Random Respawn - The random location on respawn leaves you alone and vulnerable along with a bounty marker for others to kill you. I have found this often times respawns you near a populated area as well. I understand the intention behind this is to prevent a corrupted player from being spawn camped, but this also makes retaliation or attempts to regroup difficult.
8. Unequal Penalties - Yes, the person griefing can be killed and lose their materials and incur a 2-3% exp debt. In reality, that person doesn't have materials to drop and the experience debt is fractions of a percent in penalties in comparison to being corrupted. This is fully the intention, as to persuade people not to become corrupted. By as stated previously, this is affecting normal players more often than the griefers.
9. Caravan Flagging - Caravan Events (Attacker/Defender) have many flaws beyond UI bugs. The fact a potential enemy or enemies can approach your caravan without designating being an attacker or defender for the entire length of a journey is broken. Someone can sit there, unflagged and track your caravan untouched, as you wouldn't risk gaining the corruption while transporting your goods. This allows them to call for reinforcements or set an ambush and you have no idea of their intentions. (This can be solved by requiring an attacker/defender selection within a short time limit. If they opt out, they can not rejoin the event on either side for its duration)
10. Node Citizens Priority - This issue is in regard to the affiliation priority list. When you have any scenario like the ones described above, or while you are running caravans, there is serious conflicts of interest. You have potential PUG groups that can't attack invading groups because they are of the same Node Citizenship. This seems overtly flawed in a practical level. Much like the corruption system, this ideology works well on paper, but in practice is very clunky and leads to very, very confusing open world pvp scuffles.

Final Straw
During a prior pvp scuffle, I killed my own guildmate with an AoE (attacking guildmates and fellow citizens has been fixed/implemented) and a non-combatant that didn't flag during the pvp fight, and a horse resulting in 3 ranks of Blight. I had previously had 1 rank of Blight from the first or second weekend where we were testing the corruption longevity. That means I had 4 ranks of Blight permanently on my character. This brings us to the reason for this post. I was wandering past HWMH and saw a corrupted player. Killed him, he messaged and asked for his gear back, as he was only corrupted from defending his group from a serial trainer. I agreed, gave him his loot back, and told him I would go handle the guy training his group. (Story checks out, as the training griefer was uncorrupted, while the guy I originally killed and 4/5 members were all corrupted from killing him multiple times trying to prevent him from training) I found him, killed him, and told him to knock it off and leave the group alone. I become corrupted. That's fine, as I anticipated getting corrupted. I was willing to do that to help this lower level group just trying to level and would exp it off later. Well now I am instantly Corruption level 3 and drastically debuffed. I get jumped in HWMH and die, lose 3 items (back-up primary weapon from bag, chest, helm). I respawn randomly and go back to try and fight the original guy (because its pvp right!?) and I am unable to attack him (point #3). I die again lose 3 more items (primary weapon, shoulders, ring). I respawn randomly with Corruption Level 3 STILL and get killed again by a random level 25 who was right on top of me when I spawned and I lose 3 MORE freaking items (bracer, ring, and cape). So now for just trying to help a lower level group from getting constantly griefed and killing a griefer who wouldn't flag, I have lost 9 pieces of gear, and incurred 399k experience debt. This is absolutely insane and unplayable.

If this doesn't get reworked, this will destroy Ashes of Creation before it ever makes it to launch.

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Comments

Chicago

Welp I can't say I don't agree, was going to add something but you pretty much listed it all, furthermore I would say that you should not drop gear till at least corruption 3

Its_Me

Scenario A

This is a PVX game not PVE nor PVP and as such, players that want to try to push someone else out of a particular spot encounter the risk vs reward mechanic Steven places high value on and will need to make the choice on whether the reward of engagement outweighs the risk (penalty) for doing so. Currently, steven has stated the corruption is intentionally overtuned so we do not know what the risk will be later on.

Scenario B

See Scenario A’s explanation of risk vs reward, same applies here.

Most of the time I have experienced this sort of griefing has involved a larger number of players that flag up to lower the hp of players they are training mobs on and then CCing for the mob kill. Players can outmaneuver those trying to train mobs (have done this multiple times successfully against much larger groups) and can actually end up with gear from those that make mistakes with this sort of mob griefing. We have also successfully flagged on those flagging to drop HP of other players for this type of griefing and killed them without anyone going red.

