Disincentivizing Toxic Hunts and Behavior

Suggestions
Disincentivizing Toxic Hunts and Behavior
effort 4.6 5 quality 4.0 4 reasonability 3.2 5
1

Proposal

The title is a little vague, so let me expand upon that- right now, a pretty common concern with the game is about metamancers preying on weak players who cannot fend for themselves- either for their renown or their clan infamy. I have a suggestion in 2 parts to tackle each half of the problem individually.

Details/background on your proposal

First Half: Renown
This is the most simple change. I’m not entirely sure how the amount would be calculated, but the renown gained from hunts should be related to someone’s player kills compared to your own. For example, a player with 500 player kills hunting someone with 50 will lead to them getting much less Renown from them- potentially even zero. If renown gained from the hunt is reduced below 50% by this penalty, it also shouldn’t contribute to the player kills statistic of the killer. To prevent this from protecting players and allowing people with no kills to get on leaderboards safely, this protection is revoked once a player reaches… let’s say anywhere from 100k to 250k renown in either direction. It may be a bit high, but a million would also make some sense since that’s the point where PvE methods of gaining renown drop off heavily.

HOWEVER, If a player with lower player kills attempts to hunt someone with higher player kills (with the poster and everything), they will not receive this penalty in reverse. If the higher player kills player successfully fights back against their attacker, they will not receive any penalty to renown transfers. In this example case, the higher PK player was attacked first and has full justification to fight back- that’s not inherently toxic.
If a high PK player is fended off by a low PK player they were trying to hunt, then the renown the low PK player gains is still reduced. This prevents toxicity in the other direction.

In other words:

High PK player tries to hunt low PK player and fails the kill, renown transfer is reduced as if the high PK player succeeded the kill, to prevent toxic smurfing tactics to lower people’s renown
Low PK player tries to hunt high PK player and fails the kill, renown transfer is not reduced because it is not toxic to fight back against someone attacking you and the low PK player willingly entered into this PvP interaction

Second Half: Clan Infamy
This half is itself split into two suggestions, though one is smaller- a clan should be unable to lose any infamy until they reach 10k (which if memory serves is the point where a clan becomes an Average Clan). If they lose infamy after that, they will never go below 10k.

As for the main bulk of the suggestion, infamy gains from a clan are also based on the player kills difference. If you hunt someone with significantly fewer player kills, the infamy loss on their end and the infamy gain on your end is reduced by the same percentage as the renown reduction. In addition, hunting a clan that is two ranks or more below yours reduces infamy even more. As with renown, if a low clan rank player attempts to hunt a high clan rank player and fails, the high clan rank player does not receive a penalty to the gains from the interaction.

The reduction for taking infamy from a clan ranked lower than yours also applies to claiming over someone else’s island. I know that there is less infamy to be gained by taking islands from lower ranked clans already, but this change would make it so that higher ranked clans are given even less encouragement to take islands from lower ranked ones- especially if the infamy gains are completely nullified if the rank difference is great enough. For this case, claiming an island owned by a clan two or more ranks higher than your own will impose the same penalty (if not greater) as claiming an island from a clan two ranks lower. This is to prevent situations where a low rank clan claims islands from a high rank clan, and then even if the high rank clan reclaims the island they end in a net loss of infamy anyway.

Reason to add/change

As mentioned at the top, one of the main problems with this game is the metamancers or otherwise high skill people preying on lower skill people in order to boost their own statistics- renown and infamy specifically. The change to preventing infamy loss below 10k is also meant to give more players that are more casual access to some clan features, which will become more relevant once clan building on claimed islands is added.

i wrote all this at around 2 AM so if there’s any confusing parts or parts that could do with different formatting let me know and i’ll elaborate on them before fixing them in edits when i get the chance

3 Likes
2

Honestly my only problem with Renown was because of Deckhands being connected to it. Now that deckhands got reworked to PvE, there isn’t a reason for PvE players to run renown for them, so hopefully they get ganked less

4 Likes
3

Vetex will never add

4

Finally, a good proposal for that!

