A dungeon idea

@NiKr

I just don't like it in Ashes because even if you do it 'normally', the problem is at the core 'being able to pull the boss away or shift it in a way that disrupts other people's synergies, either by wasting their flows, causing the boss to react in unintended ways, or just repositioning it at the wrong times.

If the Synergies are not that meaningful, it should be fine to have 'unmarked players flag up', but since I kinda assume that by 'marked' you mean 'got aggro from the boss at some point', this seems a bit easy too.

This is where the Dv Gauge helps a bit more. One of the easiest and 'safest' low level 'Revenge Mechanics' you could give any boss at all is to make it CC resistant/immune to those who have a high value, or raise the chance of its CC working on them.

Similarly you can make it damage resistant a bit. So if you're attacking someone to steal their boss, you need to be strong enough and coordinated enough to fight a CC-enhanced version of the boss, without really changing the boss much at all.

This would usually very explicitly preserve the Synergies of the original group, while allowing them to not worry as much about certain other things, and they could just 'let the boss rampage around against the statused players'.

Result of change: Players are more likely to compete in performance against the boss itself when they happen to be in the same spot and both want to fight it. Then activate the Boss' standard proper anti-zerg mechanics (which would not be positional, I assume) forcing the two groups to adapt but without any innate 'I can just steal this from you by killing you when things start to go badly for your team'.

Still preserves the options for disruption and last-minute betrayals.

Azherae wrote: »

If the Synergies are not that meaningful, it should be fine to have 'unmarked players flag up', but since I kinda assume that by 'marked' you mean 'got aggro from the boss at some point', this seems a bit easy too.

I'd probably make "marked ones" the first group to engage the boss. I'm assuming that's exactly how the looting rights will get calculated, so it makes sense to me to apply the same system to my flag-agro suggestion.

Azherae wrote: »

Result of change: Players are more likely to compete in performance against the boss itself when they happen to be in the same spot and both want to fight it. Then activate the Boss' standard proper anti-zerg mechanics (which would not be positional, I assume) forcing the two groups to adapt but without any innate 'I can just steal this from you by killing you when things start to go badly for your team'.

Still preserves the options for disruption and last-minute betrayals.

Do you envision that status on the attackers going away in case the defending team wipes? Cause I see two potential outcomes from that kind of application. If the status goes away and the boss goes back to normal stats - attackers will just skillcheck the defending party until the boss wipes them. If the status doesn't go away and the attackers will have to overcome all of those boss buffs even after the defenders wipe - I imagine that there'd barely any pvp around bosses or the power difference between the two groups would be so huge that defenders wouldn't have a chance in the first place.

Last minute betrayals would also only work in a situation where both groups are really close in strength to each other and they both started hitting the boss at the same time and the game also provides exact respective dmg% values, so that either party would always know who has the first hit advantage and where their HP% removed value is.

But even then, the attackers would be at a disadvantage because they'd stop attacking the boss (at least some of them), start gaining the status and buff the boss against themselves, all the while the defenders can just keep hitting the boss knowing that they definitely have the loot if at least one of them survives until the end. At this point the defenders have no reason to fight back, which makes the attackers either go red or quit completely because they've lost the boss' loot. That's a lose-lose situation for the attackers, so there'd be no reason to even start the attack.

And again, this would only apply in a fairly limited amount of situations, while pretty much every other route is either "you gotta go PK/skillcheck" or "dodge anti-zerg mechanics in hopes that the first group just wipes before you".

In other words, I'm not sure if this particular mechanic would work with currently presented looting rights design. And any reaggroing based on the status would pretty much lead to the same disruption that my initial suggestion did.

I think the radical solution here would be to close the doors to the room right before the miniboss, but have a few minute window before the spawns and the scout mob that I mentioned would shout about an upcoming boss rather than about flagged people. This would allow the boss to have better mechanics and would redirect pvp to pre- and post- farm timings. I'd probably increase drop rates on the boss to entice people not only to go and attack someone else's room, but to also defend it more often because you've already invested time into "summoning" it and you'd be missing out on the juicier loot if you just left the room to the attackers.

The few minutes of waiting before the boss spawn would allow for a more fair fight too, because it'd give the defenders a reset after the previous wave of mobs. There'd obviously be cases of attackers simply waiting outside of a room and attacking as soon as the mobs are gone, but that kind of interaction is inevitable in an owpvp game, so that's just something that the defenders would have to deal with.

