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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Ludullu

Azherae wrote: »

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.

Trade black lists and wars would be interesting. And I NEED MY HOLY WARS!! I wanna be a high ranking religious dude, so I need my religion to go to some kind of "war" against all the infidels!

I hoooope that Highwayman and BH stuff is well-designed, interconnected and involved, so those would be SO-related influences too.

With 0 info about what exactly social orgs will truly be, it's difficult to understand if this kind of stuff is anywhere near planned. There was some talk about "one org might go against another one", but that was in the context of not flagging up or being similar to guild wars.

Veeshan

Noaani wrote: »

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.

can there be a reward for winning pvp then too if when there a penalty especialy a penalty so high that causes gear to drop :P 25% material drop realy is nothing especialy when all we can do with the glint drop is sell it to a vendor for pocket change

Atm risk vs reward is no where near close if all situations murder in green or PvP/PvE in lawless

Lawless zones need better PvE drops to incentivize people farming those zones which then also incentivises people PvPing in said zones too (I would even argue for a larger portion of loot being dropped in purple zones too personally) To drops 50% keeps 25% and deletes 25% for lawless zones

Azherae

Veeshan wrote: »

can there be a reward for winning pvp then too if when there a penalty especialy a penalty so high that causes gear to drop :P 25% material drop realy is nothing especialy when all we can do with the glint drop is sell it to a vendor for pocket change

The glint/materials is the reward for winning PvP.

If you don't think you will get any glint/materials, don't PvP that opponent. If you don't think you can clear your corruption for one kill before someone comes and kills you, don't kill the opponent unless they fight back.

This is the entire point.

Noaani

Veeshan wrote: »

Lawless zones need better PvE drops to incentivize people farming those zones which then also incentivises people PvPing in said zones too (I would even argue for a larger portion of loot being dropped in purple zones too personally) To drops 50% keeps 25% and deletes 25% for lawless zones

All of a sudden, you have made the rest of the game world obsolete.

If lawless areas have the best PvE and PvP reward, other parts of the game world are worthless (or worth less). It means the entire meta of the game is to get as many people together as you can and just steamroll these lawless areas - is that really the game you want?

Veeshan

Noaani wrote: »

Veeshan wrote: »

Lawless zones need better PvE drops to incentivize people farming those zones which then also incentivises people PvPing in said zones too (I would even argue for a larger portion of loot being dropped in purple zones too personally) To drops 50% keeps 25% and deletes 25% for lawless zones

All of a sudden, you have made the rest of the game world obsolete.

If lawless areas have the best PvE and PvP reward, other parts of the game world are worthless (or worth less). It means the entire meta of the game is to get as many people together as you can and just steamroll these lawless areas - is that really the game you want?

if your constantly fighting over PvE spots its typical espeicaly with higher death penalty its actualy more efficient to farm PvE in lower PvP zones unless you specifically chasing an item that only drops in the zone. More deaths also means more items being deleted from the 25% loss aswell.
Take new world for example if you flagged up for PvP you had better drop rates and XP rates however 99.9% of players never flagged up at all they would rather pull mobs on you and steal ur node instead of flagging for it.

Noaani

Veeshan wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

Veeshan wrote: »

Lawless zones need better PvE drops to incentivize people farming those zones which then also incentivises people PvPing in said zones too (I would even argue for a larger portion of loot being dropped in purple zones too personally) To drops 50% keeps 25% and deletes 25% for lawless zones

All of a sudden, you have made the rest of the game world obsolete.

If lawless areas have the best PvE and PvP reward, other parts of the game world are worthless (or worth less). It means the entire meta of the game is to get as many people together as you can and just steamroll these lawless areas - is that really the game you want?

if your constantly fighting over PvE spots its typical espeicaly with higher death penalty its actualy more efficient to farm PvE in lower PvP zones unless you specifically chasing an item that only drops in the zone. More deaths also means more items being deleted from the 25% loss aswell.
Take new world for example if you flagged up for PvP you had better drop rates and XP rates however 99.9% of players never flagged up at all they would rather pull mobs on you and steal ur node instead of flagging for it.

Different situations.

People didn't flag in New World because the most effective means of farming was solo unflagged. It was more effective than if you were flagged, because of (if nothing else) the lack of interruption. It was also more effective than group farming either flagged or unflagged (though in a group, flagged is more productive than unflagged as the interruptions are far less frequent).

That is the design of that game, it is literally designed so that solo farming unflagged is the best way to farm.

Your suggestion with Ashes will make it so that the best farming is to join a zerg, and most zergs will happily take in more random players, as that makes the zerg stronger. The only interruption a zerg here will have is another zerg.

Basically, players will do what ever the developers design to be the best reward. Nee World has this as unflagged solo farming, you are suggesting zerg farming as being the best thing for Ashes, and so that is what players will organize themselves to do.