6

Why should he? I love spawning in and waiting for my game to load when some random jumps me and I can’t do shit due to my game still loading
:blush::fire::fire::smiling_face:

Peak gameplay

7

I’d prefer to see better anti-spawnkilling mechanics. There was a good suggestion earlier to let us pick our spawns so players didn’t all spawn on ravenna.

With deckhands being removed, PvE players can just reset their renown every so often, and a 10k-30k renown player isn’t going to provide any meaningful reward to a high-renown player - they’re certainly not worth hunting, and probably not worth killing even if the opportunity presents itself.

As for clan infamy, I don’t think I’ve ever been killed for clan infamy. I have had people take my island, but I’d consider that to be fair game, because by claiming an island I’m explicitly opting into the PvP island claiming minigame. It’s not like I’m standing there defending it anyway, the PvP metamancer skill gap is irrelevant.

In any case, I’m not losing a meaningful amount of clan infamy to sweats, and the reason my clan isn’t at 10k infamy is because it would take us about 60 cumulative hours of island ownership to get there. Me and my friends don’t play often enough for that.

The rewards for killing weaker players are being removed/already non-existant, and vetex has made it very clear that killing players for shits and giggles is part of the game. A directional combat tag would never work consistently and would only cause more problems than it solves.

8

The fact that a lot of PvE activities still give renown means that some players will still want to get their renown higher without realizing the situation they’re getting themselves into, I feel

I feel like a lot of casuals may not realize resetting your renown is an option, and those people are the ones I sought to protect with this suggestion. Having a way to completely cap your renown would be nice though.

Even if there isn’t a meaningful reward, there is still a reward. Making that reward smaller or outright null would fully discourage punching below your weight class.

You have a point with opting into the system, but at the same time there are a lot of toxic people in clans that may go out of their way to claim over the islands of weaker clans- and besides, I feel like it’s not really out of the question to force clans to play in more even fights for their infamy as they get stronger.

I agree with this sentiment, but I didn’t mention anything about a directional combat tag. If you mean the example I gave with hunting, t hose situations only show up when a player goes to a bounty board or Syndicate rep and willingly takes a poster, thus opting into the PvP interaction.

okay, wait, he really said that? That’s, like, completely counter to the idea of getting new players on board for your game. If high level or high skill players gank players with much less in both departments, that’s not just something funny. That’s the fastest way to get a new player to stop playing your game.

I should also note that while not everyone would experience these sorts of things, the fact that some people would (looking at the situations I’ve seen where people with very low bounty were hunted regardless, or my own experiences in game) should not be tolerated. Changes like these would let the game become more accessible to new players without putting them at risk of getting ganked, and the game itself has a mostly casual playerbase. People who actively indulge in PvP (and not even the sweats I’m talking regular players who do PvP sometimes) are in the minority, all things considered.

9

thing is, there’s not really any alternative to arcane odyssey for PvE players, so most of them just suck it up

btw i don’t like the island capturing changes but i think the bounty hunting changes are decent

10

i get what you’re going for but this just cannot work

11

This is a fair complaint. I agree that post-deckhand renown is very unclear, being presented as a PvE resource that you want to build up, while it actually just gets you hunted by tryhards and turns dying as a bad rep into an 11 minute cutscene.

Outside of the polarity of your renown (good vs bad rep), there aren’t any PvE implications, but it’s clear that wasn’t the original plan for renown, since there are lots of strictly PvE activities to increase it (castaways being the biggest outlier).

I’d love to see a suggestion that cleaned up the mechanic into something a bit more coherent. This one doesn’t do that, unfortunately.

When I say there are no meaningful rewards, I mean to say it’s already “fully discouraged”. Non-meaningful rewards are stuff like the galleons dropped by players you kill - they don’t factor into your decisionmaking and they’re easy to forget entirely.

The people killing 10k renown players for <1k renown would still do it even if you took away all rewards, and potentially even if you added a small penalty, because they’re not considering the rewards when they do it, they’re doing it for shits and giggles.

