Goblin Squad Member
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Finally, honesty in a thread title, right? Nope sorry this is an idea about another layer to turn seemingly random toxic pvp into healthy more meaningful pvp.
Settlements and companys each have their pools of limited resource that are spent to engage within GWs structure of meaningful pvp. How I see it is, the decision whether or not it's worth spending that limited resource for this fight or saving it for something more advantageous tomorrow is the primary thing that makes it meaningful compared to randomly just doing it whenever.
Individuals don't have that from what we've been told. We can engage in pvp through the structured Hostility paid for by our settlement, company, or faction (leaving SAD out because so much is TBD, more on it below). The only way for individuals or temporary parties to engage in pvp outside of those institutions is for one of them to break GWs rules.
So maybe, individuals and parties should also be able to make a meaningful choice to spend a limited resource and get GW-approved structure pvp scaled to their level. Power hasn't existed for most of development but now it does.
(SAF)
- The Subject spends Power from his own reserves to start the fight.
- There is a brief delay before a mutually Hostile state where the Object is made aware of the Subject's imminent attack. This simulates the puffing of chests and functionally gives the other player a few seconds to not be entirely caught off guard like in unstructured face stabbing.
- The mutual Hostile state applies only between the Subject and Object of the SAF, all other regulatory factors for other players are still in place. The Hostility lasts 10? minutes (allowing for combat state if the timer ends in combat), just long enough to have a single fight.
- There can be a party version of this with higher Power cost because it's more individuals split among all members of the issuing party and all are Hostile to all for the slightly longer (20-30m?) time period.
- Here's where I call a s&^$storm down on my head: SADs are also initiated by the SAD issuer (solo or party) spending Power.
It has meaning, in spending Power the issuer is diminishing his ability to use his best fighting/healing tactics just in starting the conflict and he can't do it all day long either.
For players it's an option that allows us to be in pvp without the sense of unfairness that Ryan talks about making the game feel toxic. The Object can call for help, ready his escape abilities, or face up to give more than he gets, the player's decision.
Think of the implications for challenging trespassers in your territory. It's much easier to maintain a NRDS policy if you can still deal with anyone you feel is a threat at any time. This covers all the cease and desist territory we talked about a while ago before Power existed.
While the danger of instantaneous face stabbing is sill omnipresent, when players have the option to use a pvp structure 100% of the time GW can give an even bigger shock to the system and crash the suckitude down even harder on players that come into the game looking to attack early and often.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The only way for individuals or temporary parties to engage in pvp outside of those institutions is for one of them to break GWs rules.
It's a minor point, granted, but I think you're doing a disservice by describing it that way. It's not against the rules to attack other players outside of Feuds, Wars, Flags, etc.
The problem I see with this is that there are no meaningful constraints on it. It's very similar in a lot of ways to the Challenge Mechanic I proposed quite some time ago. However, that mechanic was constrained because the Challenger had to have some claim to the area, and the Object of the Challenge had a simple, intuitive way to avoid being attacked by leaving the area.
I think if your proposal were adopted, PFO would end up as a murder simulator, granted with a "brief delay". There would be no long-term consequences for random PvP, unless Power is a long-term resource that fills up at roughly the same rate that Reputation does in the current design. Even then, there are no meaningful consequences for being low on Power except that you would be literally barred from the Start a Fight mechanic if you didn't have enough Power to spend on it.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The only way for individuals or temporary parties to engage in pvp outside of those institutions is for one of them to break GWs rules.It's a minor point, granted, but I think you're doing a disservice by describing it that way. It's not against the rules to attack other players outside of Feuds, Wars, Flags, etc.
The problem I see with this is that there are no meaningful constraints on it. It's very similar in a lot of ways to the Challenge Mechanic I proposed quite some time ago. However, that mechanic was constrained because the Challenger had to have some claim to the area, and the Object of the Challenge had a simple, intuitive way to avoid being attacked by leaving the area.
