i dunno people usually say that’s his actual name but see he signed it
I gotta be completely honest: I love PvP in this game. Specifically, consensual duels where both parties benefit due to having fun, gaining experience, or whatever.
You know what fucking sucks about PvP? When you’re doing a diving spot, swimming up for air and running out of stamina, and two players decide on a whim to ruin your day (there is literally zero way to salvage this situation).
That’s the biggest problem about the game right now, and why I was legitimately devastated when Elysium was revealed to be special person exclusive, because it could have been a place to just… fight other players and have fun (or a skill issue).
Consensual duels are where AO Shines. Two people who agree to fight each other, throwing their all at one another, that’s fun. That’s enjoyable. Even if I get my ass kicked 24/7, it’s more fun because I decided that I wanted to pvp. It wasn’t thrust upon me by the whims of someone else. That’s why though I am a ‘Full Package’ player as Pristine said, I still lean heavily towards PVE.
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When you get dove by three people slamming into your ship as you come up for air from a dive spot, and all three of them are Magma users, two blasting you with jumpscare Surges and the third as a Magma warlocl. Zero things you can do about this- especially if you’re some half-pruned Warrior who isn’t built for Anything yet.
Very fun.
Group gank culture is another discussion entirely. Outside of clans, I would like to see deterrents against leaderboard players hunting with their friends. I can handle losing a 1v1 against a hunter, but I can’t handle how being a ‘leaderboard’ player doesn’t require you to be consistently good at the game- rather that you have enough friends with you to farm people/ defend you from hunters.
(Saiju has been typing for hours and I am scared)
I’d kill for a deterrent against hunting with teams in general, or something that prevents it from happening either intentionally or not. Whenever I hunt somebody and win because somebody else joined in, I just feel hollow(?) compared to when I get a fully solo hunt.
I also feel its generally less frustrating, as a pve player, to die to a solo hunter. When it is ONE person, you have options, you can do something, try to escape, fight back, kite them and counter-attack, whatever. When it’s a group of people the frustration can only build. Even the best players would struggle in a 2v1, AO’s just not structured for many vs 1 types of situations to be fair.
Of course, there will always be those who love to talk themselves up saying “Oh I do that all the time”, but 90% of players just can’t win a 2v1, regardless of tactics. And the more people you get jumped by the worse it feels. Of course it’ll feel awful. You were basically handed defeat with nothing you could do in retaliation.
And because some of the critical renown changes didn’t make it in this update, some of the detterents I’d been hoping for on the balance doc are left on the backburner til’ Nimbus.
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Vaguely. If it’s some 1.2 mil+ with a monster build, 500pk, and a gajillion resources to their name it’s still quite hard to deal with. Mach speed shadow conjurer the other day gave me and a few pals tons of issues because Dodge Reflexes were a great addition with no problems.
I miss being able to at least fight half of my hunters/randos off- now there’s so many different variables you need to consider when someone materializes behind you and shoves their amped-up guillotine through your spine. Doesn’t help the game’s running like backsides right now which has utterly screwed my ability to parry and sometimes even do so much as sprint.
I’m hoping he makes SOME changes to optimization, but per usual the blame will just be placed on Roblox and absolutely nothing will be done about it. Open PVP right now is in utter shambles for me.
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my take is:
add the ability to opt out of renown entirely, now that it is purely for faction/competition purposes
encourage/reward consensual duels (duels when vetex) by virtue of higher renown at stake or betting money (also allow custom settings like no potion and food effects)
turn the auto unload feature into an auto opening (sealed chests only), which can happen anywhere (you do need to be stationed completely still)
feel free to grill me for the first and third ones
This is factual. As someone who enjoys the PVP this has been my gripe since release. PVP is only fun when you’re GOOD at it. The enjoyment level is directly tied with the skill floor/skill ceiling. This is a direct opposite to the casual nature of the PVE and the nature of the game in general so it’s extremely jarring.
I think an indirect way to alleviate this problem is by communicating how to “ correctly” play the game some how. A good pvp player will usually be better at PVE as well since it’s the same system and fundamentals.
A good example of this is Dragon Ball Fighterz. When the game dropped for a long time there was a huge divide between players who played casually but wanted to get better and players who were really good at the game and understood all the fundamentals and intricacies.
Certain tech and game knowledge that was essential to being good wasn’t explained at all in game and required knowledge from other sources like YouTube discord etc. it wasn’t until later in the games lifespan that they complete revamped the games in game tutorial and added tutorials that fully explained all the games mechanics and tech in depth.
