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Then I hope that Steven changes his stance on the nameplate decay visuals, cause that's the most direct way to grief people w/o killing them. I really don't know why they even have that. Maybe AA had smth like that? L2 sure as hell didn't and it worked just fine there.
I'm not sure that would be good for Ashes, though.
Aside from combat (mostly because speculative and untested), I believe that almost everything in Ashes other than the Open Seas PvP thing is design-consistent. Just not necessarily a draw for everyone. Which is the point.
So, 'keeping' Dygz or 'keeping' me by changing things, I don't feel should even begin to be a goal. Not for us specifically nor for our 'demographics'.
There's some things where 'doing it a different way has no real negative effect so it makes sense to change it'. I feel like this isn't one of them, whereas 'no CC on Green players' actually is (because by definition if you are Green you are not threatening the Purple person, so they didn't
really
need to CC you to get what they wanted).
Consider the 'non-pacifist' response to this, as example, even if it were 'griefing' to attack someone repeatedly while they were fighting a mob, that person will probably just heal to full after the mob and then flag up to fight, ideally.
If they don't want to do that, they're probably better off in another game, not JUST because of this though, the other aspects of Ashes wouldn't necessarily suit their flows as much as those other games either.
The Nameplate thing technically helps Dygz's situation more than harming it, in many cases. Obviously not all, but it's technically 'better' than 'being accidentally killed'. The other person becoming Corrupted unexpectedly isn't what pacifist players are likely to care about. The other person 'fearing that enough to not bother them', is.
If someone else can see you 'cast a healing spell on yourself' and then 'hits you because they saw that spell' every time', the life bar thing isn't going to matter at all.
I'm just rambling though, it just came to mind because I was thinking about something else, really...