This is a follow up to a productive discussion post talking about ways to discourage rking and preserve the fun of everyone whilst still reducing the oppressiveness of world pvp on the average joes experiences. I think I have identified three key goals to pursue in order to achieve the ultimate goal of stopping people from hitting a boiling point and dropping the game.
Reducing the impact & frustration of Loss, Increase Options for Escape, and Adding deterrents to reduce unwanted player interactions. I will be using a compendium of many of my own ideas as well as those posited on the original discussion post. As well, ideas may be added or removed based on feedback. My ultimate goal here is to present an agreeable change list and hopefully get it in front of some testers (and ultimately, vetex himself).
So, letās get into this. I will also provide my reasoning/someones reasoning for the ideas.
Reduce the Impact & Frustration of Loss
Increase the Galleon Cap before losing money on death from 1k ā 5k
An idea from the balance team first and foremost. As stated before- new players struggle to maintain wealth, especially in those crucial ālearningā parts of the game. There are several players, and even a few youtubers who complain that they go into the Calvus battle, and through a series of losses lose almost every dollar to their name. Generally, a more forgiving cap would leave people with more āsafeā money.
Reduce Boat repair costs, especially for the pre-brig boats
If boats are cheaper overall to repair, new players, who already struggle with attaining any semblance of wealth, will feel less screwed when someone decides to sink their boat out of boredom. I would say 75% cheaper for a sailboats repair from very low health. 50% reduction of cost on Caravel & Ketch. 25% reduction on the brig, as at that point people should have a decent idea how to get money. Also makes hunters who follow up/precede kills with sinking their targets boat less egregious.
Reduce the skill floor for pvp, preferably without altering the skill ceiling.
Mimhere & Pristine talked about this in brief on the topic. This idea helps in that if pvp is easier to understand, there wonāt be as many people who feel they have absolutely no choice but to run or theyāll get smashed by someone far above their level.
This is of course a hope, not a proposed solution. The best solution I thought up was some sort of ātrainerā at the redwake-frostmill stage of the game who not only tells the player about mechanics like dodging, blocking parrying, but teaches them. Weāve all seen those tutorials in games. āAlright now press the block button.ā I know its not the most fun thing in the world, but sometimes your best solution is to beat it into a learning players head so its on their mind for the rest of the game.
Increase options for Escape
Controllable Server spawn Points
Proposed by several people on the forums here over time, (There are even two suggestions for it), let people determine where they spawn into a server. This will help mitigate how absolutely chaotic Ravenna is. I would even suggest repurposing the āinnā suggestions for this. Let people pay the guy at sailors lodge for a room. Or an npc at Palo. Dispersing where people load into a server reduces unwanted interactions right out of the gate on a server.
PVE servers (Removed)
Mimhereās idea, something likely unappealing to a lot of people. Yet, there is some solid weight to the arguments he brought up. An alternative to all these bajillion small solutions could simply be opt-in pve servers with reduced drop rates on bosses nā such as a trade off.
Increase PVP level
Right now, itās 40% of the cap, which is nowhere near enough. I would recommend 60%, or even 80% (80% would be level 100 now, so people would stop farming low levels at sailors).
Additional Deterrents to reduce unwanted player interactions
Truce Zones around Bosses & Story sections. Not safe zones, but the closest we can get
Another complain I oftā hear from my newer friends is how they canāt farm for the gear they need because the bosses are being held hostage by someone who refuses to share, or alternatively, renown hungry fiends will simply kill them while they are farming the boss, regardless of how little they are worth because after a boss most people are in a weaker state.
Truce zones will be Temporary safe zones, with limits. PVP is disabled around the boss so long as you donāt enter the arena with a pvp combat tag. As well, someone who has your poster entirely ignores this truce mechanic. This will give newly maxed players the breathing room needed to flesh out their builds. The areas should be relatively sizable. So for example, both inside the throne room and the halls outside it for Calvus. (This way people can prepare without worry as well)
A second use for this is Story protection. I have seen at least one case where a high level player attacked a player at Fort Talos during the stealth section. A sparse occurrence, yes, but why worry about it in the first place? During certain sections of the story, pvp should simply be turned off entirely until someone gets past it.
Increased Nototirety gain for RKing people
A villain only solution to rking, but aside from giving a notoriety mechanic to fame players there isnāt much in the way of long-term punishments for rking you can do for good reps. Still, if people know they can hit a high notoriety for rking really easily, they might think next time they see a clueless newbie digging for the thermo fist treasure.