One way to combat scenario B without touching corruption would be to change the mechanic on unleashing where mobs return to their position after the initial aggro is dropped rather than attaching to the nearest player.

MincVinyl

Might help to suggest some fixes or paths forward on issues.

Corruption baiting - Inevitably flagging will have to be locked on if you are involved in combat for ~5 mins after flagging.
Leaving the game will just be on a timer like every other combat log game fix.
Unable to defend - I personally do not understand why corrupted players who are at risk of losing gear also have combat penalties such that they wont be able to defend themselves.
^ Otherwise there should be a corrupt ceiling for sure.
Horse corruption - I could see horses not playing into corruption, or simply make players unable to summon mounts while in combat
Gear loss combined with corruption to me is contradicting. As pointed out by the OP, if you die and lose gear.... you respawn without weapons and are corrupted ..... so you get killed again since you dont have gear to fight with...... so you respawn with less gear and get killed again........etc. If there is gear loss, the game also cannot have persisting corruption after death.
Random respawn only plays into the above.
For losing materials to work, both parties would need materials in the first place. As a pvper I most certainly would never go out with mats on me to pvp.
Caravan - this should force flagging within a certain radius. Simply give a warning of being too close to a caravan beforehand.
PvP on any level needs a simple and quickly understood flagging system. Spiderwebbing the different pvp systems and citizenship can't be wishy washy.

ShivaFang

Option 3 - you time it to throw a tomato at them at the worst possible time when they are nearly dead, causing them to die when the enemy hits them the next time.

But yes. Corruption as it is right now is more of a bait. You want people to attack you and go corrupted so you can take their stuff - you just got to find a target that you can provoke enough to do it.

Dolyem

I have been voicing this concern for years now. If corruption is too punishing, the system will be utilized as a shield for griefing in other ways.

KallenXIII

Honestly a simple solution to this is to make PoI's pvp force flagged zones. If someone is training you, you can kill them comfortably. You have a new aspect to grinding that makes it so you have to calculate pull size vs player population in the area: do I pull 4 or 5 mobs since we are grinding smoothly and there's few player threats around? Or do I grab 2 mobs at most and be ready for an ambush because someone else's group want's this boss. If highwayman Hills was a forced flag area, every single point listed originally is solved, and higher level players can come along and help their lower level guildies grind safely, and you will end up with fun organized pvp of higher level players everywhere across the map. It matches the vision of risk vs reward: this group is organized and has been grinding here for some time, if we fight for this spot can we defend ourselves from other groups while grinding here, or even their group? If not, just move on. There's plenty of area's outside of PoIs that solos can grind at, goblins north of ursine for level 18-20s, minotaurs south of Titans ring for 10-12, etc. and this would encourage the solo trolls to go explore and find other spots to grind for their level. Corruption should be the punishment for engaging in unsolicited pvp: not as a shield for trolls to attack others in creative ways (training). Force the flag, and now there's no shield - grind here at your own risk, and bring a damn good team to do it.

BRAD_AoC

Corruption as it stands is definitely way too punishing to the point where absolutely nobody is ever pvp'ing to risk losing their gear. Corruption baiting is laughably easy to do and extremely common. And the most ridiculous aspect is that simply defending yourself against the green / non-combatant players inevitably trying to kill you only increases your corruption further, which leads to everybody just "cheesing" the system by letting your party kill you.

In my experience there are also A LOT of stalemates happening where people strictly refuse to fight after you tag them when competing for spots. Their cleric just heals their party and they go on about their day. And because corruption is so absurdly punishing everybody is extra careful to not tag the enemy party to the point where they could die.

I don't have the solution, but the current corruption system is absolutely terrible and I'm honestly not sure if it will ever work out.

Nerror

Ashes does need better anti-training mechanics for sure. I am not sure how exactly, but it would mitigate some of the BS tactics currently employed. Something something leashing range and aggro-list and such. No solution will be perfect of course, but I am sure it can be improved from the current system.

Smaashley

I'm gonna give my honest opinion and I really don't often do PvP myself and I hate people taking things from me.

