Goblin Squad Member
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I have been reading the blog and I want to voice my opinion.
I think that the death mechanic should more closely resemble the tabletop game, with some modifications.
1.) when you die, you become an incorporeal spirit who can communicate with other PC and NPC but not physically interact.
2.) you can choose to re-incarnate to become another playable race, with a skill penalty.
3.) a player or npc can resurrect you. (all sorts of mechanics can be employed for this, your spirit can contract someone to retrieve your body and gear, or perhaps you leave some hair, or other part of yourself with a local temple that specializes in resurrecting dead adventures)
4.) i think gear should remain with your body and be loot-able, but a decent chance it is broken.
I am looking forward to this game and I do want it to be as imersive as possible.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I have been reading the blog and I want to voice my opinion.
I think that the death mechanic should more closely resemble the tabletop game, with some modifications.
1.) when you die, you become an incorporeal spirit who can communicate with other PC and NPC but not physically interact.
2.) you can choose to re-incarnate to become another playable race, with a skill penalty.
3.) a player or npc can resurrect you. (all sorts of mechanics can be employed for this, your spirit can contract someone to retrieve your body and gear, or perhaps you leave some hair, or other part of yourself with a local temple that specializes in resurrecting dead adventures)
4.) i think gear should remain with your body and be loot-able, but a decent chance it is broken.
I am looking forward to this game and I do want it to be as imersive as possible.
This one has come up quite a bit, while I admire the sentiment, I think the primary issue is, well when we are talking an open world PVP enabled game, in which wars etc... and other PVP based things are going to be standard, the mechanics kind of have to be built around the assumption that death... is going to be very common. No matter how smart you play, if you intend to be a part of many of the elements that the game is focused on, (IE traveling in unsafe zones, participating in wars over territory etc...), you pretty much can count on dieing 2-3x a week no matter how well you plan things out, a better PKer who is going to do everything in his power to prevent you from escaping, could lead to extremely difficult to avoid deaths. In P&P a real DM would rarely if ever throw you into a scenerio that he does not expect you to come out alive (If a DM dosn't expect you to win, he usually is expecting you to have an escape route, a PKer on the other hand has the oposite goals)
Now myself I personally actually wouldn't oppose actually fully losing equipment on death, with maybe a 25% chance of the killer getting one item or so, IMO that sort of system worked well for eve, which has very similar style of gameplay as PFO intends to have. As far as longterm skill penalties, forced racial changes, expensive resurections etc... I greatly oppose it. Equipment loss can be lessened by wearing cheaper gear etc... Skill penalties etc... well never do anything exciting on a high skilled character, that doesn't sound particularly fun for anyone.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Nestor,
you haven't offered any reasons for why you are proposing this--I presume this is not an utterly arbitrary list. You might want to link your proposal to warranted outcomes it would help us make sense of, well, your 2 cents.
My main reason is that I think such a system would make Pvp more risky, and make Pvp battles more desivisive. Also in my mind it just seems to flow better.
How about short-term skill penalties like how death penalty is done in Dragon age origin? If a character dies too often, he'll be temporarily crippled with the negative penalties (and maybe uses a slower rate of gaining skill exp for a few days?). The player will need a medical kit or healing spells to heal the wounds, or just wait for the penalties to wear off.
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Goblin Squad Member
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What are everyone's feelings regarding a temporary PvP penalty/debuff after being killed by another player? Something that makes spawn rushing less effective than blobbing.
I see a lack of need for it in light of current information. we're essentially looking at respawning with a nerfed equivelant of your weapon and armor (IE missing the consumable component for their max efficiency),
A loss of boots, rings, gloves, headgears, shoes, rings, amulets etc... Essentially the 2 options are that you respawn far enough away to a location where your storage and spares are, (Putting you too far to really return to the sight of the battle before the battle has drastically changed),
Or near the fray to attempt to recover your corpse, I would imagine the absense of all of that stuff, is on par with a pretty notable debuff
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Goblin Squad Member
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Personally I think death needs to come with a loss of assets. I think the best way to do this short of full loot drop is a substantial hit to gear durability in addition to losing other assets.
If you make it so all you lose is everything except gear. People will do suicide rushes with nothing but their gear. If you make it so it is a timed debuff, certain players will go out and pick fights every time their timer wears off.
If you make it so you lose armor durability players will either be running around zerging in utterly useless gear, or they will be taking real losses. In Darkfall at least, people in low grade gear did not commonly take part in any major offensive actions. You may get lone mine raiders in a set of robes but not generally groups of robed raiders.
So the system works.
