Player enemy visual Health Bar update on hit.

Azherae wrote: »

But this isn't particularly related to whether or not health bars should be shown, so I didn't want to bother with it. All I know is that using L2 as the blueprint and saying 'I want it to be designed this way because OTHERWISE an L2 problem will happen' doesn't make sense when you are countered by 'I don't think it needs to be designed that way because AA did it that way and the problem didn't happen'.

Ok, but Noaani said that in AA people did have enough content to not really go to the same extent of competition that L2's players did.

So which approach has the higher chance of impacting the amount of PKing and the abuse of said PKing?

We have @iccer as well. Iccer, how much content competition did you experience in AA and how much did people kill each other during that competition if there was any?

And Azherae, I assume you disagree with what I told Noaani, that AA's design had other differences in design that contributed to the fact that his abuse wasn't nearly as prevalent? Cause if more content for people creates more friction, wouldn't that mean that AA should've had more people attempting all kinds of ways to win out over the ones they're in friction with?

Or do you envision a non-pvp kind of friction here?

Azherae wrote: »

If we as a community keep being this way about basic design stuff, communication is going to break down even more, and when the NDA lifts, this place is just going to give Ashes a bad rep. I'm probably 'out of line' in saying it, but y'all L2 players need to stop this, seriously.

When NDA drops we'll have concrete testing and info directly from Ashes. And at that point we can only have our own preferences on the design, at which point comparisons wouldn't really matter.

Obviously we'll still have our own preferences and the drama related to them will not go away, but all of us L2 players will be abso-fucking-lutely drowned by everyone else's feedback. There's, like, 6 of us here or smth.

But this then brings up another question. If during testing my preferences for the design don't change, would you be against me voicing my preferences for it, even if they're dumb within the economic design of Ashes?

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

I'm not sure which assumption you're referring to, and I absolutely prefer to yield to those with the experience, but in this case I should clarify that I got caught up in this because of the terrible way this thread has gone overall.

Neither AA nor L2 has the incentive structures in question.

The question here is 'will being unable to see HP deter people from griefing down players because they don't want to risk getting Corrupted'. As a generality, this answer will almost certainly be no because of the difference in the incentive for attacking players in Ashes and therefore the resultant setup for the attack .

There is nothing about Ashes' design that supports this answer being likely to be yes. Now, I don't even care about the specifics of this, as noted, I already gave an answer to this.

If you are saying that in AA, people did this because they could see HP and wouldn't have done it in the same situations if they were in L2 because they couldn't, that's between you and Noaani I guess.

Obviously if someone thinks they can keep you low and get you killed by mobs without getting Corrupted, because they want your loot, they will try. Will they 'choose not to attack you because they aren't sure if you are low, to avoid getting Corrupted'? I guess the game can be built like that and I just think that would be such a low quality game relative to the goals that I can't imagine it...

This is such a mess... oh well...

Ludullu_(NiKr) wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

But this isn't particularly related to whether or not health bars should be shown, so I didn't want to bother with it. All I know is that using L2 as the blueprint and saying 'I want it to be designed this way because OTHERWISE an L2 problem will happen' doesn't make sense when you are countered by 'I don't think it needs to be designed that way because AA did it that way and the problem didn't happen'.

Ok, but Noaani said that in AA people did have enough content to not really go to the same extent of competition that L2's players did.

So which approach has the higher chance of impacting the amount of PKing and the abuse of said PKing?

We have @iccer as well. Iccer, how much content competition did you experience in AA and how much did people kill each other during that competition if there was any?

And Azherae, I assume you disagree with what I told Noaani, that AA's design had other differences in design that contributed to the fact that his abuse wasn't nearly as prevalent? Cause if more content for people creates more friction, wouldn't that mean that AA should've had more people attempting all kinds of ways to win out over the ones they're in friction with?

Or do you envision a non-pvp kind of friction here?

Azherae wrote: »

If we as a community keep being this way about basic design stuff, communication is going to break down even more, and when the NDA lifts, this place is just going to give Ashes a bad rep. I'm probably 'out of line' in saying it, but y'all L2 players need to stop this, seriously.

When NDA drops we'll have concrete testing and info directly from Ashes. And at that point we can only have our own preferences on the design, at which point comparisons wouldn't really matter.

Obviously we'll still have our own preferences and the drama related to them will not go away, but all of us L2 players will be abso-fucking-lutely drowned by everyone else's feedback. There's, like, 6 of us here or smth.

