Wondering about a slight change to the flagging system

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That is literally the intention though. Steven literally took Lineage 2's pvp system as it was and copied it into Ashes. It has been this way for over 5 years of development now and each time someone's scared shitless by something they don't know (because no one on the planet earth apparently played L2) and they complain about the system being broken and untested, Steven said that the game might not be for everyone, because it'll be a bit harsher than "I can pick flowers for hours and no one's got powers to stop me".

But wait! Steven went even further. He understood one of the biggest problems with L2's system. It was the one-off PK maniacs who'd run around almost naked, but due to very short ttk and to the PKer's genocidal tendencies - all the newbies and weak players would suffer, with barely any repercussion for the PKer. And to stop that Steven implemented the stat dampening mechanic, where a player can't go killing dozens of people if they want to. Hell, they'll probably won't be able to kill more than one lowbie, because the amount of corruption on them would be too big. Steven also decided to go for a much longer ttk, which also helps with that.

And all of that was done in the context of "people can attack people as much as they want, but they shouldn't kill each other as much as they want". You want to push someone away from a location? Attack them till the leave. That is an intended mechanic under this system. If your target knows that they're strong, they won't let you attack them more than once. But if it's a weak target, they'll leave even before you manage to bring them to low health.

PvErs are not the be-all and end-all of this game. But in order to balance out the scales of power, there's the corruption system that stops PvPers from becoming be-all and end-all. But you can still attack other people. Under your system, you can't.

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And Alacrite wants to prevent the combatant from doing anymore attacks on the green player.

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I don't think Alacrite is saying that. And their change wouldn't influence that part of the equation either way. Even if Alacrite's system is implemented, people would still be able to disrupt the gathering ability, if we can that at all. And if we can't disrupt it even by CCing the gatherer, then the only solution is to kill them, at which point you'd go red in either system.

Alacrite's suggestion is only applicable to "attack harassment" of green players. In the current system we can hit other players as much as we like, up until we kill them. Alacrite considers that harassment so they suggest giving people corruption on some successive hit instead of on death of your target.

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Yeah, that was more of a rebuttal to the whole concept of "there might be something wrong with your system that you have kept the same for over 5 years, and which has been tested with 1.5 decade worth of gameplay, and which I haven't tested myself but I think it's wrong".

I can totally understand the disagreement with the current system, but saying "but idk if the intention of the game would want PvP'ers to dictate so many actions of PvE'er can do. I just think it'd be weird for a PvP'er to constantly interrupt and take shit because they can" is a bit presumptuous imo, when the mechanic in question has a long history instead of something completely new and made up on the spot.

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A bit, yes, because in the past 2 years of me following this game's development I've seen countless posts of "unless you change this system that I personally dislike THE GAME WILL FAIL SO FUCKING HARD MAAAAN".

I'm not saying that you're doing the same thing, but the overall attitude towards suggested changes, to systems that people haven't even tested properly, usually gets pretty bad.

On top of that, I'm super overprotective of the PvP system in Ashes because I'm a Lineage 2 simp and with it being one of Steven's inspirations (for exactly its pvp system) I get way more defensive when it comes to suggesting changes to that system. And I do that because I know for sure that the system works just fine, that people don't just die left and right and that Steven has already added the main change to it that prevents genocides.

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I mainly blame faction-based pvp systems for this. Because in most cases you're rewarded for absolutely genociding people from another faction. And in the same amount of cases you can't change said faction (or at least heavily dissuaded from doing so), which leads to you just feeling like shit because your faction might not have as many people in it so you get assfucked day in day out.

In L2 you had no factions. But you did have clans (guilds). And every player was free to join or leave any of the clans on the server at any time (that is if the clan accepts them of course). And then you'd have guild wars which would in fact be a pvp ffa for either side (if both sides accepted the war declaration). But if a player felt like their gameplay has now become worse because of said war, they could either complain to their guild leader or just leave the guild and, with it, the war.

If the guild leader received enough complains about their members getting destroyed in the open world, any good leader would just exit the war and now the ex-enemies would have to go red if they wanted to kill that guild's members. Leaving the war would bring it's own social consequences, but that's a discussion for another day.

Some guild leaders would just create a sub-guild that wouldn't participate in the war (btw any guild could have wars with pretty much any and all guilds on the server) and just move all the displeased people to it. And once those people felt strong enough to come back to pvp - they'd join the main stack.

And Steven decided to go for a similar setup, except from my understanding of guild wars in Ashes it won't even be a pvp ffa, so even here it's more casual-friendly than L2. And that is exactly why I have a very strong belief in his vision. W/o gimping the pvp system completely, he still managed to implement the changes that are very beneficial to the casual players who'd suffer the most from said pvp system. And until proven completely otherwise, I decided to believe that his changes are enough for most people to enjoy the game.

I'll gladly be proven wrong once the proper testing begins, but if I am, I myself will probably not play the game if it turns to a no-owpvp mmo. And I'm fine with that outcome too.