Lawless Areas Should Exist

I have been playing since the beginning of alpha 2 phase 1 and have played a lot of hours. The main reason I wanted to make a post was to talk about the lawless areas in the game. Since the beginning when I started playing the main lawless areas have been the tropics and desert. I have had in my opinion the most fun and the best pvp in both of those areas and have had a lot of "end game" interactions around those areas specifically mob grind spots that ended up being the best in the game (tropics goblins/desert minotaurs/desert snakes). With the new update everything has changed and I'm worried about the future.

In the most recent update Djinna and Squall's End have been added as their own separate nodes down in the desert. What has come with that is the removal of the lawless area in the rest of the desert and has made it so the tropics are the only lawless area left. I have had a lot of fun experiences in the desert fighting over farm spots and overall think its worse for the game to have less and less lawless areas. I have been told that the overall plan is to have the ocean stay as the main lawless area on the map (not sure if true someone can correct me) with little other areas on land and I wanted to make this post to argue that some land areas on the map should stay lawless.

There are a lot of merits to having lawless area's in my opinion.
1. Farm spots that are in lawless should be great and incentivize fighting for, adds more pvp content and rewards group's that are able to win the spot with better experience. This also spreads leveling groups across the map so less areas are as crowded and leveling groups can decide to go to decent farm spots that aren't lawless versus really good experience farms but they are in lawless and more dangerous. This also will add more spice during leveling and more fun.
2. Not everyone wants to pvp in the ocean all the time. The ocean is definitely fun and I look forward to what else they add in the future but having a variety of pvp area's in my opinion is good for the game and breaks up the monotony.
3. Having more lawless area's spreads out the pvp, if there's only one central location then everyone will hang around there. Not all pvp needs to be large scale guild vs guild or 8 man vs 8 man, and having more lawless area's would help spread people around so you could potentially find more small scale fights.
4. There are times where I want to pvp but don't want to take the time to war declare on another guild or start up/find a caravan. Lawless zones are the perfect place to find small scale fights without needing to involve your guild or run a caravan.
5. They can have farm spot's stay lawless but keep the node's town safe. I'm not sure if its a technical limitation but let's say for the current Djinna node, you can keep the town itself and some area safe and then when you reach a certain distance away there should be a border where it turns lawless so certain POI's like the snake cave can be fought over. There's ways to make this better but overall I don't believe it should be this node is all lawless and this node is all safe, I'm sure we could find a good in between.

I'm worried once the Jundark area gets added and more nodes are added around the Turquoise sea even more lawless area will disappear. The most fun I have had in this game usually takes place in the Lawless area and I hope they stay and add more in the future, not just the ocean.

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Comments

Ludullu

Having lawless zones with best loot (otherwise there's no point in them) would go against the risk/reward design of the game. If a strong/zerg guild can just dominate a single location by killing anyone they see in it - they'll snowball into an even bigger/stronger guild and will then dominate all the pvp events and get to a point where others can't even touch them.

Having those zones would also immediately completely remove any other type of player from that content, because, again, they'd simply be sniped by the hardcore players w/o any issues.

Moving all of lawless pvp stuff into well-designed guild/node wars would be a much better approach, because the risks would go up (due to war declaration costs and potential loss consequences) and the reward would be appropriate (getting the content against a proper enemy and the win reward of the war itself).

It would also make the whole situation an opt-in design, rather than a forced one, all while there's still the ability to just PK your opponent, if you believe that the loot is worth it. And I believe that PKing should also be properly rebalanced, where it's still a viable choice of action rather than a near-useless feature.

Open seas will already fuck over way too many people, who might've otherwise been interested in that kind of content. I don't want even more people getting fucked over in even more locations.

norththemage

if PKing systems are rebalanced and not useless i think the game would feel fine in these situations

I do think the game would benefit from having lawless areas in between the major regions - if the areas in which the riverlands and sandsquall or tropics remained lawless permanently, it would incentivize banditry and danger around those areas as people try to move materials etc.