What we absolutely don't want to see is this:
Clan A builds a settlement.
Clan X doesn't like Clan A and has no settlement.
Clan X throws itself at Clan A over and over and over. Clan A is able to muster their forces and defeat Clan X most of the time, but Clan X is taking no real losses, so they just keep doing it over and over.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Clan X throws itself at Clan A over and over and over. Clan A is able to muster their forces and defeat Clan X most of the time, but Clan X is taking no real losses, so they just keep doing it over and over.
I think ryan's been pretty clear, attempting to take over an existing settlement will be like throwing pebbles at a tank, even if say a settlement had a civil war and 49% left and attempted to attack with full gear but no owned base of opperations.
Now I don't know the exact amount, but I'd find it highly unlikely that one with crap gear, nothing to lose etc... has too much shot in hell against major forces, and actually one thing I imagine should be the best hinderance of such... would be travel time. IE if the suicide marches take 15 minutes to re-reach the oppositions stronghold, and you accomplish next to nothing... well you are wasting your time not theirs. If you are using a nearby settlement as a base of opperations... well then that nearby settlement is the weakpoint, you can force them to stop harboring these hapless terrorists.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Clan X throws itself at Clan A over and over and over. Clan A is able to muster their forces and defeat Clan X most of the time, but Clan X is taking no real losses, so they just keep doing it over and over.
I think ryan's been pretty clear, attempting to take over an existing settlement will be like throwing pebbles at a tank, even if say a settlement had a civil war and 49% left and attempted to attack with full gear but no owned base of opperations.
Now I don't know the exact amount, but I'd find it highly unlikely that one with crap gear, nothing to lose etc... has too much shot in hell against major forces, and actually one thing I imagine should be the best hinderance of such... would be travel time. IE if the suicide marches take 15 minutes to re-reach the oppositions stronghold, and you accomplish next to nothing... well you are wasting your time not theirs. If you are using a nearby settlement as a base of opperations... well then that nearby settlement is the weakpoint, you can force them to stop harboring these hapless terrorists.
The trick is, they don't have to even directly damage the settlement to to cause harm to it. If they constantly rush the crafters, the transports, the mines, then they stand to damage the economy of said settlement. Bandits should be a real threat, but there needs to be risk in being a bandit. Else you'll have zerg rushes of players trying to knock down an opponents economy, with little to no cost to these players.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The trick is, they don't have to even directly damage the settlement to to cause harm to it. If they constantly rush the crafters, the transports, the mines, then they stand to damage the economy of said settlement. Bandits should be a real threat, but there needs to be risk in being a bandit. Else you'll have zerg rushes of players trying to knock down an opponents economy, with little to no cost to these players.
That depends on many factors, GW has stated that they aren't guaranteeing the possibility to attack within towns, we also can't eliminate the possibility of say some variations of static defenses etc... IE watchtowers, city walls etc... things that can fall to an attacking force with siege weaponry, but there is no guarantee that someone can harm the inside of a towns walls without siege weaponry, or if the gates can block out known repeat offenders etc... The guarantee of being possible to attack is only completely confirmed when you set foot outside of the city.
As well with ryan's proposed potential player marshal system (IE players that get warnings and can attack when laws are broken etc... it isn't an imposibility of them being able to attack known violators of the local law when they get within X feet of the city.
Really we have no idea how the merchant etc... systems will be, whether they are attackable individuals NPC shops, or faceless magical portals people can talk to.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Lets assume there are watch towers, and player marshals, and a whole list of other defenses. Lets assume they are 95% effective at stopping players from getting in and causing havoc. If they can still succeed at no cost, they can and will constantly storm a town. If town guards are 100% effective, then banditry becomes non-viable. However, if they add item decay on death (or some other tangible cost), then endlessly charging is no longer a viable tactic, while leaving banditry as a viable option for those with sufficient skill to pull it off.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Lets assume there are watch towers, and player marshals, and a whole list of other defenses. Lets assume they are 95% effective at stopping players from getting in and causing havoc. If they can still succeed at no cost, they can and will constantly storm a town. If town guards are 100% effective, then banditry becomes non-viable. However, if they add item decay on death (or some other tangible cost), then endlessly charging is no longer a viable tactic, while leaving banditry as a viable option for those with sufficient skill to pull it off.
What's to say they would only be 95% effective against naked bandits, with no consumables for their weapons or armor, 0 wonderous items, no rings, amulets, wands etc.... against virtually naked attackers I see no reason that automated defenses couldn't be expected to be 99.9999999999999999% effective. Now if it actually requires people to be wearing some kind of gear, using consumables etc... now we aren't talking free no loss scenarios, and we are into a fair risk/reward anticipation scenerio.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Clan X throws itself at Clan A over and over and over. Clan A is able to muster their forces and defeat Clan X most of the time, but Clan X is taking no real losses, so they just keep doing it over and over.
