Suggestion: world combat pvp (in a different way)

[bjornsbot]

Hey, first of all: great job on making this game. I'm really enjoying my time here.

I'm not sure if this is the right place to drop this suggestion (but I'm unexperienced in testing early access games and dropping suggestions, so please forgive me any beginners mistakes :D).

I know there have been a few questions (and answers) on what we can expect from pvp and as far as I understood, this is not the main focus of the game as it aims to be another type of experience and it requires resources to balance everything out. So, with that in mind, I wondered: "how to integrate a form of player combat interaction (I wouldn't call it pvp in the conventional way per se) that could be fun and fits in the experience?"

This is my suggestion:

- Let every player start with player combat off.
- As soon as you reach a combat skill (or a certain combination thereof: for example a maxed out combat skill and a another skill (e.g. called 'insanity')), allow to attack other players.
- You can only attack a limited number of players per day or per week, making it a rarer side activity (like e.g. playing some music).
- If you attacked another player, you get flagged. If you attacked the maximum amount of players, you get outlawed.
- Note that with 'attack' I do not mean 'kill' per se. Just showing aggression towards another player could be enough for the purpose of the suggested experience.
- If you are outlawed, you can get caught by other players during 2 hours of 'logged on' time. If they catch you (e.g. with some sort of lasso or by hitting you with a skill) the captor is rewarded and you are teleported to a cage in the town where other players and npc's can show you their disapproval for like 2-3 minutes). Perhaps an outlawed player can be visually flagged or they can be listed on a board in town (making the search a bit more interesting). During outlaw, you cannot go to instanced locations (so you are forced to run out in the open).
- If you defend a player that is attacked by another (flagged) player (by attacking him within a certain time limit after he attacked): you level a skill 'protection'.
- Allow a player to adjust their pvp damage intake or turn it off completely (e.g. x1 is a normal pvp situation). (x0.2 would take significantly more time to kill). Higher intakes offer higher rewards. Of course, you can only attack players that have the same or a lower damage intake than yourself.
- If you hit the same player for more than 40 times within a day, you get teleported somewhere random as a punishment and you are locked out of pvp for 24 hours. (to avoid spamming or annoying behavior)
- Ofc everything is adjustable by the player, if you would like people to be able to hit your as many times as they want you can turn it off.
- You cannot get any rewards from attacking players in your friends list or in the same guild.

Basically, I suggest player combat as an sandbox activity of 'player aggression' (not as competitive pvp) or 'player protection'. Therefore, there is less concern about balancing imo and it won't get out of hand.

This is just an idea, I'm fully aware that this might not be possible at all, ever. But then again, I thought the idea was worth sharing as I feel it is a different approach on pvp combat.

All be well!

[cr00cy]

Ok, Citan mentioned, on multipel occasion, that PvP will never be significant part of this game. It's just too much of a work.

System you are proposing is very complex, meanign even more work. Not to mention, PG doesn't have large enough playerbase to implement such 'optional' content, not when it require as much work.

Lastly, and its just my opinion, but I personaly wouldn't want any open world PvP in PG, maybe outside some seasonal events.

[Oxlazr]

The game is far too unbalanced for this to work, but I've not problem with entirely voluntarily PvP systems - but to that end, I don't think there'd be enough people willing to participate in full-time PvP for it to work.

[Greyfyn]

Hi!

Normally, I'll be one of the first to tell you that pvp won't be a serious part of Project: Gorgon. Over the years, I have definitely put up a shield defending the game's non-focus on PVP, usually because the people who propose it are clearly combative. In lieu of finding a chance to butcher players in game, they've attempted to do so via the forums. Those kind of presentations are gruesomely offensive. Forum PvP sucks!

Not so this player, who provided some well thought out ideas and presented them kindly. That kind of communication certainly remains welcome in our community. At least, that's what I think on this topic.

For those who say that a game must have pvp to survive, I say nah, nope and no thanks. For those who provide creative solutions that could be adapted in some way, however limited by the game's current structure, I say thank you. You never know when something will spark the interest of the devs, albeit possibly not in the way you completely intend.

I believe the devs when they say PvP will never be a significant factor in this game. Once a player progresses sufficiently in the game to understand how the combat system works, generally it becomes clear how hard it would be to restructure for pvp. That decision was made by the devs when they started development, with a reference to not being able to spare the resources needed to make it work; that hasn't changed. The game will never have open world pvp. Hopefully the forums won't either!

~( ' .')~

[Celerity]

I want to just start off by saying I don't really have an interest in seeing pvp becoming anymore developed, but bjornsbot mentioned some interesting ideas and I thought it would be fun to talk about how I would see pvp in this game.

So I think the problem with open world pvp is that most of the time it just happens so someone can be a douche to someone else; stopping someone from getting to a farming spot or just killing noobs for fun for example. It only doesn't happen this way if there's an actual reward to it, if it's from the other player then I guess it would have to be money since getting another player's items in this game would be probably useless to you, but crippling to the other person. I suspect that if this was the case nobody would ever flag themselves for world pvp or they would simply transfer all their money to an alt before doing so. If it's an external reward then this could be easily abused by killing friends etc. Now of course there's extra restrictions you could put in place like making somebody's reward based on their own risk and only being able to get an external reward from a kill on a player once per day for example but this makes the entire pvp system incredibly complicated and I think this is reflected also from bjornbots idea, you want conditions for attacking a player, a new skill, tons of options and the ability to change the damage you take for extra risk. I think a lot of this will only further reduce the playerbase who would actually take part in this pvp which I honestly think would be miniscule for this game already.

