A dungeon idea

With the current dev discussion and a, seemingly, very instanced-directed question in it, I tried to think up of a way to combine the freedom of L2's dungeons with the gameplay of instanced ones. The problem is, I'm not really a pver so I'll rely on @Noaani and @Azherae to tell me if this idea is complete shit and would never work as a good source of pve(x) content.

My paint skills are shit, but here's a top-down view of a floor of a tower dungeon (the same could work with layers of an underground one).

Here's a rough gameplay loop:

• each room has at least one spawn point of a group of mobs
• different rooms have different gatherables, trap mechanics, quest links
• room difficulty varies between 8-man to 40-man groups
• each room puts a marker on the group farming it
• if marked group stays within one room, the next spawn of the same mobs will have harder mechanics
• if the same group beats the room 3 times (could be more), a mini-boss gets spawned
• outside of the normal loot table, mini-boss drops a tool that lets you go through the hidden paths within that boss' lvl bracket (room type)
• if the mini-boss dies, the cycle gets reset
• hidden paths can be opened with a combo of utility abilities of classes (ideally one of each archetype, but debatable)
• if anyone in the room becomes flagged, a fast scout mob runs out of the room and yells in chat "there's a bloodbath near ___ mobs!" (or room name/location)
• mobs/boss aggro on flagged people first, but keep their anti-zerg mechanics at low strength
• if an 8-man room has more than 8 people in it for more than ~30s w/ 0 flagged people, mobs/boss start increasing the power of anti-zerg mechanics (same applies to 16/24-man rooms)
• the entrance to the next floor is in the Epic boss room
• anyone who beats Special or Epic bosses gets an indefinite pass to the next floor through the green hidden path
• green path can't be unlocked with utility abilities (also debatable, but I'd prefer if it didn't)
• Special bosses would respawn daily (+- a few hours from a preset time), Epic boss would respawn weekly
• final floor would have a Legendary boss with a several week respawn and a full room lock-out mechanic, so that its design could be closer to an instanced boss one

With this I tried to combine the endlessness of mob farm of L2 with a more pve content-driven design of "you do this sequence of events and you're done". A group could decide to farm the same room over and over until they drop what they need from its mobs/boss or they can try going to more difficult rooms if they're only interested in the pve fights themselves.

This would allow people to play from just 30min of "fully clear a room or two" up to several hours of "grind several rooms, while you wait for a special boss to respawn".

The flag protection is there to give the defenders some leeway if they get attacked by other players. It'll work even better if there's agro redirecting abilities in the game, so that the defenders could flag up on the newcomers (with no change in mob agro) and if they flag back - the defenders can redirect mobs/boss onto the attackers (with a boost from the anti-flag mechanic). But that move would still be dangerous because the scout mob would notify the nearest rooms about a pvp fight, so any pvpers around might come running in pretty soon.

So what do yall think, would this work as a dungeon design or does it lean way too much to the L2/pvp side of things? Oh, also, the mob lvl ranges can obviously be shifted or increased, same with room positions/amount - this was just a rough example.

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I had more of a "all lvl brackets have rooms for 8/16/24/32/40-man groups" thing in mind, but I guess different dungeons could have different setups.

And yeah, mechanisms like that would definitely be interesting.

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It could be smth like "you need ranger to find the path itself, then you need rogue to disarm a death trap at the entrance; mage to remove a magic barrier deeper in the path; summoner to sacrifice a mob to an irremovable trap; tank to soak up party's dmg from "lava"; warrior to lift up a super heavy obstacle; bard to activate a sound-based puzzle; healer to revive an npc that opens up the door at the end of the path".

Obviously that's a super basic surface lvl example, but that would require all archetypes to be present. If Intrepid go deeper with utility abilities and give different ones to all classes, then different dungeons could require different setups. Ideally this would be tied to singular parties, just so that zergs wouldn't trivialize this mechanic, but I guess that could depend on dungeons as well.