I think ryan's been pretty clear, attempting to take over an existing settlement will be like throwing pebbles at a tank, even if say a settlement had a civil war and 49% left and attempted to attack with full gear but no owned base of opperations.
Now I don't know the exact amount, but I'd find it highly unlikely that one with crap gear, nothing to lose etc... has too much shot in hell against major forces, and actually one thing I imagine should be the best hinderance of such... would be travel time. IE if the suicide marches take 15 minutes to re-reach the oppositions stronghold, and you accomplish next to nothing... well you are wasting your time not theirs. If you are using a nearby settlement as a base of opperations... well then that nearby settlement is the weakpoint, you can force them to stop harboring these hapless terrorists.
To be clear I'm not talking about settlement takeovers. I'm talking about raiding settlements. AKA, come through, kill a bunch of people, steal anything that isn't tied down but make no attempt to actually establish control. I would hope this is a much easier objective to accomplishment than to destroy or gain control of a settlement, and that it's something there would actually be light incentives to do such as Darkfall's city nodes where cities generate a small amount of resources that can be stolen if the owners don't empty them frequently enough.
Who says the gear is crap BTW. If there are no gear losses associated with dying be it drop or durability loss, there is absolutely no reason not to wear your masterworked mithril full-plate on a "suicide" run, which may actually make that run successful. That is the entire point I am trying to make. People don't waste their time attacking in light amounts of gear generally. In order to launch an effective attack people should have some skin in the game. Gear durability loss is a less harsh way than drop all items on death to ensure that in order to be effective, people need skin in the game.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Who says the gear is crap BTW. If there are no gear losses associated with dying be it drop or durability loss, there is absolutely no reason not to wear your masterworked mithril full-plate on a "suicide" run, which may actually make that run successful. That is the entire point I am trying to make. People don't waste their time attacking in light amounts of gear generally. In order to launch an effective attack people should have some skin in the game. Gear durability loss is a less harsh way than drop all items on death to ensure that in order to be effective, people need skin in the game.
We seem to be talking past eachother, you seem to be under the impression there is no gear loss, this isn't the case,
There is no loss of your equipped weapon or armor.
Weapon = Protected
Armor = Protected
Consumable to make weapon good = unprotected
Consumable to make armor good = unprotected
Hat = unprotected
Belt = unprotected
Shoes = Unprotected
amulet = unprotected
ring 1 = unprotected
Ring 2 = unprotected
Wands/scrolls/potions = unprotected
secondary weapons or armor = unprotected.
Off the top of my head... so if you are going in for a 0 loss suicide run... I would say having 6 or potentially more slots empty, and 2 slots at not top efficiency, is the equivalent of running in with total garbage gear. If those slots are not empty... then you have major loss on death not a risk free attack.
For those who may have missed the clarification about gear loss on death
Rings, cloaks, belts, gloves, headgear, boots, potions, scrolls, wondrous items, etc; all that stuff will have a massive market... You'll buy it in large quantities, shrug when you lose it, and replace it continuously.
None of that is armor and you don't have those things in your hand when you die.
Detail on consumable portion of weapons/armor
Instead what I anticipate we will create is a system where you need to combine a consumable resource with your weapons and armor to get maximum effect from them, and those resources won't survive the trip to the grave. So crafters will make lots of those resources instead of making lots of swords and armor sets. It's unlikely that someone will be just a guy who makes swords. It's much more likely that guy will make sword consumables, and the occasional sword on commission.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I suppose we'll have to see how that breaks down. Hopefully the unprotected items count for quite a lot more than the protected ones. As long as zerging people with only your weapons and armor is not an effective tactic to overcome people who do have all those slots filled, then I am fine with it.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I suppose we'll have to see how that breaks down. Hopefully the unprotected items count for quite a lot more than the protected ones. As long as zerging people with only your weapons and armor is not an effective tactic to overcome people who do have all those slots filled, then I am fine with it.
Disclaimer this is just a vague hypothesis or very very lose interpretation of intent, but at I'm guessing (and I could very well be wrong on this), the intent of the keep weapon and armor, is specifically intended so that you on your trip back to your corpse, assuming it hasn't been looted, you have the bare minimum required to access the skills you trained/equiped, the consumable portion is a large part, the part that makes the biggest factor in a weapon.