Veeshan

Personaly i think draakathbohr island should be lawless with 1-2 nodes on for pirate playstyle along with some useful mobs on that drop recipes and things for more naval aspect like shipcomponent recipes and so on.
I wouldnt mind seeing Sujoma and Peligora islands be lawless aswell with some decent reason to farm there maybe a node or 2 aswell but it could be cool if the islands were out of reach of the law of the 2 main continents due to being seperated by water.

SmileGurney

I personally love easily accessible lawless areas which hold some unique resources like the tropics and the old desert lawless. Especially in the desert you could pop in, gather some resources and find some consequence free pvp.

Veeshan

also get lawless area when nodes get destroyed sometime in the future where ur spose to be able to get loot that was in people banks

Noaani

@Chase

I get your concern, but keep in mind, PvP content, along with most content in general, isn't implemented yet.

Your main issue is that you currently have the most fun in the lawless areas. This is understandable in part, as the corruption system that reigns in the rest of the game simply isn't tuned to be fun right now - it is currently tuned to facilitate testing.

When the game hits live (or even beta), and we have sieges fully implemented, wars working as they should, naval content in full, caravans balanced to be worthwhile and corruption better tuned, you are unlikely to miss lawless zones.

And that is without taking in to account the objectively correct posts above mine.

Nappy

Noaani wrote: »

When the game hits live (or even beta), and we have sieges fully implemented, wars working as they should, naval content in full, caravans balanced to be worthwhile and corruption better tuned, you are unlikely to miss lawless zones.

Neither of these systems you refer to are solo/small scale PvP which he is asking for. I agree with OP that it's concerning that lawless zones are being removed when nodes are being added to those spots. Large lawless zones was the reason I kept on playing.

Ludullu

Nappy wrote: »

Large lawless zones was the reason I kept on playing.

That's a very bad reason to keep following the game, when from the start of A2 it was known that lawless areas are just a test of open sea gameplay and player behavior.

Everyone who followed dev's statements knew that lawless zones would go away.

Chuck Zitto

I have been having alot of good fights out in the tropics. They added in a crate peddler to sea hook to repair so now I permently live there. I am really hoping that when they do put in sea hook node that its only the mainland out to the shoreline and all the islands and pocket dungeons remain lawless zone. Add sport fishing like archeage so I can go steal peoples fish. Maybe even add in a few lawless nodes that have no guards and your always flagged there for the pirate characters because I really enjoy sea hook right now.

Noaani

Nappy wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

When the game hits live (or even beta), and we have sieges fully implemented, wars working as they should, naval content in full, caravans balanced to be worthwhile and corruption better tuned, you are unlikely to miss lawless zones.

Neither of these systems you refer to are solo/small scale PvP which he is asking for. I agree with OP that it's concerning that lawless zones are being removed when nodes are being added to those spots. Large lawless zones was the reason I kept on playing.

While true, Ashes isn't about solo or small scale PvP.

It is and has always been about large scale PvP.

SmileGurney

It would be good to have some land based permanent lawless zones, maybe even interconnected with the story line and the whole risk reward principle (some rare resources etc):

"No one lives in this valley, because of the necromancer's tower. No one heard from him in years, but the area is still crawling with undead".

"This area is forbidden by the locals, nothing grows here, everything has been consumed by the magic of dragons who battled here centuries past. On a good day you can see their bones shinning in the distance. One of our hunters claims he saw an actual dragon in the hills, but that's surely nonsense."

dkshaw

definitely we need more lawless zones for sure.
this is the reason I kept on playing.We can even reduce the death penalty
I don't want to have to be at sea or gather a group of people every time I want to participate in PVP activities. I prefer some random skirmishes, which will make the game more interesting. That's also the reason why I gave up World of Warcraft and came here.

Noaani

dkshaw wrote: »

definitely we need more lawless zones for sure.
this is the reason I kept on playing.We can even reduce the death penalty
I don't want to have to be at sea or gather a group of people every time I want to participate in PVP activities. I prefer some random skirmishes, which will make the game more interesting. That's also the reason why I gave up World of Warcraft and came here.

