Ashes of Creation - Another PvP Centric MMO

override367

Stragint wrote: »

BahamutZERO wrote: »

I might just be jaded but there's always hopes and dreams of such kinds of system design in PvP MMOs and it never seems to work out in practice.

I think it involves too much good faith interaction between players. For some reason devs think there wont be a bunch of people who only gain fun from causing someone else to be extremely miserable.

a player will drag their nut sack across broken glass to ruin the experience of a new player in my experience (my source is that I was one of these shitheads in ultima online when I was young, it was fun for me, not so much for everyone we griefed 10 hours a day all summer)

It feels like an average play session of this will be spending hours riding a horse to where you want to go, getting Pked , and thats pretty much your day

Stragint

Stupid wrote: »

I think the system they have developed is unique. I would call it a hybrid opt-in PvP scheme.

In order to PvP you need to "flag" which is a deliberate action. You nameplate goes from white/green to purple to alert everyone in the game that you are flagged. There is a slight time delay (10 seconds I think) after flagging before you can do anything. After that point you can attack anyone.

If you are not flagged and get attacked, you lose nothing but time, and possibly a bit of inventory. It's literally exactly the same as if you died in a PvE fight (aside from being unexpected and probably inconveniently timed).

If you are flagged and attack others that are flagged, nothing changes. You signed up for PvP, and so did they, and everyone is happy.

If you attack others that are NOT flagged (which you can do at any place and any time in the game) you become "corrupted" and your nameplate goes full on red. Whilst red, you get a global debuff, you are now attackable by ANYONE (not just flagged people!), you will drop lootable gear when killed, and NPC guards will attack you if you try to go into any settlement. The more players corrupted players engage with (whether in self-defense or not) escalates the "corrupted" debuff. The word is that killing three players will give a global 50% reduction to all stats, including armor and DPS. It's really aggressively designed to make unwanted PvP really unpalatable to all but the most psychotic players.

If you are not flagged and attack a "corrupted" (red) player, you do NOT need to flag, and you do NOT become corrupted yourself if you kill them. you just get "free loot" whehn they die. Essentially, murdering other players makes you into a PvE MOB to everyone else.

Having said that, they are purposely designing in other "opt in" PvP bits as well. Moving materials between nodes (which are quite far away - in the tiny little slice of the game map we have not, it takes about 15 minutes to run between the furthest nodes) requires a "caravan" and players can opt in to defend OR attack the caravans! If you are a defender, it is mostly a boring escort mission. Unless someone (usually one of those uber guilds) has targetted your route, in which case you might be in for a PvP fight.

Worth noting that moving stuff between nodes is impractical unless you use a caravan. Storage is not shared between nodes. And player inventories are pretty limited for bulk movement of material. And of course, the more you are carrying the juicier of a target you become for "corrupted" players. Risk v Reward starts working against you.

I'm 100% confident that there will be groups of people that will "game" the system -there always are- but I'm also confident that this is one aspect of the design that the devs are watching closely. There have already been players who have been banned from the testing phases (after buying in at $120!) for abusing the (unfinished) PvP system currently in place.

I've seen a handful of flagged players in the game. I generally tend to exit the area they are in quickly when I see them. I also witness one "murder" where a flagged player killed an unflagged player and went red. And then was immediately dogpiled by other players in the vicinity. (Hint - don't go full-on psycho in a popular leveling area.)

It seems like a pretty well thought out system and I think it has a better than even chance of working.

For not being flagged and getting attacked, you do actually still get exp debt so that is pretty detrimental and you do lose inventory items. You don't lose equiped gear or currency though.

For corrupted, from how I've seen it explained by the devs, level differential will determine corruption and it apparently takes pretty high corruption to have any real debuff apply. There are also a few ways to get rid of corruption that honestly sounded pretty easy. I haven't seen anything about the killing 3 players things to get the 50% reduction but I haven't checked the wiki in a few weeks so I'll need to look at that again.

I had a much bigger post being a big downer about the pvp aspects of this game and all that entails but I feel like my few recent posts have just been kind of shitting on the game a bunch and I'm not really feeling like being that guy right now.

With that said, I want this game to work and I want to enjoy it and I am planning on working myself up and motivating myself to actually play games this weekend and focus on the alpha and get a feel for things. I plan on taking tons of screenshots and maybe recording video and sharing it here if I'm allowed to.

With this in mind, if anyone is in the alpha and wants to play I'll be down. I don't get off work till 5:30 pacific time and wont get home till 6. Gotta feeds the dogs and such but I'm down to play afterwards and then Saturday I work till 2pm and I'm off Sunday.

Stupid

Stragint wrote: »

For not being flagged and getting attacked, you do actually still get exp debt so that is pretty detrimental and you do lose inventory items. You don't lose equiped gear or currency though.

This is incorrect. I can say from personal experience. If you're unflagged, you only drop "materials": gathered stuff, crafting stuff and glint. Inventory (which includes unequipped items and equipment, consumables, etc.) will not drop under any condition. If you are corrupted then you can drop anything, including equipped gear.

I'm currently playing on the Vyra server, but my play schedule is AEDT which isn't really compatible with Pacific times.

Also, keep in mind that for this phase of the alpha, the servers are only available 10am Friday through 10pm Sunday (PST).

Stragint

Stupid wrote: »

Stragint wrote: »

For not being flagged and getting attacked, you do actually still get exp debt so that is pretty detrimental and you do lose inventory items. You don't lose equiped gear or currency though.

This is incorrect. I can say from personal experience. If you're uinflagged, you only drop "materials": gathered stuff, crafting stuff and glint. Inventory (which includes unequipped items and equipment, consumables, etc.) will not drop under any condition. If you are corrupted then you can drop anything, including equipped gear.

I'm currently playing on the Vyra server, but my play schedule is AEDT which isn't really compatible with Pacific times.

Also, keep in mind that for this phase of the alpha, the servers are only available 10am Friday through 10pm Sunday (PST).

Yea, I know it is only matieral type stuff that is dropped if not corrupted. I assumed that stuff was kept in the inventory since that is how it was in alpha 1. I could have been more specific with it just being the matieral type stuff.