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This will highly depend on how Intrepid design their anti-zerg mechanics. If they come into play as soon as the game notices too many people around - the group would probably have to try and control the mob/boss attacks in such a way that they hit the extra person. A few hits on them would help too, but that would alert others in the nearby rooms, so could be dangerous (well, if we're talking in the context of my suggestion).

If it's more of a rough ratio with slow buildup then I think the group would be fine if there was 1-2 extra people following them around. The group could still pull the mob onto the followers and try to remove them in that way.

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I should've been more clear about this. The entrance to the second floor is open at all times. You just gotta get to it through the Epic boss room. Killing the bosses just allows you to skip the whole floor in the future.

As for letting only one group kill it, that's just how open world bosses work. Their rarity is what's gonna push the PvXness of the game. Also, just to be clear, the Epic boss is definitely a 40-man raid so it'd be 40 people that get the loot from it.

Also also, the room lock-out thing is not an instance in the common meaning of that word. As in, it's still a singular boss that'll only exist until a single kill (and obviously will then go on respawn). The lock-out is just there to let the boss have better pve mechanics, because if we have constant pvp around that boss it'll never die.

L2 had a window of time when the room's "door" would be open and anyone would be able to enter. But once even a single person enters, a timer would start (or in one case, you'd need to wake up the boss yourself). And once that timer ran out, no one would be able to enter the room again until the boss either died or completely wiped the everyone inside the room.

I'd personally want a similar system for the lock-out, but if Intrepid comes up with a better way - great. But this would still be a singular boss whose loot goes only to a single raid group. Which is, again, a way to push the PvX nature of the game. "Not everyone wins in Ashes" and all that jazz.

As for the distribution of loot across the server, I dunno how Intrepid plans to design it, but L2 balanced it in such a way:

• plain mobs have the same loot tables as bosses, but just with way worse drop rates
• epic bosses have a bigger quantity of that same loot and have a unique jewelry piece (one per each epic boss)

In other words, everyone was able to get the same gear, but some would get it faster. The jewelry was the biggest prize from the epic bosses, but, due to everyone being able to get the same gear, there was a rough balance of power in the pvp for the boss. And with long respawn timers on Epic bosses and them dropping only a single jewelry item (with some bosses not even having 100% chance to drop it) the overall impact of that special drop wasn't all that high. A guild would need to exclusively farm that boss for months if they wanted to get a noticeable increase in their overall power.

I personally liked this system a lot because it made sense to me. I hope Intrepid can come up with as good of a system as this.

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That's the point! That's the adventure!

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Yeah, it can definitely be different in different dungeons. I was just trying to implement the stuff you said before of dungeons being for both small and big groups.

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Yeah, I can definitely see that happening. I'd assume that the most pvp will come from guild/node wars, just as it did in L2. There'd be a few skirmishes here and there, but mainly rando groups wouldn't fight each other too much just because it was quite dangers to flag up willy-nilly.

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Yeah, that's a great point. Having it as a sellable item would be great. And it wouldn't cost all that much considering that pretty much any group that can beat a boss would get it, so this would just be a nice thing to help out any newcoming players.

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This is pretty much how I imagine the currently plan design to play out. The marker I mentioned in the OP would work with this as well. A group of people that managed to, say, clear 3 cycles in 3 different room on 3 different floors and killed 2 special bosses in the process would accrue a certain lvl of that "marker", which would then apply to bosses on higher lvls of the tower (or deeper in an underground dungeon). Intrepid already plan to do smth like this and I'm excited to see what they've come up with.

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Yeah, I'd definitely want some deep artisan interactions within dungeons to vary up the gameplay and make the dungeons even more meaningful.

Stronger by being higher level or stronger in some other way?

You only mentioned 'harder mechanics' so far.

Azherae wrote: »

Stronger by being higher level or stronger in some other way?

You only mentioned 'harder mechanics' so far.

Some other way. I thought about the usual stat boost but thought it'd be too simple and boring. The next best thing I could come up with was just "harder mechanics". If you've got a great idea how to design it properly, I'm sure Intrepid would appreciate the feedback (cause it would apply to whatever they're doing too).

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

Stronger by being higher level or stronger in some other way?