IE your masterwork long-sword is protected
The consumable that adds the +2 flaming, shocking property to it isn't.
Same for the hypothetical mithral full plate. it is protected, but the portion of it that makes it a +2 armor of invulnerability is not.
and of course your boots of striding and sprinting, your +4 amulet of natural armor, cloak of resistance, potions of cure X, ring of deflection etc... are all toast.
Again this one is not made from any solid quotes from the development team, just guesses that I am making based on what I think is the general intent.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I suppose we'll have to see how that breaks down. Hopefully the unprotected items count for quite a lot more than the protected ones. As long as zerging people with only your weapons and armor is not an effective tactic to overcome people who do have all those slots filled, then I am fine with it.Disclaimer this is just a vague hypothesis or very very lose interpretation of intent, but at I'm guessing (and I could very well be wrong on this), the intent of the keep weapon and armor, is specifically intended so that you on your trip back to your corpse, assuming it hasn't been looted, you have the bare minimum required to access the skills you trained/equiped, the consumable portion is a large part, the part that makes the biggest factor in a weapon.
IE your masterwork long-sword is protected
The consumable that adds the +2 flaming, shocking property to it isn't.
Same for the hypothetical mithral full plate. it is protected, but the portion of it that makes it a +2 armor of invulnerability is not.
and of course your boots of striding and sprinting, your +4 amulet of natural armor, cloak of resistance, potions of cure X, ring of deflection etc... are all toast.
Again this one is not made from any solid quotes from the development team, just guesses that I am making based on what I think is the general intent.
But, if the want death to be a common occurrence, then all those items will have to be relatively cheap, otherwise we drastically cut down on the quantity of actual player interaction.
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Goblin Squad Member
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But, if the want death to be a common occurrence, then all those items will have to be relatively cheap, otherwise we drastically cut down on the quantity of actual player interaction.
Cheap enough that you buy them 5 at a time, expensive enough that you aren't going to do repeated kamikazi missions for the hope of possibly getting something back 1 in 20 times unless you absolutely want to go bankrupt.
Basing on eve's standard model, people generally flew around in ships worth 10-20% of their current money. It's a matter of making sure the risk of randomly raiding a city, and the reward of what you might possibly carry out, are properly balanced, to the point where raids exist, but are also not a daily ocourance.
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Goblin Squad Member
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As with all things, the best answer to "people keep attacking our Settlement" is "get more Settlers". Make yourselves a target too dangerous to bother with. When attacked, identify your attackers, declare war on them, and take the fight to their base of operations.
Well in the context of this conversation I believe the fear being discussed, is what if any damage can an individual or small group with little to nothing to lose actually cause to a settlement or it's members if any. IE if targeting the merchants or attempting to damage the economy rather than take over. At least IMO that sounds like a fly smacking into a B52, but it sounds like some are fearing basically repeated suicide attacks made with negligible gear and a base of operations within say thornkeep, or some other NPC town (I chose thornkeep for the example due to that being the NPC settlement least likely to care if these suicide attacks on a foreign settlement shifted them to CE on attack 550.
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Goblin Squad Member
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As with all things, the best answer to "people keep attacking our Settlement" is "get more Settlers". Make yourselves a target too dangerous to bother with. When attacked, identify your attackers, declare war on them, and take the fight to their base of operations.
That is a viable solution only if it takes some level of investment to keep attacking a town over and over and over.
Sure, bandits are only going to throw themselves at a profitable target. But I'm assuming being involved with EVE you know how intense the rivalries surrounding wars can get. If someone who has a blood feud with another settlement can get a successful attack 10% of the time with no chance to lose anything, they'll do it.
If any chance of success requires investing in some gear which they will lose that 90% of the time, and their enemy will get a portion of it... they won't do it.
In Freelancer the death penalty was nothing. I would throw myself into 10 vs 1 battles just to waste the enemy's time. Making all the non-combatants run for cover, causing all the combatants to have to form up and fight you. That cuts into their profits. A good way to bleed an enemy dry is to master the art of distracting a lot of them, with a few of you. In Darkfall... if we had an unsuccessful raid that was likely the end of it for a couple hours, because we didn't want to hand all our gear to our enemies.
If a character with nothing but unlootable items is over 25% as effective as characters with the most commonly used PVP grade lootable items... I am guessing there will be HUGE problems with non-lootable griefers.
But I guess there isn't much point arguing it. If my predictions are correct it's something you'll be forced to deal with if you don't account for it originally.
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CEO, Goblinworks
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@Andius you're really talking about three interconnected things.