I don’t consider “going out of your way to claim over the island of weaker clans” to be toxic at all - claiming over each others islands isn’t just part of the minigame, it’s the entire minigame. The only gameplay in the island claiming minigame is the part where you claim over each others islands and potentially get into fights.

If you don’t actually want to play the island claiming minigame, and are just “playing” for the free rewards if nobody contests you: fair enough. I do the same - the minigame is a bit flawed in that sense.
But you have to understand that you are still playing the island claiming minigame, and the people who do want to play the minigame can’t distinguish you from someone who wants to play the minigame with them. That’s what it means to “opt in”.

As for strong clans only being rewarded for fighting against strong clans, it’s a nice idea, but not really practical - it’s hard enough to find a clan who will actually contest you at all, let alone one at the same level. Not to mention one side is almost always outnumbered, often severely, so you can’t just say that rookie clans are always an unfair target - they might outnumber the other clan 3:1.

My bad - skimmed over you mentioning that it’s based on the poster.
In any case, I still don’t like assuming players with low “true” PvP kills aren’t valid targets - I think whether you’re a target should be based on if you’re opting into the PvP systems.

Consider a skilled player making a new slot, for instance. They’ll have very few kills, but that tells you nothing about what gear they’re using, or what the skill gap is in any given fight.

Not in those words, no, but he’s always railed pretty hard against any idea that would reduce shits-and-giggles PvP. He’s always said that other players attacking you is part of the game, presumably because he considers it part of the atmosphere.

Even as a strictly PvE player, I agree with him. Not knowing if another player is friendly or not is a good thing - in games where I can assume nobody will attack me, I tend to just ignore other players, which detracts from the multiplayer element. Meeting a player and discovering that they’re friendly is more impactful when I can’t just take friendliness for granted.

There are two circumstances where I’m not ok with PvP that isn’t “opt-in”:

  • If it’s high stakes, such as losing bounty I need for deckhands, or being forced into an 11 minute respawn cutscene if I lose. Interacting with people isn’t worth the risk, just avoid everyone.
  • Or where players are encouraged to go out of their way to kill you. PvP stops being rare, you can no longer avoid PvP by making yourself inconvenient to attack, and it’s no longer uncertain if someone is friendly - they’re probably not, just avoid everyone.

If PvP is low-stakes and rare, it’s not really something to get upset about - getting killed unfairly isn’t always ragequit worthy.

1 Like
12

The point I was getting at is that it becomes toxic when high rank clans see lower rank clans islands and go specifically out of their way to claim it for the sole reason that it’s a lower rank clan and they know that the opposition cannot fight back or else they risk losing more infamy than they already would, and then those clans would specifically only do this with low rank clans and never contest higher ranked clans. With how much infamy you get from claimed islands, it would take a very long time to regain all the infamy lost from that single claim being overrun.

That’s why the penalty applies in reverse when a high PK player attempts to hunt a low PK player directly, and why a high PK player is not given a penalty when they fend off a low PK player who had attempted to hunt them. As for the fact that they have a low PK number in general, the idea is that the high skill player will be going out of their way to kill people over time, and thus their Players Killed statistic will rise much more quickly than someone who doesn’t like engaging in the PvP.

I think if you gave me some more time, I might be able to come up with something to tackle this problem that’s more than just a bandaid solution like this one. The reason that I brought this up to begin with is because of some of my personal experiences- in the past I have been farmed for my renown back when I had up in the 300k range and only had 20 player kills. More recently, I’ve been in a server with my clan mate when all of a sudden someone high up on the leaderboard (I don’t know what placement Emperor of the Sea is, I assume it’s the top slot) ganked my clan mate who has less than 100 PKs and over 100k renown. You can tell why that isn’t exactly a fair fight, and how that would spawn this idea.

Players shouldn’t have to just “suck it up”, though. I’m not really sure how I can word my thoughts properly, but if I had to try I’d say that when the majority of players that are playing your game are playing in a way you didn’t entirely intend, taking notes on how they’re playing and making additions to help cater to that audience would be better for the game’s longevity as a whole.