Separate, PVE Clans
This is brought up in brief sometimes but itās still not something Iāve finished concocting in my head. Iām trying to think of a more clever way to implement this than simply āCopy paste the clans to a new PVE only system with alternative infamy gain/loss and leaderboards.ā Yet, that might be what it takes. Clans are a fun long term goal that encourage one to find community- yet I feel the experience is held back by trying to include both PVP & PVE players. PVE provides risk-free methods to gain infamy (Which is unappealing to PVP players), and PVP infamy gains provides frustration and annoyance to PVE players.
By separating the two, balance team members & Vetex could lean heavily into encouraging either of the two playstyles people choose to partake in. For example, clans tuned to pvp only could reward a chunk of infamy for leaderboard placing every week. (Though we should still endeavor to push the leaderboard towards individual accomplishment rather then allowing for group hunts) But, you get it. Just a simple seperation allows for more freedom when fleshing out what either of these types of clans have to do to rise in rank. (If needed, I can continue fleshing this idea out into a proper suggestion)
There is probably some stuff I forgot/didnāt explain well enough so please, skim through the ideas at their core, give some feedback, we can completely remove some of them or add new ones on here for a bit. I donāt have high hopes this will ever pass the view of the big man himself but weāll see.
while i think thereās already not much risk to dying in this game, especially compared to some others along similar vein, i totally understand these points.
especially early-game, that āsafeā money idea is huge because i struggled on this myself. boats are always applicable though, it sucks to be sinking hundreds of galleons every other time i spawn my boat on slots that donāt really accumulate a ton of money just because it got destroyed to some mysterious cause
On boats; this stems from a pvp issue, and is sort of just an issue with how the system works. Essentially, Iāve noticed that if you auto-unload cargo (like any normal person would do) and your boat gets sunk, your cargo is still tagged as being auto-unloaded and prevents you from carrying it. This is an issue because when you auto-unload youāre typically not sticking around to supervise, so anyone who feels like it can just sink your boat at random and sink all your money with it. Might not necessarily be a part of this problem, but I wanted to bring it up in a PvP vs PvE-related way.
the issue with this is that the reason youd want to go to a non pvp server is to grind in peace without interruptions, doing this means to get boss drops at the same rate as current, you have to be in a pvp server where people are going to assume you want to fight
this means that to get a calvus drop at 10%, youre in a server where everyone assumes you WANT to fight as opposed to now where everyone assumes you dont, but some assholes just want the easy bounty hunt, increasing your chances of getting in pvp overall
Yeah there are some pretty bad issues in seperating the servers into pvp/pve. Figured Iād include the idea regardless to see if some spit and duct tape from other people could save it.
Iām just not sure why there would be a drop penalty in the first place. Just some arbitrary reason to take the risk of existing in the pvp servers? The underlying reason people pvp in the first place is for renown and bragging rights over whoās ābetter at the gameā; why would there be a motivation that affects people who only do pve? The only downside of pve servers is that your gain of renown is significantly kneecapped due to the lack of pvp, and there should be borders on pve renown gain in pve-only servers anyway to prevent farming.
As a follow up to this, someone asked during balance discussion whether or not the game would eventually split to PvP servers.
Hereās what they said:
āCry. Cry about it. Itās not happening.ā
The rest are things that I saw vetex already rejected in the vetcord general or at least something close to what you said here. If I were to assume as to why vetex rejected them is that he didnāt want ao to be a baby mode game
i mean absolutely no disrespect when I say most of these ideas are a bitā¦ too nice. I think they are bad.
I agree with this, only for new players, but Iād sit it at 2.5k.
i half agree, but this isnāt a huge issue
this is an extremely vague idea. you learn PvP through throwing yourself at it, and the skill floor in arcane is already pretty damn low considering how Iāve fought
this entire section - yeah, no. itās already annoying hunting people with 100 speed brigs, 200% swim gear, the inability to see anyone once they decide to run, and sinking to the bottom of the ocean. it is already extremely easy for you to escape an engagement with an average build.
maybe increase PvP level threshold, sure.
this is decently reasonable, and I like that posters ignore this
no.
diluting the system too much here. you should instead provide more ways to attain infamy that are equally rewarding for some equal effort
itās not huge but itās annoying when youāre getting on a slot to go mess around, not to farm, and finding yourself struggling to bring your boat back to life constantly. if youāre at a shipwright, you should be able to repair your boat without such a huge cost. repairs are slow and costly away from shipwrights for a reason so this isnāt unreasonable by any means (itās just a number change)
The skill floor is an idea from Mimhere & Pristine in the previous thread, and apparently discussed among the balance team themselves. This is not a new player friendly game, and anyone who doesnāt dedicated dozens upon dozens of hours into pvp canāt win against even those with basic competence. Itās a pretty dramatic difference, and I agree that more steps can be taken to try and ease new players into the learning process.