There's the Settlement itself, which is an advanced fortress. It isn't going to be threatened by dudes with sticks. Taking down a Settlement is a job for an army with siege engines, long logistics trains, a lot of soldiers and a lot of time.
There's the economics of a Settlement. Keeping it fed, supplied with raw materials, dealing with the Common Folk, the conditions in the surrounding Hex, etc. Harassing Settlers is going to be common in places where Settlements don't maintain standing forces to intercept and crush interlopers. That's a highly specialized role and maintaining such a force 24x7x365 is something that will require a pretty large Settlement population to make manageable. But some (many?) will do it because when you scale organizations into the high hundreds and thousands, it works.
Finally there's the members of the Settlement itself. They can't make a great home based on what is in their hex. They have to travel, trade and transport. That's lots of little links in chains to attack. And there will be attackers. Again, the cost/benefit of doing so is a function of how well protected and experienced the teams are that are engaged in traveling, trading, and transporting.
At each pressure point there will be tactics and counter tactics. And what people will find most often is that both tactic and countertactic are most efficient with more participants - driving meaningful human interaction.
So if you want a big, powerful Settlement that dominates your region and strikes fear into the hearts of your enemies, get a lot of people to work together effectively to make that happen.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think we're kind of missing each others points here. I'm mainly discussing people with nothing to lose causing chaos for others, and you are mainly discussing settlement defence.
The reason I brought up settlements is because in Darkfall, the easiest way to cause chaos for an organization is to hop the walls of their settlement, kill everyone, take their stuff, and leave. So based off my experiences that seemed the best example to use for causing chaos for others.
But lets replace attacking a settlement with:
1. Raiding the area outside the settlement.
2. Raiding major trade routes.
3. Camping areas outside newb protection zones.
4. Camping any gathering place with low protection.
In EVE, if you do this, and things go wrong. You lose your ship, you lose your modules, and some of the modules you drop will go to whoever defeated you. Or else you are doing it in a starter ship armed with a civilian weapon, so you have no chance of success even if there are a few of you up against a moderately armed T1 frigate.
In Darkfall if you do this, you lose EVERYTHING in your pack and your enemies get EVERYTHING. Unless you are naked with a starter weapon. Which means you have absolutely no chance of success against moderate-vet player armed for PVP even if there are 20 of you.
In PFO you lose everything but your weapons and armor, so consumables and accessories, and your enemy gets a portion of what is dropped. Unless you only go with weapons and armor. Do you have a chance to succeed like that? We don't know yet.
My simple point is that going with pure weapons and armor needs to be about as effective as swarming your enemies with stater ships and civilian weapons in EVE, or nakeds with starter weapons in Darkfall. Which is to say not at all. Either that or there needs to be a durability hit to those armor and weapons when you die that present repair costs.
Otherwise people do non-droppable zergs all the time. It will present no risk, and potential rewards. You won't be able to beat back their morale by defeating them so much because they won't be taking real losses, just a loss of time, which is something some people have no shortage of. You shouldn't need a highly trained guard of PVPers 24x7x365 to deal with this kind of junk. Any farmer in his fields who bothers to equip himself with decent gear he can actually lose, should be able to beat back at least four of them by himself.
Now if those bandits have consumables, accessories, and other things riding on the line, and they can afford to raid over and over and over like that. That is valid. They are taking losses. The people defeating them are getting drops of some value.
But how are my guys going to beat back bandits if when a GL patrol kills them they lose nothing, and they are still strong enough to take on travelers via numbers? How are we going to stop griefers if they can effectively grief newbs with NOTHING riding on the line? How are we going to demoralize our enemies if every time they raid our outlying farms and we manage to catch them, they lose squat?
That is the point I am making.
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Goblin Squad Member
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My concern with death affecting gear is that some classes will be considerably more gear dependent than others. It doesn't seem fair that a very gear dependent class will be penalized considerably more than a class that doesn't rely nearly as much on gear.
Some roles being less dependant on gear, would indeed be a huge flaw, Without a WBL set that everyone follows, such a system would completely tear the system appart from the ground up.
Of course the solution is simple, don't allow for roles that aren't dependent on gear. In a game where a good portion of your time is to be spent earning money, foraging gear etc.... All classes need equal dependency on gear.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I vote that gear takes a durability hit and you take a mana loss that can't be refreshed until a timer goes off, and a temporary neg level that can't be healed until the timer goes off.
Are you talking in addition to losing 80% of it or instead?
