Before I get too Excited, PVP\PVE by Choice?

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Azherae wrote: »

I also disagree with this perspective NiKr, because it's lowkey saying something very negative for the game, I think.

It is pretty hard to find a logical path that doesn't end up at:

"People who are lower level or weaker in PvP skills will have less of an impact on the game individually."

It's the only way I can see 'not having valuable resources' to be true, even with resource tiers. And since, for example, you never really know if that person on a shore is a high level Fisherperson , your incentive, particularly if you have an aquatic mount, is to hit-and-run them.

Coastal fishing is going to be extremely interesting because of this, from both the attacker and defender sides... or alternately 'people who aren't great at PvP/high enough level won't really get to fish much'. That's fine, risk vs reward, and fishing communities are among the easiest to protect, rather than attack, but... yeah.

Ok, I see your points. I should've worded it more correctly around my own pov on pvping. I will not be pvping around locations where low lvl adventurers would be present.

And even if I did, some small fraction of their resources will be nothing for me, because I'll have time to just farm those resources myself on an alt. And that is why, to me, their death would be of low value. Risking losing my gear over some 10 wood or some shit like that is nothing, when I could just go to my alt and get the same amount of wood in a few minutes.

And if that low lvl player was farming some deep high lvl location - they're most likely protected by high lvl players, so I wouldn't even try attacking them if I was alone.

NiKr wrote: »

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Azherae wrote: »

I also disagree with this perspective NiKr, because it's lowkey saying something very negative for the game, I think.

It is pretty hard to find a logical path that doesn't end up at:

"People who are lower level or weaker in PvP skills will have less of an impact on the game individually."

It's the only way I can see 'not having valuable resources' to be true, even with resource tiers. And since, for example, you never really know if that person on a shore is a high level Fisherperson , your incentive, particularly if you have an aquatic mount, is to hit-and-run them.

Coastal fishing is going to be extremely interesting because of this, from both the attacker and defender sides... or alternately 'people who aren't great at PvP/high enough level won't really get to fish much'. That's fine, risk vs reward, and fishing communities are among the easiest to protect, rather than attack, but... yeah.

Ok, I see your points. I should've worded it more correctly around my own pov on pvping. I will not be pvping around locations where low lvl adventurers would be present.

And even if I did, some small fraction of their resources will be nothing for me, because I'll have time to just farm those resources myself on an alt. And that is why, to me, their death would be of low value. Risking losing my gear over some 10 wood or some shit like that is nothing, when I could just go to my alt and get the same amount of wood in a few minutes.

And if that low lvl player was farming some deep high lvl location - they're most likely protected by high lvl players, so I wouldn't even try attacking them if I was alone.

Well, bear in mind that the 'you can drop gear at any level of Corruption' was only clarified/added recently, and while it does definitely change the dynamic, Node centric behavior is different.

You often note that you don't have the same perspective on PvP and econ behaviour as I do and I should share it, so...

Taking other people's stuff, particularly people who rely on the income for that stuff, is far more effective 'Economic PvP' than gathering your own stuff. The effects on the market are multiplied very quickly, you have not just taken control of some supply, you have reduced supply entirely.

At the end of the day, Gatherer A wants or needs to make money (they still lose durability and such when the attacker kills them if said attacker succeeds afaik), if you take their money, they must find a new way to make money, siphon money from someone else, or do the same activity again and take the risk again.

Material Advantage. This is a chess game to me, not a race. Making the chosen opponent lose is technically much more valuable than winning, because whereas the Corrupted player incurs losses, everyone else in their 'supported market' potentially makes gains.

tl;dr kill unsanctioned fisherfolk near your coastal node! Support your local fishers!

Azherae wrote: »

tl;dr kill unsanctioned fisherfolk near your coastal node! Support your local fishers!

I'm planning on being a mayor of a divine node (cause I got time to do quests) and will just "enemy of the state" such bastards.

Outside of that, pvp for me is usually purely fighting. In L2 that pure fighting mainly happened around farming spots just because you spent the most time there, so most pvp could be seen as a "fighting for you spot" action, and it definitely was that sometimes, but to me it was just "I'm farming. Someone came to farm and decided to fight me for it. I fight back."

