PvP aspect and the likely effect to casual players

Dygz, will you play Ashes if by any chance Steven decides to have the corruption values be not as high as you think they'll be and PKing will be more prevalent than just a few kills on the whole server here and there?

Cause from all of your comments (which are mainly the same ones, but still) you seem like a person that would really not like a game where you can be killed at any time, yet Ashes definitely seems to be that kind of game (even if the penalties stay harsh).

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Again the quote went "If you go on a murder spree and you have 10 pks under your belt then you might start feeling a significant dampening to your skill effects against other players."

This means that on the lower PK counts, the stat dampening effects are either miniscule or just insignificant. Which was my entire point. I didn't misrepresent anything. I was just pointing out that they haven't tested it, hence the vague language. But even before testing, Steven's stance is "PKing is meant to be fun in limited amounts, which is why your first few kills won't influence your pvp power that much".

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And this is why I'm interested in Ashes in the first place. Lineage 2 was one of the best pvx games imo and these days people would 100% call it a purely pvp game, even though 95% of your gameplay was just mob grind.

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I'm just curious, how would you control that? Do you mean that you would just switch your daily gameplay goals if you see that there's PvP/PKing going on in the location where you wanted to go on that particular day? Or is it some other way?

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This will highly depend on how Intrepid decides to design endgame gameplay loops. If the only thing I can do every day for 10h+ is grinding mobs or gather stuff or doing menial quests in the open world - I'm most likely gonna pvp people doing the same thing.

And when a pvp-disliking person gets to the same lvl of progress where the only thing they can do are those activities - they gonna come across a tooooon of pvpers, which, just as you said, would've been at that lvl of progress for quite some time so they'd most likely win most of pvps against the pvp-dislikers.

And there's a high chance that those pvpers would be wearing 3rd-4th sets of gear, so that if they get some corruption, they wouldn't ruin their main set. And they wouldn't care about some corruption here and there because they're probably playing a ton and can grind the XP debt back up (that is if they even die corrupted, which is not a 100% assurance). And depending on how Intrepid designs the PK count reduction methods, those PvPers might optimize the hell out of them and not care about their count at all, because they can reduce it back to low values somewhat easily.

So I'm really interested in hearing how people plan on avoiding pvp to such an extent that it's only <10% of their gameplay.

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There's a high chance that most people at the top of any gameplay ladder (adventure/artisan/faction lvls) will be playing in groups/guilds. If one of the group decides to PK someone, the group can go grind some mobs to remove their corruption.

If they see a random player approaching their group, they'll assume it's a BH hunting their red player. They'll throw a few hits in his face (or use a ton of super weak abilities) to bring his HP bar down to mid-low decay stage and let the PKer finish him off w/o a problem (maybe even healing the PKer, if Intrepid allows it).

At this point the BH might bring some of their own guildies and it'll start a big ol' pvp war. That's fun and all, but the victim of that PKer can't go to that place now because there's a shitton of people killing everything that moves and most likely gathering stuff in the process.

Now that pvp-disliker doesn't have this particular content available to them. And depending on their progress lvl, they might not have any other worthwhile content to do, or they might only have the stuff they're not in the mood for.

I see it as a pyramid of progress. At the base of the pyramid you're at low lvl of your character progress (as are a lot of people around you). There's a shitton of stuff to do and barely any of it involves pvp. But the higher you progress, the less space there is and the more pvp-centered the content becomes. And after some time you can only level up in lvl 6 nodes, you can only gather super rare resources which are hunted by all the other people at the same lvl of progress (unless they allow us to gather anything at high artisan lvls, which imo would kinda ruin it for any new players), your quests would most likely involve higher lvled locations/mobs/bosses which all would be hunted by the high lvl pvpers.

All of that either involves direct pvp or has you dying to the numerous potential PKers who might not even have that high of a PK count, so their penalty is not even that high and BHs might not even get to them on time. At least that's how I see the game progressing. I might be completely wrong and Intrepid might be making the best PvX mmo out there, which, instead of siphoning its players towards soft friction, gives them ample space to coexist peacefully. Though I do recall Steven mentioning soft friction systems quite a bit in his interviews, so I'm not so sure Ashes is gonna be that kind of game.