If instead when is there ever motive for banditry, attacks etc... If you are talking the 2 items that aren't lost being lost taking damage, in addition, I can't say I'm opposed, though with the consumable being needed for weapons and armor to work at optimal capacity I see far less reason to worry in that regard.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Honestly, I'd be fine with the bandit looting an item or two, you losing about half of what you had on you, and the rest of it taking item decay. If we make swords worthless without the "dohickey of power" to go with it...who the hell wants to be a dohickey crafter instead of a sword smith?
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Goblin Squad Member
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Honestly, I'd be fine with the bandit looting an item or two, you losing about half of what you had on you, and the rest of it taking item decay. If we make swords worthless without the "dohickey of power" to go with it...who the hell wants to be a dohickey crafter instead of a sword smith?
well under the current descriptions, a doohickey crafter would be where the money is at, after all it is a consumable. Just like in eve, ammunition was a very profitable business.
Just like in the real world, a quick google search of the most profitable companies in the world, shows that with the exception of software giants, (which one could note that a good portion of their position in the list, comes from an extremely negligible cost per unit), you will find one common feature, products that they can continue to sell you. IE coco-cola, McDonalds, Marlboro etc...
The gas industry is making record profits, while car manufacturers file for bankrupsy.
Sure there is a bit of pride in making a product that lasts for the rest of someones life. But pride doesn't pay rent.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I like that gear won't be lost. I'm thinking that losing your belt, boots, gloves, and helm (as stated by Ryan) will be effective enough to make dying 'hurt' even when you aren't carrying anything.
who the hell wants to be a dohickey crafter instead of a sword smith?
This is really the thing that gets me, though. This is why I'm hoping for a 'durability' system, or maybe some chance that gear will be destroyed or possibly deconstructed on use or on death.
Ryan stated that you might only be making swords when somebody asks for one... crafting seems a little less cool now =/
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Goblin Squad Member
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I like that gear won't be lost. I'm thinking that losing your belt, boots, gloves, and helm (as stated by Ryan) will be effective enough to make dying 'hurt' even when you aren't carrying anything.
I think you are downplaying that a bit. You will indeed, lose your helm, boots, gloves, belt, rings, amulets, wands, scrolls as well as any unequiped weapons or armors.
As well weapons and armors will most likely have a consumable to make them more effective, (and this is likely going to be a weapon and armor crafters bread and butter, as being consumable even a character that is lucky/skilled enough to never die, will still go through them, and unprotected on death.
IMO items that don't vanish often, have one huge negative impact on crafting.
When something lasts forever, people will stick up for the best. I'm not going to buy a +1, +2, +3, +4, +5 sword when possible, I'll buy a +1 sword once, use it until it is infeasable and jump to the highest I can, until I can get the best. I won't stick with middle tiers long, on top of that, once I'm done with my +1, I'm selling or handing it down to the next generation... Then you throw in the high level players may also be making +1 swords in addition to +5's, new crafters will essentially have no market, as both hand-me down weapons, and weapons made by experienced crafters, will likely cut new crafters profits into paper thin margains. (supply/demand laws and all).
economy relies on consumption.
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That makes multiclassing a crafters dream.
I say each style has different types of expenses, melees spend large on initial equipment then spends low on maintianence, alchemists/disposable users spend medium but for each attack, mages have low equipment cost but must eat insane amounts of food to keep their energy up, etc.
they all spend on completly different things, yet they all have costs and without those costs being for the same dohickey by a different name.
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Goblin Squad Member
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You're not going to stop them. The current public information regarding these gameplay mechanics specifies "griefing" in this fashion is going to fundamentally be part of PFO.
Your options, given this situation, are to play or not play.
Just like being attacked anywhere at any time. Again, given the public information available to date, your options are: play or not play.
You can play and live with the mechanic or not play. /shrug
Please do not address me as if I an new, or opposed to Open World PVP. I've been playing Open World PVP games for over a decade and for thousands of hours, and I'm not going to cry over the fact that griefers are in this game. In fact if you go to any topic about Open World PVP in this game you will see I am one of the biggest advocates of a very non-restrictive Open World PVP system in the Pathfinder Online community.
I don't literally mean stop them entirely. I'm simply saying, they need to hurt too. There should not be a system where they can throw themselves at you for free. The losses should be real on BOTH sides, so any system that allows you to be effective in combat without making an investment is flawed. It either needs to be everyone needs to risk losses to have meaningful participation in PVP, or nobody risks losses. No other system will work. I'm would WAY rather have PVP involve meaningful losses, so I want them for everyone.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I like that gear won't be lost. I'm thinking that losing your belt, boots, gloves, and helm (as stated by Ryan) will be effective enough to make dying 'hurt' even when you aren't carrying anything.
IMO items that don't vanish often, have one huge negative impact on crafting.
