Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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.
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
Not everything is a caravan, how about your pockets with rare materials
Also, will every ship be a caravan? Or will there be warships for killing bosses and for killing that castle?
If warships aren't caravans and they are subject to wars, then they have no loot...but they are purple? So... they won't drop loot in wars
The player caravans are the ones that become ships when they reach water,they are not "real ships", they were caravans at land with wagons and they become ships somehow when they get in the water
Yes but this is by definition a terrible design pillar, not because it automatically fails, but because it has no reason to be this way.
Even you, a great L2 fan, I am reasonably certain would be happier with at least five other implementations. There's just never a good reason to make a large part of your game 'prevent others from participating in X content' when you don't have to for some related Economy design reason.
That's what myself and Arya (I think) are concerned about here. Coming from EVE and from 'studying MMO economy design since I was young', there's no clear econ->gameplay enjoyment link here. "Guild War opponents don't drop loot" is definitionally the opposite of this, disabling the only one that existed.
I don't think the Open Seas have any equivalent of Caravanserai, and if they do, that's the basis of a massive number of other problems.
Now this riddle is on: at open seas, is a circunvent declaring war against pirates just to avoid being looted?
Band-aids, man! LOL
Band-aids always fight each other, this is why making too many rules worries me, because then the rules will need rules for the rules
The seas will be an interesting place. The corruption system on land is bordering on a system without a purpose. It's pretty much done for. Very few people will use it, other than the gimicky type stuff like depraved described earlier in the thread.
It's just not feasible. You go red, you have to grind, you can't use CC against greens who attack you, you can be essentially karma bombed, because every person you kill while defending yourself as red, is another murdercount. You're stuck in a death spiral. You're going to have inventory issues if you actually killed a couple people with decent loot, because now you have to grind and leave loot from mobs on the ground, cutting into the profit of the kills. On top of all of that, there's bounty hunters with radar hacks who know where you're at on the map. This is just not a system that's going to be used very often.
But...enter the open seas. This is where you would have to retrerat to to grind off any significant amount of corruption. On the open seas, everyone's flagged combatant. So as a red, you can use your CC's to defend yourself. And you can kill them without increasing your murder count when they attack you, because they're auto flagged combatant.
This creates kind of like a Viking/pirate dynamic that's pretty interesting. Until the carebears get all of this changed too. lol. Party dont stop. It will never end.
Also, we don't know how exactly looting will even work. What are the chances to drop any given droppable item in your inventory? What about its volume/quantity? What will people do to minimize any chances of dropping the rare stuff?
I get what you're saying and there's still a chance that this design changes somehow (just as caravan death penalties decay your gear for some fucking reason), but I would expect that the direct item looting would be a caravan/mule thing rather than general owpvp.
I can't agree that 'band-aids always fight each other'.
I believe this because at no point do I feel like any poster on this forum trying to engage on a topic has been in a position where they 'didn't have an expectation' of what would happen with a system when they make their complaints.
What I mean is, everyone has a clear expectation of how something would work, and what 'band-aids' would be needed to make it work.
While I normally don't like to fault Intrepid, it's moreso that analytically, their design appears inconsistent, and we're all just sitting around waiting for it to solidify in one of the sane directions without having all the internal data or discussions they have.
Of course it could just be that they don't agree internally either and Steven doesn't know how to build the system himself, but even that should still result in something.
Basically I think you can choose the 'correct synergy of band-aids' and it work. And that's with my personal belief that the current Corruption system is flawed. I don't think it's valid to say 'the band-aids are going to ruin it' or that 'it just won't work'.
But the PvP aspect in AoC has some inconsistencies because the game's goal is Verra, not PvP... PvP is this beast that Intrepid brought to the stage but they can't handle it properly
It is just like those circuses which have a show with lions and suddently the lion attacks the beastmaster
That "overcome other players to get the thing" is what was attractive to me. And I do realize that the majority of people would prefer a much fairer and more content-directed system rather than a "pvp if you want to even try this content". And as Dygz would probably say, "if Ashes had a lead designer, this might not have been an issue"
As I have been saying for years, people will not declare a war in order to avoid corruption but still killing a player and taking their stuff.
Wars are a big deal, second only to sieges.
There are actual things at stake in wars. Guild halls are the obvious example.
First of all 'lol'.
Secondly, I agree from the perspective that based on what we see right now, it looks like the systems don't match the game. Hopefully when the Economy and System Designers are hired and can have a serious sit-down about it all, they'll fix that either by fixing the PvP systems or changing the other aspects of the game.
Intrepid is in a good place for that. Back when I was running the TCG Community I was in charge of, it was super helpful to me to have people to provide different perspectives of that type, since it really lets you cut down on the 'randomized' feedback of the uninvested.
We're already there as a community, partially because the active community slightly shrank or went back to lurking, but the reason doesn't matter.
If Corruption fails PvP incentives from the worldbuild, NiKr will point it out. If it fails because it has too many 'carebear loopholes', you will, and if it breaks the Economy then I will.
So basically I request that you give the bandaids a chance (but definitely keep complaining, particularly with your changed perspective, since you're the one most suited to telling them when they're not even helping Verra itself).
AoC just made pvp a carebear thing!
ahahahaha so now wars is about hoarding items
Yeah see, the issue is that if you do this too early into a thread, people take you too seriously, lol.
But I appreciate the humor in it, truly.
"Quick you guys, log in on your non-guild Alts so we can actually kill these guys, they got the Kraken before we could get organized! Hurry up they're FLEEING!"
And then all the drama of actually getting the Guildless Pirate Alts onto pursuit ships somehow...
This is probably going to be funny no matter how it works actually.
I mean, one of the goals for a guild war is to take a quest objective that the rival guild just got from a raid.
So if you go and kill the Kraken with your guild, and my guild want to take the reward for that from you, declaring a war against you is our best option - depending of course on how long the declaration period is.
If you haven't checked it out, be sure to read through this official Dev Discussion thread on this topic! https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/53828/dev-discussion-45-gathering-and-pvp/p1
There were some very interesting talking points and opinions on either side of the argument. The prompt wasn't too dissimilar from OP's, either! ^_^