Non-Combatant attacking Corrupted

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

I think your problem here is that you see 'Combatant' as being a term that means 'engaging in combat' whereas it's a specific term for a state within a system.

Just forget about 'Combatant' and 'Non Combatant' and deal with just colors.

Red is by definition attackable by Green. Red is attacked by Green because Red killed one Green, and Greens have 'shared hate' which persists until one of them kills the Red or they outrun the entire serverworth of Green.

The more 'Green Mobs' you kill, the higher your 'Server Hate' becomes vs 'Green Mobs' until you do a quest, die to them enough times, or fight enough of the monsters that are their enemies.

"Engage in Combat" vs not has nothing to do with this. You are marked Red because you have 'Server Green Hate' debuff active. Go cleanse your debuff.

Bounty Hunters are just 'Elites' that can TRACK you while Red, but don't contribute to Green Hate. They're a different mob.

After reading this whole fucking thread, ooooh boi do I have an aneurism.

But just as I was about to type out a good response, Azherae pretty much laid it out already. OP disagrees with the currently established laws of the Verra land and that is fine. It's as fine as Dygz disagreeing with open seas flagging, or several other "pvpers" who disagree with the absence of unpunishable ffa genocide in Ashes.

If you disagree with the system - you're free to not participate in the game that has it. This system has been tested for years and worked just fine. A lot of people (and mainly me) are interested in Ashes because it has this kind of system.

P.S. if you're not willing to take the currently presented punishment for murder of innocence in Ashes - you're a weakling imo. I've played with this system for 12 years. None, of thousands of people who I played with, complained about gaining more corruption for killing more innocent people. None saw their executioners (the "greens") as valid combatants, because they weren't. They were just killing a hardcore mob. And the PKer became such a mob after killing an innocent person.

And you know what real hardcore pvpers did? They didn't become monsters. They'd either outplay their opponents in pve (if their target didn't respond to their flagging). Or they'd participate in pvp. PK was seen as the weakling's way out, because it meant that you had no other way to win against your target. And I bet it'll be seen in the same light in Ashes (I sure as hell will see it as such).

We have not received permission from Mag7spy to share the quoted post.

I mean, all of pvp is about elitism. Ladders, gear scores, win/lose duality - it's all about someone being superior.

And with owpvp, you'd usually flag up with your basic attack (either ability or phys atk) to let your target know your intention. That hit also lets them know how strong you are. If the target doesn't flag back and continues to farm mobs, you start farming mobs too and try to outfarm them (L2's looting right worked in the same way as AoC's iirc). If you can't outfarm them, you'd usually either move onto another room, because you "lost" already, or you'd try and bring the other player low enough in hp so that they leave the room to you or the mobs kill them. And only after all of those options failing do you proceed to just PKing them and hoping that there's no one around to punish you before you cleanse your karma.

But even that interaction only really worked on private servers where you had system buffs and could clear difficult content solo. In normal setups you'd always be in a group and you'd always fight back if flagged upon. Mainly because you had limited time to play together and getting your whole group to the same depth of the dungeon would take more time than just fighting back rn and protecting your farm. Ashes will have the same party-based content and an even bigger incentive to flag up as a party, because there's no TPs.

In other words, yes, PKing will be a very rare occurrence imo and will only happen deep within dungeons where you have the highest XP gains combined with the lowest amount of people farming the location, because murdering the other party's healer to try and remove said party from the location would be way easier and faster than trying to outfarm them. And btw, this could also lead to the "red vs purple" interactions that the OP was so confused with at the start of the thread.

But even that kind of situation would only happen if both parties are not in warring guilds or citizens of warring nodes. And if we're talking about best content around (for their lvl) - I'd assume they'd probably be at war, exactly because it's always faster to fight for the location and farm it after (and fighting through corruption is riskier).

We have not received permission from Mag7spy to share the quoted post.

If you were within the first 10 PK counts and were farming the top XP mobs - maybe a few to a dozen mobs?
Ideally you'd even let your PKer leave the party real quick and kill a few mobs solo, just so that he got the max XP possible and removed karma faster.