Random skirmishes will be a part of both corruption based PvP and bounty hunter PvP.

This isn't overly active so far during Alpha testing because corruption is set to a higher point in order to discourage PvP and facilitate better testing.

ZYBAK

One of the best lawless locations was the Shardlings by Miraleth when that was lawless. I feel like that was the PERFECT example of a lawless area. It was a highly lucrative glint farming spot that attracted solo players or small groups. These are the things we need to see more of in the game. Areas where random PvP can just happen without there having to be a declaration or crazy event happening.

If you only have PvP during events then you'll naturally create a behavior where people just log off when nothing is going on. That is terrible for MMORPGs.

I personally think there could be small lawless sections of zones that have attractive solo or small group farming content. Lawless trophies and packages need to be buffed in a serious way as well to make them something you'll always want and can never get enough of.

Veeshan

still wanna see the 3 islands be lawless zones and have better loot drop rates on things

EPMAN

100% agree with this. Lawless zones should be the main risk vs reward content in the game. They can do better with the carebear pvp system, if they manage to balance it better, but still it wont come close to real pvp content. Lawless zones can even be balanced from low-end to high-end, meaning that dead in the zone will have greater consequence in the high-end = real risk vs reward.

If ppl don´t want to do high-end risk vs reward pvp, they can always stay in the safe zone and do carebear pvp. The more variety in the system the more ppl will play the game.

Azherae

Y'all really want another PvP fairytale game?

Or can we count on all the people who want Lawless zones to also want proper changes to non-PvP conflict options? Because I'm actually fine with more Lawless areas if the 'Building' and 'Trading' parts of the game also get empowered.

But as it is planned now, I'm opposed to Lawless areas because if they're rewarding, the game is bad, and if they're not rewarding, 90% of the discourse about the game will be PvP-ers upset that their bedtime story is too realistic and not fun enough.

Noaani

EPMAN wrote: »

100% agree with this. Lawless zones should be the main risk vs reward content in the game.

Lawless zones literally remove the risk.

The point of corruption is so that there is still a loss if you PvP - you need to make sure you stand to gain more than you stand to lose.

Lawless areas remove the cost associated with PvP, as long as you are winning. This is an inherently bad situation for a PvP game to be in, as it means the strong get stronger and the weak get weaker.

There needs to be a penalty/cost to winning PvP.

Ludullu

Azherae wrote: »

Or can we count on all the people who want Lawless zones to also want proper changes to non-PvP conflict options? Because I'm actually fine with more Lawless areas if the 'Building' and 'Trading' parts of the game also get empowered.

The only way for that to happen, that I see, is corruption getting even stricter, at which point all the pvpers will complain even more, cause no casual will go into the lawless zones, while they'll be easily farming all the other zones. And now it's less of a pvp game than it could've been.

Just a classic situation of people trying to push their own fun out of the game by not knowing that what they're suggesting is completely opposed to what they want.

Azherae

Ludullu wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

Or can we count on all the people who want Lawless zones to also want proper changes to non-PvP conflict options? Because I'm actually fine with more Lawless areas if the 'Building' and 'Trading' parts of the game also get empowered.

The only way for that to happen, that I see, is corruption getting even stricter, at which point all the pvpers will complain even more, cause no casual will go into the lawless zones, while they'll be easily farming all the other zones. And now it's less of a pvp game than it could've been.

Just a classic situation of people trying to push their own fun out of the game by not knowing that what they're suggesting is completely opposed to what they want.

Corruption doesn't need to be stricter. 'Casual cooperation' needs to be stronger. None of this 'social exclusion reactions aren't part of the gameplay' stuff.

i.e. the Open Seas are 'fine' because they're expensive and don't contain a lot of Nodes, right? So if we add cheap lawless areas you can just walk into, then merchants need more game-power over who they do and don't sell things to, for example.

Or Social Orgs need to be able to put pressure on players who act against their members. Stuff like that.

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