2 suggestions for the PK count system

First one is super simple.

Account-wide PK count. This would not impact the lives of normal players, but would somewhat limit the PKing abilities of anyone who wants to have a PKing alt on their account.

Second one

PK count removal quest should send you to the node whose citizen you PKed and have you do a node quest there (ideally one of the harder more massive ones). If you PKed a citizen of your own node, you can't remove that counter tick until you change nodes. Nomads can obviously PK anyone and then just do a quest in their victim's nodes.

I think this approach would force people to travel around (which imo is a good thing), would push people to try and be friendlier with their node mates, and would provide nomadic players with a small benefit (considering that they ain't got much of that in other aspects of the game).

Neither of these suggestions increase the penalties of the currently described system. The first one just reinforces the main goal of reducing genocidal actions, while the second one gives a counterbalance to the action of murdering someone. Obviously the victim would still feel bad about the situation and the PKer might still suffer death penalties, but in the long run those who PKed other players will have to pay back to the community of their victims.

In case the victim's node got destroyed and citizenship removed, the PKer can just do a quest for their own node to remove a tick.


What do you think about this kind of design? Is this too much hassle? Not enough? Do you have other ideas to balance out the PKing in the grand scheme of things?

NiKr wrote: »

If you PKed a citizen of your own node, you can't remove that counter tick until you change nodes. Nomads can obviously PK anyone and then just do a quest in their victim's nodes.

No disagreement on the rest but this part is bad design. There's not necessarily a good way to know in advance what node someone is from, particularly if you're both abroad. There are also enough situations where you might need to fight a fellow node member after going red for another reason.

SongRune wrote: »

No disagreement on the rest but this part is bad design. There's not necessarily a good way to know in advance what node someone is from, particularly if you're both abroad. There are also enough situations where you might need to fight a fellow node member after going red for another reason.

I expect to see node citizenship in the nameplate and definitely will give that as my feedback if that is not the case. Steven wants us to have our nodes as the highest point of loyalty. How can we do that if we got no clue who's our mate or not. That would be the same as being in the same guild with another player but then not knowing that you're guildmates.

And as for situations where you might have to fight your nodemate, I personally would like for there to be a push against those situations. In theory, nodemates should be working towards a common goal. You should have comradery and all that jazz. If you meet your nodemate on the other end of the world, you should immediately know that he has your back.

And again, all those assumptions come from Steven's desire for node citizenship to be the highest loyalty for a player. Obviously it might not work out that way, and then I'd be fine if you could just remove the tick in your own node, but to me it seems like a nice way to push people together. You see a Red from your own node and you help him remove his corruption so that he might do the same for you in the future. But you'd only be sure (or at least somewhat sure) that he didn't get that corruption on your own mate if you knew that he wouldn't be able to remove that PK tick if he did (which would be detrimental to any of his future PKing endeavors).

In other words, I wanna see a true sense of neighborhood comradery in Ashes, especially considering that most guildmates will probably not talk in chat and just sit in discord. And this kind of change to the system would push them to socialize with their nodemates more.

Ah. For my part, I simply don't trust it. The point of corruption is to allow ganking of gatherers, etc, to steal their resources. If they happened to have a friend from your own node that then jumps in to take revenge, it'd break the system a bit to give you uncleansable PK count for defending yourself at that point.

I also don't believe that 'node camaraderie' is going to convince even the majority of players to not try to take you out in that case. Particularly if they're a bounty hunter generally. There's enough people on these forums who consider PKing never morally permissible to believe that this won't come up. That loyalty will be higher than node loyalty. It doesn't even matter if it's rare, because the core premise is that it can't be cured.

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I think he meant that you PKed a player and then their friend who's your nodemate comes to kill you in revenge, but if you now kill them as a Red - you'll get an uncleanseable PK tick. And yeah, I see how that might be a problem, even if I'd like that kind of interaction to be resolved through a more diplomatic method.

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I've seen (and have done it myself) multiple instances of people making glass cannon characters with trash gear just to go kill lowbies for a few hours.

Now, obviously the stat dampening is there to limit this somewhat but we don't know at which point it starts to really decrease your stats to a point where you can't even kill a lowbie.

We also know that node development will most likely have you running around both low and high lvl players, so that cuts down on the longevity of someone's PKing session.

But let's say there's a low lvl dungeon. It's full of lowbies because it's the best place for them to farm stuff. The closest high lvl location is 2-3 minutes away from the entrance and that's if the high lvl BH is even in that high lvl location. A theoretical dick has a high lvl alt with cheap gear at his lvl and the most glass-cannon build possible. He can kill a lowbie healer through burst within seconds and can then just kite the remainder of the group and kill them because they no longer have heals. Those lowbies would probably be somewhat bad at the game so it makes things even worse.

