I personally rather miss the old-time raids. It was exciting and good practice. Nowadays just feels like if someone wants to strike at an org, they wait for off-peak times or when certain defenders arent around (that they know they cant defeat) to run in and hit a mob or two. When they sense danger, they rush to the one of several docked aetherships on enemy planes and ascend out. It is rather lackluster.
Solution: Make Distort stop people entering manses and remove the ridiculous essence cost on death. Also, make ethereal archways impossible to enter while distorted while you're at it.
Then just remove Distort altogether. Right now it's just skewed.
1
EveriineWise Old Swordsbird / BrontaurIndianapolis, IN, USA
The reason we keep buffing defensive powers is because we keep increasing the number/power of abilities/artifacts that circumvent/overpower those powers. It's all part of the rat race we've trapped ourselves into.
Everiine is a man, and is very manly. This MAN before you is so manly you might as well just gender bend right now, cause he's the manliest man that you ever did see. His manly shape has spurned many women and girlyer men to boughs of fainting. He stands before you in a manly manerific typical man-like outfit which is covered in his manly motto: "I am a man!"
Daraius said: You gotta risk it for the biscuit.
Pony power all the way, yo. The more Brontaurs the better.
I have had a thought on how to address the competing interests in raids, but I am not srre how much of a pain it would be to implement.
As far as I can tell, the issue of XP Loss breaks down into: A) Loss of experience, especially multiple hours of experience, feels very punishing and acts as a disincentive for non-combatants to begin engaging in PvP and for combatants to conduct daring/risky maneuvers such as raids, contested domoth claims, etc. Death, especially for the offensive during raids, must be in some way painful or self-limiting in order to prevent griefing behavior and so that defenders may eventually dislodge even determined attackers from their territory.
I think any solution has to respect that second aspect, but I don't think it's necessary that the self-limiting aspect necessarily diminish enjoyment or destroy personal progress in non-PvP aspects.
My thought it that players could possess a 'death pool' of essence. Every time a character gains XP or essence, a matching contribution would be made to their death pool, (i.e. if an astralbeast gives 2000 essence now, it would give 2000 essence and 2000 death pool essence.) The only function of the death pool would be to absorb Essence/XP loss from death, praying, phoenix, etc. etc. The death pool should have a shallow hard cap, perhaps set to correspond to 2-4 deaths in enemy territory. There should be no way to pull essence from the death pool into your standard essence under any circumstances, to avoid the pool acting like an XP buff effect. Artifacts that affect XP loss on death, such as the ur'Stone, could isntead increase the size of the pool, decrease loss of essence from the pool, or provide a multiplier specifically and exclusively for death pool XP. Finally, any XP loss that exceeds the death pool's reserves causes the loss of real essence/XP as it does now with all the same potential consequences.
My feelings are that this provides a sufficient buffer to let inexperienced people experiment with PvP without feeling that they'll be losing something of value, since most non-coms will be sitting on a full death pool most of the time. Raiding will be fun for the offense, as, although they may have to replenish their death pool after such an excursion, they will be making a net progress on essence gain. Raiding will still be stoppable for the defense, as enemy territory requirements will cause a much more rapid depletion of raider essence than defender essence. Presumably, when the option exists to safeguard your essence with the death pool, only exceptional circumstances will push players to keep attacking after it is depleted. The one outlier I see are individuals who have hit the soft cap on essence, for whom death was previously much more painful than those below the soft cap, though I honestly don't know whether making death less painful beyond the soft cap would be considered good or bad.
It would still mean you'd have to bash that pool essence up after a raid though in order to avoid deaths eating your real essence, so it seems to be a mostly shortterm solution. If you raid, you have to bash. The only perk of this system is that you'd basically be able to die twice as much for the same loss, assuming you start with a full pool.
It would still mean you'd have to bash that pool essence up after a raid though in order to avoid deaths eating your real essence, so it seems to be a mostly shortterm solution. If you raid, you have to bash. The only perk of this system is that you'd basically be able to die twice as much for the same loss, assuming you start with a full pool.
I suggested needing to fill the pool off of regular essence gain just because I feel like there's a general understanding that for death to be a deterrent, you will need to do something to recover from dying repeated. As bashing and influencing is currently how you prepare to fight again, I suggested a format that would remain consistent with that without cutting so painfully into regular essence as the current format. It would serve a similar purpose to have it refill based on time online, end of month/weave, offerings, or anything else you want to tie it to, just so long as depletion means a delay in being ready to fight again so defenders know that a raid eventually ends.