Penalty for corrupted players shouldn't exist AT ALL. You become corrupted and that's it. Then you give HIGH rewards to bounty hunters for killing corrupted players. So everyone can PvP "freely" (if they plan their strategy) and they can get jumped very easily by bounty hunters that progress their bounty levels and unlock more things to track down those corrupted players.

Example of bounty hunter rewards :

- Titles (Legend Hunter, Hunter of Verra, Champion Hunter, etc.)
- Cosmetics related to that profession (Bounty Hunters)
- Dyes
- Skill special effects
- Armor/weapon visual special effects
- Rare materials
- Other rare rewards worth the time of hunters depending on the game's economy and reward tables

Honestly, if they implement the bounty hunter system the right way, problem solved for both side of the coin.

Dolyem

Smaashley wrote: »

I'm gonna give my honest opinion and I really don't often do PvP myself and I hate people taking things from me.

Penalty for corrupted players shouldn't exist AT ALL. You become corrupted and that's it. Then you give HIGH rewards to bounty hunters for killing corrupted players. So everyone can PvP "freely" (if they plan their strategy) and they can get jumped very easily by bounty hunters that progress their bounty levels and unlock more things to track down those corrupted players.

Example of bounty hunter rewards :

- Titles (Legend Hunter, Hunter of Verra, Champion Hunter, etc.)
- Cosmetics related to that profession (Bounty Hunters)
- Dyes
- Skill special effects
- Armor/weapon visual special effects
- Rare materials
- Other rare rewards worth the time of hunters depending on the game's economy and reward tables

Honestly, if they implement the bounty hunter system the right way, problem solved for both side of the coin.

I actually dont hate this. But I also feel like corruption can be good, as long as its focus is to deter griefing and not PvP and PKing in general. I do think bounty hunters should be the most incentivized to kill corrupt players regardless, and there should be a count to show how many corrupted kills a player has in that single instance of corruption, letting players have a little knowledge of whether or not they are actually griefing.

CROW3

If you remove the teeth from corruption might as well ditch the flagging system and move to an opt-in / out system.

Antipaladin

My honest opinion about the corruption system is this... It is supposed to PREVENT if not then at least decrease GRIEFFING. Pvp is fine, but if you keep doing it to one person or group then it becomes greiffing. Training mobs is a different form of grieffing, yet STILL grieffing. If they don't somehow incorporate that into the corruption system, people will continue to do it with no penalties and will in turn kill the game in the long run. It'll just be a train wars game at that point. Solving the issue is just somehow incorporating it into the corruption system. I should be like 1 time slap on the wrist, 2nd time you become corrupted. IMO it's really not a hard concept to understand, but to put it into action will be the most difficult part because there is a lot of grey areas around "training". IF you want people to be able to fight for their exp spot, a POI, fight the person that trained mobs on them and got them killed, then there shouldn't be a punishment from that. Which the corruption system is currently screwing over the non-grieffers more. It should ONLY become punishing (or corrupted) when it becomes grieffing. Dying 1 time from 1 person isn't grieffing. It should be changed to a Grieffing system and punish those grieffers, not someone who is just trying to defend his exp spot or killing the person that keeps training him (and gaining EXP DEBT). I am a BIG proponent to talking this game up and I plan on only playing this game on release, but if it stays a corruption system instead of some sort of grieffing system I won't play it when it releases. That's not intended to be any sort of threat. I just want to let it be known how much I am against a corruption system that punishes those that are in self defense as a Pvp player. I don't know how the problem will be solved, but I gave my best advice on a HUGE game breaking problem and how I would fix it personally and that is all I can do at this point. I've done my part and now I am leaving it in your hands Intrepid to acquire some type of fix for this system in place currently.