You only mentioned 'harder mechanics' so far.

Some other way. I thought about the usual stat boost but thought it'd be too simple and boring. The next best thing I could come up with was just "harder mechanics". If you've got a great idea how to design it properly, I'm sure Intrepid would appreciate the feedback (cause it would apply to whatever they're doing too).

I doubt it would apply.

This style of thing is very complicated to do and causes the wrong type of soft friction between players in my experiences, but this isn't to say it's impossible.

That said, there are some things that I personally believe would need to change about Ashes itself much 'lower on the pole' for it to work. Maybe not, they may surprise me.

There are four basic problems:

"Harder" mechanics:
This is a balance question and as a result will be very stressful and strict for simply groups who are running the dungeon at the point where the dungeon is challenging for them.

PvX Philosophy:
Players have no reason to 'let the players who spawned the miniboss actually fight it'. Great when two groups are working in tandem, terrible when those who are trying to spawn it are the ones who want to fight it.

DropRate Manipulation:
This would, in a roundabout way, normally lead to players doing their best to manipulate whatever system for droprates exists by being the 'correct' level. In Abyssea this doesn't happen because of many things, but here I definitely feel like it would.

Corruption Manipulation:
Creating any scenario where players are fighting over the rooms/spawns and not fighting over their paths, in a dungeon of this type, amplifies the 'jump people as soon as you think the boss will manage to kill them' effect, which sends us back through the loop of the other three problems.

Ironically, Abyssea works only because of the same reason that my initial impression considered it flawed when Square Enix first released it. The mobs literally level up. So after literally years of analyzing that, I've concluded that 'Mobs spawn at higher levels' is in fact slightly better than 'mobs use harder mechanics' in a game with proper depth.

As a PvE experience this would be great. As a PvX one, terrible, imo. If you change it to 'mobs spawn literally higher level based on your success and speed at killing them' you will get a result that is at least marginally better.

As always, FFXI has it already, you don't need to change anything about the way Abyssea works to add L2 style things/your designs into the gaps.

Azherae wrote: »

As a PvE experience this would be great. As a PvX one, terrible, imo. If you change it to 'mobs spawn literally higher level based on your success and speed at killing them' you will get a result that is at least marginally better.

If the majority of pvers would be fine with that, I'm more than ok with this change. I'm just guessing that the "higher lvl" is pretty much just a stat boost and maaaybe a bit more misses on abilities or smth along those lines. I'd probably find that boring if the game was going for really engaging pve (as they might be doing?), but my goal was to just try and combine my experience from L2 with pretty much majority of pve mmos, so if this change will make the idea successful - all the better.

I'm not sure what exactly you mean by the droprate manipulation, but that's probably due to our difference in experience. If anything, this whole idea would be build upon "rate manipulation" as a mechanic, cause yes, people would definitely min-max the hell out of mob cycles relative to their difficulty. But I'm used to abysmal drop rates, so in that context I'm not too worried about that approach. If Intrepid will go with a way way way less grindy design for loot - yeah, this suggestion would probably not fit that design.

As for the pvx part, I think it comes down to agro manipulation mechanics that I tried to address with the "boss agroes onto flagged people" thing. L2's pve was easy as hell mechanically so you didn't really need to jump through hoops when player attackers would appear. But if Ashes is trying to go for a more complex pve design, I really dunno how they'll make it pvx-viable, other than agro manipulation. But this kinda comes back to our discussions of their overall design directions and the seeming confusion in those. I'm assuming alpha2 will clear up a ton of stuff, so until then we can only hope that Intrepid know what they're doing.

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

As a PvE experience this would be great. As a PvX one, terrible, imo. If you change it to 'mobs spawn literally higher level based on your success and speed at killing them' you will get a result that is at least marginally better.

If the majority of pvers would be fine with that, I'm more than ok with this change. I'm just guessing that the "higher lvl" is pretty much just a stat boost and maaaybe a bit more misses on abilities or smth along those lines. I'd probably find that boring if the game was going for really engaging pve (as they might be doing?), but my goal was to just try and combine my experience from L2 with pretty much majority of pve mmos, so if this change will make the idea successful - all the better.

