Topic: Should groups over a certain size, such as raids, automatically be marked as combatants?

Players can't flag on their guild/ally-mates so I'd assume that the multiple parties in the same place from the same guild but w/o a raid would be the main "exploit" for this suggestion, and they wouldn't friendly fire each other. Unless Intrepid implemented your suggestion and made it so that you did in fact friendly fire your guild-all-mates, but then you have a much larger problem of non-raided parties from the same guild participating in some activity and just killing each other, which, imo, is a much bigger problem than just "3rd party waiting for one of the sides to kill the other side, become weaker and die to said 3rd party".

We have not received permission from Dolyem to share the quoted post.

I guess that's where we're different. I've been on all sides of this kind of interaction and to me it never seemed unfair. It was just battle tactics. I used them too, so why would I try and prevent my enemies from using them against me.

Sometimes we'd even have "sacrificial" attackers that would PK the 3rd party's healers so that they couldn't kill us as easily. If Ashes has 3+ sides fighting over some content, I'd definitely have several glass cannon players with 0 PK count just to kill healers of any 3rd party. And then I'd tell those players to go and cleanse their PK count so that they can repeat it again in the next fight.

If the 3rd party tries to save their healers by flagging up - there's no issue for us, because the healers will still go down (because now they're being assisted by multiple people at once), while we get no corruption. And if the 3rd party doesn't flag up, then they're not attacking us and we're fine with that too.

We have not received permission from Dolyem to share the quoted post.

There would not be a level playing field. All you would do with your suggestion is just make sure that the 3rd party just stays back while they wait for one side of the conflict to win. They would most likely do this even w/o being auto-flagged, but now they'd do this for sure.

Your suggestion brings 0 change to the interaction itself. It only makes it much much much worse for literally any raiding non-pvp group of players. You know all those people that want raiding to be its own thing? You've just fucked them all over with your suggestion. Now they're permaflagged when going to a raid. Now literally anyone can just attack them w/o any penalties. Now anyone sees them from a mile away (even more than if they were just green), because they'll be a huge purple blob on the horizon. And now you've alerted every guild in the vicinity that there's a raid that just respawned nearby, because there's a purple raid running around.

All of those things limit the amount of potential gameplay variety (baiting PKs, having big group decoys, not engaging in pvp when it's more beneficial, etc), while not brining any benefit to the people that are affected by the suggestion. And people would still look for loopholes too. They'd not raid up right up until the boss/even location. They'd keep their distance from each other to not trigger the auto-system (if you go this way instead of just "raid = flagged"). They'd do whatever it would take them to avoid being auto-flagged for no apparent reason. So yet again, the suggestion doesn't give any benefit while brings detrimental changes.

We have not received permission from Dolyem to share the quoted post.

As Penguin just said, the og raiders will have the upper hand because the newcomers will have to risk going Red in order to stop the raid.

But even outside of that, depending on how ow bosses are balanced and designed, you might not even need a huge group of people to mess up a raid. If the boss is tuned in such a way that you need near-perfect gameplay - any solo rogue willing to go red against the raiders' healer will wipe the raid. He'd be green coming up to the raid because he's alone, so the raid itself would have to immediately go red against him to prevent him from doing anything.

And in your suggestion, that raid would be flagged, so the rogue would not even risk anything at all. Hell, it could be a few rogues in stealth just fucking up everyone and everything. Or it could be a group of people that boost the boss' power because its people limiter went over and now he's "enraged". This would also wipe the raid w/o the newcomers flagging up or really even doing anything.

We've yet to see how exactly Intrepid are planning to design their top lvl pvx content, so we'll have to wait till then to really see all the potential exploits. I definitely agree that there's at least a few obvious ones, but Intrepid might've already come up with some mechanics to prevent that, so I think it's a bit silly to worry about that before we know anything. Though your concern when it comes to ow bosses is definitely valid. The concern about "two sides fighting and then the 3rd comes and beats the winner" - not so much, imo