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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
If killstealing bosses, wiping partys trying to kill said bosses etc becomes a big thing, and you will be required to join massive guilds to survive.
That will be a massive problem fast and one of the main concerns i have about the game.
It might sound fun on paper but history has told us its not when players actually get to try it.
0dbea148-8cb8-4711-ba90-eb0864e93b5f
Bugusers, cheaters, thirdparty programms, guld buyers, bots of course are absolute no go = permaban
For example, there is a good chance that when you get ganked, you won't be able to send your killer a direct message.
Because there is roughly 90% chance, that you weren't grieved since you dropped something for your killer.
So the killer/ganker doesn't even have to explain to you why he killed you as long as he looted something out of you whether it's a valuable item/mats or not.
Now, as I said before. People are well within their rights to gank you and play the corruption/bounty mini game if they choose too. People love to take gambles and see what can come out of it. Knowing full well of the possible consequences especially if within 8 hours of their gameplay all they have done is gank and accumulate corruption and that's when you become very vulnerable.
It's all risk vs reward afterall isnt it?
Well, there are 3 factors to consider for this scenario or massive zerg attacks. 1st , you have to have the knowledge that there is a raid going on at a certain dungeon. 2nd , you have to organize your own group pretty fast and make sure your group is large and good enough to conquer the other group. 3rd , you have to consider the travel time from your group to the dungeon group and hope you attack them as a group by surprise and actually win. Last thing you want is to die and respawn miles away and running back and end up being scattered wich at this point you probably failed anyways. There are other factors too, but as you can see it's not as easy as you think. Risk vs reward.
I at least, was arguing that it would be good design to have the ability to set a premade kill quote to make it slightly easier to communicate intent. But I suppose you can look at it in the antisocial manner you seem to be looking at it, yes.
In a game like Ashes of Creation, it sounds like it will be difficult to tell apart griefers from players doing their part. For example, a group from another nearby node might attack the gatherers from your node. Those gatherers might not even participate in PvP and are just trying to get resources to build up the node so they can get more benefit from it.
However to the attackers, they could be seen as just preventing the growth of a potential threat to their own node. They don't mean to cause distress to other players, but they are performing these raids because they don't want to deal with a costly conflict later on. A sort of pre-emptive strike scenario.
In general, griefing can be summed up with people just being wankers to be wankers. No motive other than to just enjoy other people's frustrations, essentially griefing = trolling.
Guys, you are playing a PVP game, everyone is fighting here, if you do not have a war flag raised, then the opponent will receive a fine and a chance to lose clothes, this can be serious if there is no invisibility in the game that makes you invulnerable (after all, you are not on the screen and the penalty will subside sooner or later) to be honest, this is a sad experience of playing TESO, where the blades of the night are people who, in any incomprehensible situation, press invisibility and you do not have the tools to resist it strongly enough. I want to say that if there is not such an easy way for some people to avoid punishment and such a person will run with a penalty and reflect at all players on the map, like a particularly dangerous killer, and everyone will go to kill him, for the sake of a reward, then this will be a really cool way fight against lovers to kill a fisherman, quest worker or resource gatherer. This is for ganker questions.
1. If we consider other options, then here each settlement (node) is kind of hostile, and this will be a feature when you fight and impede the development of rivals, of course, the issue of completely stopping development in this way should be resolved, I agree that there are obsessed communities that just won't let you pick up rare loot from the boss and that will be their goal, and they do it because you are not with them or because they just can do it, these things need to be balanced somehow, maybe even the boss fight area will be friendly so as not to turn the boss fight into a scuffle with other players, but rather the time when you all unite to fight a common enemy.
If the higher level player decides to attack the lower level one that's their choice...there's other places to gather. They can always go there...
I love the EVE online approach to this. Essentially nothing is "griefing" outside real world doxing if I remember correctly. So basically, when someone is no longer attacking or following someone in game and are now bugging them in the real world.
Outside that, the games systems like the "corruption" system should add a cost to hassling people, but not prevent it fully.
Remember, Verra is not a peaceful utopia. If someone is giving you a problem, you can try to give them a problem back. If not, you can try to find people to help aid you in revenge. This is all emergent gameplay, and excessive rules will hinder this.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
I've never experienced any real griefing but I'm inclined to think of it generally as a 1vX group mowing over solos who are just out and about or some strong/experienced player repeatedly killing the same player over and over to drive them out of some area or just for kicks.
I know there could be all manner of boorish behavior I don't think about since I personally never got the short end of that stick but I hope the devs' know alot more of what could happen if left unchecked.
Griefing extends beyond PVP and PVE, however. I could be in a group of 5 or 75 and experience the same type of griefing - a player just drags mobs through our play space for the lolz. He's well known on our server to do this and even offers "protection services" and "guided tours" for a price. He's been reported and people call him out but to no avail. Unfortunately, the Corruption system wouldn't (or shouldn't) apply because an unfortunate player may do this quite accidentally too.
Open world content is certainly better than instanced content in that it keeps me engaged with the whole world, but I feel still needs to be gated through some truly challenging encounter that prevents single griefers from entering and ruining the fun of others. Yes, a PVP group could lie in wait for another group within that area and that is the nature of open-world PVP but it is far less likely for a group of griefers to be doing the same.