I think if your proposal were adopted, PFO would end up as a murder simulator, granted with a "brief delay". There would be no long-term consequences for random PvP, unless Power is a long-term resource that fills up at roughly the same rate that Reputation does in the current design. Even then, there are no meaningful consequences for being low on Power except that you would be literally barred from the Start a Fight mechanic if you didn't have enough Power to spend on it.
Power was the resource for your limited actions and abilities. And last we knew, you could only refill Power so many times per day. The notion she is making is that you are sacrificing some of your limited actions per day in order to start a fight. If you do too many fights, you will be out of Power until the next day.
I think the idea has merit, but it will instead lead to short bursts of abusive behavior each day.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Individuals don't have that from what we've been told. We can engage in pvp through the structured Hostility paid for by our settlement, company, or faction (leaving SAD out because so much is TBD, more on it below). The only way for individuals or temporary parties to engage in pvp outside of those institutions is for one of them to break GWs rules.
Echoing Nihimon - it isn't against the rules to engage in PvP outside of feuds, war, SAD, etc.
And individuals *do* have a limited resource that they can use to engage other individuals in non-consensual PvP. It's called "Reputation".
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Goblin Squad Member
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Making the security force of a settlement spend reputation and get themselves flagged as criminal to maintain security under NRDS doesn't encourage NRDS policy across the game.
So many people say SAD is overpowered in favor of the robbers yet propose a tangible cost to it that simultaneously gives the merchants a slightly better chance to defend themselves and... nope.
Wars and feuds are non-consensual on the recipient's side, but GW distinguishes it as meaningful because of the opportunity cost of spending those limited resources.
I reject out of hand "short bursts of abusive behavior". The alternative is attack without warning and no weakening of the "abuser" for as long as both are logged in. Hell, let the guy spend his Power, avoid the first two times, and then fight him in his severely weakened state with limited specials and implement use.
Someone just wrote something about shattering the expectations of certain players that (attacking early and often without thought) = (success) in PO that was met with a decent round of applause. Here's a blatantly obvious way to make every encounter of pvp at any organizational level require thought and consideration -the opposite of a murder simulator- or be crushed under the penalties of attacking early and often.
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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I think that the concept of 'non-consensual' PvP addresses an irrelevant factor.
What is more relevant is that desirable PvP has the characteristic that both players know what decisions they could have made to avoid it. It's not bad if the actions that they could have taken are "Pay the extortion" or "Yield the territory" or "Renounce your Faction" but it IS a bad dynamic if the requirement to avoid fighting for your life is "Remain inside of class G areas".
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think that the concept of 'non-consensual' PvP addresses an irrelevant factor.
What is more relevant is that desirable PvP has the characteristic that both players know what decisions they could have made to avoid it. It's not bad if the actions that they could have taken are "Pay the extortion" or "Yield the territory" or "Renounce your Faction" but it IS a bad dynamic if the requirement to avoid fighting for your life is "Remain inside of class G areas".
I'm not sure what you mean by remaining inside certain areas. Everybody says they want a game where they don't have to worry so much about those three guys walking this way instantaneously attacking and killing me without any communication "just in case".
Here's an idea that stays consistent with what GW has already implemented that gives those three guys reason to pause and think and try to communicate before resorting to lethal action.
And allows settlements to maintain policies more open to non-members without hampering their own security concerns.
And gives bandits reason to more carefully consider initiating a SAD.
And gives a harvesting op the ability to keep their area clear of potential robbers without having to either preemptively kill everyone in sight or passively wait to be attacked at disadvantage.
If someone can think of one system that supports all those things 90% or more of us have said we want, that according to dev guidelines can be implemented thousands of times in concurrence, I'd like to hear that idea too.
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Goblin Squad Member
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That's in the realm of tweaking during playtesting, but something like 10 seconds - two rounds to gather yourself and ready your strategy seems fair to anyone that knowingly logged into an open pvp MMO.
You can't cancel a feud or war declared on you, and this is the smallest scale version of that principle. The balance being it has a very limited duration measured in minutes (again for tweaking).
