Corruption And Bounty Abusing

I don't think banning people for playing the game in the way the game allows them to is the right choice. Having a friend BH kill you (friend would have to be non-guild/ally/party/family) is not really that big of an abuse, because the death itself is the biggest penalty, rather than a death to a particular type of player.

And I agree with others who suggested having limited rewards for BHing. I'm gonna be a BH and I'd be completely fine if all I got as a reward was just a title or some cosmetic (on top of obvious reward of loot and good reputation).

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A much better strat would be to go through all 8 people PKing rather than raking up the PK count of a single player. But yes, that would work if all those people are not in a party/raid/guild/ally, cause if they are - they can't attack each other


Or at least that is my current assumption considering flagging rules. There's a chance that getting corruption might immediately throw you out of your party or disregard your guild affiliations, but I'd hope it doesn't cause that would open up the exact abuse that you mentioned.

But even outside of that interaction, the Red player will still suffer penalties and will have to remove their XP debt and repair their gear. So I'd say it's much better/easier to just help that Red player grind off their corruption than kill them.

Also, if there's a group of PKers running around somewhere, you just write about them in chat and anyone who wants some juicy loots will come for them. Have seen this and done so myself countless times in L2, and there you didn't even have the resource loot potential, only a slight chance of some gear.

I think PKing equally-lvled people should be somewhat fine for the first ~5-7 kills. It should be grindoffable within 10-15 mins, which would give a narrow window for BHs. Higher PK count would add several minutes for each kill, while PK count decreasing should be a real expensive/long/hard activity so that people have to either go out of their way to keep PKing if they really want to. And if they don't do the quest and still keep PKing, then BHs will definitely get on their ass.

And I feel like Steven somewhat agrees with that kind of balancing and that is why he disconnected the artisan levels from the adventure ones. This way the people who just wanna chill and do some non-combat gameplay - they're free to do so w/o really fearing getting attacked left and right. But those who level up their combat ability should be more prepared to either fight back or properly play around with giving their attacker corruption.

But obviously we'll have to wait and see what kind of balancing they're planning and how that balancing will relate to BHs.

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That's why I mentioned proper play with giving your attacker corruption. If you can respawn and come back to the place where you were killed within the minimum time required for the PKer to grind off his corruption - you might want to give him that corruption and remove him from that place for a while, because he'll have to deal with XP debt or high gear decay.

Obviously there's way more variables in play, but I'd definitely keep "respawn-return" timers in my head whenever I'm farming smth.

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That's where you just socialize and get friends/guildmates/nodemates with higher adventure lvls to help/protect you. And those same people will be defending the node from corruption events.

If Intrepid didn't account for this kind of interaction, I'd be very interested in hearing their reasoning for disconnecting artisan and adventure levels then. Cause to me it seems like what I described is the intended gameplay.

Pursuing reds that don't drop items and gear means you are wasting your time economically speaking. There are a lot more activities that have equal risk for higher reward. So I expect it to be fairly unpopular, which is of course bad. The corruption system is going to be balanced around the bounty hunter system working. I think bounty hunters need a perk for performing this community service and key balance to corruption.

I suggest bounty hunters should have an increased proc chance on the corrupt target's gear dropping depending on their bounty hunter rank as an additional perk. This keeps the 'reward' solely based on the targets in question and creates a real possibility of the Red having to stop their activities for awhile (at least to go gear back up in their freehold.)

I understand your concern relative to bh exploitation. Not only does my suggested perk avoid most of the flaws giving a direct perk would bring, but it also does so without creating more systems that could potentially be exploited.

The biggest 'flaw' in this I can see is:
1. A corrupt person will be more likely to run from bounty hunters.... But that isn't really a problem as far as I see it. They already have lots of incentives to run in the first place, so this isn't going to add much to the chances of that happening. And them running away from bounty hunters is time they aren't spending murdering greens or washing off their corruption via grinding mobs (and therefore make it more likely they will die and be 'maximally' punished for going red.)
2. If friends 'grinding their bh rank together to make loot drops from reds be higher' is seen as a popular strategy, what really happens is there are quickly more bounty hunters with max rank. This means that there are now slightly increased threats to reds on the server who think it is now a slightly more economically viable activity to pursue. Which also means that the sort of people who try to level up bh this way are more at risk over time because now you might have bh's that are capable of yoinking their gear. So it technically acts as a self regulating deterrent that will naturally fizzle out even if there is a big burst of dead greens in the beginning.

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Keep in mind, they are only talking about flagging rules so far. I'll probably ask a question about this for this upcoming stream to learn more.

I just supposed that it would be logical to apply those flagging rules to PKers too, but that is not a sure thing right now.