[snip]
economy relies on consumption.
The economy won't be negatively effected, there just won't be a market for those goods.
Ryan's vision for the combat/crafting includes many consumables and some loss of gear, as you detailed. Those consumables and 'throw away' pieces of gear are what crafters will be marketing instead of 'steel sword +1.'
So instead of all the new crafters making 'iron sword +1' or 'iron breastplate,' they will be making 'iron boots,' 'iron helm,' 'iron ring' (fashionable!), 'iron oil' (don't ask me how the dwarves managed that one), etc, since these items will be consumed daily and/or lost when your corpse is looted.
My reasons for disliking this system are purely superficial. As Alexander pointed out: Who wants to be a do-hickey crafter? Ryan gave a great explanation of how it works and why he wants to do it that way, but I still think a 'chance to break' on death or on use would bring the crafting experience closer to what fantasy fans have come to expect. It would even be fine if when it broke you received a 'broken iron sword' in your inventory and could give that to a crafter who could use that and a few other materials to make a new one.
Then again... if I don't mind making do-hickeys all day, but it keeps some others from starting crafter characters... more profit for me ;)
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Note that only weapons and "chest slot" armor will be permanent; "accessory" equipment has been clearly stated to be subject to destruction.
That makes it roughly similar to the effective system of EVE, except that there isn't as large a market for hulls and without the insurance mechanism.
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Goblin Squad Member
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My concern with death affecting gear is that some classes will be considerably more gear dependent than others. It doesn't seem fair that a very gear dependent class will be penalized considerably more than a class that doesn't rely nearly as much on gear.
Certainly makes monks look appealing
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Goblin Squad Member
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Note that only weapons and "chest slot" armor will be permanent; "accessory" equipment has been clearly stated to be subject to destruction.
That makes it roughly similar to the effective system of EVE, except that there isn't as large a market for hulls and without the insurance mechanism.
That insurance costs money (To the point that you don't get anywhere near the value of the hull once you calculate payout-insurance cost), and a hull without equipment is utterly useless for anything other than a shuttle or freighter. Also you have to pay to get a new clone if you are podded.
So as stated before the only thing you can do without chances of loss is newb ship + civilian weapon... if you don't factor in getting podded. Even a T1 frigate or destroyer (the two smallest and cheapest ship types) outfitted for PVP with T1 gear (the cheapest gear) could take on a LEGION of newb ships with civilian weapons.
My concern with death affecting gear is that some classes will be considerably more gear dependent than others. It doesn't seem fair that a very gear dependent class will be penalized considerably more than a class that doesn't rely nearly as much on gear.Certainly makes monks look appealing
You just do as every other MMO has done and make every class gear dependent. Make monk's dodge based on their robes and give them handwrappings that they have to use in place of weapons if they want to fight unarmed. It preserves the flavor of the class without entirely unbalancing it.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Of course, other types of death penalties could work without needing to be balanced by gear, i.e. gain negative levels, lose access to your highest abilities, lose training time, or any combo depending on how severe you want.
Absolutely, though I do have to say there is one key advantage to hitting someones wallet rather than their character. IE if I do some serious self sacrificing heroics leading my chartered company into a mass expansion, at the cost of everything I own, a good organization has means to re-imburse me for my sacrifice. Rebuild the gear, or make better gear with the new access to resources etc...
Or in a party say one member of the party has a tendency to prevent total TPK in self sacrificial ways, again the party can chip in and split his losses. Now if it were skills, training, longterm debuffs etc... well there isn't a darn thing his team mates could do to share the losses
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Goblin Squad Member
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That's when you get a cleric, restoration can fix such and requires rare materials, thus can be fixed at a cost.
besides many only think in terms of lost time regardless of what resources you hit.
So cleric item pretty much accomplishes the same thing presuming of course the cost is still comparable, with the exception of course, lowering the variety of crafters etc...
Further perks of equipment.
Groups can weigh cost benefit. IE in eve, you generally don't find people flying in ships worth 75% of their money, people actually scale back, there is actually good cause to not be in your absolute best most of the time. Which also does provide a nice mitigation option to the death penalty, compared to a consumable that could be the same.
Sure no matter what is lost it could be thought of in lost time, but gear has 3 very distinct advantages.
1. Gear expenses can be distributed as desired.
2. Cost of death can be lessened, at the cost of short term offense/defense
3. Keeps a huge variety of crafters at work, weapon smiths (or weapon consumable smiths), armor smiths, jewlers, wonderous item makers etc...
when it comes to the other ones..