The key worry is using this to chase someone around threatening them in a potentially griefy way, right? Power costs can be tweaked to quickly empty the tank on repeated tries. Give the target a buff that prevents this again for 20 minutes if you want. There are lots of ways to choose from how to prevent that one abusive use.
I keep thinking of all the discussions we've had of things that sounded like a good idea but had to be tabled for lack of a way to implement.
Now harvesters who want to remain high rep aren't helpless when those shady looking characters start loitering waiting for the storage bin to fill. Unaffiliated known alts are no longer a meta shield enemies can exploit and naked noob bombs are gone. Settlements can more securely be NRDS if they still have the power to interdict any groups that seem up to something and we want to support NRDS settlements. The act of SADing weakens the bandit side and imposes limits on how much they can do it, they won't be SADing every person that happens to walk by, and doesn't everyone but Bluddwolf like the sound of that? Same for the merc thugs paid to terrorize a crossroad we were worried about three weeks ago. I keep thinking of more meaningful, positive results every time I repeat the list.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The more I think about this the more I like it. It would even give CE players a method of being Chaotic and Evil without destroying their Rep (as long as you don't take a rep hit for issuing a SAT like you don't for SAD. Maybe even a Rep gain). It takes the random griefer and gives them a way to initiate PVP in a limited way turning them into effectively a normal PVP because it takes power to do it. Sure they could run up and just attack, take the Alignment/Rep hits and go to suckville as intended using that method but this gives a MUCH better way and has so many other uses it seems like a very valuable mechanic. Why should only Bandits have a way to initiate Rep penalty free PVP with non-hostile factions. Could be a trained skill and slotted like SAD.
I just like it as an option with many possibilities.
+1
Wex
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Goblin Squad Member
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Using Power in this way, though I like it, may not be that limited, depending on how Power is regained. Unlike Influence or Reputation, Power seems like something that's very easy to recover.
That is a valid point, we don't have any specifics on that side of the usage equation. I did review the blog
Each character has a stat we're currently calling Power, which is similar to a long-term Stamina. It doesn't regenerate on its own when you're in the wilderness. Within the boundaries of a settlement or point of interest, it regenerates slowly (with building improvements increasing its recovery speed). You can also eat food to recover variable amounts of Power (but there's a cooldown on eating food...
Long-term stamina, doesn't regenerate in the wilderness, food recovers partial power but there's a cooldown, only slowly regenerates in settlements or POI.
To me the context of that information sounded like Power is on a daily scale. Like you can log in with a nearly full pool, and that's basically what you have for that play session. Where it would take overnight at an inn or a long boring time of waiting for expensive food cooldowns to completely refill the tank.
Settlements and DI are the biggest, and on the longest time scale. Companies are smaller, Influence is more fluid than DI, and feuds aren't as broadly scoped or protracted as wars. Individuals and parties are the smallest scale with the quickest replenishment (daily?) and also by far the shortest hostility window (a few minutes, enactable a few times a day if you don't use Power for anything else).
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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What does the reputation system do that this proposal doesn't undo?
If the cost is high, the legitimate use cases don't work; if the cost is low, the opposite problem happens- and there is a point where the cost is high for legitimate use and low for abuse.
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Goblin Squad Member
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It's not a bad suggestion.....
However, the option I've always prefered for settlement security is the ability for thier officers to set TRESSPASSER laws on a very granular level....down to company and even individual.
So a settlement could set a law saying that Joe Schmoe is a tresspasser in thier territory even if he was not aligned with any hostile settlement because Joe is a known spy or notorious outlaw, even if he isn't wearing his outlaw flag today. Yet at the same time they could allow Bobby the Neutral Merchant in to trade because no one is worried about Bobby even if he isn't a settlement member.
If you are ALREADY inside a settlements territory when you get outlawed as a Tresspasser, you get a warning and are given a sufficiently long time to leave that territory before you actualy get flagged as a criminal and are subject to attack from settlement members.
