Disruption of Events in PvP POT's...

According to what ive read in the past, oov is anti PK, which i can attest to now that OTC has formed their own group. The bit about intendign to disrupt an EVL event is incorrect, as that was not the intent.

OTC is a mercenary group that takes kill contracts from other players to kill people for payment, and from what i understand multiple hit contracts were taken out against you and fulfilled for payment, which your guild members also did with another hired hand later at an event, which is awsome. Mercenaries having a place to make a living in this game is great, and they should be allowed to operate in PvP areas.

OTC in particular has been taking contracts and fulfilling them when the oportunity arises, and thsi doesnt only mean HIT contracts are the only viable mercenary contract. I've been told that if they stood to make more money by GUARDING an event, they would do so. They go where the profit is (tho they would much rather be killing )

This is not an issue between port and thier backers, and from what i understand, william and the PKs who killed him were the only casualties in game during both incidents. I believe it is more up to the town hosting the event to protect its guests.

 

several of Order of Vengeance's PvP events were crashed by PKs before and we successfully dealt with it through existing game mechanics and having guards on hand specifically for that situation (We had a rule that you would be attacked if you were seen with your weapon drawn outside of a match) which worked pretty well.

At one point we used the castle walls in-game to build an arena that was impenetrable by PKs while they stood outside attempting to attack folks outside the walls. So im confident it can be done, you jsut have to be dedicated to doing it. By dedicated i mean willing to utilize the available resources and prioritize the protection of your event.

 

I agree that it can be done - but for the POT owners that aren't playing that sort of RP world in their POTs - the player owned town is their place to host their events, in a building or across the entire scene, however they see fit. If they want to allow for more openworld PVP, they can. If they don't want to, I'm all for giving them the tools to make it so they don't have to. Does that mean more restrictive tools? Does it mean all POTs should have guards with player definable KOS orders/lists? Does it mean if you don't want open world PVP just unlock your POT and deselect the PVP option?

When the game launches, the mechanics for PvP and PvE and the combination of both will be what they become, and everyone will adapt and play. For now, this feels like an opportunity to beat the bushes and find some new ideas. If SotA was a world where everything was PVP and players could raze and loot everything, I wouldn't have any objections.

Just my $00.02

 

A dynamic discussion so far, more or less civil, so let's keep in topic, avoid personal bashing, and we're ok . The dev team is listening to your concerns about more secure PvP PoTs. I'll be talking with the team tomorrow on this topic.

 

I think that the decision to make the town you paid for open pvp or not should be made carefully with the thought of PKing in mind.

There are folks who use game mechanics or exploits to intentionally try to ruin the game for other people, and im in agreement to having some manner to deal with those. I think fixing chain lightning and other LOS issues is probably the best route, but giving folks the ability to ban willy nilly turns a Open pvp town into a glorified duel mechanic, and would "trick" honest PKs just lookin for fights into thinking they are allowed to pvp there, because theres no doubt in my mind people will ban folks just for killing people, like a giant personal safe zone. And thats not a good idea.

Griefing can work both ways, and folks will ban people just because they are losing a fight. Itll be treated as an "I win" button.

 

TBA crashing an event should be called harassment and kinda kills the enjoyment of players attending.

 

I don't see anything wrong with that in POTs. Not every POT owner will blanket ban everyone, and the few that do (still a big maybe) are going to be restricted to their POT for this type of play. They'll be in the RP world they believed they were buying into and they'll be playing with a handful of other folks... that impact on the SotA PvP world at large is negligible. It's basically like putting metal detectors at the ingress of the POT and everyone not cleared to carry will have to turn away - I don't see the downside. Really, it only enhances the enjoyment the POT owner and event attendees get from playing the game. The only people this hurts are the players that prey on weaker PVP flagged people for income. Again, not a big deal - predatory PvP types can still go anywhere else (ruins, shardfalls, other PvP POTs, PvE POTs where people stay flagged, etc...) and achieve their desired game play.

 

Good post, but you're missing something important.

If we wanted to play Darkfall, we'd be playing it. There's no roleplaying in Darkfall, there's only meaningless PVP. You either have enough people to survive or you get ganked by a group larger than you. There's no in-between. This game is supposed to have meaningful PVP, that means that it's not a gank fest.

To orchestrate meaningful pvp, you have to have the ABILITY to lower the gank fest threshold. If you don't have that ability then you can't have events, you can't have conversations, you can't have commerce and trade. Or if we go back to your scenario of the princess, the knight, and the bandits. None of that would happen because they would all be dead as a roving horde marched across the land saying "join us or die". Open pvp sandbox's are wonderful, but only if they're designed properly to support meaningful situations.

 

I've proposed to the devs that the best INTERIM solution would be to have NPC Guards attack anyone that goes into combat mode. My thinking was that this would be the easiest (less taxing) AI to create prior to final wipe. Make the guard's hit points and damage ridiculously high, and you'd be providing reasonable protection to PVP POTs.