But this then brings up another question. If during testing my preferences for the design don't change, would you be against me voicing my preferences for it, even if they're dumb within the economic design of Ashes?

You should give whatever your preferences are, I really only start to care when we go through 4 pages of people accusing each other of being fanbois, L2-cloners, PvE Themepark whatevers... because it goes nowhere and imo helps nothing.

But if Ashes changes its economic design to be closer to L2 in the way I've interpreted your wishes, I believe it will lose so much of its specific appeal that it will not stand up to TL. Because then it will be 'Lineage 2 players vs Megaguilds'. Just instinct, though.

As for the AA thing, see what I was telling James above,

Azherae wrote: »

Obviously if someone thinks they can keep you low and get you killed by mobs without getting Corrupted, because they want your loot, they will try. Will they 'choose not to attack you because they aren't sure if you are low, to avoid getting Corrupted'? I guess the game can be built like that and I just think that would be such a low quality game relative to the goals that I can't imagine it...

What are the chances that your group's bias towards corruption not being as impactful for yall impacts your attitude towards this particular approach to the system?

Iirc you said in the past that your group would be more than ok to keep PKing people as long as you physically can, simply because the punishments will not outweigh your own enjoyment of the activity. So obviously this avoidance abuse wouldn't be nearly as required for you as it might be for someone who wants to avoid the penalties at all costs.

Losing gear in L2, which sometimes took months to get, due to dying as a PKer was a fairly strong reason to try and avoid getting corruption. So, depending on how long it takes us to get gear in Ashes - that will dictate the impact of corruption penalties on people.

And, if anything, I'd imagine that a way more complicated and intricate economy system would imply that good gear might take even longer to get. And to me that implies that getting corrupted would be highly undesireable. Which then means that attempts at avoiding it would be desired. And that would finally clash with the motivation to kill a person (either for their loot or for the content contest).

To me, this sounds like a near-perfect reason to use the precise abuse us L2 players don't want to be as viable.

Azherae wrote: »

You should give whatever your preferences are, I really only start to care when we go through 4 pages of people accusing each other of being fanbois, L2-cloners, PvE Themepark whatevers... because it goes nowhere and imo helps nothing.

My own squabbles with people highly unused to these kinds of designs will come to a minimum during A2, simply because I'll be preoccupied with testing and giving Intrepid feedback based on that testing.

I simply won't have 14h to discuss these meaningless topics during that time. I didn't really have that time today either, but mihoyo grind priority is slightly lower than forum grind prio for now, hence the 14h of spamming these threads up.

Ludullu_(NiKr) wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

Obviously if someone thinks they can keep you low and get you killed by mobs without getting Corrupted, because they want your loot, they will try. Will they 'choose not to attack you because they aren't sure if you are low, to avoid getting Corrupted'? I guess the game can be built like that and I just think that would be such a low quality game relative to the goals that I can't imagine it...

What are the chances that your group's bias towards corruption not being as impactful for yall impacts your attitude towards this particular approach to the system?

Iirc you said in the past that your group would be more than ok to keep PKing people as long as you physically can, simply because the punishments will not outweigh your own enjoyment of the activity. So obviously this avoidance abuse wouldn't be nearly as required for you as it might be for someone who wants to avoid the penalties at all costs.

Losing gear in L2, which sometimes took months to get, due to dying as a PKer was a fairly strong reason to try and avoid getting corruption. So, depending on how long it takes us to get gear in Ashes - that will dictate the impact of corruption penalties on people.

And, if anything, I'd imagine that a way more complicated and intricate economy system would imply that good gear might take even longer to get. And to me that implies that getting corrupted would be highly undesireable. Which then means that attempts at avoiding it would be desired. And that would finally clash with the motivation to kill a person (either for their loot or for the content contest).

To me, this sounds like a near-perfect reason to use the precise abuse us L2 players don't want to be as viable.

You are the one who often points out that a PKer with even the slightest amount of prep is not really risking gear because they don't need good gear.

And I therefore see no connection between an intricate economy and good enough gear taking long to get, certainly not gear 'good enough for what we are talking about' because you would generally not do this kind of harrassment in good gear, would you?

Azherae wrote: »

You are the one who often points out that a PKer with even the slightest amount of prep is not really risking gear because they don't need good gear.

And I therefore see no connection between an intricate economy and good enough gear taking long to get, certainly not gear 'good enough for what we are talking about' because you would generally not do this kind of harrassment in good gear, would you?