Now, with some skill and luck this PKer might be able to clear a few rooms-worth of lowbies before they either kill him or a BH comes to save them. This would put the PKer at around 20-30 PKs. Or, depending on how much corruption you gain for killing lowbies at high lvl, you might be stopped by the stat dampening at around the last person of the first group (if not even before that).

The PKer can then just die several times, lose his cheap gear and maybe get XP debt worth a few lvls. But the counter would still be at ~8 at the minimum. And now if this PKer went back to his main char and needed to PK someone, he'd immediately get 8-count-worth of corruption, instead of whatever you'd get for your first kill.

And he'd now need to go and do the quest to reduce that counter if he wanted to be able to PK more on his main. And as I said in the OP, I'd like those quests to be as expensive/difficult as possible. Maybe even have them high-lvl only, though that might destroy low lvl pvp/pk so that might be a bit too harsh.

But either way, that PKer's actions on his alt would now influence his future actions on his main, while w/o a account-wide PK counter people could just make new alts and keep PKing lowbies for fun w/o any repercussions.

NiKr wrote: »

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I've seen (and have done it myself) multiple instances of people making glass cannon characters with trash gear just to go kill lowbies for a few hours.

Well, what stopped you? Or them?

This is my experience as well (in MMOs), once a certain mastery of the game is achieved, but I've seldom seen 'what exactly stops those people' other than 'them getting bored or losing interest'.

Bear in mind once again that I come from a community (outside of MMOs) where only personal skill progress even EXISTS, far less 'is cared about', so this may be more alien to me than to most.

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Can you give an example of how it could effect single-char players? I might be missing smth, but I can't come up with this system being any different from the current one, in the context of someone just having one char that they PK on.

Azherae wrote: »

Well, what stopped you? Or them?

Nothing really stopped them, which is why I like the stat dampening change Steven implemented and why I suggested to have an account-wide PK counter, so that those PKers couldn't just evade the punishment for genociding lowbies by doing said genocide on their alt instead of main.

And again, I mainly see this as a deterrent against lowbie genocide. If Intrepid succeed at the ttk goals genociding players at your own lvl might be fairly hard, even with glasscannon characters. RPS design might counterbalance this, but that will mostly depend on how exactly Intrepid set up the RPS.

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Hmm, I didn't consider that assumption. If anything I'd assume that a lot of carebears would only be happy if PKers were punished across all chars, while normal pvpers who don't really PK all that much (especially on multiple chars) wouldn't care about that at all.

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Nahhhh, that is the exact moment where we hit those dicks with the classic "This game is not for you". Corruption's stat dampening kinda already points to the game not appealing to complete murderhobos. My suggestion just applies that design goal to anyone who'd try to exploit the system by just genociding on their alts.

We've already seen 2 big changes to the pvp/pve balance with the open seas and ruins mechanics. As much as the carebearish part of the community has complained about those 2, I feel like some murderhobos complaining about my suggestion would bring some balance to things.

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Well, in the current system you'd just be able to remove that PK tick through the removal quest, while in my suggestion you wouldn't be able to do that because it was a kill on your nodemate. And if you happen to make a few of such kills, any of your future kills would immediately put you at higher corruption values. And the only way to remove those PK ticks would be to change node citizenships, which could be a huge loss for the player.

Though the discussion about node citizenship from another thread makes me think that your alts might be nomads, at which point that part of my suggestion kinda falls apart completely so it might not even be important.

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Does this limit them from being alts in any way OTHER than what you just described?

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Right, I forgot that one account can be on multiple servers. Yeah, the intention was for this system to apply to alts on one server.

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We have no clue how long/difficult the current quest is. My suggestion might be way easier than what they currently have planned. I just suggested making it a "give back to the community" quest rather than "I just do this and get the benefit of cleansing myself w/o anyone else seeing that benefit".

And my first suggestion is targeted at the same "exploit" as the corruption stat dampening change from L2's system. So no, this is not some new exploit that I discovered that Intrepid didn't know about. I just prefer it to curb the dicks, who'd use alts to attack lowbies, even more than the currently suggested system will already do.

In other words, I didn't increase the punishment for we don't even know how hard it was in the first place, nor did I change anything in the current design that would go against its direction.

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It only effects those who'd go PKing on alts in huge amounts. And considering that usually alts are reserved for additional professions or "to just chill", the majority of people wouldn't even care that their PK counter is account-wide. While all the dicks who'd want to kill lowbies on their newly made alt would get fucked over. As others here said, this is a commonly seen practice so I'd imagine Steven and Intrepid are well aware of it. They might've even thought up a better way to address it or, alternatively, they think it's completely fine, in which case I'll just work a bit harder to defend my node from those dicks.