I'm not sure what exactly you mean by the droprate manipulation, but that's probably due to our difference in experience. If anything, this whole idea would be build upon "rate manipulation" as a mechanic, cause yes, people would definitely min-max the hell out of mob cycles relative to their difficulty. But I'm used to abysmal drop rates, so in that context I'm not too worried about that approach. If Intrepid will go with a way way way less grindy design for loot - yeah, this suggestion would probably not fit that design.

As for the pvx part, I think it comes down to agro manipulation mechanics that I tried to address with the "boss agroes onto flagged people" thing. L2's pve was easy as hell mechanically so you didn't really need to jump through hoops when player attackers would appear. But if Ashes is trying to go for a more complex pve design, I really dunno how they'll make it pvx-viable, other than agro manipulation. But this kinda comes back to our discussions of their overall design directions and the seeming confusion in those. I'm assuming alpha2 will clear up a ton of stuff, so until then we can only hope that Intrepid know what they're doing.

I don't know how others would feel about it but I can explain further based on it.

Abyssea ends up working like this.

Newbies to the area (level 75) come in and start to fight some level 77-80 enemies until they get that 'down'. The enemies level up to 81-84 and become too hard to fight for [PvE Game Design Reasons]. The response of that group is 'move on to untouched groups that are still only level 78-81 or same level'.

The group has some good synergy going and is warmed up so the very slightly harder enemies are doable. They can choose to push themselves a little, maybe even go back to the first 'camp/room/area' after a while if no higher level people are killing them.

Higher level players benefit because lower level ones roam and raise the mobs to the point of being higher level, thereby giving higher exp. You retain the flexibility for 'no lowbies are around let's just shred them ourselves' but one doesn't want to, it's slightly inefficient. Not so inefficient that it's a pain point, but inefficient enough that you're glad to leave it to them.

The Lowbies keep exploring , moving, learning, and improving, the others benefit from this (the higher levels of the same mob still drop things like the pop items for the minibosses either way, but give better exp).

Competition between low level players for low level camps remains. Competition between high level players for high level camps remains. People adapt by moving, or trying to outfarm each other. In the "Hybrid" game that could exist, they would either get to a point where they have a reason to clash properly for the spot, or merge groups as people leave.

At that point you could make the whole dungeon have a lower 'base level' for mobs, or at least ramp it up much slower, giving players the flexibility to move back or forward based on how well they're doing to optimize their exp.

Bosses/Minibosses are a different issue that would require a better corruption system (The Dv Gauge one) in a dungeon where the challenge part is not 'beating the boss' but instead 'doing well enough to spawn the boss in a somewhat accessible (to higher level players who have a reason to be there) place'.

Ashes' current Corruption system is incompatible with the 'do well to cause a miniboss spawn in an otherwise standard location', so I do not see any good reason they'd use this dungeon design. I'd love this, don't get me wrong, in the abstract, and I'd probably use it in Cardinal, but not in Ashes.

Azherae wrote: »

The Lowbies keep exploring , moving, learning, and improving, the others benefit from this (the higher levels of the same mob still drop things like the pop items for the minibosses either way, but give better exp).

The lack of knowledge when it comes to gear tier distribution is mainly what prevents me from being fully behind the "go up in lvls" idea. But I guess that ultimately doesn't matter because the same effect could be achieved by just increasing the stats on the mobs.

Azherae wrote: »

Bosses/Minibosses are a different issue that would require a better corruption system (The Dv Gauge one) in a dungeon where the challenge part is not 'beating the boss' but instead 'doing well enough to spawn the boss in a somewhat accessible (to higher level players who have a reason to be there) place'.

Ashes' current Corruption system is incompatible with the 'do well to cause a miniboss spawn in an otherwise standard location', so I do not see any good reason they'd use this dungeon design. I'd love this, don't get me wrong, in the abstract, and I'd probably use it in Cardinal, but not in Ashes.