Antipaladin

KallenXIII wrote: »

Honestly a simple solution to this is to make PoI's pvp force flagged zones. If someone is training you, you can kill them comfortably. You have a new aspect to grinding that makes it so you have to calculate pull size vs player population in the area: do I pull 4 or 5 mobs since we are grinding smoothly and there's few player threats around? Or do I grab 2 mobs at most and be ready for an ambush because someone else's group want's this boss. If highwayman Hills was a forced flag area, every single point listed originally is solved, and higher level players can come along and help their lower level guildies grind safely, and you will end up with fun organized pvp of higher level players everywhere across the map. It matches the vision of risk vs reward: this group is organized and has been grinding here for some time, if we fight for this spot can we defend ourselves from other groups while grinding here, or even their group? If not, just move on. There's plenty of area's outside of PoIs that solos can grind at, goblins north of ursine for level 18-20s, minotaurs south of Titans ring for 10-12, etc. and this would encourage the solo trolls to go explore and find other spots to grind for their level. Corruption should be the punishment for engaging in unsolicited pvp: not as a shield for trolls to attack others in creative ways (training). Force the flag, and now there's no shield - grind here at your own risk, and bring a damn good team to do it.

EVERYONE and their mamas gonna be ONLY going to POI's then. Also, what do you do when this happens not at a POI? There is nothing you can do about it. Also if everyone is flagged and there are 2 groups on a boss then the AOE damage would be crazy to the groups (probably on purpose to kill them). Also if it flags everyone then you can get high levels to just walk through flagged low level groups just for fun. Corruption should be in place to PREVENT (or decrease) grieffing, not because a non-pvp player doesn't want to pvp. So while your fix to the situation is solved, it now brings up more problems to worry about. Unfortunately, I don't see this as being a quick fix, but more of a fix this issue now it bring 4-5 more issues to fix. Then those issues bring 2-3 more, fix those and it keeps going.

Its_Me

KallenXIII wrote: »

Which the corruption system is currently screwing over the non-grieffers more.

I disagree and have used the corruption system (staying and mob griefers taking too many chances on reducing hp with one hit or dot too many) to turn griefers red, very satisfying when it comes to dealing with larger numbers. 😉

KallenXIII wrote: »

If highwayman Hills was a forced flag area, every single point listed originally is solved,.

If places like highwayman hills is forced flag, it would become even more of the raid fest than it is now preventing smaller groups, solos and PVE players from utilizing this important POI.

Steven has repeatedly stated that he expects the overwhelming majority of PVP to come from opt in 'events'

Restricting main POIs that both pvp and pve players utilize for level and gear progression to forced flagging would not be consistent with his PVX vision of balancing his PVE and PVP playerbase which he states is a core philosophy of the game that will not change.

With that said, Steven has suggested that he intentionally overtuned corruption for alpha two so I think it is fairly safe to assume the corruption penalties will be less than what they are now which might help deter some of the issues presented by the OP.

Steven understands that not everyone will be on board with his vision and this is fine, there are many games out there that might be a better fit for players that are not on board with his core philosophies such as PVX and significantly deterring non-consensual pvp.

MincVinyl

I think many people overlook the concept of keeping the playerbase cohesive in terms of pvp and pve. Once you split the playerbase, you inevitably get stuck designing two games that have to work in parallel, with two communities that want different directions. It happened in ESO where the devs solely focused on PVE releases and removed incentives to go into the pvp zone.

Persistent open world pvp allows there to always be incentives for pvp inherently with pve releases. On top of that, the risk of pvp drastically raises pve rewards for players. This dynamic can be seen in games like Sea of Thieves. The risk of pvp makes the pve farming have more meaning and effectively slows it down. If you remove the risk of pvp.....looting/farming becomes pointless after a week because you unlock everything.

Otherwise I think stat or debuff penalties is a terrible idea. Especially combined with gear dropping. Having hundreds of players know your location, know you are weaker than average, and unable to run away is a no brainer. A replacement would be a bounty system with monetary value that increases. Make a bounty board with quests that track bounties on the map giving a general radius location.

I don't even agree with gear drops since we dont know how long gear farming will take. In games like ESO you could spend months farming endgame gear sets...... That would never be worth the risk of some mats. If you can easily farm late game gear within a day, maybe its fine. Can we assume this dynamic wont change after release? Instead of gear drops I would rather players drop higher and higher amounts of mats or held currency.

Its_Me

MincVinyl wrote: »

Otherwise I think stat or debuff penalties is a terrible idea. Especially combined with gear dropping. Having hundreds of players know your location, know you are weaker than average, and unable to run away is a no brainer. A replacement would be a bounty system with monetary value that increases. Make a bounty board with quests that track bounties on the map giving a general radius location.