That highly depends on the situation, the mob/gatherables spawn location and the prep required in relation to those.

Considering no fast travel, you'd need to have fairly static respawns if you're not just maining a career PK character. And if you ARE using that kind of character with the explicit purpose of trying and get some good high value loot from people - we'd then need to look at the statistics on how many people that are farming that loot would be willing to fight back.

L2's experience definitely wouldn't help there, cause, as I keep being told, player culture has shifted and way fewer people would be willing to just fight back when attacked. If that is the case - yes, career PKers will definitely go around murdering people for their loot in barely any gear.

And then this becomes the issue that you mentioned, where anyone can loot a corpse that was PKed. I'd definitely be all for restricting victim loot to only the PKer (and I believe I stated this in the past discussion of this topic). So if testing shows that even during Alpha no one is willing to fight back, then one of my main pieces of feedback would be a "PKed victim loot should only be pickupable by the killer". Obviously I'd love a deepening of the BH system in relation to that mechanic, but that's a way later piece of feedback.

But outside of career PK chars and kills purely for loot, fights for content definitely happened mostly between players on their mains in their good gear, so removal of contestants would always have a risk of becoming corrupted if said contestant wouldn't budge.

And obviously contests for content come down to whether they're even needed. And, as I see it, those contests can only happen if content is limited enough and valuable enough to fight over. Now, I definitely hope that the contests will mostly happen between guilds at war (or potentially nodes at war), but, as Voeltz above have pointed out (though it's funny that they called out L2 players, when we're literally the ones complaining about the potential abuses ) - people will do their best to maximize their benefits in the dirtiest way, so if wardeccing is a bit too pricey, those guilds would just resort to this (or any other) abuse. Though I guess career PK chars are more possible when it comes to guild-scale contests, though they'd probably only be viable in boss situations cause PK alts won't really be able to simply PK someone who's in a party/raid.

Ok, and that is why I didn't want to get involved in any of this really and failed my contribution by bringing up AA at all. Thank you very much, James.

But as you've just pointed out, NiKr, you see my perception moreso as a bias.

All I can ask is this, therefore:

If someone is willing to defend their farming spot at a World Boss to advance their guild, and World Bosses are not PvP zones, for example, so that defense involves going red, what is the difference between that and killing a player for a percentage of a full bag?

In the case of the World Boss you're risking somehow still not being able to kill it, so you end up Red but with no benefit. At least in the case of killing the random people, you know you will only go Red if you get some benefit.

It's incongruous. L2's Corruption system and incentives work together in exactly the way you've explained.

Either way, I'm gonna leave it, my involvement this time was as much a waste of time as the rest of the middle pages and I'm sorry to all for it.

Azherae wrote: »

If someone is willing to defend their farming spot at a World Boss to advance their guild, and World Bosses are not PvP zones, for example, so that defense involves going red, what is the difference between that and killing a player for a percentage of a full bag?

This comes down to the levels of competitiveness over said boss.

Sometimes not letting your enemy get the boss is as valuable as getting that boss yourself. And considering that bosses (especially big world ones) will be dropping full gear pieces alongside super valuable mats - not letting your enemies get boosted by those items is a much much much bigger boon than any kind of loot that you might get from a killed player.

Like, even if you were to PK your enemy after they successfully farmed the boss (and you magically knew who had ALL the mats on them) - you'd still only get a fraction of the loot w/o the full gear, so even in that situation your perceived reward would not be as big as denial of content in a competition.

Azherae wrote: »

Either way, I'm gonna leave it, my involvement this time was as much a waste of time as the rest of the middle pages and I'm sorry to all for it.

Nah, new voices in a prolonged discussion are always nice. And we at least switched away from "L2 is shit - no, wow is shit - no u - no u" to something at least a bit more productive. And that's always a good thing.

Ludullu_(NiKr) wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

If someone is willing to defend their farming spot at a World Boss to advance their guild, and World Bosses are not PvP zones, for example, so that defense involves going red, what is the difference between that and killing a player for a percentage of a full bag?

This comes down to the levels of competitiveness over said boss.

Sometimes not letting your enemy get the boss is as valuable as getting that boss yourself. And considering that bosses (especially big world ones) will be dropping full gear pieces alongside super valuable mats - not letting your enemies get boosted by those items is a much much much bigger boon than any kind of loot that you might get from a killed player.