Considering mob amounts and respawns, it'd usually take 2-3 mins, if your party was clearing the whole room within 1-1.5 mins. And it would take the dead party 2-3 mins to return to the same place in the dungeon if they were super well cooperated and just booked it right from the TP location to the room. So if your own party was somewhat weak, while the victim party was strong - they might've come back before you cleansed your corruption. Same would happen if you were on higher counts of PKs.

Though again, this was somewhat rare, because you'd usually just have warring guilds which were just a ffa, so any given room was a revolving door of parties that were constantly killing each other.

I'd personally want a roughly same timeframe for AoC's corruption cleansing and victim returnal. Your first PK of an equally-lvled player deep in the best XP dungeon should give you the amount of corruption that would take the same amount of time to clear on those mobs as the time required for your victim to return to the same place from their spawn location. The returnal time would have to account for whether you can use a mount in the dungeon, of course.

I feel like this is the fairest way to go about the system. Your first PK is barely punishable. Your second can already be punished by the victim themselves. And higher count of PKs would give even the BHs outside of the dungeon enough time to come hunt you. And if you just so happen to be a disliked person or a member of a disliked guild - even your first PK might be punished by other green players in rooms nearby, if your victim shouts to them about you.

And that last point is my biggest argument for the system remaining just as it is. Green not flagging against reds is way more social. You going red gives any green around you an outlet for their "sense of justice". It'd still be their choice whether to give up their farm and risk their loot or to just let the victim deal with you.

And again, I'm talking in the context of party farming, not solo. Stopping your farm to kill a PKer as a solo player is quite easy and fast, but convincing your whole party that this one PKer is worth several minutes of their farm, potential loss of the farming location (cause someone might take your place in your absence) AND potential death on top of that - now that's a whole different story. At which point there's a higher chance that a BH can go and try dealing with the PKer. Obviously there's a chance that having a BH in each party will be the meta, but that just means that there's enough PKers to justify that, which means that PKing is not as harshly punished as it might seem rn, which means there's quite a lot of forced pvp on top of guild/node-based one - and all of that sounds super fun to me, as a pvper.

We have not received permission from Mag7spy to share the quoted post.

It'll be a bit easier due to how nodes will work, but yes, high value mobs will most likely be deep in dungeons, so it'd require you to run through the whole damn dungeon to even try to cleanse your corruption. And throughout that whole time you'll be a target for all BHs around, any green party around and you'd have a shitton of corruption on top of that so it's not like you'd remove it with just one death.

This is why I'm almost sure that lowbie PKing will almost never happen, while equal lvl PKs will just be quite rare. I truly believe that people have this huge illogical fear of this system simply because they've never really played with it, or played with a bastardized version of it that. And even more people come from games like WoW, where genociding your enemy was the norm, so of course they'd immediately think that pvp is trash and should be removed.

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I still have THE BIG thread ahead of me. I dread it

We have not received permission from CROW3 to share the quoted post.

Yeah, Genshin consumed my life for a week. Played it for 12++h every day Really hope Ashes scratches the same itch it does.

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

The solution to this is to not be alone, technically.

Let's assume I'm in full group and we come across someone who doesn't belong to our Node, who doesn't pay protection or belong to the known organizations, etc, and they seem to be at-level or even a bit lower. We fight them, they choose not to fight back at all.

Because they are not fighting back, it is easy to have our Fighter kill them and turn Red.

Two Greens show up to 'avenge' the fallen. Bard buffs, Summoner bodyblocks, I heal. And then we just sort of ignore them, it's like having a mob on you that can't be killed for whatever reason. But we're also presumably in an area with decently strong mobs (that's how we were working off the Fighter's Corruption, after all). We reposition so that the mobs spawn in position to attack the Greens while I keep the Fighter standing. I'm Purple now, but I don't care because being Purple doesn't mean the Greens can attack ME without going purple. The moment they do, the Fighter counterattacks.

Players who like PvP should probably find a group to be the 'Designated Red' for. Just don't kill people too often when solo.

The conditions required for there to be no solution to Greens are the only thing stopping this from being an essentially PvP game.

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

What other situation exists? By design, once you are corrupted, everything is a Red vs Green situation unless you are in an Objective PvP space. That's how you can tell this is the intent.

"Purple vs Red" only exists as a random afterthought consequence of multiple players interacting at once.