Part of where the frustration can lie is people donāt even know how to start learning pvp without just kinda throwing themselves on the fire. And several people will hit a wall, get frustrated and quit trying to improve because they are getting curbstomped without really understanding why. Thatās why lowering the skill floor without affecting the skill ceiling is a difficult yet crucial task.
You just read the category and not the actual ideas. Whatās your defense against different server spawn points & increased pvp level? Leave a clutter at Ravenna so people can be camped at spawn and have to spend more time server hopping just to find somewhere they can play in peace? Leave the pvp level where it is so people can go to cirrus and kill their boredom by gatekeeping cirrus from low levels?
There have to be concessions so regular, everyday players arenāt getting kicked while they are down. The flimsy excuse of āitās part of the gameā or ālearn to pvpā falls apart quickly when you realize that forcing someone to do something they actively dislike does not make a game more entertaining.
Not for us! We know easy ways to get money, even without brigs we arenāt really inconveninced, but a new player (Especially at the learning stages) spends most of their time with boats at low health because they donāt have the funds to repair. Itās not the most critical of issues but it would, as a goal make losing your boat to hunters/bored pvpheads not sting as badly overall. This one kinda came with a goal of reducing the penalty for loss so people are generally less annoyed when they get jumped at random and so it doesnāt feel so awful.
no one wants to permaspawn at ravenna but until spawns are changed this is how it is. do you know why? itās not because the spawns, itās because Hunter Nearby. you can get loop combat tagged through spawning over and over by people with your bounty camping you.
There is a change on the balance sheet that should deal with the looping Hunter tags from being spawncamped (The one that deletes all posters after you are hunted, I recommended that alongside many others)
The only problem is that it didnāt even get through last update and is considered low priority.
call it blunt or whatever, but I earnestly think this is just the nature of PvP. over time, intricate behaviors and reactions are developed as people get better and understand the systems they are given.
nobody in Deepwoken began really feinting until a month or 2 after release, and it took even longer for movement to become meta. this is true for pretty much any game - you canāt teach those intricacies by just telling the player what they are. They have to experience it, and learn where to apply it, and PvP encounters are usually fairly diverse. Itās not an easy task to onboard someone to PvP, and Iām not entirely sure itās worth the effort, either- a lot of you folks donāt even want to grace the idea of PvP.
of course, prove me wrong if thereās a game with a nice PvP dynamic anyone can pick up and compete with amateurs if they invest a few hours.
i skimmed it, admittedly. sure, make inns a feature, and I already said Iād be open to a higher level requirement for PvP. i hate going to ravenna to fight, anyway. i did not want to waste time reading another āmuh split serversā schtick
sure, but this reads more QoL than āreduce pvp stingā (which is already fairly low, imo) since players arenāt the only reason for boat sinks. makes early game less annoying, which is agreeable
The ideas you brought up do seem pretty good, even if only a few of them get considered by Vetex. I think at bare minimum something needs to change because at the rate we are going at a lot of players will quit AO for good before Nimbus drops. Though as for the pve clans idea, I dont think completely separating clans into two different types is the best idea. It would likrly be a huge hassle, and probably still wouldnt stop pvp guilds from ganking pve guild players, due to how pvp guild infamy would work. I think the best idea is to just make getting infamy via pve activites actually viable again. For example the guild Iām in, Abyss Seekers, got onto the leaderboard for some time before the infamy wipe, and most of us donāt pvp, we just did pve activities like sealed chests. But as of right now, itās literally impossible for pve players in a guild to get anywhere close to the leaderboard, because the game rewards pvp activites disproportionately more.
and renown lol; why do agora mentions, atlantean kills, and probably a load of other things get immediately cut off at 100k? (which isnāt very high)
pvp should obviously grant faster and larger rewards for success but i do think itās a valid concern that pve isnāt nearly as viable for grinding this stuff up.
itās a leaderboard for people who want to compete at the highest level of playing, so i donāt see a problem here. thereās not enough incentive/reward to go higher for the average player, which i think discourages competition overall
Yea, focusing on a demographic is fine and some of these may be added one day, or never at all, again
nothing wrong with believing either way lmao, iām a pve type of guy while doing pvp on the side anyways
I would try to say more but I donāt have the words for it