I’m curious what your thoughts are about that, can you elaborate?

13

yea vetex is eventually planning on becoming an author, and he TRIED making a different game (world of magic) and i think he got demotivated and stopped developing it because it wasn’t his dream game (something along the lines of that). he instead reworked it into arcane odyssey

so if too many reworks are implemented the game might just stop development xd

14

I’m not sure a rework to the PvP would be too much, though? If I recall correctly, Vetex is keeping the global PvP because he wanted to cater to the older audience? I think I remember that he said that on the forum somewhere, but can’t remember where exactly.

15

first thing to consider is slots/alting, someone with 1000 player kills on their main can make a new build with 0 player kills and start hunting noobies without the reduction. would that mean it needs to be accountwide? what can you do about alting? nothing.
additionally this is just a sour solution for people who are still legitimately trying to farm all-around

at least you understand reverse penalties are dumb… and why the 150k safety net needs to be looked into. why can a 140k fame assassin lose practically nothing if i kill them, but if they kill me i lose 50k+ fame? this is already unfair and an obnoxious mechanic.

also this isnt ttt, sd just cannot be accounted for in a game with this kind of environment

16

This is a very different description to my memory of island capturing, so I double-checked the exact numbers to make sure I wasn’t misremembering:
image
Average Clan’s threshold is 10k, which is the cutoff you gave for newbie protection, so the absolute most a new player can currently lose from someone claiming your island is 75 infamy.
This is either 25 or 40 minutes of passive infamy, depending on the island size, and 10 or 25 minutes for a new clan.

This isn’t a “very long time”. Given how rare it is for someone to contest a claim, you’re probably making far more than this by “playing” the island capturing minigame, so you’re not really losing anything, rather just making less infamy from doing nothing. It’s hard to really be upset about this.

Also, how often are there multiple clans competing for islands in a server? I don’t think I’ve ever had my island taken from me while there was another island to take - I’m not getting singled out for being an easy target, I’m just the only other person in the server playing the island capturing minigame.

But why would they want to do that?
If you start a fresh slot and only kill players for high value bounties, skilled players could get a fresh slot to very high renown with only a couple dozen kills - less than me, and I avoid PvP where possible. It goes without saying that being able to hunt other players while they can’t hunt you is a pretty unfair advantage.

Ultimately, the issue is you’re equating the PK value to the player’s PvP skill. It’s a decent approximation for general use, but it’s not good enough, and it can be massively inaccurate if someone has an incentive to make it so.
A better system is one where players simply choose whether they want to play the hunting minigame, rather than the game trying to choose for them. This is what we’re getting with deckhand changes.

If you’re really concerned about bounty hunters going after unsuspecting 10k renown players, a better solution would simply be to adjust the bounty hunting formula, and make resetting your renown easier and more obvious.

17

or materials on their ship or just cause they can

1 Like
18

I’m getting a better idea of the problems with my suggestion now, but I do want to point something out with this- some clans may decide to attempt to defend their island, fail, and then lose even more infamy as a result. This would increase the time spent by double or more based on how many deaths you and your clan suffers.
My saying that it could take a long time runs under the assumption that the average altercation includes a clan member being killed at least half of the time, which can push the average time taken over an hour, which is exacerbated by clans potentially losing multiple islands in a single day based on decisions they make- which can also include attempting to reclaim the lost island and being killed for that attempt and losing even more infamy.

19

I think the comments here are making me realize that t he suggestion I made is just a bandaid on a bigger issue

20

on the average clan kill/death I notice about 125 infamy loss
this is 187 minutes on a “small” island or 125 minutes on a large island (IIRC it only gives every 15 minutes)
or about 62 sealed chest
so yeah defending/attempting to defend is a losing game usually (Unless you have major numbers advantage)

21

you lose the same amount of infamy for losing an island as you do for dying to another clan player, which is also stupid
honestly the island claiming should stay the same and the infamy lost on death should be reduced, overall