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Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about 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.
[Suggestion] Corruption Cost to Attacking a Caravan
kerrai
Member, Alpha Two
The corruption system, as we all know, is clunky and overtuned and needs an overhaul, which is planned. This would only work if corruption were properly overhauled to be more reasonable than it currently is.
There’ve been a lot of complaints about there being no cost to flag as an attacker for a caravan. Why not have it give a modest amount of corruption as the “cost” for flagging as an attacker? No corruption for kills once you’re flagged and fighting for the caravan. Maybe some extra corruption for when you actually kill the caravan (though that might not be necessary). Maybe some extra corruption if you die while attacking. Certainly no loss of corruption when you die while attacking. And I’m personally a fan of giving people one life on a caravan attack to prevent zerg respawning.
The amount of corruption would be important. It would have to not be enough to actually make you corrupt if you weren’t already most of the way there. But it does need to be enough that someone has to think to themselves “is this caravan attack worth it or would I rather not gain corruption for this?”
One big advantage I see is that it would GREATLY incentivize people to leave lowbie caravans alone. That should be a major concern for the dev team—little level ten Timmy should be able to complete the starter caravan quest mostly unbothered to learn the system and then be warned that running a real caravan is risky.
As a corollary, to incentivize defending caravans, perhaps a way to work off some of your accumulated corruption could be flagging as a defender and actually participating in the caravan defense. Perhaps you work off some of it when the caravan arrives based on how long you helped and you work some of it off for every kill/assist you get while defending. Hopefully this could be done in a way to deter “wintrading” abuse, but it would be tricky.
Really just spitballing. Most of the ideas for how to add a cost to attacking caravans are… clunky. And they usually just involve gold sinks instead of working through the existing systems in place. It’s a PvP event. Why not work within the PvP system to create costs and balance the risk/reward out?
There’ve been a lot of complaints about there being no cost to flag as an attacker for a caravan. Why not have it give a modest amount of corruption as the “cost” for flagging as an attacker? No corruption for kills once you’re flagged and fighting for the caravan. Maybe some extra corruption for when you actually kill the caravan (though that might not be necessary). Maybe some extra corruption if you die while attacking. Certainly no loss of corruption when you die while attacking. And I’m personally a fan of giving people one life on a caravan attack to prevent zerg respawning.
The amount of corruption would be important. It would have to not be enough to actually make you corrupt if you weren’t already most of the way there. But it does need to be enough that someone has to think to themselves “is this caravan attack worth it or would I rather not gain corruption for this?”
One big advantage I see is that it would GREATLY incentivize people to leave lowbie caravans alone. That should be a major concern for the dev team—little level ten Timmy should be able to complete the starter caravan quest mostly unbothered to learn the system and then be warned that running a real caravan is risky.
As a corollary, to incentivize defending caravans, perhaps a way to work off some of your accumulated corruption could be flagging as a defender and actually participating in the caravan defense. Perhaps you work off some of it when the caravan arrives based on how long you helped and you work some of it off for every kill/assist you get while defending. Hopefully this could be done in a way to deter “wintrading” abuse, but it would be tricky.
Really just spitballing. Most of the ideas for how to add a cost to attacking caravans are… clunky. And they usually just involve gold sinks instead of working through the existing systems in place. It’s a PvP event. Why not work within the PvP system to create costs and balance the risk/reward out?
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Comments
Source?
(3v3, 8v8)
Source: I’m pretty sure Steven said early on in Alpha P1 that they were intentionally setting corruption penalties very high and also making it impossible to remove blight and that these were temporary. If I’m wrong then my apologies.
No. Arenas are different in two ways.
First, lore-wise, there’s nothing corrupting about fighting a duel or gladiatorial combat. Everyone agrees to fight. There’s nothing villainous about willingly fighting another willing combatant.
Second, gameplay-wise, arenas are symmetrical. Both sides are presumably putting in the same resources to enter the arena and winning/losing the same things (rating points or whatever, I have no idea what’s planned for arenas in AoC). Caravans, on the other hand, are asymmetrical. The driver puts in glint and the value of the caravan and the time spent driving it and recruiting people to defend it and the resources to pay them to do so. The attackers put in, currently, only time and the preparation of having either a crowbar or a caravan beacon and a stored caravan. The intent of the suggestion is to find a good way to fix the lopsided asymmetry.
what a loser lmao
I too want a game that’s dead on arrival by providing no guardrails to the new player experience, thank you for this valuable insight, please move on to the next thing that will hold your attention for fifteen minutes.
Both caravans and arenas are PVP events. One is group based mobil event the other is instanced.
Do you think the differences between them are unimportant?
In the fact they are both a sacractioned PVP events there is no difference.
Caravans are have been labeled as mobile battle grounds.
Caravans are part of the heart and sole of the purposeful PvP opportunities being developed for Ashes of Creation. The corruption system has no place applying to attacking a caravan.
On the other side of that though I think there should be some mechanism as well for “less reputable” nodes where instead of trade coming in from caravans it’s the cargo coming in from the stolen goods vendors. This then sets up a system where attacking a caravan has an incentive since you can bring the goods to your home node, and defending caravans have an incentive as you can ensure your node is benefitting from them.