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

If the Synergies are not that meaningful, it should be fine to have 'unmarked players flag up', but since I kinda assume that by 'marked' you mean 'got aggro from the boss at some point', this seems a bit easy too.

I'd probably make "marked ones" the first group to engage the boss. I'm assuming that's exactly how the looting rights will get calculated, so it makes sense to me to apply the same system to my flag-agro suggestion.

Azherae wrote: »

Result of change: Players are more likely to compete in performance against the boss itself when they happen to be in the same spot and both want to fight it. Then activate the Boss' standard proper anti-zerg mechanics (which would not be positional, I assume) forcing the two groups to adapt but without any innate 'I can just steal this from you by killing you when things start to go badly for your team'.

Still preserves the options for disruption and last-minute betrayals.

Do you envision that status on the attackers going away in case the defending team wipes? Cause I see two potential outcomes from that kind of application. If the status goes away and the boss goes back to normal stats - attackers will just skillcheck the defending party until the boss wipes them. If the status doesn't go away and the attackers will have to overcome all of those boss buffs even after the defenders wipe - I imagine that there'd barely any pvp around bosses or the power difference between the two groups would be so huge that defenders wouldn't have a chance in the first place.

Last minute betrayals would also only work in a situation where both groups are really close in strength to each other and they both started hitting the boss at the same time and the game also provides exact respective dmg% values, so that either party would always know who has the first hit advantage and where their HP% removed value is.

But even then, the attackers would be at a disadvantage because they'd stop attacking the boss (at least some of them), start gaining the status and buff the boss against themselves, all the while the defenders can just keep hitting the boss knowing that they definitely have the loot if at least one of them survives until the end. At this point the defenders have no reason to fight back, which makes the attackers either go red or quit completely because they've lost the boss' loot. That's a lose-lose situation for the attackers, so there'd be no reason to even start the attack.

And again, this would only apply in a fairly limited amount of situations, while pretty much every other route is either "you gotta go PK/skillcheck" or "dodge anti-zerg mechanics in hopes that the first group just wipes before you".

In other words, I'm not sure if this particular mechanic would work with currently presented looting rights design. And any reaggroing based on the status would pretty much lead to the same disruption that my initial suggestion did.

I think the radical solution here would be to close the doors to the room right before the miniboss, but have a few minute window before the spawns and the scout mob that I mentioned would shout about an upcoming boss rather than about flagged people. This would allow the boss to have better mechanics and would redirect pvp to pre- and post- farm timings. I'd probably increase drop rates on the boss to entice people not only to go and attack someone else's room, but to also defend it more often because you've already invested time into "summoning" it and you'd be missing out on the juicier loot if you just left the room to the attackers.

The few minutes of waiting before the boss spawn would allow for a more fair fight too, because it'd give the defenders a reset after the previous wave of mobs. There'd obviously be cases of attackers simply waiting outside of a room and attacking as soon as the mobs are gone, but that kind of interaction is inevitable in an owpvp game, so that's just something that the defenders would have to deal with.

That's your honor again.

This is a question of which tactics a group is 'supposed' to employ.

In hard PvE, slight disruptions lead to defeats. So the last minute betrayal is just 'one Rogue backstabbing the other group's healer at the critical moment'.

Rogues in general would be able to just do this anyway, them building up the status doesn't really disrupt a lot, they aren't likely to be CC dependent.

I'm not quite sure why you perceive it the other way, actually, other than your honorable nature. Also, it's Ashes, right? What guarantee does a player have that even if they were the last one standing after killing the boss, and the boss drops the loot (which would almost certainly be a material) that they wouldn't just get killed by the enemy group and have the chance of having said loot taken?

I'm honestly not following this one. The problem with the Corruption system relative to this flow as is, is that the attacking group does a skillcheck on whether they can cause the enemy to die and go entirely unpunished while still taking the boss. The one I'm discussing incentivizes the players to weigh the punishment against their strength. It's explicitly supposed to be a middle ground, and middle grounds usually have some 'abuseable ground' on either side, or at least, what feels like that, to anyone trying to solve a specific 'side's' problem.

Going back to our Beam Mage.

Current system: Beam Mage flags up, does things, boss maybe aggros on them, they reposition, but more likely someone else in their group flagged up to try to get the boss out of position. If Beam Mage fails their skillcheck they get some Corruption. Fairly irrelevant.