Note that such a system only works in areas that the Settlement Owner has OFFICIAL jurrisidiction over.
It's essentialy the PFO equivalent of the local marshall saying "You have 20 minutes to get outa Dodge, kid."
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Goblin Squad Member
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What does the reputation system do that this proposal doesn't undo?
If the cost is high, the legitimate use cases don't work; if the cost is low, the opposite problem happens- and there is a point where the cost is high for legitimate use and low for abuse.
In fairness Decius, that arguement can be applied to just about any proposed mechanism...including the reputation system that GW is designing.
If a plane flies too fast it's wings will shear off, if a plane flies too slow it will stall and fall to the ground. It does not follow though that aviation is a worthless and unworkable pursuit.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Wars and feuds are the same thing on larger scales. "We have a strong reason to go pvp those guys but don't want rep or alignment shifts because this is a valid reason not a toxic one so we will spend a limited resource to show how meaningful it is to us".
The vast majority of uses I keep listing are things the community agrees are valid game activities like defending your harvest op, limiting SAD bonanzas, interdicting suspicious groups in your territory. The one exception being to chase someone around threatening to kill them without rep or alignment shift but as I described we have a smorgasbord of options to prevent that one.
Here's the brass tacks
GW already uses this exact principle on other levels to facilitate their design goal for each pvp encounter to be meaningful. If your company harasses another company without spending Influence, everyone takes rep loss. You spend your limited Influence on a feud and GW is convinced this pvp is meaningful enough to not penalize with rep loss.
When you give every player the option to either 1. spend a limited valuable resource to pvp at any level in any circumstance or 2. not initiate pvp, and they still choose to go around that structure to pvp in a way that GW feels is unmeaningful and toxic, you can in all fairness SMASH THEIR FACES with rep loss and the hurricane of suck that follows for being rude toxic murder hooligans.
And I'm really interested in pulverizing anyone that joins PO to be murder hooligans into a fine powder.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Perhaps relevant...
First, you assert a primacy of game design, which is our role, not yours. "Should be" implies that there's a definitively correct answer and if the answer is not that answer we are wrong. That obviously overlooks the fact that there is a fractal space of potential answers, in which there may be several "right" answers which achieve our design objectives in ways satisfactory to our target market. Some of those answers are likely not "24/7", ergo, your approach suffers from myopia.
Don't be a game designer. Be a Crowdforger. Don't assert; advocate.
It's fine to advocate for our cool ideas. But we shouldn't get upset if Goblinworks doesn't change course to suit our preferences.
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Goblin Squad Member
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My question would have to be is power a set amount by level, or will vary from player to player (class).
Would a wizard have 3x the power of a cleric who has 2x that of a fighter?
We don't have that information but I highly doubt GW would give characters access to training a deep Power ocean to use with implements or skills from another archetype balanced to have a Power swimming pool. Your fighter could train wizard Power and have 6x the Power fighter feats were designed to have? Nah. It makes a lot more sense archetypes have about the same amount of Power and their implements and feats use more or less of it based on the ownage of the affect and cooldowns. That is the premise I used thinking of the idea.
@GrumpyMel I appreciate what you're saying about trespasser settings. What if the security patrol doesn't currently have access to them? Then they're neutered.
It's my opinion it's more streamlined for the players involved to not have to fiddle with the guts of settlement settings every five minutes their enemies roll a new spy alt. With SAF they can still walk up to any potential threat at any time and say "You leave now or you're a ghost" but with no delaying steps between identifying the threat and removing it. That I feel is essential to helping change the EVE "must kill on sight just in case" mindset into feeling "safe enough to be NRDS and still have a secure settlement".
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Goblin Squad Member
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It's not a bad suggestion.....
However, the option I've always prefered for settlement security is the ability for thier officers to set TRESSPASSER laws on a very granular level....down to company and even individual.
