Flagging System

I'm just going to quote my post from the last time this video came up.

SongRune wrote: »

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I have now watched the video. There's some problems here.

1. If we have two greens (anyone who isn't red and hasn't hit a player in the last 90 seconds), and they want to have a fully agreed-upon and willing duel...

Both flag so they can hit each other. Green1 hits Green2. Green1 is now Purple1. Green2 fights back and becomes... Green2. The only person 'allowed' to win a duel they both agreed to is Green2. There's no fully willing and intentional (on both sides) PvP configuration that doesn't guarantee corruption for one of the participants should they win.

2. The presenter claims you are punished for fighting back. You are not.

- Fighting back means you lose less stuff if you die. (Setting aside that you might win.)
- Not punishing your attacker is not a punishment to you . You are already dead. You gain nothing and lose nothing based on whether your attacker turns red or not.

The stated purpose of the corruption system is to encourage PvP, encourage people fighting back, and discourage only serial ganking. That's why you are required to pay a price (higher green death penalties) to put a bounty on your attacker's head. You're only intended to do this if they're enough of a troublemaker that it's worth that to you.

The whole point of this system is to promote fighting back. It begs you to stand up for yourself. And even if you lose, it rewards you with lessened drops.

He suggests that you literally always lose 100% of items on death, while still giving you the flagged state if you win (which makes you a ffa target). I do not see how this system is supposed to dissuade "griefing" in any way. I only see it as a punishment for the green player.

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The green player has normal death penalties . If he dies to a mob - he will still lose the same amount as he would if he died to another player.

Fighting back is encouraged because it halves the death penalty. You are rewarded for fighting back, not punished.

You can obviously dislike the death penalties as a whole, but that's a whole different discussion.

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I'm not sure if I understand these situations. If your victims fight back, that's just a pvp. They lost less stuff, you're not a PKer.

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If the mob kills your victim you don't get corruption. You don't see your victim's hp so it'd be difficult to figure out when exactly you gotta hit him to avoid getting corruption.

If you got corruption, you'll get hunted and you'll lose time removing your XP debt.

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If your designated PKer is red, the victim can't flag up against him. If your victim sees that you're a group of people running together and then attacking them or others - they'll most likely just run away. If your designated PKer is running around with a ton of corruption he won't be able to kill anyone because he'll have high stat dampening.

If you're operating in your own node and PKing its citizens, people might stop trading with you. If you're operating in another node, those gatherers will just call stronger players to go mess you up. And if you have a corrupted player with you at most times, BHs will be hunting you at all times too.

And even if you somehow manage to completely avoid any kind of punishment or you designated PKer, you'll have to go grind off his corruption every single time he kills someone, because stat dampening will make him useless after just one kill. And if you remove corruption by killing him - you'll have to remove his massive XP debt, because he'd be "underleveled" and would need even more time to kill anyone. Both of those methods would stop your killings for some time, which is the point of the system.

And again though, if you have one weak dude attacking random gatherers, they'll just run away from him if they so chose to.

But the biggest mystery in all of this is still the gathering locations design. If the most lucrative gathering spots are near high lvl high value mobs - ya ain't PKing shit, because those places will be full of top lvl players who'd gladly wipe your little group of PKer friends. And if instead you'll be running around solo low value locations, you'd probably be PKing casual lowbies who'll give you even more corruption per kill and bring your designated killer even deeper into stat dampening.

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I've seen all possible "exploits" of this system in my 12 years of playing with it in Lineage 2. Small PKing groups would get killed by bigger or just stronger groups. Farming locations would be fought over for hours by multitudes of people, some PKing and some not. And most gatherers would either be from strong guilds or just call out for help and get responses from strong players who were yearning for some pvp. And L2 didn't have factions, so random dick PKers were looked down upon.

Now obviously Ashes might not be the same as L2 even if it has the same flagging system. But I'd assume it'll be even less similar to WoW with its genocidal faction war.

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They literally can't though. They need feedback on the balancing exactly because this kind of system can only be truly tested by a big amount of people. Intrepid already has potential result of the system from games like Lineage 2 and UO, but both of those games are super old and are kinda on the opposite ends of the spectrum, while Ashes goes for the middle of it. So Intrepid have to give players their current design and see how it plays out, before making any huge changes to it.