So the economy part of pvping in Ashes won't matter to me that much. Though I guess I should clarify further. OWPVP won't be economical. I will obviously attack caravans/node enemies/other nodes mainly because that's an economical attack. But all the other random pvp encounters will mainly be just "fight for fight's sake".

Though all of this, for me, is in my biased context of "I spend 10+h a day in one location farming mobs". Intrepid allege that this won't be a thing in Ashes, so there's a chance that most of my pvp will be economical just because I'll be fighting wars and caravans.

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

tl;dr kill unsanctioned fisherfolk near your coastal node! Support your local fishers!

I'm planning on being a mayor of a divine node (cause I got time to do quests) and will just "enemy of the state" such bastards.

Outside of that, pvp for me is usually purely fighting. In L2 that pure fighting mainly happened around farming spots just because you spent the most time there, so most pvp could be seen as a "fighting for you spot" action, and it definitely was that sometimes, but to me it was just "I'm farming. Someone came to farm and decided to fight me for it. I fight back."

So the economy part of pvping in Ashes won't matter to me that much. Though I guess I should clarify further. OWPVP won't be economical. I will obviously attack caravans/node enemies/other nodes mainly because that's an economical attack. But all the other random pvp encounters will mainly be just "fight for fight's sake".

Though all of this, for me, is in my biased context of "I spend 10+h a day in one location farming mobs". Intrepid allege that this won't be a thing in Ashes, so there's a chance that most of my pvp will be economical just because I'll be fighting wars and caravans.

I think this may be the biggest difference between L2 and Ashes, from research I did a while back when theorycrafting a playstyle.

'Drop up to half your gathered resources and certificates on death' is a BIG incentive for me. In a game without this, where the player suffers something else or is slightly inconvenienced, I would play more like you because the 'benefit to PvP' would be the fight itself or 'getting to keep the farm', and there would be no calculation to do.

"Territory Control" on the scale added by economically driven OWPvP is a different beast.

"A New Incentive Has Appeared!"

Azherae wrote: »

'Drop up to half your gathered resources and certificates on death' is a BIG incentive for me. In a game without this, where the player suffers something else or is slightly inconvenienced, I would play more like you because the 'benefit to PvP' would be the fight itself or 'getting to keep the farm', and there would be no calculation to do.

Do we have any concrete word on the "up to half" part? I think I've always heard "a fraction". If it is truly up to half their inventory of gatherables, my pov might change, but so far I've been operating on a "no more than 20%, if even that". Cause as I see it, if people can drop 50% of their shit from a gank - Ashes in a much more dangerous place than I thought.

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

'Drop up to half your gathered resources and certificates on death' is a BIG incentive for me. In a game without this, where the player suffers something else or is slightly inconvenienced, I would play more like you because the 'benefit to PvP' would be the fight itself or 'getting to keep the farm', and there would be no calculation to do.

Do we have any concrete word on the "up to half" part? I think I've always heard "a fraction". If it is truly up to half their inventory of gatherables, my pov might change, but so far I've been operating on a "no more than 20%, if even that". Cause as I see it, if people can drop 50% of their shit from a gank - Ashes in a much more dangerous place than I thought.

No idea, I'm sure it will be subject to testing. It was half in Alpha-1, so.

I will assume that in Alpha-2 they will set it to their intended value, since it won't be a valid test if not (I'd also expect them to test many different numbers).

They were not testing Corruption or PvP behavioural incentives of this type in Alpha-1, so there's no reason to assume 50% is the default, but it IS a weird value to set it to, to start with, if your 'design space' is all the way at 20%, even if you are doing max-effect testing.

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To be clear we're actually not necessarily talking about 'low level players' which is the real point here.

Skill gaps between gamers are often very large.

So 'equal level but without PvP skill' is still a 'weaker player'.

I should have clarified that to begin with. For me, (Fighting Gamer), there is no such thing as a 'lower level' player since characters are approximately equal. Player skill is the only factor worth considering. If you are level 30 and I am level 33 and my PvP skills are at 'normal gamer gap' above yours, I expect to succeed in killing you to take your stuff 8 out of 10 times.

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If L2's characters dropped half their mats on death, there'd definitely be waaaay more PKing of lowbies there, cause I have personally been a lowbie with thouuuuusands of different valuable mats on me after a good grinding session.

