Trying to better understand PvP/My current opinion

It's all about weighing risk vs reward. Do you have valuable resources on you that you don't want to lose? Then fight back and either don't lose them or lose half the amount.

Do you think you'll be able to get back to that spot and kill the attacker while he's still red? Then you can try and "punish" him with corruption, but it's also not assured that he will even go through with the kill and now you'll be at low hp and there's a chance that a mob kills you and you lose the full amount of resources, while the attacker can still loot that off of you.

And the things tautau mentioned also all apply. World pvp will be quite rare, especially if you're at a lower lvl than surrounding attackers (cause that means a ton of corruption for them if you don't fight back).

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Here's an example. You've spent the last 3 hours farming some valuable resource. If you die as a green player you'll lose 1.5h of that progress (theoretically speaking. we don't know the exact values). That death could come from a PKer or from a random mob that was just a bit too strong for you.

If a player attacks you, you have 3 choices.

• Run away and save your progress completely.
• Just stand there and die, losing that 1.5h of progress, while giving the attacker corruption
• Fight back and either win and get attacker's loot or die and only lose 45m of progress

The first choice is the most obvious one if you don't have a huge desire to keep farming that location. You can just relocate or maybe even stop playing if you're done for the day.

Second choice is fine if you have a friend around who can immediately attack the red player and punish him, and get your stuff back. Or if you believe you can return there yourself and kill the PKer. Otherwise you'll just lose 1.5h of progress and just hope that the PKer gets his punishment, even though that would not influence your life in any way.

Third option is the best one if you want to keep farming that location, while also minimizing your potential losses. And you might even gain smth, if the attacker had anything of worth on him.

The scare of "I'm not flagged for 90 seconds" only works if there's someone else around that can attack you. But if there were people around before the attacker made his move - you could run to them for help killing the attacker. And if you see that they're not willing to help, you still have the first choice.

And if you dislike the sheer fact of death penalties (which you appear to do), well - this game might not be for you.

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You can remove corruption by gaining XP too. It just takes way longer than removing it by dying.

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The main reason for death penalties is for said death to matter. And just to reiterate it, you get death penalties on any death, not just pvp.

And Steven knows that his design won't appeal to everyone. At this point it's this game's motto: "it's not for everyone". You took a wrong turn around a node and agroed a strong mob or a roaming boss? You die and suffer penalties. The next time you run around the world, you'll have to be more careful.

The same applies to pvp too. You gotta be aware of your surroundings, the players in those surroundings and then weigh your options against your goals.

I know that the "it's not for you" line is easily countered, but that's just the design of the game and there's a fair bit of people who prefer it over the current trends of "your death doesn't mean anything. you can die as much as you want and never be set back by it". Intrepid knows that the amount of those people is way smaller than the amount of casual players, but Steven seems to be fine with that (at least currently).

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I know I've said this already, but really if you're against these kinds of mechanics - you're not the target audience.

The game has death penalties, caravan attacks, node sieges, item decay and potential destruction, owpvp, supposedly hardcore pve, ffa pvp open seas where your ships can get destroyed and also guild wars that can go on for days with potentially hundreds if not thousands of deaths - literally all of those are "negative progression" mechanics. And the game is build around all of those mechanics and has them all interconnected, so the current design would have to drastically change if Intrepid suddenly decided to move away from negative progress.

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A failed caravan defense, especially if it was a solo one, is a x200 death penalty (and that's if you lose 50% of your stuff on green death). And even if you somehow managed to grab some of the dropped certificates, a portion of them just get sunk and disappear. So running a caravan means a potential of losing hoooours of progress.

A failed node siege leads to the loss of citizenship (which is pretty much a money investment) and some portion of your goods because your freehold will get raided and the node bank will get emptied too if you had anything there. And to get another citizenship will cost you way more, because by that point the housing prices would've grown above what you paid for your first citizenship.

Guild wars are an ffa pvp for the enemy guild against you. They see you - they kill you. You suffer death penalties multiple multiple times, even if they're just purple ones.

OWPVP is literally the stuff we're discussing and as you said yourself - it leads to negative progress.

Hardcore pve means that you'll die more often than against easy mobs. Which means death penalties which means negative progress.

Open seas provide huge rewards (as restated by Steven on today's stream), so by not participating in that content you're limiting your progress. And while it's not quite as negative as other examples, it's, in function, the same as running away from a pvp on land. Instead of progressing further you decide to avoid any interaction with the risky content.

The tangible justification is "risk vs reward". Steven wants the world to feel dangerous and for that danger to have consequences. If all you do is win win win no matter what - that ain't risk and that definitely ain't danger. And as we've stated multiple times already, it's fine if you dislike this design, you're just not the target audience for it.

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Not losing the stuff is the challenge. And the stuff that you can lose is the stakes for that challenge.

And as for Souls games, you do lose souls (or their alternatives). And I don't know about other gamers, but my adrenalin always spiked when I could lose my souls after a very long session of successful kills w/o depositing my souls.

Now in Souls games it's a staggered death, meaning that your first death is not as impactful because you can come back and pick up your souls, but that "come back" is the true challenge now. If you farmed a ton of souls after several hours of playing in a flow state, you would have obviously died to either a strong mob or just in a tricky location. So now you need to overcome that heightened difficulty in order to not lose several hours of progress.

And that situation heightens the stakes to their maximum state. But at the opposite end of stake values is the post-double-failure state. A place where you've lost all your souls and you now got literally nothing to lose. There's no adrenalin (or at least way less of it), no risk but way more risk taking. You're now free to do much more dumb shit than you were able to do during your "come back" run.

And some people prefer that heightened amount of adrenaline when they play games. But as you've said, we just have differing views on this and the only thing that can prove either of use wrong or right is the game coming out. But until then we can't really do much outside of presenting our opinions and feedback to Intrepid. You've presented yours and a few of us presented counter arguments to it, so now it's on Intrepid to deicide which one they gonna go with (probably both throughout the testing phase).