Other system: Beam Mage flags up, does things, boss aggros on them, they reposition. Beam Mage gets some Corruption and increases their risk of their group not being able to defeat the boss or being vulnerable to being killed by the boss more easily (but probably not a lot, Mages and Rogues would probably be best at this).

Anyways we're now on the verge of doing the exact thing I was saying I won't do. Basically if you think it doesn't work, then ok, it doesn't work. Probably just different goals anyway, but I would like to understand why you tend to go straight to 'then no one will do it' from a minor change. Just different worlds maybe?

@Azherae

Azherae wrote: »

Probably just different goals anyway, but I would like to understand why you tend to go straight to 'then no one will do it' from a minor change. Just different worlds maybe?

Most likely just my crazy extrapolations that are based on a potentially faulty assumption about majority of players, with some general projection on top of that.

It's also my L2 assumptions superimposed onto AoC's lack of info. Just as you've said before, people like to fill in the gaps in info with their own assumptions and projections, and I'm the victim of the same crime. I subconsciously thought of L2's looting method of "stuff drops on the ground and you see who picks it up", so to me it was silly to even consider the attackers PKing the last standing dude for his loot because it'd always be way more beneficial to just wait for the defenders to kill the boss and then just PK the one who looted the things (in my experience that's usually the leader).

But Ashes will have the "personal bag of shit" method, so yeah, ultimately if one person from the defender's group remains to pick up their loot - they'll probably just get killed for it.

I think I also misrepresented what you wrote about the gauge status effects in my mind, or at least increased it way beyond what you intended, all while having a different (read lacking) understanding of hard pve. And the lack of that understanding will most likely influence any of my ideas up until I get to experience that hard pve in alpha 2 (if there will be any of course). I only have my general assumptions as to the influence of an attacking group on the defending one and I feel like those assumptions are just so incorrect that any route of action I'm imagining goes in a completely different way from what the reality would most likely be.

I think I'll just need to stop putting out ideas for now, at least until we get some concrete info about the core mechanics of the game.

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

Probably just different goals anyway, but I would like to understand why you tend to go straight to 'then no one will do it' from a minor change. Just different worlds maybe?

Most likely just my crazy extrapolations that are based on a potentially faulty assumption about majority of players, with some general projection on top of that.

It's also my L2 assumptions superimposed onto AoC's lack of info. Just as you've said before, people like to fill in the gaps in info with their own assumptions and projections, and I'm the victim of the same crime. I subconsciously thought of L2's looting method of "stuff drops on the ground and you see who picks it up", so to me it was silly to even consider the attackers PKing the last standing dude for his loot because it'd always be way more beneficial to just wait for the defenders to kill the boss and then just PK the one who looted the things (in my experience that's usually the leader).

But Ashes will have the "personal bag of shit" method, so yeah, ultimately if one person from the defender's group remains to pick up their loot - they'll probably just get killed for it.

I think I also misrepresented what you wrote about the gauge status effects in my mind, or at least increased it way beyond what you intended, all while having a different (read lacking) understanding of hard pve. And the lack of that understanding will most likely influence any of my ideas up until I get to experience that hard pve in alpha 2 (if there will be any of course). I only have my general assumptions as to the influence of an attacking group on the defending one and I feel like those assumptions are just so incorrect that any route of action I'm imagining goes in a completely different way from what the reality would most likely be.

I think I'll just need to stop putting out ideas for now, at least until we get some concrete info about the core mechanics of the game.

Well, if I get any say/influence on this, please don't stop putting out ideas.

Maybe I'm being fatalistic but Intrepid is not exactly swimming in feedback/concepts right now, and I know something that is happening within my team that might be happening in theirs and if it is, it's good.

We all have assumptions, but until we debate them, sometimes we don't even notice we have them. The same thing happens in design teams, except it's so much more dangerous there. Finding out everyone is on the same page for 5 months and then having to rework something month 6 because people literally just assumed their bases/priors were the same until a clash point? It's the worst feeling .

If I say more this post will turn into a bunch of long anecdotal rants or something, so I'll leave it at that. Learning L2 stuff from you, EQ stuff from Noaani, etc, is so much faster than trying to pick history out of the internet, and similiarly the ideas and approaches that different players bring...