Consumable, component for res skill, meets 1, but still lacks in 2 and 3, In either case ryan has pretty much proposed more or less no death penalty when a cleric reses you,
When your character dies, your corpse will turn into a soulless husk on the spot. At the moment of death, a timer will begin to count down giving you a minute or two before anything else happens. If a nearby friend has the necessary magic, you may be restored to life right on the spot without any further drawbacks
Now of course the biggest factor to aknowledge in most cases whith this fact, odds are the cleric is out of luck when he dies, and most likely takes the full death penalty, (another factor that makes the distributing the cost important. Especially since in the event of PVP, you can pretty much bet that the enemy will take every chance they get to eliminate the support character first.
Expensive reagent covers 1, lacks in 2 and 3.
skills/neg levels, doesn't really accomplish any of those ideas.
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Gear loss has disadvantages, not everyone requires it the same way and is sometimes akward to need it.
costs can be distributed anyway and devs need to have a way to prevent costless death, i figured gear loss would still occur but could be left to lose only your bag with less need to balance since it becomes secondary.
besides with durability everything will need replaceing regularly, just not after each death.
don't ask me why anyone cares about point 2
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think the biggest issue the devs will have to deal with in this arena is figuring out how to impose a failure cost on bandits who aren't carrying anything. Otherwise, you'll have groups of bandits who aren't carrying anything at all, and who know they won't lose anything if they lose.
Unless the devs want bandits to have no cost for failure...
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think the biggest issue the devs will have to deal with in this arena is figuring out how to impose a failure cost on bandits who aren't carrying anything. Otherwise, you'll have groups of bandits who aren't carrying anything at all, and who know they won't lose anything if they lose.
Exactly.
They could design it such that the belt, gloves, boots, helm, rings, amulet, weapon consumables, etc. were a significant portion of your power, say 25-50%, so if you don't have anything on the line, you can also be pretty sure of being defeated without having a much larger group, but then when a character dies in the wilds and goes to retrieve the corpse, he/she will also have to be pretty cautious, lest the same creature kill him/her again.
This is why I think a durability-like system could work well in PFO. Maybe there is a random chance that any armor/weapon has a chance to become 'damaged' on hit. The damaged item has only a small decrease in benefits, but it now has a random chance to become 'broken,' at which point it is unusable. A damaged item can be repaired by a crafter with minimal resource input. A broken item takes maybe only a little more resources. The real problem with letting your items get to 'broken' status is that they can't be used and are put into the player's inventory, at which point it could be lost if the player is killed and his/her corpse looted.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think the biggest issue the devs will have to deal with in this arena is figuring out how to impose a failure cost on bandits who aren't carrying anything. Otherwise, you'll have groups of bandits who aren't carrying anything at all, and who know they won't lose anything if they lose.
Unless the devs want bandits to have no cost for failure...
Quite simply, running around naked could have a negligible chance of success. Honestly the sounds of it, we are looking at 2 half items that are protected,
Head
weapon consumable portion (counts as 1/2)
armor consumable portion (counting as 1/2)
wrists
shoes
ring 1
ring 2
amulet
wand/scrolls/potions
So when we are talking a character with nothing to lose, we are talking a character wearing 10% of his gear. Quite frankly I don't expect a character with 10% of their gear to be a serious threat, and measures to mitigate such an issue, wouldn't be particularly hard to make from a development standpoint.
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Frankly I think weapon armor pre use consumables are not ideal, the durability is better and "slimmer" and can be used to take a major hit on death which requires spending money to repair (can even have potions of repair which has a more natural feel) this means you don't need to be updating your oils just before a fight or suffer horribly for being taken by surprise or have them wear off midfight. Instead you just to spend money after the fact, and each item can take 3-8 deaths before being broken depending on the skill of the crafter, the max durability can also slowly reduce depending on low it gets before repairations.
This means naked bandits with just armor and weapons still take a loss even though they keep the items, it still allows for the need of consumables without immediete gimping of anyone who died only once. The first time you die you still have fully functional weapon and armor, but the longer you wait to repair them the faster they will wear down, and if you die several times before repairing them then they will break and jump to your bag or at least not be usable/no benefits.
This way someone who dies in a battle has a fair to reach their eq if protected by friends and even if lost can still provide help, but if the consumables are needed before hand or needed in the bag and lost on death then you make heading out pointless and if you did something stupid and have nothing left cause you keep dieing before being able to gain resources then at least you still have some time and something to provide a group without absolutly needing to borrow/be given eq just to join a group.
It also allows you to keep all equipped gear which means no running around barefoot, you can keep your entire look as long as you spend to maintain it.