Could you elaborate on this? Is it about the mobs becoming too hard to beat if there's also other people messing you up? Would well-designed location-based anti-zerg mechanics solve that or do you think that'd create other problems?

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

The Lowbies keep exploring , moving, learning, and improving, the others benefit from this (the higher levels of the same mob still drop things like the pop items for the minibosses either way, but give better exp).

The lack of knowledge when it comes to gear tier distribution is mainly what prevents me from being fully behind the "go up in lvls" idea. But I guess that ultimately doesn't matter because the same effect could be achieved by just increasing the stats on the mobs.

Azherae wrote: »

Bosses/Minibosses are a different issue that would require a better corruption system (The Dv Gauge one) in a dungeon where the challenge part is not 'beating the boss' but instead 'doing well enough to spawn the boss in a somewhat accessible (to higher level players who have a reason to be there) place'.

Ashes' current Corruption system is incompatible with the 'do well to cause a miniboss spawn in an otherwise standard location', so I do not see any good reason they'd use this dungeon design. I'd love this, don't get me wrong, in the abstract, and I'd probably use it in Cardinal, but not in Ashes.

Could you elaborate on this? Is it about the mobs becoming too hard to beat if there's also other people messing you up? Would well-designed location-based anti-zerg mechanics solve that or do you think that'd create other problems?

Ashes' Corruption system is flawed relative to a game that does not intend to treat other players as Random Encounters .

Let's take a single mage using their 'beam' style attack on a tank who is tanking a strong boss. The Mage points the beam at them and moves it off them when they think the target's HP is getting low while their allies protect them. The Mage is just keeping an eye on the mob's mechanics the same way they would for if they were fighting it, but with a different goal, so...

The mage is making a 'Skill Roll' to kill the other tank without corruption. If they fail this skill roll, the party loses Mage temporarily only from the perspective that the Mage is now Corrupted.

For most players this will not encourage any teamwork, it will encourage them to 'steal mobs using their Skill rolls'. This is probably what Steven wants.

If Steven wanted something else, the Corruption system would be different.

If you meant that I should elaborate on 'what a different Corruption system would be', I am only willing to PM that. There's no benefit to sharing my team's designs/ideas openly when there is no chance Intrepid will be able to use them to improve the game without changing the game away from what they want. It's not that I'm super protective of them, it's just annoying to get drawn into discussing designs openly (which I would end up doing) and pointless to give up ideas 'for free' when we don't need feedback on them.

EDIT: Oh, and there is no such thing as a well designed location based Anti-Zerg mechanic. Just try to make one. You'll either be here for years or massively advance the genre.

Azherae wrote: »

Let's take a single mage using their 'beam' style attack on a tank who is tanking a strong boss. The Mage points the beam at them and moves it off them when they think the target's HP is getting low while their allies protect them. The Mage is just keeping an eye on the mob's mechanics the same way they would for if they were fighting it, but with a different goal, so...

The mage is making a 'Skill Roll' to kill the other tank without corruption. If they fail this skill roll, the party loses Mage temporarily only from the perspective that the Mage is now Corrupted.

For most players this will not encourage any teamwork, it will encourage them to 'steal mobs using their Skill rolls'. This is probably what Steven wants.

Would my idea of flagged chars hard-pulling agro help with this or do you think that's potentially too abusable? I get what you're saying and I most likely agree, purely because I haven't experienced L2's flagging system in a context of hard pve.

Azherae wrote: »

EDIT: Oh, and there is no such thing as a well designed location based Anti-Zerg mechanic. Just try to make one. You'll either be here for years or massively advance the genre.

Yeah, I haven't thought too deeply about it, outside of the obvious "make it positional, with harsher mechanics on the outer rim (in the context of active body collision). That is also what Intrepid is trying to do afaik, so we'll have to see if it works out.

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

Let's take a single mage using their 'beam' style attack on a tank who is tanking a strong boss. The Mage points the beam at them and moves it off them when they think the target's HP is getting low while their allies protect them. The Mage is just keeping an eye on the mob's mechanics the same way they would for if they were fighting it, but with a different goal, so...