And such trespasser laws might be set to block some NPC settlements and not others (since characters are citizens of a NPC settlement at start). So maybe Thornkeep citizens aren't welcome someplace, if Thornkeep is the starter town for self-identified CN, NE, and CE.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Proxima,
The potential downside of the system I'm thinking about is the gankers who will abuse it through the use of multiple alts. The difference between this and Rep is that Rep seems to be on a very long replenish cycle, which (theoriticaly) is supposed to make it cost prohibitive to keep up a large enough stable of characters who can initiate unsanctioned PvP and still retain a high enough reputation to have access to the training and equipment, etc that makes a character combat effective at
PvP.
I presume with the system you propose, a character can pay a resource (Power) that replenish's at a reasonable enough rate that they could still do a little ammount of SAF's and not suffer any significant long term loss of combat effectiveness, else there is not much point to it. That would work perfectly well, IMO, when one considereds a single character in isolation. The problem comes when one considers that such a character has 20 identical twin brothers, all played by the same ganker. The concept of a limited daily allotment of free (or at least affordable) shots at unsanctioned PvP starts to strain a bit under that consideration.
Frankly, I'm not really sure GW's reputation system will work all that well to effectively achieve the dynamic they want either. So please don't be dissuaded by my critique.
The real shortcoming with GW's reputation system that I see most is that combat effectiveness is largely based on training which once achieved sticks with you forever, while reputation is more a snapshot in time. So presumably if you've been patient enough to train up sufficient skills to be combat effective to the degree you want and have access to the type of threaded gear you want to use....you are pretty much free to be a sociopath from that point everafter. At least that's been my understanding of how thier system shakes out.
Edit: I also don't really subscribe to what seems to be one of GW's core operating premisis.....namely that gankers/greifers make for fun "content" for other players as long as those players have a reasonable capacity to kill them. In my experience....beating up on a ganker/greifer is only marginaly less unpleasant then getting beat up by one. I don't really find them as fun "content" at all, just pretty much a nuiscence to be around regardless of who "wins or loses" an encounter with them....I simply have no interest in being around them period.
Then again, it's entirely possible that PFO may not be the right game for me at all....shrug.
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Goblin Squad Member
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... combat effectiveness is largely based on training which once achieved sticks with you forever...
This is not accurate.
Combat effectiveness is largely based on your ability to make use of Keywords and to slot powerful Abilities. The more powerful Keywords and Abilities are associated with certain development levels of your Settlement or Nation. If you're kicked out, you lose them.
Training up and then trashing your Reputation will significantly reduce your effectiveness.
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Goblin Squad Member
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... combat effectiveness is largely based on training which once achieved sticks with you forever...This is not accurate.
You will need to be a Member of a Settlement or Nation with appropriate facilities in order to be able to slot certain high-level Abilities.
Training up and then trashing your Reputation will significantly reduce your effectiveness.
Nihimon, perhaps I missed it but...once you "slot" something it AUTOMATICALY gets "unslotted" after a period of time? What period?
PPS. Most Gankers/Griefers/RPKers don't have High Level abilities in most games I've played anyway. They don't need them. They simply need higher level abilities then the newbies/lowbies that are their typical fare.
In Pathfinder TableTop terms, about level 5 would be all they ever needed in terms of combat power.
The griefers will in any case be mostly using the feud mechanic (my opinion) and they will be targetting newbie companies and gathering/merchant companies just like they do in eve hi sec. They will therefore mostly not be low rep
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Steelwing, I'm not real up on the whole Feud mechanic myself or how it's supposed to work, so I haven't made any comments on it.
As I said, I'm a bit skeptical as to whether PFO will actualy be successfull in achieving what it's goals are in terms of the nature of PvP and the game atmosphere.
But hey, it's an experiment for me. It's worthwhile for me as far as I'm concerned to stick around and see how it shakes out in the end. If it ends up not working out to my liking, it's not like there are any shortage of other games for me to play.
