solo pvp, corruption, suggestions, ideas, comments feelings, etc.
before you decide if you're going to take the time to read this post or not... please take a moment to consider you don't have to make the ITS JUST AN ALPHA THE DEVELOPERS KNOW BETTER LET THE SYSTEM GET COMPLETED comment you made on the 7 posts before mine, this is my personal opinion on my personal post about the state of things, based on my video gaming experiences. thank you.
a little background on me, the main "mmorpg" i played most of my life was runescape, (OSRS) i started at about the age of 7, and played for roughly 20 years. that being said i think its a fair assumption i have 20k+ hours in it. most of my "adult life" I've been a FPS gamer, 2 games i REALLY enjoyed was old APEX legends (multi time master 8-10k hour range) and RUST (i believe i have around 4-5k hours in that game) .. one thing i REALLY like about rust is the risk vs reward. the risk is you lose everything, the reward is you gain everything. mentioning I'm a 20k+ hour OSRS and RUST player (if you know those games) you can make a fair assumption I LOVE THE GRIND. to me, there is no better feeling then seeing every second you put in to a game results in some kind of benefit to you as the player, it really separates the casuals from the maingame-ers i see a lot of complaints about like the 1.5m xp gaps for leveling past 20.. and its laughable to me. i LOVE the idea of a system that when you see like a level 65 (or in alphas case 25) where you can see a player of a higher level and be like.. wow that dude put some TIME in. that was one of the things that turned me off from current day WoW... buy the game and bam max character, now go play the game. sorry for the yapping lets get in to AoC. I'll try to relate any of my ideas to games I'm getting them from, so it makes sense for those that know what I'm talking about. for reference, i am basically (like 200k off) a level 21 Ranger on the Vyra server.
my first point and a change I'd genuinely like to see:
this is a idea straight out of how OSRS worked, and i think its a beautiful system. first of all. AoC looting system is atrocious.
- players killed by mobs should have a 1 minute timer to get back to their body before it is lootable by anyone else. this is a great change because if you're even level 10+ you know about people pulling the pyro to grief you at highwaymen or on the higher level spectrum, guilds pulling mobs to kill you at carp/seph/steel bloom
- players that killed another player should be the only ones able to loot the body on the same 1 minute timer. this will prevent those ... people ... that literally sit in your way as you're pvping then steal all your loot and even if you kill them, they got more than you. sure they're "flagged for pvp now" but they still get half and you get a quarter of what you originally deserved.
my second point:
this is more of a rust ideology.
ALL ITEMS SHOULD BE LOST IN A PVP DEATH. (i mean this as a flagged player vs a flagged player) with professions, mob drops etc, enough gear should be pushed out to the economy where killing someone is worth it. in the current state of the game the meta is really just... don't bring and glint and materials and there's no punishment for dying in PVP other than paying like 4 silver to repair gear, but no benefit to the killer really.
my third point:
this comes from OSRS.
there should be solo friendly PVP zones, as someone who loves roaming the map and is open to fight anyone, there should be a zone where PVP is open to only 1v1s instead of your only option being joining a guild or getting dog walked by a guild. IN MY OWN PERSONAL OPINION, a zone where you can get a 1v1 then get put on like a 20 second no-combat timer so you can recover abilities and heal instead of getting PJ'd by the 5 man rolling in the 1v1 zone would be a beautiful addition.
my fourth point:
this stems from rust mainly i think? maybe a little of my osrs grind?
the farmers on this game are some of the BIGGEST crybabies i ever seen. either I'm the luckiest person in the world or legendary materials are not that hard to get. with all my professions being around the 5-8 range I've gotten just about at least 1 "drop" of legendary everything from the level 1 range. lets make something clear.. if legendary is BIS it shouldn't be that easily accessible TO ME a like 1/10000 drop rate for a legendary item that is BIS sounds more than reasonable. not every player needs bis, and if legendary gear drops from world bosses, your level 3 players shouldn't have access to the materials to make them, i get they don't have the crafting recipe, but access to the material is still insane to me. I'll bring this up in a later point.
fifth point:
this one will probably be the most hated as i said, the farmers here seem to be this biggest crybabies. BROTHER, nobody is stopping you from BOOKING IT to the closest town once you get that legendary wood or whatever. farmers should lose ALL farmable materials on death in PVP (if not all at least all rare-legendary materials). the game is labeled as open world PVP. Farming simulator 25 just dropped and might be more in your wheelhouse if you want risk free reward. my suggestion for this system is the farmer loses all their materials and the person that killed them gets half. this would GREATLY stabilize the economy long term, and add benefit to pvp... and lets get one thing straight.. farmers aren't not able to PVP they never cry when they get attacked and kill someone that it's not fair the other person died.. they have a weapon, class and abilities just like everyone else. its not like you had to leave your sword at the bank to farm....
to dive a little deeper in this and make it fair... if a player attacks a non-combatant I don't think the non-combatant should have to risk their gear, but the attacker (in current state corrupted) should risk it all. this will make PKing farmers just as risky as it is losing your legendary material.
sixth point:
you didn't like point 5? fair, i understand completely. here's my counter-idea. remember how i said flagged player should lose everything?... make only common/uncommon drops in most areas of the map --- and areas where you can get rare-legendary are lawless zones where you lose everything OR you have to flag for PvP to get rare or better... this is a more than fair adjustment considering the fact i seen people in chat buying items such as legendary rubies for like 4 gold a piece. if you can get up to 5 per node you don't deserve 20 gold for hitting 5 rocks getting lucky ands getting legendary considering mob farming is slowly painful and most grinders are hard stuck in like mostly green with some blue gear.
the constant loss of gear in high risk zones will increase the playability, adds a TRUE risk vs. reward factor to the game, and in the long run will stabilize the economy.