I do think, psychologically, a pool would not lead to someone fighting twice as long when they have the option to use the pool to protect their essence. Instead, its depletion would provide a somewhat graceful excuse for attackers to scale back, and it would be very reasonable to expect at least fairweather PKers to be aggressive while covered by their pool and reluctant to engage when it is empty.. That said, I feel like a death pool system would be pretty tunable by the administration to produce an environment that fits their expectations of what PvP should look like. If you want the pool to provide a very solid cap on how long PvP lasts, apply substantially greater XP loss on death if your pool is depleted (this is also a trivial way to address the 'you can die twice as much' concern). If you want attacks to start to fall apart as they wear on, make prayer/pheonix time take longer the less essence remains in the pool and go much faster when its nearly full. Things like this would make PvP fairly painless for casual PKers, provide advantages to defenders (Who presumably will remain at fairly full pools relative to attackers as a raid goes on) that are considerably less frustrating than discretionary effects, and provide still ensure that repeated deaths are painful enough for attackers to not want to occupy a plane indefinitely.
If you so disapprove of it, you could protest the game. Instead of going on at any chance you get to put down a business for trying to make money.
Not the case in this situation. I'm talking about the steady increase in power that happens in all games, to the point where, eventually, there's just too much. That's what the Overhaul is addressing: the outliers and the bloat we've accumulated. Had nothing to do with making money.
Everiine is a man, and is very manly. This MAN before you is so manly you might as well just gender bend right now, cause he's the manliest man that you ever did see. His manly shape has spurned many women and girlyer men to boughs of fainting. He stands before you in a manly manerific typical man-like outfit which is covered in his manly motto: "I am a man!"
Daraius said: You gotta risk it for the biscuit.
Pony power all the way, yo. The more Brontaurs the better.
Removing the essence loss on deaths would probably be a step in the direction toward reaching combat levels of years past, but I'm not sure what else you would be able to do to curb the Eternal Raid. The essence sink that death is right now could probably be shifted to somewhere else, though.
My first thought is to simply reverse the way these raiding essence losses happen. Instead of the cost per death, it might work to make essence costs up-front for an enemy to "break through" an org's defensive shield, or that org's associated plane(s). A cost, just to get in and raid, whether you die or not (but no further cost when dead, unless you come back to rejoin the fight). An essence drain, like in the domoth realms, might also be appropriate when on ORG (and only org) territory you're enemied to. So there's a cost to raid in the first place, whether in groups or hit-and-runs (except for your very first raid, which is 'free' until you're enemied), a cost to just sit around camping to harrass people, and absolutely zero cost to anyone defending their own org's stuff except perhaps a scaling timer for resurrection (unless rezzed by a skill).
Second, the way buffs are being changed might open the door for demis to spend their divine essence, and perhaps a considerable quantity of it, to raise a specific buffs to the cap for a short time. More essence would naturally be needed for more levels you're missing. Hypothetically, if you've got 3/10 poison resistance maybe spend 700k (or whatever) to raise it to 10/10 for half an hour or until death. This could greatly level the playing field, because now you can get your buffs from questing, skills, paying for artifacts, OR if you don't want to do any of that, you can now do it with time spent grinding.
Mayor Steingrim, the Grand Schema says to you, "Well, as I recall you kinda leave a mark whereever you go."
Increased death timer for every death in enemy territory within X time.
All fixed.
This. XP loss for raiding becomes kinda moot at a certain level, but enforced time out works as a suitable deterrent to constant raiders. Have the count reset on IC month change and you're good - especially if the scale is pretty drastic.
It doesn't stop people from raiding. It stops the non-stop raiding, because as they die the longer they have to wait to return increases. When you have to sit out for 20 minutes cause you have died over and over in a raid you might think twice about going back and continuing.
We are doing this whole Overhaul to make combat easier to get into, but we are doing nothing at all to make combat worth getting into. Penalties for PK are so excessive as to make it pointless. As I understand it you can't even raid the more important mobs in an Org anymore (Or at least not without far more people than our current game population provides)
Risk Vs. Reward has been skewed so far into Risk there is no longer Reward.
I would rather be able to raid and die 2 - 3 times than raid and die once and have to spend 4+ hours getting back that experience.
If for some reason the death timer isn't enough, a scaling debuff can also be added as well, IMO. I'm sure you'd be less inclined to raid if you had 1k hp max as soon as you entered enemy territory for dying 5 times in a row, etc etc.
I personally rather miss the old-time raids. It was exciting and good practice. Nowadays just feels like if someone wants to strike at an org, they wait for off-peak times or when certain defenders arent around (that they know they cant defeat) to run in and hit a mob or two. When they sense danger, they rush to the one of several docked aetherships on enemy planes and ascend out. It is rather lackluster.
