Splinter Topic: Micro-Competition vs Macro-Competition

We have not received permission from Dygz to share the quoted post.

I don't remember if I asked this before. What game did you experience the "chase" in before? Cause I'm mostly used to the more campy side of things, though it's usually not camping and simply "this is now my spot, so pick another".

Or are you mostly talking about the sheer possibility of the rare griefer choosing you as his next target and hunting you until you leave the game?

We have not received permission from Noaani to share the quoted post.

I mean, to me this is just the same as spot defending in L2. It's just a bigger spot, due to the respawn timer (same was true for several locations in L2 as well).

If that's what Dygz is talking about - ok. But it seems like it's not? And considering Dygz' non-competitiveness, I'd imagine he wouldn't care much about that specific type of the material, as long as he can get the material in some other way or in some other place.

Also, did people in AA control all respawn spots at all times or was player respawn locations so damn far away from the resource that killing a competitor would stop them from coming back in time? Or was it more about "if I move/act in just the right way, I can gather all the resources right at the time of them spawning, but if there's even a single competitor - the timing is off"? Cause I definitely had those kinds of situations in L2 and killing the competitor over and over until he was made sure that he can't win was definitely the answer (though this was still in one general location, so I wouldn't call this "the chase").

We have not received permission from Noaani to share the quoted post.

Again, if the respawn of materials was synced with player movements in such a way where the same player could farm all spots - yes, this would be the same as defending a spot. Because it ultimately is the same thing. That player thinks he's the only one who should benefit from him being good enough to be able to farm all the spots on his own, so he kills anyone who's trying to do the same thing.

Which is why I asked how it was in AA. Because that would directly link to the discussion of "the chase". As I understand it, Dygz is talking about an attacker who just hunts you no matter where you go, because he chose you as his target for the day. He does so regardless of his previous goal and regardless of your goals. You are talking about different people having the same goal and simply fighting over it.

If Dygz meant the same thing - ok.

We have not received permission from Dygz to share the quoted post.

And this is why I asked which game you experienced this in. Cause to me that's a rare situation, outside of the rare griefers who do in fact "pick a victim for the day". And it's a rare situation because if the player had a non-"victim of the day" goal - chasing someone down would go against said goal.

And while, sure, some people will have "I want pvp" as their goal, there's waaaay more much better sources of good pvp in the game than chasing random greens.

And this is why the "common" part of your comments stands out to me and why I was interested in learning which game this was common in. Noaani gave an example from AA, but that's a same-goal-based interaction, and you seem to be talking about a "I tried running away from the attacker, but he kept chasing me", which usually implies that the goal wasn't the same for both players.

We have not received permission from Dygz to share the quoted post.

I definitely agree that spawn camping shouldn't be a thing, and gave feedback on this several times already.

And if you mean "I want to get my loot back from my corpse, but they keep killing me" - this just comes back to my personal dislike of players dropping stuff on death, so to those players who stubbornly want to get back their loot (that is if it wasn't even looted by the attacker) - this game would definitely not be for them.

We have not received permission from Dygz to share the quoted post.

This then kinda relates to a comment I made for Azherae, about guards protecting people.

If that kind of system was in Ashes, would you be more willing to play the game in a deeper way than just running around as lvl1 just exploring?

We have not received permission from Noaani to share the quoted post.

Yes, my main point was with the "common"ality of this happening. Dygz says it was common in his experience. You say it was fairly common in AA. And in my experience only the griefers would chase down people most of the time, because they had nothing better to do (or this was the best thing they wanted to do). But griefers weren't a common occurrence in L2, even on private servers where clearing corruption (and PK count) were really easy.

What was definitely quite common is removing a person from the premises. Usually it'd take a few strong hits, and if the target realized that your hits were stronger than theirs would be - they'd leave. If they stayed - you just PK them and keep farming your mobs. If they come back and don't move away again - you PK again. Rinse repeat until one of you is tired or moves onto other content.

The only chasing I've experienced was in those locations where the farming cycle would take you across several rooms or spots in a given location. And this movement was perfectly synced with your preferred mob's spawn timers, so you'd kill one - move to the next - move to the next - etc. And if anyone else was going for the same mob - you'd want to remove that person from the location as a whole. But this was rarely achievable with just one attacker, cause player respawn-returnal times were way quicker than mob respawn (unless we're talking deep dungeon spawns).

You say that this resource had a spawn of 75 minutes, but clearing everything was 180. I assume 180 includes all the travelling you'd need to do. But then I'd have to ask, was there a way to optimize your travel in such a way where you sync the spawn of the next resource with your travel time. In other words, maximizing the farm to a point where you physically couldn't farm more of them by yourself. This is the kind of farm I'm reference from L2 and the kind of farm that could require a complete removal of a competitor (cause they mess up the perfect sync).