seventh point:
to recap back to when i said "ill bring this up in a later point" ... mob drops.. if you've read my post about drop rates you know I'm not happy as someone who grinded well over 3k seph/carp kills to see ZERO items. as someone who is struggling to even gear in full level 10 blue gear as a level 20.. again i feel like the farmers are heavily favored but whatever, that's irrelevant. mob drops should be more frequent and more class specific depending on whose on the team, in a "open world pvp" scenario where i would lose all my stuff on death... i would expect to be able to farm a full set of gear i can go pvp in a relatively fair time... (iin my head relatively fair is anywhere in the 3-10 hour range.. it took me well over 100 hours to have a piece of gear in every slot) I'm not saying the drops can't all/mostly green... but when you have level 20+ mob grinders with merchant gear and level 7 farmers in legendary gear.. something has to change.
eight point:
boy is this a heavily debated topic... corruption ... and again I'm coming from the perspective of someone that likes to kill
lets get this out the way..... killing mobs to lower corruption is a meme at best.
corrupt players do deserve SOME KIND of penalty but like... killing 300 mobs... my pet hamster if i had one could come up with a better idea in 30 minutes. before i get in to completely SLAMMING AoC for their piss-poor design. i want to say.. this is one of the most enjoyable games i ever played and even in alpha a lot of things are very well thought out, the game is fun, engaging, has WAY MORE positives than negatives, and i could see this game being up there with games like WoW.
back to the slamming - the corruption system is god awful and i have beef with whatever farm-bot, roleplayer, pacifist, developer put it in to play. they took a OPEN WORLD PVP game and made it so punitive that there is zero benefits to it and even if you decide to take the risk you get punished for the next 8+ hours of game time in xp debt and gear loss for ABSOLUTELY no benefit.
this is personally to whoever developed the corruption system: i hate you with a passion. killing mobs really? that's the BEST you could come up with? even in a short period of time for a playtest?
Here's some REAL and VIABLE ways to handle corruption.
-15 minute timer where you're marked on the map to the person you killed. if they want their revenge they have plenty of time, they can even try to bring a friend to get their stuff back etc. the corrupt player runs the risk of getting attacked by literally anyone and having to fear for their life, the "non combatant" has every chance to get their stuff back.
-a moving "corrupted zone" where corrupted players can go to take their 15 minute cooldown to something like the 5-10 minute range by being in the zone... this zone will be full of other corrupted players, a strictly 1v1 PvP zone like discussed above, and other players (who are flagged for PvP when they enter the zone. (again full loot pvp) where they can try to hunt down the corrupted.. if a corrupted player is in a corrupted zone.. they probably got that goop on them, so it would encourage players to go hunt these guys down.
- a "pay for your sins" option. where you have to pay right before entering a node.. (in current economy, subject to change or could even be subject to how many people you killed) lets say like something up there but not ridicules like 5 gold to become uncorrupt by paying in to the city. this would help nodes progress with people from within or even people traveling past a node... the fee then gets directly donated in to the node... lets say you kill someone with 20 legendary wood on them.. good for you man the 5 gold fee was worth it... but lets say you killed a player with 2 common oak on them... too bad so sad... you still killed someone and they lost their materials, you still have to pay a fee to become uncorrupted.
- make a system where you can "fight off corruption" currently if you're corrupt you're literally free to non-combatants they don't even have to flag AND you get debuffs... laughable... if you don't want to make the NONCOMBATANTS flag to engage in COMBAT then there should be some kind of "kill 1 non-combatants that attacked you first to become uncorrupt per level of corruption" endgame or something similar. not fight for your life for 13 hours while trying to farm enough mobs (which at level 20 you pretty much have to go to a named location FULL OF PLAYERS) to remove corruption. and after killing 50+ mobs get attacked by a group of 5 non combatants just to be put in 300k xp debt.
you might be wondering why I'm so passionate on the corruption system... here's a background story....
over the weekend me and my friends attacked a caravan.. it was Monday at like 6 am (PST for convenience) i did the scatter shot (aoe) attack .. and as i hit it like a level like 7 bard logged in right in front of me like at the PERFECT moment... and i took half his health, said sorry he said all good and went on his way.. and we continued attacking the caravan.. this put me at level 2 corruption.. after we destroyed the caravan.. i spent TWO HOURS farming golem saplings in the lawless zone .. at roughly roughly 2.2k xp each with 3 of us in the group... my corruption didn't even drop to level 1 so i just took the L. got almost 300k xp debt and "loss of gear" .. luckily it was my friends that killed me.. over an AOE where someone logged in as i hit it. (we killed all the defenders and were just pretty much finishing off the caravan when this happened) .. we farmed the saplings for 2 hours, (after i had to fight off like 6 people attacking me on the way there btw) and when i didn't drop at all i took the L, let them kill me, and we went to carp to try to clean up the XP debt till the servers went down.. I'm down to like 130k, which is no big deal i don't care that much. but all i did those last 3 hours was think about how whoever developed the PVP/corruption system is on their last 3 braincells. and i genuinely hope that developer reads this absolute dictionary of a post and uses it as encouragement to not be the reason a other-than-that perfect product goes in the trash to any player that enjoys a PvP experience in games.
I'm sure this post will get scrutinized 3000000 times, and I'm fine with that as long as your feedback is about the actual ideas and isn't you just saying "its still in development" "its only an alpha" or "its not a complete product" because if its that incomplete and piss poorly designed, they just shouldn't have added the PvP element yet, the purpose of a forum is to list feedbacks, discussions and suggestions.. and that's all this is.
thought?
opinions?
comments?
gripes?
concerns?
agencies?
disagrees?