The mage is making a 'Skill Roll' to kill the other tank without corruption. If they fail this skill roll, the party loses Mage temporarily only from the perspective that the Mage is now Corrupted.

For most players this will not encourage any teamwork, it will encourage them to 'steal mobs using their Skill rolls'. This is probably what Steven wants.

Would my idea of flagged chars hard-pulling agro help with this or do you think that's potentially too abusable? I get what you're saying and I most likely agree, purely because I haven't experienced L2's flagging system in a context of hard pve.

Azherae wrote: »

EDIT: Oh, and there is no such thing as a well designed location based Anti-Zerg mechanic. Just try to make one. You'll either be here for years or massively advance the genre.

Yeah, I haven't thought too deeply about it, outside of the obvious "make it positional, with harsher mechanics on the outer rim (in the context of active body collision). That is also what Intrepid is trying to do afaik, so we'll have to see if it works out.

Flagged characters heavily pulling Aggro will lead to mob leash abuses, disruption, and really do very little because if the mob wasn't deleting Tank A, it isn't going to delete Tank B, and we already know that they intend for Tank B to be able to protect Mage B.

Note that I'm in no way saying that Group B would win. I'm saying that it's a skill check.



Like that.

Paragraph 1 and Video are not really related.

I guess all I can really say is that in a design discussion that I'm in charge of I'd probably dismiss 'Flagged Characters pull Aggro' immediately as too simplistic. Though notably, it DID get incorporated into the design I have, it just, again, doesn't work in the Ashes one because... the Ashes one is simplistic.

Azherae wrote: »

Flagged characters heavily pulling Aggro will lead to mob leash abuses, disruption, and really do very little because if the mob wasn't deleting Tank A, it isn't going to delete Tank B, and we already know that they intend for Tank B to be able to protect Mage B.

Note that I'm in no way saying that Group B would win. I'm saying that it's a skill check.

If we're talking purely dungeon room context, wouldn't short leashes work well for this? Team A is fighting mobs/boss. Team B runs up to their room and decides to flag on them. Mobs/boss reagro onto the flagged B member, which makes Team B either fight the mob themselves or run outside the room. If they fight - Team A could just keep attacking the mob for free and rake up the dmg required for looting rights. If Team B run outside, Team A would've just kept attacking the mob and would then keep attacking the mob while it returns to the center of the room (or wherever it wants to). This seems like a win-win for Team A.

The main concern then becomes the leash abuse in cases where people use flagging as a tool to make their farm easier, but that's exactly why I added the shouting scout mob. Obviously it won't work 100% of the time, but I'd imagine that, if that leash abuse is a well-known thing, some pvp groups would just "patrol" the dungeons to catch these abusers and have some fun with them, cause it'd be free pvp. And at that point it'd become a social interaction and a yet another push for a somewhat consensual pvp.

Azherae wrote: »

I guess all I can really say is that in a design discussion that I'm in charge of I'd probably dismiss 'Flagged Characters pull Aggro' immediately as too simplistic. Though notably, it DID get incorporated into the design I have, it just, again, doesn't work in the Ashes one because... the Ashes one is simplistic.

Treat this as my attempts at pointing out the potential holes in the system for Intrepid I don't have neither the credentials nor the money to design my own game, so I'm trying my best to help them make the best possible version of their own game, because I like way too many things about it.

Actually for the sake of the conversation I know which parts of this I can explain, NiKr, the parts that are 'behaviour changing levers'.

1. Attacking any Green gives you a pre-corruption status with a value based on damage done/CC effectiveness vs target's remaining health (rockets up the lower HP they are when you do it)
2. Bosses react to that value, not to anyone being flagged.
3. Bosses react by unlocking 'Revenge' style mechanics (whatever suits the boss) and 'punishing' the person with the highest number of this type with special attacks or whatever, preferably CC and displaces (toward the boss)
4. Healing a character with a high value gives you some too.

So the boss gets stronger in specific ways only against the people who built up this value. Lore explanations are decently easy (at the time I was asked to come up with an Ashes-compatible one because the teammate who asked me about this wanted to talk about it here) in many settings.