As an aside, after reading many people talk about camp spawning, I think there could be an opportunity to toggle a PVP mode buffer on respawn. This would allow a player the option to respawn active in PVP (because they want to jump right into the action) or have a delayed PVP status which might also grant some invisibility to other players but not AI (giving them time to escape to another location).
I agree with some previous posts (note that I did not look at all of them) in that an objective definition of griefing is mostly dependent on the intent of the attacker (I restrict this post to PvP) and the perception of the attacked. If the intend of the attacker is to simply destroy the enjoyment of attacked for the sake of it, with no other valid motive, this is griefing for me. If the attacker has another motive, but the attacked does not know about it, this may still be percieved as griefing. If a payer is killed and he knows the motive and can comprehend it, he may not perceive this as griefing at all.
The problem is of course that the game cannot read the mind of a player and therefore cannot determin the intent of the attacker or the perception of the attacled. At least not 100% accurately. Hence, the game cannot punish an attacker that has no valid motive.
What can be done is to help the game provide the attacker with an indication that they have no valid game motive. An example would be, to show to the attacker that they are about to kill a player that will not drop anything (or the drops are negilgible; configurable) or that the player has already been killed several times in a short time before (even if the attacker was not the one to attack before, he would be part of the perceived 'griefing' if he attacked now).
Of course, a system motive is only a subset of valid motives. This game is intended to be player driven and therefore has player politics that are not necessarily restrained by the game systems (e.g. guild wars). So the attacker may have a valid reason after all. I believe an atomatic messaging system to communicate this reason from the attacker to the other player would help to communicate the reason (I believe this was propsed before). It will not prevent the killing but may alleviate the frustration on the other side. It would also prevent the situation where the attacker has to kill a player repeatedly because they come back after respawn simply because they do not know that the area is cleared out and they will be killed again if they return (how should they know this when no one tells them). They may not like this motive, but at least they know there is one (and they als know they do not have to expect this behavior all the time). Of course, if they come back anyway, this is no longer griefing in my opinion.
What would also be cool (but may be totally out of scope to implement) would be to have a 'grievences' system (similar to some deplomacy systems in 4x games), where a player or a guild can add a grievence they have with player and these can the be used for automatic communication after the kill.
The system could even use this as valid motives for attacking players if an attacker cannot simply add every player it encouters to the list shortly before it attacked them.
I define griefing as a person who is deliberately harassing another player(s) within the game by using the games systems, other than as intended by the developers, simply for their own enjoyment - or the lulz. I know there will always be some ganking. It's a game with a lot of people, it's just going to happen. But I hope for all the potential this game has that it doesn't simply become a gankfest.
Being a PVP game is new to me. I've enjoyed the PvP I've have had chances to do when it's made sense in the story to me, but I am one of those people who believe that RPing is a perfectly valid way to enjoy a MMORPG. So I am not looking or expecting an experience where I never have to lift a sword. But as an RPer I know that I have a target on my back for griefers because of an aspect of the game that I choose to enjoy.
(On a side note im curious about AoC not having factions dividing opposing player communication.
I can imagine salty toxic players will be forcing negative communication on people killing them)
To me actual griefing would be something like:
1.Following a player for extended periods of time to harass or kill them
2.Excessive camp killing (atleast 6+ times in a row or something)
Yea..pretty much every game that have open world pvp systems like this have become toxic gankfests where you have to be in the biggest guild on the server to get kills on specific bosses.
There was a reason games like DaoC divided PvP sides into 3 sides and make each side unable to talk to eachother.
0dbea148-8cb8-4711-ba90-eb0864e93b5f
Nobody wants to spawn into a game and get smoked by a level 45 who grinded 270 hours in the last 2 weeks. its fun for the level 45 maybe but not the level 1 and look at mortal online. A good mmo that is struggling because of its community griefing anyone and everyone all the time. Theres a fine line of fantasy and reality thatll transition a game from fun to exasperating. Your mechanics regarding corruption are great.
However if someone attacks a non combatant and the non combatant fights back then its two combatants and no chance of corruption, the problem is this means that the engager always gets first hit in these scenarios and sometimes you arent going to want to fight but you definitely dont want to walk 10 minutes to get back to a spot you found either. Sure you can fight for it but maybe you have multiple times already and you just want to play the game for a bit without having to outplay someone every 5 minutes whos getting first hit on you and forcing you to either engage or runaway.
So an alternative could be corruption is given to a play for doing a % max hp damage to a non combatant.
I am thinking of chain-kills, KS or hateful messages for example.
PVP is ok as long as it doesn't turn into harassment.
Lol I watched in real-time as this thread went to +275 new unread posts.
Who what? Me? I wasn't flexing at all. I really thought it was a bit funny it got merged. I just linked to the old thread so they could put all that feedback into their feedback document. Or do you mean something else?
Nah, Vaknar moving that large stack of posts lol
Oooh
Ganking is griefing when it becomes harassment. Otherwise, it should be OK. It still sucks, but it's in the game. The corruption system should help there. It is. Don't let anyone ever make you think that RP is not a valid way to play an MMO. You want to run you low quality sword bc your character is afraid of gold handed swords? More power to you. It will irritate the mechanical players, but whatever.