We have not received permission from Dygz to share the quoted post.

When you say this was a common thing, do you mean "every gaming session"? More/less often?

I dunno about the other games you listed, but afaik WoW had "pvp" locations where the chances of the other race seeing you were higher. Are you talking about those places or just "I was minding my business in my own race's location and then a dude started chasing me"?

Cause the former is closer to what I expect in Ashes, while the latter is just the product of having faction-based penalty-less PKing. And while both situations will definitely happen in Ashes, the former will mostly happen in highly contested high value areas, while the latter will be a rare occurrence for any unguilded green player.

We have not received permission from Dygz to share the quoted post.

Not players and not "guards". I was talking about literal npc-guards. Here's the comment.

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae, what's your party's opinion would be on smth like this setup?

1. The game tracks account-wide PK Count History (i.e. even if your current count is 0, the game would know that you have 10 PKs overall; and the count itself is not account-wide)
2. Military nodes have access to the PKCH of players that have PKd people in the vicinity of allied nodes
3. Other nodes can request the full PKCH list by sending a Mayoral caravan to get it (requires a full back&forth track to do)
4. PKCH info needs to be retaken every month (could be more often)
5. Guards in nodes operate according to the available PKCH
6. Guard power exists on a sliding scale of "can kill a weak mob" to "literally immortal and hits like a truck" (controlled by the mayor choices)
7. Guards are positioned across the node in predetermined places, with a predetermined patrol route
8. Guards aggro onto mobs that enter a certain radius and onto PKers who enter x2 of that radius
9. Guard-killed targets don't drop loot ("killed" here means "Guard did any dmg to the target") and Guards don't aggro onto bosses
10. After a certain PKCH value Guards aggro onto a flagged player with that value
11. If there's been a PK, Guards over a certain lvl (let's say 3/5 minimum) will go to that location and stay there for a certain amount of time
12. Amount of Guards and the duration of their presence in that location is set by the Mayor (debatable)
13. All of the above don't apply to military nodes themselves

As I see it, this would be a player-controlled TL-like system. There'll be nodes that are very good for pvers, but the system itself doesn't remove the possibility of being killed at least once. The economic macro-competition is still present in the form of mayoral actions (and any influence on them by other players), node wars/sieges (wars could have a goal of "destroy the guard post in the node", which disables it for several days) and caravan attacks to prevent the Guards from knowing the latest info about PKCH.

And this would also enforce pve-based micro-competition on the spots themselves, while not removing a casual PKing as the last resort. In other words, your enforcer might not be able to PK as much as yall might need, but a random person can still use the system for their benefit. Obviously this doesn't prevent your entire party going corrupt one after the other, but this too would only be doable up to a certain extent.

I feel like this system would be a nice way to have a not-as-gamey application of TL's events.

We have not received permission from Noaani to share the quoted post.

I'm not entirely sure what you're talking about here. Could you give an example of what that dynamic content would be, and why it would lead to more pvp chases?

We have not received permission from Noaani to share the quoted post.

I mean, to me this just seems like a moving farming spot But I feel like that's not what you mean.

Are you talking about smth like that broken caravan showcase, where new people came in and instead of fighting they all cooperated? But that stuff was system-based, so unless Intrepid lets us kill allies - we won't be able to do anything about it.

And if you mean something completely different, then I still don't really understand your point in this context.

We have not received permission from daveywavey to share the quoted post.

I don't know.

I feel like I'd maybe prefer a little if Ashes wasn't so cutthroat, but if AA2 is less so and has more 'positive non-guild relations', I don't mind 'swapping'.

This ties directly into the question @Ace1234 asked me, and the current discussion going on, actually.

My problem with Ashes is that its individual parts don't seem to fit together design wise. Each part is, for some person, appealing, or at least not terribly flawed, but combined, the experience appears to have issues.

Issues that in my opinion aren't present from 'just the base principles described'.

The Economy seems like it needs to be very player-driven in order to keep people having a clear sense of risk v reward and when they will encounter combat, yet there is Glint.
The Quest systems seem like they are very organic and drive player action, but then set up a lot of situations for griefing and conflict.
The Combat seems to be conceptually too swingy to be tactical, but then ties a lot of the combat points to non-tactics based locations (such as Caravans).
The 'balance' is claimed to be for group vs group, but the skills chosen and designed so far, don't indicate to me that balance will be possible for that.
The PvE targets are supposedly going to be challenging and open world at the same time, while that swingy combat-base is installed.
The leveling journey is supposed to be longer and let people feel like they are achieving something as they go, but levels themselves are a form of empowerment at odds with the economic states shown so far.
The PvP incentives are great for increasing PvP, but the game is supposedly about nodes and social relationships, so it's unclear which 'side of this equation' is actually important (and I don't think that making this 'Node dependent' is a good idea for another long list of reasons)
The designs around Gathering and the Territory/World manager imply long term effects of actions, with no fast travel, but like all reasonable MMORPGs, you can just 'take the negative action for as long as you feel safe and then log out/switch to alt.
The Corruption system (core principles) has issues related to the overall premise of this thread.
The value of grouping and getting into large guilds is set to 'high' with no currently-known drain, but the game is full of fiat (basically, if you have an immortal army that is bigger than anyone else's immortal army, your army doesn't actually have more incentive to break up than others, EVE tends to do it manually from the Dev side, for example)
And finally, we have a lot of systems that rely on all the above things, which we haven't seen as much of, while seeing 'signs of pain points in those systems created by other systems'.