Of course the problem with this is the guards would attack anyone (including the POT owners) if they were in combat mode. But this would just be an interim solution and could be more sophisticated as time went on.

 

Yes of course, which is why I don't support banning players in PVP towns. But to deny reasonable tools to PVP POT owners (like NPC Guards) is just as wrong as allowing POT owners to ban players. Taking that side of things is like saying "I don't want an 'I win' button for POT owners, I only want an 'I win' button for whoever can recruit the most jerks to spawn camp POTs".

If we're trying to create a fun and balanced game, the DEFENSE should have the advantage. That's why NPC Guards make so much sense.

 

Agreed.

The good news is that lower gankfest potential resides in a regular (non-PVP) POT. Such a town has several advantages for "controlled PVP" events.

-- Players can flag as they wish, with an Oracle present.
-- Governors can ban who they wish.

Truly open PVP in an open PVP town is a much different social equation.

Its all about choosing the right tool for the experience sought. Gladly, SOTA enables both approaches.

 

If these events were RP I could understand and even accept an occasional hit.

However, the perpetrator had said numerous times that this is not RP, for him this is personal.

This pushes what could be a fun RP arc into harassment.

 

Yes, I understand what you're saying. Based on everything I've read in this thread I don't believe the "event crashers" were griefing. But I also think they were extremely disruptive. The problem is that the CURRENT choices offer two extremes that don't work for anyone long term.
1. You can be fully protected and only fight EXACTLY who you want to fight. This is a fully scripted environment that only works for people that want no surprises.
2. You can have a fully open environment where surprises can't be controlled, not even after they've killed you 15 times in a row and plan on killing you until you log out of the game. Before you say "Yeah that's what I want" you should understand that these environments don't last very long and eventually you don't have anyone to fight but each other. And then you find out exactly how much fun it is when you're the one getting spawn camped 15 times in a row.

So yes, you're correct that in the CURRENT environment that's how it works. But if we're trying to make a good GAME it can't work like that.

 

i agree

 

Many releases ago, @Athanil broke into my town and proclaimed himself the best thief in the world or something like that. I decided that was an excellent roleplay opportunity so I took out a bounty on his head and offered up a reward to anyone that could kill him. This wasn't scripted, so before I posted anything I asked Portalarium if I was breaking the terms of the EULA because I didn't really care if Athanil was up for it or not. PVP was consensual and so if Athanil didn't want to be killed over and over again he could simply unflag himself. The answer from Portalarium was a good one, something like "It appears you are within the bounds of the simulation we have created."

The whole event (for my part) was great fun, but because of technical limitations it became clear that we couldn't play this game forever. For one, Athanil could always buy back his body parts which made it impossible for anyone to collect the reward I had posted. Two, eventually Athanil grew tired of always being on the run and flipped his flag to non-pvp. Three, there were massive exploits allowing people to enter my tower even though I was correctly using all of the tools provided to me.

The point I'm trying to make here is that RP happened because I said it happened. I didn't plan anything out with Athanil (and his crew), nor did I plan anything out with the people that were trying to kill him. The world supported RP to the point that the mechanics were designed and executed properly at that time. Once the mechanics started to fail, that's when the whole thing fell apart.

So who cares if the "assassin" showing up at the event scoffs at RP and says a bunch of stuff like "it's personal and I don't RP" as long as the tools provided by Portalarium are enough for the home team (POT owners) to manage the situation in a reasonable way. Right now that's not happening, and that's the problem. The solution is not to ban those people that don't like RP, the solution is to create tools that makes it very very hard for them to hang around disrupting everything when you're on your home turf.

 

While william and sciamano's grudges agaisnt either other are the sole reason for the animosity going on, the actual events that took place were not harassment, but actual contracts being carried out, no different than the contracts you placed on sciamano at the auction event in retaliation which were not in a PvP town. So the fact that the town is PvP, itself, is not the reason controls need to be in place. In the event that someone is able to stop someone from playing the game and the other party can do nothign about it, thats when controls need to be considered.

And i still think we should wait for LOS issues and chain lightning to be fixed before considering new control mechanics. It should be possible to barricade an event, ban from a lot, and mute the offenders from the immediate event area currently. If that isnt the case thent hat needs to be revisited

 

this has been a huge problem for our guild event the virtue league... it even caused us to cancel an event today because we didn't have time to rebuild the gauntlet... makes me sad...

 

this makes me especially sad, Because Other than the virtue league, And our Social nights with the republic, the guantlet is My Favourite event

 

As well as the town guard thign which i think is a cool idea, it might not be bad to have people who own a PvP town have the ability to set the length of thier respawn timers up to a fixed maximum

 

@Berek

Thank you very much for looking into this.
I hope very much that we can stay on topic, and that you understand the pain point the original poster was attempting to convey.
As the game grows I see this pain growing for every one.
I think if you remove the BAN block on PoT PvP towns this would resolve the issues for the governors, and this should require very little time from a Dev to resolve.
Town Guards would required Dev time that is probably just not needed.

Thanks
Ash