Villain Quality of Life

Suggestions
Villain Quality of Life
effort 4.777777777777778 9 quality 4.8 10 reasonability 4.8 10
1

I never touched villain in world of magic due to its unappealing nature there, and I’m sad to say that after starting a file to see what all the fuss was about here on AO, I can definitively say its pretty miserable. I want to suggest some minor changes that will hopefully make playing villain feel like a more tolerable experience to the average person:

Notoriety Decay

On paper a GTA style ‘wanted’ system is a good idea to stop evil players from just wreaking havoc across a server. In theory that is. In practice it’s sadly way worse. It’s a ticking time bomb. Doing anything related with ‘being a villain’ raises notoriety permanantly until you throw money at it to go down. What this means is you are essentially punished for partaking in the benefits of being evil, that is, sinking all kinds of ships, not worrying about fights in towns, etc.

Notoriety as a system should have some sort of Timer, where when you avoid the navys clutches for long enough it starts to naturally decay. It shouldn’t be as it is now, which is essentially ‘give away your money unless you want to be fighting pitched battles where the navy outlevels you’. Some are fine with these battles, but for many they are a nuisance, especially when trying to partake in the games other content, such as duels at munera garden.

I also think Navy ships should ignore Villain player boats when they are not on them. It’s annoying

Prison Timers

Keeping this one short and simple- Ten minutes is too long to be told you can’t play the game. It makes villain so unfun it’s almost comical. You max out your time in jail at as little as 40k bounty, which is only 10k above where the average player ends their playthrough at (30k fame/bounty~)

Prison timers should max out at 7 minutes, tops, and it should take hundreds of thousands of bounty to get there, not barely over 30k.

As well, criminal players hunting criminal players should not result in the loser being jailed. It doesn’t make sense for the navy to accept and pay bounties to wanted criminals, especially the most wanted criminals in the world. Reframe it as an additional area of assassination- after all evil players are bound to make enemies that would rather seem them dead then behind bars.

Whitesummit alternative: Tiberia

On my criminal file I found 3 major problems with criminal access to basic functions of towns.

  1. Criminal players who spawn on Ravenna have no means of repairing broken boats outside of the repair hammers which are slow and ineffective. Anyone who is actively being pursued with a hurt boat would most certainly be stuck on the island until their demise. Having a villanous, or even neutral shipwright at Tiberia can remedy this.

  2. Whitesummit, as the only criminal town, is an incredibly long winded journey for any non-assassin criminal player. Travelling halfway across the map just to upgrade your gear at a forge or buy arrows or bullets is a bit much.

  3. Assassin players can completely bar you from Whitesummit, if they so choose. If you’ve a bounty that they want, seeing as how they spawn there you can be hunted out of the gate. This is mostly anecdotal but there are multiple times I’d stop at Whitesummit to fix my boat only for an assassin player to spawn in, take the bounty from the board and immediately attack me, and because of how they won’t aggro assassin syndicate npcs, they are safe to retreat if they fail.

I think simply having Tiberia be a neutral/villain rep area with all the necessities would greatly improve the average evil players quality of life, giving them somewhere both at the top and bottom of the map to shop.

TL;DR changes if you don’t care for the long winded reasoning:

  • Notoriety naturally decays if you commit no crimes for a period of time
  • Tiberia, the town in ravenna, becomes a neutral/villain trading hub with a shiprwight
  • Prison timers are reduced to 7 minutes max. Even if this brings executions faster, its preferable to being told you cannot play for ten minutes unless you have friends to free you.
  • The climb to max prison time should be more forgiving, taking several hundreds of thousands of bounty to be stuck in jail for max time rather then just 40k bounty.
  • Hunting Navy ships will ignore the players vessel when they aren’t on it.
  • Being hunted by a criminal player won’t end in your arrest, only bounty loss.

I don’t expect people to agree with every change, but this is my best shot at trying to make villain less tedious to play. I want it to feel like an alternative way to enjoy the game, not ‘hard mode’.

9 Likes
2

well i like this idea, also the wanted system is nice since when youre under the radar for a long time, people are going to forget about you and the navy will give up

30k renown? i dont know if thats a lot, but all i know is that i got spawn-killed at sailors at lvl 40 so i never got above the 10k (got 6k before i got spawn-killed, have 6k now)

3

Yeah, having maxed out 3 files each of them ended up in the 30k~ range for renown once I finished the whole story.

4

Truth be told, I don’t get why people defend the jailing system. Yes, messing up as a criminal should be punished, but not by making said criminal wait for up to 1/6th of an hour to play the game again (not counting the extra 1 to 2 minutes per execution). At the very least, we should be allowed to change our loadouts for when we’re released.

I personally agree (or am neutral) to all of these except the one about Tiberia, but that’s only because of me reading a suggestion about making all towns in Ravenna neutral shops after the player reaches Wind-Row Island. If the Bronze Legion can’t recognize us because of a simple cloak, then why should the shop keepers recognize the player as a wanted criminal?

3 Likes
5

Fair enough on that neutral exception for Ravenna.

6

This is the only thing I disagree with.
No more defense, no more compromise, there’s no reason for prison timers to exist in the first place, they accomplish nothing as a mechanic other than wasting the player’s time.
ANY amount of time shoved in a box to sit around and wait is going to be unfun and break the flow of the game.