This is also just an issue with the way the bosses and npcs don’t really teach you either. Deepwoken for example forced you to learn the combat loop early. Mudskippers stun lock you if you fail to parry but do low damage giving you freedom to make mistakes. Bandits will kill you if you can’t parry, especially dagger npcs.
In AO you can get through the whole story without learning how to effectively block or parry, up until Calvus and MAYBE Carina. Why do you fight one of the first NPCS in an enclosed space (the ice caves) incentivizing you to use M1s when they basically become useless later on? NPC block and parries also fundamentally work differently than players so the experience isn’t even transferable lol. However, this could be argued to be a positive as the story should be much easier, but in relation to PVP it basically teaches you bad habits.
I won’t pretend to know the solution to these issues but it’s definitely something worth addressing and just my two cents
Duels are a planned feature IIRC, a smart indirect fix would be to make duels give much more renown than a regular gank that players are incentivized to actually challenge people instead of randomly jumping them.
However you’d obviously have to make sure it’s not a bus able to farm renown by just spamming the duel with an alt or something so idk
Before I discovered WoM (I’m no stranger to vetex’s games I watched AA as a kid but didn’t play it on roblox) I never really was into PvP but was practically decent enough to run 1s with strangers and hitting blasts mostly due to the fact that I played games like CS:GO and TF2 when I was a kid.
Now this is the problem, casuals can’t actually get engaged in PvP when half of that is just asking strangers for sparring to get good or even have a smidge of fun, they probably can’t ask their friends too because most of the time they aren’t available for that.
This is why I wanted some sort of a special server accessible to anyone for FREE SPARRING AND PVP so that casuals can at least have a momentum of understanding how to PvP, the problem isn’t because of PvP existing it’s because casuals cannot practice on their own whatsoever, Deepwoken literally has an NPC that lets you hone your skills first (the instructor) before going out in the wilds.
Though that’ll probably be implemented in the far far future…
duels when vetex
this is exactly what i said
potential solution, announce duels involving high renown just like executions
Smart, maybe also have it like island claiming where you can’t duel if the server count is too low.
i’m gonna be rambling a bit about myself because the world revolves around me and i am perfect, but I promise there’s something I have to say here.
i guess i’m not paying enough attention because YOU SAY FUCK?
This one’s odd for me.
I always get excited to make a build and I usually don’t have problems running through the storyline to make one, but then I never use it on anybody. I feel like it’d be a dick move to kill Villainboy, 12k bounty but then when I see JewelcraftGOD556 with 300k renown and 213 player kills, I feel very hesitant. The only build I have 50+ player kills on happens to be the magma mage with a lot of power and not much health who isn’t actually THAT fun to play as. Most of those kills came from WoM, and I just walked around and asked people to fight me. Magma SUCKED back then! What the hell was I doing on WoM?
So, I end up just bounty hunting or assassinating NPCs while pirate hunting along the way.
So, the Dark Sea would’ve been amazing for me, right?
I’ve heard that the Dark Sea was meant to be the big replayability part of the game, and when it’s fun, it is! But when you kill an atlantean for two basic treasure chests and your boat just got triple struck by lightning, it’s… something. I’m pretty excited for the new structures. Who knows, maybe I’ll feel rewarded for doing whatever’s needed in there instead of fighting the atlantean with the best build possible for ONE SILVER CHEST AND NOTHIGN ELSE BUT TRAS
Duels are fun, though. I’m ass, but they’re fun. Just don’t get much of them. Maybe I can bribe pristine into getting me in Elysium some time.
speaking of duels,
oh my fucking god this game’s pvp is ASS when you’re not dueling in munera garden
Dueling and world PVP are VASTLY different. Let’s get the obvious out of the way:
Dueling has both players ready and calm before fighting.
World PVP nearly ALWAYS begins with someone at a disadvantage. You’re lucky if you’ve seen the danger before it happens. Because of this, if you’re not used to it (like me), ALL of the skill you have is thrown out of the window and you struggle with climbing onto the dock because you’re using A FUCKING HEAT MAGIC AND VETEX HATES YOU start to panic, causing you to lose much, MUCH faster, and also leaving you kind of pissed at the end.
And then there’s the slightly less obvious one that no one talks about.
Dueling is always on a flat surface.
World PvP is NEVER on a flat surface.