Like, even if you were to PK your enemy after they successfully farmed the boss (and you magically knew who had ALL the mats on them) - you'd still only get a fraction of the loot w/o the full gear, so even in that situation your perceived reward would not be as big as denial of content in a competition.

Azherae wrote: »

Either way, I'm gonna leave it, my involvement this time was as much a waste of time as the rest of the middle pages and I'm sorry to all for it.

Nah, new voices in a prolonged discussion are always nice. And we at least switched away from "L2 is shit - no, wow is shit - no u - no u" to something at least a bit more productive. And that's always a good thing.

Well that's back to me then.

If you kill me cause you're defending your spot, all that tells me is that you think this spot is worth defending. You're gonna be here, and you're gonna be accumulating STUFF. Stuff my guys can come take . If you cared enough to defend it you're not gonna be gone with the goods, and the longer you stay there to defend it the more valuable your drops will be when we take them.

Ashes of Creation is huge. Even individual nodes are huge. If people can spread out as much as they're going to be able to, there won't be that much conflict over spots. There's gonna be enough content for everyone. The incentive for conflict in this game mostly isn't taking your spot. It's taking your stuff, and all the time you sank to collect it.

Even if there isn't enough space for everyone, all that "you defending your spot" means is that I can come take your spoils and run, instead of spending all that time out there, vulnerable, to collect it myself.

Your farming time is more valuable than your spot. I'm gonna come steal it from your bags.

SongRune wrote: »

If you kill me cause you're defending your spot, all that tells me is that you think this spot is worth defending. You're gonna be here, and you're gonna be accumulating STUFF. Stuff my guys can come take . If you cared enough to defend it you're not gonna be gone with the goods, and the longer you stay there to defend it the more valuable your drops will be when we take them.

Ashes of Creation is huge. Even individual nodes are huge. If people can spread out as much as they're going to be able to, there won't be that much conflict over spots. There's gonna be enough content for everyone. The incentive for conflict in this game mostly isn't taking your spot. It's taking your stuff, and all the time you sank to collect it.

Even if there isn't enough space for everyone, all that "you defending your spot" means is that I can come take your spoils and run, instead of spending all that time out there, vulnerable, to collect it myself.

Your farming time is more valuable than your spot. I'm gonna come steal it from your bags.

You have just described my favorite pastime in L2 Yes, w/o the item drop of course, but the activity itself is.

Fighting for spots is what's making them valuable to me, because if I manage to defend the spot and get (and in case of Ashes keep) its loot - that loot will be all the more valuable to me.

And if you bring more people to get that location's loot - I'll simply know for sure that it's a juicy spot to grind. I'll get my own people there to farm it even more and we'll have ourselves a fun time killing each other back and forth.

That's the whole soul of owpvp games to me. And, to me, losing mats will be no different from L2's "this player managed to kill you more times than you him, which directly decreased the amount of the location's loot you managed to get within the timeframe of you trying to farm it". And with flagged death penalties reducing the loot in half I wouldn't even lose all that much.

The only problem here is that all the pvers are in no way ready for this kind of gameplay and they'll definitely hate that you can do what you said you'd do. But that just means that they're not the target audience for the game. Or, at least the ones who refuse to seek help for these kinds of situations are.

Ludullu_(NiKr) wrote: »

SongRune wrote: »

If you kill me cause you're defending your spot, all that tells me is that you think this spot is worth defending. You're gonna be here, and you're gonna be accumulating STUFF. Stuff my guys can come take . If you cared enough to defend it you're not gonna be gone with the goods, and the longer you stay there to defend it the more valuable your drops will be when we take them.

Ashes of Creation is huge. Even individual nodes are huge. If people can spread out as much as they're going to be able to, there won't be that much conflict over spots. There's gonna be enough content for everyone. The incentive for conflict in this game mostly isn't taking your spot. It's taking your stuff, and all the time you sank to collect it.

Even if there isn't enough space for everyone, all that "you defending your spot" means is that I can come take your spoils and run, instead of spending all that time out there, vulnerable, to collect it myself.

Your farming time is more valuable than your spot. I'm gonna come steal it from your bags.

You have just described my favorite pastime in L2 Yes, w/o the item drop of course, but the activity itself is.

Fighting for spots is what's making them valuable to me, because if I manage to defend the spot and get (and in case of Ashes keep) its loot - that loot will be all the more valuable to me.