7

i mean im voting but its all stuff that has been suggested before plenty of times, both here and on discord

8

this is just a better version of my idea

9

Yes

10

ok nerd :nerd_face:

11

Sounds like a good compromise for villain players and people who have clearly never had a villain save file and certainly don’t give a shit, yet still decide to argue like they know what they are talking about. 7 minutes is still a bit high, I would lower that even further to maybe 5 or less. Though if you are lowering the jail timer, then it must be bad, so why bother with it in the first place?

Everything else is also good. And about the Tiberia negative rep thing that many have suggested, there’s already a hidden Assassin Syndicate area there, and it even has a quest and contract board. It’s practically begging to become a full hideout with necessities and stuff.

12

I like the idea, thought I see some flaws with it.

  1. Notoriety would stop being the ultimate retribution for their victims, as you could simply spend the time fishing.
    Imagine, in the current form of the game you can rest assured that after you’ve been assassinated by a criminal you’ll at least know that the navy will seek retribution for your murder, trying to chase them down, thought more likely forcing the murder to pay like 10 galleons for the navy to forget about your murder.
    But, should this suggestion be added then that wouldn’t even be a grantee from the navy, instead you know that the criminal will probably just spend some time fishing and face absolutely no other repercussions.

  2. What if the grand navy’s influence falls to dangerously low levels, so just because you’ve spent a while in a server where the grand navy can no longer pursue you do you really deserve to go without any punishment?

  3. And finally it wouldn’t make any sense, I mean just imagine the coordination efforts “Oh yeah sir, we’ve spotted the villain that we’ve kept track of, and we know that he’s killed over a thousand marines, thought we haven’t engaged him in a while, so instead of sending people actually capable of taking him down, let’s send people way too weak to do any harm to him”

Ultimately, the notoriety decay system would be overkill, thought I like the idea and therefore I’d like to recommend a “Heat” system instead, this system would instead be percentage based and govern how effective the Grand Navy response to you is, starting out at 0% which causes no response at all, low percentages which would cause a much weaker response than your notoriety level would demand, and so on.

The level would be increased as you get more eyes on you, committing crimes, being spotted by the navy and so on, reaching 100% eventually which causes the normal notoriety response.

Having low heat could also give a sale on purchasing notoriety removal.

I pretty much agree with this, thought I think that it should depend on how long since you’ve sat out your jail time and how safe the server is.
Here higher navy influence and less other criminals would lower the time overall, as criminal player are a critical part in making the game unpredictable.
Prison time would also be reduced if you’ve sat out your jail time recently, as a kind of pity system, this is to make sure that people who have been causing mayhem for very long wouldn’t be punished equally to people who have been arrested soon after they left jail.
Thought I believe that in some situations that time should also be prolonged, such as if you’re an accomplice of a criminal that’s currently in combat, so you can’t rejoin the fight against the people chasing how down even if you simply had low bounty.

Overall, I still believe that the 10 minute punishment should be given to the top players on the evil side who seem to never get arrested at all, but overall I do believe in a reduction on jail time

A good start, but I think criminals deserve more.

13

I didn’t want to just ‘put a time’ on the notriety decay but it should take a while, like 15-20 minutes per star, and during that time you cannot commit ANY crime. If the Navy vessels do find you, you gotta run instead of fighting back as that would only reset the timer.

I understand that its a punishment, but at this point it’s such an intense one that unless you are rolling in cash to reset your notoriety, all notoriety does is send wave after wave of difficult, overleveled enemies towards you until you get put in the timeout box or manage to scrape together enough coins whilst you are being actively pursued to clear notoriety. It’s not about ‘reason’ but rather sensibility as a game mechanic. It’s just not fun to deal with 5 star notoriety for hours on end because you are poor and don’t want to spend ten minutes not playing the game.

14

That sounds miserable.

15

It’s basically the only compromise I can give otherwise these changes are too extreme for some people.

I should add that I do agree that prison timers for players are rather punishing regardless of how long or short they are, but not everyone sees it that way, and thinks removing them is an overall bad idea.

16

Gotta agree, that sounds painful.

I really liked your suggestions crimson, but the notoriety decay sounds pretty hard to get done right, and pretty unrewarding even if done right. I think reducing the price for a notoriety reset would be awesome, but personally I like to have a higher notoriety and it decaying over time seems kind of annoying.

It also sounds annoying to use that mechanic, as it spawns more navy ships, which there are all ready so many of and if you want to use it you have to, you know not be a criminal for 20 minutes. Which includes, not fighting the now increased number of ships.

17

Notoriety decay could work when combined with locational notoriety, as you can still commit crimes in other areas. 15-20 minutes of not being able to do more or less anything anywhere is insane.

The cost of removing notoriety could also be decreased or notoriety prices could be capped to make it more fair. 1k+ after a session of playing is insane, and everyone would choose the concrete box over it. But I think removing notoriety via payment should be a crutch or something you would do if you REALLY need to do something, and not something that’s required to have fun.

18
19

I like the notoriety decay idea, I’d had basically the exact same idea as you where every 15-20 mins you lose a star as long as you don’t increase your bounty in any way.

For jail time, I’d thought of maybe making it be based off current notoriety stats instead of solely on bounty so that criminals aren’t constantly getting 10 mins, at a rate of 2 mins per star (1 minute if you have 0 stars).

20

you get 5 stars from sinking and looting one or two navy ketches.