Let's just say I choose to believe Intrepid when they say that they really want us to keep throwing out ideas and discussing them in detail. KP development benefitted massively from exactly this kind of thing back then. Every 'hey let's solve this balance problem this way', 'hey we should make this card better', 'hey we should ban this card' at least did something.

Azherae wrote: »

Let's just say I choose to believe Intrepid when they say that they really want us to keep throwing out ideas and discussing them in detail. KP development benefitted massively from exactly this kind of thing back then. Every 'hey let's solve this balance problem this way', 'hey we should make this card better', 'hey we should ban this card' at least did something.

Steven and Margaret mentioned that they're filming their internal discussions and overall development process and that they have videos of them looking through feedback and different ideas. I'm quite excited to see those videos, cause we've had a ton of super varied suggestions throughout this development and I'm really curious to see what, if anything, Intrepid got out of them.

And thanks for the reassurance. In the future I'll just try to think the ideas through more before posting them

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This wouldn't happen because Ashes doesn't have to follow the sorts of 'rules' that games like EVE and Elite put on themselves.

Ashes would have an entirely different set of chaotic problems.

I'm just saying that solving the 'DPS gets to melt the boss' is easy, it's just not easy to do it WHILE not also causing massive drama and making boss experiences stress/painful in an oWPvP game, particularly one with no mob tagging.

Designers are choosing to let those bosses fall like that.

For this, I mention another Besieged Boss.

He has an ability called Arcane Stomp which basically says 'I absorb all magic damage as healing now'. He is also fought in Besieged, obviously. It's a TP Gauge attack, so if you actually want to BEAT him, you need to get the 60 mages who rushed into the area to help with the battle to go fight something else .

Does this lead to 'frustrated screaming at random mages in zone chat'? Yes. Does it mean sometimes Gurfurlur lives when he would normally have been defeated by even the slightest bit of coordination? Yes.

But there's solutions. The 'action Economy' of bosses has to be absolutely terrible compared to players for this to be a real issue. If Intrepid has difficulty figuring out how to not make their bosses get deleted by hundreds of players at a time, I know where to find mechanics examples for them.

But I say that if that's happening, it's because they prefer for that to happen, over any of the fairly obvious mechanics they could use to prevent it, for whatever boss.

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Yes, Arya, I saw your shotgun shot of ideas that range from "eh that maybe could work with a few changes" to "that is the exact insane shit that I tried calling out before". You know my stance, I want to increase the amount of PKing, while decreasing the impact of corruption, WHILE keeping the life of greens at a normal lvl instead of hell.

Getting corruption for pve could be an interesting idea if Intrepid decided to link corruption to the mobs directly. I think I did post this idea somewhere on here, but I'd love if mob factions fought each other and there'd be a way to help one faction prevail and remove their "corruption", pretty much making them interactable NPCs. And then anyone who allied with the other faction could kill these NPCs and gain corruption through it.

But that's a whole different discussion for a whole different thread.

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I suppose that's the other part I can share (like I said, I'm not actually particularly protective of it, and I actually developed the Dv Gauge as an alternative for Ashes if you considered Ashes to change certain goals ).

Lore wise it's easy. Corruption is the metaphysical decay and disruption of society/cohesion and values. That's why it just 'randomly appears'. It's the 'underpinning of the Essence' that 'knows that the civilized world will fall into ruin (as it did in the past) if people just do things for Anarchy reasons.

That's why it would never be tied to just 'attacking' nor would it be tied to 'only on kill'. The Gauge is 'the protection that the Essence offers to the innocent by marking them against those who take this type of action'.

Right now the system incentivizes 'hitting people and then leaving them alone if they choose not to fight you'. My thought was for a system that adds to that and makes the players who do it responsible for disruption more harshly.

People who don't want to fight, who would rather let the enemy be corrupted, are already going to do that. The problem is the number of ways that the attacker groups have to work around this. But that is intentional in Ashes, it has to be. The issue is too easy to solve.

The game has a threat meter, and that means every action taken on an NPC is calculating some value specific to that NPC relative to the player taking the action. Adding/adapting those same values to be used when players attack Greens isn't some huge challenge.

I say this to remind that the whole 'you can get away with killing someone if you designate a person to do it or time it right' must be intentional currently, or it would be changed.