Anyway, I find alot of the concepts they are trying to work with pretty interesting even if some of the others are unattractive. For instance, the whole escalation cycle thing seems pretty interesting, as do some of thier thoughts about formation combat.
I also find it very engaging in it's own right to think about how different game mechanics might end up working....from a purely intellectual consideration.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Nihimon, perhaps I missed it but...once you "slot" something it AUTOMATICALY gets "unslotted" after a period of time? What period?... combat effectiveness is largely based on training which once achieved sticks with you forever...This is not accurate.
You will need to be a Member of a Settlement or Nation with appropriate facilities in order to be able to slot certain high-level Abilities.
Training up and then trashing your Reputation will significantly reduce your effectiveness.
Sorry, you caught me in the middle of editing my post to be clearer.
To try to answer your question:
... the abilities of your characters are dependent on the quality and nature of the structures in your Settlement...
You will need to have a Player Nation to unlock the highest levels of development of various buildings, and therefore to unlock the highest levels of player abilities.
We're talking a lot about what happens when a Settlement is destroyed, what happens to a character's abilities when it changes Settlements, and how to provide some manageable transitions without unrecoverable setbacks. I'd say at this point that I think the direction of the discussions is good, and we will likely blog about it when it is more developed,but I can't give you an eta on when that will be yet. Suffice it to say: we don't want you to be able to become awesome by being a good member of the community, then become toxic and remain awesome. And we don't want you to lose everything you've gained without a path to recovery in a reasonable timeframe if your Settlement is lost or you are kicked out of a Settlement (for whatever reason). We're working on it.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Proxima,
The potential downside of the system I'm thinking about is the gankers who will abuse it through the use of multiple alts.
That's a really good point. The buff for the recipient that goes 1 stack per SAF, increasing Power costs with each stack so it quickly gets to be an outrageous cost, it could be universal and apply to anyone that tries to SAF the target before it runs out.
Finding potential exploits is great (and I like when there are fixes too :o)).
@Steelwing, I'm not real up on the whole Feud mechanic myself or how it's supposed to work, so I haven't made any comments on it.
Basically the feud mechanic is a method that an organization (company, settlement, kingdom) can use to declare war on another organization. The result of that is that you suffer zero alignment and reputation hits when you kill people who belong to that organization. In order to declare a feud the organization has to spend influence. The smallest thing you can declare a feud on is a company.
So (unless I miss my guess) he is saying that most people who want to grief will do so in the rules, they will target people who would probably not be able to defend themselves very well, such as organizations who tend to be full of crafter/gatherers/merchants rather than combat characters. In addition they will go after organizations that are not well organized or well established.
for feuds i hope that if a company is sponsored by a settlement, then the other companies of the settlement can also engage in the feud without rep/alignment lose.
I think feud is company versus company only. Settlements and kingdoms declare war. It is certainly only mentioned under the company conflict section in the man in black blog
*Edit it seems a company may also declare feud on a settlement in order to raid poi's etc*
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Goblin Squad Member
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Ahhh.
i think that overall the mechanics are the same.
I wonder if the difference is in what targets you can select. So if you declare war you have to select a settlement or kingdom, companies cannot be targeted individually unless its another company doing it.
I wouldnt mind something like that to be honest. This would prevent a 1000 person organization from strong arming a single company at a time. so if you want to take the fight to a single company you are limited to the same.
There is a further difference
A feud costs influence
A war costs DI
In addition we may find a war is necessary to actually attack a settlement rather than just the poi's and outposts that feuds mention. Though they havent said much. I did get the impression the devs think of them as separate states though
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Goblin Squad Member
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My personal preferences would be:
As an example, the reputation / alignment consequences (if any) for attacking a harvesting camp set up in the wilderness (with or without a prior declaration of intent) would depend on whether GW wants to encourage or discourage this type of behavior.
Personally I would rather see significantly lowered consequences for “less undesirable” but still not “fully encouraged” actions than removing those consequences altogether, as this would allow the aggregation of repeated player actions to be more meaningfully represented by the reputation / alignment scores.