So, as a team lead/developer, this is 'red flag territory' for me because in many similar projects, what I find happens is that some system gets entrenched because no one tore it down, and then everything else's form gets warped around that and the original product you were trying to make doesn't materialize.

Then someone gets the job of selling the new, changed product to the customer, by providing all the reasons why it 'is better that way', and just handwaving questions about the entrenched system that caused it.

It's like if Intrepid came and told us:
"We had to lower the TTK to increase the risk of running Caravans, which are the lifeblood of the world."

No, in that example it would actually be 'we don't want to remove Glint because itemization is hard, so we incentivized Caravans using it, creating a Gold Faucet, and now we need to manipulate players so that they don't all just form a continent-spanning trade alliance to print money'.

But people would be focused on 'oh well I guess if TTK had to be the compromise for a good game, we should accept it', and the 'real problem' (Caravans, technically Glint) wouldn't get resolved.

NiKr wrote: »

We have not received permission from Noaani to share the quoted post.

I mean, to me this just seems like a moving farming spot But I feel like that's not what you mean.

Are you talking about smth like that broken caravan showcase, where new people came in and instead of fighting they all cooperated? But that stuff was system-based, so unless Intrepid lets us kill allies - we won't be able to do anything about it.

And if you mean something completely different, then I still don't really understand your point in this context.

If you imagine a more complex version of the Stormcaller thing, does it make more sense?

But yes, I believe that you would simplify it down to 'moving farming spot' or 'defending bigger area', SCP-NUMBER.

Semiohazarding since DATE, never gonna [REDACTED].

We have not received permission from Ace1234 to share the quoted post.

It's not that it is 'better', it's simply my preference.

Ashes TTK looks too low (I've been PKed in TL, so I know exactly what the feeling of that is), Ashes skills are designed in a way that will lead to a combat type/focus that I personally disprefer, etc.

Entirely a preference thing with a ton of sub-aspects. I can describe it in another thread, sometime, or maybe talk about it a bit in my feedback to the Fighter Preview regardless of how that turns out. TL just seems to, currently have a better handle on 'the basics of combat required to achieve a balanced combat experience in a tactical situation'.

Ashes A1 was also like this, but based only on what I've seen they've been steadily moving away from it.

Azherae wrote: »

If you imagine a more complex version of the Stormcaller thing, does it make more sense?

If that complexity would involve stuff like "healing some mobs, while attacking others" or "helping a mob move through a hazardous location, while others in the area can either get the same event-quest or the attack version of it" - then yeah, I guess I could understand the dynamism of the situation where there's no immediately obvious choice of what to do with an approaching player.

Would we get that kind of complexity, when the previously shown event was implied to be binary as hell? I dunno. And I don't remember if we've been told that we might get that kind of complexity.

But if we do get that - great. The game becomes deeper, more interesting and way more varied in terms of player approach to any given task.

Hell, have events that are triggered by people artisaning. Someone's catching fish in a particularly good way? Get an event around them with 3 sides: go fish with them (there's now more content at that spot), go do an adversarial action (say, drop a bomb-like item into the river to spook the fish), and go stop adversaries (maybe those bombs gotta be picked up from an npc and this third group can either kill the npc before that or become exclusively flagged against people with bombs). Have an internal tracking system where it can't be just adversaries (or if there's a choice on the player side - adversary choice is greyed out until there's a helper) and you got yourself an intricate event with several points of access for several kinds of people.

Will we get this though? I sure hope so.

We have not received permission from Noaani to share the quoted post.

Ok, I might be understanding what you mean. Pretty much the resource you were talking about, where travel times are huge, so you wouldn't even know if they're at other spawn locations. Is this what you're saying?

But this would then return to what I was talking about before. How does killing them prevent them from simply going to that spot afterwards? This is the "immortality" Azherae keeps mentioning. Killing a competitor doesn't do shit, especially in this current context, if they simply respawn and go to another locations with the same content.

Or am I still missing something in your point?