All the suggestions which involve making deaths more costly, aren't addressing the perceived issue here. The stated problem is not too much raiding, but rather raiding when there is nobody interesting to fight back or defend.
Hopefully it will be a problem that fixes itself, as combat becomes more accessible.
Actually, the stated problem of the thread (see: the OP) is concerns over xp loss in regards to raiding. All of this off-peak whining stuff is off topic, so...the timer business fits fine.
A far away voice whispers, the sound barely reaching your ears, yet the words remain perfectly clear, "Then so be it."
I have to agree with @Daganev here. I was under the impression that the goal was to make PvP more accessible and in particular to promote raiding that doesn't revolve around off-peak population advantages. Just increasing the death timer serves to make all raiding more difficult and will further discourage taking risks such as peak hours raids in favor of low-risk engagement, which I feel like is the opposite of the initial intent of the thread.
That's the thing - just increasing the timer isn't the only thing going here, I was under the impression this was all stuff posed in addition to decreasing the loss across the board. If not, well...it should be!
A far away voice whispers, the sound barely reaching your ears, yet the words remain perfectly clear, "Then so be it."
I don't live in a country where my time is far off from the U.S average, but my time to play does vary based on my work load any given day.
Am I not supposed to "raid", when I am able to play, because there is not X amount of players on to stop me?
Other players live in countries that have completely opposite times. Are they supposed to give up an aspect of the game due to the location they live in?
I am sorry, but I do not buy into the "off-peak" argument.
I will accept that if you are raiding when you know there is only 2 novices to stop you, then you are a douche-bag and I can bet that 98% of those who raid have been guilty of being a douche-bag at least once.
The death timer increase stops groups from raiding for hours on end. Deaths will happen and stack up and as they do so the cost of camping someone's plane becomes a cost of not being able to play the game because you are stuck in the "Sit Down. Cool Off." chair.
Edit:: Not sure if this is the case already, but I also think defenders should not lose Experience on death, at all.
One problem might be that the only 'official' objective of raids is to kill NPCs. Perhaps somehow there can more mechanical encouragement to fight with enemy players (and especially good combatants). I don't have any good ideas for that, though.
Edit:: Not sure if this is the case already, but I also think defenders should not lose Experience on death, at all.
This. Well, maybe not to the extreme, but I think that concerns over raiding would be a lot lesser if there were fewer reasons to not defend. It's difficult for new people to break into the combat scene on the defensive end when (as people like @Damut have experienced lately) every time you try to play your small part, you're losing hard-earned levels for it and getting nothing in return but a "Well you tried" CF.
Do levels and experience matter to me personally? No, not really, because I have the time and the boredom handy to just go bash myself back up and not care. But I am not every Lusternian player, and I certainly won't have the same outlook when I'm sitting over halfway through Titan and still wanting to defend because it's a thing I'm expected to do.
Lol, if you're looking to encourage people to fight when they might actually lose, no amount of mechanics will ever make people braver.
No, you're right. If we're going to lose, and continue to lose, we're probably not going to want to try as much. But when you're out of the starting gate with 1) poor odds and 2) substantial losses for even bothering, those things together bring about the 'Let's just not' attitude. Remove the one you can, and it's some improvement at least.
Of course if you're talking about raider advantage, and not defender malus, then...well nevermind I guess.
A far away voice whispers, the sound barely reaching your ears, yet the words remain perfectly clear, "Then so be it."
I don't mind losing two levels per day if I have the time to influence back up, but I'm almost more likely to see if pkers are on WHO and if they are I'll qq when I hear stuff starting.
Lol, if you're looking to encourage people to fight when they might actually lose, no amount of mechanics will ever make people braver.
I think there's ways to minimize the fear, and encourage participation that will work. People going into even fights or disadvantaged fights has happened and continues to happen, it's just increasingly uncommon.
I think Orgs have the mechanic already to encourage people to help defend.
I don't know what the credit pool is like for most Orgs, but instead of giving 1 credit to just the highest ranking members of an Org (i.e Serenwilde), because a Favour won't do anything for them, look at who was defending and their skills and give them 5 - 10 credits for defending so they can get better skills and learn more and offer to teach them.
Most defense I see is a mish-mash of people trying to help with little actual coordination, other than target calling, and when it is all over everyone goes their separate ways. If it wasn't for @Enyalida I would not know as much as I know now and what I know could fill a thimble in comparison to what people like @Shuyin, @Celina, @Synkarin, @Avurehkos knows.