This makes an extreme difference in how long a fight lasts. If you’re fighting on the trail in Ravenna, eh, yeah, escape isn’t THAT easy, but if you’re on SAILOR’S LODGE? Both of you are regenerating almost all of the health that you took because you’re either falling into the water below and can’t attack until you get out, or because both of you are hiding behind the BIG BUILDING IN THE DEAD CENTER OF THE ISLAND!
It’s a lot harder to find where your opponent’s attacking you from when the area isn’t clear, either. I got my ass kicked by a vice admiral because he simply disappeared into our boats and the rest of Thorin’s Refuge. and because i’m trash
To talk about the actual problem:
Honestly? AO is a game that revolves around the unbalance. Vetex has stated that he isn’t as focused on PvP, and when Vetex wants to something in the game, it WILL be, even if people don’t like it. One example being jail time. People think it’s a terrible idea to prevent people from playing the game, Vetex thinks that it’s a perfectly fine punishment as villains are capable of killing low levels, assassinating other players, and having a wider selection of enemies to kill. Even though high reps are also capable of the first two.
This also applies to features that don’t look very problematic at first. Main example I could see from this is potion brewing, Vetex thought it would be cool, so he made a system for it.
Now both parties fucking despise each other, because there are a LOT of potions that most people don’t bother making that actually have a hidden advantage, and if people bitching about atlantean essence/warding nerfs taught me anything, it’s that AO players LOVE their advantages.
It’s chaos, and I don’t think Vetex cares. The problem might heal over time, or it’ll grow to an extreme, because Vetex decides to drop jewelcrafting 2. Fuck jewelcrafting. The most important thing to remember is that the loudmouth sweaty assholes (ME) are usually a very small portion of the greater playerbase. (also me i promise)
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or perhaps just heavily cap renown betting, depending on the player count
Josh Strife Hayes made a good video talking about this, in the video he said that you shouldn’t make PvE players do PvP stuff and vice versa and he said that it was one of the 7 deadly sins of MMO design (Wrath) and A lot of the stuff he said in that series can easily apply to AO.
I’ve been thinking about this issue and one of my ideas is to make 2 leaderboards, one for PvE and one for PvP. The PvE leaderboard will track PvE and stuff like that then the other will just be PvP. In this system people who have high stats on the PvE leaderboard would have no stats on the PvP one, so killing them would have no benefit. Then the PvP players would only hunt down other people who appear in the PvP leaderboard. This obviously doesn’t account for people wanting to kill just because but I think I was cooking with this idea.
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Ngl
We didn’t need gem socketing to give stats.
if ALL gem socketing did was just give fun lil’ secondary effects like swimspeed or energy regen, stuff that might help a bit but won’t make or break a build, I personally think that could help lower the entry barrier for PvP.
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now i make a long reply regarding a bunch of replies i’ve seen. i hope this doesn’t count as spamming a bunch of people.
man, i wish i could spawn at shell island or redwake. an explosion mage spawning at redwake might get up to some devious activities with the floorboards though
i have something to confess.
i don’t like having my absolutely FABULOUS style and glamor so heartlessly CENSORED by the spawnpoint and also (currently) most important island in the game
oh hey, i guess that’s me, too, just replace general PvP with dueling and yeah
My friend and I had a level 70 duel in Sailor’s Lodge back in February and the health regen during our fight alone made the PvP unsalvageable for him.
While it might be more rare, it’ll just be a level 500 with revon true final boss gear instead of a 125 with calvus gear. That might be worse. A potential solution is to make PvP barriers relative, so a level 50 can’t interact with a level 125, but a level 90 can, and later on, a level 125 can’t interact with a level 300, but a level 275 can. Could lead to some pvp barrier trolling, though. Imagine a level 50 gremlin grabbing your dark sealeds before you’re even at your destination
I normally just aim at where someone’s going to land at the floor or if they’re unable to change direction, even when I don’t have much size. It works, but I can’t imagine how needing to land a direct hit feels- oh my god what if you made splash damage weaker than direct hits
would that kill AoE builds and a bunch of other things? i don’t know, but i kind of want to see it
dear god.
honestly, renown might work as a gauge of how much you want to fight other people
for me, it’s pretty hard to get to 100k renown based off of PvE alone, especially if i’m not a villain, the problem is that PvE adds to renown too, so maybe an opt-out like you said would work
shut up bitch
. . .
MYYY MOTHERFUCKIN’ MAAAAN!!!
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anyway i’m going to bed now if anyone responds to my posts i’ll check in the morning
P.S.: please respond to me i don’t want all that writing to be for nothing please please someone respson