Removes incentive to just skillcheck-murder a bunch of unflagged people fighting a boss unless you can definitely handle the boss' "Honor-Enraged" state or whatever.

The Green that was attacked to give the Attacker this status can now attack without flagging, everyone else, even in their party, must flag up.

Anyone in their party who does any damage or CC to the Attacker lowers the status.

Main differences are minor for most situations (good) and differences only appear in outlier/abuse situations (very good, for the ones it works for). New abuses relative to most models: 1.

If this would somehow cover what you're considering, just extract whatever aspects you think would help without breaking something due to being removed from the 'whole' (there's more to it, but since I don't intend to discuss the 'system', you probably don't need it).

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

Flagged characters heavily pulling Aggro will lead to mob leash abuses, disruption, and really do very little because if the mob wasn't deleting Tank A, it isn't going to delete Tank B, and we already know that they intend for Tank B to be able to protect Mage B.

Note that I'm in no way saying that Group B would win. I'm saying that it's a skill check.

If we're talking purely dungeon room context, wouldn't short leashes work well for this? Team A is fighting mobs/boss. Team B runs up to their room and decides to flag on them. Mobs/boss reagro onto the flagged B member, which makes Team B either fight the mob themselves or run outside the room. If they fight - Team A could just keep attacking the mob for free and rake up the dmg required for looting rights. If Team B run outside, Team A would've just kept attacking the mob and would then keep attacking the mob while it returns to the center of the room (or wherever it wants to). This seems like a win-win for Team A.

True only if the 'anti zerg mechanics' only punish the 'intruders'.

NiKr wrote: »

The main concern then becomes the leash abuse in cases where people use flagging as a tool to make their farm easier, but that's exactly why I added the shouting scout mob. Obviously it won't work 100% of the time, but I'd imagine that, if that leash abuse is a well-known thing, some pvp groups would just "patrol" the dungeons to catch these abusers and have some fun with them, cause it'd be free pvp. And at that point it'd become a social interaction and a yet another push for a somewhat consensual pvp.

Wouldn't the strongest/largest PvP group just be the one using the leash abuse?

You think in very 'honorable' terms a lot of the time, but a game conflict system that 'only works when the most honorable are also the strongest' might be relying on an unrealistic situation.

That's going down the rabbit hole of behavioural structures of competitive gamers though, so if you figure it would work, and that's been your experience, then all I'll say is that it isn't mine.

Azherae wrote: »

If this would somehow cover what you're considering, just extract whatever aspects you think would help without breaking something due to being removed from the 'whole' (there's more to it, but since I don't intend to discuss the 'system', you probably don't need it).

Yeah, it's pretty much what I had in mind with the flagging agro, just in a better more streamlined way. And yeah, this definitely doesn't work in the current binary (ternary?) corruption system.

Azherae wrote: »

True only if the 'anti zerg mechanics' only punish the 'intruders'.

This is why I added the "presence of flagged players puts a dampener on anti-zerg mechanics" point. So the boss would just agro on the flagged attackers, but anti-zerg mechanics wouldn't start up immediately.

I tried explaining my thought process on the "who flags first" part, but I might've failed. I should've written that unmarked flagged players would hard-pull agro, while marked ones would just keep their pre-existent one.

Azherae wrote: »

Wouldn't the strongest/largest PvP group just be the one using the leash abuse?

You think in very 'honorable' terms a lot of the time, but a game conflict system that 'only works when the most honorable are also the strongest' might be relying on an unrealistic situation.

Yeah, my stubbornness and self-imposed rules usually prevent me from wearing pvp-abuser shoes. To me, abusing this kind of system when you're the strongest group around seems wasteful, but I guess you're right, it'd be exactly the abusive kind of players that would become the strongest by abusing this system.

It could maybe be argued that weaker players could disrupt that strong group's farm exactly because there'd always be a flagged player in that group, but even that idea comes from my own bias of going up against stronger foes and bashing my guild's head against them until either we completely despair or we manage to achieve our current goal