I don't even agree with gear drops since we dont know how long gear farming will take. In games like ESO you could spend months farming endgame gear sets...... That would never be worth the risk of some mats. If you can easily farm late game gear within a day, maybe its fine. Can we assume this dynamic wont change after release? Instead of gear drops I would rather players drop higher and higher amounts of mats or held currency.

The stat debuff penalties will impact anyone that dies temporarily (I am against for wars as it benefits the stronger guilds and numbers), but a corrupted player will definitely feel it more and I think they should. It is permanent (until worked off) and accumulating based on level of corruption, and I am fine with this. Same for the blight mechanic accumulation, as this can be worked off as well.

I think the issue is how unfair and imbalanced corruption feels at this point due to the system being buggy and intentionally overtuned and people are going red on one kill.

I think we need to think ahead at a time when all the bugs are worked out and correct mechanics are in place and it is almost impossible to acquire corruption on accident via griefing mechanics like someone turning off their combatant status during a fight or triggering corruption with a mount.

Let's say once corruption is not overtuned and buggy, it takes 6 non-combatant kills to hit the first level of corruption and a total of 12 to hit the second. I would have no issue with this as it plays into Stevens vision of wanting to significantly deter non-combatant PKs while creating zero incentives and harsh disincentives for players gaining corruption.

Gear dropping at level 1 corruption, I doubt we will see that outside of this admittedly overtuned corruption system in alpha (even if currently posted on wiki) but again, I agree with it for higher levels of corruption where a piece at a time 'could' drop, but not up to 3 pieces. I like the RNG on dropping gear but feel the penalty is too high as it currently stands.

Steven's intent is to have the overwhelming majority (his words) of pvp stemming from opt in pvp events while incentivizing open world flagging for pvp and significantly deterring both griefing and PKing of non-combatants so the risk has to almost always outweigh the reward (Stevens statement) of a non-combatant PK and for this, I think we need a fairly punishing corruption system.

I see the framework for this system, now we just need to work out the bugs, make sure all the mechanics that are intended to be implemented are, and help him tweak it and test it out once it is not intentionally overtuned.

Veeshan

2 main issues i have with PvP system right now

1- You have to flag to attack a purple hitting you you should automaticly be able to attack/damage them when you go to attack them not have to find the ctrl f button cause thats not default reaction to being jumped

2- People attacking corrupted players dont flag purple (atleast for the corrupted player) anyone who attacks a corrupted player should atleast concsent to pvp with corrupted players and not further push them into corruption penalty by them defending themself, it feels bad for boths sides if im attackijng a corrupted player i want them to fight back than lie down and let me kill them and not being able to defend urself without further corruption penalty feels bad for the corrupted player

ShankNemesis

I would like to add a thought and add a couple more issues that I have come across regarding my "Final Straw" situation.

I was writing this post at 6am before work after a double all-nighter weekend, while it was still fresh in my head. I was merely giving an insight on the problems I was experiencing, not solutions. To those who are saying this is complaining and not testing, obviously don't understand what testing entails. Testing of the PvP system is 100% required, as this is a PvX game. That means the PvP Systems have to be tested as much as any other system.

Now, I was obviously mistaken in the number of corruption kills I had prior to this engagement. It would seem as though I had 3, as during the first time I was jumped in HWMH after being corrupted, I defended myself from the attacker and killed him. What I didn't realize is that corrupted players keep stacking corruption, even while defending.

So while I was attacked, I defended and won the engagement, even with the corruption debuffs, and I was punished with a 3rd rank of corruption. This is a completely bullshit mechanic. This is a requirement to just hand over your gear and take an exponentially higher exp loss and if you defend yourself (or play the game even) you are penalized for it.

Completely broken and ridiculously faulty.

Tanwedar

My experience has been random single players making the mistake of attacking me (I'm usually with a group), or bigger groups attacking mine who leave a couple people unflagged - trying to bait us into killing them via AoE or miss-clicks because those players are low on HP.

nanfoodle

There is new settings for flagging this coming weekend.

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