And if you bring more people to get that location's loot - I'll simply know for sure that it's a juicy spot to grind. I'll get my own people there to farm it even more and we'll have ourselves a fun time killing each other back and forth.

That's the whole soul of owpvp games to me. And, to me, losing mats will be no different from L2's "this player managed to kill you more times than you him, which directly decreased the amount of the location's loot you managed to get within the timeframe of you trying to farm it". And with flagged death penalties reducing the loot in half I wouldn't even lose all that much.

The only problem here is that all the pvers are in no way ready for this kind of gameplay and they'll definitely hate that you can do what you said you'd do. But that just means that they're not the target audience for the game. Or, at least the ones who refuse to seek help for these kinds of situations are.

So I've been following the discussion and it's hard to tell if you are where I think you are in your thoughts on this. The primary assumption it seems like you are making MIGHT be that 'content will be fought over in the larger metro areas PRIMARILY, because content is scarce elsewhere'. If this is incorrect, please forgive me, as it is a very long thread and instead consider my own assumptions below.

Here are some assumptions I am making instead.

• Ashes must, yes must, have a relatively even content spread across all nodes. Activities might differ, so there might be differences in player type /'required' for the content, (which can cause a type of friction/conflict but not the one you seem to be talking about usually,) but over all it is in quantity sort of even. The 'context' of that context is the thing that is changing with increased event movement and node size.

This is an assumption predicated on just how big the game is purported to be by node number and size of map.

This is an assumption predicated on the fact that other 'node-type' games tend to have equal capacity for content quantity depending on player activity. (e.g. bigger systems in elite dangerous have a mild bias to quantity of content, but not a big enough one to effect where you live. Quantity fluctuates based on random bgs factors and pilot activity on a smaller scale than we discuss with the average Ashes node.)

• It's in Steven's interest to have equal spread of activity given his personal desire for the game to feel like a living breathing world that rewards people for participating in that world as a social actor.

This is an assumption predicated on the fact that Steven might care about people living in smaller nodes having an equal amount of things to do on a personal level as a game designer.

This is an assumption predicated on the fact that different player types pursue different types of social situations and 'cooperative' social play is something that is more possible in small and medium nodes.

(this last one is possibly the most important assumption out of all of my assumptions)
This is an assumption predicated on the fact that a lack of these opportunities would limit the 'frontier' fantasy from certain types of player expression. To make it clearer why that is, the travel time from one node to another is going to be quite long based on what we know about the speed of travel and map parameters. Having to go from one node to another for content is going to be quite burdensome. If some nodes just have that much more, and more rewarding, content then the frontier players are basically indirectly taxed in a way that will lead to rural areas having basically NO incentive structure to live there. And that tax is in the form of doing ' less interesting things' and generally more predictable things. Part of being on the frontier is for the unexpected to be expected and not having anyone but your self to resolve the unexpected.

JustVine wrote: »

The primary assumption it seems like you are making MIGHT be that 'content will be fought over in the larger metro areas PRIMARILY, because content is scarce elsewhere'.

My assumption is only slightly different.

I expect metros to spawn high/top lvl content in each of its vassal nodes, but that content will still be limited, because there's only so much space in the game, and you still need to have lowbie and midbie content in the game, so that newbies can lvl up w/o issues all over the map.

The limited nature of that content will funnel more and more people towards those locations (the more people lvl up the bigger the contests for each location).

Whichever dungeon gets upgraded by its relation to the metro will only have a limited amount of mobs and bosses of top lvl which drop top mats. I'm sure there'll be pure top lvl dungeons around the metros themselves, but again, those will also be limited by available space.

Yes, the map might be huge, but I personally do not foresee it housing up-to 10k people all farming top lvl content (gatherables included).

If my assumption is proven wrong - great. Barely any pvp will happen, which means that pvers will be happier and the game will be alive for even longer.

And my assumption is also built on the fact that quite a lot of content will be prime-time-centric, so concentration of people around high value content will be even bigger, because everyone will be logging in just for that content.

Now there's definitely a hope that we'll have enough node and guild wars that will be happening at the same time, which will distract quite a lot of players away from other content, which would then free up space for those who might've been losing pvp around that content. But we'll have to see how that part of the game ends up being balanced.

But yeah, Steven's adoration of player friction, to me, dictates that design will push people together. And having limited content is one of the easiest ways of pushing people together.

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

Yes, the balance is razor-thin and will have to be figured out during testing (and most likely after release as well).