We don't need some hard-coded mechanic to make defending more appealing.
We do need a hard coded mechanic to make it more palatable if we die though.
1. Too many penalties for raiding. This should be reduced and changed to something else to discourage constant raiding.
2. No one fights when they might lose. People only fight when they have a great advantage. Painting people's unwillingness to fight as "well offpeak raiding is unfair to those of us in AUS/UK/etc" is patently wrong because for many cases, they use this as an excuse to go beat on people when they will get little to no punishment for it. <- this is what I was mostly addressing barring my suggestion re: experience loss.
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The Inner Sea. I take commissions doe.
As far as I can tell, the issue of XP Loss breaks down into:
A) Loss of experience, especially multiple hours of experience, feels very punishing and acts as a disincentive for non-combatants to begin engaging in PvP and for combatants to conduct daring/risky maneuvers such as raids, contested domoth claims, etc.
I think any solution has to respect that second aspect, but I don't think it's necessary that the self-limiting aspect necessarily diminish enjoyment or destroy personal progress in non-PvP aspects.
My thought it that players could possess a 'death pool' of essence. Every time a character gains XP or essence, a matching contribution would be made to their death pool, (i.e. if an astralbeast gives 2000 essence now, it would give 2000 essence and 2000 death pool essence.) The only function of the death pool would be to absorb Essence/XP loss from death, praying, phoenix, etc. etc. The death pool should have a shallow hard cap, perhaps set to correspond to 2-4 deaths in enemy territory. There should be no way to pull essence from the death pool into your standard essence under any circumstances, to avoid the pool acting like an XP buff effect. Artifacts that affect XP loss on death, such as the ur'Stone, could isntead increase the size of the pool, decrease loss of essence from the pool, or provide a multiplier specifically and exclusively for death pool XP. Finally, any XP loss that exceeds the death pool's reserves causes the loss of real essence/XP as it does now with all the same potential consequences.
My feelings are that this provides a sufficient buffer to let inexperienced people experiment with PvP without feeling that they'll be losing something of value, since most non-coms will be sitting on a full death pool most of the time. Raiding will be fun for the offense, as, although they may have to replenish their death pool after such an excursion, they will be making a net progress on essence gain. Raiding will still be stoppable for the defense, as enemy territory requirements will cause a much more rapid depletion of raider essence than defender essence. Presumably, when the option exists to safeguard your essence with the death pool, only exceptional circumstances will push players to keep attacking after it is depleted. The one outlier I see are individuals who have hit the soft cap on essence, for whom death was previously much more painful than those below the soft cap, though I honestly don't know whether making death less painful beyond the soft cap would be considered good or bad.
I do think, psychologically, a pool would not lead to someone fighting twice as long when they have the option to use the pool to protect their essence. Instead, its depletion would provide a somewhat graceful excuse for attackers to scale back, and it would be very reasonable to expect at least fairweather PKers to be aggressive while covered by their pool and reluctant to engage when it is empty.. That said, I feel like a death pool system would be pretty tunable by the administration to produce an environment that fits their expectations of what PvP should look like. If you want the pool to provide a very solid cap on how long PvP lasts, apply substantially greater XP loss on death if your pool is depleted (this is also a trivial way to address the 'you can die twice as much' concern). If you want attacks to start to fall apart as they wear on, make prayer/pheonix time take longer the less essence remains in the pool and go much faster when its nearly full. Things like this would make PvP fairly painless for casual PKers, provide advantages to defenders (Who presumably will remain at fairly full pools relative to attackers as a raid goes on) that are considerably less frustrating than discretionary effects, and provide still ensure that repeated deaths are painful enough for attackers to not want to occupy a plane indefinitely.
Hopefully it will be a problem that fixes itself, as combat becomes more accessible.
Do levels and experience matter to me personally? No, not really, because I have the time and the boredom handy to just go bash myself back up and not care. But I am not every Lusternian player, and I certainly won't have the same outlook when I'm sitting over halfway through Titan and still wanting to defend because it's a thing I'm expected to do. No, you're right. If we're going to lose, and continue to lose, we're probably not going to want to try as much. But when you're out of the starting gate with 1) poor odds and 2) substantial losses for even bothering, those things together bring about the 'Let's just not' attitude. Remove the one you can, and it's some improvement at least.
Of course if you're talking about raider advantage, and not defender malus, then...well nevermind I guess.
I don't mind losing two levels per day if I have the time to influence back up, but I'm almost more likely to see if pkers are on WHO and if they are I'll qq when I hear stuff starting.
I'm a horrible Glom for this.