So instead I think a dueling system would be much better suited to this game. There would also need to be adjustments to essentially every skill in the game so I don't think this is ever feasible, but theoretically every ability in the game would have an alternate set of stats for pvp. The reason this would be necessary, rather than just a damage decrease is because decreasing damage only serves to make tanks and healers more effective. If the damage was low enough to not be able to 1 or 2 shot someone then tank players would be able to stack enough mitigation in order to become invincible and I'm fairly sure this would be true for bard's healing too which you would need knockback to stop. You would also have to nerf things like stuns and mez since it would be too easy to kill someone with the current length of stun making it a game of who can stun first which isn't fun. So in short the imagined alternate stats would have to be a nerf to essentially everything; mitigation, damage, healing and cc. Furthermore there would have to be extra restrictions on the duels such as if you walk a certain distance away from where it started you would lose, if you change zones you lose and probably a timer too. So why is a duel better then if it still needs extra restrictions? Because there's 0 possibility of it being used for harassment since I imagine there would be an option in social settings to ignore all duel requests and if you don't want to fight someone, you don't fight them. The motive then becomes much more about just having fun. If this was open world pvp then you would have to opt in, but you could suddenly get 1 shot by a higher lvl player and I'm not sure if there's any way to stop that given how easy it is to change skills and thus your level. If you stopped someone from attacking somebody else x skill levels below them then the other player could just switch all their skills to low level skills to avoid being attacked and you would get people twinking which I don't think is fun either since if you just play the game normally it's unbalanced. If you base it off of ability level used in the same way that's done currently when using 2 skills of different levels it would still be a problem since you still benefit from the gear, which alone would probably be enough to still get a 1 shot off. Afking would also be a problem with open world pvp not found with duels.

Rewards could still be tied in but just make them titles or minor things similar to the druid shop, guild point shop or warden shop but not the self rez items or cashbags and make it so you can only get a reward from killing a player once a day. The main limit should still be that the rewards aren't that good though since not everyone wants to do pvp and if you make them too good people would feel forced to do it.

All in all I don't think this game is suited for pvp. Most of the fun from pvp comes from the fact that you can counterplay the other person which usually is due to cast times or having abilities specifically designed to do so, e.g. breaking a stun at a critical time. The way the abilities are designed in this game, and the fact that you're limited to only 12 main abilities plus sidebar skills means that unless there's some dramatic changes, such as sidebar skills specifically designed for pvp, I just don't think it would be any fun or anyone would actually take part in it even if it could become "balanced", not even mentioning the massive amount of work which would need to go into it which I would much rather see used elsewhere in the game.

[Stingite]

I don't think open world pvp would be fun . . . BUT . . . World vs. World PvP ala Guild Wars 2 would be pretty amazing. Imagine a completely separate version of Serbule Hills where Farms and Towers are capture points and large raids of players move from spot to spot trying to capture points for the Blue or the Red team, and all this occurs on a map with a timer and the occasional clash between large groups of players in key spots trying to conquer territory. That sounds like a pretty fun PvP experience that feels like you're in the world, but completely separate.

The LOTRO Creep vs. Freep PvP also had this feel. It would be super fun to build up enough supplies to unleash Zukelmux on the other team roaming the PvP Map!

[Illmaster]

I do appreciate bjornsbot coming up with creative ideas for PVP instead of blanket whining statement of "I want open world pvp blah blah blah." If open world pvp would ever be experimented with, I'd like to see it in a separate zone for a limited special event. I just fear all the complaining on the global chat about balance with certain skills being OP and other skills being nerfed. The player whining would be very frustrating for me.

One type of "pvp" I would like is contests. Instead of fighting each other directly, having contests like survival against increasing waves of npcs, races (when mounts become a thing), arena fights with pets (not to the death), etc. I think some of these player vs player contests would be a perfect fit for red wing casino.

Thank you for sharing your ideas bjornsbot.

[Celler]

I wouldn't mind a kind of card game pvp, something like cards of 3 rarities everyone is given randomly 6 cards 2 from each rarity.
As you battle others if you win, you win a random 20% of a card you don't have, a loss could cost you 5% but unlocked cards remain so.
Build a deck as you go. Hustler skill would do for a name.
Though I'm sure the dev has plenty of better ways to improve the game.

As for proper pvp, I fail to see where the skill would come from, currently it's a couple of whacks and done. Can think of many things I'd rather see instead.

Some well thought out ideas here though and they are always helpful.

[DarnHyena]

Ya know, your post really does highlight how rather generic mmo pvp tends to be. It's always just fight to the death.
Stuff more akin to like some kind of festival of events and competition would be much more amusing to me \o/

Mario Party : Gorgon Edition