There's definitely a possibility this will be the case in Ashes. Maybe that's even why BHs exist, because the game will kinda push people to PKing gatherers because they're piñatas. But as I said, that'd put the game into a dangerous place, cause casuals would utterly hate that setup.

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I mean, Intrepid have been fairly clear in saying that all tiers of mats will be important.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Crafting#Gathering

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It's gonna be gatherables and processed goods. The thing we don't know is whether we'll drop a portion of all of them equally or just a portion of one stack of them in our inventory at random.

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I'm actually counting on people to take the offered incentive and fight back, because in that case if we win, there's no Corruption for any of us anyway.

(I kept saying 'I' before, but it will nearly never be just me, so I figured I should stop doing that).

This is also a thing I often consider. It's easy to control who gets Corruption when the opponent isn't fighting back, so 'designated Red' is simple enough that the player might just go 'this isn't gonna work anyway, that red doesn't care, might as well fight back'.

The main thing to stop this is if your 'Designated Red' is red already, any players that are also in small-group can kill them off first without ever opening themselves up to 'dying without giving Corruption'. But that just makes the 'Designated Red' an interesting tank.

If you are of sound enough mind when jumped in a 3v2 or 3v3 to consider all this, and also decide 'am I going purple to defend an extra 10% of my materials if I lose?', then you are exactly the opponent type I want.

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While true, it still depends on how abundant/valuable your loot is. If one item from your 10 takes a few hours to acquire, even 10% would be worth it. But if you only have some random sticks that you picked up in the last 20 minutes, then even 25% wouldn't be worth flagging up.

And then there's the "is it all gatherables or only one stack that drops" issue. If it's all of them that drop a portion - 10% is still quite a lot. If it's only a stack - 25% ain't much, relatively speaking.

In other words, the balancing will be very tight and the main determinant will be the end goal of Intrepid. Do they want to have high risk/reward on each death (would push away a lot of casuals) or do they want the penalty not be as big (might remove owpvp, because it'll be better to just give corruption).

I personally wouldn't care, because I don't care for the economic side of pvp, but both the casual and the Azherae's side of this issue would definitely have more things to say about it whichever way it goes.

NiKr wrote: »

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While true, it still depends on how abundant/valuable your loot is. If one item from your 10 takes a few hours to acquire, even 10% would be worth it. But if you only have some random sticks that you picked up in the last 20 minutes, then even 25% wouldn't be worth flagging up.

And then there's the "is it all gatherables or only one stack that drops" issue. If it's all of them that drop a portion - 10% is still quite a lot. If it's only a stack - 25% ain't much, relatively speaking.

In other words, the balancing will be very tight and the main determinant will be the end goal of Intrepid. Do they want to have high risk/reward on each death (would push away a lot of casuals) or do they want the penalty not be as big (might remove owpvp, because it'll be better to just give corruption).

I personally wouldn't care, because I don't care for the economic side of pvp, but both the casual and the Azherae's side of this issue would definitely have more things to say about it whichever way it goes.

For clarity I don't actually care if Intrepid balances hard toward 'discouraging OWPvP' from the perspective of economic incentives . I would probably prefer if they did, because I like med-population dynamism in games in my areas.

I may be a more useful test case in some situationsbecause my structure is 'respond to incentives'. Intrepid can get a lot of systems data from someone who is constantly calculating 'the margins' of going Red, rather than RP-ers, PermaReds, or pacifists.

Which is why there's no real downside to me blabbing about perceptions beforehand. Also, I don't mind if this thread floats because I bet you that it is 'suppressing' a bunch of other similar threads just by its title, but we'll see in the coming weekend.

EDIT: Shoutouts to OP for having such a good title and first post, on that note.

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Ashes will have a harsher punishment for doing this, so not sure how much we can do that Though if there's some glass cannon class in the game - ohhh boi, the lowbies shall be dropping left and right.

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Well yeah, but that'll only work if there's a glass cannon class. Cause to maximize your genocide you'd have to be roughly the same lvl as lowbies and have shitty gear that you can easily replenish. Otherwise you're just getting to super decreased stats within a few kills.

But if there's no glass cannon, there's a much higher chance that your victims will either fight back or have enough time to just run away. A ton of such cases happened back in L2 if you didn't use a mage/dagger to try and PK lowbies at their own lvl.