And therefore there really aren't any additions to Corruption itself as it is now, that will matter to gankers really. The main ways that Corruption matters are 'preventing solo players from being murderers' and 'making PK a skill/determination check'.

As we've discussed before, if Intrepid wanted PvP to be common and world-changing relative to their social or economic designs, we wouldn't have design bases like 'Guild Wars prevent loot drops'.

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I think you and I just have a fundamental design disagreement, illustrated here:

To me, there should be more opt-in for greater risks and rewards, which also makes less predictable how players will min-max risk vs reward when approaching others

To me this is just introducing balance difficulty for developers for no reason, adding systems that people then complain about.

I accept that you're one of those people who believes that complex systems are a problem, and that instead adding more systems with higher potentials for chaotic emergent gameplay is better. I just don't like that design style.

In my team, I'm the one whose job it is to take the 'freeform' stuff that our equivalent of you produces and either pare it down or work out the balance details/smooth out the pain points. By habit my responses to your ideas will always be to 'fix them' and your responses to mine will probably always be 'too complex, let options/unpredictability increase instead'.

Most of the time therefore we really don't benefit from giving each other 'feedback' along those lines. If I notice that your stuff seems too 'freeform' and will cause 'chaos', it's not useful to point it out. If you notice my stuff is too 'complex and might result in controlled behaviour', it's not useful to point it out.

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And that's great, but I mean, you're on a forum for a game that is way stricter than I'd be in design.

In fact the entire reason Ashes is confusing is because it attempts to leverage simplicity but with very specific goals that seem to be removing pain points. So to both you and I, it looks like the game's design is incorrect.

For you, it's 'obvious' that it's simple and it's just adding bandaids of unnecessary complexity when it should be adding tools to keep with the simplicity and emergent gameplay theme.

For me it's 'obvious' that it is too simple and needs more complex and manipulative structures to keep with the goals of removing pain points.

Someday Intrepid will make it clear which of those things is their actual intention, or they will emerge like a Phoenix somehow managing a game with Simple Systems that still achieves the 'Pain Point Reduction' necessary for whatever their required playerbase numbers are.

But until then, even if we were somehow being helpful, we'd have to work together differently than we will 'by default' to be much help to them.

So I won't criticize your ideas for 'creating unpleasant chaos' (I'll leave that to NiKr), I'll focus on checking if you see and intend all the things it probably causes (so far, you always do), and it'd be helpful if you don't 'dismiss' mine for being complex because you believe in more freedom (maybe do the same and point out what you'd do to use such a system as a tool for your own gameplay to help me see what I missed).

From that perspective therefore I offer the 'simple example'.

Assume NiKr is on his freehold preparing to craft some armor and you come along and feel like fighting NiKr. You hit him with something and get 'a Dv Gauge number equal to what you'd get as Hate from a mob'. NiKr doesn't want to fight and tells you that he's busy crafting.

If you want to stop NiKr from crafting you keep hitting him. If you don't, you wait until he's done because the Gauge Buildup ramps up exponentially if you keep damaging this Green Crafter.

Someone else comes along and wants to fight. You're flagged but not Corrupted. You tell them 'hey help me kill this guy, I need him to stop crafting and maybe drop some materials, whichever of us doesn't go Red from killing him can loot him and my goal will be achieved and we can split it later' because you're both the type that are okay being Red for a while. In Ashes current Corruption this just works, OR you are both so scared of the massive Corruption penalty that you're not willing to risk it for this goal.

In 'Dv Gauge' world, the new person gets Dv Gauge too because they're still 'harming an innocent and disrupting society'. In fact if they do damage to NiKr while he's low, they get a high value of it, now you're both pretty high on this value. NiKr decides 'well I'm not fighting 2v1 while not even in my best gear, I'm not an idiot', and you both end it with lots of Gauge built up and one dead NiKr.

Some time later, the Gauge rolls over into true Corruption, but Corruption in general is easier to remove than in Ashes (probably).

There's some unmentioned other parts related to the Gauge offering NiKr some protection against your attacks as it rises in case he changes his mind, you being protected from gear drops (and any dampening) before the Gauge converts into true Corruption, and your ability to just 'pay off' the Corruption in town by offering some restitution to NiKr, bounty hunters, etc.

In fact, it's exactly the same sort of things you already often suggest.

I don't know if I can offer a 'simple' example because tying everything together to generate 'statistically standard' player behaviours is literally my 'job'.