Azherae

Ludullu wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

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.

Trade black lists and wars would be interesting. And I NEED MY HOLY WARS!! I wanna be a high ranking religious dude, so I need my religion to go to some kind of "war" against all the infidels!

I hoooope that Highwayman and BH stuff is well-designed, interconnected and involved, so those would be SO-related influences too.

With 0 info about what exactly social orgs will truly be, it's difficult to understand if this kind of stuff is anywhere near planned. There was some talk about "one org might go against another one", but that was in the context of not flagging up or being similar to guild wars.

Social Orgs and interrelationships are effectively a solved problem in any MMO that can generate Commissions/Contracts/Tasks though. We shouldn't generally expect that Intrepid will do something in a shoddy manner, maybe a viable one that a given person doesn't like or agree with, but Social Org stuff is practically trivial.

"The Tailoring Association requests X"
"You do X"
"The Tailoring Association relationship with you improves."

Obviously I'm biased as an Elite Dangerous player but this is one of the few cases where I don't think the difference between a sci-fi and a fantasy MMO really 'matters' in the same way. Honestly I'd prefer that PvP and friction and 'lawlessness' was much more Social Org driven, and I don't think that's because that's just what I'm used to.

The second reason I don't think Fantasy MMOs are limited by this is because this is actually the thing most 'casual' players want to play them for in the first place. They get stuck relying on Guilds which fade in and out based on whims of people who just want to group around the concept of being in a group, and it actually diminishes the enjoyability of the game itself.

Now, in Ashes, given Steven's goals, it makes more sense for Guild Drama to play out like this, that's apparently part of the point/challenge, but Social Organizations would be the other side of that, and I'd assume that was why they exist, because otherwise it's way too much work for something that's effectively RP which will be ignored by at least 50% of the playerbase.

By that, I mean, I can already 'imagine being associated with the Stonemason's Association or the Tailoring Association or the various charities that feed the poor in Throne and Liberty, it wouldn't make sense for them to add fully fleshed out Social Organizations of these types mechanically unless they also intended to build player interactions/friction around those Organizations to flesh out the world (yes, there's some percentage of players that would appreciate this, but we're talking about dev time and money relative to it).

But Intrepid is specifically saying 'Hey we are going to make Social and Religious orgs and they won't just be simple quest-givers', which means they intend to track and simulate something and that gives them all the potential to drive conflict, maybe even proper PvP events, that are still possibly initiated/controlled by players.

I don't know if there are a lot of people still following this game with a positive mindset that would really care if the Joeva Fisherfolk Conclave could spawn a whole 'Community Goal', but I choose to believe that Steven still really cares.

Ludullu

Azherae wrote: »

I don't know if there are a lot of people still following this game with a positive mindset that would really care if the Joeva Fisherfolk Conclave could spawn a whole 'Community Goal', but I choose to believe that Steven still really cares.

While my positivity is definitely waning I'd definitely care about the Fisherfolk Conclave, cause if they can do that, then my zelous religion can definitely start its own war

Chase

Bumping this since the recent patch did what I thought and got rid of jundark lawless

Azherae

Chase wrote: »

Bumping this since the recent patch did what I thought and got rid of jundark lawless

Have you encountered anyone in the Jundark that refused to PvP when you challenged them?

I'm actually really curious how much it changed the overall experience because of the games I come from (I guess this probably doesn't directly relate to your argument, but it might, if people are just staying green and refusing to fight you, now).

In my general experience, if a PvP area 'shifts to being PvE' (which isn't even exactly what is happening in Ashes but it counts for this), people who normally were around there are still 'the sort of people that want to PvP'.

In other games, the option to PvP disappears entirely so they have to go find somewhere else to fight, which might be disruptive to the fun, but Ashes doesn't work like that, you can just still 'flag up and attack' and see what the other person does, so I'm really wondering 'how many people who were in the Jundark to PvP have suddenly lost their will to PvP there?'.

Grabba_the_Butt

Intrepid probably gained a lot of data from allowing all the PvP to happen, but going into Phase 3, where the phase is supposed to be more game-like, lawlessness zones should go away. From here on out, Intrepid will need more pvers' input on systems.

That said, lawless zones that are used to give an advantage to pvpers over pvers via special drops/mats will kill the game. And having lawless zones just for pvp won't encourage anyone to enter them. Jundark was only used for leveling and to farm certain drops. No one other than gankers went there just for pvp.

Grulsh

A group of us that recently started playing did not know according to the WIKI, Lawless zones would go away. I think it is a huge mistake! There are and have been many other PVE games. Why not have both in this game? How is this modeled after ArcheAge, a pvp game but without pvp? Also, you cant say that people running caravans etc is what PVPERS are looking for. That is good to have IF it works, but we would like more.

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